The Ring of Charon the-1 Read online

  Larry stepped to the edge of the room and looked through the transparent dome at the world around him.

  In stillness, in silence, the sad gray landscape of Pluto was laid out before him, dimly seen by the faintness of starlight.

  Virtually all of the land he could see would have been liquid or gas, back on Earth. Pluto’s surface was made of frozen gases—methane, nitrogen, and traces of a few other light elements. All the surface features were low and rounded, all color subdued. To the west, a slumped-over line of yellowish ammonia-ice hills had somehow thrust its way up out of the interior.

  Elsewhere on Pluto, a thin, bright frosting of frozen methane blanketed the land. Only at perihelion, a hundred years from now, would the distant Sun be close enough to sublimate some of the methane back out into a gas.

  But here, on this plain, the methane snow was cooked away by waste heat from the station, exposing the dismal grayish brown landscape below. Here, water ice, carbon compounds, veins of ammonia ice, and a certain amount of plain old rock made up the jumbled surface of Pluto, just as they made up the interior. No one yet had developed a theory that satisfactorily explained how Pluto had come to be made that way, or accounted for the presence of Pluto’s moon, Charon.

  Larry stared out across the frozen land. The insulation of the transparent dome was not perfect. He felt a distinct chill. Ice crystals formed on the inside of the dome as he exhaled.

  Not all the landscape was natural. Close to the horizon, the jagged, shattered remains of the first and second attempts to land a station lay exposed to the stars. Larry knew the tiny graveyard was there as well, even if it was carefully hidden, out of sight of the dome.

  The design psychologists had protested vehemently against building again in view of the first two disastrous attempts, but there had been no real choice in the matter. Both of the “earlier” stations had collapsed to the ground and shattered, like red-hot marbles dropped into ice water. But cleaning up the wreckage would have been prohibitively expensive and dangerous—and perhaps not possible at all.

  This small valley was the only geothermically stable site in direct line of sight with the Ring. Here was an upthrust belt of rock that, unlike the water-ice and methane, could support the weight of the station without danger of melting. Even with the best possible insulation and laser-radiative cooling, the station’s external skin temperature was a hundred degrees Kelvin. That was cold enough to kill a human in seconds, freeze the blood in the veins—but flame hot compared to the surrounding surface, hot enough to boil away the very hills.

  This was the only site where the underlayer of rock was close enough to the surface to serve as a structural support. Anywhere else, the heat of the station would have melted the complex straight through the surface.

  If this station held together long enough to sink, Larry reminded himself, staring at the sad wreckage on the horizon. The first two didn’t.

  But this station had been here fifteen years. So far, the third try had been the charm.

  So far.

  Larry tore his eyes away from the wreckage strewn about the landscape and glanced toward the telescope. It was a thirty-centimeter reflector, with a tracking system that kept it locked on the tiny blue marble of Earth whenever the planet was above the local horizon. You could bring up the image on any video monitor in the station, but nearly everyone felt the need to come here on occasion, bend over the eyepiece, and see the homeworld with his or her own eyes.

  There was something reassuring about seeing Earth direct, without any electronic amplification, without any chance of looking at a tape or a simulation, to see for certain that Earth, and all it represented, was truly there, not a mad dream spun to make Pluto endurable.

  Larry leaned over and took a look. The telescope was set on low magnification at the moment. There she was, a tiny dot of blue, the bright spark of Earth’s Moon too small to form a disk. Larry stepped away from the telescope after only a moment. He was looking for something else in the sky tonight. He needed to see the Ring. The mighty Ring of Charon.

  Pluto does not travel the outer marches of the Solar System by himself. The frozen satellite Charon bears the god of the Underworld company. Charon, with an average diameter of about 1,250 kilometers, is, in proportion to the planet it circles, larger than any other satellite. It rides a very close orbit around Pluto, circling the ninth planet every 6.4 days.

  The rotation of both satellite and world are tidally locked: just as Earth’s Moon always shows the same face to Earth, so Charon always shows the same face to Pluto. The difference is that Pluto’s rotation is likewise affected, its rotation synchronized to match its satellite’s orbit. Viewed from Charon, Pluto does not seem to rotate, but presents one unchanging hemisphere.

  Thus, from those points on the surface where Charon is visible at all, Charon hangs motionless in Pluto’s sky. The satellite is so close to the planet that it sits below the horizon from more than half the planet’s surface.

  None of that mattered to Larry. He did not even notice the dark shadow of Charon brooding there, blotting out the stars. He had eyes for only one object in that sky.

  Encircling Charon was the Ring, its running lights gleaming in the dark sky, a diadem of jewels set about Pluto’s moon. Sixteen hundred kilometers in diameter, the largest object ever built by humans, it girdled the tiny world of Charon.

  Larry felt the wonder of it all steal over him again. It was a remarkable piece of engineering, no matter how much it cost. It was the reason so much time and treasure, so much effort, so many lives had been spent landing the Gravities Research Station on Pluto and making it operational. Compared to the cost of the Ring, the cost of placing the station on Pluto was pocket change. An orbital facility would have been cheaper, but the need for precise measurement forced them to operate the Ring from a planetary surface, a stabilized reference point.

  The Ring was face-on to Pluto, showing a perfect circle around the gloom-dark gray of Charon, a gleaming band of gold about a gloomy, lumpen world, a world so small and light that it had never completely formed into a sphere. Indeed, its tidal lock with Pluto had distorted its shape, warping it into an egg-shaped thing, with one long end pointed at Pluto.

  The Ring was the largest particle accelerator ever built—all but certainly the largest that ever would be built. Designed to probe the tiniest, most subtle intersections of matter and energy, it was so large and powerful that it had to be built here, on the borderlands of the Solar System. It was around Charon not only to escape the disturbing influence of the Sun’s radiation and the strong, interwoven gravity fields of the Inner System, but also to prevent its interfering with the inner worlds: it was capable of achieving enormous energies.

  And, as Larry had proven once again tonight, it was capable of generating and manipulating the force of gravity.

  No other machine ever built was capable of that. The ability to manipulate gravity should have been enough to keep the research station going. Basic research could be done here that would be impossible anywhere else.

  But try convincing the funding people back at the U.N. Astrophysical Foundation. They were too focused on the pie-in-the-sky dreams of near-term gravity control.

  Larry blamed Dr. Simon Raphael for that. When he had been appointed director, back when Larry was in elementary school, Raphael had made some pretty rash promises. Most of those damned artist’s conceptions were based on Raphael’s predictions of what would be possible once the research team on Pluto was able to solve the secret of gravity. Raphael had all but guaranteed a workable artificial gravity system—and now both he and the funding board were beginning to see that it wasn’t going to happen.

  Up until tonight, the Ring of Charon hadn’t been able to maintain a gravity field of more than one gee, and even that was only ten meters across. Worse, the fields collapsed in milliseconds.

  If, the U.N. Astrophysical Foundation asked, it took a piece of hardware 1,600 kilometers across to generate a puny, unstable gravity sourc
e a few meters across, and if even that giant generator was so delicate it had to be as far out from the Sun as Pluto in order to work at all, then what possible use could artificial gravity be? What conceivable purpose could gravity waves serve when they had to come from Pluto?

  And Raphael wanted to go home. Everyone knew that. Larry Chao was very much afraid that the good doctor had figured out that the quickest way to do that was to shut the damn place down.

  One million one hundred thousand gravities, sustained for thirty seconds. Larry stared harder at the Ring overhead and felt a thrill of pride. He had tweaked that monster’s tail, and forced that much power from it. Surely there could be no stronger argument in favor of staying on.

  * * *

  The Gravities Research Station was not at its best in the morning. Perhaps it was some holdover from the long-lost days when astronomers were Earthbound and forced to work at night.

  Whatever the reason, mornings were not a pretty sight at the station. Maybe that was why Raphael scheduled science staff meetings for 0900. Maybe he enjoyed the sight of twenty or so science staff members grumbling and squinting in the morning. The hundred administrative, maintenance and technical staff workers were no doubt glad to miss them.

  Dr. Simon Raphael sighed wearily as he pushed open the door to the conference room and sat down at the head of the table for this last full staff meeting. He echoed the chorus of greetings from the staff without really hearing them. He spread his papers out in front of him, relief and regret playing over him.

  Strange, to be thinking in lasts already. The last meeting, the last experimental schedule to prepare, and then the last science summary report to prepare. Then time to pack up and download, power down and close up. Time to go home. Soon it would all be over and done with.

  His hands clenched themselves into fists, and he forced them to relax, open out. Slowly, carefully, he lay his open hands palm down on the table. The voices fell silent around the table as the others waited for him to begin, but he ignored them. A few bold souls returned to their conversations. Low voices filled the room again. Raphael tried to stare a hole through a memo that sat on the table before him, a piece of paper full of words he didn’t care about.

  There was something dull and angry deep inside him, a sullen thing sitting on his soul. A sullen something that had grown there, all but unnoticed, as the years had played themselves out.

  It was hate: he knew that. Hatred and anger for all of it. For the station that might as well have been a prison, for the pointless chase after gravity control, for the waste of so much of his life in this fruitless quest, for his own failure. Hatred for the funding board that was forcing him to quit, anger at the people here around this table who were fool enough to have faith in him. Hatred for the damned frozen planet and the damned Ring that had sucked the life out of him and wrecked his career.

  And hatred for the Knowledge Crash. If you could hate something that might not even have happened. That was perhaps the surpassing irony: no one was ever quite sure if the Knowledge Crash had even taken place. Some argued that the very state of being uncertain whether or not the Crash had occurred proved that it had.

  Briefly put, the K-Crash theory was that Earth had reached the point where additional education, improved (but more expensive) technology, more and better information, and faster communications had negative value.

  If, the theory went on, there had not been a Knowledge Crash, the state of the world information economy would be orderly enough to confirm the fact that it hadn’t happened. That chaos and uncertainty held such sway therefore demonstrated that the appropriate information wasn’t being handled properly. QED, the Crash was real.

  An economic collapse had come, that much was certain. Now that the economy was a mess, learned economists were pointing quite precisely at this point in the graph, or that part of the table, or that stage in the actuarial tables to explain why. Everyone could predict it, now that it had happened, and there were as many theories as predictions. The Knowledge Crash was merely the most popular idea.

  But correct or not, the K-Crash theory was as good an explanation as any for what had happened to the Earth’s economy. Certainly there had to be some reason for the global downturn. Just as certainly, there had been a great deal of knowledge, coming in from many sources, headed toward a lot of people, for a long time.

  The cultural radicals—the Naked Purples, the Final Clan, all of them—were supposed to be a direct offshoot of the same info-neurosis that had ultimately caused the Crash. There were Whole communities who rejected the overinformed lifestyle of Earth and reached for something else—anything else—so long as it was different. Raphael did not approve of the rads. But he could easily believe they were pushed over the edge by societal neuroses.

  The mental institutions of Earth were full of info-neurotics, people who had simply become overwhelmed by all they needed to know. Information psychosis was an officially recognized—and highly prevalent—mental disorder. Living in the modern world simply took more knowledge than some people were capable of absorbing. The age-old coping mechanisms of denial, withdrawal, phobic reaction and regression expressed themselves in response to brand-new mental crises.

  Granted, therefore, that too much data could give a person a nervous breakdown. Could the same thing have happened to the whole planet?

  The time needed for the training required to do the average technical job was sucking up the time that should have gone to doing the job. There were cases, far too many of them, of workers going straight from training program to retirement, with never a day of productive labor in between. Such cases were extreme, but for many professions, the initial training period was substantially longer than the period of productive labor—and the need for periodic retraining only made the situation worse.

  Not merely the time, but the expense required for all that training was incredible. No matter how it was subsidized or reapportioned or provided via scholarship or grant program, the education was expensive, a substantial drain on the Gross Planetary Product.

  Bloated with information, choked with the needs of a world-girdling bureaucracy required to track information and put it to use, strangled by the data security nets that kept knowledge out of the wrong hands, lost in the endless maze of storing and accessing all the data required merely to keep things on an even keel, Earth’s economy had simply ground to a halt. The world was so busy learning how to work that it never got the chance to do the work. The planet was losing so much time gathering vital data that it didn’t have a chance to put the data to use. Earth’s economy was writhing in agony. Both the planet generally, and the U.N. Astrophysical Foundation specifically, could scarcely afford necessities. They certainly could not afford luxuries—especially ones that could only add to the knowledge burden. Such as the Ring of Charon.

  His heart pounding, Raphael’s vision blurred for a moment, and he glared unseeingly at the paper clenched in his fist. Anger. Hatred. For the Crash, for the Board, for the Ring, for the staff—

  And for himself, of course. Hatred for himself.

  Marooned out here all these years, with but the rarest and briefest of pilgrimages home, trapped all that time on this rotting iceball, with that damned Ring staring down at him, the satellite Charon framed inside it, the dark blind pupil of a sightless eye, pinning him to the spot in its unblinking gaze, a relentless reminder of his failure.

  The project, the station, the Ring had failed to crack the problem he had staked his reputation on. Practical gravity control was flat-out impossible. That fact he was sure of. He had certainly paid enough for that knowledge. Paid for it with his life’s work.

  He forced himself to be calm and looked around the table at the people. He knew that he should think of them as his people; he had tried for a long time to do so. But they were the ones that he, Raphael, had failed. They were the source of his guilt, and he hated them for it. For in his chase after artificial gravity, he had dragged their lives down with his.

&n
bsp; They were the ones most harmed by his failure. The last transport ship had arrived and immediately departed for home five months before, delivering the newest recruits and taking home a lucky few. Raphael remembered few things as clearly as the faces of the stay-behinds, watching the transport head for home, leaving them behind, stranded on Pluto until the next ship came, a few wistful glances skyward at the Nenya’s parking orbit.

  Now they would all be going home.

  Going home marked as failures, on a four-month journey that would offer them little more than time to brood.

  Another wave of anger washed over him, and he called the meeting to order. “Ladies and gentlemen, if we could please get started,” he said. There was something that bespoke patience above and beyond the call of duty in his gravelly voice, as if he had been sitting there waiting for order for far longer than was proper. The people around the table, chastened, stopped their low conversations.

  Sondra Berghoff leaned back in her seat and watched the man go to work. Raphael-watching was something of a hobby for her. She knew what was coming, or at least she had made a fairly shrewd guess. She was interested in seeing how Raphael would handle it, how he would play the room. The man was a past master of emotional blackmail, a prize manipulator—there was no question about that.

  “I propose to dispense with the normal meeting procedures today, if that is acceptable to you all,” Raphael said, pausing just a bit too briefly for anyone to have a chance to object. “I have a rather significant announcement to make, which I believe ought to take precedence over other matters. As per the lasergram I received from Earth this morning, I must now direct you to commence shutdown of this facility.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, and then a buzz of voices raised in protest. Sondra sighed. She had expected it, but she wasn’t happy about it. Dr. Raphael started speaking, a calculated half beat early once again, before someone had the chance to collect his or her wits enough to speak up. “If I could continue,” he went on, with a warning edge to his voice. “As you all know, shutdown has been a serious possibility for some time, and I have pursued every means of preventing it. But economic problems back home—and I might add the distraction caused by certain political movements in the Earth-Moon system—are simply too much for us to overcome. The funding board feels that the massive expense of this station is not justified by the quantity or quality of your work—of our work.” He corrected himself with great magnanimity, a gently pained expression on his face. Sondra read the meaning easily. As your leader, I must of course willingly associate myself with your work, however inadequate it might be. Such are the trials of leadership. Everyone in the room understood that subtext. “The people back home simply expected too much. Unrealistic promises were made.” Two or three people shifted uncomfortably in their seats, and angry scowls clouded more than one face.