The Ring of Charon the-1 Read online

  The Ring of Charon

  ( The Hunted Earth - 1 )

  Roger Macbride Allen

  Volume One of “The Hunted Earth” sequence. Science is toil and hard work—except when it verges on miracle. When Larry O’Shawnessy Chao manages to harness the giant Ring of Charon, orbiting Pluto’s only moon, to control a field of over one million gravities, he feels a touch of the miraculous.

  The Ring of Charon

  By Roger MacBride Allen

  “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”

  —White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass

  by Lewis Carroll

  To Charles Sheffield—friend, colleague, and the sanest man in this business.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to offer my thanks to a number of people who have been tremendously helpful on this book.

  Thanks first of all to Charles Sheffield, to whom this book is dedicated. He read and critiqued The Ring of Charon, but it goes far past that. He deserves a lot more than a book dedication for all his kindnesses to me over the years. He is a good man, and a good friend. Read his books.

  To Debbie Notkin, my editor, who rode herd on me and did that tricky thing editors must do: she forced me to be faithful to my own vision of the book, without imposing her own. She got the book focused and moving.

  To my father, Thomas B. Allen, who zeroed in on the cuts that needed to be made, substantially improving the book you hold in your hands. Read his books too.

  To practically everyone at Tor Books—Ellie Lang, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Heather Wood, and Tom Doherty. They did more than publish this book. They got behind it.

  And finally, thanks to the others who read over this book and kept me honest—my mother Scottie Allen, and my friend Rachel Russell.

  One last thing. This book is subtitled The First Book of the Hunted Earth, and yes, there will be others. But this book, and the next, and all the books I have ever written or will ever write stand alone. You’ll never pick up a book of mine and not be able to understand it without reading 37 other titles. That’s a promise.

  Roger MacBride Allen

  April, 1990 Washington, D. C.

  Dramatis Personae

  Note: a glossary of terms used in The Ring of Charon can be found at the end of the book.

  Jansen Alter. A Martian geologist.

  Sondra Berghoff. Young gravities scientist at the Gravities Research Station, Pluto.

  Wolf Bernhardt. Night shift duty scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, later head of the U.N. Directorate of Spatial Investigation (DSI).

  Larry O’Shawnessy Chao. Junior researcher at the Gravities Research Station, Pluto.

  Chelated Noisemaker Extreme, also know as Frank Barlow. Naked Purple radio technician.

  Lucian Dreyfuss. Technician at the Moon’s Orbital Traffic Control Center.

  Gerald MacDougal, husband to Marcia MacDougal. Born-again Canadian exobiologist.

  Marcia MacDougal, wife to Gerald MacDougal. Planetary engineer on Venus Initial Station for Operational Research (VISOR). Escaped from Naked Purple Movement in Tycho Purple Penal as a teenager.

  Hiram McGillicutty. Dyspeptic staff physicist at VISOR.

  Ohio Template Windbag. Maximum Windbag, or leader, of the Naked Purple Habitat (NaPurHab).

  Dr. Simon Raphael. Elderly and embittered director of the Gravities Research Station, Pluto.

  Mercer Sanchez. A Martian geologist.

  Dianne Steiger. Pilot of the cargo tug Pack Rat. Later, captain of the Terra Nova.

  Tyrone Vespasian. Director of the Moon’s Orbital Traffic Control Center.

  Dr. Jane Webling. Science Director, Gravities Research Station, Pluto.

  Coyote Westlake. Solo asteroid miner, owner of the mining ship Vegas Girl.

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  The End

  One million gravities, and climbing. Larry O’Shawnessy Chao grinned victoriously and leaned back in his seat to watch the show. They hadn’t shut the Ring down, not yet. Maybe this would change some minds. One million ten thousand gravities. One million twenty. One million twenty-five. One million thirty. Leveling off there. Larry frowned, reached forward and twitched the vernier gain up just a trifle, working more by feel and intuition than by calculation.

  It was lonely, deathly quiet in the half darkness of Control Room One of the Gravities Research Station. But then all this world of Pluto was silence. Larry ignored the stillness, the gnawing hunger in his stomach, the bleariness in his eyes. Food and sleep could come later.

  The numbers on the readout stuttered downward for a moment, then began their upward climb once again. One million fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety—

  One million one hundred thousand gravities. Eleven hundred thousand times more powerful than Earth-normal gravity. Larry looked at the number gleaming on the control panel: 1,100,000.

  He glanced up, as if he could see through the ceiling of the control room, through the station’s pressure dome, through the cold of space to the massive Ring hanging in the sky. The Ring was where the action was, not here in this control room. He was merely poking at switches and dials. It was out there, on the Ring orbiting Pluto’s moon Charon, thousands of kilometers overhead, that the work was being done.

  A feeling of triumph washed over him. He had used that Ring, and done this. Granted, he was working in a volume only a few microns across, and the thing wasn’t stable, but what the hell. Generating a field this powerful put the whole team back on track. Now even Dr. Raphael would have to admit they were well on the way to generating Virtual Black Holes, to spinning wormholes and stepping through them.

  More immediately, a viable VBH would be impressive enough to solve a hell of a lot of budget problems. Maybe even enough to make Raphael happy. Larry, though, had a hard time even imagining the director as anything but distant, cold, stiffly angry. Larry’s father had been like that. There was no pleasing him, no effort that could be great enough to win his approval.

  But all things were possible—if Larry could achieve a Virtual Black Hole. Even with this 1.1 million field, that was still a long way off. Field size and stability were still major headaches. Even as he watched, the numbers on the gravity meter flickered and then abruptly dropped to zero. The microscopic field had gone unstable and collapsed.

  Larry shook his head and sighed. There went yet another massless gravity field, evaporating spontaneously. But damn it, this one had reached 1.1 million gees and had lasted all of thirty seconds. Those were breakthrough numbers, miracle numbers, no matter how much work was still left to do.

  Too bad the rest of the staff was asleep. That was the trouble with getting an inspiration at 0100 hours: no witnesses, no one to celebrate with, no one to be inspired by this success and dream up the next screwball idea. But then he barely knew anyone on the staff. Even after five months here, and with such a glorious reason for doing it, he couldn’t think of anyone he would dare wake up at this hour. Lonely place to be, low man on the totem pole.

  Never mind. Tomorrow would be time enough. And maybe this little run would earn him enough attention so he could get to know some people. Larry stood up, stretched and made sure all the logging instruments had recorded the figures and the procedures. He ordered the computer system to prep a hard-copy report for the next day’s science staff meeting, and then powered the system down.

  * * *

  The Observer felt something.

  Brief, far-off, tantalizing. Weak, fleeting. But unquestionably, the feeling was there. For the first time in uncounted years, it felt the touch it had awaited.

  The Observer did not sense with vision, and the energy was not light,
but the Observer’s sensations were analogous to vision. It had been in standby, in watchkeeping mode, for a long time. The something it felt was, to it, a brilliant pinpoint in the darkness, a bright but distant beacon. It correctly interpreted this to mean the source was a small, intensely powerful point of energy at great distance.

  The Observer became excited. This was the signal it had waited for for so long.

  And yet not precisely the signal. Not powerful enough, not well directed enough. The Observer backed down, calmed itself.

  It longed to respond, to do the thing it had been bred and built to do, but the signal stimulus Was not strong enough. It was under the rigid control of what, for lack of a better term, might be called its instincts, or perhaps its programming—and it had no discretion, whatsoever in choosing to respond or not. It had to respond to precisely the right stimulus, and not to any other.

  A quiver of emotion played over it as it struggled against its inborn restraints.

  But now was not the time. Not yet.

  At least, not the time for action. But certainly the time to awaken, and watch more closely. Perhaps the moment for action was close.

  It directed its senses toward the source of the power, and settled in to watch carefully.

  * * *

  Ten minutes after the run was over, Larry was out in the corridor, bone weary and feeling very much alone. The excitement of a new idea, the thrill of the chase, was starting to fade away, now that the idea had worked. Larry always felt a letdown after a victory.

  Perhaps that was because even his greatest victories were hard to explain. In the world of subatomic physics, the challenges were so obscure, the solutions so tiny and intricate, that it was almost impossible for Larry to discuss them with anyone outside the field. For that matter, Larry was working so far out on the edge of theory he had trouble talking shop with most people in the field.

  The price you pay for genius, he thought to himself with a silent, self-deprecating laugh. Larry was twenty-five, and starting to feel a bit long in the tooth for a boy wonder. He looked younger than his age, and the Chinese half of his ancestry showed in his face far more than the Irish half. He was a short, slender, delicate-looking young man. His skin was pale, his straight black hair cut short, his almond eyes wide and expressive. He was one of the few people aboard the station who occasionally chose to wear the standard-issue coveralls instead of his own clothes. The gray coveralls were a bit too large for him, and made him seem younger and smaller than he was. His fondness at other times for Hawaiian shirts didn’t help him seem more mature. It never occurred to Larry that his appearance helped make others underestimate him.

  He planted his slippered feet carefully on the Velcro carpet and started walking. Pluto’s gravity, only four percent of Earth’s, was tricky when you were tired. The Gravities Research Station would be an ideal place to put artificial gravity to use, if such a fairy-tale technology were ever possible.

  Fat chance of that—but the popular press had latched on to the everyday use of artificial gravity as one of the reasons for funding the station in the first place. There had been all sorts of imaginative “artist’s conceptions” put about, of a research station floating on Jupiter’s surface, hovering on antigravity, of full-gravity space habitats that did not have to spin. Those were at best far-off dreams, at worst spectacular bits of nonsense that made everyone look foolish as it became obvious they were all impossible.

  The researchers still hadn’t learned to generate a stable point-source gravity field yet. How could they hope to float a shielded one-gee field in Jupiter’s atmosphere?

  Nonsensical though the idea might be, Larry would have welcomed an artificial gee field under his feet just then. He was thoroughly sick of shoes with Velcro. Four-percent gravity was a nuisance, combining the worst features of zero gee and full gravity, without the merits of either. In zero gee you couldn’t fall down; in a decent gee field, your feet stayed under you. Neither was true here.

  Larry felt a wave of exhaustion sweep through him. He was suddenly much aware that it was three-thirty in the morning and he was billions of kilometers from home. Unbidden, the image of his hometown street back in Scranton, Pennsylvania, popped into his head. A vague depression sank down on him.

  It was when he was deep in the problem that he felt happy. Solutions meant the game was over. It was like the math problems back at school. From grade school, to high school, to college and grad school, math had been his special love. Algebra, trig, calculus, and beyond. Larry had gobbled them all up. The first time he demonstrated a proof, or calculated a function, it was fun, challenging. Puzzlement would give way to understanding and triumph. But afterwards—afterwards the problems were dead to him, static, unchanging. He knew how they worked. From then on, working on that whole type of problem was anticlimactic, redundant. It was as if he were condemned to reading the same mystery novel over and over again, when he already knew the ending.

  While the rest of his classmates would struggle through example after example, practicing their skills, he would be bored, rattling through the second problem, and the third, and hundredth, at record speed, while the other kids dragged behind.

  Only when the professor deemed it time to move on to the next kind of problem could Larry experience even a new, brief moment of excitement.

  Postgrad school and the field of high-energy physics had given him a new freedom, a place where all the problems were new, not only to him, but to everyone. There was no longer the slightly mocking knowledge that the answers were there to be found in the back of the book. But still, when he cracked the problem at hand, the letdown came.

  Larry was not an introspective person, and even spotting such an obvious pattern in his behavior was an accomplishment for him. But before anyone got sent to Pluto, the psychiatrists worked hard to make that person more aware of how the mind worked. Put a bit less formally, they made damn sure that you didn’t drive yourself crazy on Pluto. People kept a close eye on sanity on Pluto, watching it the way a man in his pressure suit kept an eye on his air supply.

  A tiny leak in the suit could be fatal, and just so with the human mind on Pluto. One tiny weakness, one microscopic break in the armor between you and the cold and the dark, was all it took to leave good men and women watching helplessly as their own sanity dribbled away, evaporating out into the frozen wastes.

  Sanity was a scarce commodity on Pluto, easily used up, carefully rationed. The oppressive sense of isolation—of being trapped in this remote place, locked away with 120 other edgy souls, with no escape possible—that was what gnawed at reason.

  Not just the grimness of the planet but the knowledge that there was no way home, for months or years at a time, drew nightmares close to so many souls here.

  True, there was the supply ship from home every six months. But when it departed, the denizens of the station were stranded for another half year. There was one, count it, one, ship capable of reaching the Inner System stationed at Pluto. The Nenya could, at need, bear the entire station staff home, but it would be a long and grueling flight of many months. Alternatively, she could gun for Earth and get there in sixteen days—but with a maximum of only five people aboard, which meant everyone else would be utterly stranded while she was gone. So far, the Nenya was insurance no one had used.

  She could also function as an auxiliary control station for the Ring. But without the anchor of Pluto’s mass to provide calibration, the Nenya’s Ring Control Room was not capable of the sort of fine measurement the station could get. The Nenya’s real value was psychological. She represented a way home, knowledge that it was possible to get back to Earth.

  The Gravities Research Station was the only human-habitable place for a billion kilometers in any direction, and every waking moment of their lives, everyone at the station was aware of that fact.

  In the silence of the Plutonian night, Larry could imagine that the planet itself resented the presence of humans. Life, light, warmth, activity weren’t welc
ome here, in this land of unliving cold. Larry shivered at the mere thought of the frigid desolation outside the station.

  Without making any conscious decision to go there, he found himself walking toward the observation dome. He needed to get a look outside, a look at the sky.

  The darkness, the emptiness, the coldness that surrounded the windowless station preyed on all their minds. The station designer had known all that, and had made sure the station was brightly lit and painted in cheery colors. But the designers had also known it was important for the staff to be able to look on the empty landscape, the barren skyscape; perhaps more importantly, the station staff needed to be able to look toward the distant Sun, needed to use the small telescope in the observation dome to spot the Earth, needed to be able to prove to themselves that light and life and the warm, busy, lively homeworld were still there.

  And so is all the weirdness, Larry reminded himself. All the raucous, angry pressure groups, unsure of what they were for, but certain of what they were against. They were a big part of his memory of MIT, and they had frightened him. And scared him worse when they had showed up back home in Pennsylvania. But then, they frightened a lot of people. And in the wake of the half-imaginary Knowledge Crash, the rad groups were spreading.

  Larry made his way down the darkened access tunnel to the dome building. The route was long, and he had to find his way there by touch. The way to the dome was deliberately left in darkness, so that a person’s eyes would have the length of time it took to pass through the tunnel to adapt to the gloomy darkness of the Plutonian surface.

  At last he stepped out into the large, domed room. It was a big place, big enough for the entire staff to crowd in for important meetings.