Spouse of Tamer also poor risk due to extreme nervous tension. Death to be investigated carefully for possibility of suicide.
(Actual mortality rates for Tamers are classified information. Informal studies indicate that fewer than 50% survive a tour of duty.)
14 – The Slingshot Effect
Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Jaime Barnett, Research Director, Agency for Extraterrestrial Development, Colorado Springs, at the dedication of the new 120-cm. LMT crystal, 28 October 2044.)
NBC: -now this is something I’ve never understood. They all come back at the same instant, with no expenditure of power…
JB: (laughs) Welcome to the club. Nobody understands it. It’s obvious that what’s at work here is some kind of a, what scientists call, a conservation law-
NBC: I understand.
JB: -but it’s not clear exactly what is being conserved. Matter and energy and space-time are all involved…. Let me stress this. We can describe the Levant-Meyer Translation, we can describe it mathematically to ten significant figures. But it’s all empirical; we can’t pretend to understand why it works.
The Slingshot Effect is itself a good illustration of this. When a group of people is translated to another planet, one of them carries a homing device-what we call their “black box.” When their time is up on the planet, everything sufficiently close to the black box will automatically return to Earth.
NBC: How close is “sufficiently close”?
JB: It duplicates exactly the configuration of the original LMT field. In the case of our new crystal here, that will be a cylinder 120 centimeters in diameter by some five meters high.
At any rate, there isn’t any theoretical reason for the wiring in this black box to work. Scientists cobbled it together by trial and error, starting from the wiring that was present in the electron microscope that was involved in Levant’s original, uh, accidental experiment.
NBC: But only one person can carry this black box.
JB: Of course. The Los Alamos disaster proved that.
NBC: And they can bring back anything they want from the planet, so long as it fits inside the cylindrical field.
JB: That’s right, uh, Fred. But as you know, the samples they bring back only stay on earth for as long as the people were on the other planet. Then they disappear.
NBC: They also slingshot back? To their home planet?
JB: That would seem logical. Symmetrical. But we don’t know; we’ve never traced a sample.
NBC: And what happens to a person, on the other planet, if he’s caught outside the cylindrical field when time runs out?
JB: That’s happened twice. We sent rescue missions both times, but no one was there.
NBC: They just disappeared? It couldn’t-
JB: That’s right.
NBC: You have no idea what happened to them?
JB: None whatsoever.
15 – CHAPTER FIVE
They left Ch’ing’s body by the riverside and continued to survey the planet.
Without the floater, it was a difficult task. Most of their time was taken up in traveling-literally running from their high-latitude position up to the pole, down to the equator, and back. With their suits’ amplification they could cover a thousand kilometers or more per day.
The planet was less than promising:
There was a sea, covering a fourth of its surface, that had such a high concentration of salt that nothing could live in it, except for certain hardy microorganisms that stayed close to the mouths of rivers.
The polar cap was a frozen wasteland, arid and lifeless, where fossil snow rolled rattling, hard tiny granules pushed by a never-ceasing gale; where the wind carved ice mountains into fantastic shapes, great curving sweeps that met in razor edges to sing one long note in the wind.
A chain of dead volcanoes, their tops dusted with a golden snow of monoclinic sulphur.
An ancient weathered meteor crater, larger than Texas, perfectly round, with the vestige of a central peak-filled with sweet water and a bewildering variety of marine life. None of the creatures had telepathic properties.
Working down from the pole, the frozen sterile ground thawed into a bog, with more and more plant life as they moved toward the equator; then less life as the ground dried out and the temperature rose. The last several hundred kilometers before the equator was all parched desolation, bare gray rock and sand in monotonously regular dunes.