Delta Pavonis (13 page)

They pondered that for a minute. "Hey, Doc," Forrest said, "do you really believe that?"

She looked at him pityingly. "Hell, no! It's just a possibility I'm playing with. Do you people only think about things you already believe? You're not scientists. You might as well be theologians."

"Lighten up, Doc," Dierdre said. "We're almost as brilliant as you, we're just a little slower, that's all."

Sieglinde leaned back and laughed. "We're all suffering from data overload. Go get some sleep."

They trudged off to their beds, but it turned out that the day's marvels were not yet over. In the middle of the night they were awakened by the voice of OrbitCom booming over their communication system. Robot Six had returned. It had broadcast from Copernicus, a Mars-sized moon orbiting Baal, a multiringed gas giant far out toward the edge of the system. The robot had arrived at its destination, had beamed its transmission and, having received no orders to the contrary, had obeyed its programming and returned, arriving in Derek Kuroda's lab six hours ahead of its own transmission.

SEVEN

Sieglinde punched her console and lines of incomprehensible symbols scrolled upward from the set, too fast for anybody else in the lab to read, even if they had been able to comprehend the personal symbology she had invented for her work. Only the most advanced physicists and mathematicians, many of them her own students, had ever mastered it. To the team members and technicians in the room, it might as well have been Sanskrit.

"We've got discrepancies here," she said. "Serious ones. Everything complex we've sent through the offworld transporters; computers and animals especially, have arrived at the other end with glitches in their electronic or electrochemical structure. The defects from specimens sent out to this planet's larger moon were just barely detectable, even with my best instruments. Those from Copernicus were far more serious. I think that the transporter's reliability is directly linked to distance of transmission."

"You say serious, Doc," Forrest said. "How serious?"

She frowned. "Any glitch at all seems catastrophic to me, but I'll concede that my passion for order and perfection leads to exaggeration. Let's say that you'd have to be careful sending a computer through while it was handling anything important. With self-correcting systems, you'd be unlikely to have trouble, though, as long as it was adjusted to deal with this sort of failure."

She ran some holos of the experimental animals. "As for the animals, their behavior is mainly instinct-driven and so far we've observed no definite behavioral discrepancies. The differences have shown up in electrochemical activity. Their brains are too primitive to be greatly affected by the changes. Anything with more complex mental faculties, though, would be at risk.

"We now have little reason to believe that the humans who went through were altered. Planetary transportation is probably safe, although I still consider the risk foolish at this point. At most, you're sparing yourself a few hours and a little discomfort. Transportation across space, though, should not be attempted by humans at this time. It wouldn't be you that showed up at the other end. The complex wave patterns of the human brain require extreme subtlety and precision to record and transmit. The very slightest imprecision would result in someone very different from you being reassembled."

"Sieglinde," Derek asked, "do you think this glitch is actually an inevitable function of distance between transporters, or could it be deterioration from age? Such evidence as we have indicates that some of these transporters have been in place for millions of years."

"Or maybe," Forrest hazarded, "a design flaw? Maybe these aliens weren't as godlike as we've come to imagine them."

Dierdre thought that was a perceptive comment. She had some questions of her own, but she liked the way Forrest had hit on that. She also thought his curly blond beard framed his jaw nicely. She shoved the thought aside. She prided herself on how long she could nurse a grudge, and she still resented the patronizing way he had treated her when she first joined the team.

"The age is still problematical," Sieglinde said. "We really have no data to go on. My own personal vessel, for instance, is almost a hundred years old. Someone discovering it drifting in space, abandoned, could read the date of manufacture on the builder's plaque, but probably only the hull dates from that time. The aliens could be keeping these devices maintained.

"As for Steve's comment"—she shook her head, not in discouragement but in wonder—"I'm just beginning to get an idea how they've accomplished this, and it's so complex that I'm amazed they could send a potted turnip through and have it still alive on the other side. As for their intelligence, they may well have been more intelligent than we are. One thing we do know is that humans are the dumbest creatures capable of developing technology, so they couldn't have been less intelligent. On the other hand, they may just have had more time to work in."

"Doc," Dierdre said, "you mentioned when we first surveyed the cave that there were two mysteries about the cave and one about the transporter room that you needed to figure out. We've pretty well settled the one about the animal barrier. What are the other two?"

"One is minor: why do the caves stay so clean? I found that even windblown trash, leaves, feathers, dust and such don't settle for long. Snow doesn't drift in the ice age cave. Some force gently pushes everything out after a few days. I now think it's a variant use of the force field that Ping smacked his nose on. I haven't had time to figure it out yet, but it's simple compared to the transporter.

"The other is more perplexing. How does the transporter chamber contain all that energy? The area surrounding the object to be transported contains the energy from the—what shall we call it?—
disincorporated
body and stores it for the instant prior to transportation, and does the same at the other end while the wave pattern is interpreted and reincorporated. To give you an idea of what this means, the energy of a body massing 100 kilograms, when converted to pure energy, would yield about the explosive force of a couple of hundred megatons of TNT."

They winced slightly at the thought of the sort of forces they had so blithely meddled with.

"As to the aliens themselves," she went on, "we're still dealing in guesswork. The few inferences we can draw are all conditional. From the size of the transporter chambers they were roughly human-sized and had hands of some sort, If the users on this planet were its originators. They might have been servant creatures, or robots. And we can be pretty sure that they were willing to deal with time in great big chunks."

"Maybe they had a different perception of time," Dierdre suggested.

"Elaborate on that," Sieglinde said.

Dierdre waved her hands, slightly embarrassed. "It's just something I've been thinking about. I did a paper on it in my ephebe year."

"I read it," Sieglinde said, "continue."

Dierdre never failed to be amazed at Sieglinde's thoroughness. "Well, the human conception of time is totally subjective, and its rhythms and intervals are all determined by the specialized, localized circumstances peculiar to Earth: rotation of the planet, night and day, lunar cycles, tidal cycles, seasonal changes, the orbit of the planet and so forth. Even under the local conditions of Earth there were creatures with life cycles far briefer than humans, and a few that were longer. It would be unreasonable to expect aliens even to approximate our conception of time.

"Even aside from human perception of time, which is faulty to begin with, it gets really elastic when we get away from the home system. We all know that quasi-luminal travel slows down the rate of the passage of time for the traveler when measured against that for the person who does not travel." Nobody had to question what she meant. She wasn't addressing a group of dummies.

"Now, this can mean several things in relation to our putative aliens. They may just have tremendously long lives, in which case spans of time unthinkable to us become reasonable. Or they might have been hive-creatures and shared a group mind, in which the mortality of individual bodies means less than the formation and death of our bodily cells."

Dierdre sat back and took a deep breath. She wasn't used to talking this long. Arguing, yes, but not lecturing. "That's just considering the possibilities of organic life. Electronic intelligences might not consider time a factor at all."

"Super-computers?" Derek queried.

"Something like that. Something as far beyond our computers as they are ahead of a primitive calculator. It's not unthinkable. We went from calculators to sophisticated computers in less than a century."

Sieglinde nodded. "And if they're self-correcting, not relying on organic electrochemical brain action, they might be able to use the transporters across interstellar distances without risk. It's a good thought. I suspect they were made of matter, though. It's what the transporters were designed to handle."

"But, that's just the first part of this chain of thought," Dierdre persisted.

"Then finish it," Sieglinde urged.

"Well, I was thinking about different
per
ceptions of time that might separate us from the aliens, but what about differing
con
ceptions?"

Everyone else looked puzzled at this, but Sieglinde smiled as if it had been just what she had expected to hear. "You're onto something. Go ahead."

"We're born, we live and we die and everything in between is experienced along a linear time-line. Maybe they could experience time in a different way."

"You mean time travel?" Derek said.

"It's one possibility. It's been thought impossible for centuries beyond the sub-atomic level, but that doesn't mean anything. These aliens licked the speed of light limitation, so maybe they mastered time travel as well.

"Actually, though, I wasn't planning to go that far. What I was thinking was, maybe they could experience time not as a continuous line, but as discrete segments along the line, chosen perhaps at will. We have some slight capability that way. Our conscious minds don't really experience the passage of time while we're asleep or comatose, only our bodies. Maybe they could step outside the timestream. That way, even with a human lifetime, you could set up an experiment in evolution, then jump ahead a million years to see how it was making out."

"Where do they stay in the meantime?" Forrest asked.

"Ask her," Dierdre said, pointing at Sieglinde. "She's the physicist, I'm just a theorist."

"Very good," Sieglinde proclaimed. "Dierdre's taken my advice about freeing her speculations from conventional patterns of belief. As a matter of fact, I've been speculating along much the same lines. Of around thirty scenarios I've considered, her 'punctuated time frame' theory is one of the five I consider to be the most likely."

The others looked at her admiringly, impressed that she had been thinking along the same lines as the great Dr. Kornfeld. Dierdre was a little crestfallen, though. Not only had her theory not been original, but according to Sieglinde it only made it into the top five.

"As to where they would go in the interim," Sieglinde said, "I think it would be analogous to the state that matter enters prior to transmission through their transporters. They might be broken down into wave patterns, stored in an indeterminate n-time, and reincorporated after the proper passage of real time. As to how the time is determined and the retranslation effected, I have no idea. But if that's what they're doing, I'll find out.''

Nobody doubted that she would do it. Dr. Kornfeld didn't go by anyone else's rules.

"Any news on the hominids?" Derek asked.

Fumiyo, who had been assigned to keep current on that subject, reported. "Teams in the environments consistent with human or proto-human life have begun special procedures to detect and observe hominids. Remote snoops, all but invisible, are being installed in favorable areas. Two more hominid species have been identified. Well, there's some disagreement on one of them. Many anthropologists and zoologists say it's really an ape; foot, leg and spinal structure not advanced enough to call homonid. The other, though, was spotted just yesterday. It's more advanced than the ones Minsky's Team Green found."

A holo appeared in the middle of the room. A single creature squatted by a waterhole, drinking from a cupped palm. It was not quite as hairy as the first specimens had been, with more bare skin showing on face, chest and hands. The skin itself was pale tan. The face still looked as much animal as human, but its angle was more nearly vertical. Most human of all were the hands and feet. The big toes were slightly separated from the others, but the arch and heel were pronounced. The hands, except for the thick hair that grew almost to the knuckles, would have passed muster in any card game.

Forrest whistled. "Getting close. Fumiyo, has anyone recorded definite speech? That'd be the clincher."

"Not yet. They're reluctant to pursue the band Team Green found, but listening devices have been placed. This one was a single individual, so we can't know until a group is observed. The other looked too primitive."

"Doc," Ping said, "what're we gonna do if we discover real, definite, no-fooling humans?"

"Rewrite a little history, I suspect. Actually, that will be a matter for the
Althing
to decide, not us. One thing, though, hominid or human, there won't be very many of them. The area suitable for primitive human habitation is too small. And, it's consistent with known Earth history. For millennia, proto-human and human numbers were minuscule. What's really going to stir things up is if we find that they originated here and were transported to Earth rather than vice versa." That thought had been on all their minds, an unwelcome complication of what was already complicated enough.

"How are the other probes making out?" Hannie asked. "Now that they know what to look for?" It was easy for them to forget that there were other Island Worlds out there, exploring other systems. Most of Team Red were too young to remember the Sol Orbit days, when they had all been concentrated around a single star. Delta Pavonis had been one of the nearer destinations, but a few stars had been reached earlier, a few more had checked in after the Avalonian arrival in the Delta Pavonis area, and many more would be traveling for years or decades before reaching their chosen stars.

"I haven't had time to keep track lately," Sieglinde said. "Derek?"

"Nothing much so far. The Alphans have been at their destination the longest, and our news took them completely by surprise." This was the expedition that had chosen the system nearest to Earth, Alpha Centauri, a two-star system with a third, more distant companion star, Proxima Centauri. The main star had been designated Alpha Prime and its fourth planet had proven to be amazingly Earthlike: slightly more massive than the motherworld, but with a larger radius; in consequence its surface gravity was very nearly Earth normal. It rotated every twenty-five hours and had a three hundred fourteen day year. The discoverers had named it, fittingly if unimaginatively, Terra Nova. The second star, commonly called Alpha Deuce, was separated from Prime by 23.6 astronomical units and appeared in the Terra Novan night sky as an intensely bright point of light, except during a brief time of year when it was too near the primary to be seen.