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construction of a code-conversion and interface system, most of the details of which were worked out by
ZORAC itself, to couple the Ganymean computer directly into the communications network at Main and
thus into the computer complex of J5. This gave ZORAC, and through it the Ganymeans as well, direct
access to IS's data banks and opened up a mine of information on many aspects of the ways of life,
history, geography and sciences of Earth-for which the aliens had insatiable appetites.
One day, in the communications room of the Mission Control Center at UNSA Operational Command
Headquarters, Galveston, there was consternation when a strange voice began speaking suddenly and
unexpectedly over the loudspeaker system. It was another of ZORAC's jokes. The machine had
composed its own message of greeting to Earth and injected it into the outgoing signal stream of the laser
link from Jupiter.
Earth was, of course, clamoring to know more about the Ganymeans. In a press conference staged
specifically for broadcast over the world news grid, a panel of Ganymeans answered questions put to
them by scientists and reporters who had traveled with the 15 mission. A large local audience was
expected for the event and, since none of the facilities available at Main seemed to be large enough, the
Ganymeans readily agreed to the idea of holding the event inside the Shapieron. Hunt was a member of
the group that flew down from Pithead to take part.
The first questions concerned the concepts and principles behind the design of the Shapieron, especially
its propulsive system. In reply, the Ganymeans stated that the speculations of the UNSA scientists had
been partly right, but did not tell the whole story. The arrangement of massive toroids containing tiny
black holes that spun in closed circular paths did indeed generate very high rates of change of gravity
potential which resulted in a zone of in-tense space-time distortion, but this did not propel the ship
directly; it created a focal point in the center of the toroids at which a trickle of ordinary matter was
induced to annihilate out of existence. The mass-equivalent appeared in the form of gravitational energy,
though not in any way as simple as the classical notion of a force directed toward a central point; the
Ganymeans described the resultant effect as resembling "a stress in the structure of space-time
surrounding the ship. . . ." It was this stress wave that propagated through space, carrying the ship with it
as it went.
The idea of being able to cause matter to annihilate at will was astonishing, and that the ~innihi1ation
should result in artificial gravity phenomena was a revelation. But to learn that all this merely represented
a means of bringing under control something that went on naturally anyway all over the universe. . . was
astounding. For this, apparently, was exactly the way in which gravity originated in Nature; all forms of
matter were all the time decaying away to nothing, albeit at an immeasurably slow rate, and it was the tiny
proportion of basic particles that were annihilating at any given moment that gave rise to the gravitational
effect of mass. Every annihilation event produced a microscopic, transient gravity pulse, and it was the
additive effect of millions of these pulses occurring every second which, when perceived at the
macroscopic level, produced the illusion of a steady field. Thus,
gravity ceased to be something static and passive that existed wherever a quantity of mass happened to
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be; now, no longer an oddity standing apart, it fell into line with all the other field phenomena of physics
and became a quantity that depended on the rate of change of something-in this case, the rate of change
of mass. This principle, together with the discovery of a means of artificially generating and controlling the
process, formed the basis of Ganymean gravitic engineering technology.
This account caused consternation among the scientists from Earth who were present. Hunt voiced their
reactions by asking how some of the fundamental laws of physics-conservation of mass-energy and
momentum, for example-could be reconciled with the notion of particles being able to vanish
spontaneously whenever they chose. The cherished fundamental laws, it turned out, were neither
fundamental nor laws at all. Like the Newtonian mechanics of an earlier age, they were just
approximations that would be repealed with the development of more precise theoretical models and
improved measurement techniques, similar to the way in which careful experiments with light waves had
demonstrated the untenability of classical physics and resulted in the formulation of special relativity. The
Ganymeans illustrated the point by mentioning that the rate at which matter decayed was such that one
gram of water would require well over ten billion years to disappear completely-utterly undetectable by
any experiment that could be devised within the framework of contemporary terrestrial science. While
that remained true, the established laws that Hunt had referred to would prove perfectly adequate since
the errors that resulted from them would make no practical difference. In the same way, classical
Newtonian mechanics continued to suffice for most day-to-day needs although relativity provided the
more accurate description of reality. The history of Minervan science had shown the same pattern of
development; when terrestrial science had progressed further, no doubt, similar discoveries and lines of
reasoning would lead to the same reexamination of basic principles.
This led to the question of the permanency of the universe. Hunt asked how the universe could still exist
at all let alone still be evolving if all the matter in it was decaying at the rate that the Ganymeans had
indicated, which was not slow on a cosmic time scale; there ought not to have been very much of the
universe left.
The universe went on forever, he was told. All the time, throughout the whole volume of space, particles
were appearing spontaneously as well as vanishing spontaneously, the latter process taking place
predominantly inside matter-naturally, since that was where there were more of them to vanish from in the
first place. Thus the evolution of progressively more complex mechanisms of creating order out of
chaos-basic particles, interstellar clouds, stars, planets, organic chemicals, then life itself and after that
intelligence-formed a continuous cycle, a perpetual stage where the show never stopped but individual
actors came and went. Underlying it all was a unidirectional pressure that strove always to bring high
levels of organization from lower ones. The universe was the result of a conifict of two opposing,
fundamental trends; one, represented by the second law of thermodynamics, was the tendency for
disorder to increase, while the other-the evolutionary principle-produced local reversals by creating
order. In the Ganymean sense, the term evolution was not something that applied only to the world of
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