Angle of Incidents (2 of 3)
Angle of Incidents (part two)
* COLORADO, 1996, DECEMBER
The chamber was long, high, chilly, and concrete. Benton had been over the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center blueprints -- the real ones -- and knew that this had once been the bottom of a missile silo. Now it was the room where everything would happen.
At one end, high up, a control room looked down through a broad observation port. The slab stood at the other end, upright but somewhat dwarfed by its environment. Facing the slab, a couple of meters back, was a pylon rigged with equipment: floodlights, cameras, lasers, recording devices, whatever the science team thought they might want to aim through the window. Benton had spotted an unobtrusive tube that looked suspiciously like a superball cannon.
The rest of the room -- and there was a lot of room -- was empty. Benton looked around uncomfortably. "Couldn't we get some of those computers from upstairs? Just to make the place looked lived in? Maybe a sofa?"
Lee looked up from the slab, where he was re-re-rechecking the cable plugged into its edge. "Ooh, good idea. Projection TV."
Benton gave it up; even Lee's intentional jokes were half funny-by-accident. "You done? I think Tremont is getting impatient."
"Tremont understands the value of a job... well... done," said Lee distractedly, giving a connector two final taps. "It's General West who's impatient. Come on, let's go."
They walked up the room and out the side door, which hissed solidly shut behind them. (The transit room would be sealed and kept at slight negative pressure during operation. Everyone had had quite enough of quarantine procedure.) Up the stairs and into the control room, where Lee said, "All ready."
Air Force General Wallace Owen West, universally called Wally-O by anyone safely in another county, said, "Thank you, Doctor. Activate the device."
Lee sat down at a ferociously complicated control console, tapped three keys, and said "Done."
There was a pause. Benton looked at West, who looked at Tremont, who continued gazing peacefully down into the transit room. Lee coughed, hit three more keys, typed a hasty sequence of commands, and repeated, "Done." At the far end of the room, light washed over the slab.
Everyone involuntarily leaned forward, except Tremont, who snapped "Monitors." The lights on the pylon came on, and then the monitors which hung above the control console. Benton saw a closeup of the familiar Giza chamber -- bereft of superballs, as everything foreign to the other side had been retrieved, but with his footprints clear in the sand. Giza Prime, as they'd come to call it.
"All right, Doctor," continued Tremont. "Begin your scan."
"Right, right," muttered Lee. He hit a key.
The window flashed. The monitors showed the Giza chamber, unchanged... no. Changed. "No footprints," Benton whispered, and then shut himself up. But even General West was intent on the display.
Lee tapped another key. The window flashed, and turned a blank grey. "What is that?" the General asked sharply.
"Looks like... metal?" Lee said.
"Could be," said Tremont, considering. "A metal barrier set in front of the slab. Pity we can't get sonar or radar through. Try another one."
The next one was the Giza chamber, but arranged differently, and seen from a different side.
The next was an empty stone cell, much smaller. Then another metal wall. Another. A wall of rough wooden planks, a bit farther away.
Then, startlingly, a very mundane-looking storage room. Plastic bins and sheet-shrouded machinery were stacked on metal shelving. "Is that... that's military storage." said West.
"Looks like it, sir," said Tremont. "Yes, look, there's stock numbers. Air Force. If we could see a wall tag, we might be able to tell what base it is. Benton, want to go take a look?"
"No thanks. Look down." Benton gestured at the monitor, which Lee helpfully zoomed in. Threads of red light were clearly visible. "Laser alarms."
"Mmm," said the General. "Keep going."
The next view through the window was darkness. Nothing was visible, not even a floor. The floodlight beam was a faint glow into the distance, as if illuminating a thin atmospheric haze, but that was all.
"Now what could that be... yii!" Tremont jerked back. Something pale and sinuous had swept across their view. Then another, more slowly, a fat shape with fins... "Fish. The window is underwater."
"This is so cool," someone said.
"Why are the windows jumping around?" Benton asked curiously. "I'd have thought we'd get a bunch of Gizas, then maybe a bunch of other places in Egypt, and so on."
Tremont and Lee tried to answer at once, and went down in a verbal tangle of "We don't know." "This is a twelve-dimensional space, like I said," added Lee, "and I'm really not going through it in a straight line anyhow. There are blank spots."
"We'll have to plot a lot more before we get our bearings," said Tremont. "I suspect it's a quantization of a fractal eleven-manifold." Lee tried to disagree with that, but the General aimed a get-on-with-it glare around the room and he wilted.
The next flash turned into a beige veil that hissed down the length of the slab and scattered across the floor. Sand. The monitors showed a shallow sandy cavity beyond the window.
"Huh. The window must be buried in sand, face-down," said Lee. "The sand in contact with the surface jumped across, and then fell."
Benton considered. "When we were underwater, why didn't the water come flooding through?" Lee looked suddenly, retroactively worried.
Tremont shrugged. "Maybe the window is designed to ignore liquids. It ignores gasses -- we measured a pressure difference between Nevada and Giza, and it didn't cause a draft."
West looked like he was ginning up another glare, so Lee said, "Next reality," and tapped his key.
In the next reality, the window was buried face-up in sand. But Lee managed to switch it off before more than a few tons of the stuff had poured across.
"I've had a thought," said Tremont, at the regular Tuesday Lunch Thinky session (technically Weekly Liaison Strategy Overview, which was good for putting the better Indian takeout place on the lab supply budget).
"Tell us your thought," said Benton ritually. Lee emitted four matching syllables around his dosa.
"It's about the intersection rule," said Tremont. All nodded.
The window would not transfer you if your target position intersected a solid object on the other side. If you did go, then so did everything you were touching, and everything that touched that, and so on -- until the intersection rule broke the chain. (Which was why your clothing transferred, but not the floor beneath your feet. The whole thing had been hammered out between Tremont and Lee in an early, rapid-fire conversation that began and ended with "Benton's pants". Benton had put forth all his will, followed by unspecified threats of violence, to prevent the notion from being called "the Benton's Pants Rule" in progress debriefs.)
"Imagine," continued Tremont, "that we put a solid object right in front of the window. Not touching, but just a micrometer away."
Lee frowned. "Then... we couldn't touch the window?"
Benton stared into his curry. "Yeah, and... you mean, nothing could transfer from the other side."
"Right," said Tremont. "Anything that touched the window would, by definition, be intersecting the barrier on this side. So it wouldn't transfer. Not a grain of sand, not a hair. We can lock the window."
"That'll make West happy. He's been sweating for weeks about a fish invasion --"
But Lee was waving his spoon and shouting "The metal wall worlds!"
Tremont grinned her rare, pointy grin. "Exactly. Those weren't coincidences. They've already got my idea in place. I bet a samosa that if we checked with a laser interferometer, we'd find that each barrier was placed microscopically close to the window."
"Decline," said Benton, and snatched the last samosa to enforce it. "Hm. Okay, how's this for a thought. The barrier doesn't have to be strong, does it? I mean, a sheet of paper counts for intersection, just as much as a sheet of metal. It'll still keep everything out."
"Yes, so?" asked Lee.
"So, use a sheet of glass. A regular window in front of the slab window. Then we can see the other side, while still being protected."
"Except from lasers. They'd kill you through the glass."
"Thank you, Bill, except from lasers. I like it, Major."
"And basilisks."
* COLORADO, 1997, JANUARY
The window now rested on a low platform of metal grate; Tremont had insisted that the next flood of sand, or water, should have at least a little space to drain away, rather than piling up around the slab. A long ramp led up to the platform.
The slab was also now surrounded by a heavy metal framework. It looked like a sliding door built by military contractors; which, in simplest fact, it was. "Position one," ordered Benton, and a thick pane of optically clear glass slid across the surface of the window. "Position two." The barrier slid farther, replacing the glass with heavy armor plate.
The barrier didn't have to be strong, but the unspoken agreement was that strong couldn't hurt.
"I think we're good to go. Doctor Lee, back to position one, and you may continue the mapping procedure."
Flash. A beach under cloudy skies. Flash. A limestone cave, apparently unimproved and uninhabited. Flash. A row of massive wooden crates, too tall to see around.
Flash. "Okay, that's creepy," said Lee.
The window had become a mirror. Beyond it was a platform of metal grate, a ramp leading down, an equipment pylon, a long chamber. All the lights were off in the other-side transit room, and the control room observation port at the far end was covered by a metal blast shield. But aside from those differences, the cameras could have been seeing their own reflection.
"I wonder where they all are," Tremont said eventually.
"Huh," said Lee, "there's some glare, let me check... yeah, look. We're locked out. There's a glass barrier on the other side."
"Same as ours?" asked Benton. "Great minds think alike."
"Maybe it was you that thought of it there, too."
"Okay," said Benton, "that's creepy."
Flash. "That's definitely not mil-spec."
They were looking at another storage room, but the architecture was stone, angular and blocky. "I don't recognize any of those devices," said Tremont. "I don't even recognize any of the, the design idioms. Do you see a power cable? Anything like that?"
"No..." Lee replied, scanning the monitors back and forth. "...Damn."
"What?" asked Benton sharply.
"Oh, nothing. I was hoping to see another remote control, a working one. But nothing there looks, uh, remotely related."
"Pun level zero-point-five, Doctor, not up to Air Force standards. Catalog the place and let's move on."
Flash. Metal wall. Flash. The bottom of an ocean, this time with the sandy bottom visible. Flash. A museum, perhaps, dominated by roped-off stone sculptures of vaguely Mayan-looking gods. Flash. Underwater, but just beneath the surface, with colorful coral everywhere.
Flash. A dark grey wasteland, stones and dust, beneath a night sky.
They stared into the monitors, nobody quite willing to say it. Finally, Tremont did. "Is that... the Moon?"
"...Not our moon. Iapetus, maybe." Lee's voice was uncharacteristically small. Benton tried to ask him what he meant; then he saw the ghostly, braided ring system sliding into view.
After a while, the ringed planet became visible. It was indigo, with luminescent bands of peach and salmon cloud. The shrunken red star beyond it could not possibly have been the Sun.
* COLORADO, 1997, FEBRUARY
"Benton! Check this out!"
It was Jay Fagen shouting. He and several of the other white-coats were gathered around the control console. Benton checked the overhead monitors, and found they had one of the deep-ocean realities tuned in. "Yeah?"
Grinning, Fagen hit a key. Down in the transit room, an orange superball popped out of the pylon and hit the window.
The superball turned into an equal volume of seawater, which immediately burst into a shower of droplets. "The countervolume comes in highly pressurized, see?" said one of the marine biologists. "And the superball is smacked with all that pressure at once, so..."
Benton leaned forward. On the other side, the superball had shattered into irregular orange scraps, which were drifting slowly down. The muddy surface at the window's foot was littered with brightly colored fragments of rubber. A few white crab-spider-things were prodding at them, trying to decide if they were food.
"What if one of those critters touches the window?" Benton said, after a moment.
Fagen tilted his head. "I guess..."
A crab-spider appeared on the platform, and instantly exploded like messy crab popcorn.
"You're cleaning that up," said Benton.
"Doctors, did you ask anyone before setting up an interdimensional handball game between here and Giza Prime?"
The alien moon consumed much of the science team's attention. The astronomers were quick to set up an array of wide-angle star cameras close to the window. In the process, Doctor Gwen Berlioni brushed the surface with her sleeve, and became the first human being to set foot outside the Solar System. Whether by sheer luck, dive training, or love of hard science fiction, she screamed rather than trying to hold her breath. One point two seconds later, her hand was on the window, and she returned to Earth unharmed except for mortal terror and (as it turned out after some hasty dosimeter experiments) a less-than-dangerous dose of Van Allen radiation.
Tremont congratulated her, and then ordered the slab temporarily cranked an additional six inches above the platform. "That will put your feet below ground level on the other side, so intersection will prevent you from crossing over."
Tremont paused and surveyed the gathered science team. "This does not constitute a license to be careless. Lose any clothing to the other side, or any equipment that was in your hands, and I will take pleasure in writing 'virtually killed in the line of duty' in your personnel record."
Benton raised a hand. "Doctor, may I clarify?" Tremont nodded, and Benton stood up.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are not fucking around here. The Special Archives Command has many posts more congenial to the careless and inattentive. Such as the Hudson Bay Magnetic Anomaly... North Monitoring Station."
He sat down amid a thoughtful silence.
"The thing is, Alicia, we kind of are fucking around here."
Tremont frowned. "The mapping work is important. We've barely started to sketch out the range of realities -- an eleven-manifold means lots of room to get lost."
Benton shook his head. "And we should keep doing that. But it can go on in the background, especially with that visual categorizer that Lee and Choi came up with. Peeping through the window isn't telling us what we're dealing with."
"You think it's time for an exploratory mission."
"Yes, I do. Plus, it'll give the crew something to dig into. Besides handball and seeing what happens to a peanut butter sandwich dropped in eight thousand PSI of sea pressure."
General West sat at the head of the briefing table and looked skeptical. The department heads shuffled their papers.
"We've mapped only the smallest fraction of the realities that we can select," said Doctor Tremont, "and that's only a fraction of the realities that we think the window can reach. This," as she clicked up a slide, "is a rough categorization of what we've seen."
She pointed at the diagram of colored rings. "Many of the worlds near us in twelve-space are similar to us as well. The window is in storage at Area 51, or here at the Mountain, or some other military base or laboratory." She clicked rapidly through several photos of dull storerooms. "Or a Russian or Chinese laboratory, or so on. Basically, the slab has been found and noted as anomalous. We call this Zone Blue. It also includes a lot of locked windows." A picture of a metal wall appeared.
Lee interrupted, "We assume those are military bases because that's what we do with the window when it's not in use. Of course that's only an assumption. Zone Blue isn't a nice neat circle..."
Tremont smoothly interrupted him back. "As Doctor Lee says, the 'borders' between zones are very grainy and irregular -- fractal, in fact." Lee contented himself with a nod.
"Now, the next group -- Zone Green -- are worlds where the window has not been singled out for study. Either it's still buried somewhere" (a photo of Giza Prime, another of sand) "or, if it's been found, it's in a museum attic. Or dumped in a rock pile."
"You're showing me deserted storerooms and tombs," said the General. "Have you found any inhabited worlds?"
"Obviously they're inhabited, shelves don't build themselves, heh heh..." began Lee nervously.
"We believe," said Tremont quickly, "that probabilities are biased against human activity near the window. If it is thought to be a chunk of granite, it will be in unattended storage. If its properties are known, the owners are likely to invent the barrier, and then keep the window locked most of the time -- as we do. No doubt there are people moving beyond those metal walls; but we have not watched any one long enough to catch them looking back."
"But if there are an infinite number of possible worlds, some of them must have people nearby?"
"Certainly. But the window only lets us sample twelve-space."
"Like channel-surfing," said Lee. "You can only click up and down in steps. You can't see the possibilities between the channels." (Benton, from his corner of the table, nodded minutely. Good explanation-for-Generals. Lee smiled back and, even more admirably, stopped talking.)
Tremont returned to her thread. "Beyond Green Zone we have Yellow, which are cultures that appear to have no direct parallel in our own world." The slide showed the angular storage room. "There are a great many variants of this design, and then a sprinkling of others." Metal rooms, weirdly Art Deco rooms, one that seemed to have been poured out of liquid stone. "We don't know what to make of those. Then Orange, which are other planets -- such as Doctor Berlioni's vacation spot. And finally Zone Red, in which the window is either falling in free space, or in some environment we cannot even start to categorize." She clicked past a shot of starry black sky, to a dizzying image of grey and white tubules, apparently coiled and knotted in infinite profusion.
General West tapped his stack of papers. "And then there are the war worlds."
Tremont returned to the circular diagram, and then added a purple slash across its blue center. "Yes. What we call Zone Violet." The slide changed again.
It was an Air Force storage room -- devastated. Scorch marks showed along one wall, and scars that Benton still thought looked like the work of explosive bullets. The nearest shelves were overturned, their contents clearly rifled.
West gazed into, or through, the catastrophe. "We don't know who did this?"
"Not a hint," said Benton quietly.
"You've convinced me, Doctor Tremont," said West. "We need intel."
EDIT-ADD: Links to part one, part two, part three.
* COLORADO, 1996, DECEMBER
The chamber was long, high, chilly, and concrete. Benton had been over the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center blueprints -- the real ones -- and knew that this had once been the bottom of a missile silo. Now it was the room where everything would happen.
At one end, high up, a control room looked down through a broad observation port. The slab stood at the other end, upright but somewhat dwarfed by its environment. Facing the slab, a couple of meters back, was a pylon rigged with equipment: floodlights, cameras, lasers, recording devices, whatever the science team thought they might want to aim through the window. Benton had spotted an unobtrusive tube that looked suspiciously like a superball cannon.
The rest of the room -- and there was a lot of room -- was empty. Benton looked around uncomfortably. "Couldn't we get some of those computers from upstairs? Just to make the place looked lived in? Maybe a sofa?"
Lee looked up from the slab, where he was re-re-rechecking the cable plugged into its edge. "Ooh, good idea. Projection TV."
Benton gave it up; even Lee's intentional jokes were half funny-by-accident. "You done? I think Tremont is getting impatient."
"Tremont understands the value of a job... well... done," said Lee distractedly, giving a connector two final taps. "It's General West who's impatient. Come on, let's go."
They walked up the room and out the side door, which hissed solidly shut behind them. (The transit room would be sealed and kept at slight negative pressure during operation. Everyone had had quite enough of quarantine procedure.) Up the stairs and into the control room, where Lee said, "All ready."
Air Force General Wallace Owen West, universally called Wally-O by anyone safely in another county, said, "Thank you, Doctor. Activate the device."
Lee sat down at a ferociously complicated control console, tapped three keys, and said "Done."
There was a pause. Benton looked at West, who looked at Tremont, who continued gazing peacefully down into the transit room. Lee coughed, hit three more keys, typed a hasty sequence of commands, and repeated, "Done." At the far end of the room, light washed over the slab.
Everyone involuntarily leaned forward, except Tremont, who snapped "Monitors." The lights on the pylon came on, and then the monitors which hung above the control console. Benton saw a closeup of the familiar Giza chamber -- bereft of superballs, as everything foreign to the other side had been retrieved, but with his footprints clear in the sand. Giza Prime, as they'd come to call it.
"All right, Doctor," continued Tremont. "Begin your scan."
"Right, right," muttered Lee. He hit a key.
The window flashed. The monitors showed the Giza chamber, unchanged... no. Changed. "No footprints," Benton whispered, and then shut himself up. But even General West was intent on the display.
Lee tapped another key. The window flashed, and turned a blank grey. "What is that?" the General asked sharply.
"Looks like... metal?" Lee said.
"Could be," said Tremont, considering. "A metal barrier set in front of the slab. Pity we can't get sonar or radar through. Try another one."
The next one was the Giza chamber, but arranged differently, and seen from a different side.
The next was an empty stone cell, much smaller. Then another metal wall. Another. A wall of rough wooden planks, a bit farther away.
Then, startlingly, a very mundane-looking storage room. Plastic bins and sheet-shrouded machinery were stacked on metal shelving. "Is that... that's military storage." said West.
"Looks like it, sir," said Tremont. "Yes, look, there's stock numbers. Air Force. If we could see a wall tag, we might be able to tell what base it is. Benton, want to go take a look?"
"No thanks. Look down." Benton gestured at the monitor, which Lee helpfully zoomed in. Threads of red light were clearly visible. "Laser alarms."
"Mmm," said the General. "Keep going."
The next view through the window was darkness. Nothing was visible, not even a floor. The floodlight beam was a faint glow into the distance, as if illuminating a thin atmospheric haze, but that was all.
"Now what could that be... yii!" Tremont jerked back. Something pale and sinuous had swept across their view. Then another, more slowly, a fat shape with fins... "Fish. The window is underwater."
"This is so cool," someone said.
"Why are the windows jumping around?" Benton asked curiously. "I'd have thought we'd get a bunch of Gizas, then maybe a bunch of other places in Egypt, and so on."
Tremont and Lee tried to answer at once, and went down in a verbal tangle of "We don't know." "This is a twelve-dimensional space, like I said," added Lee, "and I'm really not going through it in a straight line anyhow. There are blank spots."
"We'll have to plot a lot more before we get our bearings," said Tremont. "I suspect it's a quantization of a fractal eleven-manifold." Lee tried to disagree with that, but the General aimed a get-on-with-it glare around the room and he wilted.
The next flash turned into a beige veil that hissed down the length of the slab and scattered across the floor. Sand. The monitors showed a shallow sandy cavity beyond the window.
"Huh. The window must be buried in sand, face-down," said Lee. "The sand in contact with the surface jumped across, and then fell."
Benton considered. "When we were underwater, why didn't the water come flooding through?" Lee looked suddenly, retroactively worried.
Tremont shrugged. "Maybe the window is designed to ignore liquids. It ignores gasses -- we measured a pressure difference between Nevada and Giza, and it didn't cause a draft."
West looked like he was ginning up another glare, so Lee said, "Next reality," and tapped his key.
In the next reality, the window was buried face-up in sand. But Lee managed to switch it off before more than a few tons of the stuff had poured across.
"I've had a thought," said Tremont, at the regular Tuesday Lunch Thinky session (technically Weekly Liaison Strategy Overview, which was good for putting the better Indian takeout place on the lab supply budget).
"Tell us your thought," said Benton ritually. Lee emitted four matching syllables around his dosa.
"It's about the intersection rule," said Tremont. All nodded.
The window would not transfer you if your target position intersected a solid object on the other side. If you did go, then so did everything you were touching, and everything that touched that, and so on -- until the intersection rule broke the chain. (Which was why your clothing transferred, but not the floor beneath your feet. The whole thing had been hammered out between Tremont and Lee in an early, rapid-fire conversation that began and ended with "Benton's pants". Benton had put forth all his will, followed by unspecified threats of violence, to prevent the notion from being called "the Benton's Pants Rule" in progress debriefs.)
"Imagine," continued Tremont, "that we put a solid object right in front of the window. Not touching, but just a micrometer away."
Lee frowned. "Then... we couldn't touch the window?"
Benton stared into his curry. "Yeah, and... you mean, nothing could transfer from the other side."
"Right," said Tremont. "Anything that touched the window would, by definition, be intersecting the barrier on this side. So it wouldn't transfer. Not a grain of sand, not a hair. We can lock the window."
"That'll make West happy. He's been sweating for weeks about a fish invasion --"
But Lee was waving his spoon and shouting "The metal wall worlds!"
Tremont grinned her rare, pointy grin. "Exactly. Those weren't coincidences. They've already got my idea in place. I bet a samosa that if we checked with a laser interferometer, we'd find that each barrier was placed microscopically close to the window."
"Decline," said Benton, and snatched the last samosa to enforce it. "Hm. Okay, how's this for a thought. The barrier doesn't have to be strong, does it? I mean, a sheet of paper counts for intersection, just as much as a sheet of metal. It'll still keep everything out."
"Yes, so?" asked Lee.
"So, use a sheet of glass. A regular window in front of the slab window. Then we can see the other side, while still being protected."
"Except from lasers. They'd kill you through the glass."
"Thank you, Bill, except from lasers. I like it, Major."
"And basilisks."
* COLORADO, 1997, JANUARY
The window now rested on a low platform of metal grate; Tremont had insisted that the next flood of sand, or water, should have at least a little space to drain away, rather than piling up around the slab. A long ramp led up to the platform.
The slab was also now surrounded by a heavy metal framework. It looked like a sliding door built by military contractors; which, in simplest fact, it was. "Position one," ordered Benton, and a thick pane of optically clear glass slid across the surface of the window. "Position two." The barrier slid farther, replacing the glass with heavy armor plate.
The barrier didn't have to be strong, but the unspoken agreement was that strong couldn't hurt.
"I think we're good to go. Doctor Lee, back to position one, and you may continue the mapping procedure."
Flash. A beach under cloudy skies. Flash. A limestone cave, apparently unimproved and uninhabited. Flash. A row of massive wooden crates, too tall to see around.
Flash. "Okay, that's creepy," said Lee.
The window had become a mirror. Beyond it was a platform of metal grate, a ramp leading down, an equipment pylon, a long chamber. All the lights were off in the other-side transit room, and the control room observation port at the far end was covered by a metal blast shield. But aside from those differences, the cameras could have been seeing their own reflection.
"I wonder where they all are," Tremont said eventually.
"Huh," said Lee, "there's some glare, let me check... yeah, look. We're locked out. There's a glass barrier on the other side."
"Same as ours?" asked Benton. "Great minds think alike."
"Maybe it was you that thought of it there, too."
"Okay," said Benton, "that's creepy."
Flash. "That's definitely not mil-spec."
They were looking at another storage room, but the architecture was stone, angular and blocky. "I don't recognize any of those devices," said Tremont. "I don't even recognize any of the, the design idioms. Do you see a power cable? Anything like that?"
"No..." Lee replied, scanning the monitors back and forth. "...Damn."
"What?" asked Benton sharply.
"Oh, nothing. I was hoping to see another remote control, a working one. But nothing there looks, uh, remotely related."
"Pun level zero-point-five, Doctor, not up to Air Force standards. Catalog the place and let's move on."
Flash. Metal wall. Flash. The bottom of an ocean, this time with the sandy bottom visible. Flash. A museum, perhaps, dominated by roped-off stone sculptures of vaguely Mayan-looking gods. Flash. Underwater, but just beneath the surface, with colorful coral everywhere.
Flash. A dark grey wasteland, stones and dust, beneath a night sky.
They stared into the monitors, nobody quite willing to say it. Finally, Tremont did. "Is that... the Moon?"
"...Not our moon. Iapetus, maybe." Lee's voice was uncharacteristically small. Benton tried to ask him what he meant; then he saw the ghostly, braided ring system sliding into view.
After a while, the ringed planet became visible. It was indigo, with luminescent bands of peach and salmon cloud. The shrunken red star beyond it could not possibly have been the Sun.
* COLORADO, 1997, FEBRUARY
"Benton! Check this out!"
It was Jay Fagen shouting. He and several of the other white-coats were gathered around the control console. Benton checked the overhead monitors, and found they had one of the deep-ocean realities tuned in. "Yeah?"
Grinning, Fagen hit a key. Down in the transit room, an orange superball popped out of the pylon and hit the window.
The superball turned into an equal volume of seawater, which immediately burst into a shower of droplets. "The countervolume comes in highly pressurized, see?" said one of the marine biologists. "And the superball is smacked with all that pressure at once, so..."
Benton leaned forward. On the other side, the superball had shattered into irregular orange scraps, which were drifting slowly down. The muddy surface at the window's foot was littered with brightly colored fragments of rubber. A few white crab-spider-things were prodding at them, trying to decide if they were food.
"What if one of those critters touches the window?" Benton said, after a moment.
Fagen tilted his head. "I guess..."
A crab-spider appeared on the platform, and instantly exploded like messy crab popcorn.
"You're cleaning that up," said Benton.
"Doctors, did you ask anyone before setting up an interdimensional handball game between here and Giza Prime?"
The alien moon consumed much of the science team's attention. The astronomers were quick to set up an array of wide-angle star cameras close to the window. In the process, Doctor Gwen Berlioni brushed the surface with her sleeve, and became the first human being to set foot outside the Solar System. Whether by sheer luck, dive training, or love of hard science fiction, she screamed rather than trying to hold her breath. One point two seconds later, her hand was on the window, and she returned to Earth unharmed except for mortal terror and (as it turned out after some hasty dosimeter experiments) a less-than-dangerous dose of Van Allen radiation.
Tremont congratulated her, and then ordered the slab temporarily cranked an additional six inches above the platform. "That will put your feet below ground level on the other side, so intersection will prevent you from crossing over."
Tremont paused and surveyed the gathered science team. "This does not constitute a license to be careless. Lose any clothing to the other side, or any equipment that was in your hands, and I will take pleasure in writing 'virtually killed in the line of duty' in your personnel record."
Benton raised a hand. "Doctor, may I clarify?" Tremont nodded, and Benton stood up.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are not fucking around here. The Special Archives Command has many posts more congenial to the careless and inattentive. Such as the Hudson Bay Magnetic Anomaly... North Monitoring Station."
He sat down amid a thoughtful silence.
"The thing is, Alicia, we kind of are fucking around here."
Tremont frowned. "The mapping work is important. We've barely started to sketch out the range of realities -- an eleven-manifold means lots of room to get lost."
Benton shook his head. "And we should keep doing that. But it can go on in the background, especially with that visual categorizer that Lee and Choi came up with. Peeping through the window isn't telling us what we're dealing with."
"You think it's time for an exploratory mission."
"Yes, I do. Plus, it'll give the crew something to dig into. Besides handball and seeing what happens to a peanut butter sandwich dropped in eight thousand PSI of sea pressure."
General West sat at the head of the briefing table and looked skeptical. The department heads shuffled their papers.
"We've mapped only the smallest fraction of the realities that we can select," said Doctor Tremont, "and that's only a fraction of the realities that we think the window can reach. This," as she clicked up a slide, "is a rough categorization of what we've seen."
She pointed at the diagram of colored rings. "Many of the worlds near us in twelve-space are similar to us as well. The window is in storage at Area 51, or here at the Mountain, or some other military base or laboratory." She clicked rapidly through several photos of dull storerooms. "Or a Russian or Chinese laboratory, or so on. Basically, the slab has been found and noted as anomalous. We call this Zone Blue. It also includes a lot of locked windows." A picture of a metal wall appeared.
Lee interrupted, "We assume those are military bases because that's what we do with the window when it's not in use. Of course that's only an assumption. Zone Blue isn't a nice neat circle..."
Tremont smoothly interrupted him back. "As Doctor Lee says, the 'borders' between zones are very grainy and irregular -- fractal, in fact." Lee contented himself with a nod.
"Now, the next group -- Zone Green -- are worlds where the window has not been singled out for study. Either it's still buried somewhere" (a photo of Giza Prime, another of sand) "or, if it's been found, it's in a museum attic. Or dumped in a rock pile."
"You're showing me deserted storerooms and tombs," said the General. "Have you found any inhabited worlds?"
"Obviously they're inhabited, shelves don't build themselves, heh heh..." began Lee nervously.
"We believe," said Tremont quickly, "that probabilities are biased against human activity near the window. If it is thought to be a chunk of granite, it will be in unattended storage. If its properties are known, the owners are likely to invent the barrier, and then keep the window locked most of the time -- as we do. No doubt there are people moving beyond those metal walls; but we have not watched any one long enough to catch them looking back."
"But if there are an infinite number of possible worlds, some of them must have people nearby?"
"Certainly. But the window only lets us sample twelve-space."
"Like channel-surfing," said Lee. "You can only click up and down in steps. You can't see the possibilities between the channels." (Benton, from his corner of the table, nodded minutely. Good explanation-for-Generals. Lee smiled back and, even more admirably, stopped talking.)
Tremont returned to her thread. "Beyond Green Zone we have Yellow, which are cultures that appear to have no direct parallel in our own world." The slide showed the angular storage room. "There are a great many variants of this design, and then a sprinkling of others." Metal rooms, weirdly Art Deco rooms, one that seemed to have been poured out of liquid stone. "We don't know what to make of those. Then Orange, which are other planets -- such as Doctor Berlioni's vacation spot. And finally Zone Red, in which the window is either falling in free space, or in some environment we cannot even start to categorize." She clicked past a shot of starry black sky, to a dizzying image of grey and white tubules, apparently coiled and knotted in infinite profusion.
General West tapped his stack of papers. "And then there are the war worlds."
Tremont returned to the circular diagram, and then added a purple slash across its blue center. "Yes. What we call Zone Violet." The slide changed again.
It was an Air Force storage room -- devastated. Scorch marks showed along one wall, and scars that Benton still thought looked like the work of explosive bullets. The nearest shelves were overturned, their contents clearly rifled.
West gazed into, or through, the catastrophe. "We don't know who did this?"
"Not a hint," said Benton quietly.
"You've convinced me, Doctor Tremont," said West. "We need intel."
EDIT-ADD: Links to part one, part two, part three.