“That’s too bad. I can’t wait to see Jevien. Just imagine, a real, actual, alien planet. And we’ll be there tomorrow. I still haven’t really gotten over all this.”
Hunt looked at her thoughtfully. “Maybe we don’t have to keep you waiting that long,” he said.
Gina looked puzzled. “Why? What are you talking about?”
“What you just said has given me an idea . . . VISAR, are there any couplers nearby?”
“A bank of them, to the right outside the door you came in through,” VISA.R replied.
“Are there two free right now?”
“What are you doing?” Gina murmured.
“Wait, and you’ll see.”
“Plenty,” VISAR replied.
Hunt stood up. “Come on,” he said to Gina. “You haven’t seen half of Ganymean communications yet. This’ll be the fastest interstellar trip you ever dreamed of. I guarantee it.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The room was just a cubicle, its main furnishing being a kind of rediner, padded in red, with several panels of what looked like a multicolored crystalline material above and on either side of a concave support where the occupant’s head would be. The wall behind carried equipment and fittings of unfamiliar construction.
Gina ran her eye over the interior. “I take it this is how you connect into the Thurien virtual—travel net,” she guessed.
“That’s right,” Hunt said. He tapped the communicator disk attached behind his ear. “This gadget that they gave you when you came aboard is just a two-way audiovisual link to VISAR—a viphone that goes straight into your head instead of through screens and senses. But this is the full works.”
“What they call total neural stimulation?”
“Instead of you having to go take your sense to wherever the information is, this brings the information to your senses—provided that the place you want to ‘go’ is wired with sensors for the system. It wouldn’t work too well for Times Square or the middle of the Gobi. Also, it intercepts the motor and speech outputs from your brain, and generates the feedback that you’d experience from moving around and interacting there.”
Gina nodded but still looked unsure. After a few seconds, she said, “And all of that two—way information transfer takes place instantly through the same—what do you call it, ‘dimension’?”
‘‘I—space.’’
“That’s it . . . that this ship goes through to get to Jevien, right?”
‘‘Yes.”
“Okay. . . But the ship has to spend a whole day getting out past Pluto before it can use i-space. How come this coupler can do it from right here? Or how come you can do it from Goddard, for that matter?”
Hunt was already nodding. “A port big enough to take a ship would mess up everybody’s astronomical tables if you projected it into a planetary system. So instant planet-to-planet hopping is out. But for communications it’s a different matter. You can send information on a gamma-frequency laser into a microtoroid that can be generated on planetary surfaces—or in ships like this one—without undesirable side effects. The Thuriens use it for most of their routine business and social calling—and you don’t have to worry about drinking the water or catching any foreign bugs. It’s got a lot of advantages.”
Gina moved forward and touched the material of the recliner curiously. It was soft and yielding. Hunt watched from inside the do~irway. “So what do I do?” she asked.
“Just take a seat. VISAR will handle the rest.”
Gina hesitated for a moment, feeling just a trifle self-conscious. The she lowered herself into the recliner, settled her feet on the rest, and let herself sink back. A warm, drowsy feeling swept over her, causing her head to drop back automatically onto the concave support, which was also padded. She felt more relaxed than she could ever remember. The interior of the cubicle seemed to be floating distantly in a detached kind of way. A part of her mind was aware that she had been thinking coherently only moments before, and that someone else had been there for some reason, but she was unable to recall who or why, or really to care. Nothing really mattered.
“Like it?” She recognized the voice as VISAR’s.
“It’s great. What do I do—just lie back and enjoy it?”