mean physics by that time to be astounded. “And they could control events like that down at that level?” he asked.
“That’s what Mike’s people reckon.”
Shortly afterward, an argument developed over one of the details, and Hunt left the group as they were in the process of placing a call to Livermore for clarification.
It seemed as if the information left by the Ganymeans was all starting to bear fruit at once, causing something new to break out every day. Caidwell’s idea of using Hunt’s section as an international clearinghouse for the research into Ganymean sciences was starting to produce results. When the first clues concerning Minerva and the Ganymeans were coming to light, Caidwell had set up Hunt’s original pilot group to do exactly this kind of thing. The organization had proved well suited to the task, and now it formed a ready-made group for tackling the latest studies.
Hunt’s last call was on Paul Shelling, whose people occupied a group of offices and a computer room on the floor below. One of the most challenging aspects of Ganymean technology was their “gravities,” which enabled them to deform spacetime artificially without requiring large concentrations of mass. The Shapieron’s drive system had utilized this capability by creating a “hole” ahead of the ship into which it “fell” continuously to propel itself through space; the “gravity” inside the vessel was also manufactured, not simulated. Shelling, a gravitational physicist on a sabbatical from Rockwell International, headed up a mathematical group which had been delving into Ganymean field equations and energy-metric transforms for six months. Hunt found him staring at a display of isochrons and distorted spacetime geodesics, and looking very thoughtful.
“It’s all there,” Sheffing said, keeping his eyes fixed on the softly glowing colored curves and speaking in a faraway voice. “Artificial black holes. . . just switch ’em on and off to order.”
The information did not come as a big surprise to Hunt. The Ganymeans had confirmed that the Shapieron’s drive had in fact achieved this, and Hunt and Shelling had talked about its theoretical basis on many occasions. “You’ve figured it out?” Hunt asked, slipping into a vacant chair and studying the display.
“We’re on our way, anyhow.”
“Does it get us any nearer instant point-to-point transfers?” That was something the Ganymeans had not achieved, although
the possibility was implicit in their theoretical constructs. Black holes distantly separated in normal space seemed to link up via a hyperrealm within which unfamiliar physical principles operated, and the ordinary concepts and restrictions of the relativistic universe simply didn’t apply. As the Ganymeans had agreed, the promises implied by this were staggering, but nobody knew how to turn them into realities yet.
“It’s in there,” Shelling answered. “The possibility is in there, but there’s another side to it that bothers me, and it’s impossible to separate Out.”
“What’s that?” Hunt asked.
“Time transfers,” Shelling told him. Hunt frowned. Had he been talking to anybody else, he would have allowed his skepticism to show openly. Shelling spread his hands and gestured toward the screen. “You can’t get away from it. If the solutions admit point-to-point transfers through normal space, they admit transfers through time too. If you could find a way of exploiting one, you’d automatically have a way of exploiting the other as well. Those matrix integrals are symmetric.”
Hunt waited for a moment to avoid appearing derisive. “That’s too much, Paul,” he said. “What happens to causality? You’d never be able to unscramble the mess.”
“I know. . . I know the theory sounds screwy, but there it is. Either we’re up a dead end and none of it works, or we’re stuck with both solutions.”
They spent the next hour working through Sheffing’s equations again but ended up none the wiser. Groups at Cal Tech, Cambridge, the Ministry of Space Sciences in Moscow, and the University of Sydney, Australia, had found the same thing. Obviously Hunt and Shelling were not about to crack the problem there and then, and Hunt eventually left in a very curious and thoughtful mood.
Back in his own office, he called Speehan at MIT, who turned out to have some interesting results from a simulation model of the climatic upheavals caused fifty thousand years earlier by the process of lunar capture. Hunt then took care of a couple of other urgent items that had come in that morning, and was just settling down to study the Livermore paper when Lyn called from Caldwell’s suite at the top of the building. Her face was unusually serious.