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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 contenance 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 Fernández-Dávila 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 someplace 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 those 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?

I think this is part and parcel of their doctrine of non-interference.

Think. They put the Solar System machine opposite Earth, and we didn’t dream it existed till we had developed a substantial capability in space. But the machine in the other system orbits much more handily, in a stable path, sixty degrees ahead of the planet we’ll probably be colonizing, clearly visible to any astronomers there. However, apparently no astronomers, no truly thinking creatures, are native to it: nobody that might be lured by the sight into feverish, unbalanced efforts or a deadly struggle for control.

The Voice said the Others love us. They must; they have given
us a whole new world. But they must love all sentient races. I suspect a breed like ours, with its history of war, oppression, rapine, and exploitation, would bring disaster if it burst overnight into the galaxy. I suspect also that we are not unusually bad or short-sighted, that many a species would become an equal menace if it got the chance.

At the same time, the Others seemingly refuse to take us, or anybody, under tutelage. I am sure that, from their viewpoint, they have far better things to do. And from the viewpoint of our well-being, they may feel it would be wrong to domesticate us.

So they leave us our free will, they permit us to use their star gates, but they make no further gifts. We must endure the frustration of seeing Alpha Centauri and Sirius shining still unattainable in our skies, until we have groped our own way out into the cosmos. I hope that they hope the long, cooperative effort that this requires will mature us a little….

(View of a spacecraft completing her path. Suddenly she vanishes. View of the T machine in the Phoebean System. Suddenly the spacecraft appears, about half a million kilometers from the cylinder.

(Shots taken on the original faring. Fernández-Dávila, Tonari, and Napier stare from their cramped cabin. They babble. Two of them offer prayers. Presently they master themselves and look outward with trained eyes. A groundling cannot see constellations in space; the visible stars are too many. An astronaut can. Here, none are familiar. After a while, the men think they can puzzle out a few, changed though the shapes are; and extragalactic objects do not appear different. They reckon roughly that they have gone more than one hundred and less than five hundred light-years northwest of Sol.)

VOICE

—The planet that will interest you most is in the sky hard by the Crab Nebula….

(The view settles on a point of sapphire, infinitely lovely.)

NARRATOR

The world we have since named Demeter—

(Stopped-down view of Phoebus. View of
Discoverer’s
cabin and three men stunned with glory.)

VOICE

Your ship has not the reserves to go there. You had best return to the Solar System at once. Surely more vessels, outfitted to explore, will come after. You yourselves may be aboard….

(Scenes of the path back through the gate being traced out, not the least like the earlier pattern. Scenes of emergence at the other end, of jubilation, of solemnity, of the long haul home. Scenes of tumult, parades, ceremonies, parties, extravagant predictions, and in between an occasional word of foreboding.)

NARRATOR

—we are at last ready to send our first colonists. Beforehand, we had to spend years of research, learning the most elementary things about Demeter. The Others promised it would be worth our trouble, but not that it would be Eden….

(The home of a famous spaceman)

FERNÁNDEZ-DÁVILA

—The price is high per person we send, and we cannot tell what they might send back that would repay it. On this account, we hear protests, we hear demands that the whole program be dropped. Well, I maintain that the stimulus to space technology it has given, the order-of-magnitude improvement in ships and instruments, has already recouped the entire cost plus a high profit. Then there’s the scientific revolution, especially in biology, that we’ve gotten out of Demeter. An entire independent set of life forms! We need decades, maybe centuries, to examine them further, with their implications for medicine, genetics, agriculture, mariculture, and who can foresee what else? That requires a permanent settlement.

Beyond this, in the crassest economic terms, I claim that within a generation, humans on Demeter will be returning
Earth’s investment to Earth a thousand times over. Remember what America meant to Europe. Remember what Luna and the satellites mean to us today.

Far beyond
this,
think of the imponderables and unpredictables: challenge, opportunity, enlightenment, freedom….

The beginning of our growth toward the Others….

Joelle found that a sequel had been added. She thought it was equally honest, but the honesty was that of a later generation.

It went into Demetrian history. No more than a few thousand individuals per year could be boosted to the gate and landed on the planet. Conveyance capacity did expand as the colony started to yield dividends—but slowly, because of conflicting claims on that wealth. Emigrants went under national auspices, according to an elaborate quota setup. However, through bribery or lawful agreement, many traveled under flags different from their own.

The reasons for going were as various as the people who went. Ambition, adventure, Utopian visions were among them. But certain governments subsidized the departure of dissident citizens, and pressured them to accept; certain ones aimed to found outposts of power for themselves; certain more had crazier motives, as did assorted unofficial organizations and individuals.

Initially, everybody must live in or near Eopolis, and close cooperation was a requirement of survival. A notion that the Others might be somewhere around, watching, reinforced solidarity. This faded with time, and meanwhile population and the economy grew. Likewise did knowledge. People learned how to live independently of the city. The countryside became a patchwork of ethnic clusters and social contracts.

At last a Demetrian legislature was a perceived necessity. It remained subordinate to the Union, represented by the governor general, and its authority was further limited by the fact that most communities ran most of their affairs without reference to it.

Elsewhere, time had also been riding. What precarious order had prevailed on Earth had broken down, and the Troubles begun. No few rhetoricians claimed that the fact of the Others brought this on; it was too disturbing, too provocative of heresy; there were things man was never meant to know. In Joelle’s opinion—derived in large part from conversations with Dan
Brodersen, who was thoroughly opinionated—that was nonsense. If anything, the miracle was that the equilibrium had lasted, seesawing, until then; and the fact of the Others gave enough pause for reflection that lunacy did not lay waste the entire globe. Be this as it may, indisputable was that, though millions died and whole nations went under, the world survived. Civilization survived, in more areas than not. Space endeavors survived; no important hiatus occurred beyond Earth, whether in industry, exploration, or the settlement of Demeter.

One ongoing effort was reckoned more important than even the dispatching of unmanned probes toward neighbor stars. It was the sending of such craft through the gates, along arbitrary paths, programmed to return from wherever they went by taking equally arbitrary paths. None did.

Slowly, mankind appeared to settle down. In Lima they signed the Covenant.

(The office of a famous astrophysicist, still alive.)

ROSSET

—the theory we’ve been developing says that a T machine has a finite range. We estimate it as five hundred light-years in space, perhaps more, perhaps less. The point is that if you want to go across a greater span than that, you must go through an intermediate machine, which acts as a relay.