Still purring contentedly to himself, Tarrischall belly flopped onto his pallet, his rear-and mid-claw sets hooking into the webbing while the stubby digits of his forepaws played across the touch bar arrays surrounding his display bubble, summoning it to life.
“Fair night, pups,” he called cheerfully. “Let’s send the Uprights some presents.”
The security hatch into the gate operations center recognized Marta’s bio-pattern, sliding open at her approach.
The compartment that contained the center was a large one for a space station. Three tiers of ranked workstations descended from Director’s row, facing the ten-by-five-meter main viewer tank inset in the far bulkhead. Her section chiefs were already hard at it, working the shift countdown.
“Evening, Marta,” Assistant Operations Director Estiban Rocardo called up from the central station of the upper tier. “T minus two and ten to dilation and we are showing all green boards.”
Behind him, the primary display held focus on the Worm Gate itself. Considerable familiarity was required before the view ceased to inspire awe.
The gate complex hovered in fixed orbit at the L-2 La-grange point beyond Earth’s moon. Several kilometers beyond the rotating rim of the command station, the gate itself lay silhouetted against the mottled gray expanse of Luna’s rear face.
The gate structure itself could only be called titanic. Taking advantage of free-fall engineering, its individual components were unconnected, stationkeeping on each other via cybernetically precise thruster control. The twin semi-cylinders of the field generator/accumulator arrays dwarfed the girder structure tube of the perimeter grid, the so-called “worm cage” at their center focus, and the cage itself was one half a kilometer across by one and a half in length.
The toylike myriad of support facilities clustering in free space around the gate, the barge docks, the maintenance and warehousing platforms and the habitat wheels, gave the facility scale. Smaller yet, tug and barge combos and orbital shuttles flitted between the stations like gleaming fish within the structure of a coral reef.
In absolute contrast was the wormhole itself. It was there. It was always there, trapped at the central nexus of the worm cage. Marta knew she was looking right at it, but there was nothing to be seen save for the hole’s imprint on her instrumentation.
In its power-conserving nontransit mode, the wormhole was almost microscopic, held open just enough to insure continued existence and to permit the coherent light flow of the communications laser.
The Worm Gate was beyond being the single greatest creation of humanity. Its building had required the concentrated efforts of two civilizations. The only like to it was its identical twin parked above the second planet of the Wolf 359 system.
Marta chuckled softly, deliberately pausing for a moment to make herself be impressed.
“What’s the joke, Marta?” Rocardo inquired, lifting a dark eyebrow.
“Oh, nothing, Estiban. It’s all so workaday anymore that sometimes I forget that we’re busy doing the impossible out here.”
“What do you mean by impossible?”
“Back in my first year at MIT I can remember attending a lecture by one of the world’s foremost physicists who loudly and firmly proclaimed that the worm search was a waste of funding and that interstellar travel was and would always be beyond the reach of mankind.”
Her Assistant Director smiled indulgently. “No insult intended. But that was a long time ago.”
“I suspect, young man, that had we not made contact with the Furrys that world view would still be in effect. Science is instinctively conservative. We don’t like to shuffle the laws of the universe around unless we have a very good reason for it. But once we knew that somebody was indeed in the neighborhood, we simply had to figure out a way to borrow each other’s lawn mowers.”
Marta had been a little girl when first contact had been established between Humanity and the People. The two species had found each other intriguingly different and yet much alike, both had a broad streak of curiosity in their racial psyche. Both also soon found the years’ long cycle of conversation via radio telescope infinitely unsatisfying. A human scholar asking a question of his counterpart among The People had to wait years for the reply and vice versa. Within the scientific communities of both worlds the quest for an improved form of communication became a fixation that bordered on a mania.
Each culture had possessed its own Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Each had an approximately equal understanding of the structure of the universe and each focused its search in the same rarified area of theoretical physics, seeking for a mathematically irrational chimera called a wormhole.
A decade was spent proving that, yes, such things did in fact exist, but as an ephemeral transitory at the outermost edge of quantum reality. Dimensional “holes” did indeed open intermittently between far distant points in space, but so submicroscopically small and for such a brief period that even a single photon of light could not hope to transit through one.
A second decade was spent proving that such a wormhole could be “caught” and “held open” via a negative energy field. With the proper application of power, vast oceans of power, it could be “stretched “ to a “size” that would permit the passage of physical matter. However, a living being could not survive the transit. Systems created within the three-dimensional universe, be they mechanical, electronic, or biological, could not function within the dimensionless realm that existed within the wormhole, but ideas and goods could theoretically be passed across from one world to the other.
A third decade went into the construction of the hardware to make it happen.
“River–’Tween-Worlds, this is Worm Gate. We are coming up on shift initiation. We show good systems and we are ready to set transfer sequencing.”
Marta gave her command headset a final settling tug, her eyes flicking to the multiple countdown display bars glowing across the bottom of the imaging tank.
“Understood, Worm Gate. We also prepared.” Over the translator link Tarrischall’s voice held none of its usual humorous shading. Her Furry compatriot was the consummate professional when it came to Operations. “We have good systems. We stand by sequencing.”
“Very well, River–’Tween-Worlds. Coming up on sequencing initiator. Mark zero three… two… one… Set.”
The twin timing bar displays crawled across the main screen. T minus ten minutes to power up. T minus twenty-five to barge entry. Instantly the bars began their slow shrink back down toward the zero point.
The clocks had started.
One could not dally around with a barge shift. Not while one was expending enough electricity to power an entire continent. The gate crews at both ends of the hole lived by the fact they could build up enough juice in their accumulator arrays to execute a single two-way barge transfer every twenty-four hours plus a small emergency reserve.
“We have systems verification from ’Tween-Worlds,” the Grid Systems Manager called up from his station. “Auto sequencing set and verified.”
“Very good, grid. River–’Tween-Worlds, we show auto sequencing set and counting. Do you concur?”
“We concur sequencing, Worm Gate. We are go for transfer.”
Lane abstractly noted that the archaic space age technoslang sounded odd coming from one of the People. Tarrischall had become immensely proud of his linguistic expertise in the area, however.
“Acknowledged, River-’Tween-Worlds. Transfer is go. Securing communications and data links and withdrawing lasercom platform at this time. Talk with you afterward.”
“A-Okay, Worm Gate. Later. Want to hear more about this Jumping Jive. River-’Tween-Worlds, over and out.”