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“Well,” said Jack’s father, casting about for something to say, “What was your thesis on, or did they do away with that requirement, too?”
“They still have theses, sir. I wrote mine on the Truth and Beauty experiments.”
“Truth and Beauty,” asked the vice admiral.
“Yes, sir. In ‘39, Doctor Hein proposed a long-distance teleport system using hyperspace. The core of the idea was to beam matter through hyperspace, using specially designed warp gates that were calibrated to the teleporters’ frequency. Sending the beam through hyperspace drastically cut the distance that the beam had to travel, enabling it to reach much farther without degrading. Special Projects picked up the idea, but didn’t want to build any more gates than were necessary for an unproven theory, so they decided to refit a pair of T2s, which they named Truth and Beauty, as gate generators, progressively moving them further apart for longer-distance trials.” He went on for some time, growing warm to the subject, until a familiar coldness in his father’s eye told him that he had lost his audience, and he concluded lamely.
The silence roused the Admiral. “Mm,” he said. “What became of her - them?”
“Truth and Beauty? Many of the records are still classified, but it appears that they were decommissioned and held in ordinary for a while. By then the T2s were showing their design flaws, of course. Beauty is mentioned as being ready for scrapping on an internal memo from ‘49 or ‘50, and I expect that Truth was scrapped at about the same time.”
“Probably for the best,” said the admiral. “The T2s were all junk anyway. ‘Floating coffins,’ we used to call ‘em. Ain’t that right, Willis?”
Vice Admiral Willis gave Jack an apologetic smile. “The class did have a troubled history, it is true. But some of them did quite well, doubled and braced, and the G1 T2s-”
“You always was a prevaricating son of a bitch, Willis. Junk. The boy knows it. I know it. You know it." He turned to Jack. "Get out of this brig as soon as you can, son, before she breaks her back on you.”
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