Chapter 3

Susan found an astronomer whose silence could be bought for the right amount of money. She brought him to the laboratory and took him through the portal at night under adequate guard. He looked at the sky long enough to be sure, which wasn't very long, and pronounced, "I don't understand what is going on, but the pattern of the stars definitely indicates that the land beyond that remarkable portal is certainly the Earth at this day and time."

He was thanked, paid, and sent on his way. This was enough expert opinion to convince Jim that Susan had been correct in her assumption that they had, indeed, contacted a parallel universe. Jim's further study of the math corroborated this opinion, so they decided to work from that assumption. Jim believed that the most useful thing he could do would be to find a way to shift the portal's location in space. A secondary objective would be to find a way to shift to another parallel universe.

He tried moving the relative position of the two coils which had been the basis for his original discovery, but that didn't seem to make any difference. Jim was certain that he should be able to relocate the portal in space, he just had to try the available variables until he found the key.

For simplicity's sake, the original frequency that the device operated on was crystal controlled for stability purposes and the oscillator was carefully compensated against drift. This had been done to simplify the math, but Jim wondered if changing the frequency would change anything else. He consulted a "ham" friend and found that he could "pull" the frequency of the crystal with one minor change to the circuitry, so he did that immediately.

As soon as he changed the frequency, the scene in the portal jumped to something new! He found that he could move the scene to many different apparent locations as he shifted the frequency. This must be what he was looking for! He did find that manual adjustment of the frequency was too crude to let him set a precise location, so he switched to a digital frequency generator in the range of the crystal. When this was set up, he found that he could "dial in" any location, he just didn't know the significance of these locations.

A bigger problem was that slight changes in frequency sometimes moved the portal only a few inches and sometimes moved it a few feet! This was not acceptable for the degree of precision he felt that he needed. It was as if there was a discontinuity in the effect of the frequency change. His math said that these jumps in location should not be there if the frequency change was smooth; it looked like the frequency changes looked different to him and to the machine. The big question was "WHY?"

Jim thought about the problem for a while and suddenly realized that the unit of frequency, the hertz, was just another way of saying "cycles per second." He also realized that the second of time was really an arbitrary division of time arrived at with no scientific effort, it was just a convenient unit adapted from the Babylonians. What if the quantum universe had its own absolute value for its "second?" What if the strings that controlled everything in the universes had a fundamental, absolute value of time which was probably different from the human second? If he adjusted his frequency based on that true second, shouldn't he have the fine control he was looking for?

He plotted the relative location of the portal for each 1-hertz change in frequency. He found that his graph looked like a "saw-tooth" wave form, when it should have been a straight line. Some relatively simple calculations told him what his new second must be. For the fun of it, he decided to call this new time interval a q-sec, and cycles per q-sec would be called susans.

Jim rebuilt his frequency generator to operate in susans instead of hertz and tried it out. Bulls-eye! He could now adjust the position of his portal with high precision. The next step was to measure how much frequency change was required for a kilometer offset (he switched to metric for measurement convenience). Back calculation gave him the value of 15.763 mm per susan.

He now had horizontal movement, right-and-left. He also needed front-and-back and up-and-down control. He had other signals within the device that he could modulate and he soon found the ones to change for position control in three dimensions.

Eureka! Jim could now position the portal wherever he wished. With a minimum of trial and error, he found their gold mining site and recorded the settings for future reference.

This series of experiments was easy to describe, but it had taken Jim almost seven weeks to do it all. He wanted a break from all that mental effort, so, after discussing it with Susan, called his gold mining crew back for another trip to restock the financial larder. They all readily agreed and met for the trip a week later.

This time, there was no need to trek through the wilderness nor to camp out; they could live at home and eat in the dining room. They still needed their weapons and vehicles at the gold mining site, but they could park in the lab each night. Now this was the way to mine gold!

Jim had managed to work out a way to control the permeability of the portal from the target side, so they could open the doorway whenever they wished. He positioned the portal at the gold site and they set out to recover as much gold as they could in a reasonable amount of time. Susan had researched the most productive sites from the old records, so they were able to save themselves quite a bit of searching time. Once a location was stripped, the were able to use the portal to shift to the next site in only a few minutes.

This time, they had more trouble from the local wildlife, but the .50 caliber machine guns had no difficulty controlling the situation. One day, they caught and killed one of the proto-horses and brought it back for Mary to cook. She looked at it for a while and decided to treat it like veal; her efforts were spectacularly delicious. They speculated that this would make a excellent alternate food supply for third-world nations if it was managed properly.

By the time they quit the mining expedition, they had collected over 2,500 pounds of gold. They thought that this was enough because they didn't want to depress the market by selling too much at one time. Twenty million dollars would hold them for a while!

Jim's next project was to try to contact other parallel universes. This should be something like moving the portal, he just had to find it. This took five weeks of heavy work, but he finally made the breakthrough.

Since it was such an obvious place for people to gather, Jim set the portal for a dry place in New Orleans to begin his search. His first effort was a real surprise: when he activated the view screen, the first thing he saw was snow! It was snowing to beat hell and there was no evidence of people being around. Jim recorded the device settings and went on to look at a new place.

He had found that a 1-susan shift in the controlling frequency was enough to change the universe, so, for practical purposes, the possibilities were infinite. The next universe, down 1-susan, had snow on the ground, but none was falling. As Jim progressed down in frequency, the weather appeared to get warmer, so that he was initially able to see bare ground, and, finally, no sign of snow. From heavy snow to no snow took 47 susans, he wondered if that might be significant.

Susan had wandered into the lab and taken a seat to watch the show, but she quickly got bored just sitting and watching, so Jim offered to let her take over the search. She agreed, but wanted to select her own frequencies; she was going to skip around at random, just to see what she might find.

She closed her eyes and punched in a frequency at random. She activated the viewscreen and was startled to see that it was completely under water. Susan called to Jim to check the coordinates. He verified that the screen had not moved relative to its old position; the water level had risen enough to cover the screen completely. Was this the result of global warming? They watched fish swimming by; it was like a monster aquarium! They recorded the control settings and moved on to another setting.