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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] She got up, put a wrap around her shoulders, and made a coffee, intending to settle her nerves before trying to get back to sleep again. But her mind was too active for sleep to be a possibility. The reality of the dream was gone, but instead of fading in the way that dreams normally do, the images kept replaying themselves, as if some significance about them was insistently trying to register. She sat, nursing her mug in the semidarkness, and pictured them again. A thousand Nomads all sending back their transmissions to a single place . . . Or was it the same Nomad existing at a thousand different points along the timeline that traced its existence, all transmitting to the same point in the past? The energy from a thousand futures concentrated on a single instant in the past . . . Suddenly Carol was wide awake. The thought was crazy, surely. But then, everything about Nomad was crazy. "Why not?" she asked herself aloud. She thought about it for half an hour without moving, while the rest of the coffee in the mug turned cold. Then she said, "Computers, normal lighting." The lights came up around the Page 130 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html cabin. "Intercom." "Intercom," a synthetic voice acknowledged. "Put me through to Dr. Donald Yaiger, visiting the Guam from Washington." The cabin's vipanel turned itself to face her, and several seconds later activated to show Don blinking and rubbing sleep from his eyes. "What is it? . . . Hey! What's the matter? Is something up?" "Don, I've got to talk to you. No, it can't wait till morning. I'm in G-37. Can you get here right away?" * * * "The operation will be controlled by computers installed in Nomad and connected into Nomad 's direction system." Carol, now dressed in fatigues, paced from one side of the cabin to the other as she described the preparations to supply Garfax's demands. Don listened from the worktable below the shelved recess. "The computers will translate the receiver's spacetime coordinates into optical signals compatible with Nomad 's equipment, that specify where in time the energy is sent from, and the point in the past that it's sent to. Okay so far?" "Okay," Don confirmed, nodding. "Well, you're the physicist. Tell me if there's any reason why this couldn't work. From what I can make out from the things Kreissenbaum said, the whole timeline that lies ahead of any now you care to pick is all equally real as real as the instant we're at now. Correct?" "It seems that way," Don agreed. "So every instant along the timeline every nanosecond of it contains a Nomad , right? And every one of those Nomads could beam its energy back to the same, precisely defined, instant in the past." Carol turned to face where Don was sitting. His jaw dropped as the first hint of what she was getting at seemed to register. She went on, "Suppose we wrote a program in which the instructions to begin transmitting were repeated to execute, say, a billion times at some specified interval. Even if the timeline is plastic and I'm not sure anyone really knows what that means all those copies would commence beaming at different points spaced sequentially along it. Now suppose they were all aiming at the same point in the past that Garfax specified. What would happen to the receiver?" Don stared at her for a few seconds. "You'd have to have some kind of updating mechanism. Every discrete point would need its own measure of elapsed time to hit the target." "A standard offset would take care of that. Routine stuff. No problem." Don thought for a moment longer. " Jesus! The receiver would get zapped with a billion times more energy than it was supposed to handle. . . . You'd be sending a zigaton bomb back up the timeline!" Carol nodded, satisfied. "That's what I thought. Strictly one-way, huh?" A strange gleam came into her eyes. "So that bastard wants our energy, eh? Okay, let's give it to him. Why don't we let him have a billion times more than he ever dreamed of?" * * * Don raised the issue at a meeting of DSRP scientists and government people on the Guam first thing the next morning. By lunchtime Norfield and his staff in Washington had become involved, and by late afternoon the plan was being examined in detail jointly with ISA. The upshot was that nobody could say for sure whether or not it would work, or offer any precise explanation to support Page 131 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html their opinion, whichever way their opinion happened to be. It was no more or no less crazy than everything else connected with Nomad . And it was, after all, the only alternative to total and ignominious surrender that anyone had been able to come up with. With ISA's blessing, Norfield gave his approval. For two hectic weeks, while discussions to finalize details of the official operation continued with Garfax's people, another team worked to develop the real programs that would be running when the day came for the blackmailers to collect. As the originator of the plan, Carol was offered the job of operating the console from which the master sequencing program would be run. It gave her a singular feeling of inner satisfaction to accept. * * * Garfax's face looked out from one of the screens on Carol's panel and beamed its crooked smile. Seventy miles away from the Guam Nomad , was hanging in space, surrounded by the first three relays positioned to redirect the beams from the Sun-orbiting projectors ninety-three million miles away. Inside Nomad , the control computers were installed and running, awaiting further commands from the Guam 's supervisory system. The relays and Nomad 's time-beam transmission would begin operating on receipt of a master signal. Carol was working in a small communications direction room opening off from the main control deck, where the official charade was being acted out. "Five minutes to zero," Garfax declared cheerfully. "Why such serious faces there? This is a big day. We should all be celebrating. Just think, in five minutes time we'll have changed thirty years of history for the better. Who knows what great things may emerge from this moment? You should be proud and confident with visions of things to come." Norfield watched from another screen without saying anything. Carol knew from Don's accounts of the exchanges with Washington that Norfield had been troubled when he gave the go-ahead. But the time simply hadn't permitted detailed consideration of all the niceties. If everything worked in the way that had been outlined then, a large piece of Nebraska would be vaporized, and along with it a lot of innocent people who weren't mixed up in Garfax's blackmail and knew nothing about it. True, they existed almost thirty years in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |