The Ring of Charon the-1 Read online

  “As you can see, the Sun is just rising over the coast of North and South America, and there’s clear weather over most of the Atlantic. Can anyone spot the coast of Africa?”

  The murmur of voices swept toward a crescendo as the groundlings eagerly pointed out the perfectly obvious to each other. Next step. He could explain how the South American coast matched up with Africa. He looked up at the Earth and began.

  “Very good. Now, if you look toward the dark side of the planet, you can just see—”

  He saw it. He saw it happen. One moment the Earth was there, and then, suddenly, in a weird, twisted flash of blue light, it wasn’t. He blinked, unbelieving.

  The Earth wasn’t there anymore.

  Around him, the tourist voices rose again, a bit uncertainly. “Is it an eclipse?” one of them asked.

  “Hey, sonny, is this some kind of joke?”

  “Did the polarizers switch on in the wrong place?”

  “No, dummy, this dome isn’t polarized. It’s got that Sun-blocking gizmo on the control arm outside.”

  “It must be a power failure. All the lights on Earth went out.”

  “Yeah, right, including the Sun?”

  “Hey, mister, you ever seen anything like this before?”

  “Young man, what in heaven’s name is going on?” Mrs. Chester demanded in an imperious voice, as if Lucian were responsible for preventing disasters.

  Lucian ignored the welter of voices and stared at the impossible sky, his mind racing for an explanation. What in the name of God could create the illusion of a planet vanishing? He dreamed up a half dozen theories. A black dust cloud wandering through the Solar System, a bad prank by some grad students on one of the space habitats, flinging a king-size occulting disk in front of Earth, a sudden weird flaw in the dome’s glass that filtered out Earth-colored light. But none of his ideas made sense, or were even physically possible.

  Then if there were no way to make it seem the Earth was gone, then it had to be that—

  Lucian never had the chance to complete the terrifying thought. The first moonquake hit.

  The Moon’s entire existence had been shaped by the tidal stresses imposed by Earth’s massive gravity well. Internal stresses in the Moon’s crust, stresses that had existed before the first trilobite ever swam Earth’s seas, were suddenly no longer there. With the strain patterns of a billion years suddenly relieved, the Moon’s crust snapped, like a rubber band let go after being stretched out. The first of the shock waves smashed into the surface, sending everyone in the dome sprawling.

  Lucian, standing on the low tour-guide dais, was flung into the air, tumbling end over end in the Moon’s leisurely gravity.

  It was the quake that convinced Lucian of the impossible truth. The sudden, appalling shock of the very ground beneath his feet, flinging him about, made the disaster real. He slammed into the floor of the dome and clung to it, digging his fingers into the rubber matting.

  Suddenly his mind was clear. A legend spoke to him, and told him what to do.

  “Accept the situation, think and act,” his father’s voice whispered to him. His father, Bernard Dreyfuss, hero of the SubBubble Three disaster. A thousand—ten thousand more would have died, if Bernard Dreyfuss had not kept his head. “Most people panic when they are in danger. Not our family.” That was family lore, the family law, Lucian told himself. “We think in a crisis, boy,” his father had told him. “That’s why we survive. When the terrible, the frightening, the incredible happens, accept it and act while the others are still in shock. It’s in your blood to do it. Trust that and act.”

  He looked up in the sky. All his life, all the centuries humanity had lived on the Moon, all the endless millions of years before that, the Earth had hung in that one spot in the Lunar sky, the one unmoving object among the wheeling Sun and stars. It had hung there, always.

  And it wasn’t there now. Damn it, accept that. No one was going to believe it, but accept it. It had happened. How? How had it been wrecked? Had it exploded?

  Stop it. Accept the incredible. The how of it didn’t matter just now. The ground below his feet rattled again, and he heard a little girl whimper in fear. It refocused his mind. He could do nothing for the people of Earth, but the loss of the planet had consequences here, now.

  And he had responsibilities. For starters, the people in this dome. He did not even notice that he had stopped thinking of them as tourists and groundlings.

  They needed help. If the ground danced again, and the dome cracked this time… He had to get them safely down below, down into the panicked ant heap the city must be by now…

  It struck him that down below they wouldn’t know about Earth yet.

  Earth. Dear God, Earth. He looked again at the frightened people all around him. Earth people. They needed help. Help in getting below to safety, help in avoiding panic.

  Keeping their minds off whatever had just happened to their world was vital. Focus them on the immediate danger. Don’t let them have time to think.

  Lucian stood up carefully, adopting the cautious, wide-legged stance of a man expecting the ground to give way. “Everyone, please listen carefully.” He must have gotten some sort of tone of authority into his voice; they all quieted down and turned to him. Calm them. Downplay the situation. “You are in no immediate danger, but safety regulations require the evacuation of these domes after even a minor tremor.” There was nothing remotely “minor” about the temblor they had just experienced, but Lucian was perfectly willing to minimize the danger if it calmed these people and got them the hell out of here.

  “Please form a single-file line and move in an orderly fashion back down the entrance ramp.” Warn them of the turmoil below. “Please bear in mind that everyone under us in the city felt that tremor too, so things might be a little chaotic down there.”

  Fine, that will keep them from being shocked—but won’t they get completely freaked if they see the goddamn natives in an uproar? Panic is contagious. How to keep them from catching it—or causing it? Of course. Appeal to their pride. “The people below will be scared, and we’re scared—but let’s not let other people’s fear panic us. Show them tourists can handle a crisis just as well as Conners. Now let’s move, quickly.”

  He jumped down and made his way through the crowd to the exit ramp. He started ushering the people down, and found himself pleasantly surprised at how cooperative they all were. He spotted a young woman who looked levelheaded toward the head of the line and took her by the arm. What was her name? Deborah, that was it. “Listen, Deborah,” he said. “We’ll need to keep the whole crowd together until we get back to the hotel. Hold them at the entrance to the main concourse while I take up the rear.”

  If we get that far. Lucian knew full well what a quake could do to the underground tunnel-and-dome system that made up Central City. A collapse, a major pressure breach, a jammed lock, and they would be trapped. He thrust the thought from his mind. Just get them down below.

  He never even noticed he had managed to make himself forget the main problem:

  Earth was gone.

  * * *

  Dianne Steiger flinched back from the madness. The sky flared up in a field of unseeable whiteness that swept toward and over her and then vanished, taking the sky with it. Her ship lurched drunkenly and pinwheeled wildly—tumbling, pitching, yawing, tumbling end over end. Fighting the errant controls, she managed to stabilize the Rat on one, two, three axes. Stable again. She stared in shock at what was, and what was not. The stars and the slender crescent Moon beyond had been swallowed up in that whiteness that was there and then gone. Stars, but not the stars of Earth, sprawled across the sky once again. Only Earth and the ugly bulk of NaPurHab, now several kilometers distant, remained of the familiar Universe.

  Until the blue-whiteness snapped into being and lunged toward her once more.

  But no, it was not whiteness, but nothingness. For a split second, her eyes decided it was utter black, but that was wrong too. There was
not even black to see. Unless it was a blinding white, or a fog leaping for her mind through the viewport. Whatever it was, it flashed over the ship once again. This time her ship held attitude. The Universe, or at least a universe, snapped into existence in front of her. Again, it was not a sky she had ever seen. No Moon, no High New York, none of the familiar constellations.

  At least there were stars and a proper sky. She checked her stern cameras. Below and behind her, the fat crescent of dayside Earth was suddenly night, barely visible but for the gleaming of starlight. Was the Sun gone? Before she had time to wonder how such a thing could be, the new sky vanished into a new world of that black/white nothingness. An unseen fist slapped at her ship and the Pack Rat fell off its axes again, tumbling madly. Even as she brought the nose steady, yet another new sky appeared. And the whiteness, and the mad tumbling. Then a true sky. And then it happened again, the whole nightmare cycle.

  Again.

  And again.

  And again.

  The sky outside the ship thundered in silence, exploding, vanishing, destroying itself, renewing itself over and over. Dianne’s hindbrain told her such violence should have been deafening, should have made a noise that would rattle the ship apart—but the cold vacuum of space kept all sound at bay, and the nightmare outside her ship was reeling past in utter quiet.

  But no, the quiet was not that absolute. With every pulse from nothingness to sky, with every pulse back again to the solidity of the tangible Universe, she thought she heard and felt a low rippling boom shudder through the ship, almost too low to hear.

  That gave her hope that she had gone mad. For there could be no sound in space. Could there? But was she in any normal version of space?

  She realized belatedly that every alarm on the Pack Rat’s control board was lit up and screaming. Dianne dared not move her hands from the control yoke long enough to shut them off. Outside the viewport was an insane pinwheel of white, red and blue-white stars. No, not stars: suns, close enough for their disks to be visible, close enough to be blindingly bright. She checked the rear monitor to see Earth in strange colors, lit by the light of stars it had never been meant to see.

  Acting more by instinct than logic, Dianne fired the Pack Rat’s nose jets to back away from the churning madness of the sky, a few hundred meters back toward the imagined safety of Earth.

  Damn it! There was something seriously wrong with the nose jets. They seemed to have been badly damaged in the first jolt, and tended to tumble her toward portside. Dianne held on and leaned into the port jets, and managed to back off in a more or less straight line. Her nose yawed over a bit, but this time she let the Rat have its head, let her tumble a bit. She might need her reaction gas later. The wall of white appeared again. With the Pack Rat’s nose looking to one side when it appeared, this time she saw the edge of the nothingness, a knife-sharp boundary between the nothing and normal space. It suddenly struck her that perhaps the nothingness was stationary, and it was she herself that was moving, falling into a series of holes in space that opened before her.

  Herself, and NaPurHab, and the Earth, falling into the holes. HolyJesusChrist. The Earth.

  A new hole yawned wide. New stars snapped back into being on the other side. And then another hole appeared before them. On the other side of this one, Earth, the hab and the Pack Rat hovered under an impossible hell-red plane, a throbbing scarlet landscape stretching overhead to infinity in all directions. Regular markings that resembled lines of latitude and longitude scored the surface. Dianne could feel the star heat burning on her face. But this could be no star. Its surface was not gaseous and moving, but distinct, solid, concrete.

  But then a new hole opened and that vision vanished as well.

  Dianne held the control yoke in a death grip and prayed that she was going insane. Her own personal madness was far preferable to a universe that could indulge in such lunacy.

  * * *

  The sky was falling. Gerald MacDougal lay faceup on the ground, his hands clawed into the earth, hanging on for dear life, watching it coming down.

  The sky was blue, noonday bright, in the middle of the night. And not true daylight, but a deep blue skycolor he had never seen before. How could that possibly be?

  A disk of white/not-white appeared in the sky and swelled outward over the clean blue Vancouver sky, stretching out in all directions until all the world was blotted out. Bigger and closer it came, sweeping all before it, coming closer, closer—and then it passed through him, leaving darkness where daylight had been. Stars that were strangers to Earth shone down in a night that should not have been, casting a cold light that sent a shiver through Gerald’s heart.

  The ground trembled again. Earthquake. Gerald shut his eyes and prayed. He had spent some time in Mexico and had developed a good set of earthquake reflexes there. It had been the first ground tremor, rather than the strange shifts in light, that had awakened him and sent him outside in the first place.

  Again the sky fell, the cloud of nothing swelling out, sweeping down. The hole in the sky swallowed Gerald, swallowed the land he was on, and left behind still another skyworld. From horizon to horizon, it turned to fire, a hell-red glow, brightest in the north. The lush and lovely greensward of Vancouver looked as if it had been dipped in blood.

  In that moment Gerald knew that this was Judgment Day. God, in His Infinite Wisdom, had decreed the long-awaited End of Days foretold for thousands of years. Here was the Rapture, the Shout, the Trump of Doom. He closed his eyes again and prayed, prayed hard. For who could be sure of Salvation? He thought of his wife, Marcia, far away on that station orbiting Venus, and a small part of him smiled. In Heaven, families long divided would be reunited. He prayed for her, too, and found some comfort there. An unbeliever, but a good woman, a kind and loving woman who followed her heart and used her God-given talents. How could a just Lord deny her Paradise?

  If any of them survived this Judgment. Fear rattled his faith.

  By a sheer act of will, he forced his eyelids open. Still praying, still praising the Lord with all his heart, he watched. He was determined to witness the End of all things. Few indeed would be privileged to see such a sight. He was to be a Witness of Doom. He did not wish to annoy the Lord by refusing to see the sight set before him.

  But, all things being equal, to witness such events was an honor he would gladly forgo.

  * * *

  Wolf Bernhardt, astronomer, sat inside on the floor in the dark, with no thought for the sky. He picked himself up off the floor, moving carefully in the sudden darkness. The lights had gone out right in the middle of the first quake. He knew, already, that the quake and the gravity wave could not be a coincidence. He had no proof, no evidence whatsoever—but he knew. Somehow, the gravity beam had disturbed the San Andreas Fault—and the San Andreas practically ran through the parking lot of JPL. No wonder the temblor had been so violent.

  But how could the microscopic power of a gravity wave jolt something as massive as a planetary fault system? It didn’t make sense. But the seismologists hadn’t predicted a quake, either. The Californians at JPL were forever boasting to visiting scientists that the seismo-predictions hadn’t been wrong once in the last fifty years.

  Until today.

  But how could a gravity beam do this? There had to be more to it. The gravities people out on Pluto had discovered something far greater than they had imagined.

  The lights came back on, and Wolf got back into his chair. The autocamera came back to life and swiveled back to focus in on him. “Hello again to you on Pluto,” he said. “You may have set something off down here. There was a quake here in California, though we can’t know what caused it.”

  More of the reserve power system was coming back on-line. He looked up at the communications status board and noticed that the comm line from Pluto had dropped out. Damn it! All the comm lines had dropped, and all the backups. “Pluto, it looks as though we have lost incoming contact with you. I will keep transmitting in the hope that
you can receive me.” He glanced at another set of meters, displaying the readouts from the gravity-wave sensors.

  And then he stared at the readouts. Impossible. Flat-out impossible. The Ring of Charon was supposed to be sending a steady pulsing signal from a single direction. The meters were showing a chaos of gravity signals of all strengths coming from all directions. Then, even as he watched, all of the readouts went dead at once. A warning bar appeared across the screen:

  SYSTEM OVERLOADED, SAFETY CIRCUIT BREAKERS INTERRUPTING SYSTEM.

  A strange little thud quivered past his feet, shaking the whole building. An aftershock? It didn’t quite feel like one. Too sharp, too abrupt and focused. It seemed to come from the direction of the gravity sensor lab, in a building a few hundred meters away. A new warning bar appeared:

  SYSTEM FAILURE. CATASTROPHIC FAILURE OF ALL GRAV SENSORS.

  God in His Heaven, what else could go wrong? “Pluto, we are getting some definitely weird results down here. I think that quake might have damaged the gear. Stand by. I will keep this message beam active while I check the situation.”

  Wolf stood up and shook his head. So much for dreams of glory. Duty required that he check the system. But the experiment had failed, somehow. No one was going to get famous off this one.

  He headed for the gravity lab, while the message system valiantly tried to send a blank carrier beam to a planet that wasn’t there anymore.

  Wolf found a fair-sized crater where the gravity lab should have been, and fires still burning in the rubble.

  * * *

  Lucian breathed a sigh of relief as the airlock swung open. He had wondered if it had been a bad idea to head down into the depths during a quake—but now the move was vindicated. He didn’t mention it to any of the tourists, but the blinking yellow panel on the lock indicator meant that there was an air leak somewhere in the observation-dome complex. Had they stayed behind, sooner or later they would have been out of air. If the quake had likewise jammed the airlock door mechanism, they’d all be dead. The door stopped its travel and locked into the open position.