“Precisely, Gray-laker. If we can manage the shifts properly, I’ll challenge we can pop her out of there like a robug out of a hollow reed. Speak, Voice-of-Physics. Valid or no?”
Narisara thought long, her eyes almost closed. All of the watch held their breaths as if on a deep dive. “Yes,” she said finally. “Possibly.”
“Ha!”
She cut off Tarrischall’s bark of triumph with a lifted forepaw. “But such an action would have to be perfectly timed and coordinated with the Uprights at their end of things. I say once more, perfectly timed and coordinated in both interval and sequence. Otherwise we could unbalance and lose the channel. And we have no way of telling the Uprights what they must do.”
Assistant Director Rocardo tossed his work pad stylus down onto the tabletop. “That’s it, the simulator team says it could work, but we’d have to do it in absolute lockstep with the Furrys, and we haven’t any way to tell them what to do.”
“Damn the damn budgetary committee to hell,” Marta paced angrily beside the conference room. “I told them we needed to put more funding into communications R&D, but it’s always ‘next year, next year, we have to watch the profit margins’.”
Rocardo shrugged pragmatically. “The laser link’s always been adequate. No one ever visualized having to shove a photon beam past a mass of trans-state stuck in the hole before.”
“It’s not adequate now. And we certainly can’t wait around for seven and a half years for a radio message to reach 359.”
Rocardo glanced at his data pad. “We can’t even wait another seven and a half hours.
Ces-Lunar is screaming for their power back, Company Headquarters is demanding we come up with a solution and, most critically, our receptor and transformer systems are starting to degrade from the overload. We have to do something, Marta!”
“I know it, Estiban. I even know what we need to do. But we have to establish three factors with River-’Tween-Worlds to pull it off; an execution time, a duration for the field cycles and which gate initiates the cycling sequence.”
She paused in her pacing. “Tarrischall and his crew are sharp, as good or better than we are. I’m willing to bet he must have come to the same conclusions we have and that he must be hunting for a way to establish a mutual operational baseline with us to make it work.”
“How are we supposed to manage that without a communications link? By mind reading?”
“Exactly.”
Tarrischall had returned to the observation dome at the planetside end of the skynest.
With the Word-of-Crisis still in effect, the half bubble of Glass-like-Steel was empty save for himself. Floating limply, he juggled his inert sphere-of-communications between his fore and mid-paws in an unthinking pattern, his tiring mind focused on the looming problem.
How do you match thought processes with a semi-hairless, bipedal land dweller with a penchant for munching on vegetation? How could minds reach across the gap between stars?
Talk with me, Marta-From-the-Place-Called-New-England. You must know the solution as well as I. How are we to do this thing?
If only they could have their last conversation back again. Just thirty or so heartbeats of the time they had spent casually discussing music and dance.
Idly, Tarrischall twisted the two halves of the sphere-of-communications, triggering the replay of the musical selections Marta had sent him. As the lissome alien tone patterns flowed around him, he wondered sadly if they were the last present he would ever receive from his distant friend of Earth.
Tarrischall’s grip on the sphere tightened abruptly and he stared at the silver orb as if he had never seen it before.
“T minus ninety! All stations, stand by! We’re doing this thing now! Gate Control?”
“Go!”
“Tug Control?”
“Go!”
“Power Control?”
“Systems are in overload but holding nominal.”
“Traffic Control.”
“L-2 Block is clear except for authorized emergency spacecraft.”
It had been a long, long night shift and now the eyes of all humanity were peering over Marta Lane’s shoulder. The Ces-Lunar media nets were accessing Gate Control’s video feeds, streaming a second-by-second narration of the crisis around the worlds. No doubt the media newsies would have loved to be underfoot aboard the command station as well, but Marta’s emergency prerogatives were still worth something.
Likewise she’d also cut off all communication with Transstellar’s board of directors and semihysterical CEO. If this didn’t work, there would be plenty of time to be fired later.
She glanced at the primary screen time hack. Oh-seven hours, oh-four minutes, and forty seconds.
“Stand by to initiate magnetic field modulation program on my mark… three… two… one… mark!”
“Program engaged,” Gate Control reported. “Perimeter grid field intensity dropping to eighty-percent load. Two minutes and fifty-five seconds and counting to power up.”
Somewhere within the control center a whisper of long-ago music played.
Uncountable trillions of miles away the first bar of the same tune issued from Tarrischall’s sphere-of- communications.
“Flow increase!” he snarled with eyes narrowed and ears laid back.
“Flow increasing to perimeter grid. Magnetoelectric field intensity growing to plus one fifth of standard.” Narisara’s voice rose excitedly. “Magnetodynamic flux noted in the channel, but the quantum structures appear stable. They are doing it, Tarrischall! They understand! The Upright gate is reducing flow! They are cycling with us!”
“Yes! Yessss! Marta-of-the-Place-Called-New-England thinks as one of the People! Four limbs or not, I’d put a pup in her come the next season!”
The otherworldly music ran on, trickling from the sphere.
“Director Lane, the switching arrays don’t like this. We’re throwing thermal spikes at each power shift and the cyclic rate we’ve set isn’t giving us the time we need to cool them down.”
“Blame Glenn Miller, not me, Mr. Desvergers. Stay on the cycle and do the best you can.”
“Marta, check your quantum structure readouts!”
“What is it, Estiban?”
“We are registering a shift! We have mass movement! She’s starting to rock!”
A rising chorus of warning tones from the tasking displays sang a song of incipient disaster that threatened to drive out the twelfth replay of the Terran melody.
“Tarrischall, the raft was displaying a slow but definite lateral drift on that last emergence. If she angles off enough to collide with the grid…”
“Don’t encourage the curse with your words, Black Fur, I saw it. Claws out, pups! This strike ends the chase. Marrun, maneuvering room be damned! This time grab her by the throat and hang on till your jaws crack!”
The Voice-of-Pusher-Guidance grunted an acknowledgment. He had his six most powerful units hovering around the mouth of the perimeter grid, ready to pounce like a hunter’s pack on a surfacing deep rover. It wasn’t a bad analogy for the situation.
The shadow sphere within the grid began to shimmer.
“The time is on us! Narisara. Full flow on the gate fields! Full flow! Haul her in!”
The stern of the cargo raft burst out of the event horizon, no longer tracking true but drifting off side and angling across the channel, its dead gyros and propulsor vents incapable of stabilization. Even if the straining function nets of River–’Tween-Worlds could withstand another modulation cycle, a few more fractions of drift would bring about a catastrophic collision between the raft and the grid structure. It had to be now!
Tarrischall held a diving breath as the curve of the raft’s stern protruded a few lengths from the lip of the grid, hovering on the cusp of the cycle.
“Take her! Take her now!”
