04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (8 page)

"I've given orders to the remote stations in orbit to being the robotized placement of the Gates and preliminary testing. That'll eat up our three months. Then we'll have to begin the bleeds"—allowing Flux to come into the world—"and that will take quite some time. When sufficient Flux is formed to create a physical atmosphere, we will begin to ship and put in place the network of twenty-eight master-computer stations. We'll have to anchor and test them, create the proper atmospheric balance and study what it does—quite a lot. Our current estimate is seven years, but I hope we will be able to shorten it."

Haller was dumbstruck, his romantic vision rapidly fading away. "Seven y
ears
. . ."

The orders went out from Borelli Station through Flux and were received by the already awaiting units in orbit around the tiny world, all of them dwarfed by the gigantic planet the moon orbited.

The robotized stations were gigantic, although modular in construction, having assembled themselves from pieces sent through one by one. Now they would have a better and surer way to transmit and receive. The earliest ones had created a small automated counterpart to Borelli Station in orbit themselves; now they began to receive what they needed.

Every square millimeter of the moon's surface had been scanned and mapped, and calculations made. Modules now detached from the orbiting mothers and descended to the surface, where crawlers had already checked and double-checked the terrain, the surface and underlying composition of the ground; made seismic estimates; even bored with strong lasers for several kilometers into the very heart of the place.

Cost was always a factor, even with the availability of Flux energy. To totally use the entire place, a network of twelve Borelli Points would be required, but they had to make do with seven. This would be sufficient to maintain temperature and atmosphere within tolerable limits, but it would create a life zone extending only from forty degrees north to thirty degrees south latitude, give or take a degree. Beyond that, Flux would begin to thin, sufficient for atmospheric maintenance but with rapidly declining heat as you went beyond the zone, and without sufficient Flux density to properly use it in transmutation.

Now they dug out the holes for the Gates, first with crude explosives, then smoothed with powerful lasers, then they assembled the great dish-shaped depressions that would be the multipurpose, multifunction hearts and souls of the operation. With the precision that only computers could command, the fit was a perfect one.

Now the feed tubes were blasted by other, smaller machines using only laser drillers, the tunnels becoming smooth as glass and far, far harder than diamond with the addition of selected compounds. Everything was checked and double-checked again and again, for there was absolutely no tolerance for error. They had learned that bitterly on Titan.

At the end of the feed tunnel, now, was installed a massive, complex machine, actually a Borelli generator. It was designed to fit into the walls and practically surround the tunnel's end; anyone at this point would be literally within the Gate itself. Covered with the same compounds as the tunnel, it would be invisible, only an emergency control panel showing that there was anything there at all.

The object was to begin the bleed from the strange alternate universe of energy as quickly as possible. Up to this point the machines were working with conventional technology and conventional energy; even the initial punches creating the Borelli Point in each of the seven feed tunnels would be done with massive conventional generators loaded up with Flux power from the orbiting Borelli Gate, the storage mechanism inside converting that energy into raw power.

Only then would come the real test, the real question. A sample or short test burst was out of the question here; you either had it right the first time, or you didn't.

Engineers on Titan liked to explain the process as analogous to jump-starting a dead engine. Now the great energy cells and the true Gate mechanism itself was inert, lifeless. It was designed to draw what power it needed from the Borelli Point itself and store it. If the punch into another universe was successful, the machines would start up and draw what they needed to come to full life and operation. If it failed, or if the regulatory mechanisms failed to hold, a number of things could happen. The Point could remain open, allowing Flux to ooze out in an uncontrolled stream indefinitely, and no one quite knew what the result of that would be. It was only hoped that if it
did
happen, this place was so far from Earth that it might be millions of years before humans found out the hard way.

The opening might also be too small, in which case sufficient power would not flow from the initial punches into the installed machinery to keep the Point opening and closing at a regulated rate and thus charge the rest of the system. In that case, all of this had been for nothing.

Finally ready, checked and double-checked, the master computers in orbit sent their signals to the first Gate, its dish filled with energy-storage modules—always called batteries, although they bore slight resemblance except in function to the devices which first bore that name—and at the precisely timed moment, the initial long punch was made.

There were no humans to watch, no humans to bite their nails and cheer or cry; those were all still an infinitely long distance away across the galaxy, or perhaps even elsewhere in the universe.

There was a bright, brilliant flash in the tunnel almost as if a new, tiny sun were born, then changing, collapsing in upon itself, becoming a microcosm of the fate of the universe. At a specific point, perhaps no larger than a pencil's diameter, all of this converged, pushed, and punched. The timing was exquisite; bare millionths of a second later, and the punch itself would have had such density that it would have fallen clear through the floor and down at least to the core of the tiny planet.

At the end of the tunnel was a vacuum chamber maintained by electromagnetic force behind a transparent but diamond-hard membrane. It had flashed into light when the punch was made, but now, for a while, it was dark once more.

The internal lighting came on. Flux had entered the chamber, but not in sufficient quantities to be useful. The great machines had only enough battery storage for three tries; then it worked or they had to start all over again.

The second punch proved sufficient. Enough Flux energy entered, and was captured, that with the aid of the topside generators, the Gate machinery had enough to do one thing— punch again. And again. And again.

Regulating itself and keeping the Point open longer than humans back on Titan would have dared, it sucked the energy from that other universe into itself, fed itself, and began to hold the Point open longer and longer, so that it built up excess capacity. Within an hour all umbilicals connecting the external batteries to the internal machinery were disengaged.

Still, it took more than two months before sufficient rhythm had been built up, and sufficient power bled in, so that the internal computers could report they were in fact totally self-sufficient. There were many minor component failures, but none in the early, critical stages, both a matter of luck and a testament to the thoroughness of computer checks both on the Titan and project end of things. By this point the computers and their extensions could analyze failures almost instantly, direct Flux to those points, and by transmutation use Flux to recreate the original part from designs in memory and replace defects. The self-maintenance was complete.

By now, at the vacuum-chamber end of the Gate. Flux was coming in at a steady rate. Held there, and now affected by rotation, revolution, and gravity, it began a swirling motion, a great spiral mass of Flux at maximum density. As the other Gates were similarly opened and tested. Flux began to be bled off from that swirl and allowed to escape, both through tubes drilled through solid rock to the surface and out the feed tube itself.

By the end of the first year sufficient Flux had been introduced to literally enshroud the planet, but the density was so thin that it was useless for any work and in fact not apparent unless viewed through the superhuman devices of the computers themselves. Still, a dramatic change had already taken place on the little world.

It was inhabited.

The barren piece of rock was crawling with tiny metallic creatures whose origins were in the imaginations of men and women who had never seen or dreamed of this place and in the vast computers those people used. There, too, were the ghosts of a tiny crude ashtray now taken to the infinite power.

Inside the computers who supervised the project were the digitized programs that, when put together and pressed in a concentration of Flux by forces also fueled by Flux, became the first generation of life on the new world. The project was already self-generating; it was creating what it required out of its own memories and needs and out of Flux itself.

To convert even Flux energy into matter took three times the energy that would go into making up the result, but they now had that energy to spare. Soon there were thousands of creeping, crawling, rolling, walking creatures working on areas of the world, creatures who needed only a trip to their blood banks, the Gates, and the Flux storage areas now and then to be independent of all other needs.

Below the orbiting master computers, on the dark surface, blasting, drilling, smoothing, boring, and a thousand other tasks were under way.

Four Gates were equidistantly placed around the equator; two were placed north of the equator, one east and one west of the agreed-upon zero-degree meridian, and one south, centered on the zero line. This gave a northerly tilt to the life zone, but this was decided upon because of a rougher southern hemisphere terrain.

By the end of the second year an outside observer could observe a noticeable haze around the world that might be mistaken for a true atmosphere, thickest around the zero-zero area, where meridian met parallel. By this time sufficient Flux had been introduced to extend power lines, cables, and connectors from the Gates to the areas under development. These were strung in channels burned deep into the bedrock and then covered with rock melted by laser, and stretched out for over eighteen hundred kilometers from Gate to the areas under development. Now remote areas from the Gate had both access to conventional energy from the great batteries and to direct Flux energy as needed, and the developmental areas needed a lot.

Starting in the third year, similar channels were made between Gates so that energy could be combined, jointly measured, and shifted as needed. There was in the end a single great energy railway, with sextuple redundancy, going north from the far west, then south again from the northwest Gate, then south again to the lone southern Gate, then back north to the first eastern Gate and north some more to the northeast Gate, then back south again to the easternmost and due west again to where it started. It was not the best way to do it, but it was the most expedient.

Early in the fourth year Flux consistency had reached very dense levels within the proposed life zone. Now was the time for the greatest transmutation, upon which the ultimate success or failure of the mission depended. It
should
work; it worked to scale on Titan, but with a single Gate and contained by a vast dome to a localized area. It had never been tried on this scale before, if only because they feared to do it so close to home.

First, convert a measured amount of Flux into heat; let the forces of the planet's movement distribute it while reinforcing it evenly through the life zone through all seven Gates and their outlying outlets.

There was a crackling, and a circle of pencil-thin fire went out from each Gate and a smaller one from each of the twenty-eight remote bases. They ultimately hit, merged, and continued on in a measured mathematical pattern, successive waves following the first, but weaker now.

Above, in orbit, great silvery saillike mechanisms looked down from geostationary orbits at this, and at the precise moment began to work on the Flux below.

Snow fell on the little world for the first time, snow that was not water but frozen gasses—oxygen and nitrogen primarily, but also trace elements of some others and a carefully measured amount of hydrogen.

The stuff began to melt as it hit the ground, throwing up tremendous clouds of steam, and there was within hours a whirling mass of gasses seething and boiling and attempting to find equilibrium, as the computers who created it all measured and monitored and adjusted this and that until that state could be reached.

But, ultimately, it did stabilize and it did begin to form as expected, while the network of vents and control pads converted Flux to heat and then maintained it as coffee was maintained hot on a small hot plate. An outer layer, or cap, was now placed around the world, created out of Flux by the orbital stations and made by modifying the Flux and holding it, using the magnetic field of the planet augmented by the areas below. Gravity anchored the atmosphere; the twenty-eight stations around the Gates, through direct Flux beams, anchored the shield.

It would be insubstantial to matter, but it would retain heat, and could be constantly adjusted and regulated as needed to bleed off heat if temperatures rose, or keep in more if they fell. Losses would be made up as needed by the mechanisms of the Gates and Anchors, but once the temperatures stabilized in the life zone and the shield was in place, this was a matter of minor fine tuning, not a constant battle. The master computers now had their two mechanisms—heat generation and electromagnetic cap situations could exist in the equatorial regions, causing regulatory overload. Lacking more Borelli Points and regulators, all Flux north and south of the life zone was needed to maintain atmosphere and basic life requirements.

The atmospheric mix was a mildly purified blend of gases close to Earth-normal and well within human toleration limits. It moved, in predetermined patterns, around the world, influenced by the cold of the polar areas and the warmth of the equatorial zone as determined and maintained by the master programs through Flux transmutation, but this could not be sensed on the surface. Flux in such concentrations seemed to damp out and absorb much of this, leaving real movement to the upper regions of the atmosphere.