Then the people in front moved quickly forward and Rigg was staring Cooper in the face.
“That’s him,” said Cooper. “That’s the boy
who’s claiming to be a prince.”
CHAPTER 9
Umbo
“If we are trapped inside the same starship, Ram, on the same voyage, moving backwards through time,” said the expendable, “why did the ship’s computers show that we made the jump successfully?”
“What were the criteria for determining a successful jump?” asked Ram.
“Observations of the positions of distant stars relative to how they should look near the target star system.”
“Can you bring up an image of what the stars looked like at the moment the computers determined that the jump was successful?”
In an instant, a hologram of a starfield appeared in the air over Ram’s console.
“I take it that’s not the appearance of the stars around our present position.”
“Correct,” said the expendable.
“How long did the stars have the appearance recorded here?”
“The scan was repeated three nanoseconds later and the stars were as they had been just before the jump.”
“So we made the jump, and then we unjumped,” said Ram.
“So it seems.”
“And we’re sure that this wasn’t just a glitch? That the computers weren’t just ‘detecting’ what they were predicted to detect?”
“No, because the starfield of the target was not quite identical to the prediction.”
“Show me the difference,” said Ram.
The starfield view on his holodisplay changed to show yellow and green dots instead of white ones.
“The nearest stars show the most difference, and the farthest ones the least,” Ram observed.
“Not always,” said the expendable, pointing to the few exceptions. “This is expected because our observations of the universe are based on old data—light that has had to travel ninety lightyears to reach Earth.”
“Didn’t the astronomers allow for that?”
“Yes,” said the expendable. “But it was partly guesswork.”
“Let’s play a game,” said Ram. “What if the difference between the prediction and what was observed in that less-than-three-nanosecond interval could be explained, not by astronomer error, but by the passage of time. Is there some point in the future or in the past when the stars would be in these positions relative to the target star system?”
One second. Two seconds.
“Eleven thousand years ago, roughly speaking,” said the expendable.
“So when we made our jump through a stuttering, quantized fold in spacetime, the fold didn’t just move us through space, it also moved us backward in time.”
“That is one explanation,” said the expendable.
“And so we got hurtled back into our previous position in spacetime, only progressing backward.”