“Where did you go when you stepped through the doorway?” Ellie softly asked her. “Four-sixteen Maidenhall Way,” she answered. Ellie looked at her blankly. “London, 1973. With Surindar.” She nodded her head in his direction. “Before he died.” Ellie wondered what she would have found had she crossed that threshold on the beach. Wisconsin in the late `50s, probably. She hadn’t shown up on schedule, so he had come to find her. He had done that in Wisconsin more than once.
Eda had also been told about a message deep inside a transcendental number, but in his story it was not ? or e, the base of natural logarithms, but a class of numbers she had never heard of. With an infinity of transcendental numbers, they would never know for sure which number to examine back on Earth.
“I hungered to stay and work on it,” he told Ellie softly, “and I sensed they needed help–some way of thinking about the decipherment that hadn’t occurred to them. But I think it’s something very personal for them. They don’t want to share it with others. And realistically, I suppose we just aren’t smart enough to give them a hand.”
They hadn’t decrypted the message in ?? The Station-masters, the Caretakers, the designers of new galaxies hadn’t figured out a message that had been sitting under their thumbs for a galactic rotation or two? Was the message that difficult, or were they…? “Time to go home,” her father said gently. It was wrenching. She didn’t want to go. She tried staring at the palm frond. She tried asking more questions.
“How do you mean `go home’? You mean we’re going to emerge somewhere in the solar system? How will we get down to Earth?”
“You’ll see,” he answered. “It’ll be interesting.” He put his arm around her waist, guiding her toward the open airlock door.
It was like bedtime. You could be cute, you could ask bright questions, and maybe they’d let you stay up a little later. It used to work, at least a little.
“The Earth is linked up now, right? Both ways. If we can go home, you can come down to us in a jiffy. You know, that makes me awfully nervous. Why don’t yon just sever the link? We’ll take it from here.”
“Sorry, Presh,” he replied, as if she had already shamelessly prolonged her eight o’clock bedtime. Was he sorry about bedtime, or about being unready to denozzle the tunnel? “For a while at least, it’ll be open only to inbound traffic,” he said. “But we don’t expect to use it.”
She liked the isolation of the Earth from Vega. She preferred a fifty-two-year-long leeway between unacceptable behavior on Earth and the arrival of a punitive expedition. The black hole link was uncomfortable. They could arrive almost instantaneously, perhaps only in Hokkaido, perhaps anywhere on Earth. It was a transition to what Hadden had called microintervention. No matter what assurances they gave, they would watch us more closely now. No more dropping in for a casual look-see every few million years.
She explored her discomfort further. How….heological…the circumstances had become. Here were beings who live in the sky, beings enormously knowledgeable and powerful, beings concerned for our survival, beings with a set of expectations about how we should behave. They disclaim such a role, but they could clearly visit reward and punishment, life and death, on the puny inhabitants of Earth. Now how is this different, she asked herself, from the old-time religion? The answer occurred to her instantly: It was a matter of evidence. In her videotapes, in the data the others had acquired, there would be hard evidence of the existence of the Station, of what went on here, of the blackhole transit system. There would be five independent, mutually corroborative stories supported by compelling physical evidence. This one was fact, not hearsay and hocus-pocus.
She turned toward him and dropped the frond. Wordlessly, he stooped and returned it to her.
“You’ve been very generous in answering all my questions. Can I answer any for you?”
“Thanks. You answered all our questions last night.”
“That’s it? No commandments? No instructions for the provincials?”
“It doesn’t work that way, Presh. You’re grown up now. You’re on your own.” He tilted his head, gave her that grin, and she flew into his arms, her eyes again filling with tears. It was a long embrace. Eventually, she felt him gently disengage her arms. It was time to go to bed. She imagined holding up her index finger and asking for still one more minute. But she did not want to disappoint him. “Bye, Presh,” he said. “Give your mother my love.” `Take care,” she replied in a small voice. She took one last look at the seashore at the center of the Galaxy. A pair of seabirds, petrels perhaps, were suspended on some rising column of air. They remained aloft with hardly a beat of their wings. Just at the entrance to the airlock, she turned and called to him.
“What does your Message say? The one in pi?”
“We don’t know,” he replied a little sadly, taking a few steps toward her. “Maybe it’s a kind of statistical accident. We’re still working on it.” The breeze stirred up, tousling her hair once again. “Well, give us a call when you figure it out,” she said.
CHAPTER 21
Causality
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods– They kill us for their sport.
-WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear, IV, i, 36
Who is all-powerful should fear everything.
-PIERRE CORNEILLE
Cinna (1640), Act IV, Scene II
They were overjoyed to be back. They whooped it up, giddy with excitement. They climbed over the chairs. They bugged and patted erne another on the back. All of them were dose to tears. They had succeeded–but not only that, they had returned, safely negotiating all the tunnels. Abruptly, amidst a bail of static, the radio began blaring out the Machine status report. All three benzels were decelerating. The built-up electrical charge was dissipating. From the commentary, it was clear that Project had no idea of what had happened.
Ellie wondered how much time had passed. She glanced at her watch. It had been a day at least, which would bring them well into the year 2000. Appropriate enough. Oh, wait till they hear what we have to tell them, she thought. Reassuringly, she patted the compartment where the dozens of video microcassettes were stored. How the world would change when these films were released! The space between and around the benzels had been re-pressurized. The airlock doors were being opened. Now there were radio inquiries about their well-being.
“We’re fine!” she shouted back into her microphone. “Let us out. You won’t believe what happened to us.”
The Five emerged from the airlock happy, effusively greeting their comrades who had helped build and operate the Machine. The Japanese technicians saluted them. Project officials surged toward them.
Devi said quietly to Ellie, “As far as I can tell, everyone’s wearing exactly the same clothing they did yesterday. Look at that ghastly yellow tie on Peter Valerian.”
“Oh, he wears that old thing all the time,” Ellie replied. “His wife gave it to him.” The clocks read 15:20. Activation had occurred close to three o’clock the previous afternoon. So they had been gone just a little over twenty-four…
“What day is it?” she asked. They looked at her uncomprehendingly. Something was wrong. “Peter, for heaven’s sake, what day is it?”
“How do you mean?” Valerian answered. “It’s today. Friday, December 31, 1999. It’s New Year’s Eve. Is that what you mean? Ellie, are you all right?”
Vaygay was telling Archangelsky to let him begin at the beginning, but only after his cigarettes were produced. Project officials and representatives of the Machine Consortium were converging around them. She saw der Heer wedging his way to her through the crowd.
“From your perspective, what happened?” she asked as finally he came within conversational range.
“Nothing. The vacuum system worked, the benzels spun up, they accumulated quite an electrical charge, they reached the prescribed speed, and then everything reversed.”
“What do you mean, `everything reversed’?”
“The benzels slowed down and the charge dissipated. The system was repressurized, the benzels stopped, and all of you came out. The whole thing took maybe twenty minutes, and we couldn’t talk to you while the benzels were spinning. Did you experience anything at all?”
She laughed. “Ken, my boy,” she said, “have I got a story for you.”
There was a party for project personnel to celebrate Machine Activation and the momentous New Year. Ellie and her traveling companions did not attend. The television stations were full of celebrations, parades, exhibits, retrospectives, prognostications and optimistic addresses by national leaders. She caught a glimpse of remarks by the Abbot Utsumi, beatific as ever. But she could not dawdle. Project Directorate had quickly concluded, from the fragments of their adventures that the Five had time to recount, that something had gone wrong. They found themselves hustled away from the milling crowds of government and Consortium officials for a preliminary interrogation. It was thought prudent, project officials explained, for each of the Five to be questioned separately. Der Heer and Valerian conducted her debriefing in a small conference room. There were other project officials present, including Vaygay’s former student Anatoly Goldmann. She understood that Bobby Bui, who spoke Russian, was sitting in for the Americans during Vaygay’s interrogation.