“That’s it!” he shouted, gesticulating wildly at the screen. “It’s responding! We’re getting a response! Those readings are pure, 100 percent hi-radiation.”
Peter Hughes stepped forward to peer at the display, his face wreathed in a smile of pure delight.
“They’ve done it, Al!” he exclaimed, turning toward Morelli. “Well I’ll be doggone . . . they’ve actually gone and hit jackpot!”
Morelli moved forward and gazed at the screen in disbelief.
“You’re absolutely certain that that’s what you’re measuring,” he said to Aub. “That really is hi-radiation doing that? It’s not just some indirect measure of secondary reactions or something like that?”
“It sure as hell is not,” Aub stated in a tone that left no room for doubt. “What we’re measuring here is coming straight from the middle of that black hole in there.” Just to make sure the message was loud and clear he added a few more words. “And to get from in there to out here, it isn’t traveling through any of the dimensions of ordinary spacetime. It’s coming through the hi-order domain of k-space.”
Peter Hughes was studying the screen closely, his brow knitted into a frown of concentration. Eventually he caught Aub’s sleeve lightly and pointed to the display in front of them.
“If that data relates to hi-waves that are propagating through a domain of k-space unknown to conventional physics, then surely none of the units of conventional physics can be used to measure it,” he said.
“Absolutely right,” Aub agreed.
“That’s what I thought,” Hughes informed him. “So in that case, what units do those numbers represent?” Aub beamed a wide grin up at him.
“A new unit that we’ve defined specifically for the purpose,” he said. “The first unit ever defined for measuring pure hi-phenomena.”
“What do you call it?” Hughes asked. “Have you thought of a name yet?”
“Of course we have, man.” Aub’s smile broadened. “Milliaubs—what else?”
* * *
The first major hurdle had been cleared. Hi-radiation had not only been demonstrated positively to exist, but an instrumental technique for detecting and measuring it had been found. The project team was naturally in high spirits after these developments, but as further experiments were conducted to exploit the new knowledge, Clifford became even more troubled by the difficulties he was running into on the theoretical side. The detector had provided a complete vindication of his predictions concerning the existence and nature of hi-radiation, it was true, but measurements of the secondary radiation—conventional electromagnetic radiation—showed repeatedly that there was a flaw in his mathematical model somewhere. The amount of radiation measured always turned out to be far greater than his theory predicted. He found himself describing the problem to Sarah one evening, while they were out having a few drinks in the bar of one of the local hotels.
“You really wanna know?” he said, leaning forward across the table of the booth in which they were sitting. Sarah whisked his glass out of harm’s way a split-second before his elbow reached the spot. “It’s all kinda technical . . . I’m not sure I know how to put it.”
“I really want to know,” she told him. “I know there’s something not quite right, and I’d just like some idea of what it is. Try me anyway—I’m interested.”
Clifford folded his arms on the table in front of him, buried his chin in his chest for a moment, then looked up at her and began. “We’ve talked before about k-space, hi-space . . . that kind of thing. Just tell me first what you understand about it.”
“Any prizes?” she asked hopefully.
“Not today. Just testing.”
“Okay,” she said, then thought for a second. “As I understand it, there’s more to the world around us than we can see. Didn’t you say once that you can think of the normal world as some kind of ‘shadow’ existence—a ‘projection,’ I think you said, of something bigger—like shadows on a wall being projections on a flat world of solid things in a real world? Wasn’t it something like that?”
“You’ve got the general idea,” he said, nodding. “We can perceive—in other words, we know about—the things that happen in space and time, which turn out to be different aspects of the same thing anyway—”