VOICE
-understand that the truth will not be easy to make clear. Now, while you calm yourselves, you should retreat to approximately five hundred thousand kilometers and take orbit. Otherwise you will not likely see your homes again. Here are the timing and the vectors for you- (Miscellaneous shots, exterior and interior, taken during the
days that follow: the titanic artifact, stars, Milky Way, Magellanic Clouds, the sister galaxy in Andromeda, the men, who somehow continue their routines, actually joking or playing games, in between grave discussions of what they have learned each time a message comes.)
VOICE
(excerpts)
You hear a kind of computer-effector system, a robot, if you will. No living being could or should abide out here, awaiting your arrival.
The universe is a cornucopia of life. .
The builders have existed through age after age. They wish the cosmos well, but for that very reason do not seek to be overlords, let alone gods. Best that each race make its own destiny, tragic though that may prove. Only thus can it grow, in strength, mind, and spirit. Too, the builders have lives of their own to live, dreams of their own to pursue. Thus you will hear little more than this about them, ever. To you, to countless beings more among the suns, they must remain the unknown Others. .
Yet they are interested in you. They love you. Plain to see, they have observed you at length and in depth. Having made your way here, you are free to use their engine for interstellar travel. You will be guided to a system wherein is a planet akin to your mother world, save that it has borne no sentience to claim it -yours for the taking, if you choose. . .
NARRATOR
When Discoverer's transmissions reached Earth, few indeed were the persons who kept a measure of calm.
(The office of the astrophysicist)
IONESCU
-speculations that began to be heard when the flyby observations came in, seem now to be confirmed. As far as we can tell, that thing is a Tipler machine.
I call it that in honor of the theoretician who, extending the work of Kerr and others, published in 1974 a paper on this exact subject, which afterward he pursued farther with imagination as well as mathematical rigor. True, he was forced to make certain simplifying assumptions. However, he did use strict, well-established principles of physics to show that transport across space.. time was conceptually sound though apparently requiring conditions impossible to achieve in the real universe. (Smiling) I'm afraid the proof is rather esoteric. What it amounts to, in everyday terms, is this. A cylinder of ultra-dense matter, spinning at a speed in excess of one-half light's, will generate a field. Not a force-field, in the proper sense. Call it, instead, a region in which some quantities vary according to your position. A body passing through that field can be transported directly from event to event. In more popular language, depending on what path it takes, it can go from any point in space-time to any other in range of the machine.
As I said, this effect seemed to demand impossible conditions. For instance, it called for matter densities many orders of magnitude greater than that of nucleons themselves, such as might conceivably exist within a black hole but nowhere else. I therefore suspect that the density we have measured for yonder cylinder, high though it be, is only a mean; that it increases within, to the point where black hole-type phenomena occur; that at the very center is an actual singularity. How the Others have achieved this, we can only guess-we can speculate that the weak energy condition may, after all, in the right circumstances be violated-and most likely our guesses are dead wrong. With a little more confidence, we think that the finite length of this real-world object limits the range of its effect: though obviously that range is interstellar and perhaps it is interepochal.
We are also beginning to get an inkling of how the cylinder stays in position with respect to Earth. That position is not stable. Planetary perturbations should cause a body there to drift away from it in a fairly short time. Yet presumably the device has been where it is for centuries at least. What gives it its station-keeping capability? Analyzing available data, we think probably there is a continuous interaction with the interplanetary and the galactic magnetic fields, though this too must take place throughout awesome distances.
I hope to live long enough to see us gain a little more knowledge about the creation the Others have added to Creation. We may even, at last, find a way to make our findings comprehensible to the layman-or to ourselves.
(The professorial countenance glows) But no matter now. What matters above everything else today is that we have been given the chance for a fresh beginning!
NARRATOR
Before Discoverer returned home, the Voice offered to conduct her through the star gate and back. As FernЗndez-DЗvila said afterward, "How could we not have accepted?"
(Views of a vessel which later traced the route, photographed from a companion ship. They are interspersed with simulations and animations, as well as pictures taken during the maiden venture: This and the narration make clear what happens. The spacecraft moves from sphere to sphere in a precise order.)
VOICE
The globes are simply markers, navigational aids. With their help, you can follow the exact path through the transport field which will bring you to the place prepared for you.
Have care! Any different path will take you to quite a different destination. It may well be that no machine exists there. You would perish somewhere out in those light-years. When the builders wish to establish a new foothold, they must send all needful materials and equipment through an existing engine and make a new one at the new site, before they can return.
Even if you emerged at a machine, you would never find your way back. Consider. Ten globes, taken in their various orders, define 3,628,800 paths. In truth the combinations are many more, since not every path requires passing by every beacon; if you ignore the markers altogether, the number becomes virtually infinite. You would blunder blind until you died, or more probably until you emerged where no machine was.
You must have noted that the configuration of the spheres is not constant, but gradually changes. Doubtless you have guessed that that is to compensate for the changing positions of the stars. Do not worry about it. Simply follow the same order of close passage by each, as you have been instructed. Likewise, the correct order at the far end of this trip of yours will always bring you back from there to here. You will note that it is entirely unlike the course which took you from here to there.
Beware, repeat, beware of deviating from either of these patterns. Send unmanned probes on random paths if you like, but never a live crew, for it could never return.
(The study of a famous philosopher)
SAMUELSON
-I don't believe any human is equipped to understand the Others. They must have what is infinitely more important than a science and technology superior to ours by perhaps millions of years. I feel convinced that they have superior minds . . . and, yes, I suppose, superior, nobler souls. I cannot believe they'd exist for such reaches of time, with such powers as are theirs, and not evolve.
Nevertheless, in the case of the T machines, I'll risk a guess about their motives. Why hasn't their Voice described any paths to us except the ones between Sol and this single distant star? Why hasn't it even hinted at what the mathematical relation is between a given path and two given points in space-time, so we can work out how to get from A where we're at to a B which we'd like to visit? Why, indeed, has the Voice been silent since that first advent of humans?
