I supposed my responsibility now was to maintain control and hold the team together. Although we all knew the bare bones of the problem, the implications had not yet had time to truly sink in.
Would I ever see Linda and three-year-old Jason again? If Mary found a way back for us, would everything be as it was, or would we encounter large changes? What would I do if I arrived home and found Linda married to someone else because she’d never met me? If there really are parallel worlds, how many could there be? Perhaps I could return to an Earth where I’d never been born.
Getting the detailed inventory done and planning the rationing was a priority and would keep Bill busy for a few days. Tosh was doing the same with his medical supplies and the research equipment, and Anna was helping Mary, by acting as a sounding board and putting all of their ideas through their entities to increase the viewpoints.
We had a great team but were in real trouble. There was just one Rimor. We could certainly get down to the surface of any single planet, but it needed to be well thought through. If we got back to an Earth which was anything like ours, then, presumably, we could get another couple of Rimors sent up to us and two more tanks. On a more primitive Earth, we could stay and help the technology develop. That might be possible if we landed on an Earth with mid to late twentieth century industries. In fact, what would happen if we turned up in the Spirit at a pre-space technology Earth? The inhabitants would consider us to have come from the future. If we landed on an Earth which didn’t have technology, once we’d got back into orbit we could never land anywhere again. Spirit wasn’t designed for re-entry. We’d be well and truly scuppered, traversing the cosmos until our supplies were exhausted. The permutations were frightening.
I continued with my systems checks with all of this running through my mind and bouncing ideas back and forth with my entity. We were enhanced humans. We had to trust that we would resolve the situation.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
By day four, I’d checked all the Spirit’s systems – twice. Tosh had reported back with a full list of not just his medical supplies, but all the scientific equipment, electronic equipment and spares too. He’d also checked the content of the external Rimor lockers. I saw Chi’s Shooey part way down one of the columns and Tosh told me he’d found no sign of Haven’s plant anywhere. We had to hope we’d eradicated it from all of our exterior surfaces and the outsides of our sample boxes.
Bill had finished the supply stocktake and had created a rationing regime which he wished to run through with me. Most importantly, Anna and Mary wanted to present their ideas to the rest of us. Should I see them first in case there was something which might damage our morale even more than it already had been? I decided not to. It could undermine their confidence. I called for a crew meeting after lunch.
It was only eleven, so I drifted through to the bridge and continued studying the surface of this apparently uninhabited Earth.
The Celestron had an effective magnification of around five hundred times. With it firmly mounted in the wall of the bridge, it allowed me to see the larger animals. I’d managed to rig up a video connection which transferred the telescope’s images to a television monitor to make observation easier. I identified elephants and hippos as we travelled over Africa and plenty of whales in the oceans, but there was no sign of humans. Mud huts would have been within the visibility range of the telescope so villages should be fairly obvious. This Earth was a world without humankind unless they were living underground or not forming family groups. There were certainly no roads, no harbours, no ships, no villages, towns or cities. Why were there no humans? It would be fascinating to descend and discover whether we could find any homo-like species at all, but not yet living in the sorts of communities which could be seen from space. Still in the jungles or dwelling in caves, perhaps? If they’d developed fire, we’d have seen it on the night hemisphere. If only we had a supply of Rimors. This would be an amazing place to visit and study. My entity had a desire to land in order to enhance any primitive humans we found.
If it turned out that there really was no way back for us, could five of us begin a viable population? I’d never see my wife and son again. I knew Anna lived with a serious partner called Wally. Mary was unattached as far as I knew, Tosh had lost Chi on Haven and Bill was happily married to Ronnie. How would colonising work? I didn’t want to give it any more thought. Both women were still of childbearing age, but the gene pool would be small. I didn’t believe Anna and Mary would think too highly of being in a continual state of pregnancy for the rest of their reproductive lives, which would be the only way to ensure the gene pool was maximised.
As we passed over Europe, I saw a large herd of elephants moving through central France indicating that wildlife had taken over this Earth. Fascinating.
I ate my lunch studying herds of large deer, reindeer or wildebeests crossing the plains of eastern Russia. I supposed, if I could see more detail, I might be able to identify the actual species. They certainly appeared to be migrating, but through a part of the world they’d never have been in on our own version of the planet. I guessed, tracking them down there would be the usual predators – lions, hyenas, tigers and perhaps even larger carnivores. Without human intrusion, evolution would have taken a more natural course. It could be very dangerous for a handful of humans living on this Earth. I supposed fire would protect us, but we’d always have to be on our guard. Everything which moved would be prey for something else.
My entity wondered if there might be an Earth somewhere in a parallel universe which had not been impacted by the massive asteroid which was thought to have destroyed the dinosaurs. A truly Jurassic world.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Just aft of the bridge was our largest living area, the entire diameter of Spirit and about eight metres long. Plenty of space to play games, eat and socialise. Our gym was also in this area. Treadmill, cycle, rowing machine, climbing machine, squat rack, bench press and so on. We all had to exercise more than an hour a day to keep the effects of weightlessness to a minimum. The equipment all folded into the walls allowing us a large unobstructed open area. Tosh, Bill and I were throwing a beanbag between ourselves, waiting for the women. Eventually, they arrived, both looking serious. Mary had a large tablet in her hand, Anna a smaller version.
I didn’t need to call order; we all found comfortable places to secure ourselves so that we weren’t forever moving around in free fall. The discarded bean bag tumbled lazily towards the wall, where it would expend its kinetic energy and remain until it was next needed.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Mary timidly, as she anchored herself to the wall beside the treadmill. Of Pakistani origin, the thirty-one-year-old astrophysicist was slim with long shiny black hair which she’d tied into a ponytail almost reaching her waist, and which floated around in a completely random manner.
‘Let’s just have it, Mary,’ said Tosh, his slightly overweight and rotund, fifty-two-year-old body being held still by his stockinged feet which were hooked over the wall fixing of the exercise bike. Tosh undoubtedly had “attitude”, perhaps inherited from his Glaswegian parents. He was a brilliant doctor, with surgical skills, and was also the oldest of our crew. He added, ‘What’s done is done. Let’s make the best of it.’
‘We’re fairly sure we know what has happened,’ Mary said, ‘and it all comes down to the same time-dilation mystery we’d been considering – the fact that spolding wasn’t instantaneous. Each time we used the spolding drive, we moved from our own universe into an adjacent one.’
‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘That frozen time during spolding was the most frightening thing I’ve ever experienced.’
‘We were lucky, Bill,’ said Mary. ‘My entity calculated that if the Trappist-1 travel time were in proportion to the travel time to Mars, we’d have all died where we sat from dehydration.’
‘Yes, mine did the same calculation,’ I said. ‘Reckoned that, even with his help, I’d only survive a week and the proportional time was over a hundred days. Nasty death.’
‘Not compared with Chi’s,’ Tosh said, almost too quietly to be heard.
‘Let’s get back to the matter in hand,’ I said. ‘Please continue, Mary.’
‘When we swivelled from our normal universe into the dark matter universe in order to use the space-folding system to get us to Mars, there was no problem, but at the other end, when we left the dark matter universe, we swivelled into an adjacent parallel universe – not our own. In other words, we made two left turns instead of turning left to enter and right to exit.’
‘So, it’s correctable?’ asked Bill, a large, strong Afro-Caribbean man in his late thirties. He had huge hands, a balding head and jovial personality. My second in command, he was always my go-to advisor for down to earth common sense viewpoints on any problems.
‘I’ll get to that, Bill,’ Mary continued. ‘The trouble is that when we re-entered the dark matter universe to return to Earth from Mars, we again made two left turns. When we were designing the system, no one had any inkling about parallel universes. We didn’t think it mattered which rotation we made, but it did matter – to the electrons of the dark matter universe if nothing else. They were the key.’
‘We moved to a different universe on the way to Mars,’ I said, ‘and yet another on the way back, so we were then already two away from our original?’
‘Yes, more or less,’ she said. ‘Hence the EBC, Anna’s father’s manual gearbox, Tosh’s parents’ phone, and my kitchen taps et cetera.’
‘So, if we retrace our journeys, but turning the opposite way each time, that should get us back to our own Earth?’ asked Tosh.
‘Anna has a good analogy to help us all understand,’ said Mary.
We looked towards NASA’s chief pilot, hanging in free fall, a beautiful woman, even in the unflattering flight suit. She was twenty-eight with flowing locks of strawberry blonde hair, standing almost straight out from her head in the microgravity, and the most captivating blue eyes, the sort of girl you’d expect to be adorning a fashion magazine cover rather than piloting a starship.
She swiped her tablet’s screen and peered at the notes it contained. ‘At least, working together and with our entities, we’ve been able to work out what has gone wrong, it doesn’t mean that we have a way to put it right.
‘Until now, none of us had had an inkling about parallel universes. It had been talked about, of course, in scientific circles, but only speculatively, not as a reality. Now we know they do exist. The Earth we can see from the bridge is undeniable proof.’
‘Anna and I,’ said Mary, ‘have been trying to understand how the universes might lie alongside each other and we’ve been having to undertake that without any scientific data. Don’t assume Anna’s explanation is gospel but it is a starting point. Back to you, Anna.’
Anna continued, ‘You can imagine each universe as being part of a multiverse within a larger, what shall we call it, the entiroverse in which everything exists. The universes might lie side by side, spreading out into infinity. If so, our chance of getting back would be quite high as they’d be lying in a sequence.’
‘And are they?’ asked Tosh.
‘Probably not,’ said Anna. ‘We have no way of knowing.’
‘How might they be laid out then?’ I asked.
‘The simple answer, as I said, is that we don’t know,’ said Anna. ‘I’ve mentioned one possibility, but there are others. Picture our universe being like a long tube or cylinder. Where is the dark matter universe associated with it?’
‘Within it, occupying the same space?’ said Bill.
‘For space-folding to work,’ continued Anna, ‘the dark matter universe must either be outside our normal universe or inside it, like a core.’
‘Eh? How do you mean?’ asked Bill.
‘If, as we think happened, we turned from the normal universe into the dark matter universe,’ said Mary, picking up the point, ‘then got lost coming out, logic tells us that the dark matter universe is outside the normal universe. Sorry, Anna, you go on.’
‘Let’s go back to the tube analogy. I want you to imagine that our universe is like a copper wire within the dark matter universe which wraps around it as if it were the wire’s insulation. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes, but why not the other way around?’ asked Tosh.
‘If it was the other way around,’ said Anna, ‘we wouldn’t have a problem. If the dark matter universe was the core and we turned into it on departure, then we turned out of it on arrival we’d still be in the same normal universe. We have to see it as wrapping around our universe, so picture it as the insulation around the outside. An insulated copper wire is perfect for our purposes.’
‘Right, okay,’ Tosh said. ‘So why’s that a problem? We turn out of the core at departure and back into it on arrival.’
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘That’s where the entiroverse plays its part. The entiroverse contains the multiverse – an unlimited number of parallel universes. It’s how they fit together which is what is causing our problem with navigating a return. We turn left into the dark matter universe, but when we turned left instead of right to come out of it, we entered the new universe the other side of the insulation – the dark universe. Do you see?’
‘Okay,’ said Bill, ‘I’m still with you, but don’t quite see why that should affect our travels.’
Anna continued, ‘Go back to the original concept, the core, our normal universe and the surrounding insulation, our dark matter universe.’
‘Yes,’ said Bill.
‘You know those deep sea communication cables?’ asked Anna.
‘Yes,’ repeated Bill.
‘They contain thousands of wires, each of them insulated, all packed together. Imagine that as the entiroverse. Our universe is just one of those wires.’
‘I see,’ I said, ‘so we turned out of our dark matter universe into a parallel universe on the way to Mars and on our return we turned from that universe’s dark matter universe into a third universe. We were suddenly two universes away from where we started.’
‘Exactly!’ said Mary.
‘But the wire analogy breaks down there,’ said Tosh. ‘If our universe is encapsulated within the dark matter universe then, surely, we can’t get from our dark matter universe into a parallel universe without passing through its dark matter universe first. Does that statement make sense?’
‘Yes, it would,’ said Mary, ‘if they worked in that way, but one system Anna and I have been working on is that the dark matter universe is common to all – think of it as if the insulation, the dark matter, is a solid block and the copper “parallel universe” wires all run within it.’
‘So, the normal parallel universes run through a communal dark matter universe,’ I said.
‘Possibly,’ said Mary.
‘Okay, I see how that complicates things,’ said Tosh, ‘but our universe will only have, say, five or six others lying alongside it.’
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘You are taking the analogy too literally. We have no idea how many multiverses lie alongside ours. It could be just a few or it could be a million or a billion. That is where the analogy breaks down. We really can’t visualise it as a multi-wire cable, except in the very broadest sense.’
‘In other words, we’re fucked!’ said Bill.
‘Possibly,’ said Mary, ‘but not certainly.’
Everyone lapsed into a depressed silence.
Eventually, Tosh asked, ‘So if we retrace our steps, we could get closer to our universe or even further away.’
‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘So far, we can be pretty certain that we have moved through six universes. One when we arrived at Mars, two when we returned to Earth, three when we arrived at Haven, four when we arrived at Quietus, five when we arrived at Trappist-1D and six when we arrived here.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Bill. ‘Do you know for certain that the universes don’t lie side by side? Like railway lines instead of a multicore cable?’
‘No, we don’t know,’ said Mary.
‘And if they are laid out side by side,’ said Tosh, ‘retracing our routes exactly, could return us to where we began.’
‘It is possible, but not likely,’ said Mary. ‘We’re only using the wire and cable analogy to aid our explanation.’
‘But it must be worth a try!’ said Bill.
‘It is, in fact, we feel that it’s our only hope,’ said Mary.
I asked, ‘Are you able to calculate a way to reverse everything, as closely as possible, as we retrace our steps?’
‘You’d think so,’ said Mary, ‘but there is a further complication.’
‘Let’s have it,’ said Tosh. ‘It seems that it’s always one step forwards and two back.’
‘Physical distance and mass might play their parts. Between arriving at and leaving Mars, the planets separated by over two million miles owing to their orbits – that is a distance factor, and when we returned to Earth from Mars, the mass of two fuel tanks was missing – the mass factor,’ said Mary.
‘The distance factor is two million, one hundred and sixty-four thousand, eight hundred and three miles to be exact. We’ve been calculating it,’ said Anna.
‘The same applies with each of our journeys to and from and within the Trappist-1 system,’ added Mary, ‘and, even worse, Earth and Trappist-1 have been diverging as they rotate around the Milky Way.’
‘And we don’t have the wherewithal to calculate the divergence,’ said Anna.
‘So, we could be hopelessly lost with only a random chance of finding home?’ asked Bill.
‘Probably,’ said Mary. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
Silence reigned again for several minutes.
‘Right, snap out of it!’ I said loudly, clapping my hands to wake everyone from their morose stupor. ‘Mary, you and Anna work on that last journey from Trappist-1D. Try to work out the exact motions in and out of the dark matter universe and the distance travelled. Then reverse them as near exactly as possible, trying to match mass as well. Once you’ve done that, we’ll make the jump.’
‘Sorry to disappoint, but we can’t do that,’ said Anna.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because we can’t get a fix on Trappist-1D through the spolding device. It’s too small. We can lock on to Haven, Quietus and even planet G, but not D,’ said Mary
‘What about if we attached the Celestron to the spolding device to increase the resolution?’ asked Tosh.
Mary looked at Anna and the two women exchanged expressions. ‘It could be possible, I don’t know,’ said Anna.
‘You wouldn’t need the full magnification,’ I said. ‘Adding a factor of five or ten should be enough.’
‘Yes,’ said Mary, much chirpier. ‘We must experiment.’
‘I’ll help,’ I said, as I probably had the best knowledge of the workings of the Celestron.
‘When we get to D, we’ll know if we’ve got it right,’ said Tosh. ‘We’ll pick up the beacon on the Rimor we left in orbit around Haven.’
‘Okay,’ said Anna and Mary, almost in unison.
‘All you can do is your best, ladies,’ I said, trying to lift their spirits. ‘Get your entities into overdrive. I’ll help you with the Celestron. If you need any other help, just ask. I’m assuming two is probably better than three, four or five when working on the physics of spolding, but the rest of us are here if necessary. We can’t go anywhere anyway.’
‘You do understand that the universes are probably not laid out side by side?’ said Mary.
‘Yes, but let’s hope they are until they’re proven not to be,’ said Bill. ‘Let’s stay positive.’
‘By the way,’ said Anna, ‘I checked the Earth/moon distance and it is identical to what it was when we were in our own universe. It proves this is a parallel universe problem, not a time problem.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Bill. ‘That’s one less worry.’
Our crew meeting broke up and I followed Mary and Anna through to the bridge to mount the Celestron onto the spolding device.