Timeline - Crichton Michael - Страница 33

The bars began to revolve slowly. The woman in the center remained still. The lasers made green horizontal streaks over her body. Then the bars stopped.

"Lasers aligned."

Gordon said, "See you in a minute, Sue." He turned to the others. "Okay. Here we go."

The curved water shields around the cage began to glow a faint blue. Once again the machine began to rotate slowly. The woman in the center stood motionless; the machine moved around her.

The humming grew louder. The rotation increased in speed. The woman stood, calm and relaxed.

"For this trip," Gordon said, "she'll use up only a minute or two. But she actually has thirty-seven hours in her battery cells. That's the limit these machines can remain in a location without returning."

The bars were spinning swiftly. They now heard a rapid chattering sound, like a machine gun.

"That's the clearance check: infrared sensors verify the space around the machine. They won't proceed without two meters on all sides. They check both ways. It's a safety measure. We wouldn't want the machine emerging in the middle of a stone wall. All right. They're releasing xenon. Here she goes."

The humming was now very loud. The enclosure spun so rapidly, the metal strips were blurred. They could see the woman inside quite clearly.

They heard a recorded voice say, "Stand still - eyes open - deep breath - hold it… Now!"

From the top of the machine, a single ring descended, scanning quickly to her feet.

"Now watch closely. It's fast," Gordon said.

Kate saw deep violet lasers fire inward from all the bars toward the center. The woman inside seemed to glow white-hot for an instant, and then a burst of blinding white light flashed inside the machine. Kate closed her eyes, turned away. When she looked back again, there were spots in front of her eyes, and for a moment she couldn't see what had happened. Then she realized that the machine was smaller. It had pulled away from the cables at the top, which now dangled free.

Another laser flash.

The machine was smaller. The woman inside was smaller. She was now only about three feet high, and shrinking before their eyes in a series of bright laser flashes.

"Jesus," Stern said, watching. "What does that feel like?"

"Nothing," Gordon said. "You don't feel a thing. Nerve conduction time from skin to brain is on the order of a hundred milliseconds. Laser vaporization is five nanoseconds. You're long gone."

"But she's still there."

"No, she's not. She was gone in the first laser burst. The computer's just processing the data now. What you see is an artifact of compression stepping. The compression's about three to the minus two…"

There was another bright flash. The cage now shrank rapidly. It was three feet high, then two. Now it was close to the floor - less than a foot tall. The woman inside looked like a little doll in khakis.

"Minus four," Gordon said. There was another bright burst, near the floor. Now Kate couldn't see the cage at all.

"What happened to it?"

"It's there. Barely."

Another burst, this time just a pinpoint flash on the floor.

"Minus five."

The flashes came more quickly now, winking like a firefly, diminishing in strength. Gordon counted them out.

"And minus fourteen… Gone."

There were no more flashes.

Nothing.

The cage had vanished. The floor was dark rubber, empty.

Kate said, "We're supposed to do that?"

"It's not an unpleasant experience," Gordon said. "You're entirely conscious all the way down, which is something we can't explain. By the final data compressions, you are in very small domains - subatomic regions - and consciousness should not be possible. Yet it occurs. We think it may be an artifact, a hallucination that bridges the transition. If so, it's analogous to the phantom limb that amputees feel, even though the limb isn't there. This may be a kind of phantom brain. Of course, we are talking about very brief time periods, nanoseconds. But nobody understands consciousness anyway."

Kate was frowning. For some time now, she had been looking at what she saw as architecture, a kind of "form follows function" approach: wasn't it remarkable how these huge underground structures had concentric symmetry - slightly reminiscent of medieval castles - even though these modern structures had been built without any aesthetic plan at all. They had simply been built to solve a scientific problem. She found the resulting appearance fascinating.

But now that she was confronted by what these machines were actually used for, she struggled to make sense of what her eyes had just seen. And her architectural training was absolutely no help to her. "But this, uh, method of shrinking a person, it requires you to break her down-"

"No. We destroy her," Gordon said bluntly. "You have to destroy the original, so that it can be reconstructed at the other end. You can't have one without the other."

"So she actually died?"

"I wouldn't say that, no. You see-"

"But if you destroy the person at one end," Kate said, "don't they die?"

Gordon sighed. "It's difficult to think of this in traditional terms," he said. "Since you're instantaneously reconstructed at the very moment you are destroyed, how can you be said to have died? You haven't died. You've just moved somewhere else."

Stern felt certain - it was a visceral sense - that Gordon wasn't being entirely honest about this technology. Just looking at the curved water shields, at all the different machines standing on the floor, gave him the sense that there was quite a bit more that was being left unexplained. He tried to find it.

"So she is in the other universe now?" he asked.

"That's right."

"You transmitted her, and she arrived in the other universe? Just like a fax?"

"Exactly."

"But to rebuild her, you need a fax machine at the other end."

Gordon shook his head. "No, you don't," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because she's already there."

Stern frowned. "She's already there? How could that be?"

"At the moment of transmission, the person is already in the other universe. And therefore the person doesn't need to be rebuilt by us."

"Why?" Stern said.

"For now, just call it a characteristic of the multiverse. We can discuss it later if you like. I'm not sure everybody needs to be bothered with these details," he said, nodding to the others.

Stern thought, There is something more. Something he doesn't want to say to us. Stern looked back at the transmission area. Trying to find the odd detail, the thing that was out of place. Because he was sure that something here was out of place.

"Didn't you tell us that you've only sent a few people back?"

"That's right, yes."

"More than one at a time?"

"Almost never. Very rarely two."

"Then why do you have so many machines?" Stern said. "I count eight in there. Wouldn't two be enough?"

"You're just seeing the results of our research program," Gordon said. "We are constantly working to refine our design."

Gordon had answered smoothly enough, but Stern was certain he had seen something - some buried glint of uneasiness - in Gordon's eyes.

There is definitely something more.

"I would have thought," Stern said, "that you'd make refinements to the same machines."

Gordon shrugged again, but did not answer.

Definitely.

"What are those repairmen doing in there?" Stern said, still probing. He pointed to the men on their hands and knees, working on the base of one machine. "I mean by the machine in the corner. What exactly are they repairing?"

"David," Gordon began. "I really think-"

"Is this technology really safe?" Stern said.

Gordon sighed. "See for yourself."

On the big screen, a sequence of rapid flashes appeared on the floor of the transit room.