She closed the door. Another corridor, another lab, this one entered through a double insulating door. Before they went inside, they sealed their suits. “Temperature here is well below freezing.” Niles spoke over the suit radio. “This one should be more interesting. We discovered it about seven thousand Earth-years ago. Wolfgang Gibbs stumbled across the condition when we were exploring the long-term physiological effects of cold sleep. He calls it T-state.”
The room had four people in it, each sitting in a chair and supported at head, wrists, waist, and thighs. They wore headsets covering eyes and ears, and they did not move.
Sy moved forward and looked at each of them closely. He touched a frozen fingertip, and lifted the front of a headset to peer into an open eye. “They can’t be in S-space,” he said at last. “This room is too cold for it. Are they conscious?”
“Completely. These four are volunteers. They have been in T-state for almost one thousand Earth-years, but they feel as though they entered it less than five hours ago. Their subjective rate of experience is about a two-millionth of normal, roughly one thousandth of the usual S-space rate.”
Sy was silent, but for the first time he looked impressed.
“Mind-boggled?” She nodded. “We all felt the same when Wolfgang showed us. But the real significance of T-state won’t be obvious to you for a little while yet. It’s hard to grasp just how slow time passes there. Let me tell you how Charlene Bloom put it when she and I had our first one-minute experience of T-state: in the time it takes a T-state clock to strike the hour of midnight, Earth would pass through two whole seasons, from winter to spring to summer. A full life on Earth would flash by in half a T-hour. We have no idea of the human life expectancy for someone who remains in T-state, but we assume it’s hundreds of millions of Earth-years.”
“Why the headsets?”
“Sensory perception. Humans in T-state are blind, deaf and dumb without computer assistance. Our sense organs are not designed for light and sound waves of such long wavelength. The headsets do the frequency adjustment. Want to try T-state?” “Definitely.”
“I’ll put you on the roster to spend a few minutes there. That’s enough. Remember the time rate difference — one T-minute costs most of a day in S-space, and nearly four Earth-years.”
Again Judith Niles turned to leave the room. Sy, after a final glance at the four cowled and motionless figures, followed her outside and along another long and dimly lit corridor. He noted approvingly that her energy and concentration remained undiminished.
They finally approached a massive metal door, protected against entry by locks that called for fingerprint, vocal, retinal, and DNA matching. When Sy was cleared by the system and stepped inside, he looked around him in surprise. He had expected something new and exotic, perhaps another frozen lab, full of strange experiments in time-slowing or suspension of consciousness; but this room appeared to be no more than a standard communications complex. And a dusty, poorly maintained one at that.
“Don’t judge by appearances.” Judith Niles had seen his expression. “This is the most important room in Gulf City. If there are any secrets, they’re here. And don’t think that human nature changes when people move to S-space. It doesn’t, and most individuals never question why things are done the way they are in our system. If they do question, they are shown what you are about to see. If not, we don’t force the information on them. This is the place where the oldest records are accessed.”
She sat down at the console and performed a lengthy coded entry procedure. “You should try cracking this, if you think you’re a hot-shot at finding holes in system software. It has six levels of entry protection. Let’s feel our way into the data base gradually. This is a good place to begin.”
She entered another sequence. The screen lit with the soft, uniform white glow characteristic of S-space. After a few moments there appeared on it a dark network of polyhedral patterns, panels joined by silvery filaments. “You’ve seen one of these yourself, I gather. Gossameres and Pipistrelles — possibly the first alien intelligence that humans discovered. We ran into them twenty thousand Earth-years ago, as soon as deep space probes began with S-space crews; but we’re still not sure if they possess true intelligence. Maybe it depends on our definition. Interesting?”
Sy shrugged in a noncommittal way.
“But not that interesting?” Judith Niles touched the control console again. “I agree. Abstractly interesting, but no more than that unless humans learn to set up a real dialog with them. Well, we have tried. We located their preferred output frequencies, and we found that simple signal sequences would drive them away and discourage them from draining our power supplies. But that’s not much of a message, and we never got beyond it. The Gossameres and Pipistrelles proved to be a kind of dead end. But they served one enormously important function. They alerted us to a particular wavelength region. We began to listen on those frequencies anytime we were in deep space and thought there might be a Gossamere around. And that’s when we began to intercept other signals on the same wavelengths — regular coded pulses of low-frequency radiation, with a pattern like this.”
On the screen appeared a series of rising and falling curves, an interlocking sequence of complex sinusoids broken by regularly spaced even pulses. “We became convinced they were signals, not just natural emissions. But they were faint and intermittent, and we couldn’t locate their sources. Sometimes, a ship on an interstellar transit would pick up a signal on the receiver, long enough for the crew to lock an imaging antenna onto the signal source direction. They might receive a faint source image for a while, then they would lose it as the ship moved on. It was tantalizing, but over the years we built up a library of partial, blurred images. Finally we had enough to plug everything into a computer and look for a pattern. We found one. The ‘sightings’ took place only near the midpoints of the trips, and only when the ships were far from all material bodies and signal sources. The signals were received only when we were in deep space — the deeper, the better.
“By then we knew we were seeing something different from Gossameres and Pipistrelles. The new sources were very faint and distant, and the reconstructed image outlines showed a hint of a spiral structure, nothing like those paneled polyhedra. But we were still too short of information. It seemed a fascinating scientific mystery, but not much more. That was when Otto Kermel proposed a series of missions for a long-term search and study of the objects. “I don’t claim or deserve any credit for what happened next. I thought his idea would go nowhere, and gave him minimal resources and support. He did all the pioneer work on his own. We gave him the use of a one-man ship, and he went away to a quiet location about seven light-years from Sol. He argued that the absence of electromagnetic and gravitational fields was essential to studying the objects. Although his first objective was communication with them, he found that a round-trip message to even the nearest of them took two S-years. That limited him, but during his studies he discovered lots of other things.
“First, he found many Kermel Objects, all around the Galaxy. The signals we intercept are not intended for us. We are eavesdroppers on transmissions between the Kermels, and those signals between them are numerous. Based on the length of those transmissions, Otto concluded that the Kermel Objects are immensely old, with a natural life-rate so slow that S-space is inadequate to study them — in thousands of Earth-years, he was receiving only partial signals. Otto claimed that he could partially decode their messages, and he believed that they have been in existence since the formation of the Universe — since before the Big Bang, according to one of his wilder reports. He also suggested that they propagate not by exchange of genetic material, but by radio exchange of genetic information. We have not been able to verify any of those conjectures, and Otto could not provide enough data for convincing proof. What he needed was the T-state, and a chance for more extended study periods on a time scale appropriate to the Kermel Objects. But by an accident of timing, he departed for a second expedition just before the T-state was discovered. And he has never returned.