The Ring of Charon the-1 Read online

  He pulled up far UV and ran that. A bright, fuzzy image that told him nothing. Damn it, he would need better images of Earth! For now he would have to settle for the view from VISOR of a slightly smeary Earth about the size of a golf ball at arm’s length. He watched the playback again and again, tracking the vanishment against every data line he had recorded. This was the third time he had run through the complete dataset.

  The amplitude lines and false-color images for UV, visual, infrared, magnetism, and radio marched across the right-side screen, one after the other, and then again in various combinations—while on the left-hand screen, the visible-light Earth vanished again and again. It was a crude technique, and no doubt the computer system could have found any and all corollaries between the various datasets within a few milliseconds. Later he would use the computer to do just that. But speed was not the only issue here. Hiram wanted to be immersed in the data, wanted to understand each bump and twist of it backwards and forwards. Then, when he ran it through the computer, perhaps he could understand what the computer’s findings were telling him.

  Even without a computer, he had already learned two or three fascinating things not readily apparent.

  One, Earth vanished not at the moment the gravity beam struck it, but 2.6 seconds afterwards—which, interestingly enough, was the period of time it took for light to travel between Earth and the Moon and back.

  Two, simultaneous with the vanishment came the first of a massive series of gravity-wave pulses—far more powerful than the Pluto beam, and continuing long after Earth was gone. Indeed, VISOR’s gear was still detecting gee waves from the vicinity of Earth’s former orbit. Those waves had to be coming from somewhere—presumably someplace fairly large, as it would require a Ring of Charon-size generator to create them.

  Three, that squeal on the twenty-one-centimeter band had started at the moment Earth vanished, and it likewise was continuing, long after the Earth was gone. As best his direction-finding gear could tell, it was coming from the Moon, though no known Lunar transmitter worked on that frequency.

  All of which strongly suggested that the Moon had something to do with what had happened.

  There was another point, a rather obvious prediction. The orbits of every planet in the Solar System were going to be very slightly shifted. Nothing very dramatic, of course. There would be minor changes to Venus’s orbit, and Mars’s. Enough to throw off navigation a bit, that was all. The big changes would be in the area of the Moon.

  Which was probably more than anyone on the Moon had realized yet, McGillicutty told himself proudly.

  McGillicutty cackled to himself. Nice to be ahead of the pack. But in science, it was important not just to be ahead, but to prove it, to the world at large.

  He ordered the computer to summarize his finding and transmit the text and images to all the public-access channels on the Moon, Pluto, Mars and the major satellites.

  That ought to give them something to think about. He read over the computer-generated summary, made one or two changes, adjusted a few of the graphs, and told the computer to send it. He grinned and started running the playbacks again. He was having a wonderful time.

  * * *

  Orbital Traffic Control had its own tunnel-and-airlock system leading to the Lunar surface. OTC had a lot of instruments topside, and it made sense to have direct access to them without having to deal with the municipal locks.

  But Tyrone Vespasian was not going to check on his instruments, except, quite literally, in the most basic possible way. For all scientific instruments are merely extensions of the human senses. The instruments Vespasian needed to check were his eyes. He needed to see for himself.

  There was always the faint chance, the faint hope that a camera, a lens, an electronic image system would have malfunctioned. He had to eliminate that possibility. He needed to know there was nothing but his own bare-assed eyeballs between himself and what he was looking at. He needed to go up to the surface, look in the sky, and see for himself.

  He knew Earth was gone, but this was not about knowing. He needed to believe.

  The outer airlock door opened and Vespasian, huge and squat in his pressure suit, stepped awkwardly out onto the Lunar surface.

  Look to the skies, he told himself, but somehow his gaze stayed determinedly staring at the ground. Strange thoughts ran through his head. What, exactly, would happen to the Moon without the Earth? Vespasian found his eyes scanning the horizon, not the zenith. He could not bring himself to look up. Lucian’s computer models showed the Moon merely retaining its previous Solar orbit with a somewhat increased eccentricity that would gradually damp out, eventually leaving the Moon riding secure, square on the former barycenter, the old center of gravity for the Earth-Moon system.

  Look to the skies. What would happen to the Moon’s rotation? Would it retain its old once-a-month spin? Still he could not force his eyes to look up, toward Gemini, to where Earth should have been. Would the Moon’s spin speed up? Slow down?

  Look to the skies. At last he turned his gaze upward, and looked—at nothing. A blankness, an empty spot where Earth had always been. He felt his knees about to give way, and leaned backward in time to land on his ample rump, rather than flat on his face.

  He sat there, legs splayed out in front of him, head thrown back, staring at the sky, for hours, or days, or seconds. The lifeless hills of the Moon, the gray, cratered landscape no longer graced by the blue-white marble in the sky. He felt a tear in his eye, and was glad for some reason that he could not reach through his helmet and brush it away. Another tear fell, and another. These were tears for Earth, tears that deserved to flow.

  * * *

  Dr. Simon Raphael paced back and forth, stalking up and down the carpet, completely ignoring the visitors in his office. No one in the room had spoken in the five minutes since Raphael brought them in.

  Finally Raphael seemed to have run out of steam. He slowed, turned, walked back behind his desk, and sat down. “Very well then. It’s gone. Eight and a half hours ago in real time, and three hours ago to our awareness, the planet vanished. All our instruments confirm that, and all contacts with other stations confirm it as well.

  “And it happened when Mr. Chao’s magic beam touched the planet. All correct so far?” he asked, his voice frighteningly calm.

  Sondra, Larry, and Webling said nothing.

  Raphael stood up again, came around his desk, stood over Larry, raised his arm as if to strike the young man and then backed away. He stood there, breathing hard, with his arm raised, for a long moment. Then he slowly lowered his arm to his side. “I am actively restraining myself at this point, you know, trying to keep from screaming bloody murder at all of you, trying to keep from blaming Mr. Chao especially for this catastrophe. That is my first impulse. I expect everyone on this station—including all of you here—are harboring similar feelings. If not of anger, then of fear and horror.

  “But my rational side, my scientific side, is holding me back.” Raphael leaned over Larry, wrapped his hands on the armrests of Larry’s chair, put his face close enough to Larry’s so that Larry could feel the clean warmth of Raphael’s breath on his face. “I want to blame you, Chao. I want to blame you very much. I don’t like you. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I hate you right about now. My home is gone, Chao. My family, my grandchildren, my wife’s grave. Eight billion souls are gone, vanished, destroyed. Because of that damn-fool gravity beam you had to fire at Earth.” Larry forced himself to look the director in the eye. The ruined patrician’s face was pale, chalk white with fear and repressed rage.

  Raphael stood up straight again and recommenced his pacing. He seemed incapable of keeping still, seemed to need to be in motion. All of them were in shock. None of them knew how to respond. At least Raphael was reacting, moving forward instead of staring into space. “I want to blame you,” he repeated, “except I understand gravity, and gravity waves.

  “Nothing about this makes sense. But I do know enough to see one obvi
ous fact: that your beam did not do this. I understand the power—or rather the absence of power—of that beam at that range. Passing asteroids and comets have more powerful gravity fields. Nor is this result the sort of thing that gravity could do. A powerful enough beam handled the right way might conceivably shift Earth in its orbit a bit, but no more. So why did your beam destroy a planet when so many other, stronger gravity sources have had no effect?”

  Raphael turned and faced the three of them again. “We don’t know, and we have to find out. The ironic thing is that I must turn to the people who have done the damage. You three are the most likely to get at the answers, for the very good reason that you understand gravity waves better than anyone else. I want you to figure out what happened. Was Earth destroyed? Then why is there no rubble? Did that force move the planet? But how? Did it produce the illusion of Earth vanishing? Again, how?”

  Raphael stopped pacing again and sat down at the edge of his desk with a deep sigh. “Find out. Forgive me for bending the rules, Dr. Berghoff, but I am ordering you to figure out those things.” He rubbed his face and slumped forward, a tired old man incapable of feeling any further shock, any further emotion of any kind. Suddenly the angry director was gone, to be replaced by a lonely, frightened, tired old man. “The entire station and all its facilities are at your disposal,” he said, in a voice that was suddenly weak and reedy.

  The facade of strength and control was crumbling before their eyes. This man had suffered as deep a loss as any of them. He had held together long enough to do his job—but now, Sondra realized, he was at the end of his courage,: his endurance. “Now,” Simon Raphael said, “if you will excuse me, I am going to go lie down.”

  Without another word, Raphael stood up, made at least a show of squaring his shoulders, and walked out of the room. Sondra watched him go, and thought how much she had underestimated the man. There were unknown depths of courage, of self-control, of cool intellect beneath all that pomposity. Her image of Raphael had been a mere caricature of the real man—but it struck her that Raphael had been acting like a caricature of himself. She had seen a strutting egotist because that was what Raphael chose to show the world. She closed her eyes and rubbed her brow. Not as if that mattered now.

  She turned toward Larry. Another one she hardly knew. Here was another one deep in shock, and in mourning. Raphael managed his shock by calling forth the shield of rationality and reason to hide behind. How would Larry react? “Well, Larry,” she asked gently. “Earth is gone. What do we do?”

  “It didn’t happen,” Larry announced, staring down into the carpet. “It didn’t happen.”

  Denial, Sondra thought. “Larry, I wish that were true, but it isn’t. Earth isn’t there anymore.”

  Larry looked up at her sharply, a blazing gleam in his eye. “I know that,” he snapped. “But Earth was not destroyed.”

  Sondra looked up helplessly at Dr. Webling. But she seemed further gone than anyone. She wouldn’t be of any use for a long time. Only by the slightest of connections was she involved in this at all. They had hijacked her perfectly innocent experiment, and destroyed the home-world. Thanks to them, the name Webling would go down in history as one of the maniacs who destroyed Earth.

  Sondra felt her mind wandering, bouncing from one question to another. History? Why worry about that now?

  If indeed there was any more history after this. Were the surviving human settlements, on Mars and the Moon and elsewhere, really self-sufficient enough to survive without Earth? And suppose whatever happened to Earth happened to them, too?

  Bingo. That was what her mind was trying to tell her. That was what gave this crisis urgency, why Raphael had set them to work now. It wasn’t over yet. They had to solve this problem fast, to protect whatever was left of human civilization. That was why Larry had to face the truth now. He was the best chance at finding the answer. They could not afford to wait for him to recover. “Larry, Earth is gone. Lost. Destroyed. We have to figure out why before it happens to the rest of the Solar System. Earth is gone. Accept it.”

  “Without debris? Without any residual heat?” he demanded. “There isn’t any way to wreck a world without leaving something behind. You can’t destroy matter or energy. If the Earth was instantly converted into energy somehow, the flashover would at least have melted the Moon. From here it would be like a temporary second Sun, at least. The nuclear radiation would probably kill us. If Earth was simply smashed, there would be debris. Earth had—has—a mass greater than a hundred Asteroid Belts, and we can detect the Belt, certainly. Where is the rubble of Earth? There ought to be debris pieces from the size of the Moon down through asteroid size, right down to molecules. There isn’t any way to wreck a world without leaving behind something. Even if the planet had been reduced to a gas cloud, single molecules, we’d be able to detect it. It would block the Sun, dim the sky. None of that happened. Therefore Earth was not destroyed.”

  Sondra stood up and walked to the far end of the room.

  It sounded coldly logical, but she was in no condition to judge. Nor was Larry in any shape to make sense. Sondra knew she was in no state to tell if someone else was thinking clearly right now. But it almost sounded as if Larry were offering hope, and she could certainly use some.

  “Then what happened?” she asked. “We didn’t see it move anywhere. It… it just went.”

  “Wormhole,” Webling said.

  Sondra drew back, startled. She had almost forgotten Webling was there.

  The old woman looked up from whatever blue funk she was in and repeated the one word. “Wormhole.”

  Larry nodded absently and Sondra frowned. “Huh? How the hell do you bring wormholes into this?” she demanded. “They’re just some bit of theoretical fluff. No one’s even proved they exist.”

  Larry rubbed his eyes and dropped his hands into his lap. He sat there, knitting his fingers together, staring straight ahead. “I was working on gravity as a step toward something else,” he said in a quiet voice. “As a step on the way to creating a wormhole transit pair. I wanted to create a stable Virtual Black Hole, an artificial gravity field powerful enough to make space-time cave in on itself.

  “According to theory, if you create a pair of VBHs tuned to each other, exactly matching each other in mass, charge, spin, velocity, you might be able to induce them to link up, in effect to become one black hole that exists in two places at once. Induce the black hole to enclose a plane of normal space at each end, and those two normal-space planes become contiguous—you’ve got a wormhole link. The two Virtual Black Holes can be ten meters apart, or a thousand light-years from each other. It doesn’t make any difference. The two planes of normal space are effectively next to each other. You can move from one to another without moving through any of the normal space in between. A wormhole transit pair. Maybe I stimulated a natural wormhole. God knows how.”

  Webling stirred again, seeming to come out of herself. “But that’s impossible, isn’t it? I know I suggested it— but it doesn’t make sense. I remember reading a calculation showing that a natural wormhole was just barely theoretically possible, on about the same order of probability as every air molecule in a given room rushing out the window all at once and leaving the room in vacuum. Quantum theory says both are possible. The odds on each happening are about as realistic—and the two conditions would be about as stable. And how could a wormhole the size of a planet appear? I can’t accept Earth being snatched away by something that incredibly unlikely.”

  Larry nodded, and a bit of his hardness seemed to fade away, as if he were letting some of the barriers down. “I know, you’re right. But something about all this says wormhole to me. After all, it was touched off by a gravity wave.”

  Sondra blinked and looked at Larry. “Wait a second. Gravity wave. Gravity has been interacting with Earth for four billion years—but this is the first time a powerful modulated gravity wave has been aimed at the planet. Maybe the fact that it was a modulated tensor gravity wave is the impo
rtant thing. Could a gravity wave stimulate that black-hole linkup somehow?”

  Larry shrugged. “I think so. Ask me after I have some black holes of my own to play with. You need a pair of them. One here, and one there. Wherever ‘there’ is.”

  Sondra turned her palms up in a gesture of confusion. “So maybe Earth’s core has been an imprisoned black hole right along, for four billion years, and our gravity wave just touched it off somehow.”

  Larry frowned. “That might work insofar as supplying a black hole to induce a wormhole. Maybe. So long as you kept the main mass of Earth far enough away from the hole so that the hole couldn’t suck any mass down into itself. A black hole is mass like anything else. If the Earth were a hollow shell with a black hole at the center, there would still be one Earth-gravity at the surface. Though you’d give any geologist fits if you suggested any such thing. To allow for a black hole in the Earth’s core, you’d have to have a layer of vacuum somewhere in the planet’s interior.”

  Sondra was a little hazy on geology, but that didn’t sound reasonable. “Could that be possible?”

  “No!” Webling said vehemently. “Unless every theory of geology in the past four hundred years is wrong. Every time there’s an earthquake the geologists examine the shock waves, use them to map the Earth’s interior, like reading a radar signal. Don’t you think they’d have detected something as obvious as a hollow Earth and a black hole in all this time? Besides, all you’ve done is add another incredibly unlikely thing on top of your first one. A black hole inside the Earth, plus your natural wormhole. It doesn’t explain anything, it just creates more and more ridiculous questions. Where did the black hole come from? Why didn’t it suck Earth down into itself? How did our gravity beam induce it to form a wormhole? I can’t accept any of this.”