MINDBRIDGE by Joe Haldeman

“Also, the females . . . the genital slit extends about a centimeter higher than it normally does in humans, viewed frontally. And in a low dorsal presentation, the last view we have of the injured alien, the external genitalia aren’t visible. They would be in a human.”

He shook his head. “These are small details, but maybe one of them is a clue.

“None of the aliens had a mole, birthmark, or other visible skin deformity. Every one of them had brown eyes. The two women were the same height, 173 centimeters. The men were four and seven centimeters taller. Neither of the men ever opened their mouths.

All four had long, graceful fingers and the high foreheads that we unconsciously, erroneously, associate with intellectual ability.

“Their fingernails and toenails were closely trimmed, what would be painfully close for a human. Collarbones and shoulderblades less prominent than the average human.

“Dr. Jameson feels that the skeletal structure in the legs and pelvis is slightly different than in humans. But that awaits more precise measurement.

“Finally, the injury the female alien sustained. Most people would go into shock and pass out with that kind of a severe fracture. A human might ignore such an injury if he were in a berserker rage, or under deep hypnosis of anesthesia. She seemed to act the same, before and after.

Also, in my opinion, the damage should have been more severe. He grabbed her just above the elbow, in a dying spasm, and shook her twice. With the GPEM’s amplification circuits, that’s like being attacked by a bulldozer. Her arm should have come off.

“We’ll be running this cube continuously for several days, in Studio A next door. I want everybody to see it over and over, as often as you can stand it. There’s no specialty that applies to this problem; there’s none that doesn’t apply. Anything you come up with, send it on to me through Planning.

“Obviously we have to go back. Probably an automated probe; I won’t order anybody to undertake a suicide mission.

“Damned expensive, too. The energy we have to push through the crystal for a 115 light-year jump, just for a couple of hours, would pay for hundreds of routine resupply missions.”

He folded the papers together and gave them a sharp crease. “But once we show this cube around, I doubt we’ll have any trouble getting funded.”

34 – Numbers and Dollars

(From AED Employees’ Handbook, AED TFX, Colorado, 2053:)

It might seem inefficient for us to proceed with geoformy in a sequence of many short jumps, rather than fewer long ones. It is unavoidable, though, from the mathematics of the Levant-Meyer Translation.

To appreciate this, it’s not necessary to have a complete technical description of the LMT; indeed, not one in a thousand AED employees understands all of the subtleties of the process. But it’s instructive to compare the energy requirements of the crystal for jumps of different duration.

(Readers without first-year college mathematics may wish to skip to the last table.)

The basic equation describing the energy needed for a given jump is:

E=C (e^(t/k) cosh s^(1/2))/(l/t+1) , { t>=.01356, s>=9.4095

where C and k are constants, t is the duration of the jump, and s is the distance. Calculations are normally done in the MKS system, but for clarity we will consider t in units of days, and s in units of light-years.

The constraints braced to the right of the equation are due to an energy threshold phenomenon of the LMT crystal. Jumps cannot be made to destinations closer than 9.4095 light-years, nor may a jump be of less than about 191/2 minutes duration. The first constraint keeps us from exploiting the promising Alpha Centauri system.1 The second makes it impossible to explore planets more than about 100-light-years distant.

It’s a convenient fiction to consider this equation as continuous over the range of values allowed. The LMT, however, can’t translate an object to any desired point in space; it translates only from matter boundary to matter boundary. There has to be an object with a distinct and relatively cold surface-a planet or asteroid-“near” the point to which the LMT crystal is tuned (attempts to translate probes onto the surface of planetless stars have always failed). The margin of error allowed is described by a fourth-order differential equation involving distance, energy, and the angular displacement of charge application away from the lattice axis of the LMT crystal.2

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