Ms. Mulling looked confused. “What are you talking about, Professor Danchekker? There are urgent things to be attended to.”
“I have no time for anything urgent. There are too many important things to be done, instead.”
“But—where are you going?”
“To Jevlen. Where else can a science of alien life be practiced?” Danchekker lifted a leg to dangle a sneaker-shod foot in view of the screen and waggled it provocatively. “Far, far away, Ms. Mulling. Beyond the horizons of imagination of the entire Republican Society, the verbal compass of a gaggle of senators’ wives, and even, if you are capable of comprehending such a thing, beyond the reaches of the sacred UNSA Corporate Procedure Manual.”
“Jevlen? Why? What are you going to do there?”
But Danchekker wasn’t listening. Hunt and Mitzi could hear him singing tunelessly to himself as he ambled away down the corridor beyond the open door.
“Far, far away. Far, far away . .
CHAPTER TEN
Earth’s physicists were having to do a lot of rethinking to accommodate the new facts brought by the Ganymeans. Some of the most far-reaching revelations had to do with the fundamental nature of matter itself.
As some Terran scientists had suspected and been investigating without conclusive result since the late twentieth century, the permanency of matter turned out to be just another illusion to be thrown overboard with such notions as classical predictability and absolute, universal time. For all forms of matter were continually decaying away to nothing, although at a rate immeasurably small by the techniques so far available on Earth—it would take ten billion years for a gram of water to vanish completely.
The fundamental particles of which matter was composed annihilated spontaneously, returning to a hyperrealm governed by laws different from those that operated in the familiar universe. It was the tiny proportion that was disappearing at any instant that gave rise to the gravitational effect of mass. Every annihilation event produced a minute gravity pulse, and the additive effect of large numbers of these pulses occurring every second gave the apparently steady field that was perceived macroscopically.
Hence, gravity ceased being a thing apart in physics, a static effect, passively associated with a mass, and fell instead into line along with other field phenomena as a vector quantity generated by the rate of change of something—in this case, the rate of change of mass. This principle, together with means of artificially inducing and controlling the process, formed the basis of early Ganymean gravitic engineering—the drive system used by the Shapieron was an example of its application.
Small though it sounded, such a rate of disappearance was not trivial on a cosmic time scale. The reason there was much of the universe left at all was that, throughout the entire volume of space, particles were constantly being created spontaneously, too. And in a converse way to that in which particle-annihilations induced gravity, particle-creations induced “negative gravity.” Since a particle could only disappear from where it already existed, extinctions predominated inside masses and induced an attractive curvature into the local vicinity of space—time; but in the vast regions of empty space between galaxies, creations far outnumbered extinctions, and the resultant effect was a cosmic repulsion. It all made a rather tidy and symmetric, satisfying kind of sense.
A fundamental particle, therefore, appeared, lived out its allotted span in the observable dimensions of the known universe, and then vanished. Where it came from and where it returned to were questions that the scientists of Earth had never had to face, and which even the Ganymeans on Minerva at the time of the Shapieron’s departure had only begun delving into. It was their subsequent work in this direction that had given the Thuriens the technologies that made possible their interstellar civilization.
The hyperrealm that particles temporarily emerged from was the same domain that matter—energy entered when it disappeared into a black hole. That an object no longer continued to exist where it had when it entered a black hole, Terran physicists had known theoretically for some time. Therefore, it had to be either somewhere else in the known universe; or in another universe; or, conceivably, in some other time. Logic admitted no other alternatives. Remarkably, it turned out, all three were possible. The Thuriens had realized and applied the first two; they were still looking into and puzzling over the third.