Gina shook her head. “Surely there has to be some way to get further.”

“Probably true, but hardly constructive.”

“What about that office of Baumer’s, the one I went to? Mightn’t that turn up something?” she asked, reaching for a straw.

“It was broken into and ransacked. Whoever did it made a bonfire. There wasn’t enough paper left to write your name on. Now, wasn’t that convenient for somebody?” Hunt stretched back in his chair. “I don’t know, Gina. Why do people insist on complicating life like this? You’d think they’d learn to just enjoy the pleasant side of it, wouldn’t you? It’s short enough… Thinking about it, I might even go and join this monastery of Eubeleus’s. Now, wouldn’t that qualify as a genuine miracle?” He grinned tiredly across the room at her. “Anyway, how are you feeling? I never even thought to ask.”

“Oh, a bit like having a tooth out. It feels strange at first, but you get used to it. Pretty much the way you said.”

“That’s good to know, anyhow. Did you talk to Sandy?”

“Yes. She’s glad it worked out.”

ZORAC came through at that moment with a call for Hunt from Duncan Watt, who was at another JEVEX site with the Ganymean engineers. Further findings had corroborated the nonsensical conclusion of the first: not only was JEVEX evidently far smaller than the original design information said; if what the Ganymeans were discovering was typical, it was virtually nonexistent.

“Another one,” Watt announced.

Hunt was baffled. “Another fake?”

“Worse. I wanted you to see this one for yourself.”

“Where are you?”

“Traganon, city about three hundred miles north.”

“So, what have you found?” Hunt asked.

“Well, you know what we found at the other sites: usually some interfacing and i-space transmission gear that was real enough, and then streets of impressive-looking cubes and beamguides all doing nothing. But take a look at what we’ve got here. It beats the rest for sheer audacity.”

Watt stepped to one side to reveal the scene behind him. He had been standing in front of a wide window. It looked like that of a control room, facing out over a vast floor, dark in shadows. The floor was bare and dusty: just an empty expanse of untiled concrete, stretching away between lines of square, unadorned pillars into shadows cast by a few, weak, overhead lamps.

For a moment Hunt wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at. “That’s it?”

“That’s it. Nothing. They didn’t even bother faking this one. Rodgar thinks it could have been like this for centuries.”

The camera moved, sliding Watt out of the frame completely and showing more derelict galleries. There were oddments of trash and debris scattered in places, and here and there a length of cable hanging from a roof support. Small animals were scurrying in the shadows. Hunt wondered if there had once been equipment installed there that had been moved elsewhere for some reason.

It seemed larger than most of the other vaults that Duncan had checked. Hunt tried to visualize it as the Thurien designers had intended: packed with tiers of crystalline slab stacked to the roof and serviced by access elevators and walkways-Hunt had “visited” some of the halls on Thurien where VISAR’s bulk-processing centers were located. The contrast between the desolation of the view on the screen and the image in Hunt’s mind took on an odd significance that he couldn’t quite pin down. He stared at the screen with a strange mixture of somberness and reverie.

“You’re getting around, anyway, Duncan,” he half heard Gina saying from across the room.

“If you think Shiban’s run down, come and see this place,” Watt answered.

Something moving caught Hunt’s eye-something bright, appearing and disappearing in the shadows higher up between two of the pillars. Several things, tiny white points. Hunt stared at the view, then realized that they were flying, insectlike creatures, crisscrossing through a shaft of light from one of the lamps. They looked like speeded-up images of stars orbiting in a black void, he thought to himself.

“Did you hear about the news from JPC?” Gina was asking Duncan.

“Not yet. What’s up?”

“Oh, it doesn’t sound too good…”

And then a strange superposition took place in Hunt’s mind of the scene he was looking at, and the picture in his imagination of what should have been there but wasn’t. He saw the void, but its volume filled in his mind’s eye with banks of Thurien processing crystal; the tiny points of light were still there, orbiting through the solid lattices. And suddenly he saw them no longer as stars, but as atoms.

Or as elementary quanta.

Quanta of what? Nobody knew. It could have been anything.

The quanta that a real, physical universe could evolve out of.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Langerif, the new deputy chief of police, had applied himself to continuing his late predecessor’s policy of cooperation with the Ganymean administration. He became a regular visitor to PAC, and in particular showed much interest in learning more from the security people that Cullen had imported from Earth. He even arranged for a three-day training class to be held in PAC for a picked group of his own officers. At the same time, a firm of contractors that the Ganymeans had been vainly pressuring to start work on remodeling and redecorating parts of the complex at last responded, zealously sending in a legion of workers as if anxious to make up for the lost time. So, for the last few days, PAC had been swarming with all kinds of Jevlenese.

The scientists, however, had become too engrossed in a completely new explanation of Phantasmagoria that Hunt had suddenly produced from nowhere to take much notice.

The practical usefulness of mathematics arises from the fortuitous ability of some mathematical constructs to approximate real physical processes. There is no obvious reason why such correspondence should exist; luckily for engineers and others, it just does. This makes it a lot easier and cheaper to test a design for, say, a bridge, by making a mathematical model of it and seeing what happens when mathematical trains roll over and mathematical winds blow-than having to actually build the bridge. But as science probes successively deeper and more refined levels of reality, things change. Complexity and nonlinearities become more important in their effects, making mathematical representation more intractable, until the real thing becomes a better model of the model: a daffodil, a single cell of it, or even one DNA molecule from the cell is a far more concise and comprehensible statement of what’s going on than the reams of equations that would be necessary to express it analytically in symbols.

Accordingly, the computer techniques used for modeling reality developed from the simple mechanized solving of analytical equations to progressively more elaborate methods of simulation. The trend was reflected in system architectures, where, to accommodate demands for ever greater speed and precision, earlier design philosophies based on bringing passive data to a few centralized processing bottlenecks gave way to connecting large numbers of simpler units in parallel to provide on-the-spot processing of large arrays of data simultaneously.

Ganymean technology had long before taken this trend to its ultimate. Their systems consisted of enormous numbers of microscopic cells arranged in three-dimensional arrays. Individually, each cell possessed only a limited capability that combined the rudiments of processing, memory, and communication; but ensembles of them working in conjunction could handle staggering throughputs of information. ZORAC exemplified a relatively early phase of development; VISAR’s astounding ability to cope with the full virtual-travel traffic of the entire, interstellar Thurien civilization in real time was the culmination.