James P. Hogan Giants 4 Entoverse

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attend. Maybe Yamumatsu would like to stand in for me there, too."
For a few seconds Ms. Mulling was too shocked to reply; she stared back at him
from the screen, open-mouthed, like a mother superior who had just heard the
Pope proclaim his conversion to atheism. She recovered herself falteringly. "I
don't understand...What's happened? Is something wrong?"
"Wrong?" Danchekker repeated lightly. "Not at all. Quite the contrary, in
fact. Effective immediately, I shall be preoccupied with other matters.
Have Brady come to my office, would you? Get out all the plans, charts,
budgets, and other wastepaper that holds up the walls over there, and tell him
he'll be deputized as from tomorrow morning. I -- " Danchekker spread both
hands in a careless throwing-away motion, " -- shall have flown."
Ms. Mulling looked confused. "What are you talking about, Professor
Danchekker? There are urgent things to be attended to."
"I have no time for anything urgent. There are too many important things to be
done, instead."
"But -- where are you going?"
"To Jevlen. Where else can a science of alien life be practiced?"
Danchekker lifted a leg to dangle a sneaker-shod foot in view of the screen
and waggled it provocatively. "Far, far away, Ms. Mulling. Beyond the horizons
of imagination of the entire Republican Society, the verbal compass of a
gaggle of senators' wives, and even, if you are capable of comprehending such
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a thing, beyond the reaches of the sacred UNSA Corporate Procedure Manual."
"Jevlen? Why? What are you going to do there?"
But Danchekker wasn't listening. Hunt and Mitzi could hear him singing
tunelessly to himself as he ambled away down the corridor beyond the open
door.
"Far, far away. Far, far away..."
CHAPTER TEN
Earth's physicists were having to do a lot of rethinking to accommodate the
new facts brought by the Ganymeans. Some of the most far-reaching revelations
had to do with the fundamental nature of matter itself.
As some Terran scientists had suspected and been investigating without
conclusive result since the late twentieth century, the permanency of matter
turned out to be just another illusion to be thrown overboard with such
notions as classical predictability and absolute, universal time. For all
forms of matter were continually decaying away to nothing, although at a rate
immeasurably small by the techniques so far available on Earth -- it would
take ten billion years for a gram of water to vanish completely.
The fundamental particles of which matter was composed annihilated
spontaneously, returning to a hyperrealm governed by laws different from those
that operated in the familiar universe. It was the tiny proportion that was
disappearing at any instant that gave rise to the gravitational effect of
mass. Every annihilation event produced a minute gravity pulse, and the
additive effect of large numbers of these pulses occurring every second gave
the apparently steady field that was perceived macroscopically.
Hence, gravity ceased being a thing apart in physics, a static effect,
passively associated with a mass, and fell instead into line along with other
field phenomena as a vector quantity generated by the rate of change of
something -- in this case, the rate of change of mass. This principle,
together with means of artificially inducing and controlling the process,
formed the basis of early Ganymean gravitic engineering -- the drive system
used by the Shapieron was an example of its application.
Small though it sounded, such a rate of disappearance was not trivial on a
cosmic time scale. The reason there was much of the universe left at all was
that, throughout the entire volume of space, particles were constantly being
created spontaneously, too. And in a converse way to that in which particle-
annihilations induced gravity, particle-creations induced "negative gravity."
Since a particle could only disappear from where it already existed,
extinctions predominated inside masses and induced an attractive curvature
into the local vicinity of space-time; but in the vast regions of empty space
between galaxies, creations far outnumbered extinctions, and the resultant
effect was a cosmic repulsion. It all made a rather tidy and symmetric,
satisfying kind of sense.
A fundamental particle, therefore, appeared, lived out its allotted span in
the observable dimensions of the known universe, and then vanished. Where it
came from and where it returned to were questions that the scientists of
Earth had never had to face, and which even the Ganymeans on Minerva at the
time of the Shapieron's departure had only begun delving into. It was their
subsequent work in this direction that had given the Thuriens the technologies
that made possible their interstellar civilization.
The hyperrealm that particles temporarily emerged from was the same domain
that matter-energy entered when it disappeared into a black hole. That an
object no longer continued to exist where it had when it entered a black hole, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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