Starquake.pdf

"After the success with the three multi-great transmissions, I had no trouble getting the grant committee
to authorize the construction of a 24-channel machine with a greatly increased channel capacity in each
channel. Getting the money approved took a while, and while the preliminary design work was underway
the time came for the first of the transmissions to be received, the one sent over two greats of turns. The
two ex-students as well as members of the grant committee were there as the message came out of the
machine from two greats in the past, and they watched as I measured the bit count and sent the
confirmation back to myself in the past. I should have quit then."
"What happened?"
"Since I now had two channels free in each direction, I decided to show the committee how the
Time-Comm machine worked by sending a messagesix greats into the future. As I prepared the message
for the forward-time channel, I was a little surprised that the back-time channel had not already indicated
the message had been received. Thinking that the differential calibration had drifted off so that the
back-time
channels were now shorter than the forward-time channels, I sent the message off six greats into the
future and waited for a reply."
"And?"
"It didn't come," he said. "I didn't find out what had happened until a great of turns later, long after the
grant committee had decided to hold up on the construction of the new machine."
They had finished eating, and the faculty dining compound was nearly empty.
"You have to get back to your work," he said. "I can't do anything until the next channel clears a few
dozen turns from now, so you spread the fields and I'll snuggle along behind and tell you the rest of the
sad story."
She headed across the grounds of the Institute and he switched to a soft electronic whisper that tickled
through her hide.
"I was really dejected until the time came for the reception of the three-great-long message. That came
through on schedule, and I sent the reply through the back-time channel. Almost as soon as the reply was
on its way through the channel into the past, the channel was full again with a message from the future,
eight greats away. At eight greats time distance, you can only send 108 bits of information, so the
message was brief. Both the six greatand the eight great messages had been received, but the response
to the six-great message had been blocked by some spontaneous emission in the back-time channel."
"Spontaneous emission?"
"That bewildered me at first. My time communication theory, although based on the quantization of
space and time, didn't predict any spontaneous emission of signal energy in the channels," he said. "I
brought in a bright theoretical student, and we soon found a third-order effect that could produce
spontaneous emission of a bit pair that travels simultaneously backward and forward in time for a short
period, then emerges in the receiver. Even though the 'message' is only one bit, that is enough to keep the
channel from being used by any other message. It is only supposed to happen once every dozen
generations or so, and it had to happen just as I needed that channel to impress the committee."
"Did your new results get the committee to resume the work on the 24-channel machine?" she asked.