“You mean there’s this guy in Baltimore and there’s this other guy out in California someplace, both plugged into BIACs that are hooked together, and they can exchange thoughts?” Aub stared over his beer in astonishment. “Man, that’s crazy.”
“You’ve gotta be joking, Brad,” Morelli said.
“Really.” Clifford nodded emphatically. “I’ve seen them doing it. One of them can read a list of numbers off a piece of paper and the other one will tell you what they are. . . . They can send pictures—one guy imagines a face that they both know and the other guy identifies it . . . all kinds of things.”
“Sorta like telepathy by the sound of it,” Morelli remarked. “I never had much time for that kinda stuff.”
“It’s not really, though, is it,” Clifford pointed out. “Not in the way that people usually mean the word.”
“How d’you mean?” Morelli asked.
“Well, usually they’re talking about paranormal phenomena . . . things outside known science. But this isn’t like that—it’s all based on things we know about and understand.”
“It achieves the same sort of effect, though,” Aub broke in.
“Which is my whole point,” Clifford declared. “It’s just another example of the kind of thing that’s happened over and over again through history.” Two pairs of eyes looked back at him blankly. “Every day,” he explained, “we take it for granted that we can do things that people five hundred years ago dreamed about, but could only think of in terms of magic. We can fly through the air, stare into magic mirrors, and watch things going on in other places. . . . We can even talk to people all over the world. . . .” Clifford opened his hands expressively. “We’ve made all those things happen, but we’ve used methods of doing it that people from way back could never have imagined.”
“Yeah, I’m with you,” Aub said, nodding. “Because they had no idea about electronics and the like.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m getting at,” Clifford told him. “They imagined flying and talked about levitation, because they couldn’t see in advance the kind of engineering needed to make the idea work.”
“Okay,” Morelli agreed. “You’re saying that people made the mistake of imagining telepathy, thinking it had to be some kind of magic. Now that the effects they talked about are actually starting to happen, it turns out you don’t need anything magic to do it—just a couple of BIACs.”
“That’s exactly it, Al,” Clifford confirmed. “Talking about something paranormal is just a way of discussing something you don’t properly understand . . . yet. The operative word is ‘yet.’ In the end, the idea all becomes part of what’s normal. Nobody thinks now that there’s anything mysterious about talking across country by Infonet. And effectively, this is no different, except that the talking uses a BIAC instead of a regular Infonet terminal.”
“Well . . . I guess that doesn’t leave much over outside orthodox science,” Aub mused after reflecting for a while. “I guess maybe that’s what everything we do is about—turning paradox into orthodox.”
Chapter 17
Through Zimmermann, the ISF astronomers at Joliot-Curie had been kept updated on developments at Sudbury. Excited by the way in which k-theory had accounted successfully for the observed distribution of the three-degree cosmic background radiation, a group of them had begun reappraising other outstanding problems in the light of the new theory. This led to their formulating a new system of k-conservation principles and enabled them to explain at last, among other things, why the amount of conventional radiation produced in the vicinity of the Cygnus X-1 black hole was larger than classical quantum theory predicted it should be.
Essentially, the new conservation principles stated that when matter/energy ‘vanished’ out of normal space to exist totally in hi-space, as happened when a particle annihilated or matter fell into a black hole, then an equivalent amount of energy had to reappear in normal space somewhere. Calculation showed that this ‘return energy’ would appear in a distribution pattern that gave the greatest intensity in the immediate vicinity of the point at which the original annihilation had taken place, but which fell away exponentially all the way to infinity. This led to the remarkable conclusion that when matter annihilated, say in Cygnus X-l, or in Morelli’s 58 GRASER, energy reappeared instantaneously at every point in the universe as a direct consequence of the event. The amount of return energy that would appear, for example, somewhere in the middle of the Andromeda Galaxy as a result of one gram of matter being consumed in the GRASER in Massachusetts would thus be immeasurably and unimaginably small; nevertheless, mathematically at least, it would be there.