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trying to figure out where the hell he was.
* * *
San Francisco International Airport was built closer to the city than the one
that
Hugh knew. It consisted partly of an artificial extension out over the Bay,
and had service piers for flying boats as well as regular runways. Hugh was
surprised when he arrived with Yvonne on the subway link from the city to find
a
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airport security. Yvonne couldn't understand why there should be a need for
any. He tried to explain about terrorists and hijackings, but she couldn't
comprehend why anyone would want to hijack an aircraft.
"What would they do with it?" she asked. "Where would they find pilots and a
maintenance crew, and where would they get spare parts?"
"No, you're missing the point. The idea isn't to acquire the plane. It's to
get visibility for political causes."
"Oh." Yvonne didn't press the matter. It was clear that she really didn't have
a concept of what he meant.
The plane was a Lockheed turboprop. Hugh had never flown in a turboprop
before. It had four engines and twin tail fins, and apart from the unfamiliar
airline name "American Pacific," which sounded more like a railroad
looked the way airliners should. Hugh suspected that aircraft in any universe
would be pretty similar for the same reasons that caused sharks, porpoises,
and submarines to end up pretty much the same shape. Their flight time to New
York would actually be longer than Dave's from London, which would be with one
of the new European jets. An aviation journalist had commented that
trans-Atlantic jets might be carrying as many as two hundred fifty passengers
before very much longer. Wow, Hugh remembered thinking to himself.
He had told Rauth some things about twenty-first-century air travel, warfare,
and aerospace technology back in his own world. Rauth had passed a few details
on to friends of his in the business, who had laughed it off as a joke until
they checked the claims with some of Otherwhere's designers and engineers.
Then, all of a sudden, Rauth was inundated with calls that they wanted to hear
more. Hugh
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in the LANL library, cramming his brain with facts and figures on things like
aerodynamic performances, radar navigation systems, laser ring gyros, and
high-efficiency turbofans before his next transfer, and now a lot of people
wanted to talk to him.
It seemed that a market for information trading across the Multiverse was
there, in very much the way that he had speculated with Dave and Sarah back in
the early days. But they would have no access to it if they burned their
bridges and migrated permanently. That fact had caused Hugh to do some hard
thinking and reevaluating.
And then Rauth had come up with a thought whereby even that might turn out to
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be a temporary problem. As a physicist, he couldn't help but be intrigued by
the
QUADAR, and in one of his more fanciful moments he had wondered about the
possibility of building a simpler version of it in Otherwhere. On closer
examination the thought had turned out to be not so fantastic. Most of the
required knowledge of MV physics was already in Hugh's head, and Rauth knew
most of Otherwhere's leading quantum theorists personally. The reduction of
MV data required enormous processing power, and it was true there was nothing
in existence that came close to being able to provide it. But hardware design
was
Dave's field, and with the world's principal industrial and academic research
centers available to draw on, it was conceivable that a crash program could
produce something workable in as little as five years. A world war followed by
a cold war, predatory international commercial rivalries, a lunar landing
program, and all the other factors that had spurred things along in the old
world didn't have to be necessary preliminaries.
And the most amazing thing to Hugh was the openness of it all. There was no
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Otherwhere. Rauth was perfectly frank about the source of his information when
he talked to others, and as many of them had smiled or sneered as had taken
him seriously. What others chose to believe seemed to be generally
acknowledged as being their business. Already, there had been several calls to
U.C. Berkeley from reporters wanting to talk to the scientist who said he'd
been taken over by an intelligence from another dimension. Hugh had the
feeling that if a QUADAR-like device were ever to be built here, it would be a
very different affair from the sinister business going on in his own world
probably with a public opening ceremony attended by movie stars and hosting
regular tours of schoolchildren.
The other area where the openness of Otherwhere had astounded Hugh was in the
reaction to the threat of other intruders from other parts of the Multiverse
showing up with other motives. Hugh had finally broached the subject with
Rauth, and Rauth had conveyed it elsewhere to invite opinions. The general
feeling was that the way to deal with it would be to inform the population at
large of the possibility and what to look out for, and to set up some kind of
coordinating network to report suspected instances to. Vastly outnumbered, any
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