Probability Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

for a Special Project Team get-acquainted party. Commander Grafton made available the services of the ship’s galley, the observation deck, and a spectacular view of Mars as the Alan B. Shepard pulled away from orbit. She would proceed at top speed toward Space Tunnel #1, that enigmatic object silently circling the Solar System out beyond Neptune.
    The space tunnels had been discovered fifty-six years ago. A flexible, mappable network of wormholes, they made the galaxy into a giant instantaneous bus system. All you had to do was get your bus to the nearest tunnel, drive it through, and you emerged at another station at the edge of another star system. Double back through the same tunnel and you emerged at your place of origin— if nothing else had gone through that tunnel in the meantime. If something had, you emerged in the same place it did. The bus system kept rerouting its vehicles.
    Some systems had three or even four tunnels in orbit around them, although Sol had only one. Evidently whatever long-vanished race had constructed the tunnels had not considered Sol an important nexus.
    It was now. Exploring the space tunnels, humans had made two astonishing discoveries. One was that the other races in the galaxy and even most (not all) of the other vegetation in the galaxy shared basic DNA with humanity. Somewhere there had been a common “seeding” of an enormous number of planets—by whom? Unknown.
    The second discovery was that humans were the most technologically advanced of all species—until the Fallers emerged from their own space tunnel to make swift and uncommunicative attacks.
    The discovery of Space Tunnel #1 had rocked the struggling solar civilization. New disciplines sprang up: xenobiology, interstellar treasure hunting, holomovies shot under pink or yellow skies. Serious thinkers pointed out that humankind was scarcely ready to colonize the stars, having solved none of its problems at home. Nobody listened. The rich flourished on the new investments; the poor remained poor; Earth went on lurching from one ecological tragedy to another. Everything was the same, and nothing was.
    The first years were filled with triumphs and disasters. Experimentation proved that a ship—or any other object—put through a space tunnel for the first time went to wherever the directly previous ship had gone. A ship that had gone through a tunnel and then went through it from the other side was automatically returned to its starting point, no matter how many other ships had used the tunnel in the meantime. Somehow—that most operative word in human understanding of tunnel technology—the tunnel “remembered” where each individual ship had entered tunnel space. It was an interstellar “Chutes and Ladders” composed of all chutes.
    After fifty-six years, science still knew almost nothing about how space tunnels actually worked. The physical objects, panels floating in space in the general shape of a doughnut, were completely impenetrable. The science was too alien. The best guess was that the panels created a field of macro-level object entanglement, analogous to the quantum entanglement that permitted one particle to affect its paired counterpart regardless of distance, thus eliminating any spatial dimension to the universe by treating it as a single point. But this was merely a guess. Achieving entanglement for an object the size of a warship—let alone controlling the phenomenon—violated so many cherished principles that the feuding in physics journals resembled gang warfare. But the bottom line remained: The tunnels worked.
    It would take the Alan B. Shepard several days to reach Space Tunnel #1 and less than twenty-four hours to go through the rest of the tunnels that would bring her to the “World” System. And, of course, the Special Project Team would be together for weeks after that. Kaufman hoped the first-night celebration would provide a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere for the all-important initial sizing