The Ring of Charon the-1 Read online

  Larry thought for a minute. “Hell, there’s no way I’m going to be able to pay anything more anyway. All right; I’ll do it your way.”

  “Great. Glad to hear it.” Sondra set the notepack to one side. “The real reason I came in was to apologize for not sticking up for you today. Let me fudge the figures for you, just to make it up.”

  “Why should you have done anything today? You barely know me.”

  “Yeah, but by this time, I should know you. The old-timer is supposed to show the new kid around. Besides, every one of us around that table should have spoken up, and none of us did. We’re all too browbeaten by Raphael.”

  Larry sat up again. “That much I can believe. He reminds of my Uncle Tal. Tal always managed to find a way to let me know I wasn’t sufficiently grateful to my parents. Nothing I did was ever enough. I don’t know how many times I wanted to face up to him, but I never worked up the nerve. And Dr. Raphael is a hundred times worse.”

  Sondra felt a twinge of guilt, a legitimate one this time. Much as she hated to admit it, there was a part of her that admired Raphael’s cussedness, that felt some sympathy for him. “Don’t be too hard on him. He hasn’t had it easy. He’s spent practically his whole life being an old man in a young person’s game. It took him a few extra years to get his doctorate for some reason. He fell behind the current theories and research, and never really got caught up. That was twenty-five years ago. He’s lived all that time watching boy and girl wonders like us make all the big strides.

  “Imagine what a whole life like that would be—always a little bit behind the curve, forever condemned to be a bright man in a field where the average worker is a genius. No wonder he gets frustrated.” She paused, and shrugged. “Even so, he shouldn’t take it out on the rest of us.”

  “And we shouldn’t let him get away with it,” Larry said with surprising firmness. “If we didn’t cooperate, he couldn’t push us around.”

  “I’ve been telling myself that for a long time,” Sondra agreed. “But if we’re going to close up shop in a month, it’s a little late to stage a revolt.”

  A shy, tentative smile played over Larry’s face. “There’s still my results. They might be worth something.”

  Sondra smiled indulgently. It would take miracle numbers to do any good. Mere refinement, another tweakup in performance wouldn’t help. But she wasn’t going to say that to Larry. What good could it do to dash all his hopes? “Yeah, you’re right. They might be something.”

  “Wanna see them?” Larry asked eagerly. He bounded off the bed without waiting for an answer, shot over Sondra’s head and caromed off the ceiling, much to her startlement. He made a perfect landing in front of his desk and wrapped his legs around the chair legs. Obviously he had practiced a lot moving in Pluto’s weak gravity. He dug through the papers clipped to the desktop, and pulled a single sheet out of the thick sheaf. “This is the summary,” he said. “I’ve got a preliminary detail report, but the computer is still doing some number crunching.”

  Sondra took the paper without looking at it. “Why so long to run the calculations?” she asked.

  Larry shrugged. “I didn’t have a chance to start it running until after the meeting, and it’s a complicated problem that’ll suck up a lot of processing time. Too big for a remote terminal. I’ve got the Ring control computer slipstreaming pieces of my job in between legitimate work, in small enough hunks that it won’t get flagged on the accounting system. I don’t want Raphael nailing me for sucking up computer time too.” He grinned shyly.

  Sondra laughed. “You’re learning,” she said, and glanced casually at the summary sheet. Then she blinked, and looked at it again, more carefully. She had to read it twice more before she was certain she had read the numbers correctly. They couldn’t be right. They couldn’t be. “This has got to be wrong,” she objected. “You can’t have gotten that kind of gee field. Even if we knew how to do it, we don’t have the power to generate even one percent that much force.”

  “The numbers are right,” Larry said. “And I didn’t generate that gravity force—I focused and amplified an existing gravity field. Charon’s gravity field.”

  Sondra looked at him. His voice was calm, steady. There was nothing defensive in his tone, and he looked her straight in the eye. He believed in the figures. She looked at the page again and checked the time stamp on the experiment. Hours before Raphael had dropped his bombshell. No, Larry could not have faked the numbers in some sort of mad attempt to cancel the closing with a spectacular success. Besides, these numbers were too spectacular. They were too good for anyone to try to fake them. No one would believe it. They had to be real.

  She realized that she had been staring blankly at the summary sheet. She put it down and took a good hard look at Larry. He was not the sort to make a good liar. If he had been trying to put something over, he would have blushed and stammered, his eyes would have shifted away from hers. Either the data were right, or Larry had made a spectacular error.

  He believed. But no one else would.

  “Has Raphael seen this?” she asked, tapping a finger on the sum sheet.

  “I haven’t worked up the nerve to send the data to his terminal yet. I was going to present it at the meeting, but I didn’t,” Larry admitted unhappily.

  “Damn it.” If Larry had sent them in before the meeting, they would have had at least some credibility. “Send it right now. Not just to his terminal. Copy to every researcher on the station. Now.”

  “But—”

  “But me no buts, Larry. When they see those figures coming after the shutdown announcement, everyone will assume you cooked them up to cancel the shutdown. If we release them now, at least there’ll be the argument that you wouldn’t have had the time to fabricate the figures. The longer you wait the weaker that argument will get.”

  “But those figures are right,” Larry objected. “They’re not faked.”

  “I know that, and you know that—but who else will buy it? These figures are five hundred thousand times larger than they ought to be. Use Occam’s razor. What’s the simplest explanation—a perfectly timed breakthrough, or a fraud?”

  Larry thought for a moment, then grabbed his note-pack and typed in a series of commands. For a long moment, there was no sound in the little room but the low chuckle of the keyboard. Sondra stared intently at Larry, and she realized that her heart was racing, that sweat had broken out on her forehead.

  I’m scared, she told herself, wondering what in the world there was to be frightened of.

  And then the answer came to her. She was scared of the power Larry had found. He had stabilized it across a microscopic volume, and only for a few seconds. But inside that tiny time and space, he had produced a gravity field a thousand times more powerful than the Sun’s. He had produced force great enough to crush whole worlds.

  Surely that should be enough to frighten anyone.

  * * *

  I’m coming home, Jessie. Home. Simon Raphael set down his old-fashioned pen and felt his eyes mist over for a moment. The foolish tears of an old man. But that didn’t matter. No need to be ashamed. That was the whole point of the journal, of course. To let his emotions out in private, where they could do no harm. To tell everything to the one woman he had ever loved.

  There were times, many of them, when he questioned the wisdom, indeed the sanity, of writing his journal down in the form of letters to his dead wife. But sanity was in short supply on Pluto. Best not to spend his hoarded supply on private thoughts. Best to have it in reserve for his dealings with the others.

  The final notice came by lasergram last night, he wrote. Soon, soon now, I will walk again under an open blue sky. Soon, once again, I shall visit you. Her grave was a lovely place, nestled into the side of a quiet hillside, looking down on the green fields of Shenandoah Valley, looking out over the cool uplands of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I will leave this place and come home to you.

  He set down his pen, sighed, and closed his eyes. He ima
gined that he could smell the cool forest air wafted over the valley. It was incredible to him that others would chose to stay here. Fantastic that they would struggle to find reasons to stay. Even make them up. Perhaps this boy Chao seriously thought he had discovered something worthwhile. Perhaps it was not deliberate fraud.

  Too bad. The moment was past for wasting time on harebrained theories.

  Raphael knew Chao was wrong. Chao could not have found anything, for there was nothing to find. Gravity research was a dead end. That, when all was said and done, was Simon Raphael’s reason for giving up.

  He smiled, a wan and thin creasing of his lips, and took up his pen again. I feel no regret in leaving here, he wrote. I have done all I could, tried as hard as I might. Now there is nothing left but to remember what W. C. Fields said. Jessie had always loved the ancient comedy films, even if Raphael himself had not. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then give up. No sense being a damn fool about it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  From Pawn to Player

  The observer’s slumbers, heretofore measured in unbroken millennia, were now irrevocably disturbed. Rest, sleep were not to be. That small ray of hope would not be stilled. The Observer stirred restlessly, unable to ignore any longer the tantalizing energies it felt.

  Something was happening in the depths of space. Now that it had been awakened by the not-quite-correct signal, its sensitivity was increased. It could detect many faint twitches and whispers emanating from the far reaches of the Solar System, from a source moving slowly in a distant orbit.

  It formed a first theory, though the process by which it did so could not precisely be called thinking. Rather, it was a memory search, an attempt to match new input against the results of previous experience.

  It examined its heritage memory, calling forth not only its own lengthy, if somewhat uneventful, experience, but the recollections of all its forebears. It found a circumstance that came close to matching the present one, in the life of a distant ancestor. Perhaps the results of that ancient event could provide an explanation for the current odd situation.

  With something like a pang of disappointment, it played back the outcome of the old event. If that precedent was a guide, then this flurry of gravity signals was nothing more than one of its own group malfunctioning, erroneously radiating random gravity signals.

  To set its conclusions in two human analogs, each useful and neither entirely accurate, it conjectured that an alternate phenotype of its own genotype had taken ill. Or else that a distant subsystem, another component of the same machine of which it was apart, had broken down.

  Was perhaps one of its own breed orbiting in that space? It consulted its memory store and found the scans relating to that part of the sky.

  It had expected to find a small, asteroid-sized body reported as orbiting there, another subtype of its breed placed in orbit. To its utter shock, it instead discovered records of a natural body, a frozen planet, accompanied by an outsized moon.

  A planetary body emitting modulated gravity waves? That could not be. This was outside not only its own experience, but beyond any circumstance any of its kind had ever reported. Its denial of the situation went beyond any human ability to gainsay a set of facts. In the Observer’s universe, if it had not happened before, it was physically impossible for it to happen now.

  The anomaly must be investigated. It focused its senses as precisely as possible, examining the target planet.

  Further shock. Insupportable. The planet’s satellite now sported a ring, quite unrecorded in memory store. A ring flickering intermittently with every sort of energy.

  A ring that might have been the Observer’s own twin.

  * * *

  Larry sat outside Raphael’s office, sweating bullets. The “invitation” to meet with the station head immediately had come a half hour ago, but Raphael seemed to want his rebellious underling to cool his heels for a while before being granted an audience.

  Larry knitted his fingers together nervously. He had known what he was doing when he ran his million-gee experiment. That was physics, natural law, controlled and understandable. Once inspiration hit, once he could see the answer and set up the run properly—then of course it would work. It was inevitable. His experiment could no more help working than the Sun could help coming up in the morning.

  But the human commotion his experiment had set off— that he did not understand at all. Four hours after his summary report had hit the station’s datanet, the whole station was turned upside down.

  He had used the Ring to unleash fantastic power, but that power was under control. Pull the plug and it would stop. Not so with this uproar. This controversy was a genie he could not stuff back in the bottle.

  Everyone in the station was excited, or infuriated, or both. They were taking sides, all of them, and no one was shy about expressing his or her feelings, right to Larry’s face. He was a hero. He was a liar. He was a genius. He was a fool. The Nobel Prize wasn’t good enough. They ought to make Tycho a prison again, because a life term anywhere else wasn’t bad enough. Larry found himself as alarmed by the adulation as by the excoriation.

  The whole station was stampeding, running roughshod over normal procedure in the excitement. Larry’s own complete analysis of his experimental results was still running whenever it could grab processing time, but it got pushed off the main computer’s job queue altogether as researchers with higher access rights barged into the system on priority status to try their own simulations.

  Raphael himself sanctioned a computer simulation by two of the senior scientists. Larry wasn’t a bit surprised to learn that Raphael’s sim had “proven” Larry’s results were impossible. A rival simulation by a cadre of more junior scientists (with Sondra conspicuous by her presence) demonstrated the Chao Effect was real. (Larry himself wasn’t exactly sure who had named it that, but he suspected Sondra.)

  Larry didn’t quite dare say anything, but from what he could see, both computer runs were based on incorrect assumptions.

  But the excitement went deeper than a need to see whose figures were right. Lines were being drawn. People were being required to take sides—and not just on the objective question of whether Larry was right or wrong. Other issues were getting entangled. Were you for or against Raphael? Were you for or against closing the station? Are you on our side or theirs? In a matter of hours, the results of a scientific experiment had become politicized, had crystallized all the complex, swirling antagonisms and personality conflicts, all the morale problems at the station into one simple question: Do you believe? A question of science was reduced to a judgment of one’s faith, a choice between orthodoxy or heresy.

  At which point, Larry told himself, it ceased to be science at all. Very little of this had anything to do with the quest for knowledge.

  The intercom box clicked on and Raphael’s voice said, “Come in,” in peremptory tones. Larry stood up, a bit uncertainly. The man had not even checked to see if Larry was waiting. He glanced up, looking for a camera. If there was one, it was concealed. Or was the point of the exercise to show Larry how confident Raphael was that his commands would be followed? Raphael’s word was law, and therefore Larry would be there.

  It occurred to Larry that if he hadn’t been there, Raphael would have lost nothing by his little power play, for there would be no one mere to hear it. Larry was half-tempted to just sit there and see what Raphael would do. But that wouldn’t be good strategy.

  He stood, opened the door, and walked into Raphael’s office.

  Raphael sat behind his desk, seemingly engrossed by some sort of report on his computer screen. He did not glance up or acknowledge Larry in any way. Larry stopped in front of the man’s desk, and hesitated for a moment.

  But Larry had had enough. If Raphael was going to turn this into a game, then Larry would rather be a player than a pawn. With a slightly theatric sigh, he sat down and pulled out his own notepack. There was some work he could be getting on with. Or
at least pretend to get on with.

  He opened up the little computer, switched it on, and called up a work file. His face was calm, his heart pounding. The gesture was eloquent, brazen, impudent. Larry had never done anything in his life even remotely as contemptuous of a superior. His father would have said his mother’s Irish temper was making a rare appearance, and maybe that wasn’t far wrong.

  There was a moment, a half moment, in which Raphael could have gotten the upper hand by looking up from his work and leveling his visitor with a withering comment.

  But the moment passed, and the director continued at his desk pretending to read his files, while Larry sat in the visitor’s chair, pretending to be engrossed in his work.

  With each passing second, it was becoming more and more impossible for Raphael to play the scene as he had planned.

  Larry thought Raphael was taking quick sidelong glances at him, but he didn’t dare look up from his notepack’s screen to be sure. He began to wonder how the old man would recoup. At last Raphael stood, carrying a book, and walked over to his bookshelf. He put the book on the shelf. No doubt the book didn’t belong on the shelf, but at least the gesture broke the stalemate. He turned back to his desk and then sat on its corner, a remarkably informal pose for Raphael. It did not pass Larry’s notice that it placed Raphael in the position of looking down on Larry. “Mr. Chao?” he asked in a calm, if steely, voice.

  Larry closed his notepack and looked up to see Raphael glaring balefully down at him.

  The older man nodded, stood, and returned to sit down at his own desk. Now that he had Larry’s attention he could sit wherever he pleased. “I see no reason to waste time with pleasantries or delicate words,” Raphael began. “You have disrupted this station and its work for the last twenty-four hours. I cannot permit any further disruption. We have performed the computer simulation needed to confirm the fraudulent nature of your so-called experiment, and that should satisfy whatever duty we might have had to examine your absurd claims.