Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [38]
‘That’s better. That hatch on the level below us, er, level one-zero-zero, seems the obvious choice.’ The Doctor set off down the corridor at a brisk pace. Adric had little choice but to follow him.
Unlike most people, Whitfield kept her eyes open while she travelled by transmat. Psychologists recognized the condition of ‘transitphobia’, the fear that some people had of teleportation, but such beliefs were irrational. Most phobias had deep-seated origins. Spiders, snakes, rats, fire, high places and enclosed spaces, the causes of the six most common fears, had all been genuinely dangerous thousands of years ago. Cavemen who were wary of spiders or fire were at an evolutionary advantage over those that didn’t. Their genes survived. In a similar way, centuries ago, the first transmat systems had carried an element of risk. Phobics realized that the safety features built into modem transmats had statistically eliminated the dangers of accidents or signal distortion, but they were still scarey.
To rationalize their fears they now claimed that the designers had not managed to eliminate psychological damage to those teleported. They said that men had been driven mad, that people suffered flashbacks, hallucinations. That was all nonsense. Transportation was instantaneous — less time than it took to blink. There were no proven cases of mental instability resulting from transmaterialization. The people who came out of a transmat with a mental illness already had it when they went in.
As a child, Whitfield had found the sudden change of surroundings disconcerting, but now she was used to it.
She still remembered how strange she had felt when her father had explained how the transmat worked. They had teleported from the family home to an orbiting starliner, the first stage of a trip to Earth. Daddy bought her an ice cream and explained that a computer had broken up her entire body into dust and moisture. Then it had broadcast a radio signal, telling another computer tens of thousands of kilometres away how to rebuild her from the dust and moisture stored up at the other end. Whitfield remembered how strange it had felt that night looking at herself in the mirror. Now, her little body was made from bits of other people. She had tried to imagine whose dust and moisture she was made from now and had stared at her reflection trying to see if she looked at all different. Everything was exactly in place: each mole and hair, Even that any scratch on her finger where her last body had caught itself on a pin. She didn’t feel different, she didn’t look different. Her memories were all there: she could still recite the whole periodic table and the Tolvey equations. She was still the same person. Over the years, she had come to realize that there was much in the mundane world that could be presented as disturbing to a child. There were microbes that crawled across her skin and tiny mites in her eyebrows and skin. When magnified they were spiky, antlered creatures with massive mandibles, the stuff of nightmares or science fiction. All food is full of insect carcasses and dung, the tapwater in your drinking glass has been recycled from urine. The dust that danced in the sunlight and settled on the furniture was mostly dead flakes of human skin.
The transmat cycled once, and Whitfield appeared in the materialization cubicle, wearing a new body built from someone else’s dust and moisture.
‘Welcome back, Chief Scientist.’ The Protector bowed his head as a mark of respect. He was thirty-three, a slightly built young man. He had been her deputy here for three years, after impressing her with a paper on Einstein’s twin paradox. His name was Henna, but she rarely used it.
They walked through into the observation dome.
‘Why was I summoned?’
‘One of the extrasensors in the cavern is registering what we think is a datastream on a very high frequency psionic wavelength. It s coming from the Machine.’
Whitfield stepped over, looking out into the cavern. The Machine loomed there, as ever, lit by spotlights on the roof of the observation