Bridge
WHEN the summoner had activated, Tunnel Maker had been deep in transtemporal meditation. He hurried out of his personal enclosure, hurled himself down a deep inertial shaft, and accelerated through a maze of access conduits to the enclosure of the Bridge Generator.
A glance told him that there had been a massive discharge. The energy receptacles in the long row had been fully drained of their antimatter and stood cold and empty. He accessed the data stream from the nearest neural node. His sensorium translated along the time axis until he came to the discharge event.
A feeling of relief overlaid with deep satisfaction suffused his emotion center. The apparatus had performed flawlessly. A microscopic Bridge with the right characteristics had been snatched from the quantum vacuum, establishing a connection between his universe and a point of ultra-high energy density in the target Bubble. The Bridge Generator had successfully brought the new Bridge to a stable energy balance.
He studied the data stream further. The Bridgehead had appeared in the new Bubble while traveling at a high velocity relative to the matter medium there. It had appeared in a vacuum, passed through a region of pure element 4 and several layers of element 14, then moved to a gaseous medium consisting mainly of element 10, with traces of elements 1 and 6. It had traveled some distance in that and various solid media which analysis showed to consist of layers of elements 14, 26, 29, 82, and 92. A momentum flow through the Bridge consisting mainly of massive neutral dark-matter particles, with a few quarks entrained, had been established and used to decelerate its Bubble end until it had come to rest. The Bridge had stopped in a medium made of elements 82, 14 and 8. The ambient temperature of the medium was between the freezing and boiling points of water. The data on the medium made of element 92 was particularly interesting. It was essentially pure isotope 238, with only faint traces of the other expected isotopes.
The message implicit in these data was very good news. The new Bubble was an accessible matter universe. The combination of materials encountered was clearly a product of technology. Element 10 was an inert gas and was never found naturally in high concentrations.
There was also a puzzle. The isotopic composition of the element 92 medium through which the Bridgehead had passed was difficult to explain. Element 92 was the most massive and highly charged of the stable chemical elements, with good structural properties, and so it was a commonly used material. That much was to be expected. Because of its high nuclear charge and mass it was excellent for slowing or stopping charged particles. But why did the medium consist of pure isotope 238, with only parts per hundred thousand of the other two stable isotopes? Isotope separation was technologically very difficult, particularly for so massive a nucleus, and there seemed little point in it.
Was it possible that the processes of nucleosynthesis in the new Bubble were sufficiently different as to suppress the natural occurrence of the other two stable isotopes of element 92? Tunnel Maker had no idea. The Individuals specializing in astrophysics and cosmology should be alerted immediately to these data. Perhaps when contact was established, they could learn the answer by asking.