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Lisa Wu nodded in agreement. "I see more of everyone else's departments than
anyone except maybe His Nibs. There's been a massive acceleration in both the
Soviet and Chinese projects since peace broke out. They're using far older
computers and they won't be able to be as versatile or as comfortable as we
will, but that hardly matters to them or to anyone. It's a race to be first,
and we still might not win it. I think they'll go even if the risk factor is
enormous."
Haller looked over at Johnson. "It seems to me to be one hell of a bloody risk
if they still haven't sent folks out there and brought them back alive."
Johnson's eyebrows rose. "But they have," she said quietly.
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It was a bombshell and silenced the group immediately. They all looked at the
Australian woman with a mixture of expectation and nervousness. This was new
even to Lisa Wu.
"You mean," Weinbaum managed at last, "that there are already people on New
Eden?"
"Orbital only right now. The early animal tests worked so well, they skipped a
number of steps.
A volunteer crew from Engineering went seven in all and they arrived O.K.
They've sent back extensive surveys and evaluations to back up the computer
reports. The first ship to be finished will have one trial run there and back
with no human cargo, then it'll return with a full load of folks from all
seven major departments. No orbit, not first three stages. They're going
directly to
Gate One to establish a headquarters unit. If that goes well, Engineering and
Signals will be sent in force to Gate Five. After that it's us. The reason why
they won't have any problem with the influx of colonists or whatever they're
calling them these days is that we won't be here. We'll be there."
Haller felt the same butterflies as the rest of them at this news. It was a
curious reaction, really it was, after all, why he was here at all, and what
they had all been working toward. He had, however, adjusted himself to the
seven-year interval, which seemed far off even now, and to now be told that
this was to be cut very short it was, well, unexpected.
"Well, that explains why we never got the Kagan 7800's" Fanfani sighed.
"Huh?" Several said it at once.
"A new generation of computer altogether, related to the 7240's we have here
only in that it's compatible with all the programs and information we've been
working with. They're only a bit bigger than ours, but their storage capacity
is supposed to be nearly infinite they can directly transform Flux into added
storage modules as necessary and their computational speed and capacity is
said to be just about at the physical limits of the universe. We were supposed
to get the first two here to play with a month or two ago they're so beyond
anything we can comprehend that a lot of folks are plain scared of it,
including the Kagan people."
Haller was appalled. "You mean nobody's ever even found out if they work?"
"Oh, they work just fine. What nobody's done is link them into a Flux network.
They know they have a near godlike brain, but they don't know what it'll do
when it's handed godlike powers.
When you think of twenty-eight of them being networked together with nearly
unlimited access to seven Gates and all the Flux they want well, if we can't
control them, we might just wind up worshipping them, and with justification."
That sobered them up. "Van Haas knows about this?" Haller asked.
"Of course. All the big folk do. They're gambling that the gods can be
suborned. If they can, it'll make everything even easier. If not who knows?"
It was a sobering idea, considering that all of them were putting their own
necks in this noose fashioned by expediency and politics.
"At least this will end some of the thoughts of the bright boys in
Engineering," Haller said at last. "Lately they've shifted from just designing
a nice place to live to designing the folks who'd live there. I've been a
lonely voice protesting this line of thinking. After all, if we can make the
place over to suit our needs, why bother to remake ?"
us
"Is that possible?" Fanfani asked nervously. This was the first he'd heard of
this.
"It's possible even with just the 7240's," Marsha Johnson assured him. "In the
process of reducing you to a contained bit of energy in a particular digital
equation suspended in that vacuum tube, we read in the whole chain. The
computer originally treated it as a whole, of course, but it wasn't much of a
curiosity step to see if the machine could also decide which parts were which.
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We got it to where it could take a scraping, read your genetic code, figure
all the basics out, then apply that to you when you get digitized in the tube.
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