Their approach was straightforward. They fitted me with a more advanced type of headnet, able to map brain activity with great precision, then asked me to keep walking through the settlement’s slider machine (recalibrated to connect with New Earth) again and again, and to concentrate on what I experienced. I found that the more I did it, the more the nausea receded; I was evidently becoming accustomed to it. It seemed to be caused by a strange twisting sensation at the moment of transfer. The process became a little tedious as they consulted and mentally muttered over their instruments, so I focused as closely as I could on the blurred flash of light I saw each time, moving more and more slowly through the hole, then stopping afterwards to replay the memory step by step, trying to analyse what was happening. I suddenly realised that it consisted of hundreds, even thousands, of images, flickering through my mind almost too rapidly for me to comprehend. I slowed down my movement through the hole even more, concentrating on breaking down this vision into the smallest possible increments, until I could play the show through, one frame at a time. At first I was puzzled; some of the views seemed to be just variations on the one I could see in the arena, others were quite different. Some featured humans, some saurians, most neither. It took a few minutes before the reality sank in; it was the view of an abandoned saurian encampment, tents being removed, which finally made the penny drop – I was seeing the parallel worlds!
Scientists are normally a methodical and cautious lot, but there was no restraining their excitement at this news. The problem was that despite my science background I had great difficulty in understanding what they were saying, even though they were supposedly communicating in English; they seemed to have cobbled together their own hybrid vocabulary to describe slider theory and related brain activity. Evidently a particular area of my brain – or rather, a combination of areas – was activated when I went through the slider hole, but they were having problems in relating that to similar scans of human and saurian brains passing through the hole. Yes, I discovered, in the interests of research, volunteers from the scientists had indeed passed through the hole while conscious, despite the agony and unconsciousness which followed. I regarded them with a deeper respect.
My head had begun to ache so I left them to debate among themselves. I was beginning to feel restless and impatient, with no obvious role to play. The Assembly made the slider ship available to me so I visited Luke on New Earth; everything was going well, the area for dozens of kilometres around the transfer point had been divided up into farms and the transfer of population at this place was being wound down and switched to other areas. A start was being made on a permanent settlement to replace the tents, with a school being the first priority. The larger and more aggressive wild animals had begun to present problems and requests for hunting rifles had been made, but the saurians came up with something better; a device which projected an intense field which directly affected the nervous system, causing the animals to retreat in panic. The beauty was that this effect could easily be blocked by people with mind-linking powers, so the device could not be used for nefarious purposes.
A different group of scientists came to visit me (the others having determined what I could do, although they were no closer to finding a way to replicate it). The new group wanted to catalogue and describe every one of the parallel worlds I could see. Ultimately they hoped to draw up a kind of genealogical map of the worlds, showing their relationships and branching points, but I guessed that would be the work of a lifetime – even a saurian one. Still, I tried to help them to make a start. After much head-aching experimentation I discovered that the images did come in a logical relationship sequence. From a starting point in S1, the first few worlds I saw were all saurian ones; interestingly, there were many more than the S1 scientists were aware of, the additional ones not having developed means of propagating electro-magnetic signals. Some of the saurians were clearly of a different species to the ones I knew. Similarly, a long sequence of worlds came in which I spotted only humans. At one edge of this group, I caught a brief glimpse of what seemed to be Neanderthals. There were groups of worlds in which there was no obvious evidence of organised activity although, as the scientists pointed out, that did not necessarily mean that there was no intelligent life present. My view into each world was restricted to my normal field of vision at that one spot, which meant that I only caught occasional, random glimpses of life. Saurians had a different attitude to time; these scientists didn’t spend a few days on intensive research before rushing off to write their reports, they settled in indefinitely, so on most days I set aside some time to spend with them.
The members of the Planetary Assembly had returned to their homes at the end of the crisis but I stayed on at the settlement, as did my three saurian friends. For them, taking a few years out for some activity was as nothing, in a lifetime of centuries. Genetic tests had confirmed that I could expect to live for at least as long; their scientists couldn’t be totally sure, since they had no one else with my particular genetic heritage to compare me with. I mulled over what Richards had last said, and I had to admit that although I did not feel that I really belonged anywhere, I felt most comfortable with the saurians of S1. Their particular attitude to life meshed with my own, like a kind of ideal which humans could only aspire to. In part, I realised, this was due to the long perspective that their life expectancy gave them. At its simplest, it meant that if you were planning to live in a place for centuries, you didn’t mess it up.
I spent some time learning the S1 spoken and written languages, a process made much easier by my enhanced memory. Out of curiosity, I learned the S2 variation on this; over many millennia of civilisation they had evolved a common tongue (albeit with regional dialects), despite the lack of mind-linking among the general population. I had an uneasy feeling that we had not heard the last of them, although even in my most paranoid moments I couldn’t work out what kind of threat they could pose; the S1 scientists were certain that the scientific understanding and technological capabilities of their S2 opposite numbers lagged so far behind that there was no chance of them designing and constructing a slider machine for centuries, if ever. Their Rulers’ rejection of mind-linking for their scientists put severe limitations on their potential. Still, I knew that such problems wouldn’t stop human scientists from trying – once they knew that something could be done, they wouldn’t rest until they did it.
The saurians of S1 had commenced another project; to help those human worlds in which civilisation had collapsed. The first essential was to provide a power supply, to which they found an ingenious solution. Secundo explained that they had some space elevators – thick ribbons of immensely strong material which were stretched from the surface of the Earth to a massive space station in an orbit that would have flung it into space if not restrained by the ribbon. The theory of these was well understood on Old Earth, but sufficiently strong materials for the ribbon were not yet available. Elevator cars rode the ribbons up into space, and a slider machine had been transported to the orbital station. They were using this to transfer beam power stations into orbit above collapsed worlds. While the assembled power stations were huge, with solar panels stretching for kilometres, the individual elements were small enough to pass through the slider hole. The same applied to the beam collectors on the ground. It would take a very long time to restart the lost civilisations, but the saurians had that time.