The Siege of Eternity

It was a queer, scary-attractive thought. It made something inside her twitch, and she was glad when the cab ride was over and she had to attend to current reality. At the Observatory's reception desk, Jan-ice DuPage was talking to a woman who looked vaguely familiar, and turned out to be Maureen Capobianco, the cruise companion Janice hadn't had. The cruise, however, hadn't been a total success. Capobianco told her they'd had some sort of accident as the ship approached Rio de Janeiro-engine trouble of some kind; they'd lain dead in the water for most of one night, with the antiroll pumps that shifted ballast around not working and the ship heaving uncomfortably in the Atlantic swell and everybody getting seasick. They finally limped into Rio twelve hours late. "So we had a day in Rio," Maureen told her, "but then they canceled the rest of the cruise and flew us home."

"And they're all getting some kind of a refund," Janice said bitterly, "but I got stuck for the whole thing, and I didn't even get to go. Pat? Is it all right if I go out to lunch a little early?"

Whether it was all right or not, Pat felt, she had to say it was-having made Janice miss her cruise because of the "emergency." Once in her own office it didn't take long to find that that emergency search for the Scarecrow scout ship had still produced nothing. On the other hand, it had pretty well ruled out any new spacecraft heading in toward Earth at any immediately worrisome distance, too.

She flipped on the news screen to see if anything else was happening, but the only fresh items that came up had mostly to do with things like the thousands of religious fanatics at that moment demonstrating before the White House, demanding that the President do something-which particular something they wanted done varying from group to group, who were, as usual, fighting among themselves.

She was checking the latest summaries from the "Scarecrow Search" site when, belatedly, she remembered to make an announcement in everybody's mail about Pat Five's condition. A moment later Rosaleen peered in.

"But she's all right?" she asked.

"Hope so. What've you got there?"

The old lady was carrying a hard-copy printout. "Nothing useful," she said. "I've been going over what's been published about the artifacts from Starlab. The people at Camp Smolley have started disassembling the green object."

"Disassembling? But I thought they weren't supposed to do that yet.

"Yes, of course," Rosaleen said impatiently. "You thought they would wait until observers could be present, or some such thing. You have always been quite naive, dear Pat. In any case, I'm damned if I can figure out what that thing is supposed to be doing, much less how it does it. I'd love to get my hands on it-"

"Talk to Dan. Maybe he can arrange it," Pat suggested. "You're one of the best instrument people in the world."

"I'm one of the best instrument people in the world who unfortunately also happens to be a Ukrainian national," Rosaleen pointed out.

"You could at least ask."

Rosaleen grunted. "Maybe. Listen, I've been thinking about how that transporter works."

Pat looked puzzled. "I thought we knew that. It doesn't transmit anything material, only a kind of blueprint of whatever's involved-people, machines, whatever, and then the thing gets constructed at the receiver."

Technology Analysis, NBI Agency Eyes Only Subject: Tachyon transfer

The so-called "matter transporter" which is used for communications and travel at speeds faster than light does not transport any matter. The device analyzes whatever is to be transported and transmits a sort of "blueprint" by means of the radiation called "tachyons" by some American scientists. (Until the arrival of the aliens, tachyons were known only in theory; none had ever been detected.) There at the receiving station an exact copy is made. Even living creatures may be transported in this way.

There are two unanswered questions about this device. 1, how is the object or person to be transmitted analyzed and encoded? 2, what is the copy made from? It was at first conjectured that the receiver took all the necessary elements from its surroundings and used them to construct the copy. But that does not seem to be the case. According to statements of the human and extraterrestrial witnesses, there does not appear to be any depletion of matter in the vicinity of the receiver, no matter how much mass is transmitted.

"Right. Out of what?"

"What do you mean, out of what?"

"I mean," Rosaleen said patiently, "suppose you want to transmit a human being. The raw materials in the human body are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, calcium and about fifty other elements. What if some of those elements don't exist at the receiving station?

"Urn," Pat said, seeing the difficulty.

"Right. So I was talking to Pete Schneyman about it. Do you know what a virtual particle is?"

"Sure. Well," Pat qualified, "sort of."