Timeline. Part 18

"Yes. You, and the Professor before you."

Silence.

Suddenly, Marek broke into a broad grin. "Terrific," he said. "I can't wait!"

But the others said nothing. They looked uneasy, edgy.

Stern said, "About this guy they found in the desert...."

"Joe Traub," Doniger said. "He was one of our best scientists."

"What was he doing in the desert?"

"Apparently, he drove there. They found his car. But we don't know why he went."

Stern said, "Supposedly, he was all messed up, there was something about his fingers...."

"That wasn't in the autopsy report," Doniger said. "He died of a heart attack."

"Then his death had nothing to do with your technology?"

"Nothing at all," Doniger said.

There was another silence. Chris s.h.i.+fted in his chair. "In layman's terms-how safe is this technology?"

"Safer than driving your car," Doniger said without hesitation. "You will be thoroughly briefed, and we'll send you back with our experienced observers. The trip will last a maximum of two hours. You'll just go back and get him."

Chris Hughes drummed his fingers on the table. Kate bit her lip. n.o.body spoke.

"Look, this is all voluntary," Doniger said. "It's entirely up to you whether you go or not. But the Professor has asked for your help. And I don't think you would let him down."

"Why don't you just send the observers?" Stern said.

"Because they don't know enough, David. As you're aware, it's an entirely different world back there. You have the advantage of your knowledge. You know the site, and you know the time, in detail. You know languages and customs."

"But our knowledge is academic," Chris said.

"Not anymore," Doniger said.

The group filed out of the room, heading off with Gordon to see the machines. Doniger watched them go, then turned as Kramer entered the room. She had been watching everything on the closed-circuit television.

"What do you think, Diane?" Doniger said. "Will they go?"

"Yeah. They'll go."

"Can they pull it off?"

Kramer paused. "I'd say it's fifty-fifty."

They walked down a broad concrete ramp, large enough for a truck to drive down. At the bottom was a pair of heavy steel doors. Marek saw a half-dozen security cameras mounted in different locations around the ramp. The cameras turned, following them as they walked down to the doors. At the bottom of the ramp, Gordon looked up at the security cameras, and waited.

The doors opened.

Gordon led them through into a small room beyond. The steel doors clanged shut behind them. Gordon went forward to an inner set of doors, again waited.

Marek said, "You can't open them yourself?"

"No."

"Why? They don't trust you?"

"They don't trust anybody," Gordon said. "Believe me, n.o.body gets in here unless we intend for them to get in."

The doors opened.

They walked into an industrial-looking metal cage. The air was cold, faintly musty. The doors closed behind them. With a whir, the cage began to descend.

Marek saw that they were standing in an elevator.

"We're going down a thousand feet," Gordon said. "Be patient."

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. They walked down a long concrete tunnel, their footsteps echoing. Gordon said, "This is the control and maintenance level. The actual machines are another five hundred feet below us."

They came to a pair of heavy doors that were dark blue and transparent. At first, Marek thought they were made of extremely thick gla.s.s. But as the doors slid open on a motorized track, he saw slight movement beneath the surface. "Water," Gordon said. "We use a lot of water s.h.i.+elding here. Quantum technology is very sensitive to random outside influences-cosmic rays, spurious electronic fields, all of that. That's why we're down here in the first place."

Up ahead, they saw what appeared to be the doors to an ordinary laboratory hallway. Pa.s.sing through another set of gla.s.s doors, they entered a hallway painted antiseptic white, with doors opening off on either side. The first door on the left said PREPACK. PREPACK. The second, The second, FIELD PREP. FIELD PREP. And further down the hallway, they saw a sign marked simply And further down the hallway, they saw a sign marked simply TRANSIT. TRANSIT.

Gordon rubbed his hands together. He said, "Let's get right to the packing."

The room was small and reminded Marek of a hospital laboratory; it made him uneasy. In the center of the room stood a vertical tube, about seven feet high and five feet in diameter. It was hinged open. Inside were dull strips. Marek said, "A suntanning machine?"

"Actually, it's an advanced resonance imager. Basically it's a high-powered MRI. But you'll find it's good practice for the machine itself. Perhaps you should go first, Dr. Marek."

"Go in there?" Marek pointed to the tube. Seen up close, it looked more like a white coffin.

"Just remove your clothes and step inside. It's exactly like an MRI-you won't feel anything at all. The entire process takes about a minute. We'll be next door."

They went through a side door with a small window, into another room. Marek couldn't see what was in there. The door clanged shut.

He saw a chair in the corner. He went over and took his clothes off, then walked into the scanner. There was the click of an intercom and he heard Gordon say, "Dr. Marek, if you will look at your feet."

Marek looked down at his feet.

"You see the circle on the floor? Please make sure your feet are entirely within that circle." Marek s.h.i.+fted his position. "Thank you, that's fine. The door will close now."

With a mechanical hum, the hinged door swung shut. Marek heard a hiss as it sealed. He said, "Airtight?"

"Yes, it has to be. You may feel some cold air coming in now. We'll give you added oxygen while we calibrate. You're not claustrophobic, are you?"

"I wasn't, until now." Marek was looking around at the interior. The dull strips, he now saw, were plastic-covered openings. Behind the plastic he saw lights, small whirring machines. The air became noticeably cooler.

"We're calibrating now," Gordon said. "Try not to move."

Suddenly, the individual strips around him began to rotate, the machines clicking. The strips spun faster and faster, then suddenly jerked to a stop.

"That's good. Feel all right?"

"It's like being inside a pepper mill," Marek said.

Gordon laughed. "Calibration is completed. The rest is dependent on exact timing, so the sequence is automatic. Just follow the instructions as you hear them. Okay?"

"Okay."

A click. Marek was alone.

A recorded voice said, "The scan sequence has begun. We are turning on lasers. Look straight ahead. And do not look up."

Instantly, the interior of the tube was a bright, glowing blue. The air itself seemed to be glowing.

"Lasers are polarizing the xenon gas, which is now being pumped into the compartment. Five seconds."

Marek thought, Xenon gas?

The bright blue color all around him increased in intensity. He looked down at his hand and could hardly see it for the s.h.i.+mmering air.

"We have reached xenon concentration. Now we will ask you to take a deep breath."

Marek thought, Take a deep breath? Of xenon?

"Hold your position without moving for thirty seconds. Ready? Stand still-eyes open-deep breath-hold it.... Now! Now!"

The strips suddenly began to spin wildly, then one by one, each strip started to jerk back and forth, almost as if it were looking, and sometimes had to go back for a second look. Each strip seemed to be moving individually. Marek had the uncanny sense of being examined by hundreds of eyes.

The recorded voice said, "Very still, please. Twenty seconds remaining."

All around him, the strips hummed and whirred. And then suddenly, they all stopped. Several seconds of silence. The machinery clicked. Now the strips began to move forward and back, as well as laterally.

"Very still, please. Ten seconds."

The strips began to spin in circles now, slowly synchronizing, until finally they were all rotating together as a unit. Then they stopped.

"The scan is completed. Thank you for your cooperation."

The blue light clicked off, and the hinged door hissed open. Marek stepped out.

In the adjacent room, Gordon sat in front of a computer console. The others had pulled up chairs around him.

"Most people," Gordon said, "don't realize that the ordinary hospital MRI works by changing the quantum state of atoms in your body-generally, the angular momentum of nuclear particles. Experience with MRIs tells us that changing your quantum state has no ill effect. In fact, you don't even notice it happening.

"But the ordinary MRI does this with a very powerful magnetic field-say, 1.5 tesla, about twenty-five thousand times as strong as the earth's magnetic field. We don't need that. We use superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDs, that are so sensitive they can measure resonance just from the earth's magnetic field. We don't have any magnets in there."

Marek came into the room. "How do I look?" he said.

The image on the screen showed a translucent picture of Marek's limbs, in speckled red. "You're looking at the marrow, inside the long bones, the spine, and the skull," Gordon said. "Now it builds outward, by organ systems. Here's the bones"-they saw a complete skeleton-"and now we're adding muscles...."

Watching the organ systems appear, Stern said, "Your computer's incredibly fast."

"Oh, we've slowed this way down," Gordon said. "Otherwise you wouldn't be able to see it happening. The actual processing time is essentially zero."

Stern stared. "Zero?"

"Different world," Gordon said, nodding. "Old a.s.sumptions don't apply." He turned to the others. "Who's next?"

They walked down to the end of the corridor, to the room marked TRANSIT. TRANSIT. Kate said, "Why did we just do all that?" Kate said, "Why did we just do all that?"

"We call it prepacking," Gordon said. "It enables us to transmit faster, because most of the information about you is already loaded into the machine. We just do a final scan for differences, and then we transmit."

They entered another elevator, and pa.s.sed through another set of water-filled doors. "Okay," Gordon said. "Here we are."

They came out into an enormous, brightly lit, cavernous s.p.a.ce. Sounds echoed. The air was cold. They were walking on a metal pa.s.sageway, suspended a hundred feet above the floor. Looking down, Chris saw three semicircular water-filled walls, arranged to form a circle, with gaps between large enough for a person to walk through. Inside this outer wall were three smaller semicircles, forming a second wall. And inside the second wall was a third. Each successive semicircle was rotated so that the gaps never lined up, giving the whole thing a mazelike appearance.

In the center of the concentric circles was a s.p.a.ce about twenty feet across. Here, half a dozen cagelike devices stood, each about the size of a phone booth. They were arranged in no particular pattern. They had dull-colored metal tops. White mist drifted across the enclosure. Tanks lay on the floor, and heavy black power cables snaked everywhere. It looked like a workroom. And in fact, some men were working on one of the cages.

"This is our transmission area," Gordon said. "Heavily s.h.i.+elded, as you can see. We're building a second area over there but it won't be ready for several months." He pointed across the cavernous s.p.a.ce, where a second series of concentric walls were going up. These walls were clear; they hadn't been filled with water yet.

From the gangway, a cable elevator went down to the s.p.a.ce in the center of the gla.s.s walls.

Marek said, "Can we go down there?"

"Not yet, no."