making World War III thinkable again for them. Step in here, step out so many light-years away. It was a leapfrog development, they missed out all the logical steps to it and never realized the hazards of setting up anomalous-physics coordinate systems. Of course, what they were worried about back then was the world war everyone saw coming, the energy war. They wanted a hideyhole and, by God, they found one. They found another planet.”
This was throwing what I knew about history into a fresh sort of light...
“We don’t know very much about the planet because most of the records went with the eastern American seaboard. Poor sods had backtracked and found the nullbomb effect—and so they got their war after all. AP is most definitely not something to fiddle with. But a colossal number of NATO people had been shifted out through the stargate by then, out to this other place, supposed to be enough like Earth you could walk there barefoot after a few shots. Lucky them. They get to start again on a nice green planet out Corvus way, and we get the fag-ends of what they left behind...”
“Kindly spare us the personal opinions,Mick y,” said Birch in a tired voice.
“Why can’t people go there still?” said Corman. “Did they somehow lose contact after the East Coast Incident and the five days?”
Wui pushed four fingers through his hair again. “That was what shut them down, it’s thought. The AP
transient disrupted the gateway, but by then it had been open for eighteen months and they were beginning to see what the damn thing was doing.” He started telling points off on his fingers. “Stellar instability, they call it in the records. Solar flares. Skin cancer up 800 percent. We were the lucky ones.
The red shift was behaving oddly for those who were still watching it, and the 3 degreesK microwave background radiation in space was starting to pulsate . Meteors in swarms, we had: something was going wrong with big G, the gravitational constant. Imagine; you punch a hole that size through space and the whole universe ripples and shudders. We still didn’t know how lucky we were, but they were beginning to make connections by then, MT theory starting to catch up with practice. So they started playing with the hypothesis that their interstellar subway might have side effects. It was a big one, too, a portal nine or ten meters across, from the junk that’s on record as having gone through. A big cancer in space/time, sitting there metastasizing. They didn’t, you understand, they didn’t consider it expedient to shut down the gate by way of experiment. It had to be done for them. So that was the Superpower Incident when they invented the nullbomb and all contact was lost. Afterward theU.S. went isolationist and over here the Force—“
Birch was making cool-it signs, beating out imaginary flames with his hands. “We do know our history,Mick y.”
“Yes, well, after all the troubles, just when maybe someone might have considered giving the stargate another try, the nova light from Centaurus got here. Very pretty it was, they say—it’s cooled down a little now. And year after year, the others. Meckis and Canning tried to get it on a theoretical footing around
‘55; that gate jogged stars at certain points in the main sequence and pow ! There’s some sort of random factor involved as well, but I think they guessed at six percent of suns as liable to be affected. A few hundred of the ones you can see with the naked eye out there, maybe more than a thousand million throughout the galaxy, God knows how many in the universe: the propagation seems to be damn near instantaneous and much as we’ve tried, no one can find any grounds for tying in the inverse-square law. If only I could look into the galactic core now...
“Welcome to your heritage, folks. Doesn’t it make you proud to be human?”
Birch had his elbows on the desk, his chin in his hands. “Doubtless you’re quite right about past
This was throwing what I knew about history into a fresh sort of light...
“We don’t know very much about the planet because most of the records went with the eastern American seaboard. Poor sods had backtracked and found the nullbomb effect—and so they got their war after all. AP is most definitely not something to fiddle with. But a colossal number of NATO people had been shifted out through the stargate by then, out to this other place, supposed to be enough like Earth you could walk there barefoot after a few shots. Lucky them. They get to start again on a nice green planet out Corvus way, and we get the fag-ends of what they left behind...”
“Kindly spare us the personal opinions,Mick y,” said Birch in a tired voice.
“Why can’t people go there still?” said Corman. “Did they somehow lose contact after the East Coast Incident and the five days?”
Wui pushed four fingers through his hair again. “That was what shut them down, it’s thought. The AP
transient disrupted the gateway, but by then it had been open for eighteen months and they were beginning to see what the damn thing was doing.” He started telling points off on his fingers. “Stellar instability, they call it in the records. Solar flares. Skin cancer up 800 percent. We were the lucky ones.
The red shift was behaving oddly for those who were still watching it, and the 3 degreesK microwave background radiation in space was starting to pulsate . Meteors in swarms, we had: something was going wrong with big G, the gravitational constant. Imagine; you punch a hole that size through space and the whole universe ripples and shudders. We still didn’t know how lucky we were, but they were beginning to make connections by then, MT theory starting to catch up with practice. So they started playing with the hypothesis that their interstellar subway might have side effects. It was a big one, too, a portal nine or ten meters across, from the junk that’s on record as having gone through. A big cancer in space/time, sitting there metastasizing. They didn’t, you understand, they didn’t consider it expedient to shut down the gate by way of experiment. It had to be done for them. So that was the Superpower Incident when they invented the nullbomb and all contact was lost. Afterward theU.S. went isolationist and over here the Force—“
Birch was making cool-it signs, beating out imaginary flames with his hands. “We do know our history,Mick y.”
“Yes, well, after all the troubles, just when maybe someone might have considered giving the stargate another try, the nova light from Centaurus got here. Very pretty it was, they say—it’s cooled down a little now. And year after year, the others. Meckis and Canning tried to get it on a theoretical footing around
‘55; that gate jogged stars at certain points in the main sequence and pow ! There’s some sort of random factor involved as well, but I think they guessed at six percent of suns as liable to be affected. A few hundred of the ones you can see with the naked eye out there, maybe more than a thousand million throughout the galaxy, God knows how many in the universe: the propagation seems to be damn near instantaneous and much as we’ve tried, no one can find any grounds for tying in the inverse-square law. If only I could look into the galactic core now...
“Welcome to your heritage, folks. Doesn’t it make you proud to be human?”
Birch had his elbows on the desk, his chin in his hands. “Doubtless you’re quite right about past
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