Hunted Earth Omnibus Read online

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  Larry watched the Moon’s scarred and cratered surface leaping toward them, and suddenly concerns over the nature of black holes seemed far less important. He clenched his hands into a death grip on the crash couch’s armrests, shut his eyes, and saw images of the Nenya slamming into the Moon. No good. He opened his eyes again. The engines were humming along, seeming to run far too leisurely to counteract a fall toward a planet. Then they cut out altogether, and that was far more disturbing. He fixed his eyes on the monitor as the harshly cratered surface swept past, moving faster, getting closer with every moment.

  The engines flared to life again, slowing into a sensible hover. The Nenya eased herself down onto the landing field. The engines shut down, and the ship landed with a gentle and anticlimactic bump.

  Larry barely had time to breathe before there was a banging and clanging belowdecks. A young man stuck his head up through the deck hatch and looked around until he spotted Larry. “Larry O’Shawnessy Chao?” he asked.

  Larry stood up, more than a little wobbly in the one-sixth gee. “Yeah,” he said, recognising the voice from his arguments over the radio. “You’re Lucian Dreyfuss.”

  Lucian popped up through the hatch with a disconcerting bounce and grinned. He stuck out a hand, and Larry shook it with as much vigour as he could. Larry looked Lucian over. He was a short, wiry, high-strung-looking sort, very much the opposite of the roly-poly, easy-going Lunar stereotype. His face was narrow and pale, and his smile seemed to have a lot of teeth in it. His reddish brown hair was cut in a rather longish crew cut that stood bottle-brush straight on his head. His handshake was a bit too firm. His short-sleeved shirt revealed well-muscled arms. He was a year or two older than Larry, and there was something in his grin that said he thought he was ahead on points, as if there were already a competition between them.

  Lucian looked around the room. “Dr. Berghoff, Dr. Raphael, welcome to you as well. Follow me down through the access port. I have a runcart waiting on the city side of the lock. The conference will convene as soon as you arrive. The port crew will see to your luggage. They’re all in a bit of rush down at the conference center, to put it mildly. There’s been some wild rumours shooting around the stuff coming in from VISOR—” He abruptly stopped talking, as if discussing the rumours would only delay his finding out the truth. “Once you arrive, the meeting will start immediately.” He gestured the three of them down the hatch with what struck Larry as an oddly professional assuredness, as if he were used to playing guide.

  “Immediately?” Dr. Raphael asked.

  “Ah, yes sir.”

  “I see,” Dr. Raphael said, with a rather concerned glance at Sondra and Larry.

  They were all still in their travelling clothes, chosen for comfort on a cramped ship, and not for appearance. Larry was wearing one of his loudest shirts, and it was a safe bet that his purple shorts did not match it, as the shorts did not match anything. Great outfit for a historic meeting, Larry thought. Sondra was at least somewhat better off in a frowsy black coverall, but it definitely looked like it had been slept in, with a few crumbs from breakfast on the lapel. Raphael, in his sensible slacks and pullover shirt, seemed the height of formality.

  “Ah, well, it’s our words and not our fashion sense they’re interested in, I suppose,” Raphael said.

  “Yes, sir,” Lucian said with a glance at his watch, clearly not paying much attention to anything but the march of time. “Shall we go?”

  The three visitors followed him, a bit uncertainly. He led them through the deck hatch, then the ship’s airlock, down a flexible accessway that was long and steep enough to lead them underground into an elaborate airlock complex. A squad of workers in pressure suits were checking each other’s equipment. “Repair crew,” Lucian announced. “Going to soup up your ship—we figure this isn’t going to be the last time she needs to make a fast run.” Larry glanced at the worried expression on Dr. Raphael’s face, and couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy. He was the director of the station, and the Nenya had always been the lifeline, the ticket home if it all went wrong, a talisman that made it all seem safer.

  Things were moving too fast. Lucian led them from the airlock complex and out into a city tunnel, to a small open-body electric car. Lucian took the driver’s seat and the others got aboard.

  Larry’s rear end had barely met the seat when Lucian hit the accelerator. The tires squealed, and the runcart took off at speed down the narrow, dimly lit tunnel. Ten minutes ago Larry had been scared to ride a landing spacecraft. It did not take him long to decide that a ballistic landing on the Nenya was downright safe compared to being Lucian’s passenger in this go-cart.

  “You three are the last to arrive,” Lucian shouted above the roar of the air whipping past them down the tunnel. “Things are happening fast, even since my last comm signal to you. Marcia MacDougal from VISOR is supposed to have some sort of really hot numbers.”

  “Do our numbers still hold up?” Larry shouted back, trying to forget that he was clinging to the seat frame just as hard as he had held onto his crash couch on the ship.

  “The numbers are fine, very solid. It’s your conclusions I don’t like.”

  “There’s no question at all about the conclusions.”

  “There is in my mind,” Lucian shouted, trying to be heard over the air rushing past them. “But back to the numbers. I pulled together a last update just before you landed. The Earthpoint black hole mass is definitely 1.054 terrestrial, no appreciable accretion since appearance, though we’re starting to see a nice little debris field. We’ve used the optical scalar technique to nail down the spin rate. The north magnetic and spin poles are definitely pointed south. But are you that solid on what the figures mean? I’m still a little hesitant about going public with them.”

  “If the numbers are right, then we go,” Larry shouted back, a bit heatedly. “If they’ve called a crash meeting, we can’t waste time quadruple-checking just because you have a gut reaction against the answers. Give me an alternative explanation and I’ll hold back.”

  “Okay, okay. I guess I’m convinced, but just barely. The other researchers will have to make up their own minds.”

  In the backseat, Sondra couldn’t hear half the words, but she didn’t much care. The two of them had been going back and forth over this ground for weeks. The runcart burst out of the tunnel into what a sign said was the Amundsen SubBubble, and there was suddenly a lot more to look at than rock wall. She recorded a brief impression of a city that had been rattled about a bit, and people here and there working on the cleanup. There wasn’t time to note much before Lucian stood on the brakes nearly hard enough to throw them all over the front of the cart. Presumably, they had arrived at Armstrong University, though Sondra hadn’t seen a sign. “Here we are,” Lucian announced, and hopped out of the cart. He led them into a long, low, academic-looking building. They hurried down a long corridor. The door at the end of the hall was open, and Lucian ushered them right inside.

  Larry was the last one into the room, and at first it seemed to him that the place was full of nothing but eyes sitting around an oblong table. Everyone in the room was staring straight at him, getting a good look at the man who destroyed Earth. Larry felt like he had been moving at breakneck speed and had just slammed into a brick wall. A brick wall made out of eyes.

  He heard the door swing shut and latch behind him, and did not feel reassured.

  Larry felt a gentle hand on his arm and turned to see a gnomish-looking little man in a rather severely cut lime green frock coat that lived up to the Lunar reputation for garish dress. “Welcome to you all,” he said. “I am Pierre Daltry, chancellor of the university and, it would appear, the de facto head of our group, at least for the time being. If you would take your seats, we can begin. Mr. Chao, Dr. Berghoff, Dr. Raphael?” They sat down in the chairs reserved for them at the head of the long table, Larry for one wishing for a less prominent place to sit.

  Chancellor
Daltry took his place at the middle of the table, but remained standing. “I will not waste too much time on introductions,” he said, “but let me note a few of the other principal speakers for the day. These are the people who have done the most to study our present situation. Lucian Dreyfuss you have all met. Tyrone Vespasian, also of the Orbital Traffic Control Center. Marcia MacDougal and Hiram McGillicutty from VISOR.” He pointed each of them out, and then gestured to include the entire table.

  “Every major government in the Solar System is represented here—including Earth, I might add. Nancy Stanton, the U.N. ambassador to the Lunar Republic, is here. And we are here to make decisions. Simon Raphael and Larry Chao suggested this meeting some days ago, and things have happened quickly since then, enlarging the importance—and the responsibility—of this conference. As the time for deliberation is short, and the need for action urgent, the various governments have agreed to authorise this joint committee to speak and to act. What we decide around this table will not be mere recommendations, but the orders of the day. So let us consider well what we do.”

  Daltry paused and looked around the table.

  “A moment from the Moon’s history comes to my mind. About a century ago, the political situation between the Earth and Moon on one side, and the rest of the Solar System on the other, came dangerously close to interplanetary war. In the midst of that crisis, an asteroid that was to be placed in Earth orbit came horribly close to striking the Earth, a disaster that would have made a nuclear war seem trivial by comparison. The Moon bore the brunt of that crisis, and we have Morrow Crater in the center of Farside—and our independence from Earth—to remind us of those days.

  “Up until a few days ago, we all imagined such an asteroid impact to be the worst possible catastrophe that could befall humanity, or the Earth. Now we know better.

  “We as a race have often imagined that we knew the worst that could befall us—and time after time we have found something worse that could happen. Famine, flood, ecologic disaster, nuclear winter, asteroidal impact. Every time, a new worst has supplanted the old, imagined worst. Can we now be sure the worst is behind us?”

  There was silence around the table.

  “I call upon Mr. Chao to open the substantive discussion.”

  Larry Chao wondered whether to stand up or not, and decided not to; he felt exposed enough just sitting there. He had never even been to the Moon before. What the hell was he doing here now, addressing all these big shots? Had it really been worth all the money and effort to get him here so fast just so he could talk?

  The hell with it. Larry squared his shoulders and launched into his talk, hoping to get it over with as soon as possible. “Ah, thank you once again, Chancellor, and, ah, members of the joint committee.” He wasn’t even quite sure if that was what this group should be called.

  He pulled some notes from his pocket and shuffled through them without comprehension, trying to stall long enough to order his thoughts. “Let me start by settling the first and foremost issue before the group: Is the black hole now where Earth once was actually the Earth? Did our—did my—experiment somehow cause Earth to be crushed down into nothingness?” There, I’ve said it, he thought. His heart was pounding in his chest. There was a slight rustle around the table as Larry confessed his own part in the disaster.

  Yes, I was the one who did it, he thought. I admit it. He knew he had no choice in the matter but to accept the facts. He could never hide from what had happened, from what he had done. He was going to travel under a cloud for the rest of his days. Pretending it wasn’t there would not improve the situation.

  Sondra sat next to him, watching her friend. Even through his nervousness, she could see that he had grown, changed, matured in these past days. As he spoke, he sat up a little straighter, returned the gaze of his audience with a bit more confidence. The shy half-child was not yet gone, but there was much more of the adult about him, too.

  Larry went on. “During our journey in from Pluto, I was in constant contact with the Orbital Traffic Control Center here on the Moon. As you all no doubt know, that facility came up with excellent data on the situation here in the Earth-Moon system—or perhaps calling it Lunar space might make more sense now.” Again, a small stir in the audience. “Lucian Dreyfuss of OTC has collated the OTC information on the black hole. Both he and I have analysed that data and come to the same conclusions.”

  Larry saw Lucian at the far end of the table, returning Larry’s gaze evenly, doing nothing to signal agreement or disagreement. Larry found himself forced to admire Lucian’s cool.

  “We modelled what Earth would look like as a black hole, and compared it to what we can measure of the black hole that is now sitting where Earth used to be.”

  Warming to his subject, Larry forgot his shyness. “The trouble is, very few properties of a black hole can be measured. In many senses, a black hole isn’t there at all. It has no size, no color, no spectrum. Its density is infinite. But there are certain things we can get readings on. First and most obvious is the hole’s mass. The first thing we knew about the hole was how much it weighed.

  “You will also recall that it weighed five percent more than Earth. That may not sound like much, but bear in mind, the Moon only has one-point-two percent of the Earth’s mass. And remember, the black hole’s mass was measured only eight hours after Earth vanished. It could not have accumulated that much more mass that quickly. For the Earthpoint black hole to be Earth, it would have to be removed, compressed down into a singularity, fed the equivalent of four Moon masses, and then returned to its starting point, all in eight hours. To my mind that makes it all but impossible that the black hole truly is the Earth.”

  Larry found himself remembering his days as a teaching assistant. He had always enjoyed lecturing. “Now I’ve got to jump into some slightly complicated areas. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to be something less than a purist about my nomenclature. Forgive me if I oversimplify a bit, but I won’t hand out any wrong data, just make it a bit easier to follow.

  “There are a few things we can measure in a black hole: spin attributes; electric charge and magnetic field, if any; event horizon; mass; and of course the strength of the gravity field itself. These are not independent variables, of course. For example, the magnetic field, or lack of it, depends on both the electrical charge of the hole, and on its spin.

  “We can measure spin, charge, and the magnetic field effects—and they can tell us useful things. Let me start with spin. We can get a reading on the hole’s rotation from the movement of its magnetic fields, and from what is called the optical scalar technique. The black hole’s axis of spin is precisely ninety degrees from the plane of its orbit. As you know, Earth’s axis is canted 23.5 degrees from its orbital plane. It would require tremendous energy to move Earth’s axis into the vertical and then hold it there. The planet would resist the motion, the way a gyroscope resists any effort to change its axis of spin. I doubt that you could force Earth toward the vertical without cracking the planetary crust and flinging large amounts of debris into space. We did not see that debris.

  “But that is only the first point concerning spin. In order to conserve momentum, an object must spin faster if it gets smaller, the way a skater in a pirouette spins faster and faster as he draws his arms in toward his body.

  “If you crush Earth into a black hole, the resultant hole would have to spin at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed. This hole is rotating far too slowly for it to be Earth. It is only rotating at about one percent of the velocity that an Earth-derived hole would turn. I might add that it is also spinning in the wrong direction.

  “This black hole also exhibits a massive negative electric charge. Earth was—is—electrically neutral. Another point: the north and south magnetic poles of the hole are reversed.

  “In mass, spin data, electric charge and magnetic properties—in every way that we can measure—this black hole is drastically different from what the Earth would be like if the Eart
h were made into a black hole.

  “For all these reasons, I feel confident that this black hole is not the Earth.”

  A murmur of relief whispered about the room. Larry let it die down before he went on. “What then has happened to Earth? Earth is either somewhere else, or has been destroyed. If it has been destroyed, where was the rubble it should have left behind, the debris? Where was the energy pulse? If the Earth had been smashed to rubble, or blown up, or disintegrated into elementary particles or pure energy, we would know about it—if we survived the event. There would be nothing subtle about the effects. The Moon would have been pelted with a massive amount of debris or roasted in the energy release, or both.

  “I believe that the Earth has been transported to another place, and was not destroyed.”

  “Now hold on a minute!” A strident voice broke in from halfway down the table. “There is not the slightest bit of information in the data to support that claim. I know! I gathered most of the data myself.” It was McGillicutty, sputtering mad. “I didn’t watch your precious black hole close up. But you’ve just made the high-and-mighty argument that no technology could wreck a planet without a trace—but then you go and say, casual as you please, that it’s possible to steal a planet without any fuss? What technology makes that possible?”

  Sondra leaned in. “The wormhole, dammit! That’s what the black hole is. A wormhole gateway to where Earth is.”

  “Wormhole, that’s damned ridiculous!” McGillicutty snorted. “They don’t exist. They can’t exist. And for my money, neither can black holes. Certainly not black holes this small.”

  Sondra felt her temper beginning to fray. “For God’s sake—you’ve seen asteroid-sized bodies popping out of those blue flashes—and you provided the images of that blue flash sweeping up from behind Earth, engulfing it.”