“That’s a pretty long haul.”
“Nah,” Moore said. “It still has a bunch of fuel left. Whenever and wherever it comes out, it’ll make for where Arcadia will be then. We just gotta wait till it gets close, then go catch it.”
“Oh. OK. That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Well, hard to say. But we’ll know more on Tuesday.”
On Saturday, JieMin and ChaoLi took the three boys to the park. The girls were content to stay at home. They first stopped at the cafe in the Uptown Market and had a picnic lunch prepared. They then walked to the park.
The twins, YanMing and YanJing, played on the playground equipment, while JieJun found a group of friends from the apartment building’s daycare center and played in the sandbox. The parents kept an eye on them while they enjoyed sitting in the shade on the beautiful day.
“I read they launched the probe yesterday,” ChaoLi said.
“Yes,” JieMin said. “I heard it all went well.”
“And now it is drifting out there?”
“The official word is coasting. It’s going pretty fast, but in space you don’t need to keep pushing on something to keep it moving.”
“Of course. And they will attempt transition on Tuesday?” ChaoLi asked.
“Yes. They want enough distance from the planet. On this, Dr. Huenemann listened to us.”
“And when they attempt transition?”
“The probe will be destroyed,” JieMin said. “It will disappear and not come back.”
“Then what happens?”
“I’m not privy to all their plans, but I believe Chen Zufu and the prime minister have a plan to kill the government program and have the Chen finish it properly.”
“What a waste,” ChaoLi said.
“Yes and no. If the probe transitions, it is a very big confirmation of the theory. Bear in mind, we as yet have no proof hyperspace exists. I can see it, but it could all be an invention of my own. If the probe transitions, though, it will mean I am right.”
“Yes, but you know hyperspace exists.”
JieMin shrugged.
“The mathematics works out, but I could be wrong. Perhaps nothing happens.”
“But that is not what you expect.”
“No. That is not what I expect.”
The twins headed back to their parents, hungry after running around for two hours. On their way past the sandbox, they called JieJun. With the prospect of food, he came running.
It took JieMin and ChaoLi the better part of ten minutes and a package of wet wipes to get the boys clean enough to eat, and then they ate their lunch together in the shade of the trees.
Karl Huenemann spent a weekend worrying about the probe, too. Was he right? He thought he was, but that didn’t keep his guts from churning or make him sleep any better.
Of course, it was always this way going into the clinches on a big project. Huenemann truly cared about results, and the crucial point of any project gave him nerves. The controversy on this project just exacerbated them.
Then again, he had been right far more often than wrong in his career, and at some point you just needed to trust your instincts.
Tuesday came, bright and sunny, but there were no operations out of the Arcadia City Shuttleport related to the project today. All of the action would be a million miles away.
Nevertheless, the command crew all showed up at the control center attached to the warehouse on the shuttleport grounds. Mikhail Borovsky and Karl Huenemann were there, too, though mostly as spectators. The probe was running under computer control.
The hyperspace probe’s flight over the last four days had been normal. It coasted along at its terminal velocity. It had not hit any debris or anything of that kind, and all its systems were operating within nominal parameters.
The probe’s computer verified its distance from Arcadia by sending a message to the flight control computer in the control center. It timed the delay until acknowledgement to make sure it was as far away as specified. Then the probe’s computer ran up the power levels on the probe’s power supply.
“Probe power supply coming up to necessary power levels,” the technician in the control center reported.
The probe’s computer verified operation of the power supply within nominal parameters, then began the hyperspace transition sequence.
“Hyperspace transition sequence initiating.”
A distortion began forming around the hyperspace probe. As it moved along, were one traveling with it, one would see the star field behind the probe being distorted, as if the probe were in an ovoid of glass.
“Hyperspace bubble forming.”
The probe’s computer sent the signal to the hyperspace field generator, and power consumption spiked. There was a flash, and the probe was gone.
“We lost telemetry on the mark. The probe’s transitioned.”
The probe was programmed to spend five minutes in hyperspace and transition back. The problem was that they didn’t know if hyperspace ran on the same clock or not. Was it delayed? Running at some factor from space-time normal? Relativity time-dilation implied it could be.
They waited five hours and the probe did not reappear. A watch was posted in the control center, and everyone went home.
Three days later, the probe had still not reappeared, and the watch was switched from a manned watch to a computer watch for telemetry from the probe.
But the hyperspace probe never reappeared.
Recrimination And Cancellation
The recriminations over the loss of the probe began even before it was sure it was lost. As the time disparity to hyperspace was unknown, it was not known how long five minutes counted out by the probe’s computer in hyperspace would translate to in space-time. So when the probe should be back was an open question.
Nevertheless, there were many reactions to the apparent loss of the probe.
Karl Huenemann spent the week in self-examination. Had he been wrong, or had he been too right? Was the
