Beyond the Event Horizon (8 page)

“It seemed to
me that it all went like clockwork,” remarked Shelby in some
surprise.

“From the
civilian point of view, yes. But war is a serious matter, it does
not forgive mistakes. The enemy usually attacks not head-on, but at
the weakest point, and during mobilisation we discovered a whole
lot of them. So that means a lot of work. We are now completely
reviewing the entire structure of the space fleet.”

There was a
short silence.

“Well then,”
said MacQueen eventually. “Shall we get down to business?” He
pointed to the nearest chair in front of the table, and sat in the
chair next to it without waiting for his guest to take his
seat.

“Our
expedition has achieved the aims of its journey and is continuing
its research,” Shelby began. “The scientific team periodically
sends the results of its work. On the basis of the latest data, we
are inclining towards the theory that the anomaly is of artificial
origin.”

“But you
already knew that before the expedition, didn’t you?” asked
MacQueen.

“It was the
working hypothesis. But now we have experimental arguments in its
favour.”

“What
exactly?”

“My people
succeeded in determining its location. The point is that it begins
not from a point source, as we assumed initially, but is spread out
in space, as it were. That is, it has a certain shape. Such
geometrical shapes are not characteristics of nature in the
raw.”

“Interesting...”

“It is a rough
approximation of a cuboid, or hexahedron...”

“Excuse me,
what’s that?”

“The
three-dimensional equivalent of a rectangle. Like a tabletop, for
example,” explained Shelby, drumming his fingers on the table.

MacQueen
nodded in satisfaction.

“Taking recent
events into account, we think that this phenomenon is connected
with the visit of our mysterious guest. My team collected more
precise information about the radiation, and this made it possible
to improve our methods of detection. Working from here, from Earth,
we have scanned our galaxy and have discovered dozens of similar
phenomena.”

“Excuse me for
interrupting you, but if these things are scattered all over the
Milky Way, why haven’t we noticed them before?”

“The problem
has many aspects. It is difficult to detect gravity waves due to
their low intensity, particularly when they are of natural origin.
As I said before, the generation of such waves requires the
oscillation of massive heavenly bodies, such as a binary neutron
star system. These stars rotate at high speed around their own
centre of mass, and moving with acceleration – and movement in a
circle is always movement with acceleration – they create a ripple
in space-time.

“The cosmos we
are studying is extremely noisy. Everything that exists in it, the
planets, gas clouds, stars, black holes, all this fills it with
noise in some waveband or other, littered with elementary
particles. Or rather each of these objects emits noise in all
wavebands, but more in one and less in another, depending on the
nature of the heavenly body. For example, our Sun is extremely
noisy in the infrared and visible spectra of electromagnetic
radiation, because they are the ones in which it radiates most of
its energy. And let us not forget solar wind. It is like a
bombardment with an ocean of elementary particles.

“Apart from
this, our Universe is filled with residual radiation coming in from
all directions. If man had organs capable of registering all this
radiation of energy, it would seem to him that the world was filled
with loud noise, the song of Nature. It is very difficult to
identify and separate out any unknown signal from it. But the
problem is made easier if we know exactly what we have to look
for.

“My lads on
the ship who are now studying this phenomenon are located very
close to the source, which is why they have managed to draw a very
detailed picture. Now we know very well what we should be looking
for, and we didn’t have to wait long for a result.”

MacQueen
nodded.

“OK, let’s get
back to the phenomenon.”

“Yes. Knowing
its signature, we set out to search for similar phenomena in our
galaxy. If you remember, as a result of the shape of the Milky Way
and the position of our Solar System in it, a great part of it is
concealed from us by stellar dust and gas clouds. Any radiation is
to a greater or lesser extent absorbed by this barrier, so a great
part of our galaxy is hidden from our eyes on the other side of the
gas-dust cloud.

“Gravity waves
differ from electromagnetic waves in that they are not absorbed by
these clouds. To be precise, it seems that they are not subject to
absorption by matter at all. Therefore we have succeeded in
detecting such beacons not only in those regions we have already
studied by the classical methods, but also in looking where we
could not look before.

“And now we
come to the most interesting part. The following law became obvious
to us. The beacons are not scattered uniformly over the cosmos, but
form certain clusters in certain sectors of the Milky Way. These
clusters are most likely to be found, firstly, close to stable star
systems; that is, systems in which the central star is in the quiet
stage of its life cycle. And secondly, near those star systems
which have planets in the habitable zone.

“On this
basis, we draw the conclusion that this source of gravity waves is
something like a beacon, integrated into the cosmic infrastructure
of the incomer’s civilisation. Since we did not know of the
existence of such a phenomenon close to us before the Solar System
was visited, it can be assumed that the incomer activated some kind
of a mechanism which created this beacon during its visit. It is
quite possible that setting up this beacon was the real aim of its
visit. The contact with us may simply have been a distracting
manoeuvre.”

“Interesting.
As a military man, the first analogy that comes to mind is that
this phenomenon is something like a marker, as often used by
clandestine groups to correct missile fire and bombing
strikes.”

“That may be
so. But to me, as a civilian, another analogy comes to mind. I
called the source of the gravity waves a beacon. But beacons, at
least in our civilisation, act as landmarks in space. In other
words, they are part of our transport infrastructure.

“If you
remember, the alien ship came into our telescopes’ field of vision
while it was still beyond the orbits of the Solar System’s planets.
At first it was moving slowly, and only later picked up a fair bit
of speed. Yet it is not rational to overcome interstellar distances
at low speeds, or its journey would take tens of thousands of
years.

“This leads to
the thought that the incomer started from some kind of base located
somewhere outside the orbit of Pluto. Or its starting point might
not be a base, but some element of a transport infrastructure
making it possible to overcome cosmic distances faster than at the
speed of light. If this supposition is true, the gravity radiator
may denote the location of a portal for fast travel which the
incomer was using.

“This would
also explain the radiation of gravity waves, because, as I said,
they are not in the least subject to absorption by matter.
Therefore the dust clouds filling our galaxy are no obstacle to
such beacons. They can be seen everywhere and from anywhere.”

“These
portals... To what extent are they possible, from the point of view
of contemporary science?”

“From the
point of view of our science, they are pure fantasy. We know that
at sub-light speeds, the mass of a rocket begins to grow
perceptibly. The closer to the light barrier, the greater it
becomes. Therefore we require more and more energy to impart more
speed to the ship. As it approaches the speed of light, the mass
value rises to infinity, which means we would require an infinite
quantity of energy to continue accelerating the ship. Naturally,
this is impossible, which is why it is impossible for any object
with a mass of more than zero to travel even at the speed of light.
It is customary in science to call the effect of the increase in
mass and other phenomena which appear at sub-light speeds
‘relativistic’. These effects are a consequence of the properties
of our space-time.

“But as we
know, the aliens are able to manipulate space-time itself. Who
knows how far they have succeeded in that? Therefore the existence
of such portals cannot be excluded.

“Nor should we
forget that the incomer, when it left the Solar System after our
attack, selected a flight trajectory towards the phenomenon. This
could hardly have been a coincidence. I think we ought to consider
the portal theory the most probable, although we shouldn’t exclude
your marker theory either.”

“All right,
then let’s take the theories of beacons and portals as starting
points,” proposed MacQueen. “It seems they’ve built a space highway
to us. That means that sooner or later we are going to have
numerous guests.”

“You’re
probably right.”

That morning,
Clive’s face was despondent, and there were many empty glasses on
the table. Steve knew what that meant. Clive had not closed his
eyes all night, but had been sitting at his calculations after
finding something which didn’t add up. That was how problems
usually began.

“Hey, what’s
up?” asked Steve, sitting down next to him. “Are my calculations
about the shape wrong?”

Clive
grinned.

“No, your
calculations are correct. So are mine.”

“So what’s the
matter then?”

“When I put
them together, it produces a contradiction.”

The day
promised to be a lousy one. If Clive had been sitting over his
calculations for several hours, it would not be easy to find the
error. The worst thing of all is when two sets of calculations are
both true, but lead to mutually exclusive results. You could spend
months looking for the solution. Something similar had happened a
few times with the telescope. Just remembering those cases was
enough to give Steve a headache.

“All right,
let’s go through it again together,” proposed Steve.

“It’s no good.
I’ve already rechecked a hundred times. There are no errors in your
figures.”

“And
yours?”

“Not in mine
either.”

“But it has to
be somewhere, doesn’t it?”

“I know that
without you telling me,” snapped Clive.

When Clive was
in this state, it was best to leave him alone. Steve turned to his
own console and set about rechecking his calculations. A
visualisation of the anomaly in space was revolving on one of the
auxiliary displays.

Due to the
relatively low resolution capability of the apparatus for detecting
gravity waves, the size and shape of the anomaly were only known
roughly. The data on which the visualisation was based were
approximate, and were extrapolated in several sectors.

Steve was
fascinated by the picture. On the visualisation, the gravity
anomaly was rocking slightly from side to side, or even rotating.
It was quite possible that it was shuddering in space, slightly
changing its state, but due to the imprecision of the data, the
computer was interpreting this as rotation.

The rotation
looked unnatural, somehow. The cuboid, which had recently been
looking more and more like a cube, the edges of which were denoted
in the visualisation by fine lines, seemed to be rotating around
its axis, but after making a half turn, it jumped sharply back to
its original position. This sudden jump did not look like a natural
movement. Maybe that was the crux of the problem.

“Does anything
about the visualisation seem strange to you?” asked Steve after
several minutes’ thought.

Clive raised
his eyes, red from lack of sleep, to the auxiliary display.

“It’s rotating
in a strange sort of way. It keeps twitching,” he replied.

“But it isn’t
a sticking pinion, to twitch like that.”

“It’s the low
resolution of the instruments distorting the result, that’s why
it’s twitching.”

“No, hang on.
Shelby sent us the theoretical calculations of the anomaly in the
form of a portal between two points in space, right?”

“Well, so
what? It’s pure fantasy. The lads from the theoretical physics
faculty gave free reign to their imagination. From the practical
application point of view, their description is worse than
useless.”

“All the same,
they did construct the mathematical model.”

“Not every
mathematical solution to a system of equations makes sense in terms
of physics. Speaking purely mathematically, time goes backwards at
superluminal speeds. That doesn’t mean it will be like that in the
real world.”

“Well, look at
it this way. It follows from their calculations that the portals
are connected to each other in space, right?”

“Well... yes.
Only they call it hyperspace, because the tunnel exists in five or
more dimensions.”

“It doesn’t
matter what they call it. They postulate a space with a larger
number of dimensions than ours. If they are right, then the portal
is partly in our space and partly in hyperspace. That’s so, isn’t
it?”

Clive thought
for a second or two.

“Well, if you
mean within the framework of their theory, yes. So?”

“Then we
aren’t seeing the whole portal, but only part of it, as a
three-dimensional projection.”

Clive thought
again, and his eyes suddenly came alive.

“There’s
something in that...”

He turned back
to his own console and started rapidly working his magic on it.
Then he transferred a picture to the main screen in which a number
of different strange-shaped figures were rotating. Steve had
already seen this many times in lectures on hyperbolic geometry.
They were three-dimensional projections of rotating
four-dimensional objects. In other words, they were how objects in
four-dimensional space would look in our three-dimensional
universe. On condition, that is, that such objects did exist in
reality, not only in theory.