avoided discussing the issue among themselves.
Both the interior and the exterior doors of the airlock opened simultaneously. They had given no command. Apparently, this sector of Grand central was adequately pressurized and oxygenated. “Well, who wants to go first?” Devi asked. Video camera in hand, Ellie waited in line to exit, but then decided that the palm frond should be with her when she set foot on this new world. As she went to retrieve it, she heard a whoop of delight from outside, probably from Vaygay. Ellie rushed into the bright sunlight. The threshold of the airlock's exterior doorway was flush with the sand. Devi was ankle-deep in the water, playfully splashing in Xi's direction. Eda was smiling broadly.
It was a beach. Waves were lapping on the sand. The blue sky sported a few lazy cumulus clouds. There was a stand of palm trees, irregularly spaced a little back from the water's edge. A sun was in the sky. One sun. A yellow one. Just like ours, she thought. A faint aroma was in the air; cloves, perhaps, and cinnamon.
It could have been a beach on Zanzibar.
So they had voyaged 30,000 light-years to walk on a beach. Could be worse, she thought. The breeze stirred, and a little whirlwind of sand was created before her. Was all this just some elaborate simulation of the Earth, perhaps reconstructed from the data returned by a routine scouting expedition millions of years earlier? Or had the five of them undertaken this epic voyage only to improve their knowledge of descriptive astronomy, and then been unceremoniously dumped into some pleasant corner of the Earth? When she turned, she discovered that the dodecahedron had disappeared. They bad left the superconducting supercomputer and its reference library as well as some of the instruments aboard. It worried them for about a minute. They were safe and they had survived a trip worth writing home about. Vaygay glanced from the frond she had struggled to bring here to the colony of palm trees along the beach, and laughed.
“Coals to Newcastle,” Devi commented. But her frond was different. Perhaps they had different species here. Or maybe the local variety had been produced by an inattentive manufacturer. She looked out to sea.
Irresistibly brought to mind was the image of the first colonization of the Earth's land, some 400 million years ago. Wherever this was—the Indian Ocean or the center of the Galaxy—the five of them had done something unparalleled. The itinerary and destinations were entirely out of their hands, it was true. But they had crossed the ocean of interstellar space and begun what surely must be a new age in human history. She was very proud.
Xi removed his boots and rolled up to his knees the legs of the tacky insignia-laden jump suit the governments had decreed they all must wear. He ambled through the gentle surf. Devi stepped behind a palm tree and emerged sari-clad, her jump suit draped over her arm. It reminded Ellie of a Dorothy Lamour movie. Eda produced the sort of linen hat that was his visual trademark throughout the world. Ellie videotaped them in short jumpy takes. It would look, when they got home, exactly like a home movie. She joined Xi and Vaygay in the surf. The water seemed almost warm. It was a pleasant afternoon and, everything considered, a welcome change from the Hokkaido winter they had left little more than an hour before.
“Everyone has brought something symbolic,” said Vaygay, “except me.”
“How do you mean?”
“Sukhavati and Eda bring national costumes. Xi here has brought a grain of rice.” Indeed, Xi was holding the grain in a plastic bag between thumb and forefinger. “Youhave your palm frond,” Vaygay continued. “But me, I have brought no symbols, no mementos from Earth. I'm the only real materialist in the group, and everything I've brought is in my head.”
Ellie had hung her medallion around her neck, under the jump suit. Now she loosened the collar and pulled out the pendant. Vaygay noticed, and she gave it to him to read.
“It's Plutarch, I think,” he said after a moment. “Those were brave words the Spartans spoke. But remember, the Romans won the battle.”
From the tone of this admonition, Vaygay must have thought the medallion a gift from der Heer. She was warmed by his disapproval of Ken—surely justified by events—and by his steadfast solicitude. She took his arm. “I would kill for a cigarette,” he said amiably, using his arm to squeeze her hand to his side.
The five of them sat together by a little tide pool. The breaking of the surf generated asoft white noise that reminded her of Argus and her years of listening to cosmic static. The Sun was well past the zenith, over the ocean. A crab scuttled by, sidewise dexterous, its eyes swiveling on their stalks. With crabs, coconuts, and the limited provisions in their pockets, they could survive comfortably enough for some time.
There were no footprints on the beach besides their own.
“We think they did almost all the work.” Vaygay was explaining his and Eda's thinking on what the five of them had experienced. “All the project did was to make the faintest pucker in space-time, so they would have something to hook their tunnel onto. In all of that multidimensional geometry, it must be very difficult to detect a tiny pucker in space-time. Even harder to fit a nozzle onto it.”
“What are you saying? They changed the geometry of space?”
“Yes. We're saying that space is topologically non-sim-ply connected. It's like—1 know Abonnema doesn't like this analogy—it's like a flat two-dimensional surface, thesmart surface, connected by some maze of tubing with some other flat two-dimensional surface, the dumb surface. The only way you can get from the smart surface to the dumb surface in a reasonable time is through the tubes. Now imagine that the people on the smart surface lower a tube with a nozzle on it. They will make a tunnel between the two surfaces, provided the dumb ones cooperate by making a little pucker on their surface, so the nozzle can attach itself.”
“So the smart guys send a radio message and tell the dumb ones how to make a pucker. But if they're truly two-dimensional beings, how could they make a pucker on their surface?”
“By accumulating a great deal of mass in one place.” Vaygay said this tentatively. “But that's not what we did.”
“I know. I know. Somehow the benzels did it.”
“You see,” Eda explained softly, “if the tunnels are black holes, there are real contradictions implied.
There is an interior tunnel in the exact Kerr solution of the Einstein Field Equations, but it's unstable. The slightest perturbation would seal it off and convert the tunnel into a physical singularity through which nothing can pass. I have tried to imagine a superior civilization that would control the internal structure of a collapsing star to keep the interior tunnel stable. This is very difficult. The civilization would have to monitor and stabilize the tunnel forever. It would be especially difficult with something as large as the dodecahedron falling through.”
“Even if Abonnema can discover how to keep the tunnel open, there are many other problems,” Vaygay said. “Too many. Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter. There are the tidal forces. We should have been torn apart in the black hole's gravitational field. We should have been stretched like people in the paintings of El Greco or the sculptures of that Italian…?” He turned to Ellie to fill in the blank.
“Giacometti,” she suggested. “He was Swiss.”
“Yes, like Giacometti. Then other problems: As measured from Earth it takes an infinite amount of time for usto pass through a black hole, and we could never, never return to Earth. Maybe this is what happened.
Maybe we will never go home. Then, there should be an inferno of radiation near the singularity. This is a quantum-mechanical instability….”
“Ana finally,” Eda continued, “a Kerr-type tunnel can lead to grotesque causality violations. With a modest change of trajectory inside the tunnel, one could emerge from the other end as early in the history of the universe as “you might like—a picosecond after the Big Bang, for example. That would be a very disorderly universe.”
“Look, fellas,” she said, “I'm no expert in General Relativity. But didn't we see black holes? Didn't we fall into them? Didn't we emerge out of them? Isn't a gram of observation worth a ton of theory?”
“I know, I know,” Vaygay said in mild agony. “It has to be something else. Our understanding of physics can't be so far off. Can it?”
He addressed this last question, a little plaintively, to Eda, who only replied, “A naturally occurring black hole can't be a tunnel; they have impassable singularities at their centers.”
With a jerry-rigged sextant and their wristwatches, they timed the angular motion of the setting Sun. It was 360 degrees in twenty-four hours. Earth standard. Before the Sun got too low on the horizon, they disassembled Ellie's camera and used the lens to start a fire. She kept the frond by her side, fearful that someone would carelessly throw it on the flames after dark. Xi proved to be an expert fire maker. He positioned them upwind and kept the fire low.
Gradually the stars came out. They were all there, the familiar constellations of Earth. She volunteered to stay up awhile tending the fire while the others slept. She wanted to see Lyra rise. After some hours, it did. The
