Space Stations

In its power-conserving nontransit mode, the wormhole was almost microscopic, held open just enough to insure continued existence and to permit the coherent light flow of the communications laser.

The Worm Gate was beyond being the single greatest creation of humanity. Its building had required the concentrated efforts of two civilizations. The only like to it was its identical twin parked above the second planet of the Wolf 359 system.

Marta chuckled softly, deliberately pausing for a moment to make herself be impressed.

“What's the joke, Marta?” Rocardo inquired, lifting a dark eyebrow.

“Oh, nothing, Estiban. It's all so workaday anymore that sometimes I forget that we're busy doing the impossible out here.”

“What do you mean by impossible?”

“Back in my first year at MIT I can remember attending a lecture by one of the world's foremost physicists who loudly and firmly proclaimed that the worm search was a waste of funding and that interstellar travel was and would always be beyond the reach of mankind.”

Her Assistant Director smiled indulgently. “No insult intended. But that was a long time ago.”

“I suspect, young man, that had we not made contact with the Furrys that world view would still be in effect. Science is instinctively conservative. We don't like to shuffle the laws of the universe around unless we have a very good reason for it. But once we knew that somebody was indeed in the neighborhood, we simply had to figure out a way to borrow each other's lawn mowers.”

Marta had been a little girl when first contact had been established between Humanity and the People. The two species had found each other intriguingly different and yet much alike, both had a broad streak of curiosity in their racial psyche. Both also soon found the years' long cycle of conversation via radio telescope infinitely unsatisfying. A human scholar asking a question of his counterpart among The People had to wait years for the reply and vice versa. Within the scientific communities of both worlds the quest for an improved form of communication became a fixation that bordered on a mania.

Each culture had possessed its own Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Each had an approximately equal understanding of the structure of the universe and each focused its search in the same rarified area of theoretical physics, seeking for a mathematically irrational chimera called a wormhole.

A decade was spent proving that, yes, such things did in fact exist, but as an ephemeral transitory at the outermost edge of quantum reality. Dimensional “holes” did indeed open intermittently between far distant points in space, but so submicroscopically small and for such a brief period that even a single photon of light could not hope to transit through one.

A second decade was spent proving that such a wormhole could be “caught” and “held open” via a negative energy field. With the proper application of power, vast oceans of power, it could be “stretched “ to a “size” that would permit the passage of physical matter. However, a living being could not survive the transit. Systems created within the three-dimensional universe, be they mechanical, electronic, or biological, could not function within the dimensionless realm that existed within the wormhole, but ideas and goods could theoretically be passed across from one world to the other.

A third decade went into the construction of the hardware to make it happen.

“River-'Tween-Worlds, this is Worm Gate. We are coming up on shift initiation. We show good systems and we are ready to set transfer sequencing.”

Marta gave her command headset a final settling tug, her eyes flicking to the multiple countdown display bars glowing across the bottom of the imaging tank.

“Understood, Worm Gate. We also prepared.” Over the translator link Tarrischall's voice held none of its usual humorous shading. Her Furry compatriot was the consummate professional when it came to Operations. “We have good systems. We stand by sequencing.”

“Very well, River-'Tween-Worlds. Coming up on sequencing initiator. Mark zero three…

two… one… Set.”

The twin timing bar displays crawled across the main screen. T minus ten minutes to power up. T minus twenty-five to barge entry. Instantly the bars began their slow shrink back down toward the zero point.

The clocks had started.

One could not dally around with a barge shift. Not while one was expending enough electricity to power an entire continent. The gate crews at both ends of the hole lived by the fact they could build up enough juice in their accumulator arrays to execute a single two-way barge transfer every twenty-four hours plus a small emergency reserve.

“We have systems verification from 'Tween-Worlds,” the Grid Systems Manager called up from his station. “Auto sequencing set and verified.”

“Very good, grid. River-'Tween-Worlds, we show auto sequencing set and counting. Do you concur?”

“We concur sequencing, Worm Gate. We are go for transfer.”