Reading Room

MK-CHIRON

CONTROL: / ONLY

23 July 1956

SUBJECT: The Regions Designated Infernus and Caelus — Present Understanding and Consequences for Recovery

TO: W. Seaton, Director, MK-CHIRON

The Director has requested an explanation of the terms I employed during the recovery attempt of 18 July. I have used them in my private working notes for some months. Their appearance upon the wire was unpremeditated. Since they are now in the record, they require a more exact definition than I was able to give in the chamber.

I shall write in the first person. Certain judgments below are mine alone, and the technical group ought not to be made responsible for them by the customary form of a memorandum.

THE DISTINCTION

Infernus designates the region encountered through rearward translation. Caelus designates the region encountered through forward translation. The names express the contrast between the effects we have observed. They do not establish a theology. I have chosen memorable names for two things which the apparatus distinguishes more readily than we can explain.

The words rearward and forward properly describe settings of our apparatus. They have encouraged us to imagine the past upon one side of the chamber and the future upon the other. My predecessor’s revised account supplied a better picture: the apparatus admits an article to a higher manifold, from which it may emerge at another place and time. The present work suggests that reversal admits the article to a different region of that manifold, or brings it into a different relation with the same region. We cannot yet distinguish these alternatives.

Consider a railway tunnel with two entrances. The station at which a passenger emerges tells us where he has arrived. It tells us little of the country through which the tunnel passes. Our temporal setting may specify an intended exit. We have mistaken it for a description of the whole journey.

INFERNUS

Our earliest evidence was the deterioration of organic material. The oak lost mass and acquired the appearance of prolonged exposure to dry heat, although the laboratory interval was approximately four seconds. The relation between loss and nominal displacement was not linear. Later trials extended the injury to steel and electrical components. Trial Fourteen returned a sphere with seven per centum of its mass missing. Trial Sixteen returned damaged instrumentation with its chronometers fourteen minutes ahead of the laboratory clock.

These findings do not describe ordinary ageing with any consistency. The earliest steel articles survived displacements that now produce substantial deterioration. Either our modifications have changed the passage, or conditions beyond the apparatus have changed. I continue to suspect the latter. The chronology permits a connection with the September trial, but does not prove one.

The shadow upon the plates of Trial Seven remains our clearest instrumental evidence of something within the region. The account received from the vessel is compatible with the interpretation of that shadow as a partial appearance of an object of higher dimensionality. The men could perceive portions of what surrounded them, but could not preserve a coherent account of its shape. Their language is distressed. The difficulty it describes is nevertheless a physical one we had already encountered upon glass.

I use the word inhabitants provisionally. There is evidence of presence, alteration, and selective return. Together these suggest agency. They do not establish how many agents exist, whether they share a purpose, or whether the processes that damage our articles are deliberate. A man may be injured by the atmosphere of a country whose inhabitants have never noticed him.

Infernus is therefore the designation of an injurious environment with evidence of occupation. It is not, by that definition alone, the headquarters of an enemy. I concurred with the Director’s stronger interpretation in September. It remains a possibility for which we must prepare; it must no longer serve as a fact from which every subsequent calculation begins.

CAELUS

The evidence for Caelus began with the steel sphere of Trial Eleven. Its surface returned with a finish beyond the capacity of our workshop, without measurable change in mass. Repetition established the effect. Trial Seventeen carried the matter further: the recovered oak retained its external dimensions and mass, while its internal grain was more regular than before dispatch.

The word polishing is consequently inadequate. Something acts upon the arrangement of the article throughout its substance. Nor is improvement an innocent word. A fine finish is desirable to a machinist. Closely spaced, regular grain is desirable for certain uses of timber. We have recognized these results as improvements because they answer familiar requirements. We have not established what requirement the process itself answers.

I cannot yet tell the Director whether Caelus repairs an article, reconstructs it, or returns a different realization of it. The serial mark upon the sphere is evidence of continuity. It is not sufficient evidence that continuity has occurred in the manner we suppose. Trial Fifteen, in which the dispatched and recovered spheres were photographed together during the interval of translation, makes this more than a philosophical objection. Our ordinary method of identifying an object by following it from one moment to the next fails at the chamber itself.

The absence of shadows and field noise in forward trials is established. The absence of inhabitants is not. Whatever produces the refinement may be a property of the region, an activity within it, or a distinction which has no meaning there. A quiet workshop need not be an empty one.

Caelus also fails to return articles. The sphere dispatched five years forward in Trial Nineteen was lost without disturbance. We have a successful recovery at one year and a failure at five, using spheres of different dimensions. These observations do not justify a precise boundary of safe operation. Still less do they justify describing the forward region as benevolent. It has returned excellent specimens. It has given us no assurance concerning men.

THE PASSAGE OF THE VESSEL

The transmission received on 18 July describes a sequence: a dark region containing shapes, an appearance above Italy, and a further passage through a region distinguished by light and the absence of those shapes. I identified the first passage with Infernus and the second with Caelus. The identification fits our instrumental findings, but remains an interpretation of an incomplete account. Neither speaker supplied those names.

If the interpretation is correct, the vessel has passed through both regions without a second dispatch by our apparatus. It follows that the routes are accessible from beyond the chamber. Something can transfer an article between them, or cause it to re-enter them from ordinary space. We do not know whether the second passage was a rescue, a further detention, or merely another stage of the same process.

This is the principal new fact for our purposes. We have approached the regions as though reversal placed the operator at a choice between two destinations. The vessel’s history suggests a system of passages in which our apparatus controls one entrance. The remaining connections are outside our command.

During the trial I said that we had found the vessel at the original coordinates. The plates and the transmission gave me grounds for recognizing her. They did not establish that she remained there in any ordinary sense. Those coordinates afforded contact with some part of her passage. They may have admitted us to an event rather than to her present position. Until we can distinguish the two, repeating the setting may yield the same voices, another portion of the journey, or nothing.

The date which the master began to report was not received. No inference concerning his destination is to be entered as a finding. In particular, his statement that he was not at liberty to give the date deserves to remain in its exact form. We do not know to whom he understood himself to be answerable.

FURTHER WORK

I propose that the next recovery work be directed toward establishing whether a channel can be opened repeatedly and whether a question can be put through it. A response to a question composed after 18 July would be more useful than another apparent confirmation of the vessel’s outline. We should seek the condition and number of the survivors, the readings of their instruments, and the circumstances under which the master withheld the date. No order to alter their course should be transmitted while we lack a means of observing its consequences.

The material trials should continue with matched articles in both directions, using the same mass, composition, and nominal displacement. The purpose is to determine which effects belong to the setting and which depend upon the article. Comparisons across unlike specimens have already permitted more confidence than the evidence warrants. Further explosive dispatches would introduce another variable into an investigation already burdened with them; I advise against such dispatches during this work.

I have not lost interest in Caelus. Quite the contrary. The alteration of the oak alone would warrant years of investigation. But before we speak of sending an aircraft to be perfected, we must learn what is preserved by the process and what is selected for alteration. A machine may return with every measurable property improved and with its intended use no longer possible. Our instruments measure what we have thought to ask of them.

The men have supplied the first account of the passage from within. Their voices are evidence of survival at an unplaced moment, not a successful recovery. I intend to recover them. I have no calculation that entitles me to promise it.

When I first held the sphere of Trial Eleven, I asked Mr. Seaton to admire the finish. I should have spent longer examining the mark by which we claimed to know it was ours.

H. LORENZ

Principal Technical Officer

MK-CHIRON