Mission to Minerva by James P. Hogan

Author:James P. Hogan [Hogan, James P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781416520900
Google: gN1o2qZYdVoC
Amazon: 1416520902
Barnesnoble: 1416520902
Goodreads: 396584
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2005-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

VISAR had abandoned its attempts to solve the convergence problem by generating a “quantum signature” unique to a particular universe, by means of which other universes could effectively be locked out. Although the concept was sound enough, it turned out that the amount of information needed to define a stable zone increased exponentially with the size of the zone. This meant that beyond trivial experiments that had little value other than to demonstrate the principle, the amount of calculation necessary to achieve a realistic operating volume capable of supporting anything worthwhile rose rapidly toward infinity, taxing the capacity of even something like VISAR. The Thurien mathematicians held hopes they might find some form of short-cut or algorithm that would render the problem tractable, but they were the first to admit that as of now they had no clear idea of what they were looking for, and the search for a solution, if one existed at all, could well take years.

The breakthrough came from a completely unexpected direction that didn’t involve mathematicians or advanced theoreticians at all, but space propulsion engineers. Thurien spacecraft operated by an advanced form of the drive employed in the Shapieron, going back to the early days of Ganymean Minerva, whereby the ship was carried inside a propagating “bubble” of distorted spacetime. Whereas modern Thurien vessels drew their power from the interstellar grid beamed through h-space, the Shapieron used its own onboard generators. Some of Eesyan’s group had been looking into the separate problem of maintaining coherence of the standing wave that defined an object projected out across the Multiverse, hence halting it. The method worked, but it was unstable. After a brief existence ranging so far from fractions of a second to a minute or so, the wave would break up—not observed directly, but inferred from observations of objects arriving from other universes that had done so in this one.

Eesyan’s scientists had approached the space-drive designers to find out more about how this bubble was created, their thought being that something like it might be contrived to contain the standing wave pattern in such a way that would prevent it from dispersing. It seemed, when they looked into it, that adapting the technique to M-space should be fairly straightforward—it involved a longitudinal form of the same type of wave that the engineers had long experience of dealing with. But when preliminary experiments were run at Quelsang to investigate the creation of M-space bubbles, a completely unexpected result was observed.

An M-space bubble apparently kept timeline convergences contained, restricting them to the inside. Even when Eesyan gave approval for the machine’s power to be cautiously increased to a level where convergences had occurred outside the transfer chamber before, nothing was detected. Tests showed that the effect was still there, but confined inside the bubble sitting in the center of the chamber. Outside, the chaos of events and objects with different past histories all being present at the same time and place was eliminated. Nobody was quite sure

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