Across A Billion Years

EIGHT

October 1, 2315

Higby V

A very busy few weeks. We have all been working double and triple overtime, which is why I’ve made no entry in these memoirs for you, Lorie. Let’s see if I can bring you up to date in one sizzling blaze of verbiage. The important thing is that we are now committed, kneecaps, collarbones, and medulla, to my totally chimpo project for finding that asteroid vault.

It happened in easy stages, the way cataclysmic events often do. When you sink into quicksand, you don’t get sucked — sploosh! — to the bottom of the swamp in one quick glunk. No, you’re drawn in slowly thinking at first that the quicksand is just ordinary muck, that you can always pull out of it if you want to, that it’s a cinch to get free in case you decide you didn’t really want to cross that particular swamp. Suddenly the stuff is up around your shins and you get a little worried, and you move faster, thinking it’ll do you some good, but it only mires you in deeper, but you remain cool and confident, and gradually, when you’re hip deep and gently sinking, you begin to admit that your struggles are making things worse and that you’re in the sticky for keepses.

Thus I found the globe. Thus we watched the fascinating scenes. Particularly the asteroid-and-rock-vault sequence. Whereupon I suggested finding the vault. Whereafter Pilazinool lent his vast prestige to the quest. Ipso facto we took the idea seriously and went so far as to obtain the computer simulations I talked about. And then — and then-One of the first steps in our ensnarement involved borrowing a telepath from the military base, so we could transmit our astronomical data to the observatory. We did not request Marge Hotchkiss. I made it clear to Dr. Schein that her attitude wasn’t a positive one. Dr. Schein spoke to the base commander and we got one of the other TPs stationed on Higby V. Perhaps you know him: Ron Santangelo.

In the flesh he’s a pale young man, nineteen at most, with watery blue eyes, thin sandy hair, and a generally fragile look. He gives the appearance of being poetic. Maybe he is. He once had a Virangonian tattoo job on both cheeks, but evidently thought better of it and had it removed; not by a very capable surgeon, though, because the outline scars still show. I’ll bet he hates it here.

His first job for us was to make TP contact with Luna City Observatory and find out if they could handle the work we needed. We chose Luna City after a long debate; half a dozen other observatories were proposed, including one on Thhh, the Marsport one, and even old Mount Palomar, but we decided to go to the biggest and best. It doesn’t cost any more to call Luna than it does Marsport or Mount Palomar, after all, and the time factor would be the same. And despite Dr. Horkkk’s chauvinism, neither Thhhian astronomers nor Thhhian computers are in neutrino-buzzing distance of those of Earth and Earth’s colonies; everybody knows that.

Santangelo obligingly went through bimpty-bump relay posts and transmitted our message to Luna City, a task that took about an hour. The folks on the other end already knew about our globe, from the news release we had sent out, and naturally they were quite excited at taking part in the search for the High Ones’ hidden asteroid.

I don’t think they knew what they were letting themselves in for. Nor did we. Quicksand. Utter quicksand.

We had to get our data to the observatory, now. The easiest way to accomplish that would have been to ship our photos to Luna aboard the next ultraspace vessel to call at Higby V. One of the regular multihoppers was due here in the middle of September and would be reaching the Sol system in its roundabout way a couple of weeks after Christmas. Luna City could process the material, reply by TP, and give us our info by the end of January, say.

But that seemed like an impossibly long time from now. So the three bosses conferred and decided to send the data to Luna City via TP. That’s right — TP transmission of photographs. I can feel you shuddering from here.

Ron Santangelo looked paler than ever when we told him what we wanted him to do. Give him credit, though: he didn’t run off screaming into the night. Instead he served as our technical advisor. Here’s how he had us handle the job.

We began by making a standard stereo photo of the thousand-parsec galactic scene that the robot sequence opens with. Jan did most of the darkroom work, and came forth with a fine blowup, two meters long, one meter high, and with an apparent perceptual depth of one meter. Then we rephotographed this, using a trick camera from the military base that is capable of stepping down a stereo hologram into an ordinary antiquated two-dimensional photo. What it gave us was a sheaf of prints, each representing a flat section of the stereo; it was as though we had taken a knife and sliced that three-dimensional print into a bunch of layers.

It took a little over a week to do all this, with an assist from Dr. Horkkk’s little computer, which we had to reprogram completely in the process. (He is now restoring the original program for linguistic analysis, and doing a lot of cursing in Thhhian and many other tongues.) We now had our first astronomical shot converted into a form suitable for TP transmission.

Poor Ron.

He went off into a quiet corner of the lab to transmit. He labeled each photo, keying in its place in the overall picture so that the composite could be put back together again at the other end. Then he broke every photo into a series of ten-square-centimeter grids. And then he started transmitting the contents of each grid to other members of the TP relay network.

I hadn’t ever given much thought to methods of transmitting pictures by TP. In my naive and ill-informed way, I assumed that Ron was somehow going to send descriptions of each section of the photo. (You know: “Up here, two point eight five centimeters from the top left-hand corner, we’ve got a star that covers point nine millimeters, and is sort of fuzzy on the right-hand side.…") But of course that would never have worked. At best it would have produced a vague approximation of the original photos; and computations based on vague approximations tend to come out as even vaguer approximations. As they say in the data-processing trade, garbage in, garbage out.

Jan had a much more imaginative idea of how Ron was going to do it. She said, “I think he’ll stare at each little piece of the grid until he’s got it firmly in his mind. Then he’ll transmit the entire image to the next TP in the relay chain, and on and on so that the picture reaches Luna City in all its original detail.”

Certainly that was superior to trying to break the image down into words and measurements and dictating those. But there was one little flaw in Jan’s scheme, and Steen Steen found it.

“How,” he/she asked nastily, “does the final TP in the chain convert the transmitted mental image back into a photograph?”

Jan thought there might be some kind of machine that the TP could think the image into, which would mechanically transform it into a photo. Saul Shahmoon overheard that and clapped his hands. “A thought-activated camera! Wonderful! Wonderful! When shall it be invented?”

“There isn’t any such thing?” Jan asked.

“Sadly, no,” said Saul.

It turned out that Ron Santangelo transmitted the details of those photos in the most prosaic way possible, using a method that was invented more than three hundred years ago so that the primitive space satellites and flybys could relay photographs of the Moon and the planets to Earth. We were embarrassed for our ignorance when we found out about it. All that was done — as I suppose you know — was that each little photo was placed before an optical scanner that converted its gradations of black and white into data bits. Ron then took the printout and transmitted it to the TP network. He didn’t send images, he didn’t send verbal descriptions; he sent stuff that went like this:

0000000000000010000000000000 0000000000000110000000000000 0000000000000111000000000000 0000000000000111000000000000 0000000000000111000000000000 0000000000001111000000000000 0000000000001111000000000000

And so on and on and on, thousands of bits for each photo.

At the far end of the relay, a computer would with the greatest of ease turn the combinations of 1s and 0s back into shades of light and dark and produce photo-replications. Then something similar to Jan’s suggestion would be used. Our TP would indeed transmit the whole image of the photo to a specially-trained TP at the Luna City Observatory, who would compare the image against the replication and carefully make any necessary corrections. Finally the whole giboo could be assembled into a duplicate of the original three-dimensional photo and handed over to the astronomers, who could at last begin their work. What a cosmic headache! More to the point: what a cosmic expense! Ron looked a little grim as he began his task, but the rest of us, having no hint of the immensity of it, were in high spirits. We trotted to and fro between the scanner and Ron, bringing him his pages of gray printout with their interminable Is and Os, and he sat there, getting paler and thinner and more poetic-looking by the minute, boosting the data into the TP net. Meanwhile Jan and Saul were already at work making a two-dimensional breakdown of the second photo we planned to transmit, the close-up of the white dwarf and its stellar neighbors.

Ron didn’t collapse until the third day. We non-TPs talk a lot about the soaring wonder of roving the galaxy with your mind. What we overlook, I guess, is the terrible strain of it. And the fact that drudgery is drudgery, with or without TP.

Ron gave. He worked maximum hours, two hours on, two hours off, four shifts a day; and during the rest shifts he seemed impatient to get back to transmitting. God knows why. He had become as involved in the project as we were, but there couldn’t have been much thrill for him in sitting in the corner going 0000011100000 for eight hours a day.

The strain showed on him. He sweated a lot, and his tattoo scars mysteriously became more visible, glowing against his sunken cheeks. Why a quiet, reserved lad like that had ever let a Virangonian needle artist go to work on him is beyond me. The tattoos were wildly obscene, too — according to the Virangonian notion of obscenity. That’s what Mirrik said. Someday I’d like to know why Virangonians consider mouths obscene, because that’s what Ron had on his cheeks: two big toothy tattooed mouths.

We could see him caving in hour by hour, and we tried to be good to him, to help him relax. Mirrik told stories, and Steen Steen did a pretty fair juggling act, and Jan took him for a walk and came back looking a little flushed and rumpled. I wasn’t too happy about that, but I told myself it was All For The Cause. By the second day Ron’s data-transmission speed was about two thirds what it had been at the start, and the next day it was even slower. And he was nowhere near the midpoint of the job. On his fourth shift of the third day he stopped suddenly, looked around the laboratory, blinked, and said, “What time is it? Does anyone know the time? My watch won’t tell me. I’ve asked it, but it won’t tell.”

Then he stood up and, as though all his bones had suddenly been pulled from his body, crumpled and dropped.

The base medic said it was simply exhaustion, ordered Ron not to do any TP work for a week, and hauled him away for a few days of deepsleep recuperation. There were two other TPs available on Higby V: Marge Hotchkiss and a gloomy Israeli named Nach-man Ben-Dov. Since the communications net had to stay open for messages around the clock, this presented certain problems of scheduling. With Ron temporarily out of the hookup, Hotchkiss and Ben-Dov were required to put in twelve Earthnorm hours each day simply handling routine switching and transmitting assignments. That was four hours a day more than the supposed maximum for TP work, and left neither of them any time at all for us. Since they had already been working overtime for the three days that Ron had been transmitting full-time from our lab, neither of them took kindly to an extension of their duties. Particularly dear Marge.

Dr. Schein pulled some strings and we managed to work out a deal. First, it was agreed that the TP staff on Higby III, where some patchy farming settlements have been founded lately, would intercept all incoming messages bound for Higby V. These would be relayed from III to V by ordinary radio transmission; we undertook to pay the extra cost of this. That took about half the burden off the local TP staff. The military people were willing — grudgingly — to defer most outgoing messages until Ron got better, which also helped. The two TPs would still have to be on call four hours a day apiece for normal duties. But that left each one of them four hours a day for us.

We didn’t want any more collapses, though. We decided on a pattern whereby Ben-Dov would come out to the lab and transmit for us for two two-hour shifts, while Marge was sleeping. Then somebody would drive him back into town and get Marge, who’d come out and do two two-hour shifts while Ben-Dov was handling the ordinary stuff at the communications office. Then Ben-Dov would get some sleep and Marge would go back to put in her four hours of office work. That gave us the four daily shifts we had been getting out of Ron, and still left the two TPs time to handle their real work without burning out. Our transmission times were different now, though. Ron had preferred to do his transmitting in one sixteen-hour burst, two hours on and two hours off for the full four shifts, followed by eight hours of exhausted sleep. But Marge and Ben-Dov didn’t work that way. They kept shifting their sleep periods around, now knocking out in the evening, now in the middle of the day; they might put in eight hours of TP (four work, four rest) after breakfast and then eight more (four work, four rest) after dinner, with a nap in between. With sleepdrugs it’s no trick to arrange your slumber pattern to suit your whims, of course, and you know all about the odd living habits of the TP tribe. It made life weird for us, though, since somebody had to be around to assist the TP, bring snacks, correlate the computer printouts, and so forth. We tried to maintain a normal digging schedule at the site — yes, we’re still digging through all this — and yet have somebody available to hold the TP’s hand no matter what hour.

Pilazinool, who needs one hour of sleep out of every twenty-four, did much more than his share of this work. Too bad, for his gifts were needed elsewhere.

We did manage to get most of the data transmitted. Marge was no joy to have around the lab, and even less fun to drive back and forth from town — I made a point of avoiding that assignment — but I’ll give her credit: she’s got superb TP stamina. She’d come in, pick up the data sheets, start sending, and hum along on the dreary job faster than Ron ever did, and with less apparent effort. I suspect she could have volunteered for overtime work and not suffered for it. But of course the idea never entered her head.

Ben-Dov was an odd one: about fifty years old, graying, paunchy, always needing a shave, not at all displaying the conqueror-of-the-desert image that most Israelis try to project. Yet behind his sloppiness he was made of iron. We talked a little; he said that until the age of thirty he had never even been outside of Israel, though he moved around a lot inside the country; he grew up in Cairo, studied in Tel-Aviv and Damascus, and drifted around to Amman, Jerusalem, Haifa, Alexandria, Baghdad, and the other important Israeli cities. Then he got the urge to travel and signed up for TP duty at the Ben-Gurion Kibbutz on Mars. Like a lot of other TPs he’s kept on wandering, getting farther and farther from Earth with each change of post, but always volunteering for bleak, desolate planets like Higby V.

Mirrik, who as I think I told you is a big one on religion, became greatly excited when he found out Ben-Dov was an Israeli. “Tell me about the ethical constructs of Judaism,” the huge Dinamonian bellowed eagerly. “I myself am Paradoxian, but I have studied many of the creeds of Earth, and never before have I encountered an actual Jew. The teachings of Moses concerning—”

“I’m sorry,” said Nachman Ben-Dov mildly. “I’m not Jewish.”

“But Israel — am I wrong, is this not the Jewish nation of Earth?”

“There are many Jews in Israel,” said Ben-Dov. “I am, however, of the Authentic Buddhist faith. Perhaps you know of my father, the leader of the Israeli Buddhist community: Mordecai Ben-Dov?”

Mirrik hadn’t; but he already knew a good deal about Authentic Buddhism, and his tusks drooped in disappointment as his opportunity to find out the inside data on the Laws of Moses faded. That’s the trouble with the spread of global communications: tribal structures break down. You get Authentic Buddhists in Israel, and Mormons in Tibet, and Revised Methodist Baptists in the Congo, and such. I must admit that Ben-Dov’s Buddhism startled me, though.

Jewish or not, he was a fine TP operator. He and Marge between them waded beautifully through the data sheets. At the end of his week of rest, Ron San-tangelo returned to the job, now on a work-sharing basis with the other two, and the skull-to-skull transmission of our first photo was completed. Back from Luna City came an acknowledgment; they had decoded the transmission and were going to work on trying to locate the zone of space shown.

I tried to do something a little shady about this time.

I called Ben-Dov aside after he had finished his stint for the day and said, “In your data-boosting, have you had occasion to link minds with an Earthside relay girl named Lorie Rice?”

“No,” he said. “We haven’t relayed anything through Earth.”

“Do you know her? She’s my sister.”

He thought a bit. “I don’t think so. You know, space is very large, and there are so many members of the communications net—”

“Well, you could relay something through her, couldn’t you? By way of giving the other relay people a rest. And maybe if you did, you could slip in an extra thought or two, just to tell her that Tom says hello, that he’s doing fine and misses her a lot—”

The way Nachman Ben-Dov looked at me, you’d think I’d just suggested that Israel give Egypt, Syria, and Iraq back to the Arabs.

“Wholly impossible. The basic rule of the TP service: no free riders. Such a thing would violate my oath. It might also get me into serious trouble. There are supervisory monitors, you know.”

I dropped the scheme fast. I can’t crank about Ben-Dov’s refusal; he was right and I was wrong. But it would have been nice to send a word to you. I try to pretend that these letters really are reaching you, but I know they aren’t, because I’m looking at the whole stack of message cubes that I’ve dictated so far. You haven’t heard from me or about me since June, and I wish I could afford to let you know what I’ve been doing.

Anyway, our TPs finished sending the data of the first photograph last Tuesday. They started in at once on transmitting the stellar close-up. They’re still busy with that one.

We have, in the meantime, gone on excavating the site, but our finds are drearily ordinary. By normal, that is, pre-globe, standards, we’d have been delighted with the wealth of High Ones artifacts we’ve taken from the hill. But now all of us right up to the three top men are inflamed by the wild urge to make spectacular discoveries, instantly, instead of going through the potsherd-and-crumb tactics of standard archaeology. It’s bad science, we know, but we’re palpitating to buzz away to the robot in the vault, leaving the rest of this once-promising site to lesser drudges.

And as of yesterday we find that we’re absolutely committed to making spectacular discoveries. Because yesterday was the last day of the month, and the TP network rendered its bill.

Nobody had said much about the cost of all this frenzied overtime. The big thing was to relay the data; sordid matters of stash could be discussed some other time. Well, some other time has arrived. I don’t even know how big the bill actually was. But you can compute it for yourself: we’ve kept a whole TP staff sitting skull-to-skull on an Earth relay for eight transmission hours a day over something like fifteen days.

The chilly fact is that we’ve spent our whole second year’s budget on two weeks of TP communications.

As the finances of archaeological expeditions go, this one has an awfully big thumb. I don’t know the details, but we have grants from half a dozen universities, a couple of private foundations, and the governments of six worlds. The purpose of all this stash was to pay our transportation to and from Higby V, to provide (modest) salaries for expedition personnel, to cover our field expenses, and to underwrite the cost of publishing our results. The funds thus set aside were supposed to last us for two years in the field. Nothing was budgeted in for extraordinary TP bills.

We are in trouble now.

Late last night Dr. Schein came over to me and said, “Tom, are you sure you don’t have latent TP?”

“Positive, sir.”

“With a twin sister who’s a communicator?”

“I’ve been tested up and down,” I said. “There isn’t an atom of TP ability in me. My sister’s got the family monopoly.”

“Too bad. If we had a TP of our own, and didn’t have to pay the ruinous official rates—” He walked away, shaking his head. Half an hour later Dr. Horkkk also approached me and quizzed me about possible TP abilities. Try, he begged me. Try to make contact with a TP. I felt like telling him to try to fly. Trying isn’t enough sometimes.

Besides, did they really think that a freelance TP would be able to bypass the utility laws and use the communications net without charge?

As of this morning, this is the position: we have to find that asteroid, because we simply don’t have enough funds to work our full two years on Higby V. Having crashed our stash, we now must come through with phenomenal results in relatively little time. One bit of encouraging news did arrive last night from Luna City. They’ve run the computer simulation and have indeed located the piece of sky our photo shows. They’ve identified Rigel, Procyon, Aldebaran, Arc-turus, and a number of other familiar stars.

This is not colossally useful to us. The photo shows a cube of space with a volume of thousands of light-years, and finding a single white dwarf (possibly burned out) and a single asteroid in all of that is an impossible task. But what Luna City has told us is that the robot-and-vault sequence took place in our galaxy, which is some comfort. If the closeup photo enables them to pinpoint the actual solar system involved, we can take it from there.

We have to.