Phobos smiled mildly. It reminded Lamont of the expression one might make if asked by a child what the stars are made of. “How much do you know about math?” He asked.
“Lamont,” The Martian greeted politely. “What can I do for you?” Given his towering stature, his voice was surprisingly high and reedy, perhaps a function of the long, thin neck that appeared inadequate to the task of supporting the oversized cranium of his head. Passing between Lamont and the kaleidoscope of colors outside the viewing window, Phobos lowered himself awkwardly to sit on the bench beside the newspaperman. With his knees bent up at an extreme angle and his long arms hanging down to the side, he looked like a giant marionette whose strings had just been cut.
“I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Lamont said.
The Martian turned his eyes toward Lamont expectantly, two globes of gold glittering strangely from the deep shadow beneath his brow.
“When we jump through Escherspace,” Lamont ventured, “What exactly happens? Physically, I mean?”
Phobos smiled mildly. It reminded Lamont of the expression one might make if asked by a child what the stars are made of. “How much do you know about math?” He asked.
“I remember my times tables all the way up to twelve,” Lamont offered.
“Perhaps I can try a—” The Martian hesitated as if searching for the phrase. “Word picture.”
“That would be a start,” Lamont agreed.
“Imagine that you are an ant on the surface of an orange,” Phobos began. “You would like to travel from the stem of the orange to its bottom. Because of your nature, you have no choice but to traverse the circumference of the orange’s exterior until you reach your destination.”
“I’ve heard this one,” Lamont interrupted. Phobos was repeating, almost word-for-word, the explanation offered in United Space’s official press releases. “Peel the orange, and now the two ends can be pinched together, eliminating the space between.”
“There you have it,” Phobos agreed, spreading his skeletal hands. “Escherspace.”
The newspaperman shook his head. “That one doesn’t work for me.”
“Why not?” The Martian asked, his tone genuinely curious.
“For one thing,” Lamont said, “You can’t unpeel an orange.”
“It isn’t a perfect analogy,” Phobos admitted. “The point of the picture is to look at it from the perspective of the ant. The ant’s problem only begins with a physical limitation. If the ant were a moth, it would see the orange as a sphere. If it were a grub, the orange would be a tunnel. As a human, you see the orange as an arrangement of wedge-shaped segments bound within a soft shell. The challenge being described is not essentially physical in nature—it is a conceptual problem experienced in physical terms.”
Lamont felt his brow furrow. Was Phobos obfuscating, or was he actually missing the point? “Okay,” He pressed, “But the orange is a physical object. The ant might know everything about the orange at the atomic level and it wouldn’t change anything about the basic problem.”
“Wouldn’t it?” Countered the Martian. “What if the ant never moved at all?”
“For how long?” Lamont asked.
“Until the problem solved itself,” Phobos explained. “If the ant understood the orange in temporal geometry, it would know that the fruit will, in time, shrivel away until the bottom and the stem are indistinguishable.”
Lamont found himself suppressing frustration from his tone. “But the ant would die of old age waiting for that to happen. And ignoring that, the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri isn’t going to close itself no matter how long we wait.”
The martian turned his eyes toward the panoramic window and steepled long fingers so that the tips pressed against his thin lips. “Perhaps we should set the analogy of the orange aside for now,” He suggested.
Next: Time Machine
Based on Phobos' challenging words, I wonder: Is Escherspace essentially "accessing" a time before the universe expanded, or perhaps after it begins to collapse (presuming the 'big crunch' theory is correct for a moment)? Is it accessing a framework where two physical points currently distant would naturally be close together?
Time will tell, I suppose.
(I didn't plan that pun, but I was powerless to avoid it.)