The Infinity Link Read Free Page A

would. The feeling was always there at the end of a session.
    She passed the glassed-in control room where Jonders and Hoshi Aronson were working, retrieved her jacket from the rack in the foyer, and walked down the long corridor to the main lobby and the transit station. The monorail platform was uncrowded, despite the hour. As usual, a large part of the staff was working overtime. She had never been asked to do so herself, but she was only a part-time subject. Some important test was coming up, and most of the departments were putting in long hours. She rather envied them.
    The train hummed into the station on its single maglev rail. Evening workers piled out, and Mozy and a handful of others boarded. She chose a seat and settled in for the ride back to New Phoenix, resting her head against the aluminum window jamb.
    Her mood persisted. She didn't know what she had a right to expect—but something more than just a paycheck. Her hours spent at the institute both excited her and exhausted her. Perhaps she wanted more challenge, or more recognition; perhaps she just didn't want to feel depressed every time she said good-bye to Kadin. Perhaps she ought to discuss her feelings with someone; but everyone was always so busy.
    She peered out the window for a last glimpse of the installation, as the train accelerated on a long curve into the mountains. The main research building turned its profile, a curiously graceful merging of oblong shapes. Perched atop one corner of the building, a squarish tower jutted into the twilight. Behind it sat the domed housing for the fusion generators and tachyon rings. Together, the buildings stood stark and imposing, surrounded by peaks in the fading afternoon sky.
    Finally an embankment cut off the view. Mozy dozed as the train gathered speed, leaping along a steel thread as it descended along the Mazatzal Mountain Range. Sleepily she thought of how little she really knew of the center's work—hardly anything beyond the words of the subject applicants' introductory booklet:
     
    "Sandaran-Choharis Institute for the Study of Tachyonic Phenomena, often referred to as the Sandaran Link Research Center, is a civilian, federally funded institution conducting both classified and unclassified research into tachyon behavior and theoretical and applied principles of matter translocation through the use of modulated tachyon beams."
     
    In other words, the theory and practice of dissociating matter—a rock, a cup of coffee, a dog—and transmitting an exact description of its molecular structure to a receiving station for reassembly. In short, moving an object almost instantaneously from, say, Los Angeles to New Phoenix. Or from the Earth to the Moon.
    Tachyons were particles that moved faster than light, and only faster than light. Like normal particles, they came in various sizes and shapes. The researchers at the Center were interested in a family of tachyons known as T4 particles, which they proposed to use in a coherent beam to scan, transmit, and reconstruct objects. Whether they had actually tried yet, and if so, whether they'd succeeded or failed, she didn't know. Most of the work was classified. Her own job was a part of a program to devise systems for profiling the human consciousness, not in the gross detail of ordinary psychological profiling, but in intimate and microscopic detail. It was, she had been told, more a problem of artificial intelligence than of psychology. It was all part of the process of making a transmission system safe for humans. Apparently, the goal was to ensure that human subjects did not arrive at the receiving end of a transmission link with their brains scrambled.
    But why the secrecy? Was the military involved at some level? Probably. She'd have to pump Hoshi on the subject, the next time they went out for a drink.
    She rubbed her jaw, imagining the process going wrong—and some poor fool being blasted to dust by tachyon lightning, only to reappear in some