Story Circle

West of Eden

By Miki Yamuri and Liljennie

Mankind had always dreamed of exploring very deep space. They strived for many years to over come the great distances between systems with little success, until one day a couple of young physicists discovered a unique group of particles and their energy waves.

They had discovered a high energy particle that appeared to be nonsymmetrical and had no antiparticle, although it did have several amazing particles that went along with it. Since the particles seemed to be nonreactive to most stimuli, they dubbed them NR Particles and gave each a special designation depending on its unique spin and energy frequency.

The interactions between the special components of the entended equipment and the energy the particles produced was used in also producing another amazing item, an engine that created an energy envelope that caused something like a wormhole to form. Since all of this produced an action, but no reaction any of the research team could find, they called it the Nonreaction Wormhole Drive, or NR WDrive for short.

“We’re famous,” said Norton, holding up his tablet, showing not a scientific journal, not a popular science magazine, but a news website for the general public. The headline read, “PHYSICS COUPLE DISCOVERS WARP DRIVE?”

His girlfriend Jill, sitting across from him at the breakfast table, replied, “I just hope we’re famous for something good. I hope what we just found isn’t the doom of the human race or something.”

“I’d be happy if we just advanced the study of particle physics without any practical applications at all,” Norton said. “It’s true that your idea allowed us to discover new particles without needing to use a huge particle collider.”

“But your idea was to focus on a particular range of rest energies, where your theory predicted we’d find new particles,” Jill said. “I think we work … very well together.” She smiled.

He put the tablet down. “Well, so do I,” he said, smiling and moving closer to her. “The synergy of our ideas has always been very fruitful.”

“We have an appointment in an hour,” she reminded him.

He sighed. “Another grant application interview. Well, it can’t be helped.” He got up. “I’ll get the car packed.”



At the Institute for Advanced Studies, they joined their friend Edward in the hallway and walked toward the conference room. “It might really happen,” he said. “Fingers crossed. Don’t want to jinx it.”

“If it happens, it happens,” said Norton.

“But think about it … an actual starship, like something out of science fiction! And you two built it!”

Jill objected, “We didn’t build it, we just designed the engine, based on particles we discovered and described.”

“Sure,” said Edward, “but if this grant goes through, we, the human race, could actually travel to the stars.”

“Maybe,” Norton said. “According to my theory, the engine can open a wormhole – but quantum uncertainty is going to make it very difficult to predict where it’ll go.”

“For now,” Jill said. “I’m sure that will get better as we learn more.”

They entered the conference room. “Ah, Dr. Sykes and Dr. Ahannanias,” said the official who was already in the room, standing up from the table to greet them and shake their hands. “I’m Howard Buchanan. It’s an honor. I’m here mostly as a formality – everyone knows your names now. The project is all but guaranteed to go forward.”

“It is?” asked Norton.

“Yes,” said Buchanan. “There’s Defense Department backing. The USA wants to be the first nation in the world with a spacecraft that uses this technology. We’ll be putting everything we’ve got into developing this engine. The spacecraft itself is already being designed by NASA contractors.”

Jill replied, “I suppose that makes sense. The details of creating a spacegoing vessel with life support are really not our area of expertise. Better to get people who know what they’re doing to pull that off.”

“All I really need is to see the engine in action,” said Buchanan. “I know it’s experimental. But the backers just want me as an eyewitness.”

Norton raised an eyebrow. “The test was going to happen today anyway,” he said.

“It’s the first test,” Jill said. “I mean, the theory is proven. It’s worked on subatomic particles and in simulations. We’ve just never fired the engine up to the level where anything macroscopic could cross the wormhole up to now.”

“Well, no better time than the present,” said Buchanan. “When was the test going to happen?”

“Anytime, really,” Jill replied. “Want to go?”

All agreed, so they followed Jill and Norton to the elevator and down into the sub-basement lab. “It’s down here to minimize interference from high-energy cosmic ray particles,” Norton explained.

They went to the experiment area, where everything was already set up. “I’m sending out a notification that we’re starting,” said Jill, typing on a laptop computer near the apparatus. “Everyone knows the test was going to be today; this is just so nobody’s surprised at the electric bill.”

The device was surprisingly small; it was about the shape and size of a car tire, only made of metals and plastics with many cables and wires leading from it. Norton connected a few cables and pressed some buttons. The device started to hum and glow, the hum increasing gradually in pitch and volume.

“We’re already exceeding the output levels of the previous test,” Norton said, “but things look fine.”

“What do you plan to send through?” asked Buchanan.

“That probe there,” said Jill. She pointed to what looked like a small RC car. “It’s basically a camera on wheels. It’s got more data collection than that, but that’s the easiest way to explain it. It’s connected with a steel cable so it can be pulled back, and there’s a data cable inside that steel cable.”

“Synchronize,” said Norton.

“In three … two … one …” Jill said, and together they pressed similar buttons. A glow appeared some distance from the apparatus and expanded to a ring, about a foot across, its border vibrating and coruscating with energy. Within it they could see … well, it was difficult to see. It wasn’t the wall of the lab, though. The probe rolled toward the opening faster and faster, then surged through, the cable unrolling behind it.

“We’re getting data,” said Jill. She put it on a monitor. “Look at that! Out of all the places we could’ve picked, it looks like we actually found a planet – and an Earthlike one, or close enough.” The image showed a bright pink sky with a rainbow and multicolored trees, or things that looked like trees at any rate. There was bright blue vegetation on the ground – or at least it looked like plants. “An oxygen-rich atmosphere … we’d been worried our probe would get fried or frozen, but not this time! We’re lucky.”

Buchanan replied, “Is there any way to … save those coordinates so you can return? Or something like that?”

“Not really,” said Norton. “At this point it’s very random. It’ll stay on that location until the wormhole closes, but next time, where it goes is anybody’s guess.” Suddenly the wormhole started flickering and looking unstable. “Oh no! I don’t want to lose the probe – increasing power, which I hope will keep it together.”

“Pulling the probe back,” said Jill, pulling a lever, and the winch started reeling the cable back in. As the power increased, the diameter of the wormhole enlarged, but it still looked wobbly and unsteady.

“It’s not stabilizing!” said Norton. “Maybe more power –” He increased it more, and now the wormhole was almost ten feet across. Some kind of wind was starting to blow toward it.

“Atmospheric pressure must be lower on the other side,” said Jill. “Not too much lower, or this would be a gale-force wind, but still … OK, the probe is back through!”

“All right, I’m going to shut it off –” said Norton. As he cut the main power to the apparatus, a major circuit breaker tripped. A massive surge of energy arced all around the laboratory as energy feedback from the sudden closure discharged to ground state. All the lights went off. The wormhole vanished.

When the lab’s electricity came back up and the lights came back on, Jill and Norton were gone.

“No!” shouted Edward. “They’re gone!”

To their credit, none of the researchers panicked. Edward hit the emergency button, although he had no idea what they could do at this point to aid Norton or Jill. This was a preliminary test and had no ability to record coordinates or spacial locations. No one had any idea where they had gone, or how they might find them once again.



Immediately, the emergency strobes began flashing as alarms and sirens sounded throughout the large facility. The emergency rescue team and even armed military arrived within minutes only to find the group of researchers standing looking dazed while a couple seemed more normal and were sitting at the computers typing away and doing some sort of obvious research.

Buchanan turned to the Emergency Team Leader and said, “My name is Howard Buchanan. I’m the head of the Washington DC bureau for grants.” He showed the man his ID, “I’m not sure what you could do at this point. No one here in this room was attacked, or hurt. We lost two of our main researchers, but they vanished into whatever the large energy discharge was.”

Edward didn’t look away from his screen and its large amount of data as he said, “I can tell you what caused the huge discharge, and now that it happened I have a fix for it so it won’t happen again.”

One of the other scientists said, “Well? Don’t keep us in suspense.”

Edward replied, “From what the data says, Norton was turning the power up, but he drew too much power and tripped the breakers with the feed back – yes, even the massive ones we’ve got here. But when the power was abruptly cut, it left the crystalline capacitors fully charged with a great deal of kinetic energy that suddenly was in a potential energy state. It had to go somewhere as it sought out a ground, and it did. But the wormhole was still open, and Jill and Norton were too close to the enlarged opening when it collapsed. For reasons I am still researching, the closure created some sort of quantum vacuum that pulled the two closest in. Unfortunately, that was Norton and Jill.”



Norton felt it when his feet hit the ground. It wasn’t hard, but he knew he was no longer in the research facility. Jill appeared next him and looked around with large surprised eyes. The place they had arrived seemed like a lush tropical garden. They could see many fruits, nuts, and berries growing on trees and bushes all around.

A huge waterfall nearby fell into a large crystal-clear pool that was filled with many types of what looked like fish. The air was fresh and laden with wonderful aromas from the many flowering plants.

There was a momentary scare as a large predatory-looking feline-type creature bounded out of the foliage, then began rubbing around their legs in a friendly manner.

Jill asked in a small voice, “Just where in the universe are we?”

Norton replied, “I haven’t the faintest idea. But … there’s another thing we need to think about.”

Jill asked, “What’s that?”

Norton replied, “How in the heck are we going to get back home?”



Buchanan went back to Washington, while Edward continued analyzing all the data they had. A few days later, Buchanan invited him to a teleconference.

“I don’t suppose you’ve made any progress in locating them, Dr. Wilson?” Buchanan asked Edward, his face on a big monitor in the conference room.

“I wish I could say yes,” Edward replied. “But we don’t even have a schema for specifying destination coordinates. The whole project was in very preliminary stages.”

“Well, I have good news there,” said Buchanan. “The funding came through – in spades. Your evidence shows that they went to a physical place – the probe came back and wasn’t vaporized, so chances are that Drs. Anannias and Sykes are in that location, most likely alive.”

“Yes, all data from the probe showed a compatible biology and survivable climate conditions,” said Edward. “There’s every likelihood that they could be alive, wherever it is.”

“And that means the device works,” said Buchanan. “In a proof-of-concept sense, of course. It has the ability to transport macroscopic matter to other points in space. There are some people who are very interested in developing that.”

“I’m glad to hear it …” said Edward, “but right now I just hope we can get Jill and Norton back alive.”

“Well,” said Buchanan, “you’ve got a grant, and a big one. As I said last time we met, the spacecraft is already being designed and construction is under way. More funding will go toward completing and building that design, and you’re about to get a huge infusion of funding with which you can hire the top scientists in the field, and you’ll have access to all the equipment you need. Maybe our missing researchers are the discoverers of the phenomenon, but there are a lot of others studying it all over the world. You’ll be able to pick the best among them and hire them for the project. We’re going to build the first NR WDrive spaceship, and its first mission will be to look for Jill and Norton.”

“I’ve already got a list of candidates,” said Edward. “Just tell me when I can start sending out job offers.”



The first thing Norton did was start to make some kind of shelter. Jill caught on and helped. Jill found an interesting crystalline rock and banged it hard against another rock. It split almost perfectly and made two sharp-edged pieces that could easily be used as hand axes. This helped Norton speed up the hut construction. It also aided in the creation of the necessary plant fibers so Jill, who knew how to do this, wove extremely useful cordages which also Norton had used to make a fairly decent rope.

The feline creature seemed to take a friendly but interested look at what the humans were doing. It bounded off into the thick brush. Jill said, “Looks like it got tired of our company.”

Norton laughed. “Or we bored it to death!” Both laughed and continued their work.

By the time the hut was completed and much cordage had been woven, Jill had dug a shallow hole and surrounded it with rocks to make a fire pit, it was starting to get dark.

Jill asked, “Any bright ideas on making a fire, perhaps?”

Norton knelt by the stocked fire pit and stuffed a handful of leaves under the wood. “I haven’t done this since I was in the Rangers. Let’s see if I still can.”

Norton examined several rocks lying around where they had built their shack, chose two interesting ones, brought them back to the fire pit, and knelt. Jill watched intently as Norton banged the two rocks together, which created very large sparks that started the leaves smoldering. A sort series of blowing on the glowing embers ignited the leaves. Jill was impressed. In about 10 minutes Norton had a very nice fire burning.

About that time the feline came back with a fairly large creature in its jaws. “Aww, look,” said Jill, “Kitty brought us dinner!”

“Well, thank you, you helpful cat, you,” Norton said to it as it laid the carcass down at their feet. “Or … cat-like entity.” He looked at Jill. “How intelligent is it, do you think?”

Jill had already picked up the prey it had brought them and was sizing it up, trying to figure out how to skin and bone it for cooking. Those makeshift hand axes would work perfectly, although they would have to make several more and retouch the edges of the original two to keep them sharp.

Jill replied, “Already I’d say it’s not only a lot larger than but also smarter than an Earth cat. It’s figured out on its own that we can be its allies – Earth cats have taken thousands of years to domesticate.”



The large cat creature rolled over onto its back while making some sort of urrrking noises. Norton and Jill could have sworn that it sounded like laughter. Jill disagreed until the creature stood up on its hind legs and said (clarified for the reader’s benefit), “Thems mus be stupid. No tooked us enny time ta realize we can does stuffs.”

Jill almost wet herself with shock. Norton wasn’t far behind as they both came face to face with a catlike creature as intelligent as they. Jill gasped out, “So … sorry. Don’t be offended, but on our home world a cat, even one as large as you, is still almost just an animal. Maybe they aren’t dumb … but they don’t have the abilities we do.”

Norton asked, “How is it you speak English? This is like some kind of paradox.”

The creature replied, “My name in our language is,” and the creature once again in a musical errking way said “Gerrolf. I sorta liked the Kitty name you called me earlier, guess you can call me that.”

Jill and Norton were totally flabbergasted as they did their best to gather their long scattered wits. They began to think they were on another world who knew how far from their own world or even their own galaxy.

Kitty said, “My people call ourselves Lacerta Cattus. No sure where camed up with that xactly. There are legends of creatures like you that were on our world uncounted centuries ago and taught us how to be more civilized. We still resort to our animalistic ways at times; they fun.”

Jill said with amazement in her voice, “Lacerta cattus? That’s .. Latin. Translated it means Lizard Cat. How is it your people call themselves by a Latin nomenclature, and how does lizard fit in?”

“Is better than Renni-Tu, a name a very nasty enemy gave us,” Kitty replied. “Anna lizard part is cuz we kinda a blend. I look a lot like a cat right now, but …” suddenly before the totally mind blown Norton and Jill’s eyes, Kitty transformed. The end result was some sort of combination of humanoid, lizard, and cat all mixed with natural armor plating. “I can take on one of any three creature’s features amma blend of.”

Norton asked with incredulity obvious in his tone, “Are there any others on this planet like us?”

The Kitty replied, “No no more. We no no why, but they got mad at each other many seasons ago and killed themselves off somehow.”

Norton asked, “Is there any technology left after all the passage of time? We would really like to find a way back to our home.”

Kitty transformed back into the cat creature, got back down on all fours, and sat. “There are extremely old buildings. Many of em fallded in or crumbled to dust. There are some that got dug ina mountain. Might still be sompin there. Kitty takes u there when it get light is ya wannas. We can look round. I call several of my huntin mates jus incase.”

Early the next morning, Norton was awakened by the soft headbutting of Kitty. As Norton sat up in his nature-made bed, he could see that Kitty had called more than several of his companions to come explore with them. Food and water apparently weren’t an issue along the way. The cat creatures showed Jill and Norton places they could rest and get clean fresh water along the path to the ruin’s location.

After traveling into a particular mountain pass, Norton began to feel antsy inside as he looked around. “Jill?” he whispered nervously, “Either I’m losing my mind, or this place is somehow familiar. I know this place has been almost destroyed and overgrown, but still, enough is here it’s somehow recognisable.”

Jill took a good look around and agreed, “It is. But that isn’t possible. We’ve never been here before, have we?”

Norton replied, “Not that I’m aware of. But still.” He pointed. “Around that corner would be a secure and well guarded entrance to a launch facility back home.”

Jill nodded in agreement as they rounded the corner. To their total shocked surprise, it was there, though it had obviously been severely damaged and left to molder for many uncounted years. Debris and much growth hid most of the area, but this was still North American Launch Strike Control’s secure entrance. Norton knew; he remembered being stationed here when he’d been in the Rangers. This couldn’t be.

Kitty and his friends led Jill and Norton to the remains of the entrance. There was a large steel door, badly corroded and overgrown with vegetation. Whatever road had once led up to it was long gone. “There would’ve been a guard post over there,” Norton said, pointing, “and a parking lot, and a reinforced fence … none of it’s here now.”

“How long would things like concrete and steel last?” asked Jill.

“Concrete? About a hundred years, max,” said Norton.

“What about Roman concrete?” Jill continued to ask. “Some of that’s still around today.”

“That’s because they built to last,” Norton said. “I read somewhere that they had a secret formula … well, secret to us, until a few years ago we figured it out. I don’t know what it was, but we don’t use it anymore.”

Jill said, “Looks like the frame around this door is pretty much gone.” Sure enough, it may have had a concrete frame at one time, but now there was just a massive rusty steel door, on hinges that were probably inoperable.

“I’m not sure how much of this door is still steel and how much is rust,” said Norton. Taking one of their crystalline rock tools, he scraped at some of the rust in one area of the door. A lot of it flaked off, but a lot was still left. “OK, this might be difficult. But on the other hand, if we can find a way to open and close it, we can use it as a shelter without worrying about something coming in and bothering us.

“Ifn ya can’t,” said Kitty, “me ‘n my friends can guard your door.”

“Well, let’s see what we can do about getting this open first,” Norton said, “and let’s see what’s inside.”

It took some doing, because although the door wasn’t locked in the usual meaning of the word, it was still tons of rusty steel with no hinges to speak of. Finally Norton and Jill gave up on the idea of closing it again and just pried at the top, inserting larger and larger pieces of stone and wood until it stuck out noticeably from the mountainside. “Look out below!” called Norton. “I think it’s gonna fall …” The cats scattered in every direction, and Jill ran to the side. Norton gave one more push and felt the huge steel slab starting to topple. As soon as the opening was large enough, he slid down the inside.

The door came to rest with a mighty and resonating booming thump amid clouds of scattered debris and dust, echoing through the mountains and through the cavernous tunnel beyond the door. It was dark within, and they had no light sources until Norton and Jill made some torches from some of the oily nuts and old fibrous debris from the trees.

The cat creatures were extremely interested in the way Norton made the oils and Jill wrapped the fibers around a short limb to make the head of the torch. It set the group back in their explorations a few days while they made the oils and torches, but it aided in learning about the feline creatures that were aiding them.

Norton remembered a tunnel leading to the large area where most of the equipment storage was. Norton and Jill entered the small area to the left of the main tunnel. Dust and obvious decay was everywhere. The flickering of the torches insured that every shadow appeared to be alive and in motion.

“I’m totally expecting giant spiders,” said Jill. But although there were some ordinary cobwebs near the door made by tiny spiders that had crawled around it through crevices to feed on the insects that did the same, as they went further in there were fewer and fewer signs of wildlife of any kind.

The desks and computer equipment sat exactly where it had been left uncounted seasons ago. Those things actually looked like pictures they had seen of items found sealed in pyramids. There was no hope of finding anything in any kind of working shape. Too much time had passed, and it had taken its usual toll.

Jill got lucky and found a filing wall – basically a large filing area. She pulled on one of the handles, which of course, came off in her hand, but it also opened the drawer enough that she could get something in and pry it the rest of the way. By this time, Norton had arrived and supplied a small but thick stick as a pry. The drawer slid open amid much scraping.

Neither one knew exactly how to find or even what they wanted, but each drawer held neatly organized folders. Each file folder contained many neat file pages arranged in order, so if any paper records somehow remained readable, they might tell the story of what had happened. Right now, both of them were starting to think they had arrived in Earth’s future … after some type of apocalyptic conflict.

“This must all be acid-free paper,” said Norton as he touched one of the folders. “I see, it’s made of some kind of other thing that was not meant to decay rapidly.”

“Yes,” Jill said. “If it weren’t, nothing would be left. It’s certainly been at least a thousand years since anything with fewer than six legs was last here. Look at this.” She held up a blueprint. “What in the world is this a plan for? They used English, but some of these terms … ‘circumelemental reverberation chamber?’ ‘Incremental helical metamplifier?’ They used … different technology, I guess? Maybe these are things we haven’t discovered yet?”

“I … don’t … know about that,” said Norton, staring at a folder he’d just opened. “This has requisitions for ‘variable mercury thaumionic power cells’ and ‘aqua relvia vis viva conduits.’ Those are … almost alchemical terms. This is … not something that would ever actually work … is it?”

“Let’s keep looking,” Jill said. They found a lot more mysterious references to technologies they weren’t familiar with, and more tellingly, no references to technologies they knew.

“They weren’t using electronics,” Norton said. “From what I can tell they used something called thaumionics?”

“This is a plan for what might be a rifle, but … it doesn’t fire bullets or even lasers; it fires … ignivocative ergonic waves?” Jill was puzzled.

“This doesn’t make sense!” said Norton in frustration. “Their description of any technology more complicated than fire is … nonsense!”

“Maybe it’s just different terms for what we know,” suggested Jill.

“This would never work,” Norton said, pointing at the rifle blueprint. “There’s no activation mechanism. There’s no mechanism whatsoever. It’s got no moving parts, not even a power source I recognise.”

“Can we find some of this gear and look at it?” Jill wondered.

“Let’s focus on finding out what happened here first,” Norton suggested. “At least, unless we find out that this room doesn’t have that information. From what I can see, we have a great many more to choose from.”



Norton and Jill read through a very large number of the stored folders. Neither had any clue as to what the medium was that the files and folders were made from, but they’d concluded that it wasn’t paper, and whatever it was totally ignored the passage of time. Neither had a clue as to the method used to print on each of the pages either, but the letters and images were clear and crisp, even after whatever extended period of time had passed.

While Norton and Jill scratched their heads over the seeming nonsensical nomenclature used to describe the scientific developments, Kitty came in and said, “Oomans come. Kitty gots sompina shows you.” then turned and slinked out.

Jill and Norton followed him back out into the hall, then to the door they had forced open to enter the hall. Kitty pointed to a sign beside the door that they had missed the first time. It appeared that the cats had been removing some of the debris that had collected over time, and the words, “Secure Archive Storage - Authorized Personnel only - lethal force authorized,” were able to be made out.

Kitty pointed back down the long hall, “Ever door long hall is different archive. We find historical archive n want alla us togevers when we sees it.”

Norton asked, “Have any of you opened any of the files and read anything?”

Kitty replied as he slowly shook his head, “Nopes, we gotted u first. No ever members bein here afroes.”

Kitty led them to a door leading off of the main hall. On the wall beside the decrepit door was a very aged sign that read, “Historical Archive. -- caution - some files are sealed in a nitrogenous atmosphere and some in as close to a perfect vacuum as attainable. Caution is advised.”

The group all entered the room. Norton brushed the place above one of the file drawers where a label had been located on the file containers he had previously investigated. It said, “Renni-Tu Hybrid Warrior Project.” Norton and Jill were instantly extremely interested in this series of files.

By this time, Norton and Jill had gotten opening of the drawers down to an art form, it took no time to have the file drawer open, and the first of many folders in Norton’s hands.

Norton learned that there were three genetic frameworks used in the creation of what was supposed to be an ultimate warrior … a Renni-Tu. From what Jill and Norton could tell, they had used some form of genetic protein similar to a CRISPR editing protein, but they used all sorts of wild alchemical-sounding terminology. They were physicists, and quantum field theory had become their chosen field of expertise, not genetics, but what they read was incredible.

Wading through the sciobabble was hard, but they were familiar enough with the aspects of the report they understood. A Rennic was something akin to a very large predatory lizard. It had natural body armor and an ability to change its skin color like a chameleon to hide, sometimes in plain sight. Their six-inch retractable claws were as hard as steel and damn near indestructible, as many of the warning pages expressed. It was a species not in Norton or Jill’s familiar Earth’s biodiversity.

Another of the mysterious creatures whose genetics had been used was called a Tunie. Another creature totally unknown to Jill and Norton, this catlike animal had the unique ability to morph into a bipedal form. Both Jill and Norton had always thought a shapeshifter was a fantasy creature. To discover that they in fact existed on this planet blew their minds.

The addition of the Tunie genes gave the Renni-Tu the ability to shapeshift. This addition to its chameleon abilities made it a formidable adversary, especially in low-light situations. What the genetic manipulation created with the mixing of those two gene pools was a horribly vicious and extremely violent creature. According to the archive, it was so violent that they had to terminate their samples for the safety of the science team.

The solution, apparently, had been the introduction of a humanoid gene. From what the document said, the humanoid had originated from somewhere beyond this planet, although no data was listed on what planet it had come from.

This resolved many of the issues with the Renni-Tu program. The result of this genetic manipulation produced a highly intelligent and trainable creature. Once a large army of them had been produced, their exploits were enough to scare anyone, and from the archived documents, scared a large portion of a galaxy Jill and Norton never knew had civilizations.

It was more than obvious that these people had had some form of interstellar flight. Many references to off-world locations and civilizations unknown to Jill and Norton were mentioned over and over.

Jill found all the files she had read ended abruptly at exactly the same time. She pulled an incomplete archive folder labeled, “History of the Apocalypse.” Both of them were highly interested in this. Most of what it said was conflicting and confusing.

The very best they could figure was that something currently unknown had suddenly been introduced into the biosphere that managed to kill off the entire humanoid population of the planet, but left all else untouched. From the way the folders had abruptly ended, what ever it was happened almost instantly and on a global scale.

This had also left a highly intelligent warrior class of creature to fend for itself, which it did admirably. On their own, they abandoned the violent and warrior-like actions they were bred for and became peaceful. The Renni-Tu found an archived database and took upon themselves a new name, Lacerta Cattus, to get away from the name they were given when they had been held in bondage and to put their severely violent past behind them. It was obvious one of the lizard cats of that day made the final entry.

Norton said softly, “So that’s how they came to be identified with a Latin name. They technically took it from the historical archives, apparently many thousands of years ago.”

Jill whimpered, “How are we ever going to get home? All this stuff is museum artifacts at this point. So much time and decay, I know we’ll find nothing useable in any of the ruins, unless it’s made from unique materials like these files.”

“But they did make the files,” said Norton. “Maybe other things are made out of long-lasting materials. Whatever they used for concrete clearly didn’t last, but what if there are smaller but more durable items? And what if they’re stored somewhere that’s protected from the elements? I still want to know what the heck a ‘variable mercury thaumionic power cell’ is.”

Jill and Norton searched around, finding rusty metal desks that practically crumbled to the touch, and in what might once have been a locked drawer they found some kind of ID card. “Harry Noble, Th. D.,” Norton read. “What’s a Th. D.?”

“I don’t know what the heck a Th.D might be or if there’s power to any of the electronic locks,” said Jill, “but if there somehow is power, maybe this card will open some of these locked doors around here.”

They went to the nearest door that had no knob, only a panel of some kind, and waved the ID card in front of it. Then the strangest thing they’d seen so far happened. The door simply faded and vanished. “What the …?” said Norton, jumping back. The door faded back into view. “Did you see that?” he asked Jill.

“Yes …” she said, poking the door with a finger to make sure it was really there. “That … I have no explanation for that. Try it again.”

Norton held the ID card in front of the panel on the door again, and once more the door vanished into apparent nothingness. They cautiously walked through the opening, moving quickly in case it reappeared soon, and looked around. This appeared to be a storeroom; there were several shelf units holding moldering boxes. They found what was apparently a metal rod sitting on a shelf near the entrance. “What’s this?” Jill asked, picking it up. It had some kind of marble sized transparent orb at one end and some kind of button at the other. She pressed the button, and the orb lit up.

“Flashlight?” asked Norton. “It’s certainly brighter than this torch, even after all these years.”

“I think this button turns,” Jill said, rotating the button, and the light shifted from shining in all directions to a beam pointing in one direction. “It really is a flashlight,” she said. “OK.” She used it to help them search the room.

A sign on the wall near the door said, “In Case of Fire,” and there was another metal rod device hanging on the wall under this sign. This rod was red and had some sort of cone on one end, and a button on the other, similar to the flashlight-like device.

“Fire extinguisher?” asked Norton, examining it. “Can’t possibly hold much CO2, or fire suppression chemicals. It’s too small. But I’m not pressing that button. Whatever’s inside might have decayed into something toxic over the years.”

“Yeah, leave it unless there’s some kind of emergency,” said Jill. “Let’s see what’s over here.” As soon as they stepped away from the doorway, the door reappeared again. Jill caught the motion out of the corner of her eye and turned the light toward it. “Guess it doesn’t close if anyone’s near it,” she said. “That’s safer, I guess.”

She turned back toward some of the shelves. It was hard to say what some of the objects in the boxes had once been, but some objects were completely intact, if only they knew what they were. “I doubt any of these are weapons,” Norton said, “because they don’t look like them and aren’t stored like them, but … maybe cleaning tools? Or office supplies?”

“Let’s try another room,” Jill said. They walked toward the door, and it just vanished as they approached. “Guess there’s no need to swipe your card to get out of the supply room,” said Jill.

They walked through the facility, and as they did, Kitty or another of the cats came by to see what they were up to from time to time. “We lookin round too,” Kitty told them. “You find a light thing.”

“Yeah, this seems like some kind of flashlight or something,” said Jill. “Somehow it still works.”

“This door says Machine Shop,” Norton said, holding the torch up to the sign after knocking the debris off. He tried the ID card, and the door vanished. “Whoa. I’m not used to that yet.”

“Ooo make door go way,” said Kitty.

“Yeah, apparently this guy had access to this room,” Norton said, showing Kitty the ID card. He turned to go inside, and the others followed.

Norton and Jill soon found that there were a wide variety of handheld tools that all looked the same aside from having different color schemes and different printing on them. They were all shaped like the flashlight – a handheld rod apparently made of some kind of metal, with a button on one end and some kind of orb, nozzle, cone, tube, or needle on the business end. He picked one up that said, “Jigsaw – Caution,” and asked, “Now, how could this be a jigsaw?” Then he put it down and saw another. “Lifter – Caution,” he read on it. “What’s a lifter?” He tried pointing it at an empty shelf unit and touching the button. The shelf unit rose a few inches off the floor. “What?”

“No way,” said Jill. “How can that even work? That’s … nonphysical.” Nevertheless, when Norton carefully turned the device, the shelf unit moved where he pointed it. He set it down with a clank and pressed the button again, which seemed to deactivate it.

Norton looked at the device more closely. “How could such a thing even do that?” he asked.

“I think we can safely say now that this isn’t our Earth,” Jill suggested, “so perhaps we’re not even in our universe. We may be in a universe with different physical laws. Many things, such as the chemical reactions within our bodies, have the same end results, but perhaps there are different underlying rules that govern how quantum fields – or whatever they have here – behave.”

“A universe not based on quantum fields?” asked Norton. “Well, there go our Ph. Ds. Maybe we need Th. Ds to understand it.”

“Do you suppose there’s a science library somewhere around here?” asked Jill. “Maybe we can learn something about this world’s science.”

“Maybe,” Norton said. “I’m going to take a few of these tools with me, though.” He took the lifter, the jigsaw, and a few others that seemed useful. He found another flashlight, so he extinguished the torch and used that instead.

“Ooo look for books?” asked Kitty. “There place gots picture of book on sign. I take there.”

“OK, lead on,” said Jill. They followed him to a sign that did in fact say, “Library.” There was a universal book symbol on it. The door vanished as they walked toward it; one apparently didn’t need an ID card to enter this room.

“OK, now we’re getting somewhere,” said Norton. He searched the shelves. “Some of these have disintegrated pretty badly,” he said, “but a lot of them look pretty good, amazingly. Actually, I’ve heard that acid-free paper can last thousands of years if it doesn’t see much use. And … well, I’d say these haven’t seen much. Here’s one: ‘Applied Thaumaturgy?’ That’s … magic, isn’t it?”

“‘Advanced Digital Thaumionics,’” said Jill, picking up another book and reading its title. “We have got to read some of these.”

“Yeah, and I don’t think we should take them out of this room,” said Norton. “There’s no way to preserve them out there.” He sat down on the floor and started leafing carefully through the book he’d found.

After a while, Norton said, “This is … basically some kind of applied magic. If we were at home, I’d say this sounds like nonsense, but they’ve got references to experiments that apparently actually work, equations that predict what happens, laws that they’ve discovered … completely different from the physics we know.”

“And there’s a particle called the thaumion that acts somewhat like the electron we know,” said Jill. “It has a ‘thaumic charge,’ and it can be directed along predictable pathways to make complex devices like computers. The end results are mostly like what we’ve got at home, but there are some startling differences. That lifter you found, for example.”

“These things are basically magic wands,” Norton said, looking at the flashlight. “Only … created by magical technology.”

They continued to read until they had some understanding of the technology these people had used. “We might be able to use this technology to get home!” Jill suggested. “If we can understand it well enough and cobble together the right parts. They seem to have been able to make at least some devices that lasted for thousands of years. Thaumionic power cells don’t lose energy over time, it appears.”

“And a variable mercury thaumionic power cell is the best kind there is, according to this,” said Norton. “It apparently generates energy out of nothing. It never runs out of power. That’s impossible, at least in our universe, but here, who knows? They’re made of some very rare materials, so they’re very expensive and hard to make. But maybe there are some of those around here somewhere.”

“Wait,” said Jill. “There’s a lot of dust everywhere. And the air isn’t bad. Where’s an air vent?” She found one near the ceiling, and Norton held up his hand to feel.

“It’s very faint, but there’s airflow,” Norton said. “The motors are probably mostly dead or choked with dust, but there’s at least one fan slightly moving somewhere.”

“If I’m guessing right, then this complex probably has one of those cells running it,” said Jill. “So to use it, we just have to find an outlet and plug in.”



Jill and Norton continued to explore the long-defunct facility. The kitties seemed to have ESP and knew how and where to find them. They brought them drinks, not plain water either, but real, familiar drinks … like tea or coffee, and snacks … like sandwiches on real baked bread. Now that they had found the light rod, they had no need for the torches or the oil containers. There was much less to carry.

Every place they searched showed signs of long passage of time with no use. Dust and major decay had seemed to collect on almost everything and gave the place a definite air of extreme age.

They finally came to a rather secluded archive room. They cleaned the many years of debris from the sign on the wall next to this archive, and it said, “Thaumion Research and Development ... Authorized persons only.” The ID opened this door, and both of them entered.

After an hour or so of intense study, Jill burst into laughter and shouted, “No! It can’t be that simple, can it?”

Norton looked at her with surprise on his face. “What’s so simple you can’t believe it?”

Jill waved her hand for a bit then said, “Give me a minute. While you’re doing that, think about that bird course you and I took, way back when we first met.”

Norton looked thoughtful for a bit, then replied, “You mean that stupid introduction to mythology we took for the credits? The one we both aced and never even attended the class?”

Jill nodded, “Exactly. Remember, according to Greek myth, at the dawn of creation the Titans had three sons and three daughters. In this version, the daughters are the three sisters of fate who weave the tapestry of reality on the loom of all creation.”

Norton said slightly impatiently, “OK, in the Greek version they became three of the Olympian goddesses, but fine, it’s different here, get to the point.”

She continued, “The three brothers were endowed with great power, same as their sisters. The brothers wished to share their good fortune with the rest of their realm and created a law to govern this awesome power’s use. The Law of Three Times Three. Any violation of this law or any of the other three addenda added by the brothers would result in a three times three penalty on the perpetrator or perpetrators. Avoiding an initial determination only results in a more severe judgement when it happens. No reprieve. However, there were certain circumstances where the end judgement could be modified to something less severe on a case by case basis.”

Norton replied, “So? So what?”

Jill snorted, “The law of three times three. That’s why there are no humanoids on this world. According to the records I’ve read, they attempted to use the power to gain control of an element they didn’t necessarily have a need for at the expense of all the humanoids on their target world. The documentation ends abruptly in all the archived files as soon as the indicated time of their attack had arrived. Retaliation was by the law. Three times three total singular species form eradication … it was severe, but it was exactly what they had intended for their target world times three … men, women, pregnant or not, and children, it didn't matter; all removed and exterminated.”

Norton screwed up his expression, “Aww, that’s fantasy. This is real life.”

Jill snorted in frustration, “Open your eyes, dummy. Look at the terms they use to describe their tech. They discovered the magic particle, this thaumion they talk about. You even commented on the light wand we’re using and the others being magic wands. I wonder, though … in many of our experiments, looking for the proper fields and waves to make our engine, we saw statistical anomalies in the analysis … could they be accounted for by the presents of the thaumion? What if they explored the anomaly, while we dismissed it?”

Norton looked at one of the many pages in the file he was holding and replied, “Hmm, yes, I see. The problem is, if the thaumion exists in our reality as it does here, then the particles we know must exist here too – only it seems they didn’t discover a lot of the quantum fields that we did. I also see they were using magic as some sort of … energy source with benefits kinda thing.”

Both of them laughed. Jill replied, “Energy with benefits! But the law is still the law, regardless of how you put magic to use.”

Norton and Jill continued to read the historical research archive. Norton couldn’t believe it as he saw experiments that were exactly like their research that had led them to the NR WDrive. He discovered that the NR particles they had discovered had an almost hidden signal accompanying the data set. This was the signal that caught the researcher's eyes and was deeply explored, not the others we had searched so diligently for.

A chill of amazement went through him as he saw the frequency variations, and the frequency for the magic particle … the thaumion. The difference in their frequency was .00000001. They and their whole team had dismissed this variance to a statistical error, as it was below the margin of error of their equipment, which had been imprecise compared to what the scientists had come up with on this world. Reality began to set in as understanding dawned.

“Jill?” he called as he turned toward her, “I discovered something I think might interest you.”

She came over, “What’s that?”

He showed her the folder he had been reading. He watched as Jill’s eyes became as large as tea saucers with surprise. “You mean all this time that weird error reading we were getting … ?”

“Really was the magic particle, yes. Only thing was the margin of error made us dismiss it as insignificant, so we ignored it.”

Jill replied, “Yeah, but these people didn’t, a long time ago. Then a time came when they misused what they’d discovered. The backlash totally destroyed them.”

“So … this law of three times three is a real thing?” Norton wondered.

“Maybe it’s got a mythical basis, and maybe not,” said Jill, “but you don’t see any people here, do you? However it happened, these people were wiped out, to the last man, woman, and child, with nothing else harmed.”

“Just what they planned for that other planet, only three times worse,” said Norton. “I wonder why they didn’t come here and colonize.”

“No way to know,” said Jill, shrugging. “It’s not as if they’re here to ask. Maybe they just didn’t want to.”

“So … this thaumion,” said Norton. “I wonder if we can put it to work for us. Help us get home.”

“I had been thinking about that,” Jill agreed, nodding. “Maybe … but we’ll have to understand it first.”

“Experimentation,” said Norton.

“Need an inventory of working equipment,” Jill said.

“Then we can draw up the plans,” Norton replied.

“Design the experiment.”

“Make predictions to test.”

“Let’s do it!” said Jill.



“This vessel will be able to accommodate a crew of up to 40,” said Buchanan, the screen behind him showing live video of the near-completed spacecraft at the new L1 construction yard as astronauts and robots continued to work on it. “It can run with a minimal crew of 6, but they’d be constantly busy, getting no sleep and doing no science. That’s why optimal crew size is 24. But there’s extra flexible space for additional personnel, science payloads, or cargo.” The assembled staff of military brass and scientists watched attentively.

“And it’s almost finished?” asked one of the generals.

“It is,” said Buchanan. “As for the engine … Dr. Elliott?”

Edward stood and activated his presentation. “We have two problems to solve, and we’ve made progress in both: developing the experiment for the vessel, and finding Drs. Anannanias and Sykes. Now, we’ve made progress on scaling up the equipment to produce effects comparable in dimension to the vessel; it doesn’t appear that will be a problem. So the real problem: how to duplicate their destination. They hadn’t even developed a coordinate system for where their apparatus led, but we’ve made a great deal of progress there. The problem is simply this: Because they had no coordinates, the fact that we do makes little to no difference. But that’s where this little side experiment comes in.” He pushed a button, and a photo of an experimental apparatus appeared, similar to Jill and Norton’s, but far more sophisticated.

“Compared to their original experiment, this is much more refined, and we have a lot more precise control over energy levels and frequency modulations. What we have here is an automated experiment that will sequentially probe destinations over the entire range surrounding the original experiment’s parameters. It’s a brute-force method, but it can narrow down the window, and has at least a 5% chance of finding them outright. At the very least, it can guide us to the next phase of the experiment, and in only a few days – and its power requirements are far lower than those of the actual drive system. After all, this only has to be able to transport a microprobe like this one.” Edward held up a device the size of a pencil eraser. “We’ll be ready to start the first run next week. And this time … nobody will be standing near the wormhole.”



“OK, there’s a tiny bit wrong with your hypothesis,” said Jill, as she and Norton made notes and wrote equations on a magical glassboard they’d found operational.

“What’s that?” Norton asked.

Jill held up her mobile phone. Norton interrupted, “No! We’d agreed that the batteries on those are too precious to waste, and there’s nothing for us to contact with them anyway …”

And then Jill turned her phone on. The screen went white … then filled with multicolored hash … then went black.

“What?” asked Norton. “I’m assuming it isn’t merely damaged.”

“No,” said Jill. “This is a problem. When we first found this complex and its thaumionic technology, we made the initial assumption that the laws of physics were different here than they are back home. But then we learned that it’s quite possible that the thaumion exists in our universe too, so we made the assumption that they’re the same as back home.”

Norton tried the same thing with his phone while Jill watched, and got the exact same result. “I see what you’re saying,” he replied. “Our phones’ behavior is evidence that things aren’t quite the same here as at home. Nearly, but not close enough for a device like this to work properly. It was designed to work for our laws of physics, so it doesn’t work here.”

“Nope, not quite,” Jill said. “But the battery does produce electricity. That electric current does flow through its circuitry and does make the backlight glow. It’s even close enough to produce some kind of screen output momentarily. But it ends there – the CPU can’t send coherent data and can’t boot the system. So it’s very close, but not quite.”

“I looked up their best values for the physical constants,” said Norton, “but I can’t compare them with our most precise measurements of those constants in our universe – after the first eight digits, it’s hard to remember. And they have a thaumionic structure constant; nobody’s even heard of that back home. But speaking of back home …”

“If I know Edward,” said Jill, “he’s spearheading a project to come find us with that spacecraft they were building. And if they do find us …”

“Then the spacecraft’s computers will crash the moment they get here,” said Norton.

“And, quite likely, so will the ship,” finished Jill.

Norton said, “And there’s no way to warn them! If we can’t get ourselves home before they get here to save us … we’re going to have to save them.”

“So … we’re in a race against time,” Jill concluded.

“We really are gonna need magic,” said Norton.

“There’s still a chance,” Jill said. “They still have to find us. They might try to replicate our experiment. Our first probe was pretty basic, but Edward and whoever he’s working with might design something more sophisticated. And the more sophisticated it is, the less likely it is to work under different physical laws.”

“If those probes have a system crash when they go through, it might tip him off that the wormhole’s opening on at least one other universe with different laws,” Norton said. “We don’t know that this one and our home one are the only ones that exist.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Jill. “We should have immediately wondered why this world and our home Earth were synced. They should have been moving relative to one another with astronomical velocity. The planet should have zoomed away immediately, but it didn’t.”

“It’s because they’re both Earth,” Norton replied, “in the same position in space, but in another universe. Same orbital elements, same orbital anomaly, same phase, same rotational velocity. Or almost – we didn’t arrive in the exact same location as the lab. Just a tiny fraction of difference, and we end up hundreds of miles away. Of course, if it had been in the ocean, or in space, we wouldn’t have tried to keep the portal steady and we wouldn’t have been pulled through.”

“So it’s not surprising at all that we found an Earth Like planet on the first try,” Jill said. “That wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t luck. It was because we opened a portal to another Earth.”

“And that may be all that our wormholes could do with the equipment we had,” said Norton. “The question is which Earth, though. There could be a lot of them. But each one could have a slightly different variation on the laws of physics, with everything that goes along with it.”

“OK, so I’m feeling a bit of relief,” Jill said. “Edward and the rest probably won’t immediately doom themselves the moment they find us. They’ll likely figure out well in advance that they’ll be facing a new kind of problem if they attempt to use the drive to find us.”

“I’m not sure how they’d solve it,” said Norton. “But if they can at least manage to get the drive to send them somewhere in the same universe, they can avoid that problem and explore our universe, so at least that’s good.”

“Maybe we can find a way to solve it,” Jill said. “Maybe we can recalibrate our phones.”

“And make them work with the power cells they have here,” Norton said.

“If we can do that, then … wait.” Jill stopped.

“What?”

“Wait a minute!” said Jill. “Our phones! They’re calibrated to work in our universe and don’t work here! What if we can use them as a sort of signpost that points back home?”

“Estimate the parameters for our portal based on the calibration differences required to make our phones work!” said Norton.

“Smart phones really can do anything,” Jill said sarcastically.

“But,” said Norton, “there’s a large hole in that idea – we don’t have any of the necessary equipment to measure those physical constants, or even the variances between our phones and this universe.” He shook his head. “The few tools we do have won’t be precise enough for any analysis like that.”

Kitty and several of his cohort had been lazing around the two humans while they had been thinking, talking, and writing equations on the glass. Kitty sat up and said, “Oooman. We ken get ya som kinna workin stuffs ta elp see.” The others were making errking noises that sounded like agreement.

One of the younger cat creatures dashed away and was gone for a while. When he returned, he was carrying several large saddle packs across his back. When Jill and Norton opened them, they found that each one carried some rather interesting, although slightly primitive, handheld energy wave diagnostic equipment, several devices that were each the size of a deck of cards.

Along with this was a device that looked the world like a laptop. Kitty assured them that it was was an electronic notebook. It had the ability to copy from the glass board and print to it, and it had a pen so it could record written and drawn data, besides a very unusual keyboard, obviously made for Lizard Cat hands and not human ones. It wasn’t a laptop … quite. So close.

But the only words from Norton and Jill were heartfelt thanks as they began examining the waveforms their cells, clothes, and phones were attuned to. Kitty and his cohorts proved once again that they were highly intelligent as they immediately understood the humans’ intentions and started gathering any and all data they could possibly glean.

In their humanoid bipedal form, it was far too easy to forget that these individuals were not as they appeared to be … or perhaps that was how they were supposed to be, because after all, how they appeared now was part of their physiological makeup.

One of the other cat creatures said, “Knosa place. Mosta wha we yawolins on is aweredy there.” The rest of the cat creatures errked in agreement.

Kitty said, “Whena Ooomans ready, trails us there n we sees.”

It didn’t take Norton or Jill long to return the files back to the safety of the storage bins. With Kitty in front of them and the other in front of him leading the way, the rest watched their back. They made their way through the dark corridors of the installation. Norton looked around and had the grim gruesome thought of some poor hapless nasty attacking.

Jill noticed Norton’s grim expression, “What’s up? Seems we just got some fairly good news.”

Norton seemed to become aware.”What? Oh, sorry. Was thinking about some idiot baddie attacking us just now.” He looked around at the dozen cat creatures that made up their party. “My thoughts got kinda dark.”

Jill giggled as she shook her head. “Men. Always got that killer instinct, huh?”

Norton looked at her and blinked, then both of them burst out laughing. Of course, it took some explaining to Kitty before he understood the nuances. One of the female cat creatures said something in their language, and all of the female ones laughed in the errking way of their species. The males … laughed noticeably a lot less and seemed a bit embarrassed for once.

Jill and Norton were totally mind blown when the cat creatures led them outside and to another large metal door set in the stone of a cliff, this one seemingly well tended, or at least well preserved. The cat creatures couldn’t have led them to this one first, though; it didn’t look like there would have been any way to get to it without going through the complex.

They opened the massive door easily using the ID card – it simply vanished while they entered as the rest had. It opened into what was obviously a huge underground hangar. What was stored there were some type of large aircraft. They were sleek and elegant beyond belief.

Kitty stood on his hind legs, held a paw towards the aircraft, and said, “No no how theys work. Themsa thingys other Oomans went other places beyond tha sky.”

The interior of the hangar was pristine clean. It was more than obvious that this particular area and its contents were well taken care of. Neither Norton nor Jill had ever imagined such elegant aircraft as they slowly approached for a closer inspection.

“Well,” said Norton, “I used to be qualified for Army helos, and I know you’ve got a licence to fly fixed-wing craft … but I don’t know if either of those things would help with these.” These looked aerodynamic, but didn’t have wings or rotors in any Earthly sense. It was clear they flew by magic, or thaumionics, or whatever one called it. They were designed to cut cleanly through the air but with no need to support or direct themselves by interacting with it.

“Those are probably fighter craft,” said Jill, pointing to some that were super sleek needle-shaped craft, obviously one-seaters. “But then … those are probably passenger carriers, and those are likely cargo vessels.” She pointed to others that had a broader fuselage and five or six guidance fins that extended along the length of the craft. There was a group of large ones, and another group of even larger ones.

“Tempting as they are,” said Norton, “what we’re looking for is equipment precise enough to let us measure the differences in waveforms between our devices and what would work here … somehow. I’m still not totally sure how we’re going to do that, though I’ve got the beginnings of some ideas.”

“So do I,” said Jill. “But …”

Their guide cat told them, “Oomans trails me. Is over here. Dis ways.” He led them through the hangar, past the aircraft, to another door, which also opened to the ID card. It was another hallway, but there were many doors along it. He stopped in front of one of them. “Think they use tha flyin thingies ta gets here.” Norton opened this door as well … and found a particle accelerator lab, only using this universe’s magical technology.

“Wow,” said Jill. “OK, that’s a … what did they call it … A semeion collider? I read about this. When thaumions enter into bound states and form a type of … well, what we would call hadrons, but they’d call them semeions. This is designed to throw them at each other and see what other particles come out as a result.”

“Everything’s so well preserved here,” said Norton. “Probably since it’s more expensive, they used their sciences to make them super durable. These are computers, probably more geared toward human operators … and if they’re connected to one of those energy cells …” He looked around for a power button and found one; glowing text appeared in the air above the console, describing its boot procedure.



Over time, they figured out how to actually run the collider and took some data. But they also found that nearby rooms contained very precise equipment, and more documentation that told them how to use most of it. Over the next few months they worked until they actually got Norton’s phone to work.

They’d also found a way to compatibly charge the thing, since they did still have electricity here. They’d found microscopic manipulator devices capable of making minute adjustments to matter, including the chips in Norton’s phone.

His phone screen showed the corporate logo of the manufacturer, then continued on to its home screen. At the top it said, “NO SIGNAL,” but other than that, it worked. He tried taking Jill’s photo with its camera, and even that worked. “Great!” Norton said. “So, these are the adjustments that were necessary to make that happen, down to the tenth decimal place, and it’s pretty amazing that we can be that precise.” He pointed to a readout on the computer’s “screen,” glowing numbers floating in the air.

“OK, I can fit those into the equations I’ve come up with,” said Jill, “and what I get is this.” She pointed at her display, where several equations hung in the air. “And this agrees with the measurements these people made of this universe’s physical constants, so that’s good too.”

“Does that mean …?” Norton asked. He kind of knew the answer already.

“Yes,” said Jill. “It means that if we can build the equivalent of our experiment using this technology, we can use those parameters to get ourselves home. Oh, and it also means that if Edward or anybody else comes here looking for us, we know how to fix their computers so they’ll work here. Of course, they won’t work at home anymore after that – until we can get that adjuster widget to work back home.”

“We’ll just have to discover thaumions once we’re home,” said Norton.

“Oomans learn how ta get home?” asked Kitty. As usual, there was a constantly-shifting group of the feline creatures around, some arriving, others leaving.

“We just made a huge step toward it, anyway,” Jill told him.

“Is good,” Kitty said. “Is good ta be home. We sad you no can go home. We try help oomans go home. Trails us, we tookted you ta our home an shows u that we a peoples too.” With this, the feline like creatures began to lead us out of the huge complex into the wilds outside.



The group had a distance to travel, but what Norton and Jill saw when they arrived almost made their minds crash. The Lizard Cat civilization was much more robust and rich than they had ever assumed.

At first they didn’t realize. After walking among several of the vine and tree enshrouded dome structures, it dawned on them they were obviously in the middle of a large collection of the structures, all blended and perfectly in harmony with the surrounding forest.

It was also about the time Norton and Jill realized that they had started seeing a large number of male and female cat creatures, accompanied by young kits, meandering all through the area on whatever business they had at the time.

Jill said with amazement in her tone, “Norton … This is a rather large town. It's built in such way that it not only blends into the natural environment, it somehow synergises with it.”

Norton stopped and took a good look around. Once he understood what his eyes were looking at, it was more than plain. He could even tell the ingenious way all the dwellings were wired with what appeared to be nothing more than vines growing randomly about.

Kitty came up and said, “Ooomans come trails me. Take you to tha place they does tha weird sciency stuff.”

Kitty turned and slowly slinked off, with Norton and Jill very close behind. Both of them did notice the other creatures roaming about took interested notice of them, but still continued about their daily missions.

After a walk through some extremely beautifully flowered avenues, Kitty came to a door in one of the dome structures that did that weird vanishing act too. Kitty motioned for them to follow as he entered the building.

Norton and Jill stopped in amazement as they looked around. The foyer was as advanced and well decorated as any they could think of. Kitty went to the reception counter and interacted with the receptionist there for a moment, then led them to an elevator unit that had a few surprises.

Once they had entered and the door appeared, Kitty made a weird yowling sound. Jill and Norton felt a really pleasant tingle wash all through them, then the door opened on a fantasy land of electronics, advanced technology, and several other items they had no clue as to what they might have been.

Everywhere Norton or Jill looked, there was another unimaginable thing they had no idea what it could have been. Both of them now knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Lacerta Cattus was as, if not more, intelligent than they.

“We helps oomans get home?” asked Kitty. “Is awful thing, no can go home. We sad for oomans. Want help.”

Jill and Norton looked at each other, then turned back to Kitty. “Can we explain how we got here? Maybe you can help us figure out a way to build something like the experiment that got us here … so we can use it to get back.”

Kitty said, “You splain with board over here. We listen.” Kitty led them to what was apparently a glassboard, like the ones they had found in the installation. Just as there had been there, there were pens that seemingly wrote on the glass in colored light, and text and images could be printed to the board or copied from it.

Several of the felines gathered round. Norton and Jill each picked up a pen and began.



“400 tests,” said Edward, looking at the data, “and 400 times the probe’s systems have crashed the moment it went through the portal. That didn’t happen to Norton and Jill’s probe.”

Dr. Beth Sibelius, one of the experts in quantum field theory Edward had hired for the project, replied, “Yes, but their probe was very basic. It had an electric motor to go forward, and it was pulled back by a winch on this side. Its instruments were also very basic. Most of the data analysis was done on this side. The most complex part of its systems were its accelerometers – and look at the data they sent back.” She pointed at her tablet’s screen.

“You’re right … absolute gibberish,” said Edward. “The rest of the data is fine. So … what would it be about the portal that scrambles the data?”

“I don’t think it’s scrambling the data,” said Beth. “I think it’s scrambling the probe. Something about the environment on the other side is making the probe go crazy – and that’s consistently the case, whether it opens on empty space or on a planet.”

“What could do that?” Edward asked. “And another thing – we’re seeing planets about 90% of the time, and what’s more, they’re usually in sync with us, or nearly. Not whizzing by because they’re in a different reference frame. They’re not moving relative to us, or barely moving. How can that be? It’s almost as if …”

“Hypothesis,” said Beth, “we aren’t opening portals to other places in our universe but rather portals to slightly different parallel universes.”

“With slightly different physical constants, not noticeable to us but significant to sensitive electronics,” said Edward.

“This could potentially have a huge impact on the starship project,” said Beth.

“The starship can’t be jumping to other universes where its computers don’t work,” agreed Edward. “It’ll be stranded, and that’s the best-case scenario if it doesn’t crash. What do we do?”

“Perhaps there’s a way to recalibrate the portal and restrict it to travel within this universe,” Beth said. “This term in the Sykes-Anannanias equation here … it has a degree of freedom. What if we varied the gauge?”

“Worth a try,” Edward said. “Let’s come up with a hypothesis about what that might do, then let’s test that hypothesis. Meanwhile, I’ll run more tests with this rig. This means Beth and Norton might be on an … alternate Earth. Knowing that might help find them.”

“On it,” Beth said.



The feline creatures spoke amongst themselves in their own language for a while, then some of them morphed into humanoid form and also began writing equations on the glassboard. “We thinks we makes a kinda celerator like the one oomans talk bout, but gots be different,” one said, drawing a diagram.

“Use a thaumion stead,” said another, writing an equation. “See? Needs teric field here n here … makes thaumions bend. Like magnetic fields oomans talk bout.”

They continued, and Jill and Norton even sort of understood, having read some books in the installation about this world’s thaumion physics.

“We never try twistin beam like that,” said the first feline scientist. “Is mazin’ idea. No wonder we no scover this. Issa neat twisty tail trick.”

“Well, thanks!” Jill replied. “You think this might actually cause a wormhole? Of course, it’s not exactly a wormhole; that’s more of a figurative way to use that term …”

“Think maybe make hole,” the second feline scientist remarked. “No no ‘til try. Quations say it gonna, though. Gotsa test.”

Norton and Jill stayed in the Lizard Cat city for several weeks, learning about their culture and working on the growing apparatus that was going to be a new particle accelerator. The felines had tools even more magical than the ones in the installation – they’d started with that technology thousands of years ago and had been improving it ever since, but they didn’t seem to have the same drive for progress for its own sake that humans seemed to have.

Instead, they worked on some innovation when they decided they needed it. Still, it had been thousands of years, so they had handheld devices that could fabricate parts and equipment, for example.



Back at the L1 Lagrange ship yard location, a very large and elegant starship had been taking shape over the past few months. It was the very first starship of this scale ever produced by mankind. NASA and the military both had extremely high hopes for the new NR Wdrive. But in Buchanan’s office, things weren’t going smoothly.

“Yes, Sir,” he said on his phone, “but the research and development team has run into a serious problem … Yes, I know there’s more and more pressure to install the engine in the ship and continue testing … but all the probes they’ve been sending have basically been committing mechanical suicide … Surely you can see, Sir, that if anything like that happens to the ship, it would be catastrophic for the project … OK, well, let me explain.”

Buchanan explained that after losing the first six probes due to unknown causes, the research team had added a failsafe, a carbon steel cable attached to each probe including a data tether that transmitted data directly back to the lab.

“You see, Sir, before they added this auto-retrieve cable, the data they were getting from the probes before they failed had basically been garbage. After they added the cable, it wasn’t much better, but at least they got something. The best they could tell from the mess they got back was that something during transit had changed many of the aspects of the electronics and added and removed data to its programming. After analyzing the data carefully, the changed data was determined to be just as much electronic garbage as the rest of the data created by the severe and radical changes within the probe at the time of arrival.”

“So, Sir, what they’re theorizing is that the drive’s actually been sending the probes to a parallel universe of some kind, not to our own, and it has slightly different physical properties, so electronics don’t work right …”

Meanwhile, at the lab, Beth watched over Edward’s shoulder as he ran the newest transit model they had just compiled. The AI governing the model had previously been used by NASA to seek out anomalous energy waves and frequencies. What the AI’s interpretation of the data said was that the probe had left plainer normal space-time and entered another continuum.

Beth commented, “Well, darn. Even the AI is losing its mind.”

Edward began adding some new code to the transit program that the AI had just crunched up. He said, “Not necessarily. From what I’m seeing, what the AI is saying is that the data’s basically confirming my theory – the probes have been leaving our current space and entering similar but … different space.”

Beth asked, “Different, but specifically how?”

Edward replied, “Not exactly sure yet. I need to do more research on this new data set. The AI is basically telling us the NRW Field took the probe to this location … but with a delta in another dimension with similar but different enough physics that it scrambles our probes’ electronics. Another thing, the AI is identifying something we’d always rejected as a statistical error as a significant signal due to its persistence in our experiments.”

Beth thought. “Can we make our measurements more precise and determine whether that’s truly a statistical error … or something significant?”

“Well, that’s the next step for the team,” said Edward. “We’ll all have to rack our brains and come up with ways to eliminate measurement error.”



Edward’s team had a dozen of the world’s brightest physicists on it, and in a week’s time they had not only completely redesigned the original experimental rig; they’d done so using almost all the same parts. “Just a bit more precision in the build and a recalibration of the field emitters went a long way!” said Edward as one of the others put the finishing touches on the code. He told Beth, “Your theoretical model of the dimensional delta’s effect on the trans-threshold space’s physics is really helping us get a handle on what’s going on here.”

“Well, the experiment we’re about to do will be the real test,” Beth replied. “Are we ready?”

“Ready!” said Andy, the physicist who had just finished compiling the code. He rolled his chair backward away from the console. “Simulation is good!”

Edward said, “Once we’re ready to take data, let’s start this run!”

“Ready,” said Hannah, who was monitoring the data recording system.

“Powering up,” said Beth. The equipment hummed, and the sound was somehow tighter than before, more controlled. The portal opened, and its appearance was steadier, less chaotic.

“Extending probe,” said another team member.

“Receiving data,” Hannah reported.

“Retrieving probe in T minus 10 … 9 …”

“Predicted data variance detected,” said Hannah.

“That’s good,” said Edward. “Just as expected.”

“2 … 1 … 0, retrieving probe!” The winch started winding, and the cable pulled the tiny probe back through the portal, which closed precisely as predicted.

“That was awesome, people!” Edward shouted encouragingly. “Smooth as silk.”

“Software analyzing data,” said Andy. “And … comparing with theoretical predictions …” Everyone waited with bated breath as they stared at the monitor.

A cheer went up as the results came through. Beth practically shouted, “10 to the minus 10 uncertainty! Correlation between the delta and the variances! And we might have just discovered a new particle! Yes!”

“I have to tell Buchanan,” said Edward. “This is a breakthrough.”



“So what you’re saying is that you can control it now,” Buchanan said. “The brass will be very encouraged to hear that. I’m getting a lot of pressure from higher up to get the drive installed on the ship.”

Edward offered, “Well, we should be able to size up what we’ve come up with, no problem, but we really need more testing to prove that we can really keep the dimensional delta contained. What we’ve proven, though, is no small thing – we can predict the variances in physical constants in the trans-threshold space based on the dimensional delta. That means we have an estimate for the delta that Jill and Norton experienced.”

“Just so I’m clear,” said Buchanan, “the drive’s still sending the probes to parallel universe, not this one? Because we’re hoping to send the ship to, well, other places in this universe.”

“Yes,” replied Edward, “but we’ve now got a much more reliable measure of which parallel universe, and some control over which one too. I’d like to improve that control. We’re going to run some more tests today, take some more data, and see what we see.”

“Good,” Buchanan said. “The pressure’s building up like you wouldn’t believe, though. I’m starting to measure it in stars calling me per day. When it becomes stars per hour, that drive’s going to get put on the ship, ready or not.”

“Actually,” said Edward, “with the new design, why don’t we go ahead? This design is brilliant. The team’s outdone itself. It’s likely that control refinements we make will be minor changes from here on out.”

“That’s what I want to hear,” said Buchanan. “Get me some blueprints, and we’ll get the thing built.”

“Sending them now,” said Edward.



“Well, it hasn’t been entirely as easy as just scaling up the experimental drive,” said Buchanan, “but we’ve overcome the issues. We’re actually ahead of schedule now. I had my doubts, but here we are.” He looked like he was standing in space, showing some VIPs a virtual view of the space dock facility where the builder robots were attaching the NR Wdrive parts to the starship, one at a time. The ship looked like it was wearing a circular belt around its middle.

“The issues have been resolved?” asked the Secretary.

“Edward tells me the uncertainty is now below 10 to the minus 10,” Buchanan said. “And research continues. We can make it.”

“We’re hearing intelligence that our rivals are working on the same thing,” said the general.

“I really don’t see how they could be even with us,” Buchanan said. “Right behind us … maybe. But I think they’re exaggerating their success.”

“But you’re not …” the Secretary half-asked. “Right? You’re confident?”

“As it’s been explained to me,” Buchanan said, “the ship will have full control over its dimensional delta.”

“To within 10 to the minus 10,” said the Secretary.

“Exactly,” said Buchanan.



“Now, let’s see how it works,” said Norton. The Lizard Cat scientists and engineers had helped him and Jill assemble an amazing apparatus, which Norton had been calling a “lemon on a stick,” because of its shape and size. But all the science he’d learned in this universe and all the engineering know-how of the Lizard Cats told him that it should actually work. It was a truncated spheroid attached to an extended shaft packed with microcomponents that directed the thaumions along incredibly precise paths. It wouldn’t have worked in Jill and Norton’s home universe … but many other things they’d seen wouldn’t either.

“We ready,” said one scientist. “Here go.” He pressed a button on the device, which was firmly clamped down onto a bench so it wouldn’t move. It hummed, and a glowing ring of light appeared in the air forward of the truncated spheroid, about a foot in diameter. Through it, they could see a twilight scene with a deep blue sky full of stars in the distance, punctuated by the silhouettes of distant tree-covered hills.

“That looks just like our portal,” Jill said hopefully.

“The data readings look good,” said Norton, watching them appear on the glassboard. “Now … for the probe.” The probe was Norton’s phone. They’d found ways to charge its battery using equipment from this universe, but it remained a device of his home universe. He turned it on, and carefully thrust it through the portal, attached to a long handle. Its screen lit up on the other side, he could see, but then it filled with blue and black rectangles, and went dark. He disappointedly brought it back. The Lizard Cat scientist switched off the portal.

“Well, it’s a start,” he said. “That was definitely different behavior, but it wasn’t home.” He sighed. “It’s progress, but it’s slow.”

“Bettern last test. We keeps try,” said the Lizard Cat.

“No worrys oomans,” said Kitty. “It work one day. We make it.”



Back on Jill and Norton’s Earth, things were suddenly not going well for the project. The starship was the most advanced technological wonder mankind had ever produced. But its only problem was that there were small factions who had large numbers of long range-destructive weapons. Many of those factions had banded together and even resorted to piracy to obtain a bigger stockpile of large weapons.

One unlucky morning, a very large flying bird happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and was ingested into one of a nuclear bomber’s jet engine intakes. The huge lump of inert flesh and feathers smacked into a rotating razor-thin turbine blade moving at over 40K RPM, which then exploded into thousands of metal pieces that impacted other turbine blades.

Needless to say, this totally destroyed the engine, causing it to catch fire and explode, removing a portion of the wing it was attached to. The fire and resulting explosion caused the bomber to pitch over onto the side that was now missing part of its wing, and the bomber rapidly augered into the ground. Fortunately this didn’t set off the nuclear weapons aboard the aircraft; they hadn’t been primed, so as a safety measure they couldn’t be set off by a mere impact.

But the result was perhaps worse than the explosion that would have happened. The bomber had crashed in an area claimed by a large coalition of rogue factions, which had thus just acquired 24 of the nastiest hydrous warhead nuclear weapons imaginable; the weapons were shared among them. Each of the 24 explosive warheads also contained 14 smaller independently-targetable nuclear explosives, thus giving them the name hydrous.

Each faction was quick to repurpose the weapons and was able to adapt them to their old-fashioned mobile launchers. It only took them one test launch to prove to the world that they too wanted the secret to NR Wdrive … or else.

Not one of the many nations involved with the starship program had any intention of giving the most dangerous coalition of rogue factions on the planet that kind of data. Unfortunately for everyone, the starship program was back-burnered due to a more pressing global issue that had to be dealt with first.



“But the starship is practically ready,” said Buchanan to his phone. “The first live engine tests were going to happen next week … you can’t pull the funding; the starship’s practically finished! … But it’s right there … yes, Sir.” He sighed and called Edward.

“Oh, hey,” said Edward, his face appearing on Buchanan’s screen. “You … don’t look like you have good news. I’m betting this is about the Mijalan Coalition.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Buchanan said. “They’ve pulled funding on projects left and right. The most dangerous people in the world have nukes now. This is a nightmare in every imaginable way. I wouldn’t want to be the President right now. There’s no good decision.”

“But … wait, does that mean we have to let everybody go?” Edward asked. “This is a dream team. If we can’t pay them, they go their separate ways. They’ll all get other jobs. We’ll never get them back together.”

“I know that!” Buchanan said, slapping the desk with his hand in frustration. “It’s not something I can do anything about. There’s money in the accounts until the end of the month.”

“But this means … we can’t get Norton and Jill back …” Edward said, suddenly turning pale. “They’re stuck … wherever they are. Unless …”

“Unless we can rescue them right away,” said Buchanan. “What’s your data like?”

“Straightened out the coordinate system,” Edward said. “We’ve got the delta shift for Norton and Jill narrowed down to within 10 to the minus fourth units. No lock-on yet. And then there’s that elusive particle. That paper’s getting a lot of buzz in the journals.”

“Well there’s a possibility for jobs for some of the PhDs,” Buchanan said. “But can you get a lock? You still have their original rig, right?”

“Right, and we’ve got readings from their probe, and all the alignment settings,” said Edward, “but so far none of the tests has matched the data from Jill and Norton’s probe. We don’t think we’ve managed to scan the same universe they went to.”

“This new particle,” said Buchanan. “What if it’s involved in that somehow?”

“Well it was responsible for what we thought was a measurement error,” said Edward. “But it … wait. What if … we deliberately reintroduced that particle into the process? Right now we’re directing those particles out of the system when they’re generated. But what if we were to rearrange the setup so the particles fed back in?” Edward was scribbling equations on the piece of paper in front of him. “It would … it would cause the same variance we originally observed! That’s brilliant! Howard, you’re a genius! The problem isn’t that we had a measurement error. The problem is that we got rid of that error, which wasn’t an error! I … have to go.” Edward ended the call.



“There is data that is given to the public, and data that is not,” said the spokesman for the Mijalan Coalition on the Internet video. “We demand all the data for the NR Wdrive project, and we demand it now. If it is not released immediately, we will pick a city in one of the nations collaborating on the starship project, and we will target it with one of our devices.” The video cut to a clip of one of the launchers, prepped with one of the nuclear warheads and ready to launch. “You will not know in advance which city it will be. You will not know when the missile is coming. The only way to prevent this is to release the data as soon as possible.”

Buchanan and the various government officials and military generals looked at each other. “That missile undoubtedly has a thermonuclear warhead,” said one of the scientists, “but I don’t think it can actually reach any American cities.”

The director of one of the intelligence agencies replied, “You don’t think? From analysis of that video, that site is actually in Central America. It could easily hit any city in the lower 48. And our reports tell us that the coalition has other launch sites that could hit any of our allies.”

“So what do we do?” asked Buchanan. “Just give them the data?”

The official from the State Department offered, “They’re trying to make themselves look like the good guys and us like the bad guys, make it look like we’re hoarding the data. They claim they want the data released to the world. What if we do just that? Give it to everyone, not just them. We know they want it for themselves, but what if we erase their advantage by giving it to everyone?”

“And have everyone in the world able to just … open a portal to another dimension?” asked one of the generals.

“It’s not as easy as that,” said Buchanan. “It requires some precision equipment and a lot of scientific know-how. But that knowledge is out there already, and nobody’s been doing that. And besides, what we want to do with the starship, sending it to another point in this universe, hasn’t been tested yet. That test was canceled by this very situation. We don’t actually have any data about that. If that’s what the Coalition wants, they managed to prevent it by the very act of demanding it.”

“Doesn’t mean they won’t carry through on their threats,” said the intelligence director. “We’ve got people on this, but don’t count on their being able to sabotage the launch or disable the weapons. There just hasn’t been enough time.”

“What drives me nuts about this is that almost all the data’s public already,” said Buchanan. “They just have to subscribe to the scientific journals and read the papers. The only data that’s not out there is about the design of the starship itself – all the scientific principles are public knowledge.”

“Well, if that’s all, then let’s make that public knowledge too,” said the State Department official.



“The White House has just announced that the design for the new NR Wdrive spacecraft will be released to the public sphere as soon as possible,” said the news anchor. “The Mijalan Coalition has not yet responded.”

Edward and the team of scientists were listening to the news as they wrote equations, did calculations, and slightly adjusted the angles of the experimental rig in the lab. “No, no, this will work,” said Beth, altering the plan in the design software. “We just shift this angle by 0.54 and change this input voltage by 32.3%. That will have the same net acceleration but direct the beam parallel to the ion beam.”

“I’m running the simulations with those changes … yeah, it checks out.”

“OK, I’m tweaking the rig.”

“I’m on the electronics.”

“Let me get the software modded.”

“We still want to do the full sweep, or narrow it?”

The room was full of activity until the President appeared on the news and announced, “The data for the NR Wdrive is already public knowledge, out there for anybody to read. I’ve read it, and I totally understand it. Simple stuff for a very stable genius like me. Only thing being held back was the starship blueprints, and now we’ve released those so everyone can see it, the Mijalan Coalition, everybody. If the Coalition launches those missiles now, it’s because they’re just bad guys who want to blow up somebody in the developed world, which they hate. They’ve got what they want – or said they wanted. You know, I bet they want more. I bet they get on the Internet and say they want something else or they’re gonna blow up something. That’s the kinda people these guys are.”

“Why is this guy President?” asked Edward. “He’s a complete moron! He never read those physics papers. He’s never gotten over a D in a physics class in his life. And he’s running his mouth instead of trying to defuse a delicate diplomatic situation involving nuclear weapons. I just can’t listen to any more of this.” He thumped the rig in frustration.

And the TV turned off.

There was a pause.

“That was weird,” said Beth, breaking the sudden silence. “The remote’s over there. Nobody’s near it. How could that have …”

“The remote’s infrared,” suggested one scientist. “Could the rig have emitted the right signal pattern to turn it off?”

“It doesn’t emit significant infrared,” said another. “And the odds against emitting just the right pattern are … astronomical.”

“Edward, you bumped the rig,” said Beth. “Where exactly did you strike it?”

Edward blushed. “I hope I didn’t damage anything,” he said, “but it was … right about here?”

“It was only at baseline power, though.”

“What does that part do?”

“That’s the part that directs the new particles, you know, the ones so new nobody has a name for them yet?”

“But it wasn’t fully powered.”

“Could still be producing them.”

“What direction are they emitted in?”

“... Exactly toward the TV, right now. We were adjusting the angle.”

“Could that have …?”

“Do it again.”

Edward tried thumping the device again. Nothing happened.

“You wanted to stop the madness on the TV, Edward,” said Beth. “Try … meaning to do something.”

“OK,” Edward said. “I want to turn the TV around so I don’t have to see it.” He thumped the device.

The cart the TV was on rotated slightly.

“What.”

“How?”

“Why?”

“Observer effect?”

“Action at a distance?”

“Let’s just finish aligning the rig,” said Edward. “We can think about this while we do it.”

When they had the rig adjusted to match the new design, they noticed that the part Edward had struck was now aimed directly through where the portal would be when they activated it. “OK, given new data,” said Beth, “everyone try to stay focused on the pure test, just get the data into the computer. We’ll try something else after, but for now, just data. Eye protection on.” They put on their protective glasses and started the run, letting the computer control the whole experiment. Repeatedly, it opened a portal, pushed the probe through it, winched it back, closed the portal, altered some parameters, repeated, and continued with this as the team observed.

When it was done, the computer drew the graphs, comparing their data with the data from Jill and Norton’s disappearance. Nothing matched exactly. “That’s way closer than before,” said Edward. “We’re on the right track, but not quite there.”

“I want to try something now,” said Beth. “This time, Edward, hold the particle emitter component and think of Jill and Norton. We’ll set the parameters to the closest trial from the last run.”

When the rig was powered up and the portal opened, Edward was doing just as Beth had suggested … almost.



All Edward had on his mind was finding the correct frequency and quantum location Jill and Norton had vanished into. He was also slightly frustrated over what was going on in the world currently.

Without warning, the equipment monitoring the frequencies and amplitudes went, as one of the techs described it, totally off-the-wall bonkers.

There was no doubt that there was a real particle at this frequency and energy level, as the graph showed the energy peak growing in size and strength, but the field densities were completely flat and showed no readings. To everyone’s total amazement, most of the readings on the particle made no sense in any way.

The portal opened. It had exactly the same boiling, coalescing energies surrounding it as the original. All the recorded data began appearing as if it were a carbon copy of the earlier probe’s data, only this time it was much sharper because of all the refinements.

The image within the portal cleared. Everyone stared in total amazement, shock, wonder, or whatever their varied emotional states were … and saw Norton and Jill standing there among several peculiar bipedal creatures, and many that appeared to be feline in nature … all apparently working on some type of device.

Without warning, everything went dark as a massive circuit breaker tripped. The normal energies it was designed to take had been exceeded by far with this new energy within the system. The portal was gone, and the computers were on battery backup as they saved their data, then shut down for safety.

“No no no!” shouted Edward. “They were there! We were so close!”

There was a lot of speculation in the dark. “Was that them?” “What were those things they were with?” “Did they find … help?” “It looked like they were doing an experiment too.” “Were they trying to get home at the same time we were trying to get them home?”

Edward was silently thinking about everything. The scary thing was, if he thought really hard and came near the device he had hit, he was starting to believe anything could be possible. Especially after the portal thing just now.

The lights in the lab suddenly came back on, and all the computers and other equipment start auto booting. Everyone immediately started looking at the data they’d just recorded.

After looking at it for a moment, Beth said, “As much information as we’ve managed to collect, so little of it makes any kind of sense.”

One of the other theoreticians said, “But it’s becoming more and more clear that this ‘statistical error’ is a real particle. There must be an undiscovered field or fields, and this particle must be an excitation of one of them.”

But Edward had also started speculating on something else. This new energy field could actually be manipulated. “I have to know what was happening when I was hitting this component,” he said, detaching the box he had been striking from the rest of the experiment. “What exactly was that causing?”

“You’re right,” said Beth. “Let’s have a look at that source emitter. There is no way that your bumping it as you did contributed significantly to the energy of the emitted particles … but perhaps you altered their trajectory slightly …”



“That was Edward!” shouted Jill. “I saw him! Didn’t you? Am I crazy?”

“No, that was either him or some alternate-universe double,” said Norton. “If that’s a thing that happens, anyway.”

Jill replied, “Well, it’s not impossible, but we shouldn’t make any assumptions. But … I think I recognized Beth Sibelius there! I remember meeting her at a conference. And there were several others there I think I recognized! Edward’s gotten some real heavy hitters to help.”

“But … then the connection seemed to be cut off,” Norton said. “Nothing seemed to go wrong on our end … did it?” He looked toward the Lizard Cat scientists.

“Machine fine,” one of them said. “Was … peeerfeck alignment. Then … was off again. Other oomans, something go funny. Maybe lose power.”

“Yea, sawed lots sparks,” said another. “Oomans home use lots lectricity, yea? Think they lose power.”

Norton sighed. “That must have been pure luck, with them running their experiment at the same time we were running ours. It’s hard to say when we’ll get that lucky again.”

Jill added, “Well, we can try making sure we’re always running our experiment at the same time of day – time seems to flow at about the same rate here as back home, and the length of the day seems equal or nearly so.”

“Righty,” said one of the Lizard Cats. “We make sure run the speriment same time every day. With same settings. Give ‘em lots chances to have luck.”

“I agree,” said Jill. “We can work on our other projects, but at this time every day, we try to contact Edward again. Same settings.”



“My emotional state?” asked Edward. “You think that somehow altered the experiment?”

“We’ve ruled out everything else,” Beth said. “We’ve had a machine thump the box with exactly the same force, direction, and location. No effect.”

Edward complained, “But how can my … thoughts, emotions, intentions … affect the behavior of some quantum field?”

Beth shrugged. “That’s for us theorists to figure out. For now, it works experimentally. We’ve ruled out everything else, so, as Sherlock Holmes said, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer.”

“We don’t really understand how thought happens,” Edward mused. “Perhaps it’s tied in with this unknown quantum field too …”

“Look, try it yourself,” said Beth. “I’ve set up an interferometer over there, Michelson-Morley style – very sensitive. The source emitter’s pointed directly toward it. Anything that disturbs it will be immediately obvious and will show up on the graph. Just … think at it. Don’t even touch it this time.”

“Just think?” asked Edward. “How could that possibly … well, if thought is somehow coupled to the unknown field …”

He thought about the emitter. About how frustrating this all was. About how badly he wanted his friends home.

“You can stop now,” said Beth. Edward looked up at her. She was pointing at the monitor. It was showing a graph. And the graph was all over the place, leaping jaggedly up and down – except before he’d started thinking about the emitter, and after. There, it was flat.

“What does this mean?” Edward asked.



“This means we’ve only got a limited time to try this,” said Edward. “We’re running out of time. The experiment’s going to be shut down. Soon we won’t have any electricity to work with. We’re going to make a portal to the starship, and we’re going to try to use it to get Jill and Norton back home. It’s got deployable solar panels and a nuclear reactor.”

The others gasped. “You’re going to try to open a portal to the interior of the starship?” “At the L1 point?” “What about the velocity differential? We’re on a rotating planet.”

“There shouldn’t be any reason why it wouldn’t work,” Beth said. “We’ve got frame of reference compensation now.”

“And we’ve never used it,” pointed out another scientist. “Besides, once on the starship, we won’t have this rig to work with.”

Beth replied, “The starship’s drive is this exact same equipment, only geared toward traveling to other points in this universe, rather than other ones. But it can be adjusted with software.”

“We hope,” pointed out another physicist. “It hasn’t been tested.”

“Who better to test it?” said Edward. “Who knows the science better, both theory and experiment? I’m not asking everyone to come with me – I wouldn’t be surprised if I were the only one to go. But anyone who wants to help is welcome.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” said one of the scientists, “but this sounds like a suicide mission, and even if you come back alive, you’ve basically made the career-ending move of stealing a trillion-dollar starship from the US government. I’ve got a family, and a good job lined up after this. Good luck, but I just can’t.”

Beth said, “I understand. But I’m in. With Edward and me, at the very least, I’m confident we can operate the drive, find Sykes and Anannanias, and bring them both home. I know we’re talking about moving the drive itself into another continuum with varied universal constants, but I believe we can overcome that.”

Much discussion ensued, but in the end, only Edward and Beth were willing to take what could be a one-way trip to the starship to steal the starship and use it to rescue two people.



After the other scientists left for other jobs in other places, Edward worked hard on the equations while Beth worked on retooling the targeting array. Technically both of them worked feverishly for almost a week. There were no other techs anymore to bring them food and drinks … or to remind them to at least get a few hours sleep every couple of days. They paid out of their own pockets to keep the lab open and electricity going. It wasn’t that bad, as there were no other experiments going on at the lab anymore. Everything else was shut down.

Beth said early one morning, “Eddie, come look here at what I just did. I think I solved the differing frequency issues.”

Edward walked over to the workbench Beth had scattered with electronics, wires, chips, crystals, and many other items. He saw the field generator that would permeate the ship with its home frequency modulations, keeping the electronics from failing … or at least that was the hope. It had never been tested.

He looked over Beth’s shoulder through the magoptic at the micro circuits of the newly reconstructed targeting array. “I see you narrowed the gateway adjustability access so we can reset the frequency from TD to the 3rd power to .00000001.”

Beth handed Edward a full face helmet with many devices and wires attached. She plugged the helmet into the targeting array. She said, “I know it’s worked for you before, so I made this.”

Edward asked, “Just what in the Sam Hill is that thing for?”

Beth replied with a giggle, “To put on your fat head so it can read your thoughts.” She pointed to a small but massively complicated looking device attached to the helmet. “This is the neural translator. What it does is translate your neural impulses into binary so the system can better read it.” She then pointed to another small crystalline item. “And this allows the new particle to intermingle with the translated thought patterns. From there it’s sent to the main energy wave generator.”

Edward said, “That sounds more like a fantasy than reality. But … if this new particle does somehow interact with thought, then maybe …”

Beth placed the helmet on Edward’s head as she whispered close enough for him to hear, “All you have to do is form an image in your mind of … say, the large area in engineering in the new starship. Don’t argue, just do it.”

Edward grumbled over the foolishness of it all but still leaned back in his chair and tried to form an image of the engineering bay in his mind. Beth flipped the power switch … Edward found himself thumping down on his butt in the middle of the starship’s engineering bay, with Beth lying prone beside him.

The transition was instantaneous and painless. They were on the ship, and they didn’t have any of their specialty equipment, but that was ok … there were plenty of items lying about because of the recent construction. Rebuilding their gear would be a snap.



“Well, let’s try the usual for today,” said Norton. He, Jill, and the Lizard Cat scientists powered up the device and loaded the parameters they’d saved on that astounding day when they’d caught a glimpse of Edward through the portal. “And … activating.”

They’d tried this every day at the same time since then, and since that day they’d gotten nothing. But this time … there was a very quick flash. It was actually kind of ridiculous. Someone with a bucket on their head was in the foreground, someone else was in the background, and their environment quickly changed from one place to another, and then just as soon as the flash had started, it was gone.

“What … what was that?” asked Jill. “Did we … record that?”

“Can plays back pictures,” said the Lizard Cat scientist who was helping them today, a female who they’d dubbed Dr. Felicia, because there was no way for the humans to pronounce her actual name. “Here.” She touched some controls on the large glassboard, and the equations and readouts were temporarily replaced with a slow-motion video image. “We go one picture atta time.”

“In the background … is that Dr. Sibelius?” asked Norton.

“I think so!” Jill replied. “So … is that Edward? Why does he have a bucket on his head?”

“It’s got all those cables attached,” Norton said. “Is it some kind of … virtual reality experiment?”

“Could bea thaumion ‘lignment helmet,” said Dr. Felicia. “Is what we do afore we scover thaumion thought twinnins.”

“Oh, I see …” said Norton. “Have they discovered thaumions too? Then what –”

Then both Norton and Jill gasped as the background changed abruptly, and they recognized what it had changed to.

“They … they transported themselves to the starship …” Jill said worriedly.

“Why would they do that?” Norton asked.

“Wait, back it up again please,” said Jill. Dr. Felicia adjusted the image on the glassboard backward a few frames. “Look at the lab. Really look. Look how dark it is. Do you see anyone else there but Edward and Dr. Sibelius?”

“No …” said Norton. “Don’t tell me the lab’s funding’s been cut off … why? Why would they put a stop to the greatest breakthrough in scientific history?”

“Did something terrible happen?” asked Jill. “Did the experiment … kill someone? Oh wait … what if it killed us? What if they think we’re dead? But Edward and Dr. Sibelius don’t think that, or they wouldn’t still be there …”

“Doesn’t matter what happened,” said Norton. “Something did. Could’ve been anything. The point is … if funding got cut for that experiment, which was pretty cheap especially compared to the starship, then the starship definitely got cut too. But they went there anyway.”

“Oh no,” said Jill, “they’re going to try to use the starship to come here …”

“OK, I think we’re going to have to change our research focus,” said Norton, rummaging through the tools he’d brought from the old human installation.



Edward said, “Done. All our refinements have been uploaded to the drive control systems. The ship’s NR Wdrive is basically our experimental rig from back at the lab, writ large. It can take the ship, and itself, along with it to whatever coordinates we specify …”

“Only we’ll have to compensate for momentum differentials,” said Beth. The ship wasn’t on a rotating planet, either here or in any other universe. “But we had to do that to get here, and it worked, so that’s actually been tested once.”

“It’s been tested on the scale of two humans,” said Edward. “Not for anything as massive as this starship.”

“True,” agreed Beth. “The math seems sound, but that can mean nothing once it comes down to real-life testing. There’s also the delta-c, delta-h, delta-alpha, and so on – how to compensate for the changes in fundamental physical constants when crossing to an alternate continuum. We’ve got a theory for how to do that, but it’s only been tested on microprobes.”

“Still, it did work on those microprobes,” Edward said. “If we’re not perfect, we’re close.”

“How do we run a test?” asked Beth. “Can we focus the ship’s drive on a small area?”

Edward called up a graphical simulation. “We designed it so we could,” he said. The screen showed the drive focusing on a small area in the engineering section. “It wouldn’t use much energy from the reactors, either – they were designed to power the drive to generate a portal big enough for the whole ship. A portal a few centimeters in diameter? Much less energy.”

“OK, let’s run our first test, then,” said Beth. “We’ve put together a probe and a support system for it. Let’s use the drive and open a portal for it, using the parameters for when we got a tiny glimpse of Norton and Jill.”

“The program’s already in the system,” Norton said. They ran the program, launched the tiny probe through the small portal that formed in main engineering, and reeled it back in with its cable.



“That was them,” said Jill, looking through a telescope on a tripod that had automatically swiveled to point to where the energy readings had been detected. Its magnification was impossibly high, to see something so far out in space, but she’d clearly seen the tiny portal open and a small object peek through, then pull back, no doubt Edward’s probe.

“They’re going to bring the ship across soon,” said Norton, furiously working on a new device. “And we have no way to know just when, or where. Have to … make assumptions and … cover the bases we can …”



“Well, we have the deltas for the target coordinates,” said Edward. “Let’s run that probe test again with those.” He did so.

Looking at the data coming in from the probe on the other side of the portal, Beth said, “Looks good – we’re getting data while the probe is live on the other side. That’s a very good sign.”

“We could basically take the ship through now,” Edward stated. “Any objections?”

“Just one,” said Beth. “I doubt they’ve noticed anything we’ve been doing from back on Earth – it’s all been inside the ship, and low energy. But if we fully power up the drive, they’ll notice – and when the ship vanishes, they’ll definitely notice. That’s the point of no return.”

“Right,” said Edward, seeing her point. “We become the criminal scientists who stole a trillion-dollar spacecraft.”

“We’re going to either get locked up for life or hired for life,” said Beth.

“That’s assuming our lives go on for long once we use the drive,” said Edward. “Untested at full power.”

“So … let’s give ourselves a bit of time to make sure our calculations are correct,” Beth said.

“All right, good idea,” Edward said. “Just … remember that if the assumptions are wrong, the equations can be 100% perfect, and it won’t matter.”

“Well, the assumptions haven’t been wrong so far,” Beth replied, starting to check their math one more time.



It didn’t matter how many times they checked the math, it always came out properly. Beth finally said, “Put on the helmet and think very hard about Norton and Jill. We need to try to hit this the first time. I’m not real sure if an error would be fatal or not. But just in case … think about us being with Norton and Jill and all of us being OK.”

“Wait,” asked Edward, “do we bring the ship with us? That sounds like it could just … take us to them, with none of us any closer to getting all of us home.”

“You’re right,” said Beth. “How about … well, let’s think about what bringing the ship with us would look like. Would it be landed on the ground? In orbit? In the air?”

“Well, the ship isn’t really designed to be airborne,” said Edward. “What if it were in orbit? If we were in orbit and could ensure that we were in the proper alternate reality, so we knew Jill and Norton were on the planet below, we could work from there.”

Edward put the helmet on, strapped himself into the pilot’s seat, and plugged it in. He closed his eyes and relaxed into the soft embrace of the couch while he imagined Jill and Norton, and where they might be now. Edward did his level best to create an image in his mind based on several of the images they had gotten back from the original probe and the earlier glimpse they’d gotten and recorded. Then he imagined the ship, with Beth and himself on board, in orbit around that version of Earth, the one with Jill and Norton on it.

Beth made a few minor adjustments to the astrogation program, then said, “Enabling in … 5 … 4 … 3… 2 … 1.” She hit the enable switch.

For a seeming instant, there were some kind of ghostly flashes of infinite colors. Beth saw them all around her, not just through the exterior viewscreens but also within the ship. “Are you seeing these unusual color flashes?” she asked Edward.

“Yes,” he said, “even with this helmet on. I have to assume they have something to do with our eyes or brains adjusting to this reality.”

Then Beth realized that she hadn’t been seeing the flashes on the viewscreens but in front of them, because the screens were dark. Every screen was dark. The ship’s computers had all gone down. The overhead lights were still on, but they were starting to flicker. “Uh-oh …” she said. “The ship’s systems … they aren’t compatible with the continuum deltas …”

Edward quickly took the helmet off and looked around. The lights flickered and went out. “Oh no,” he said. “That means … our orbit will decay, and I’m not sure how much oxygen we have left.”

They both quickly did some calculations with pen and paper. They traded papers to check each other’s math. “Good news: there are only two of us breathing the oxygen,” said Beth. “Bad news: I think we’re only going to stay in orbit for another 36 hours or so.”

“Ideas?” asked Edward. “We can try to address the delta variance issues and get the guidance computers back online.”

“Or we can try to figure out how to manually operate the guidance thrusters,” said Beth. “I’ll do that. You do the other.”

“OK.” said Edward, unbuckling himself from the pilot’s couch and going to the guidance computers, while Beth went to the thruster section.



“Oh no,” said Jill, “there they are.” She was again looking through the thaumion-powered scope, and she quite clearly saw the new starship, in a low orbit. She entered her observational data into this Earth’s equivalent of a computer, and the calculations appeared on the glassboard. “They’re in a low orbit. It’s decaying. I don’t think their guidance systems are functioning. This says they’ve got 36 hours before reentry.”

They were on top of the tallest building in the Lizard Cat town, which was about five stories tall. They didn’t need to build upward, so they mostly built outward. Norton and some of the lacerta cattus were building a contraption; it looked like a cannon on a huge gimbaled mount, though the cannon was impossibly thin. Norton swore when he heard Jill’s news. “Can you calculate how long they’ll be in line of sight, and when they’ll be visible from here again?”

“I’m tracking them and estimating orbital elements,” said Jill. “They’ll go below the horizon in about 10 minutes, and they won’t be back for another 90. Estimates are pretty rough, but they’re getting better with more measurements.”

“We’re not quite ready,” said Norton. “But we’ll get them next time around.”

The next 90 minutes were a flurry of activity both on the ground and on the spaceship. “We need a better targeting setup here!” Norton said.

One of the Lizard Cat engineers said, “Could use … surveying scope. Very accurate.” He went to get such a thing.

“Also … we can’t just pull them out of the sky,” Norton said. “We have to alter their momentum gradually, or the G-forces could kill them. That means … we’ll have to start the instant we first see them.”

“Believe me, I’ll be watching,” said Jill. “I’m watching now. Even though I know they won’t be back around the world for another … 75 minutes, at the earliest.”

Meanwhile, on the ship …

“I can fire the thrusters, I think!” said Beth. “The problem is … I can’t turn them. I wouldn’t know what direction to turn them. Also I don’t know which ones to fire, or when. Let me do some math.”

“This thing is hopeless,” said Edward. “It’s as if … the electrons just don’t want to flow through the circuits. The resistors are all the wrong resistance. The capacitors are all the wrong capacitance. The transistors just don’t want to pass current.” He did some math too. “I can’t just increase the voltage or current. Too much current will fry the chips. Too much voltage will fry the capacitors.” He sighed. “What if I reroute this with some of this spare wire …”

“I see them!” Jill shouted, looking at their image through the scope. “Their orbit’s decayed. They’re early.”

“Get ready!” Norton said. “Aiming …” He looked through the scope on the large device he’d been building and rotated its gimbals into position. “I see them too. Activating …” He hit the large button with the palm of his hand. It glowed with a green symbol, and a blue-white beam shot into the sky. “Missed!” He deactivated it and adjusted the scope. “Trying again …” Again with the button and the beam … “Got them!” He and Jill could both see the starship, enveloped by the blue beam. “Now … just enough force to bring them in sync with us …”

Aboard the ship, they first noticed the acceleration. Beth and Edward’s tools suddenly slid toward one side of the room they were each in, while they grabbed hold of something to keep themselves from doing the same. “Whoa!” yelled Edward. “Watch out!”

“What’s going on?” Jill asked. “We couldn’t have hit something – that would have been sudden, and would already be over. Are we re-entering the atmosphere already?”

“No, look at that! Look at a port!” shouted Edward, noticing that there was a bright blue light coming through the manual viewports from outside. “That’s not reentry heat! But what is it?”

Foreseeing that Edward and whoever else had come with him would find the starship’s electronics inoperable, Norton had used the concepts behind the lifter wand he’d found, which was great at lifting heavy weights and moving them around, to make a much larger device capable of imparting far more momentum to much larger objects at a much greater range. He’d explained what he wanted to the Lizard Cat scientists, who knew in principle how to make such a thing but had never actually found a need to do so until now.

Working together, they’d assembled it fairly quickly, adapting machines they already had to the new purpose. “Steady,” he said, adjusting the mount’s motors, which were whining under the load. He was bringing the starship slowly closer to the planet while gradually decreasing its velocity relative to his location. It continued to streak across the sky, but at an ever-decreasing speed.

“It’s some kind of … drag force,” said Edward, looking out the viewport at the planet and the blue light, “but it’s not the atmosphere. I can’t say what it is.”

“One thing about it, though,” said Beth, “is that it’s exactly or very nearly 1 G. Whatever it is … it’s being very careful not to hurt us.”

“Is it … Jill and Norton?” asked Edward. “What … how would they even be doing this?”

“Maybe they’ve learned a lot about this universe’s physics while they’ve been here. After all it’s been months.” said Beth.

“I sure hope that’s what’s going on,” said Edward, “because we’re slowing down, and we’re going to hit atmosphere soon.”

On the ground, Norton was saying, “That’s it … keep the acceleration magnitude to 1 G … as their orbital velocity slows, we won’t have to pull toward us as much … gravity will take over …” They were halfway across the sky, but now they were barely moving across it. The starship was now falling toward them, and the lifter beam was actually having to push them away to prevent an uncontrolled descent.

“A bit less than 1G now, I’d say,” Beth said to Edward, aboard the starship. They’d abandoned their efforts, since they now knew they were either going to crash or be greeted by Jill and Norton at the end of this ride. They sat side by side near a viewport, watching as the planet’s surface got closer and closer.

“This is definitely a controlled landing,” Edward said. “I mean, right? There’s no way this could be some kind of natural phenomenon, could it?”

“We know this universe’s physical constants, except for that new particle and whatever its deal is,” said Beth. “So … we don’t know anything. We don’t know anything about our universe either. It’s kind of … refreshing, really.”

While Beth and Edward awaited the end of their journey, one way or another, Jill was helping guide Norton as he adjusted the beam emitter. “I think they’ll be safe now,” said Norton. “Just a bit more and we can set them down.”

“A bit to your left,” said Jill, looking through her scope. “There’s a nice flat plain there, uninhabited and covered in soft grass and plants. Does that sound OK to you folks?” The Lizard Cats responded positively in their musical errking way.

“I see it,” Norton said. His eye ached from pressing it to the scope for hours, and his back ached from staying in the same position. “It’s coming down … slower … slower … and …”

Edward and Beth found their ship had seemingly landed in the middle of some plush park or something. “Looks like some kind of grassy plain,” said Beth, “with several strange mounds evenly arranged – but they’re so well placed they blend in perfectly with their surroundings.”

Edward said, “I think we’re going to have to manually pop the hatch. I wish the power systems were functioning normally. But it appears we’re … wherever somebody wanted us to be.”

Beth fidgeted with the manual hatch levers and remarked, “I just wonder who that somebody is.”

Edward pointed to the forward viewport and said, “Isn’t that Norton there walking toward us with several of those weird cat creatures?”

Beth’s eyebrows rose in surprise as she replied, “Yeah, and if I’m not mistaken, that other person in back is Jill.”

Edward said, “What happens to the energy field around the ship when we open a hatch and step out?”

Beth looked side-eyed at Edward and said, “What energy field? It looks like it’s gone. Now, hush, quit asking what if before you really jinx us.”

Norton said “Sorry … “ in the most pitiful voice. Both of them laughed.

As she finally found the right levers to release the hatch and pulled them, Beth said, “Well, let’s get to it. I believe Norton and Jill will have a few questions for us.”

Edward unstrapped himself and stood. “I’m very sure they will. Now I’m wondering how we get this thing and ourselves back home, so we don’t have to pay the government back the trillion dollars this ship cost to build.”

“I told you to stop that,” Beth said as she exited through the hatch.



Neither Edward nor Beth had given any forethought to what the many and varied repercussions of their stealing the starship could be. The anomalous energy flashes recorded in the engine bay when Edward and Beth had transported in were basically ignored. Satellites had already recorded several small energy readings all due to microstrikes. Their energy signatures matched and were summarily overlooked.

When the NR WDrive energy corona appeared and the ship vanished within it … that was noticed immediately. The L-1 shipyard instantly went on war alert and notified the U.S. President, who in turn notified others and brought the country to defense condition 2 … the finger was on the button.

America had made deals with China and Russia and offered them places on the ship when the mission to Alpha Centauri launched. In their minds, it was far better to let the Yankee imperialists spend all the money to build the ship and then hitch a free ride. But now that their free ride had vanished, China and Russia were also highly agitated.

All three countries made an immediate no-nonsense demand to the terrorist coalition for the return of the starship. It was more than unfortunate that the individual who was monitoring the transmission for his coalition was high on some kind of drugs. It gave the individual a delusion of grandeur and power he did not have.

His arrogant reply was, “Who are you, you sons of dogs? That ship would be as much ours as it is yours. Never will we willingly give anything up just because you demand it. We now have nuclear weapons, too, so threats mean nothing to us. It looks like your nation needs a live demonstration of our nuclear capabilities.”

It wasn’t until later that the USA, China, and Russia listened more carefully and realized that the terrorists had never actually admitted to having the missing starship.

There was no need for any reply. It was more than obvious that this idiot had said no, which wasn’t an option.

Within a few hours, strange looking drones rapidly appeared in large swarms from every direction across all the claimed territories of the terrorist alliance. These drones were special, as each was basically a flying 1-MW hydrogen fuel cell wrapped in about two pounds of C-4, then encased in an aluminum shell to protect the circuits and wiring. Of course, there were other minor electronics on board, but the fuel cell arrangement was ingenious.

Basically, when the drone had reached its designated target, which was also verified by a small video camera and GPS, a signal was sent to the picric acid ampule that made up its trigger, causing a small explosion. A spring-loaded contact snapped shut immediately after the picric acid ate through the hair-thin metallic retaining pin, completing the firing circuit. The fuel cells produced far more energy than necessary, especially when prompted.

The C-4 detonated, causing the hydrogen fuel cell to explode. It went off with the force of about three kilotons, devastating over ¾ of a mile. There was no residual fallout, ionizing radiation, or lingering clouds of radioactive dust in the aftermath of the detonation.

China, Russia, and the USA all had this swarm drone technology. It had been the Japanese who had suggested using a fuel cell as payload and creating a nuclear bomb/drone. It finally came to light why the fuel cell was so controversial. Japan ought to know, as their commercial automotive fuel cell was banned in many places.

The fuel cell was super easy to install and wire up in the drone’s empty bomb bay. The neatest thing was how inexpensive it was to create them and how effective they were. Compared to a tactical or strategic nuclear missile, they could mass-produce these non-nuclear drones by the thousands for the cost of just one missile, and the drones were radar-avoidance masters due to the materials they were constructed from, their small size, and their instantaneous ability to dodge, dash, and do 100 other things.

Many hundreds of three kiloton explosions rocked the alliance’s territories. After months of sifting through the massive wreckage, evidence was found that all the missing nuclear weapons had been eradicated, along with their launching capabilities. There was no denying the debris they had uncovered were the remains of those devices.

It was assumed, due to the lack of any evidence or debris coupled with the severely massive destruction, that the ship had been destroyed in the assault. Needless to say, not one of the coalition of terrorists was ever heard from again.

It was very fortunate that the Japanese had intervened, because an actual tactical or strategic nuclear missile strike from all three superpowers, which they’d been prepared to do, would have caused severe climate and ecological damage that would have taken centuries for the ecosystem to recover from, if recovery was even possible. As things stood now, it would still take many years for the land to recover.



Unbeknownst to Norton and Jill, while they went to the ship to greet the passengers, the Lizard Cat physicists had made an astounding discovery with the newly completed thaumion collider. To their total amazement, the scientists had discovered that the magic particle, as their new friends had called it, was unaffected by any differing physics from any dimension. It was the one constant across all alternate universes.

Regardless of how the other laws of physics changed, the thaumion particle retained its configuration. This meant that any device powered by the thaumion cells or any other thaumion-based power source would continue to function properly regardless of the current physics the devices found themselves in. Any thaumion-based information processing devices would continue to work too, as would guidance systems, weapons, life support, and anything else that a portal-traveling ship would need.

“We’d like to introduce you to some of our friends,” Norton said as he entered the science lab. “This is Kitty, of course, the first friend we met when we arrived; without him we wouldn’t have survived. He’s a scout and hunter. These are Dr. Felicia and Dr. Leopard.”

Jill added, “Of course, those aren’t their real names, because our vocal apparatus just isn’t designed like theirs; we’ve tried to pronounce their real names, but it just doesn’t work. So they’re OK with us creating nicknames for them.”

“Oomans got more friends,” said Dr. Felicia. “Is good. Should know. We just maked scovery. Hard to say in ooman words. Here is quations.” She pointed to the glassboard, where the equations describing what they had learned were neatly printed, alongside the data and graphs showing the evidence. All four humans looked at the board.

“This is … amazing,” Norton said. “This means …”

“It means the starship needs a massive refit,” said Edward.

“But once it has one,” said Beth, “it won’t need one again. It’ll function in any continuum under any delta conditions.”

“And we’ll be going home,” Jill said. “Obviously we have to get that ship back home. We can’t just let it disappear.”

“Oh, the nations of Earth are probably going insane right about now,” said Norton. “But also, our work, and the very concepts behind the starship, are going to be abandoned and defunded if we don’t. Nobody’s going to want to ever build another one unless this one gets home.”

“Speaking of defunded,” said Edward, who then went on to explain the world events that had led to the project’s being put on indefinite hiatus.

Jill and Norton listened in stunned silence until he was done, then Jill replied, “And of course the whole world’s going to blame this terrorist coalition for the ship’s disappearance.”

“Probably, yes,” said Beth nodding with sudden realization.

“Let’s get that ship refitted,” said Edward urgently.



They all agreed, and they made plans. It would have taken a long time to completely rebuild every electronic system on the ship as a thaumion-based system … if the thaumion particle hadn’t basically been magic. Thaumion-based devices existed that could be programmed to replace one type of machine with another, like an LED with a thaumion-based glowing element.

The Lizard Cats had suggested that Jill and Norton use these converter devices to make their mobile phones work, but they’d declined, because they were too useful for detecting whether their portals had opened on their home universe. And besides, there were no cell towers, so they still would have been useless as communication devices. If they hadn’t chosen not to do this, they might have made the discovery about thaumion universality much earlier.

The Lizard Cat scientists showed them how to carefully program the converters so they could handle any type of chip or circuit. This was what actually took the longest time. They tested them again and again. It took a week.

But the actual conversion was quick. Edward knew the ship’s designs backward and forward, so he was the one to operate the converter – although he couldn’t resist calling it something else.

“OK, I guess we’re ready for me to wave the magic wand,” said Edward. “What? That’s what it looks like, and what it’s about to do seems like nothing less than magic to me.”

He pointed the wandlike device toward the nose of the ship, then pressed and held the device’s button, slowly sweeping it down the ship’s profile from stem to stern. The ship glowed with multicolored light as everything based on the way electrons worked in the humans’ home universe was replaced with components that were instead based on the way thaumions worked everywhere. And when the process was done and the light faded, the ship was changed. Its metals had been transmuted; some of its shape had been reconfigured.

The ship was now a beautiful black with gold trim, and its lines were seemingly much more flourishing. It looked like something from a fairy tale, or perhaps a comic book.

“Is … is everyone on Earth going to recognize this as the same ship?” asked Beth. “It looks so different and exotic.”

“What’s it look like inside?” Norton asked. They all went for the hatch. It opened to the same codes it had been programmed with, and there was power; it didn’t require manual override. “That’s a good sign,” Norton remarked.

Once inside, the humans and their Lizard Cat friends marveled at the shape and color of the renewed ship. All the data displays were working, all the lights were on, and the life support system was producing a cool breeze. Edward and Beth led them to the main control room, where they were able to raise the ship a few feet from the ground with its new kind of thrusters, then deploy landing jacks. The ship hadn’t had landing jacks before, as originally it had never been intended to land – this was something the thaumion converter had been programmed to add.

“I guess we’ll have wait to try out the new launch system until we’re ready to go,” said Beth.

“I … I kind of don’t want to go,” said Jill, looking at their Lizard Cat friends. “I’m going to miss you all so much.”

“Oomans no worry,” said Dr. Felicia, her voice also affected by emotion, though it was hard for the humans to interpret. “You come visit. We have party.”

“We do know how to come back here now,” said Norton.

“So do we,” Edward added. “We have a coordinate system, and we recorded the coordinates from when we briefly made contact. And then we had a power hit that shut everything down, but fortunately we saved all the data.”

“So that’s what happened,” said Norton.

“Everything’s working,” said Beth, inspecting the systems, “even the thrusters and guidance systems we tried to jury-rig when everything went haywire.”

“So … I guess that means we can go home anytime,” Jill said. “And … we kind of have to.”

“We unnerstan,” said Kitty. “Oomans gotta go home. Everybody needa home. Family, friends. You got new friends here. You visit sometime.”

“We will,” said Jill. “I promise. Thank you all so much.”



After solemn farewells, the Lizard Cats left the ship, and Edward and Beth activated the launch system – a thaumion-based beam similar to the lifter device that had landed the ship from orbit. It gradually lifted the ship higher and higher into the atmosphere and increased its velocity until it was in a stable orbit around the planet.

“Wow,” said Beth, finally able to see a full view of the planet on the external cameras, “it looks exactly like Earth.” The familiar oceans and continents were all there.

“Well, we have the coordinates for our universe, so are we ready to look at our Earth?” asked Edward.

“Way too ready,” said Norton.

“Programming the drive … and activating,” said Beth. They felt a wave of energy go through them, and they were looking at another Earth on the viewscreen. They could tell they’d traveled, because the clouds and continents had suddenly shifted.

“Well,” said Norton, “time to shock the world. Again.”

“NR Wdrive ship to Canaveral. NR Wdrive ship to Canaveral.”

“What? NR Wdrive ship?” came an astonished-sounding female voice. “Th-this is Cape Canaveral. Who am I speaking to? Over.”

“This is Dr. Norton Sykes,” Norton said. “I’m here with Dr. Jill Anannanias, Dr. Edward Wilson, and Dr. Beth Sibelius. Transponders show active. Over.”

“D-Dr. Sykes!” the comms operator replied in shock. “You’re … alive? And … you’re in the starship? It’s not destroyed? Receiving transponder signal … Over …”

“It’s better than ever,” said Norton, “There’s a long story to tell. For now, where can we land? Over.”

“Land? The starship was never intended to land … Over.”

“There’ve been some modifications,” Norton said. “We just need a landing area big enough. No need for an airstrip. Over.”

“Give me that,” said a voice. “Good thing I was visiting NASA today. Norton? Jill? Edward? Beth? This is Buchanan. We’re clearing Landing Zone 7, sending you the coordinates for the guidance system. How the hell are you alive, on the starship, and up there? Over.”

“We’ll tell you the story on the ground, Howard,” said Norton. “You’re not gonna believe it. Edward’s programming the landing sequence now. ETA is … two hours 50 minutes as of … mark. Over.”

“I don’t know how you’re bringing that thing down,” said Buchanan, “but this had better be one damn good story. Over.”

“Oh, it is, Howard, it is. Over and out.”



The starship came in for an impossibly quiet landing using what NASA assumed was a thruster system of a type nobody had ever seen before. It was so quiet that the assembled crowd of politicians, security forces, reporters, scientists, and engineers could hear the landing gear creak as it set down. The crowd erupted into cheers as the hatch opened and the stairs extended … stairs that had never been part of the original design. One by one, the four scientists emerged from the ship, which was clearly the same one, but had also clearly been massively altered somehow.

Three men and a small entourage met the scientists at the base of the stairs. The man that held his hand out first was the U.S. President, “Welcome home, Doctors. I’m not real sure about being exactly glad over the end results, but they are far better than I might have hoped. The folks from the State Department will fill you in later.”

He shook hands warmly with the four returning scientists, then introduced the other two men. One was the premier of Russia, the other of China, who both warmly shook their hand and welcomed the wayward scientists home.

As they walked towards the cheering crowds, the President explained to Edward what the final repercussions of his stealing the starship were. State Department officials also told them that they had been gone for such an extended period of time that they would all have to be brought up to speed on current events.

They were told of the devastation and destruction dropped on who they thought had taken the ship and was the same as any carpet bombing by nuclear weapons, but with no fallout or residual ionizing radiations. The only good thing to come out of this disaster, was that one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist sects had been destroyed, and the rest were now so fearful no one heard from them – and there were no longer any terrorists organizations with nuclear weapons, at least for now, that anyone one had any reliable intelligence on at any rate.

Immediately, Edward retorted back angrily, “What? I ‘stole’ the ship? Where the hell do you get that? If anyone had bothered to check, whether or not you had cancelled the funding temporarily, the record clearly shows that there was a power-on test of the NR Wdrive scheduled for that very day.”

The three world leaders stopped in mid-stride and looked at each other first, then contacted their government assistants to consult secret documents on their secure comms. While Beth and Edward acted as if they had real issues with being told they had stolen the ship … in their hearts they knew …

Beth leaned over and whispered to Edward, “Good thinking. I had forgotten about the original timetable, but you’re right. There was a pre-scheduled engine runup test at almost the exact time we went to get Norton and Jill.”

Edward whispered back, “Yeah, good thing I remembered. Not sure if it will keep our butts out of the wringer, but it’s worth a try.”

The three world leaders had obviously gotten the requested data. They seemingly huddled together and had a minimally heated discussion amongst themselves. It got energetic enough the three security teams came to see if all was well. Of course, the leaders stopped their heated discussion long enough to tell them all was well before starting anew.

Beth managed to get hold of a folder that had an after action briefing describing what was done about the supposed theft of the US Starship. Beth tapped Norton on his shoulder and motioned Jill over. She showed them the contents of the folder.

None of them could believe it. USA, China, and Russia, with a bit of instruction from the Japanese, had basically bombed a certain sect and coalition along with all their claimed lands to oblivion. The devastation shown in the pictures of the aftermath were horrendous.

The four stood in open mouthed shock. The true death toll was unknown, although estimates placed it at hundreds of thousands. The land they dwelled in was devastated beyond anything they could have dreamed in their worst nightmares.

They all stopped in a conference room, and Secret Service agents told the President, “Sir, the room is secure.” They then left and closed the door.

The President motioned for everyone to take a seat and stated, “The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, we didn’t cancel the funding because we needed the money elsewhere or anything like that. Governments borrow money all the time. No, it was just that we had a terrorist coalition on our hands that now had nuclear weapons. What could we do? We had to quickly catch up and develop those bomb drones, but we also had to take the starship out of the spotlight.”

The premier of Russia said, in excellent but accented English, “What do terrorists want? Attention. They have a cause. It’s the reason they do everything they do. We were about to make a lot of noise with the first interstellar starship. That would have enraged the terrorists. They would have done anything to get the world spotlight back onto them – and that would have meant one of two things. Either they would have used one of their newfound nuclear missiles on some unsuspecting nation … or they would have directly struck at the starship project. Or both.”

“You mean they’d have targeted Beth and myself,” said Edward. The Russian premier nodded.

“So we had to take the spotlight off the starship, let the terrorists have their day,” said the Chinese premier. “All the while developing the means to destroy them.”

“So you would likely have used the drones against them sooner or later anyway,” Norton interjected.

“Of course,” said the Chinese premier. “We cannot allow terrorists to have a nuclear stockpile.”

“I mean, sure,” said the President, “we do our share of saber rattling, but in the end, our three nations want stability. Good for the economy. Maybe there are some ideological differences, but we’re not terrorists. Terrorists want the opposite. They want to shake things up and make radical demands.”

“So we’re … what?” asked Beth. “Are we criminals or just scientists who were following our plan?”

“Well, the world’s already seen what you brought back,” said the President. “It’s the starship, but you’ve made radical improvements. I don’t pretend to understand the science, but I’m told that you’ve developed some kind of radical new technology. And of course my, er, peers here will want to know about it.”

“I do not want Russian science to fall behind the rest of the world,” said the Russian premier. “I am sure that my Chinese counterpart feels the same.” The Chinese premier nodded.

“And then there are the Japanese, and the EU,” said the President. “We all need to know – or, well, our respective top scientists need to know.”

“So we’re here because …?” asked Edward.

“Because we need you to write up what you’ve got here,” said the President. “We need scientific papers. We have to know what you did to the ship, and how it works.”

“And if we don’t, we’re criminals,” said Beth.

“I do not want to put it like that,” said the Chinese premier, “but the world in general would be far more charitable toward you all if you shared what you have learned – for the benefit of all, of course.”

Norton knew that he’d brought the thaumion converter with them, and it was on board the ship. What would happen if someone converted one of those non-nuclear but very devastating bunker-buster drones to thaumion-powered weapons? Well … they’d do exactly what they did now. There were things thaumions could do that nothing else could, but what if they didn’t focus on that?

“Well, of course we want to share our discoveries with the scientific community,” said Norton. “That’s why we’re scientists. We’ll need time to consolidate just what exactly we’ve learned. We traveled to a universe with different physical laws, where none of our electronics work, and we figured out how to make them work. But it wasn’t easy.” He left out the fact that they’d had help. He didn’t want there to be any military visits to the Lizard Cats.

“Good, then, we’re in agreement,” said the President. The four scientists looked at each other. Were they really? “We’ll let you get to your official debriefing, then your press debriefing.”



They were very tired by the time they were checked into their hotel rooms for the night. Every conceivable question had been asked by government officials, and then again by every blogger and reporter. They knew they’d be able to write a book about this and make a ton of money. And there was one thing they didn’t know, which was what was going to happen to the starship sitting out there in Landing Zone 7.



In another dimension ruled by a different physics, a young female humanoid made an astounding discovery while she was doing wave form studies. She almost wet her panties in excitement as the data scrolled slowly up her screen.

It had taken her months to convince her instructors the deviations she was looking for were real and not a statistical error. Finally, after all this time she had proof. This particular particle was somehow different than all the others in the fact it was stable regardless of any of the other quantum factors that should theoretically affect it. As fast as she could, she backed up all her data. She was going to prove there really was such a particle.

“Martine,” said her advisor, “you cannot have discovered a new particle at that energy. That range has been examined time and again. That is a measurement error.”

“Look again, Dr. Neville,” Martine said. “You’re thinking of the old dataset. This is new.”

He looked again. “Holy smokes!” he said, roughly translated. “This could be it! Your precise rotation of the fields makes the statistical errors cancel out, yet this factor remains! What particle is this? What field is it part of? Does it carry a force? What does it couple to? The implications …”

“We really need to pay attention to this particle,” Martine said, though what she really meant was that her contributions deserved attention.

“We’ll publish a paper! Others can confirm it! Quick, Martine, write this up!”

Martine gave him a stack of pages. “Already did. Have a look.”

“I will,” said Dr. Neville. “And we will get this before the peer review board of the journal as soon as possible, before anyone else can claim it!”

And so it was that Martine’s name was attached to the discovery of what other universes called the thaumion … behind Dr. Neville’s name, of course.



Martine was furious when she discovered that Dr. Neville was accredited with the discovery and she was only listed as one of the technicians on the project that made the discovery. It was not true, and she knew it. She had enough documentation to completely destroy Dr. Neville’s career and reputation. She was determined as she filled out the Rebuttal Paperwork, and filed the proper governmental documents.

Dr. Neville scrambled, trying to prove the allegations against him were unfounded, even though there was no way he could. Too much documentation proved otherwise. Things looked very bad for his future. To his great horror, the discussions of the board were leading to talk of massive time behind bars due to academic theft, plagiarism, and professional scientific fraud. What he had done had been all too common and silently accepted in earlier eras, but things were different now, and women had a better chance of being recognized for their accomplishments in the modern world. In Dr. Neville’s defense, he at least hadn’t engaged in any sexual harassment.

As Martine’s anger cooled a bit and she began to think rationally, she had an idea. After she submitted her rebuttal and many copies of the proof to the Board of Scientific Research that she was the one who had made the discovery of the new particle, she began working on a thaumion device that not only scanned the frequencies like a radio scanner, but could also reliably broadcast information with the new particle, and actually faster than the speed of light at that.

It took a bit, but she finally managed to build a variable potentiometer from the newly discovered crystal technology that allowed for manual selection of frequencies instead of the scatter scanning it had been doing. It wasn’t perfect and didn’t exactly lock on to many frequencies. This was ok for now, she knew how to fix the issues and would do so after her preliminary testing.

Using the slotted target technique, she discovered the signal actually arrived at the receiver unit that was deliberately placed several hundred miles away in another research facility about 14 jiffies before it was actually sent. The implications were obvious: the signal moved through time to the bonded receiver unit. Now that they were working on interstellar flights, there was desperate need for communications that could cross interstellar space in real time like this.

Martine had constructed a device that was tunable to certain frequencies and could transmit on those frequencies and receive coherent signals from the other device she had placed several hundred miles away in another research lab. This test proved the new architecture significantly boosted the performance of GaN amplifiers.

This breakthrough was made possible by discovering a latch-effect in GaN, which led to a major improvement in energy frequency device performance. These next-generation devices used parallel channels, which require sub-100nm side fins — a type of transistor that controls the flow of current through the devices. Of course, she had documented the dickens out of this project so no one could make any claims; she wasn’t going to fall victim to that again. And that was where things stood right when, in another universe our four scientists landed the starship at Cape Canaveral.



Edward, Beth, Norton, and Jill were all huddled in their R&D lab, putting the finishing touches on their newest creation, a true real-time interstellar comm unit. They had published their joint paper on their discovery of the thaumion and its potential, and they were in the process of writing a book about their experience, but for now they had another scientific lead to follow. The frequency selector potentiometer still needed a lot of work and didn’t perfectly align to many wave lengths, but this was being quickly addressed in the next tuner potentiometer they were constructing.

With the addition of support devices called superlattice castellated field effect transistors (SLCFETs), in which more than 1000 fins with sub-100 nm width help drive the current, it stabilized the frequencies into something a bit more coherent. Although SLCFETs demonstrated the highest performance in the W-band frequency range, equating to 75 gigahertz -110 GHz, the physics behind it was currently unknown, but it worked well. The current one still functioned well enough to prove FTL Comms were, in fact, possible.

As he flipped the power switch and the scanning monitor came on, Norton said, ”Let’s see how well this electronic nightmare works.”

The unit’s control panel’s indicator lights all blinked and flashed red, orange, and yellow for a few minutes before they all turned green. Immediately, the incoming signal indicator came on and began to alarm.

Jill commented, “Darn, we just invented this stupid thing, and already we’re getting a signal. Probably one of those stupid robo-calls.” She flipped the answer switch.

Everyone laughed.

Beth said with incredulity on her face as an image appeared in the monitor, “Look, I don’t know who it is or where it is, but we’re actually in contact with someone.”

The woman they saw wasn’t human, but she was an extremely pretty humanoid all the same. She had a major expression of shock on her face; perhaps she hadn’t expected to contact anyone either. But although they could hear each other speaking, they had no clue what any of it meant. At least they knew beyond any doubt that their devices worked, and used a similar enough method of encoding sound and images onto carrier waves that they could interpret each other’s signals.

“Is … she really orange, or is that just a color balance issue between our technology and whatever she’s using?” asked Edward.

Jill said, “It’s hard to tell, but … no, there are indications from the objects in the background that our decoder is doing things right. She probably really is orange.”

“How do we learn her language?” wondered Beth.

“Well, the Lizard Cats had no trouble learning ours, or enough of it that they could make themselves understood,” said Norton, “and they did it quickly, too. Now we know they used thaumion-based technology to do it.”

“So … can we do the same thing?” asked Jill? “If I recall from what they showed us, it involved something like this …” She brought a whiteboard over in front of their camera so the woman they were talking to could see. Jill started making sketches and writing equations, and Norton joined in. The woman on the screen watched with interest, getting a writing board of her own and making notations that seemed completely alien to the four human scientists, but in a matter of a couple of hours they had drawings that seemed to agree and equations that looked sufficiently like one another that it seemed they understood each other. Then it was a matter of building the device, which took multiple days.

It was very exciting. Jill and Norton had each other; they were very much a couple when they weren’t in the lab, and Edward and Beth were starting to form a true relationship too, but over these days they were all so focused on the project that they didn’t do much else other than eat and sleep.

When they actually managed to build the thaumionic translator, they all held their breath. It seemed the woman on the other end had built a similar one, though she wasn’t working alone either; there were others who occasionally appeared on camera too.

“Here goes,” said Norton.

As with many other thaumion-based devices, this one had ended up in a linear shape. Thaumions liked devices that looked like magic wands – they worked best when they could travel in circles and helices around their targets, which was easily accomplished by building what was basically a small handheld linear accelerator. This one wasn’t handheld, though; it was on a tripod. Norton had volunteered to be the one to stand in front of the thing as he attempted to talk to the mysterious orange scientist on the screen … and she seemed to have a device of her own that looked very similar pointed at her. He turned it on, and so did she.

“Do you … understand me?” asked Norton.

The woman said, “I … do. Or I think I do. Do you understand me?”

Norton replied, “Yes! This is amazing! My name is Dr. Norton Sykes. I am a physicist.”

“I am Martine Cuvillier. I am also a physicist. A doctoral candidate, hoping to get my degree soon.”

“Judging by how quickly you picked up on what we were drawing,” said Norton, “I think it will be very soon. But … you can probably imagine our surprise when we turned on our device and found a signal!”

“Yes! I was similarly surprised,” said Martine. “It would seem that there are similarities in how this particle behaves, even between continua with different physical constants.”

“So far,” said Norton, “we have found that it is the one constant, even when other things change.”

“I wonder whether it is possible to travel from one alternate continuum to another,” Martine said.

“It is!” said Norton. “In fact … well, it is a bit of a long story.”

Jill poked Norton. “Let some others have a turn! I don’t understand a word of what you’re babbling into the machine, though I understand Martine perfectly well.”

“You do?” Norton asked. “Very well. Let me introduce Dr. Jill Anannanias, with whom I shared quite an adventure recently. She can explain more.” He stepped out of the beam, and Jill stepped in and was immediately affected by it.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Martine,” said Jill.

“Delighted, likewise,” Martine replied, and they could understand each other.

“Can you still understand her?” Edward asked Norton, meanwhile.

“Yes – why, can’t you?”

“No!” Edward thought. “Well, it does seem, then, that the device somehow teaches you the language of the person you’re talking to. How very odd.”

Jill was in the midst of explaining to Martine about their accidental trip to a parallel universe when Edward got a call from Buchanan. He went to another room to use his phone. Norton was curious and followed.

“I … well, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Edward was saying. “This technology … I don’t think it would make very good weapons.”

“What?” asked Norton. “Weapons?”

Edward held up his index finger towards Norton and whispered, “They’re starting to have people examine the starship so they can try to replicate its technology for military use.”

“Give me that phone!” said Norton, grabbing it from Edward.

“Dr. Sykes?” said Buchanan.

“Look, Buchanan, I don’t know who I have to talk to about this, but using thaumionic technology to make weapons is a 100% terrible idea,” said Norton. “I’m not sure how well it’s been explained, but the world we went to had no surviving humans on it. Do you know why? They used thaumionic technology to attack another planet. Nobody made thaumionic weapons, for the same reason we don’t duel with sticks of dynamite, but they had fantastically powerful thaumionic tools – but tools can be used for good or evil, and somebody decided to try to wipe out another planet’s intelligent species. And it backfired threefold.”

“Backfired?” asked Buchanan. “Well, I’m sure it’s a technical issue that can be ironed out –”

“You’re not listening,” said Norton. “The new force that thaumions are a part of – it’s all about intent, and whatever you do, you get the intent back times three. And if you use it with malicious intent, you’ll get back three times what you intended to do. It’s an intrinsic part of the force, no way around it. Use it to help somebody, though, and you get positive benefits back times three.”

“But –”

“No ifs, ands, or buts, Buchanan!” said Norton. “Build thaumionic weapons on the same scale as the thermonuclear devices we’ve already got, and you make this world barren of human life if they’re ever used.”

“But you said you collaborated with other people there,” Buchanan said.

“Did we have time to go into a lot of detail?” Norton said. “There were people there – they were the distant descendants of a genetically engineered slave race of soldiers bred by the humans. Their ancestors had long ago chosen the way of peace, out of rebellion against their former masters’ wishes. Maybe most of the humans of that world were nice people, but a few of them weren’t – and the actions of those few doomed them all. These Lizard Cats, they’re now the only intelligent species on their planet, because the humans wiped themselves out. So thaumions are great as a tool, but as a weapon they’re the ultimate backbiter. You tell them that if they try this, they’ll be the doom of us all. And now I’ve got to find a way to somehow protect at least some of the human race from this, because I know somewhere there’ll be somebody psychopathic or nihilistic enough to try to weaponize thaumion tech. Great. Just great.” Norton thrust the phone back into Edward’s hands and stormed away to talk to the others, and to Martine.

“Err …” said Buchanan, who found himself back on the phone with Edward.

“Yeah, I heard that too,” said Edward. “I know there’s going to be an arms race. I know someone’s going to fire the first shot, or maybe even some crazy nihilistic zealot who wants to bring about Armageddon, and I know it’ll annihilate them and at least a large chunk of the rest of us when they do. And I know there’s no technical way around it. But I don’t know how we save ourselves.”

“I … look, I believe you,” said Buchanan, “but decisions have already been made. They’re already trying to figure out how to take the ship apart – it’s surprisingly resistant, almost as if it wasn’t exactly built but sort of made as one entire piece.”

“Err, yeah, it was just sort of … changed into its current form, not really rebuilt,” Edward said.

“But … it means there’s time,” Buchanan said. “They don’t want to harm it, because they don’t want to destroy the tech just to learn how it works. But eventually they’ll find a way.”

“You do know that … if they do, sooner or later, we’re all dead,” said Edward.



Norton, Beth, and Jill all sat in Norton’s office with him and ate the meal that had been catered in and discussed current events and the serious consequences the military had a high potential of creating.

Beth swallowed a mouthful of the most delicious roast beef she had ever tasted, then said, “From my understanding, they’re trying hard to disassemble parts of the starship so they can reverse engineer it, but are unable on the most part, due to there being no real seams.”

Norton replied after taking a large drink of his sweet tea and honey, “It gives us time to think of a way to save those idiots and keep them from wiping out all humanity.”

Edward commented, “The new thaumion tech and the physics behind it are still mostly unpublished. We just published a paper on our portal tech, which includes the anomalous result that we now know to be the thaumion, but that’s it. Only a very few have even been indoctrinated and not nearly enough for them to even begin to understand it. We do have time, not much, but let’s hope we can come up with something in what time we have.”

“Fortunately,” said Norton, “the thaumion can create seemingly miraculous results very quickly, once we have a concept to work toward.”

Jill had been scribbling away on several sheets of scientific graph paper. After a few minutes, she said, “Hey, guys. I think I have a solution to our dilemma.”

The other three said at the same time, “OK? Don’t keep us in the dark.”

Jill pushed several of the pages covered in math towards them, “Take a look and tell me if I’m correct.”

Norton and Edward each grabbed a page and began looking over it. Beth came and was looking over their shoulders. What the rough sketches and complex equations showed was that there was some sort of interphasic action on a subatomic scale between the NR particles and the thaumion particles. NR particles’ behavior varied from universe to universe, so any solution they came up with involving them would be specific to their universe … but it may not require much alteration to work for another universe. The math indicated, however, that the energy wave associated with the thaumion particle would also keep the NR particles more or less protected from errant alternate physics

The rough sketches showed some sort of device that would act as an echo chamber coupled with another device that intermixed thaumion tech with NR tech so they were compatible. According to the equations, the hybrid energy field created had the ability, on a quantum scale, to repel just about anything, including thaumion tech. It was an amazing finding, since the thaumion field interacted with every other quantum field, but until now nobody had imagined that it could produce a hybrid effect like this. They couldn’t explain it yet, but it seemed to work out in the math.

Norton said, “This is fantastic. We need to get to building one immediately.”

Beth laughed, “Remember, the four of us are the heart and soul of this project.”

Edward got a thoughtful expression, “Yea, and we have the highest security clearance on the project.”

Beth replied, “You’re correct. This time, we have direct access to the flight deck and the absolute authority to order all others off the ship. This project is ours. So far, only we understand it enough to make it work. That is … unless they’ve canceled our access.”

Jill asked, “With this new energy field, does the law of 3x3 apply to everyone, or just to those who have the deed in their hearts and not those who have nothing to do with it?”

“Remember,” said Norton, “the humans of the world we went to were completely wiped out, down to every last man, woman, and child. According to the Lizard Cats there were no humans left. The Lizard Cats’ ancestors only survived because they were slaves – they had no agency in the event.”

Jill went pale. “That’s right,” she said in a frightened voice. “If anyone were to set off a thaumionic bomb that destroyed a city of a million people …”

“Three million other people would also be wiped out,” said Edward in a near whisper. “Probably starting with whoever pressed the button, whoever they got their orders from, whoever gave those orders, whoever suggested that course of action to them, and spreading outward from each point …”

“It would follow the chain of causality,” Beth said solemnly, “and it wouldn’t stop until the math was satisfied.”

“We gotta get to the ship,” said Jill. “Yesterday.”



First thing in the morning, the four of them showed up at Landing Zone 7 in their best scientist attire – sharp professional suits with white lab coats over them, decorated with their clearance badges. Layer after layer of guards had simply checked them through, as the system said they had authorization.

There was only the pair of guards at each of the starship’s two hatches. Jill and Norton looked at each other, as did Beth and Edward, and they split up. One pair of them approached one hatch, while the other pair went to the other.

“Dr. Sykes, Dr. Anannanias,” said one of the guards as Norton and Jill came close enough for him to read their badges. “Reason for access?”

“We have a theory we need to test,” Jill said.

“Is this theory in regards to how to reverse-engineer the technology?” the guard asked. “That is the only authorized activity at this site at present.”

“Yes,” lied Norton immediately. And the ship immediately pulled up the gangplank leading to the hatch. Both guards and both scientists stared in surprise.

“That was weird,” said the other guard. “Why did that happen?”

“I don’t know.” Both guards then looked at Jill and Norton.

“I’m … not sure,” Norton said. He suspected that it was because he’d lied to get in, but he didn’t know that for certain, so this wasn’t a lie. But now he and Jill couldn’t get in, even though the guards were disposed to allow it.

It was now up to Edward and Jill, who didn’t know this as they walked up to the other pair of guards, who read their badges. “Dr. Wilson. Dr. Sibelius. Reason for access?”

“We need to test a theory,” said Beth.

“Can only let you in if that theory’s related to reverse-engineering the ship’s tech,” said the guard.

“It’s about something related to that, yes,” said Edward. “We suspect that trying to reverse-engineer it might be exceedingly dangerous, and we’re trying to find a way to mitigate that danger to the human race.”

The ship didn’t react. There was nothing in what he’d said that wasn’t true.

“I see,” said the guard. “Good luck, then.” The two guards stepped aside, and Edward and Beth climbed the gangplank to the hatch.

Once inside, they found that the other hatch had retracted its gangplank for some reason and let Jill and Norton in.

The hatches closed, the four of them went to the engineering deck. “I lied to the guard,” Norton said, “and the gangplank retracted. I believe it’s the Law of Three Times Three. If by lying I got onto the ship and enacted … whatever we’re going to do, it would have been on false pretenses. We have to watch out for those sorts of things.”

“Got it,” said Edward. “Very sensitive to intent.”

“OK, then,” said Jill, “we’re now in the only place on the planet that has both a thaumion accelerator and an NR Wdrive. So from here we should be able to produce waves in that hybrid thaumion-NR field that Beth worked out the theory for. All we need to do is program the accelerator and the drive.”

“Wait, why does it have a thaumion accelerator?” asked Edward. “I didn’t put one of those in.”

“Everything on the ship is now a thaumion accelerator,” said Norton. “The converter changed every device on the ship to do exactly the same thing it did previously, but using thaumions. The drive is no different – it uses thaumions to produce NR particles, but it must produce thaumions first in order to do that. So … it can be both. With a little reprogramming.”



The four of them went to the flight deck and sent all other researchers off ship to the NASA facility. They were the very top of the research team and had the authority. They told them that they needed absolutely clean data for this system sweep.

Edward took the pilot’s couch, Beth took tactical, Jill took navigation, and Norton took the engineering station. Once they had all strapped in and powered up the command center, it was like magic as they once more looked around at the most advanced command deck they had ever seen. Now, if they could get this ship out of Earth’s hands and hide it somewhere before the idiots wiped out all human life on the planet.

Edward said, “Navigation, set course for the Lacerta Cattus dimension and planetary locus.”

Jill replied, “Aye, Captain. Set, and all parameters calibrated.”

Edward said, "Engage!" with a small smile as he motioned then pointed with his index finger.

Everyone laughed as the portal opened. This time, the portal was different. They were on the ground, for one thing, and not moving, so the portal formed above them, just slightly larger than the ship. But also, the NR particles that made up the opening to the portal were contained and massively stabilized by an intermixing wave of sparkling thaumions. For the few moments before the attitude thrusters fired and the ship accelerated upward and vanished from its home dimension, all marveled at how a simple reprogramming and a minor adjustment had changed things.

The ship vanished once again. This time, no one went to war and killed thousands, but the industrialized world was more than upset that their only working starship had once again vanished to places unknown and they didn’t have enough data, nor enough understanding of the new physics, to hope to build another engine easily or anytime soon.

Instantly, once the portal energies dissipated, scan readings showed the alternate world and the familiar plain beneath their landing gear, as the ship appeared within massive waves of NR and thaumion energy. The energy field surrounding and permeating the entire ship performed perfectly. “All systems green and functioning above parameters,” Norton reported.

They could see through the viewscreens that some Lizard Cats had already noticed their quiet but not silent reappearance and had started cautiously approaching the ship, not coming too close. They didn’t know whether their friends had returned or whether the ship contained hostile humans.

“OK, this time we’ve really stolen the starship,” said Edward. “If we go back, we’re in huge trouble.”

“But we’ve likely prevented the destruction of the entire human race,” Norton said.

“Think so?” asked Beth. “You really think nobody’s going to discover thaumions after reading what research we did post and start making weapons with them?”

Jill replied, “Well, I personally won’t be responsible, but I know what you mean. I’ve got friends and family. But what I don’t have is any kind of solution. This will delay the problem, but it won’t stop it. Something else will have to happen.”

They deactivated and locked the controls and went out the port side hatch, the one Edward and Beth had come in.

Kitty ran up and greeted them. “Oomans back!” Kitty said as he rubbed around Edward’s feet. “Knewed it. Oomans miss us lots. No wait to see us again.”

“Kitty, was that a … joke?” asked Jill. Kitty shrugged, his expression unreadable to humans.

“Somethin go … wrong?” asked Dr. Felicia, approaching.

“Going home was a danger to our home planet. Let’s all meet so we can explain,” said Norton.

“Yea,” Dr. Felicia said. “Have meetin.” She turned and headed for the town, and they all followed.

All the Lizard Cat scientists and engineers who had helped them get home gathered in a large meeting hall, along with some curious onlookers and what passed for leaders among the decentralized Lizard Cat society. There, Norton and Jill, who were best known to them, explained what had happened as soon as they’d gotten home.

“Hrrrm,” said Dr. Felicia. “You right to comes back. Soon they find way to break the sky boat, find out how to make humankillers.”

“You call weapons … humankillers?” asked Edward. “Don’t you have weapons? And where are there humans to kill with them?”

“Weapons made with thaumions,” Dr. Felicia said. “We no kill humans. Humans kill themselves. All gone. We no make them. Not Lacerta Cattus Killers.” Edward paled noticeably. Thousands of years later, these people still remembered the legends and still knew not to turn thaumionic tools on one another. History hadn’t repeated itself. Or had it?

“Nobody ever attacked anybody with one of this kind of tool?” Edward asked.

“Oh yes,” Kitty said. “Not lots. Not often. Enough to remind the rest.”

“But on our world, there aren’t object lessons like that from the past,” said Norton. “It’s a completely new discovery. It’s far too similar for comfort to what we found in that underground installation. They found what they saw as a new form of weapon, they used it to attempt genocide, and it wiped them out times three.”

“Yowwwssa,” said Dr. Felicia. “Oomans do it. No sure how to help them. They scover thaumions anyway. Maybe even now.”

And just at that very moment, Dr. Felicia proved correct. A physicist on their Earth was repeating their experiments and discovered the thaumion. He didn’t call it that, of course; he called it “Particle X.” Some news outlets picked up the story and called it the “miracle particle.” But back in the Lizard Cat world, they had no way to know this.

The Lizard Cats were gracious hosts and offered to let the four humans stay with them as long as they liked, but nobody of either species knew of a solution to the problem. Even the humans of this world, who had had a long history of their society and culture developing alongside thaumion physics, had still managed to wipe themselves out once the technology reached a large enough scale.

“Have we considered,” said Norton, “that there may be no solution to this problem? This may be the answer to the Fermi Paradox.”

“The question about why no aliens have visited Earth?” asked Beth. “That’s depressing. So the answer might be that they all discovered thaumions and couldn’t help themselves from using them as weapons of mass destruction.”

“But here are the Lizard Cats,” said Jill. “They know about them. They’ve known for thousands of years. And they’re still here.”

“And it’s clear why, too,” said Edward. “They have a different kind of society. They don’t have a drive to endlessly discover and explore … or exploit. There’s no constant greed for profits. Sustainability is good enough for them. And thus they’ve survived. They seem pretty happy, too.”

“And that’s also the answer to the Fermi Paradox,” added Beth. “They aren’t the type of people to be constantly expanding into more territory in space. So either an intelligent species is expansionist, and wipes themselves out before they ever meet us … or sustainability-focused, so they stay home and never meet us. Can’t anybody just be curious without being self-destructive?”



The meeting had evolved into more of a social activity among friends than the serious discussion all knew it really was. Dr. Felicia had become very silent and seemingly sullen. This was not like her. When asked, the only explanation was she was just worried over the new news.

The next morning found Dr. Felicia and several of her physics team hard at work at their thaumion collider. For any who might have understood what they were doing, the particles were being slammed together at a super high energy level not achieved before due to a new discovery on how to create attractions and directional containment using a special laser device.

By a serendipitous accident, one or two of the ion traps slightly malfunctioned and failed to completely capture and remove the NR particles that were present due to the way thaumions now created NR particles.

What they came up with was a new type of atom, basically.

“Amazing,” said Beth as they talked about it. “A bound state consisting of a thaumion particle and an NR particle, bound by the apocryphonic field that interacts with both particles. According to the literature you’ve found, semeions consisting of two apocryphonically-bound thaumions have been observed before, but this is different.”

“Yes,” said Norton, “the energy states are quite different. In one way it’s like a meson, or positronium, but with the unequal thaumionic charge it’s also like an atom in a way.”

To the total astonishment of all the Lizard Cat science team as well as the humans, they had just effectively created an atom that had never before existed. The more amazing thing was the energy barrier it created. Nothing the Lizard Cats had modeled had any hope of ever penetrating it.

Dr. Felicia now had a serious matter to discuss with her human friends. It might not yet be perfect, but over time things could be worked out. Beth and Norton were amazed at the small desk device. Nothing he did to the energy shield had any effect of any kind on the object within.

Another interesting thing they discovered while testing was that no thaumion had any kind of activity of any kind while under the influence of the energy bubble. It somehow negated and transformed apocryphonic energy states into another compatible energy state that was already known to science, such as an excited atom or plasma. Energy dissipated quickly. “And it would dissipate even more quickly if there were technology designed to dissipate it,” said Jill, “such as a grounding cable. If it were transformed into electromagnetic waves, it could even be reflected by something like a Faraday cage – or even a simple mirror.”

“Never seen this afore,” said Dr. Felicia. “But … oomans use this … make … shield? Hide behind, protect? Thaumion weapon … do nothing.”

“And the Law of Three Times Three …” said Norton. “This isn’t a weapon. It protects … it doesn’t do harm.”

“Protect … and the Law no hurts you,” said Dr. Felicia. “Gives you helps. Something good. Make stronger, better.”

“I can see a case for both active and passive defense,” said Edward. “A shielding system … we’d have to put shields around the shield generators, and shields around those, perhaps in a circular arrangement … but also neutralizer beams. If a defender can see an incoming missile, they fire a neutralizer at it, and turn its warhead into harmless nothing before it ever gets close.”

The four of them, with the Lizard Cat physics team, worked feverishly to build and install all the new devices on the starship. One bright Lizard Cat came up with the idea of a neutralizer pulse, rather than a beam. The idea was that a massive pulse of the neutralizer energy wave would clear a huge area around the object that deployed it … like the ship. With its new power source, it had more than enough energy.



Back on the home planet:

Meanwhile, back in the human’s home universe, physicists had written a whole new physics to explain the newly discovered X-particle. As best they could determine, this new particle could create a tunable weapon with the ability to selectively destroy specific targets rather than the usual splatter and collateral. According to the math, the explosive yield was incredible.

Under direction of their President, US physicists worked tirelessly to create enough of this new X-matter to create the core of their new weapon, which had been named the X-bomb. The new device was deployed to the drone swarm command, which armed their swarms with them. And it was just in time, because a remnant of the terrorist coalition had taken root in an area near the territory of one of the coalition’s former members. They didn’t have nuclear weapons, but they did have conventional ones, and intelligence reports indicated that they were getting huge funding from one of the US’ main enemies. It was only a matter of time before they launched a terrorist attack on the US or one of its allies. A message had to be sent.

Destroying the target they had selected would accomplish two goals. First, it was known that it would kill a huge number of civilians, which was unfortunate, but then the entire area would be devoid of people, and the threat of terrorist attack from them would end. Nothing else would be harmed, and there would be no lingering ionizing radiation or fallout. Second, it would show anyone else in the world who had any derogatory statement to make that the US could basically remove them from the planet without destroying anything else.

The drone swarm was loaded onto the US’s most stealthy aircraft, the B-3. The pilot was given instructions to launch his drone swarms from 100,000 feet, then turn immediately and return to base. Once launched, the drones were fully autonomous and would need no further supervision to find their targets. According to the math, … even a miss of 50 miles would still remove all human life from the target area.

Sadly, despite warnings from Buchanan and from some of the physicists who had figured out that there might be a backlash effect, the gung-ho military idiots had no clue what was about to happen as the aircraft took off, immediately climbed to 100,000 feet, and maintained it as cruising altitude. The aircraft was top of the line, one of the most stealthy aircraft ever built. The enemy’s radar was unable to see the aircraft because of its superior radar avoidance capabilities, and being at such high altitude didn’t make them any more visible.

“Ground control, this is Airborne Watchdog. Approaching Dz.”

“Ground Control. Affirmative Watchdog. You are authorized to enable and deploy at your discretion.”

After a minute, the bomb bay doors of the aircraft opened, and what looked like a black vapor of some kind flowed out in a long string.



Norton said, “All right, everyone, strap in. I’m launching in 3 minutes.”

The other three fastened their flight harnesses and put on their helmets. After running down a prelaunch check, Beth set the the astrogator controls to their home continuum, then hit enable. The huge portal, with its roiling foam of thaumion particles, surrounded the ship, and it vanished. It reappeared in perfect orbit above their home Earth.

Jill on tactical spoke up. “What is that? Oh, no … we have a real problem. Those idiots are launching a swarm attack using thaumion tech.”

Edward said, “Move us into a better position, and I’ll stop it.”

Beth on astrogation said, “Done – they’re about 300,000 feet beneath us.”

Edward was bent over, looking through his targeting scope. The computer enhanced image showed many hundreds of drones, each one seemingly choosing its own target. He set the neutralizer array to burst fire and hit the enable button. The drones reacted as if they had been hit by a high wind, but continued on to their targets. The expected explosions never happened as the many hundreds of drones suicided into the prearranged targets … all to no avail.

“Looks like that worked,” said Norton. “I’m betting that down there is a remnant of that terrorist coalition, and we just saved their lives … but we just saved the lives of three times as many Americans; the US just doesn’t know it. I don’t think they know we’re here yet, and it’s even less likely that they have any idea what just happened.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Jill. “Maybe they’ll think these thaumion weapons, or X-bombs or whatever they’re calling them, are unreliable. Maybe they’ll quit using them.”

“Meanwhile, I’m getting us out of here,” said Beth. “The less time we spend here, the less likely it is that we’ll be spotted.” The ship vanished from its location and reappeared over an ocean thousands of miles away. They just hung there in the air, impertinently ignoring gravity due to the ship’s thaumionic nature.

“Monitoring for any other signs of thaumionic weapons," Jill said, manipulating her console.

“Wait,” said Norton. “The comms computers are picking something up.”

The signal was weak and crackling, but it was clearly Buchanan’s voice. “Ed?” he said. “That you? I’m on my ham radio set. I saw some military intel photos … you folks are in trouble. You really did steal the ship this time, and if I’m right and you just saved a bunch of terrorists from US attack, you’re looking at treason if they find you. I’m in trouble if they catch me doing this. Don’t answer.”

They looked at each other. “What do we do?” asked Jill. “We can’t go home. They’ll shoot us down. They’ll just use conventional weapons. This ship isn’t armored. We’ll … wait.”

“What is it?” asked Beth.

“Picking up … huge thaumionic energy buildup,” Jill said. “From …” She rattled off a set of coordinates. “That’s near one of the other terrorist coalition territories. Much closer to the US.”

“Are they another target … or are they firing?” asked Edward.

“Firing, I’d guess,” Jill said.

“Getting us in the area,” said Beth, and again the portal formed around the ship, and it vanished, reappearing in American skies, but hundreds of thousands of feet above any air traffic.

Jill scanned carefully. “It’s … a barrage of missiles,” she said. “Nothing nuclear; it’s all thaumionic. It’s headed … just across the border into the US. They’re launching at Houston.”

“Going,” said Beth.

“You don’t need coordinates?”

“I do, but I know where Houston is.” The ship vanished again, reappearing in Houston’s skies.

Norton activated his panels, and news reports started playing … “starship has just appeared above Houston … no idea what this means … missile launch detected from terrorist territory … strike imminent … advising all citizens of the Houston area to seek shelter and take cover … missiles ETA 15 minutes …” The reports continued to come in.

“What do you think?” Jill asked Edward.

“I can try the neutralizer,” he said, “but these targets are fast. Maybe the neutralizer pulse …”

“Picking up another launch,” said Jill. “Oh, great. It’s the US. They’re shooting at us.”

“Thaumionic, or conventional?” Edward asked her.

“Thaumionic. More of those drone swarms. We’re low enough that they can target us.”

“And if we leave,” said Beth, “the terrorists’ missiles will hit Houston.”

“I think we’ll be using that thaumion pulse,” said Edward. “Everything’s going to get here at the same time. I guess we neutralize it all and let the Law of Three Times Three sort out the consequences.” He prepared a massive pulse that would blanket the entire Houston area and stayed there, finger on the button, until everything was in range.

“Five … four … three … two …” counted Jill. The missiles had started out as distant specks and were now … less distant. They looked much smaller than one would think.

“One … Fire!” said Edward, firmly palming the large blue button that had been added to the panel. It wasn’t obvious that the pulse had gone off; its effects weren’t visible. But … its effects were obvious. Beth dodged, and the missiles missed them, but when they fell to the ground, that was all they did. They impacted and did some damage that way, but there were no explosions, no thaumionic effects, just large pointed hunks of metal plummeting into the ground, striking cars or buildings, breaking glass.

And then the miracle occurred.



“So I’d like you to explain this to me like I’m five,” said Helga Kohl to the four of them, who were guests on her very popular WeTube channel. “These X-bombs … they heal people?”

“No, no, they’re terribly, horribly deadly,” said Norton. “To whomever you fire them at, unless somebody has defensive measures that can stop them. But they’re triply bad for whoever fires them.”

“But that didn’t happen,” said Kohl. “Is that because you stopped them?”

“Yes, and thank goodness we did,” said Jill. “As it was, there were still a few of those X-bomb drones that made it through and killed some of the terrorists …”

“Yes, I believe there were six total killed,” said Kohl. “And exactly 18 US casualties – the two pilots of the bomber, their flight crew, the officers who gave the order, the general who gave them the order … and the President of the United States.”

Beth shuddered. “I’ve seen the video of that,” she said. “It’s … horrific to see him turning into a mummified skeleton before your eyes like that. We met him, you know.”

“Yes, I remember reading about that,” said Kohl. “But … then there was Houston. You detected X-bomb weapons and went there to stop those too. And the US fired at you too.”

“Yeah,” said Edward. “They thought we were in the business of protecting terrorists. Do you know how many Americans would’ve died if we hadn’t intervened? As it was, it was only 18. There were three million people in the area those drone bombs were used on.”

“You saved three million, mostly civilians, plus … nine million Americans,” said Kohl. “And this is just … how X-bombs work?”

“There’s no way to avoid it,” said Norton. “It’s just in the nature of the quantum field. Without getting too deep into it, it’s about the causality. Anyone involved in the decision chain is affected, guaranteed. People involved in their lives are next, then people involved in their lives, and so on. If we’d caused enough casualties, we’d have destroyed ourselves completely.”

“And that brings me back to Houston,” said Kohl. “You blocked both those terrorist missiles and the ones fired by the US military at you.”

“That’s right,” said Jill. “And the missiles kept going, still striking their targets, but they were just … big Lawn Darts. They augured their way into whatever they hit, but no explosions, no X-bombs. But the thing is, they still did property damage.”

“That’s why the terrorists’ missile base was wrecked,” said Kohl.

“And that’s also why the damage was all repaired,” said Beth.

“That’s the part I especially don’t get,” Kohl said. “Why was that?”

“We’re on the US’ side,” said Edward. “This proves it. We did a good thing. We prevented all those deaths. Because of that, good things happen to people on the same side.”

“There’s a preliminary statistic about the number of people in Houston-area hospitals,” said Kohl. “Every single patient was cured that day – diseases, injuries, everything. Cancers went into remission. People … regrew lost limbs. Nothing like it has been seen before or since.”

“These X-particles can be used for a lot more than military purposes,” said Norton. “Shame on us, the human race, for thinking of weapons first.”

Jill added, “I don’t know whether the US launch facility that fired at us was damaged, because that’s all top secret, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Those drone bombs went crashing into the ground too. But they’re lighter than missiles and do less damage when they just crash.”

“Thank goodness for that, I suppose,” said Kohl. “But you prevented your own deaths. What do you get for that?”

“To not die, thankfully,” said Beth. “I think that’s as far as it goes.”



Dr. Martine Cuvillier sat back in her chair and smiled with satisfaction as she steepled her fingers. She had developed a neat little device that was sort of not exactly in the continuum to which she had deployed it, but according to the math it existed in a superposition, sort of like a quantum material. At any time, it was in many places and many states all at the same time. And, like her earlier invention, its purpose was to scan for signals.

She had been monitoring energy waves with her new scanning device when an image appeared clear, clean, and unobstructed. She saw the ship her newest contacts had shown her. It was using a burst type of weapon and disabled many types of smaller and very fast devices. She now knew how to help the keep the warmongering types from destroying all life in their solar system.

It took a bit to accomplish, but she managed to adjust a small device that would emit a much more tuned energy wave that should, according to the simulations, cause all of the thaumion particles to assume an immediate ground state, thereby making them inert.

The energy wave from this new device would propagate on the solar winds and even aid in keeping certain damaging energy waves from entering the Sol system. Due to its superposed nature, transporting it into the heart of their small G2V star would cause no damage to the device, nor to the star’s ability to continue normal fusion. It was there, and not there, simultaneously.

She adjusted the device to the proper emitter frequency, then had it implanted into that planet's star – her ally Norton had taught her quite a bit about what these thaumions could do. Immediately, the device’s energy waves washed outward from the sun in many nearby dimensions, causing all unshielded thaumion energy states to drop to ground state and became inert. Of course, the starship was shielded and had the ability to traverse to any dimension regardless of how different their physical laws might happen to be, and subsequently was totally unaffected.

Martine adjusted the frequency to the one she had been able to contact the humans on once before. When she hit the transmit button, to her great pleasure, the screen lit up, with Norton turning to look into the scanner.

Norton saw the new comm unit light up with an incoming communication. He turned and saw the very beautiful but nonhuman female he knew as Dr. Martine Cuvillier on the screen. Norton was just now starting to get an inkling of where the amazing thing that had happened came from.

“It’s in the Sun, isn’t it?” Norton asked Martine.

“Well, it is … and it isn’t,” she replied.

“Amazing,” said Norton. “You probably just saved at least a dozen parallel Earths. And I’m not even counting the Lizard Cat one, which didn’t even need saving.”

“It was out of desperation, really,” said Martine. “Your world, and my world, both of them, would have found a way to blow themselves up with thaumion weapons, wouldn’t they? Now they won’t.”

“I wish we could use thaumions to heal people, build things, do great works,” said Norton. “But as long as it’s possible to do unto others before the retribution, there are going to be nihilists or people with grudges wanting revenge who can short-sightedly blow up the world.”

“You can bring them aboard the starship, heal them there,” Martine said. “Just like my laboratory here, small spaces can be made thaumion havens. Small compared to a city, I mean. They can be big enough.” She showed him a page of calculations, which he read.

“Up to about the size of a … well, about a basketball arena,” said Norton, “if I read that right.”

“This ball of baskets,” Martine said, “it sounds like a lovely festive dance event. Is it a tradition? Do the men present the women with baskets of flowers?”

“Um, no, that’s not what …” replied Norton. “Anyway, a large space, around 80,000 square meters in footprint.”

“Yes,” said Martine. “The starship of your world, it is around that size. This could be done for a building, or a group of them. But the thaumions could have effects within.”

“Well, my next question, then,” said Norton, “is whether one could set up such a thaumion-protection field within a missile. Because if it’s possible to do, someone will be mad enough to try it, and we’re back to square one.”

“No, this will not work,” said Martine. “The energy waves, the missile will impinge into them like a swimmer against the sea. This will strip the thaumions of their energy. A building, traveling with the Earth, will not do this. A starship able to travel without traveling will not do this.”

“Someone will think of a missile with a portal system, able to appear within the enemy capital and detonate there,” said Norton. “This problem is twisted … but so are the minds of some people out there.”

“Perhaps,” said Martine, “but the explosion, it could only be as large as the inside of the missile, and it would first destroy the device producing the thaumion-protection field, would it not?”

“That’s true,” Norton said, “it would collapse the very field allowing it to work.”

Norton and Martine agreed that there was basically no way for a weaponized thaumion device to be built. But there were enough very tiny loopholes that they would both have to be vigilant.



Buchanan later spoke with them. “Yes,” he said, “of course there are black-ops military labs trying to make new X-bombs that work again, and I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets because you already knew that, and because it just doesn’t work anymore. What did you do?”

“Nothing,” said Edward. “We did nothing at all.” And he wasn’t lying. It had been Martine’s doing, but they didn’t mention her.

“Meanwhile,” said Buchanan, “since you basically saved the city of Houston from terrorist attack and prevented the self-inflicted deaths of millions of Americans as well, the new President has pardoned you four … and you now have a unique job ahead of you. Explorers of the many alternate universes. Because no one else can do it. There’s just nobody else who knows how.”

The four of them looked at each other. “What do you think …?” asked Norton.

“We’ll be able to come home when we want,” said Jill.

“The discoveries we could make seem limitless,” Beth added.

“They’ll probably make us train cadets,” Edward noted.

“Not to mention build more star ships,” said Norton. “but I think this is the beginning of a fantastic new adventure.”

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