Depending on whom you talk to, Jerry Redlands either ranks among the noblest heroes of the third millennium, or was the greatest traitor to humanity that history has ever recorded. The records he broadcast against Sol's orders, detailing the hole in space left by the explosion of the Mad Scientist's Phased Antimatter Bomb, caused an unprecedented flurry of activity among theoretical physicists. Every star system wanted its theorists to be the first to create and solve the equations which pointed to this enigma. The solution — the Energy Density Limit theory which we are all so familiar with today — was reached by a group from Sirius who discovered it far in advance of everyone else. Sirius was so far ahead in coming up with the answer, in fact, that none of the other major systems had discovered it even by the time Sirius's radio announcement reached them!
The budding young field of Hyperspace Physics was essentially limited to theory due to the enormous amount of antimatter necessary to generate a phased annihilation. (It should be noted that the energy density limit, by sheer coincidence, lies almost exactly half way between the energy density generated by the minimum amount of reacting antimatter required for phasing to occur and the "straight" (non-phased) detonation of that same amount of antimatter.) Most of the theories that came out of this period were quite extravagant, but only two are worthy of mention here: (1) That time as we are accustomed to it is meaningless in a parallel space, so travel through any such space would be instantaneous for both the traveller and any outside observer, and (2) That the simultaneous creation of two "hyper-holes" aimed directly at each other would create a permanent "tunnel," linking both real-space ends through a parallel space.
Needless to say, the implications of these two theories were astounding. Two phased antimatter bombs, now usually called "hyper-bombs," could be detonated facing each other and would thus form a tunnel of any length desired through which anything would travel instantaneously. This theory had been backed up so well and held so much promise that it became the only one in the entire history of hyperspace physics that has actually been tested. Sol and Alpha-Centauri both sacrificed the requisite amount of positrons. Teams in both star systems lined their hyper bombs up with the other to within a fraction of an arc-second. And teams in both star systems timed — via radio, despite the four-point-three lightyear difference between them — their bombs to detonate within five milliseconds of the other's.
Against all the odds and all the unknowns, both the theory and the experiment were a success. Within a quarter of a century, all five major star systems — Sol, Alpha Centauri, Sirius, CN Leonis, and Human-Centauri — had hyperspace corridors linking them with their two nearest neighbors. Interstellar commerce and communications which used to take years or decades now took only a few days or hours.
The crudely pentagonal shape that this arrangement resulted in gave the Pentagon of our primary populated space its name. This was the birth of the Pentagon as we now know it. The political problems that arose as a result of such drastically reduced interstellar travel times will be the topic of the next section.
The Pentagon War is continued in chapter 4.
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