Hunted Earth Omnibus Read online

  “I recorded that image,” McGillicutty snapped, “but I do not support that interpretation of it. There is clearly a compact mass in Earth’s old position, but you are merely assuming this compact mass is a black hole. I haven’t seen any evidence that supports that idea. Suppose it is merely very dense, with no event horizon, and a surface gravity low enough for physical matter to escape? I haven’t run the figures yet, but it seems to me that an Earth mass could be a thousandth the density of a black hole and still only be a few meters across, far too small to see from this distance. It could be that the beam shifted Earth from normal matter into strange-quark matter. A strange-quark body of Earth mass might only be a few kilometres across, and extremely dark in color. I suggest that is the situation, and the asteroid-sized bodies are being blown off the strange-matter compact body’s surface somehow. By violent transitions back into normal matter.”

  “And the blue flashes?” Sondra asked.

  “Energy discharges related to whatever is blasting the gee points off the strange-matter surface.”

  “But how are they being blown off?” Larry asked. “What’s the mechanism?”

  “I don’t know yet, sonny,” McGillicutty snapped. “But that’s the only unexplained feature of my theory. Your black hole idea is nothing but unexplained features. My idea makes sense. Yours doesn’t.”

  With that, a dozen voices joined in, offering their own opinions.

  Larry listened to the shouting with a sinking heart. They had been willing—even eager—to believe in evidence that the Earth had not been destroyed. But suddenly, he sensed something different around the table. McGillicutty’s theory had a dozen major flaws in it, was contradicted by the available evidence. But perhaps it was more palatable than something with the terrifying power to drop the Earth into a wormhole.

  Larry watched the argument storm around him. They had been with him up until McGillicutty interrupted. But he had lost them when they’d been given something more like what they wanted to hear.

  Larry shrank back in his chair, feeling very much like a little child lost in a sea of doubting grown-ups. He thought back to the last full science staff meeting of the Gravities Research Station. How long ago had it been? Just seventeen days ago? Eighteen? He had made a very long, strange trip indeed just to come and feel lost again. He sat there, feeling young and alone.

  But then a new voice, strong and determined, cut through the welter of voices. “All this is a side issue,” Simon Raphael said in a stern voice. “Black hole, worm-hole, compact mass—just before we left Pluto, Mr. Chao reminded me that none of that truly matters. What matters is that our homeworld has been stolen, and our Solar System invaded by an alien force.” Raphael stood up, leaned his hands on the table, and looked about the room. There was silence.

  “How that has happened does not matter. In a strange way, it is almost comforting to get lost in technical arguments over how it happened—because then we could get so lost in the details of the situation that we never have to look at these larger, and more terrifying issues. Our Solar System has been invaded. In some unknown way, our gravity-wave experiment appears to have been the signal for that invasion.

  “I know as well as all of you how absurd that sounds—attack from beyond the stars—but what other explanation fits the facts? Do you have an idea, Dr. McGillicutty? Some other interpretation that does not contradict any of the very few facts we do have?” Raphael looked around the table. “The quiet in this room tells me there is no other explanation. But we cannot reject the only answer we have simply because it is difficult to accept. I know of what I speak when I say that. Refusing to accept a challenge is an old man’s failing, and one of which I have been much guilty in recent days.

  “We have been attacked, that is obvious. And yet no one asks, ‘By whom?’ We are so reluctant to accept this incredible disaster that we cannot go even one step further and ask who did this, or why they did it. It seems to me that those questions are far more important than how they did it, or whether their technology seems to violate this or that pet theory. I don’t know what their motives are, but I cannot imagine that a fleet of thirty thousand asteroid-sized spacecraft are headed toward all our worlds with the intention of doing good deeds.

  “And yet how they do what they do is important, because we must fight them, whoever they are. Before we can do that, we must learn more about them. If Earth has been removed, where was it taken? What do the aliens intend here in the Solar System? How, precisely, are the other planets threatened? And why?

  “The latest reports estimate thirty-two thousand large objects, which we’ve been calling gee points, all of them on constant-boost courses headed straight for every one of the major planets—but not for the Moon. So let’s talk about why, if we can.”

  “Ah, maybe this is the place for me to jump in,” said a bald, heavyset man sitting next to Lucian. “I’m Tyrone Vespasian, and I’ve been concentrating on the gee points.”

  Raphael nodded and sat down. “By all means.”

  “Okay, I guess the big questions about the gee points are one, what are they, and two, why is the Moon exempt? Let me talk about the first. Some of the fastest-moving gee points have reached Venus and Mercury. Unfortunately we don’t know what happened to them on arrival. Quicksilver Station on Mercury just saw large radar blips go below the horizon, and VISOR also lost the gee points as they went in. There weren’t any big seismic events on either world, which suggests that the gee points managed to make soft landings somehow.

  “I don’t know if it’s good news or bad, but we ought to have landings on Mars in a few days. We should be able to get better information from there when that happens. The Venus and Mercury arrivals are from gee points moving out from the Earthpoint black hole.” Vespasian looked up and glared at McGillicutty. “Or compact mass, if you need to call it that. Anyway, there are a few gee points moving from Earth-space toward the outer planets, but they have farther to go. The gee points moving from the Asteroid Belt and Oort Cloud are moving slower and have the longest distances to travel.

  “Some of the gee points are moving toward the gas giants. What they plan to do when they get there, we don’t know. We don’t know if they’re interested in the planets, the satellites, or both.

  “If you take a look at the Asteroid Belt gee points through a long-range camera, they look just like ordinary asteroids. In fact, a few of them were mined as asteroids for some time. Except asteroids aren’t supposed to contain point-source gravity-wave systems.

  “The objects coming out of the Earthpoint black hole look totally different, as far as we can tell. It’s hard to get good imagery on them. They’re a little smaller, and look more like artificial objects. Their surfaces are more reflective, and they seem to be very regular in shape. The Earthpoint gee points are moving too fast for any of our ships to match velocity with them real easy, though there are four or five missions already on the way. On the other hand, they seem to behave just like the asteroidal gee points. I think they’re all really the same thing.”

  “And what is that?” Chancellor Daltry asked gently.

  Vespasian’s face turned sad, and he was silent for a long moment before he spoke. “I thought a lot about that,” he said. “I think they’re spaceships. Really big spaceships. The ones coming from the Outer System have been waiting, hidden, camouflaged as asteroids and comets. Hiding from what, I don’t know. Once these things start accelerating, moving, it’s obvious they aren’t what they seem. Disguise is pointless. So, since the ones coming through Earthpoint are accelerating from the start, there’s no sense in disguising them. The Earthpoint ones are accelerated on the other side of the wormhole somehow—given a high initial speed. Plus they have a slightly higher boost rate. That makes them seem different from the Outer System jobs, but I think they’re really all the same thing. Big ships.”

  He hesitated one last time, and then said it. “Invasion ships. I’ve tried to come up with some other explanation, but nothing else fits.
They’re ships. What sort of crews they have aboard, I don’t know.

  “But we’re going to find out when the first one lands on Mars.”

  chapter 14: Empire of the Suns

  Maybe the world hadn’t ended, but Gerald MacDougal found himself in paradise, after all. Or at least in California.

  But then, California, Vancouver, and in fact all of Earth were suddenly an exobiologist’s paradise. This new home for Earth was not the afterlife, but it was certainly a celestial realm, a kingdom of stars, an Empire of the Suns.

  And it was a realm crowded with life. Of that Gerald was convinced—and surely that was the next best thing to Heaven for an exobiologist. Most of the other planets were too far off for good imagery from a ground-based telescope, but they could get good spectroscopic data. Gerald looked again at the document in his hand, barely able to resist jumping for joy. It was a summary from the first run-through of planetary spectrographs, as collected from observatories all over the world.

  And the summary practically shouted evidence of life-bearing worlds. Free oxygen, water vapour, nitrogen glowed up from every spectrograph.

  Likewise, every world was at the proper distance from its respective star for life. For every star of a given size and temperature, there was a particular range of distances, called the biosphere, wherein a planet would be at the right temperature for Earthlike life, neither too hot nor too cold. Only certain types of stars were capable of supporting life. But every star around the sphere was of the right size, temperature and color to support life—and every planet in the Multisystem rode a secure and perfect orbit inside its star’s biosphere.

  He had to get to those worlds. Somehow. Getting here was a good first step. He had guessed right. JPL had been officially designated the lead lab for finding out what the hell had happened. Gerald barely had time to finish mentioning his credentials as an exobiologist before they had signed him up. JPL’s people could read a spectrograph as well as Gerald could. They knew they were going to need exobiology expertise, sooner or later. And until such time as he could work directly in his field, there was endless staff work that needed doing. Earth’s survival could well hinge on figuring out what had happened. The scientific community generally and JPL specifically were confronted with the largest and most urgent research program in history, and they needed to gear up for the job. Gerald was a good organiser, and was glad to help out.

  But there was a core of pain underneath all the excitement. Marcia was lost to him, somewhere out across the sea of stars.

  And, as wondrous as this place was, it was not Earth’s home. No doubt a sojourn here would teach many things, but Earth belonged in the Solar System. Gerald was determined to see her returned there.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Dianne Steiger had learned something in the ten days since they had fished her out of the Pack Rat’s wreckage at the Los Angeles Spaceport: People can get used to anything.

  Already she was used to the ghostly pseudo-sensations her new left hand provided. Maybe the astronaut’s union was a waning political power, but it still bought damn good medical care. She sat in Wolf Bernhardt’s outer office, waiting. From time to time, someone would rush past, carrying a stack of datablocks, looking worried. There was a frantic air about the place. Fumbling a bit, working awkwardly with just her right hand, she pulled out another cigarette and lit it.

  Frantic yes, but at the same time eerily normal and calm.

  That was the way the world was now. Massive and unseen forces had stolen Earth—and yet life went on. If it was time to go to work, it didn’t much matter which star system Earth was in. You still had to get up, eat breakfast, drink your coffee—and step out into a world where the light of day wasn’t quite the right color, where the sun in the sky was not the Sun. You still had to go to the office and get those invoices out, or go to the store and get the shopping done, or go to the dentist for your cleaning. You still had to go home at night, though under a too-bright sky that held not the Moon and the familiar constellations, but a half-dozen too-bright stars that washed out much of the sky, leaving it tinged with blue in places. There were too few fixed-background stars, and far too many planets that were too large, too close. And a lot more meteors than there used to be. Everything in the sky had changed, and yet everything on Earth was exactly the same.

  Even if you wanted to react, there was nothing you could do about it. What did you do about the sky transmogrifying? And on a practical level, if you weren’t a spacer, what difference did it make?

  She blew out a cloud of smoke, sighed, and tried to tell herself how lucky she had been. Of course, if you were a spacer, you had a few more problems. Not that Dianne felt she had any right to complain. She was home, and alive. There were a lot of astros—a lot of her friends—who weren’t.

  She lifted her left arm and examined her new hand. Too pink, the nails not properly grown in, no muscle tone to speak of, unweathered and characterless. A baby hand grown into the size and form of a woman’s, but without the slightest sign of maturity. She closed her eyes, and willed the hand to close, to clench itself into a fist. Eyes shut, she concentrated on her sensations in the hand. She could feel the arching of her fingers, the pressure of her fingertips on the base of her palm, her thumb wrapped around the side of her forefinger. The feelings were clear enough so that she could see her hand, her fist, through closed eyes.

  She opened her eyes again, and found herself staring at an open hand, the fingers splayed out, starfished away from each other. With a new and separate act of will, she again forced her new hand into a fist, watched it close with open eyes this time. And felt nothing at all from it but a numb warmth. Her nervous system, confused by conflicting signals, simply gave up.

  She carefully laid the hand in her lap and cursed silently. Again, and still, it happened. It was as if she had one left hand that she could only see, and another that she could only feel.

  The doctors were soothing and reassuring. In the old days, when amputations were permanent, amputees reported phantom feelings—an itch in the leg that wasn’t there anymore, that sort of thing. Intellectually, she knew, the disconcerting sensations she was experiencing were merely an echo of the same phenomenon. Her new left hand was sending legitimate signals to her nervous system, but a replacement body part, even a sprint-grown bud-clone produced from the patient’s own cells, never precisely matched the original. In time the new hand would develop muscle tone and coordination, but for now it didn’t respond or report sensation the same way her old hand had.

  For a long time yet, until she learned to use it, the physical sensations would be… disturbing. She would learn to tolerate it, then get used to it, then accept it, until the new hand seemed normal and natural.

  In the meantime, the doctors told her, life went on. Wait it out.

  That was the second lesson she had learned. Life went on, no matter what.

  Quite abruptly and without warning, the entire planet is grabbed and thrown into a new solar system, without any explanation. No one knew why or how it had happened. Nonetheless, there were plenty of crises people could understand, and those were what people focused on. Perhaps dealing with the smaller crises was a means of avoiding the larger disaster.

  Whether or not dealing with them was a denial mechanism, Earth was facing some extremely serious problems that did require attention. The loss of space facilities hurt badly, caused energy shortages, communications lapses, transportation problems, supply problems. People were suffering. The papers and the tapes and the newsblocks were still reporting new disasters, new updates on the number killed or injured, on the loss of this space facility or that. No one could truly comprehend the theft of a world, but people could understand the death of ten thousand in the crash of a habitat.

  And yet, on another, broader level, the damage was superficial. Taken as a social whole, planet Earth was still strong enough, resilient enough, to survive this trauma. Society wasn’t showing any signs of collapsing.

  Or at l
east that was the reassuring message everyone was trying to give everyone else. Whether or not it was true, humanity needed to believe it.

  Perhaps people glanced to the sky now and again, but they walked down the street, met their friends, ate their meals and went to their jobs. If those, too, were denial mechanisms, they were healthy ones.

  Meanwhile the bars were all full, and so were the churches. The various organisations of crazies had more than a few new recruits. Any group that claimed to have an explanation, or an escape from danger, was popular. And there were more than a few incidents of attacks on the crazies, as people looked for someone to blame.

  Yet, all told, as represented in Los Angeles at least, the people of Earth were taking the catastrophe in stride. Dianne Steiger looked down at the cloned, alien hand resting in her lap. She was taking that catastrophe in stride, too, and for much the same reasons. What choice did she have? She may have lost a part of herself, but she could not stop going about the business of staying alive. The whole of the world could not drop everything it was doing in order to find an appropriate way to react.

  And the people who did react, with protest marches (against whom or what, Dianne could not understand), accomplished nothing. The jaded, world-weary leaders of Earth’s nations and cities, still hurting from the Knowledge Crash riots and the worldwide recession, had learned the hard way that emotional appeals could only produce more riot, more destruction, more fear. Governments and large institutions put all their efforts into spreading calm, urging a return to normalcy, whatever that was.

  Life went on, in spite of all. It wasn’t just fact: it was official policy.

  Dianne thought there was reason to believe the policy would work. After all, people could get used to anything.

  Even a Dyson Sphere hanging in the sky. People were acting as if giving it a name explained it. Dianne felt a grim amusement at that. She was one of a very few persons to see it unveiled by atmosphere, blazing with power at the height of its energy pulse. She knew to fear it. Not so the average person in the street. They had learned that it was many billions of kilometres away, and many seemed to assume that anything that far off could do them no harm. Never mind that it was presumably related to the power that had snatched the planet away. And besides, the Sphere wasn’t visible in the sky anymore. Its cherry red glow had faded down through brick red, to a dim glow, to darkness. Now it was merely a spot of blackness in the night sky, eclipsing the background stars. In infrared, of course, it was another story. In IR, the damned thing was bright as hell.