Chapter 2

Returning to Everett was not what I thought it would be. I had been gone more than two Vorian years. For Mom and Dad, I had been gone almost three Everett years. It seemed to me that Everett had changed, but it was actually me who had changed. Vora is a very different world than Everett and most of the differences are due to Vora being a Level 2 world, while Everett is a Level 5 world. For Member Worlds, the difference between two consecutive Trade Levels (i.e. Levels 1 through Level 20) was not very large. But a three-level difference was very noticeable.

At the University, we learned the primary factors that were evaluated to determine a world’s Trade Level Rating, but the full range of factors were too extensive for our class. For trade, Level 5 is the magic number. A Level 5 rating, meant the world and its population had matured to the point that they could be trusted to use Multiverse technology in a safe, mature, and sane manner. There are no trade restrictions imposed on Member Worlds with ratings of Level 5 and above. The differences between the Trade Level Ratings of these five Levels are primarily manufacturing capability, and the sophistication of the world’s cultural and political structures.

For Level 6 through Level 20, a D-Hopper has to be very careful regarding what trade items they are hopping to the world. It is illegal to provide the local population of a world with a trade level of less than Level 5 with certain technologies, because such worlds cannot be trusted with advanced technology.

In general, a world with a very low rating, such as Level 20, has a population that is very prone to using violence to resolve its disputes and it usually has primitive levels of technology. Allowing that type of world to possess advanced Multiverse weaponry, defensive systems, spacecraft, and other highly technical products; is likely to result in the world using the technology on its own population, or possibly on the population of its neighboring worlds.

The penalties for violating the trade restrictions applied to Level 6 through Level 20 worlds are severe. If a judge learns you violated the Trade Restrictions by knowingly hopping certain technology to a world, you can end up on a prison planet. The veracity equipment used in courtrooms will inform the judge if you lie about not knowing that you were hopping prohibited technology to the world.

Note: Veracity equipment detects the Conflict Brainwave that a person’s brain generates when the person is formulating a statement they know is not true.

The Multiverse Government also works with worlds that cannot qualify for a Trade Level rating. These worlds are referred to as Provisional Member Worlds. Most of the Provisional worlds have a high crime rate and the danger associated with those crimes is escalated by the use of violence in the commission of the crime. Traders have to exercise more than the average level of care for their personal wellbeing, when doing business on a Provisional Member World. However, trading on Provisional worlds is where you normally make the highest profits. That is the problem; the more primitive the world, the higher the danger and the higher the profits.

The most dangerous of the unrated trade worlds is a planet called Earth, and it is still a Limited Provisional World. The description of the world, published by the Trading Guilds, makes me shudder. Earth sounds like it is a planet of war mongering people, who are equipped with fairly advanced projectile weapons, and weapons of mass destruction. These people have demonstrated they are willing to use their weapons in a war that will kill a million or more of their citizens. This world has a very high violence rating, almost the highest rating possible. The worst of the world’s hazards is sugar. According to the report, it is everywhere, and a visiting trader has to be exceptionally careful to keep from becoming a sugar addict. No, thank you! The level of risk inherent in visiting the Provisional Worlds is not for me, regardless of the potential profit margin.

Most Commercial D-Hoppers who work for a company, move merchandise over the existing trade routes, and also provide transportation for their company’s staff and clients. The D-Hoppers, who service a trade route, know the conditions on the planet where they are based, the planet where the merchandise is to be delivered, and all of the interim layover planets. The D-Hoppers who regularly travel these routes are familiar with the diseases, dangerous animals and plants, weather conditions at various times of the year, and other potentially hazardous factors that they are likely to encounter.

When a D-Hopper takes over an existing route, they are given a route description that describes all of the hazards they might encounter on the route. At most companies, once a new D-Hopper is familiar with the route description, a D-Hopper who is familiar with the route will take the new D-hopper on at least one familiarization trip. The new D-Hopper learns how to identify and reach the destination planet, and all of the interim planets.

A D-Hopper sometimes encounters an unexpected problem with a known route. That is, he ends up on a strange planet and doesn’t know where he is. To the uninformed, it seems impossible to get lost on a route that you know like the back of your hand, but it does happen. Getting lost is normally not a problem, unless the D-Hopper contracts a disease while on an unknown planet. The normal search algorithms will allow the D-Hopper to return to a known planet.

Standard policy for a Commercial D-Hopper who has been lost and ended up on an unknown planet is to voluntarily place themself under quarantine for at least three days, when they reach the next inhabited planet. A D-Hopper who fails to comply with this policy is in serious trouble if he spreads a contagious disease through a planet’s population. Such an act is classified as a violent crime, and it is punishable by a life sentence on a prison planet for violent criminals. Prior to being taken to the planet, the D-Hopper’s ability to make a hop is destroyed by an injection of End Hop. If the D-Hopper complied with the requirement and still infected a planet, they weren’t looked on kindly; but it wasn’t a crime. Exploratory D-Hoppers who believe they may have contracted a contagious illness must also place themself in quarantine.

As a Commercial D-Hopper, my employment opportunities on Everett were very good. During my University training, I received a five-universe Hop Rating and a Recovery Rating of forty-five minutes. A Hop Rating is the maximum recommended number of universes a hopper can travel during a single hop. My rating meant, I could hop along one of the force field axes passing through four interim universes and arrive on the fifth universe. The Recovery Rating is how long the hopper must rest before it is safe to make another hop. The average D-Hopper has a three-universe Hop Rating and a Recovery Rating of one hour. My ratings made me a very powerful hopper and very desirable to an employer interested in doing business with distant universes.

The fish packing companies on Everett were very interested in employing me to transport their fresh fish to customers in distant universes. Fresh fish means the fish are transported while still alive or they are freshly caught and packed in ice. My high Hop Rating and my short Recovery Rating meant I could get the fish to the customer faster than an average D-Hopper when hopping to a distant customer. That is important, when you are transporting a spoilable commodity like fresh fish.

I went to work for Simm’s Seafood Ltd. They were the largest exporter of live fish on Everett, and they had an extensive list of customers. On my first day, I was teamed with Tom King. Tom had been with Simm’s Seafood for twenty-two years, and had experience with all of the company’s routes. Most of the Simm’s customers were on routes within a three-hop radius.

A three-hop radius is not necessarily a straight line between planets. D-Hoppers always hop along the Fourth Dimension’s X, Y, and Z force field axes. So, a three-hop radius means the destination world was no more than three hops along one of the three axes, one hop on one axes and two hops on a second axes, or one hop on each of the three axes. Each hop is considered to be a three-universe hop.

Setting up trade routes having a three-hop radius may not seem like a big deal, but for a commercial company, it meant they could use average D-Hoppers on the trade routes. On these short trade routes, an average D-Hopper can get the product to market as fast as a hopper with a higher Hop Rating. It also meant using average D-Hoppers gave the company access to all of the worlds in a six by six by six cube of universes. That is two hundred and sixteen universes, but the majority of those universes have never been explored. In the explored universes, there are usually at least three inhabited planets; but, some of the worlds in an explored universe may not have been explored by a D-Hopper.

Simm’s owner, John Thomson, wanted to extend the company’s area of coverage to some of the more distant universes. My supervisor, Jim Taylor, told me the owner wanted to open several, new trade routes, and I would be working with Tom King while surveying the new routes. Jim told me Tom should get into work sometime in the next hour and he would meet me in the breakroom.

“I gather you’re Samuel Hall, I’m Tom King. A few of our coworkers refer to me as Mr. K, but I prefer Tom. I helped open a few of the company’s longer routes, so Jim decided I should teach you about hopping fish to our customers, and teach you how we survey and install a new route. Did he fill you in on what we are to do, Samuel?”

“Sort of, Tom, and I prefer Sam to Samuel. I was told we are to develop a number of new trade routes, but Jim didn’t say how many, to where, or explain what is involved.”

“What Jim wants us to do right now is survey and setup a trade route to Telemann. The owner, Mr. John Thomson, also expects that we will survey additional trade routes during the coming years. Right now, John is in the process of negotiating the delivery of Chelp to Carson Seafood Ltd., which is located in Charles City on Telemann, and Telemann is in the Cham Universe.

“Chelp is a delicacy on Telemann, so they are willing to pay a premium price to have it delivered alive. Mr. Thomson and Jim believe that the two of us working together can hop a tank of super-oxygenated seawater filled with live Chelp to Telemann before the fish die. They believe the super-oxygenated water will keep the Chelp alive and in good condition for at least ten hours. Someone they met on Telemann told them two average D-Hoppers can get to Charles City in a little over eight hours. If that is true, then with your five-universe Hop Rating and forty-five minute recuperation time, we should be able to get there in about seven hours.

“Jim told me that for the next couple of months, we are to survey a route to Telemann for two average hoppers, who have three-universe hop ratings and one-hour recovery times. I guess you could say that for Simm’s this route will be the proof of concept for using a seawater tank with super-oxygenated water to transport live fish over long distances. Assuming there is no problem with us getting the Chelp to Telemann using a three-universe hopping route, we are to train four average D-Hoppers to take over the route from us, before we have to survey the next route. If the three-universe hopping route isn’t doable for average hoppers, then we need to let Jim and Mr. Thomson know right away.

“Alright. How do you want to go about this task, Tom?”

“Did the University train you in what is involved in surveying a trade route, Sam?”

“Yeah, we had a class on surveying, but no practical experience. Somehow, it seemed to me that it would not be as easy as they made it sound at the University. Arriving on an unknown world, even if it is in a known universe, seems more like Exploratory D-Hopping to me.”

Tom said, “You’re right about that! I had to survey my first new route about twelve years ago. What I experienced was very different from what I remembered of my University course in surveying new trade routes.

“I remember most of what I learned in laying out my first and subsequent routes. At least, I won’t be completely new at survey work, and I can teach you what I know. The D-Hopping Guild’s official position is that new trade routes should be laid out by D-Hoppers that have been trained in Exploration. However in practice, commercial companies get Commercial D-Hoppers like us to do the survey by paying us Hazard Pay. John understands how dangerous surveying a new route is. The Hazard Pay he will pay us is very generous and the money will be a very welcome addition to our bank accounts.

“Let’s do it this way. First, we will layout a three-universe hopping route and then we will see if it will work on paper for two average D-Hoppers.”

Tom then explained how to lay out a new route.

“Laying out a new trade route can be done several ways, Sam. We could layout a new direct route to attain a shortest-time route, but the problem with this approach is we would probably have to survey the entire route. When surveying such a route, we will probably be selecting planets that no one has ever visited, or if they have, no Visit Report was ever filed with the D-Hopping Guild. This would be extremely hazardous for us to attempt, as we are not fully trained and experienced in Exploratory D-Hopping. The introductory classes that we had in Exploratory D-Hopping are helpful; but, we didn’t get the advanced classes and the practical training. Those two things are what we are lacking. You also need to remember, Sam, that visiting unknown worlds can be hazardous, even for a fully-trained Exploratory D-Hopper. That is why Exploratory D-Hopping has such a high mortality rate.

“Alternatively, we can use existing trade routes that intersect with each other, so we don’t have to do any surveying of unknown planets. The problem with this approach is the route can be extremely long and require an excessive amount of time to get the product to market. Since our product is perishable, a short-time route is necessary.

“The solution I’ve used in the past is to use previously surveyed trade routes to the extent possible, and to survey a path between the surveyed routes that will significantly shorten the overall distance.

“What I did for my last survey was determine where the destination planet was located. Then I checked the ‘Commercial D-Hopper’s Reference’ to determine if any of my destination world’s current trade routes came in my direction. I then determined if there were existing trade routes that went from Everett toward my destination planet. This approach gave me two sections of a new route that had already been surveyed, so all I had to do was survey a short route that connected the two sections.

“That is the best method for people like us to use in surveying a new route, Sam. It reduces the dangers associated with surveying a completely new route, while giving us a reasonably short travel time.”

“Yeah, I can see that, Tom. My instructor at the university said nobody knows how big the Multiverse is. He also said, we define The Known Multiverse by the universes in which we have developed planets, which is only a small portion of the entire Multiverse. We describe The Known Multiverse as a cube that currently measures ninety-five by one hundred and ten by one hundred and thirty universes in size. That means the Known Multiverse consists of over one point three million universes connected by a total of over thirty-seven thousand Fourth Dimensional lines of force.

“He said we actually know very little about The Known Multiverse. Out of more than a million universes, there are less than ten thousand universes with at least one explored planet. That means less than one percent of the universes in The Known Multiverse have been even partially explored. Therefore, deviating from a known trade route can be very dangerous.”

The first thing Tom and I did, was to get our copies of The D-Hopper’s Guide to the Multiverse and the Commercial D-Hopper’s Reference; so we could begin laying out our route to Telemann.

We looked up the Fourth Dimension coordinates of the Cham Universe, and then we checked for existing trade routes between Everett and Telemann. Since you always want a new Commercial Trade Route to be as short as possible, we selected two routes that when joined would give us a relatively short route. The unsurveyed portion of our route represented about twenty percent of the total hop distance.

I was glad Tom had experience doing this, for I found it difficult to form a three-dimensional image of the two existing routes in my mind. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. First you have to visualize the departure and destination universes of each route in a three-dimensional grid structure. Then you need to visualize the path that each three-dimensional route takes, between its departure and destination universes. If you can visualize the four universes and two routes, then you should be able to determine where they are the closest to each other.

I couldn’t do it. Tom said the way he did it, was to visualize each of the two routes as a straight line between its departure and destination planets. When I tried that method, I could sort of visualize how the two routes came close to each other, although they never intersected.

For the two existing trade routes, we researched the characteristics of the planets we would hop to along the route. For most of the planets, the route used the universes’ Standard Arrival Planets.

Note: It is a standard practice for D-Hoppers to select the planet closest to the intersection of the X, Y, and Z force axes in a universe as the universe’s Standard Arrival Planet. If the universe has been visited in the past and a Visit Report was filed on it, the location of the Standard Arrival Planet relative to the intersection of the X, Y, and Z-axes is provided in The D-Hopper’s Guide to the Multiverse, along with a brief description of the planet. If the closest planet to the axes’ intersection is considered dangerous, the dangers are defined and reported in the universe’s Visit Report. A second planet is then selected, as the Standard Arrival Planet for that universe; Visit Reports are prepared and filed on both planets.

For the unsurveyed portion of our route, we first laid out a possible route. We then checked to see if a D-Hopper may have visited that portion of the Multiverse and reported any Fourth Dimension irregularities, uninhabitable planets, or dangerous worlds along our intended route. It would not be a good idea to establish a route that had significant known dangers.

According to The D-Hopper’s Guide to the Multiverse, there were no known Fourth Dimension irregularities or uninhabitable planets along the portions of the force axes we were planning to follow. However, we couldn’t count on that being true. The unsurveyed portion of the path we would be traveling may never have been traveled by a D-Hopper. If someone had traveled any portion of that path, then they may not have survived what they encountered to file a Visit Report with the Guild. We would be earning our hazard pay for this job.

When we finished planning our route, we determined we would travel through sixty universes to get to Telemann. By our calculations, the route would require a total of twenty hops, and it would take Tom and me a minimum of nine hours to get to Telemann. For two average D-Hoppers, the three-universe hopping route would require the same number of hops and more than ten hours to get to Telemann.

The three-universe hopper’s route left no safety margin for the Chelp, if average D-Hoppers were used. The maximum survival time without degradation of the Chelp in a super-oxygenated tank of seawater was ten hours. So, the Chelp would be dangerously low on oxygen and the Chelp would probably be in poor condition with a few losses when they arrived on Telemann. If the D-Hoppers were delayed, it was probable that most or all of the Chelp would die from a lack of oxygen. We needed a solution for this problem. Pulling out his comm unit, Tom commed Jim.