"S. M. Stirling - Draka 04 - Drakon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

memorable experience for them—the pleasure would be as intense as they could bear—and an enjoyable
one for her after six months alone in the wilderness.

"A charming gesture," she said. And just what she needed to relax. "Do come in."
 ***

Tolya gestured at the holographic image that hung over the table and it rotated through a
figure-eight.

"This is a three-dimensional representation," the physicist said. It showed something rather like an
hourglass shape. "We take a molehole from the quantum foam, pump in energy to enlarge it, and stretch the
ends apart. Both ends always remain fully congruent in spacetime. It's a closed timelike loop."

That was the theory, at least. You could anchor one end and whip the other out like a bead on the
end of an elastic string. Something sent through one end emerged from the other without subjective
duration. The side-effects were extremely odd; if one end were traveling at relativistic speeds, you got the
time-dilation effect reversibly. Observed from the outside, it would take the mobile end 4.2-odd years to
reach say, Alpha Centauri. But from the fixed end back at Sol, it would be a matter of weeks until the
moving exit reached across the light-years. Stepping in would move you 4.2 light-years in space, and 4.2
years in time. So far that was only a weird amplification of ordinary high-tau interstellar travel. Seriously
strange was the fact that you could step back through the molehole and through time; and if you sent the
mobile end on a round-trip journey to the Centauri system and returned, you'd have two gates right next to
each other, separated by more than eight years in time.

FTL always was considered equivalent to time-travel, Gwen mused. The surprising thing was
that both seemed to be possible.

"Of course, as an object passes through, the molehole tries to pinch out—you have to feed in heavy
energy to keep it from closing, a virtual-matter ring. We've achieved consistent results using slightly
enlarged ones and passing subatomic particles through, down on a single-atom scale. Proof of concept; it
definitely works, overlord."

"But."

The servus scientist sighed and ran a hand through her graying hair. "Yes. There seems to be some
sort of asymptotic phenomenon that takes over when we enlarge. The energy inputs give extremely
variable results, and the variability increases exponentially as size goes up. It's a chaotic effect, somehow.
The theory we have says that once stabilized the molehole shouldn't do that, but obviously the theory's not
everything we could wish. At a guess, I'd say that there's some sort of . . . inherent linkage to the quantum
foam. There could even be advantages to that, eventually, but it's not a completely understood phenomenon.
In fact, overlord, it's not even partly understood."

"What are you trying?"

"Well, we're running a series of tests; enlarging the captive molehole without separating the ends
spatially. That ought to be easier under a relatively heavy and uniform gravitational field. We'll bring it up in
size before manipulating it; still very small compared to the eventual macrocosmic applications, you
understand. About on the scale of a medium-sized molecule. If we can do that, then we might be able to
separate the ends later. Here's the math."