Mission to Minerva

549 Pages·2011·0.49 MB·english

by  Hogan

Mission to Minerva
When explorers on the Moon found a skeleton in a space suit of strange design,
a baffling mystery began. The skeleton was undeniably human, but carbon dating
showed it was older than the human race itself. The mystery deepened with the
discovery of a wrecked ship on a moon of Jupiter, showing that another race
had once inhabited the Solar System, originating on the now-shattered planet
whose remains form the asteroid belt. Then a ship manned by the humanoid
“giants” returned, bringing with it answers to the riddle of humanity’s
origins. But it brought great danger, as Earth found itself caught in a battle
between a benevolent alien empire, and another offshoot of the human race who
regarded the Earth as their property and were bent on taking it over.
That was in the recent past, and the future now looked bright for Earth, as
trade and knowledge flowed back and forth between Earth and Thuria, the world
the Giants colonized when they left the Solar System aeons ago. Then Dr.
Victor Hunt received a phone call—and the face in the phone’s video screen was
an older version of himself, calling from a parallel world. That was the first
step in bridging the gap between the parallel universes of the “multiverse.”
Unfortunately, it also meant that the enemies who had been decisively defeated
in one universe might still be alive and dangerous in another, and could
arrive in force at any time. And the possibility soon became a frightening
reality. . . .
Cover art by Bob Eggleton
ORDER Hardcover
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this
book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely
coincidental.
First printing, May 2005
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 0-7434-9902-6
Copyright 2005 by James P. Hogan
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
http://www.baen.com
Production by Windhaven Press
Auburn, NH
Electronic version by WebWrights
http://www.webwrights.com
For Sheryl, Lindsey, and Tara
Baen Books by JAMES P. HOGAN
Inherit the Stars
The Genesis Machine
The Gentle Giants of Ganymede
The Two Faces of Tomorrow
Thrice Upon a Time
Giants' Star
Voyage from Yesteryear
Code of the Lifemaker
The Proteus Operation
Endgame Enigma
The Mirror Maze
The Infinity Gambit
Entoverse
The Multiplex Man
Realtime Interrupt
Minds, Machines & Evolution
The Immortality Option
Paths to Otherwhere
Bug Park
Star Child
Rockets, Redheads & Revolution
Cradle of Saturn
The Legend That Was Earth
Martian Knightlife
The Anguished Dawn
Kicking the Sacred Cow (nonfiction)
Mission to Minerva
PROLOGUE
By the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, the nations of Earth had
finally resolved or learned to live with the differences that had made so much
of their history a story of exploitation and conflict. A major expression of
the new spirit of cooperation and optimism toward the future took the form of
a joint program of Solar System exploration carried out under the direction of
a Space Arm formed as part of the UN. With its redirection of the resources
and industries that had once served a bloated defense sector, the program was
seen as a triumph of the unifying power of technology and reason, and a
prelude to reaching outward toward the stars. As permanent bases appeared on
the Moon and Mars, and manned mission ships reached the outer planets, it was
confidently assumed that the sciences responsible for such spectacular success
were thereby shown to form a solidly based foundation for the continuing
expansion of human knowledge. The basic belief structure was secure. While the
universe undoubtedly had more revelations and surprises to deliver, the body
of fact that had been established was impregnable to any major need in the way
of revision.
Such moments of blissful self-assurance invariably come immediately before the
biggest tumbles. In just a few short years, a series of stupefying discoveries
not only added an entire new dimension to the history of the Solar System, but
uncovered a strange, totally unanticipated story of the origins of the human
race itself.
Twenty-five million years before the present time, a race of nonviolent,
eight-foot-tall giants had flourished across the Solar System and surpassed
everything that humankind had achieved. The "Ganymeans"—so-called when the
first indication of their existence was discovered in the form of a wrecked
spacecraft buried under the ice of Ganymede, largest of the Jovian moons—had
originated on a planet christened Minerva, that had once occupied the position
between Mars and Jupiter. By the time the Ganymean civilization reached an
advanced stage, climatic conditions on Minerva were deteriorating. As would be
expected, their voyages of discovery had brought them to Earth, from where
they transported large numbers of plant and animal forms from the late
Oligocene–early Miocene period back to their own world as part of a
large-scale bioengineering research project to combat the problem. Terran life
enjoyed a generally greater toxic resistance than that possessed by the
Ganymeans, and their hope was to incorporate the appropriate genetic
structures into their own makeup in order to render themselves tolerant to
altering Minerva's atmosphere in a way that would enhance its natural
greenhouse mechanism. These efforts failed, however, and the Ganymeans
migrated to what would later come to be called the Giants' Star, located
twenty light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation of Taurus.
In the millions of years that followed, the imported terrestrial animals left
on Minerva replaced most of the native Minervan forms, which owing to a
peculiarity of early Minervan biology that precluded the emergence of
land-dwelling carnivores, were unable to compete effectively. The terrestrial
forms included a population of primates as advanced as anything existing on
Earth at the time, which in addition had undergone genetic modification in the
course of the Ganymean experimental program. Fifty thousand years before the
present time, while the various hominid lines developing on Earth were still
at stone-using stages of culture, a second advanced, spacegoing race had
already appeared on Minerva as the first version of modern Man. They were
given the name "Lunarians," after evidence of their existence came to light in
the course of twenty-first century lunar exploration. (See Inherit the Stars.)
At the time of the emergence of the Lunarians, varying solar conditions were
bringing the onset of the most recent ice age on Earth, while the even greater
effect on Minerva threatened to render the planet uninhabitable. The Lunarians
responded with a concerted effort to develop their space and industrial
technologies to a level that would permit mass migration to the more
hospitable climate of Earth. But, as with the Ganymeans before them, the
ambitious plan came to nothing. When the Lunarians were practically within
reach of their goal, the cooperative spirit in which they had worked for
generations broke down with the polarization of their civilization into two
superpowers, Cerios and Lambia. Resources that could have been concentrated on
saving the race were squandered instead on a ruinous military rivalry. The
result was a cataclysmic planetwide war, in the course of which Minerva was
destroyed.
The Ganymean culture, in the meantime, had entered a long period of stagnation
brought about by the unanticipated effects of advancing biological science to
the point of prolonging life practically indefinitely. When the consequences
became clear, they took a decision to revert to their natural condition and
accept mortality as the price of experiencing a life enriched by motivation
and change. By the time of the events on Minerva, they had established a
thriving interstellar civilization centered on the planet Thurien of the
Giants' Star system. The Thuriens were never comfortable with what they
regarded their ancestors' abandonment of a genetically mutated sapient species
left to take its chances in the survival arena of Minerva, and followed the
subsequent emergence of the Lunarians with a mixture of guilt and increasing
awe. But when it all ended in catastrophe, the Thuriens relaxed the policy of
nonintervention that they had been observing and sent a rescue mission to save
the survivors. Gravitational upheavals caused by the emergency methods used to
transport the Thurien ships threw what remained of Minerva into an eccentric
outer orbit to become Pluto, while the smaller debris dispersed under
Jupiter's tidal effects as the Asteroids. Minerva's orphaned moon fell inward
toward the Sun and was later captured by Earth, which until then had existed
as a solitary body.
Even after all their experiences and the loss of their world, hostility
between the Cerians and the Lambians persisted, making them incapable of
uniting to rebuild their culture. The Lambians went back with the Thuriens and
were installed on a planet called Jevlen, where they grew to become a fully
human element of the Thurien civilization. The Cerians, at their own request,
were returned to the world of their origins, Earth, only to be almost
overwhelmed by the climatic and tidal devastation caused by the arrival of
Minerva's moon. Their remnants fell back into barbarism, struggling for
millennia on the verge of extinction. Apart from myths handed down from
antiquity, the meanings of which were forgotten, all memory of their origins
was lost. Only in modern times, when they at last mastered space again and
ventured outward to find the traces of what had gone before, were they able to
piece parts of the story together. The rest was added when a freak occurrence
reestablished contact between the human inhabitants of modern Earth and the
ancient Ganymean race that had created them in the form of their Lunarian
ancestors. (See The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.)
The Jevlenese never ceased regarding themselves as Lambians, and the Terrans
as ongoing rivals who would challenge them again if the opportunity arose. As
part of a plan to eliminate the perceived threat, they inaugurated a campaign
to retard the progress of Earth toward rediscovery of the sciences, while they
themselves absorbed Thurien technology and gained autonomy over their own
affairs. Fully human in form, they obstructed Earth's development by
infiltrating agents throughout history to spread irrational beliefs and found
cults of unreason, diverting energies from the path to reacquiring true
knowledge.
As the confidence and arrogance of the Jevlenese leaders grew, so did their
resentment of the restraint to their ambitions posed by the Thuriens.
Exploiting the innate inability of the Ganymean psyche to suspect motives,
they gained control of the surveillance operation that the Thuriens had set up
to keep a watch over Earth after the catastrophe that had befallen Minerva.
The Jevlenese fed falsified accounts to the Thuriens of a militarized Earth
poised to burst out from the Solar System, and by playing on the implications,
induced the Thuriens to devise countermeasures to isolate and contain the
threat. But the Jevlenese intent was to seize control of the countermeasures
themselves and contain the Thuriens, settle the score with their Cerian rivals
of old, and then take control of the system of Thurien-administered worlds
themselves. And the plan would have been fulfilled but for the reappearance of
a lost starship from the time of ancient Ganymean Minerva.
The scientific mission ship Shapieron was sent to conduct experiments on
altering the radiation dynamics of a distant star to assess the feasibility of
changing the Sun's output as an alternative solution to Minerva's problem if
the attempt based on atmospheric reengineering coupled with biological
modification failed. But the star went unstable, forcing the Shapieron to make
an emergency departure when partway through overhauling its drive system,
which operated by creating a local distortion of spacetime. The result was
that the ship experienced an artificially compounded time-dilation in which
twenty-five million years passed by before it was able to reintegrate with the
local solar reference frame, compared to only twenty years of ship's time.
Hence, it returned to find the configuration of the Solar System changed,
Minerva gone, and a new race of terrestrial humans spacefaring among the
planets.
The "Giants" came to Earth, where they were cordially received, and remained
for six months. But the most significant outcome of their presence was the
opening of the first direct contact between Earth and the Thuriens, bypassing
the Jevelenese intermediaries established by longstanding precedent. The story
of how the Jevlenese had schemed to retard Earth's development and
misrepresent its modern-day situation was finally exposed. In the ensuing
confrontation the Jevelenese, who had been secretly making military
preparations of their own, proclaimed their independence, staged a
demonstration of strength, and demanded submission from the Thuriens. But
their hand had been forced; the bid was premature and collapsed when the
Terrans and Thuriens working together turned the Jevlenese's own stratagem of
deception against them by inventing a fictitious Terran battle force
manufactured entirely within the supercomputing entity VISAR, which supported
the Thuriens' interstellar civilization. (See Giants' Star.)
The Jevelense leaders believed the deception and capitulated, after which the
world of Jevlen was placed under Ganymean and Terran administration while a
reformed system of government was being worked out. Because of the autonomy
and privacy to run their own affairs that the Jevlenese had always insisted
on, this was the first opportunity for outsiders to look closely into what had
been going on there. What they found was even stranger than anything that had
gone before.
Obsession for conquest and fixation on the irrational ideas that had been
imported to Earth was not a general trait common to all Jevelenese. They
stemmed from a small, disaffected but influential group within the race that
had appeared suddenly. Something about their deeper psychology seemed to set
them apart from the majority of Jevlenese. They were the source of the beliefs
in magic and supernatural powers that defied all experience and had never
arisen among the Ganymeans or Lunarians, yet sprang from inner convictions
that were unshakable. It was as if their instincts about the nature of the
world and the forces operating in it had been shaped by a different reality.
And it turned out that this was indeed exactly the case. For the "Ents"—from
"Entoverse," or "Universe Within," as the unique realm where they originated
came to be named—were not products of the familiar world of space, time,
matter, and physics at all. In setting up their own planetary administration,
the Jevlenese had created an independent computing complex, JEVEX, to serve a
comparable purpose to that of the Thuriens' VISAR. In a peculiar concurrence
of circumstances, information quanta took on a role analogous to that of
material particles, interacting and combining to form structures in the
dataspace continuum that corresponded to molecules and more complex
configurations in physical space. A complete phenomenological "universe"
resulted, eventually producing self-organizing entities that were sufficiently
complex to become aware of their own existence and perceive themselves as
inhabitants of a world. But the "forces" that guided the unfolding of events
in that world derived not from the physics of the universe outside, but from
the underlying internal rules imposed by the system programmers.
Following Thurien practice, the primary method for interfacing with JEVEX was
by direct neural coupling to the mental processes of the user. Some of the
Ents discovered that they could interact with the data streams flowing through
their world, and from them they extracted perceptions of a "higher space"
beyond the one that they existed in, where superior beings lived and
impossible things happened. Adepts among the Ents learned to project their
psyches into these "currents" and transfer themselves into this world
"beyond," where they became occupiers of hosts who had literally been
possessed. So the aberrant element among the Jevlenese were not deviants who
had acquired their aggressions, insecurities, and strange notions of causality
in the same world of experience that had molded the minds of Ganymeans,
Lunarians, and Terrans; they were victims of a form of alien invasion more
weird than science fiction had ever conceived. (See Entoverse.)
Such "possessed" Jevelenese—taken over by Ent personalities—seemed also have
been at the root of the schism that subverted the Lunarian enterprise when it
had almost succeeded—fifty thousand years before JEVEX even existed! How could
this possibly be?
Following from the earlier Ganymean spacecraft propulsion technology, the
Thurien interstellar transportation and communications web exploited
artificial manipulations of spacetime to bypass the restrictions of ordinary
space. The mathematics of the physics involved also admitted solutions that
implied the possibility of transfer through time. Since the Thuriens had never
been able to put a physical interpretation to this, they regarded it as no
more than a theoretical curiosity. But then, in the final stage of the
"Pseudowar" in which the Jevlenese believed themselves about to be assailed by
VISAR's imaginary Terran invasion fleet, their leadership attempted an escape
to a distant planet that they had secretly made into a fortress. When JEVEX
initiated creation of a transfer port to transport their ships, VISAR
intervened in a countermove to neutralize it. Nobody ever knew quite what
happened as the two supercomputers grappled across light-years for control of
the same knot of spacetime—except that the fleeing Jevlenese craft were swept
into the convulsions. Afterward, all sign of them had vanished. Everywhere.
But the last images to be received from a surveillance probe that had clung in
pursuit showed they had rematerialized somewhere. There was a background of
stars. And there was a world. The world was Minerva, intact, as it had been.
The starfield showed the time to have been the late period of the Lunarians.
In fact, it was at just before the time when the Lambians adopted their
militant and uncompromising policy toward Cerios. This was surely too much to
have been a coincidence.
With Jevlen pacified and on probation while its population adjusted to life
undisturbed by the influence of the Ents, the scientists of Thurien and Earth
were free to turn their attention to the latest, and perhaps the most baffling
mystery of all. (See also the "Giants Chronology" compiled by Dr. Attila
Torkos, page 403.)
PART ONE: The Multiverse
CHAPTER ONE
The object appeared out of nowhere on the Earth-ward side of the Sun, roughly
halfway between the mean orbits of Earth and Mars. Its bulk ejected the flux
of solar-wind particles and cosmic-ray photons that happened to be occupying
the volume that it materialized in, and generated a mild gravitational ripple
fitting for its mass of several tens of thousand tons equivalent. But
otherwise, its arrival was as unremarkable as its appearance.
It was about the size of a domestic washing machine and vaguely cubical in
form, although any clear lines were lost in the profusion of antennas and
sensor appendages cluttered untidily on all its sides. For a while it hung in
space, sampling and processing information from its surroundings and sending
its findings back to the realm from whence it had come. Then, as suddenly as
it had arrived, it vanished again.
Its corrected position put it inside the Moon's orbit, approximately
twenty-two thousand miles above the Earth's surface in the belt used by
synchronous communications satellites. One more relocation, and it was in
place to intercept the beam from the comnet ground station in Maine, which
handled one of the primary trunk routes into the USA. The alien device
connected into the system using standard Terran communications protocols and
transmitted the phone number of the UN Space Arm's Advanced Sciences Division
at the Goddard Center in Maryland, one of the homes of what had been NASA in
years gone by.
* * *
In a neighborhood bar called Happy Days, a few miles from Goddard, Dr. Victor
Hunt leaned back in a corner booth by the window and took in the scene. It was
a sunny Saturday morning in June. People were making the best of the fine
weekend. Across the aisle, three men who had pulled up earlier in a pickup
loaded with timber were downing some preventative thirst medicine on what
looked like their way to a home remodeling project. Some younger people at the
far end were working up enthusiasm in advance for the Baltimore Orioles versus
Atlanta Braves game due to be played later. A couple sat holding hands across
one of the tables, blissfully unaware of anything else.
For Hunt, the snatched moment of relaxation was a rare luxury. His position as
Deputy Director for Physics of UNSA Advanced Sciences put him at the center of
the effort to assimilate Thurien scientific knowledge without disrupting
Earth's social and economic structure. Already, some of the most cherished
notions once believed to be permanently beyond questioning had been consigned
to oblivion. The whole system of values that most had considered as
constituting the inescapable underpinnings of commerce and production was
having to be rethought in the light of the Thurien existence, proof that
deeper, less adversarial ways of motivating creativity and cooperation were
possible. Nobody knew what the next ten or twenty years might bring.
Paradoxically, for the majority of people this all added up to carrying on
more or less as normal. The gigantic forces now in motion that would change
all their lives irreversibly were beyond any ability of theirs to control.
A swarthy figure sporting a shaggy mustache and wearing a bright scarlet shirt
and shorts turned from the bar and came over, bearing two pint glasses of
black, creamy-headed Guinness. Jerry Santello was Hunt's neighbor from the
adjacent apartment unit in a landscaped residential development on the edge of
town. They had come out for some refreshment after a morning workout at the
complex's gym. Jerry deposited the glasses on the table, pushed one across,
and sat back down on the seat opposite.
"Cheers," Hunt acknowledged, raising his in salutation as he picked it up.
Jerry took a draft and licked his lips. "I'd never have believed it. I'm
actually taking to this stuff."
"About time, too. Beats that fizzy yellow concoction. Too sweet. I'm not sure
I like the connotations of Clydesdales, either."
"The bartender asked me if I wanted them mixed with ale. Is that normal in
England too?"
"Black and tan," Hunt replied, nodding.
"Oh, really?"
"Half and half. That's what they call it. It was the name of the auxiliary
military units the English used in Ireland back it the time of the Troubles .
. . around 1920, or whenever it was. They had uniforms that were half police
and half army."
"Wasn't it two different countries there until not long ago?"
"Right. The North originally stayed with the UK—when the rest became the
Republic."
"What was all that shit about? I never could figure it."
Hunt shrugged. "Usual thing, Jerry. Too many Catholics. Too many Protestants.
No Christians." He looked away while he took another sip. A girl called Julie,
who worked in one of the administration sections at ASD, had come in with two
others that he didn't recognize. Jerry carried on.
"Anyway, Vic, as I was saying, this scheme that the guys are buying into. . .
. People are working less, retiring sooner, and when the family's grown and
gone and they move to a smaller house that's paid for." He made an open-handed
gesture. "They've got money. The spendable income isn't with the kids anymore.
By the time they leave school half of them are maxed out on credit already."
Jerry was a former employee of the intelligence agencies. The spy business had
contracted markedly as the world gradually resolved a legacy of
twentieth-century political absurdities by allowing people to live among those
they chose to. Having banked a lump severance payment, and finding himself
less than enamored by the thought of returning to the corporate style of
workplace, he was constantly on the lookout for investment opportunities to
provide the wherewithal for preserving the ease and freedoms that a period of
enforced paid leave had led him to grow accustomed to. The latest was a plan
for a chain of theater-restaurants with lounge bars and dance floors to cater
to the more mature clientele. It was an interesting thought, Hunt had to
agree. There were probably thousands of such couples, or singles wanting to be
half a couple, hidden away in the suburbs with nowhere to go that suited their
taste. At just over forty himself, Hunt could go for it.
"I've always wanted to own a nightclub," he said. "I like the image. It must
be from seeing Casablanca years ago. You know, Bogart in the white tuxedo with
the carnation in the lapel. Piano bar and all that stuff. . . . You don't see
that kind of style these days. Do you reckon we could bring it back, Jerry?"
Jerry tossed up a hand. "Who knows? Anything's possible. Does that mean you're
in?"
"How much are we talking about?"
"The other guys are coming in for ten grand."
"Um . . . I'd need to think a bit more. How soon do you need to know?"
"The option on the deal closes at the end of next week."
"Okay, I'll let you know one way or another by then."
"You can't lose, Vic. Lot's of people have been waiting for something like
this, who don't take to the bar scene. Some place to go out and meet your
friends, have a meal, see a show. . . . Music that you don't have to be some
kind of spastic epileptic or something to dance to . . ."
"Dr. Hunt?" Hunt looked up. Julie had come over to the booth with her two
friends. She was tallish and slim, with fair hair, a scattering of freckles
around her nose, and just at that moment, a nervously uncertain smile. "I saw
you over here and just wanted to stop by and say hi. I hope you don't mind."
"Not at all. Glad you did." Hunt looked at her quizzically for a moment.
"Julie, from the main admin section, right?"
"That's right!" Julie seemed impressed.
Hunt glanced at the other two girls, who were hovering behind. "So what are we
doing—starting a party?"
"Oh. This is Becky, who's visiting from Virginia . . . and Dana."
Hunt gestured across the booth. "Jerry, my neighbor."
"You live near here?"
"Redfern Canyons—on the west side from here."
"I think I know it. Where they have all the valleys and ridges cut into the
hills so it looks like somewhere in California. With a creek and ponds down
the middle."
"That's it."
Becky, who was looking mildly awed, found her voice finally. "This is really
the Dr. Hunt . . . who was there at Ganymede when the aliens came back, and
then discovered that whole world inside the computer on Jevlen?" She shook her
head. "I always think of people you see on shows and read about in magazines
as flying everywhere in limousines and living in places with security gates
and fences. But here you are, just a regular guy in the local bar."
"I hope we weren't interrupting something," Dana said.
"We're quaffing away all the benefit from a couple of hours of healthy working
out this morning," Hunt replied. "But I've always had this theory that too
much health is bad for you."
"So that tastes really good, I bet." Julie indicated their drinks.
"The first one didn't touch the sides going down," Jerry said.
"Actually, Jerry was trying to sell me on a business proposition. Restaurant
nightclubs for older fossils like us to get out to and creak around in. What
do you think?"
Julie looked perplexed. "I'm not sure what to say. You don't exactly look over
the hill or anything like that, Dr. Hunt."
"Oh, don't worry about it," Hunt told her cheerfully. "People have the wrong
attitude. What's wrong with getting over a hill? Think what happens on a
bicycle. All the hard work's over. You just leave everything to gravity, sit
back, enjoy the view, and pick up speed. Life's the same. That's why everyone
says time goes so much faster. You know—" The call tone from the seefone in
the holder on his belt interrupted. "Excuse me." He took it out, flipped it
open, and thumbed the Accept button. The head and shoulders of a young man in
a white shirt greeted him on the screen. A caption below gave the sending code
and advised that the call was from the UNSA Goddard Center. "Hello. Vic Hunt
here."
"Dr. Hunt, this is ASD. We have an incoming off-planet call on hold. The
caller is asking for you."
Off-planet? Hunt wasn't especially expecting anything of that nature. UNSA
communications from distances farther than about the Moon usually came in as
recordings because of the propagation delays. Ironically, an interactive call
was more likely to be from the Thuriens' interstellar net, which communicated
virtually instantaneously via spinning microscopic black-hole toroids, and
linked to the Terran system via Earth-orbiting relay satellites. "Who is it?"
he asked, at the same time conveying an apology with his eyes to the others
around him. But the face on the screen hesitated, seeming not to know how to
answer. "It doesn't matter," Hunt said. "Just put it through." A moment later,
he was staring incredulously in total befuddlement.
The face looking back at him was of a man around forty, with tanned,
lean-lined features giving him an alert and active look, and wavy brown hair
starting to show touches of gray just discernible on the matchbook-size
screen. He seemed amused, even impudently so, waiting several seconds as if
savoring the effect to the utmost. Finally, he said, "I suppose this must come
as a bit of a shock."
Which perhaps qualified as one of the greatest understatements in all Hunt's
years of experience. For the face was his own. He was talking to some bizarre
version—existing in some other where, and for all he knew, some other
"when"—of himself. He could do nothing but sit there, stupefied, unable to
muster a coherent response. The three girls exchanged mystified looks. Then
Jerry said, "Are you all right, Vic?"
The words jolted Hunt sufficiently to make him look up, though for the moment
still only marginally aware of his surroundings. Finally, with an effort, he
forced his faculties back to something resembling working order. "Er, I'm
sorry," he said, standing up. "If you'll excuse me, I need to take this
privately." He crossed to the exit and left.
"What was it, a ghost?" Jerry muttered to the others.
Outside in the parking lot, Hunt climbed into his car and closed the door. The
face of his other self was still there, waiting on the screen of the seefone.
"Okay, I give up," he told it. "So . . . just what in hell is going on?"
"I'll try to be brief, because there may not be a lot of time," the image
answered. "First, the Thuriens are trying the wrong approach. It isn't an
extension of the h-space physics the way they've assumed. That only applies
within particular wave solutions evolving vertically and manifesting internal
space and time separation. Horizontal movement involves a different concept.
Think of the dynamics of the data structures that we found in JEVEX's
computing matrix. . . . As I said, there may not be a lot of time. This is an
early test run. We haven't learned how to sustain coherence for extended
periods yet. I've got a compressed file here that will give you what we've
managed to figure out so far. The main thing you need to know about is the
convergences. But codes can be different, even between nearby regions. Can you
send me something to scan for any transmission corrections we might need to
make?"
"What . . . ?" Hunt was still numbed by the shock.
"A file out of your system there. Anything. We need to know the codes you're
using so the one here can be set to match."
"Oh. . . . Right. . . ." Hunt shook himself into action sufficiently to bring