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  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.

  “I see no need to waste any further staff time or effort chasing this chimera, to say nothing of Ring time or other access to experimental facilities. I have ordered that all further work on testing your claim, no matter who performs it, be cancelled immediately, so that this station can return to its proper work. I might add that I do not yet know who the appropriate legal and professional authorities are in cases of fraud such as this, but I intend to find out and report your actions to them.”

  Larry opened his mouth and tried to speak. But there were no words. His boss, his own boss, was calling him a liar to his face and threatening to turn him in for the high crime of making a breakthrough.

  At last he found his voice again. “You want this station to return to its proper work?” Larry asked. “What’s that? Getting ready for shutdown?” Larry shook his head in bewilderment. “Why is it easier to think that one of the staff you yourself hired is a liar and a cheat, rather than to accept that I might have discovered something? Did you even look at the data, the real data and not your simulations?”

  Raphael smiled contemptuously. “The only thing you have discovered, Mr. Chao, is how to end your career. Our simulation was quite sufficient to confirm your results were flatly impossible. There was not anything like the power required available to the system.”

  “I’ve seen your simulation equations,” Larry replied in a hard-edged voice. He stood up and leaned over Raphael’s desk. “They don’t even attempt to account for the effects of amplifying and focusing outside gravity fields. Of course that power wasn’t available from inside the Ring’s power system—it came from the outside, from tapping Charon’s gravity field! I grabbed a piece of Charon’s gravity and compressed it in one locus. The gravity equations are still balanced. That was the whole point of the test. You might as well run a simulation of a radio receiver without accounting for a radio signal. Obviously it can’t work without something to work on. The results of my test run will stand up. It’s your work that’s flawed, Doctor.”

  Larry stared down into the blazing fury of the old man’s eyes, and then turned and left the director’s office without another word, without looking back for Raphael’s reaction. Anger, real anger, cold hard adult anger gripped him, for the first time in his life.

  He realised he was angry not at Raphael’s baseless accusations, but angry at the man’s stupidity, his rigidity.

  It was the man’s assault against truth, against the discoveries they had all been sent here to make, that infuriated Larry. Larry had the computer records, the numbers, the readings that could prove he was right. But all those would be cold comfort back on Earth, billions of kilometres away from the Ring. Cold comfort when the Ring was mothballed for a generation, and there was no other facility available that could possibly follow up on the results.

  That was what angered Larry—the blind and needless waste, the opportunity being thrown away!

  If Larry’s test results were accepted and confirmed, it would be impossible to shut down the Ring. Even with the recession back on Earth, the funding board would have to come up with some sort of operating budget. Maybe even the Settlements on Mars and the outer satellites would finally contribute. Hell, that was too timid a thought. Everyone would throw money at the Ring, in the hope of sharing in the fruits of the research. What might not be possible if artificial gravity were real? Whole new avenues of research would open up on every side, now that the initial problem had been cracked. A lifetime of work, of exciting new challenges and discoveries, would lie open in front of Larry.

  And all that stood between him and that bright future was one cranky old man’s bruised ego. It was not to be tolerated.

  He had a strong impulse to find Sondra and ask her what he should do. But letting her call the shots would be as bad as letting Raphael roll over him. He would have to decide for himself. Once he had chosen a course of action he could ask her advice, her guidance, as to how to do it. But Larry knew he would have to decide what to do for himself, if he was going to go on respecting himself!

  Without realizing where he was headed, he found himself back at the door of his own cabin. He shoved open the door, went in, and locked the door behind him. He needed some calm and quiet time alone. Time to think. Time to play the damned games, all of them.

  Larry needed another experiment, a rush experiment not only to get some science done, but for career reasons, publicity reasons. Something that might make a big enough splash to prevent the shutdown.

  Failing that, he had his own career to think of. The million-gee Ring run was spectacular, but it would be as discounted by the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation on Earth as it was here. Earth would listen to Raphael over Larry.

  If things broke the wrong way, if Raphael did manage to cause trouble, Larry could not afford to have that one unreplicated run be his only claim to fame. He needed something further to publish, something he could bring home to Earth and base further research on. Hell, he needed an experiment that would get him a job. He scowled unhappily. Politics.

  Acting the good pure little scientist, interested only in the Truth, would ensure that his discovery would be thrown away. Only by getting bogged down in politics and gamesmanship could he truly serve Truth. This situation called for scheming, not naive idealism.

  Everyone gets caught justifying the means to their ends sometimes, Larry told himself, a bit uncomfortably.

  Okay, then. He had a goal and a fallback goal: saving the station and/or his career. Now how to go about reaching one of both of those?

  He needed to know the state of play. Had all the tests of his results had been cancelled? He had a hard time believing that the entire research staff would meekly go along with the cease-work order. On the other hand, Raphael undoubtedly expected some of the staff to try to circumvent the ruling. So anyone trying for a test would have to disguise the run as something else.

  Larry used his notepack computer to check the Ring experiment schedule. It was certainly much heavier than usual, with experiments scheduled around the clock. Of course, that could be explained by the planned closing, and people rushing to get their runs made before the shutdown came—but perhaps some of that scheduled time was actually intended to test Larry’s theory.

  People working on the Chao Effect would have the sense to hide their work from Raphael. And a lot of people might well be doing that very thing. But who?

  There was only one name he could be sure of. One of those covert experimenters was going to be, had to be, Sondra Berghoff. Maybe there would be other malcontents willing to do more than mouth off, actually willing to wade in and break some rules. But Sondra was the only one Larry knew who would take the chances involved.

  Larry
worked over the experiment roster, looking for experiments in which Sondra was involved.

  There were three, only one of which listed her as primary researcher. That was likewise the only one of the three that had been scheduled after Larry had shown her his test results. He rejected it as too obvious. Raphael would certainly monitor that experiment closely. Besides, it wasn’t due to be run for another week. He couldn’t afford to wait that long.

  One of the others seemed perfect. It had been scheduled weeks ago, and was supposed to run on the graveyard shift, 0200 GMT tonight. Sondra was listed as the technical operator, not an experimenter.

  Better still, Larry noted that Dr. Jane Webling was the primary investigator. Webling, nominally the science chief of the station, was getting on in years, to put it charitably. Probably she would go to bed before the experiment ran, and simply check with her “assistant” the next morning. In all likelihood, therefore, Sondra would be on the board by herself.

  So. If Sondra were going to pull something, that would be her moment. Okay, but what was the purpose of the run? Larry checked the title of the experiment: “Test of a Revised Procedure for Gravitic Collimation.” Just the sort of pompous name people learned to hang on a test when Raphael was running things, Larry thought.

  Gravitic collimation. He had seen an earlier paper by Webling on the subject—in fact, he had gotten a few ideas from it. Webling had been working for some time on developing a focused beam of gravity waves—a “graser.” Like light, gravity was usually radiated in all directions from its source. But, like light, it could be manipulated, focused down into a one-dimensional beam. Larry’s own techniques of gravity focusing relied on similar techniques.

  A laser was a perfectly collimated light beam. Webling’s graser project sought to develop a focused beam of gravity, albeit of microscopic power, and beam it at detectors on the other planets. Strange thought, Larry told himself, since gravity could be defined as a curve in space. A beam of curved space.

  Actually, the basic technique produced two beams, pointed one hundred eighty degrees apart from each other-one aimed at the target, the other outgoing in exactly the opposite direction. Webling’s greatest success was in creating a “push-pull” beam by warping the outgoing beam around, changing its direction of travel without affecting its direction of attraction. In effect, the outgoing beam signal became a repulser. Merged with the targeted beam, it had exactly zero net attractive power, because the two beams cancelled each other out. The beam should be detectable, but effectively powerless.

  But suppose, Larry thought, he boosted the power rating a bit? Say, by a factor of one million? It still would be self-cancelling, and thus not have any effect on the target worlds—but it would sure prove Larry was on to something. Hell, it would melt the readouts right off the gravity detectors.

  That should get them some off-planet attention.

  chapter 4: The Finger on the Button

  The observer did not understand the strange ring at the edge of the Solar System. The ring should have been perfectly familiar, its actions as familiar as the Observer’s own. Yet the stranger seemed to break every law, every control that should have been burned into its very being.

  Why did it behave so strangely? Why did it orbit a frozen, useless world at the very borderlands of this system? Why did it not hide itself? Why, indeed, did it radiate wasted, dissipated power, advertising its presence? Hourly, the stranger permitted cumulative leakage greater than what the Observer had allowed in the last million years.

  And in spite of the leakage, the stranger radiated uselessly small amounts of effective gravity power. Why did it do so with such clumsiness, such inefficiency?

  So many things were quite unlike a proper ring. Only in its shape, size, and attempt to use gravity did the stranger truly resemble the Observer.

  But the obvious conclusion that this was a new thing, unknown to the Observers heritage memory, never occurred to the Observer.

  The Observer was congenitally incapable of asking the rather obvious question, Where did it come from? It knew, beyond any possibility of contradiction, that there was only one possible ultimate source for a gravity ring.

  The Observer knew, to a certainty, that the mystery ring was at least in some degree akin to the Observer itself.

  That was the error that wrecked its entire edifice of logic.

  It assumed that this alien structure was of its own kind. But then why was the mystery ring so strange? Why were its procedures, its behaviour so wildly unknown ?

  The answer was suddenly clear, brought up from some ancient memory of a forebear lost to time.

  The alien was a massively modified derivative model, a mutant. Built by a related or ancestral sphere system long, long ago.

  That was the Observer’s second error.

  On this was based its third error, which would, in time, send its entire universe reeling, and threaten a way of being millions of years old.

  But for it, disaster was yet far off.

  Earth was not as lucky.

  “Well, Dr. Berghoff, it’s a pity we could only arrange such a late-night experiment time, but I think you have matters well in hand,” Dr. Webling said. “It should be a fairly straightforward experiment run. Quite routine. I think I might as well head on off to bed. I’ll be looking forward to seeing your results in the morning. I suppose we won’t have the last return signals from Earth until after lunchtime.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sondra said distractedly. She had her mind on other things than pleasantries.

  “Treat yourself to that extra cup of coffee tonight,” Webling said playfully. “You’ll need it. Good night, then, Dr. Berghoff.”

  “Good night, Dr. Webling.”

  Dr. Webling cautiously eased her way out of the lab, as if she were afraid of a fall. A lot of the older scientists never did master the tricks of moving in low gravity.

  Sondra watched the door close behind Webling and breathed a sigh of relief. She had thought the old girl would never get moving. She stood up and locked the door behind Webling. Sondra definitely did not want to be disturbed.

  She glanced up at the main control display. Just four hours until the scheduled start of Webling’s experiment. Damn! Barely time to scrap the preliminary setup for Webling’s run and reset the center’s controls to replicate Larry Chao’s results. And there was no slack time in the system tonight, either. The other three control rooms were full and busy. Control Room One was running a test now, and Two and Three were waiting their turns to get command of the Ring. Sondra’s, Control Room Four, got its shot at the ring only after Three was done—and there was an experimenter already signed up for the 0300 slot in Control Room One.

  Once she got command of the Ring, she would have an hour to make her run. No time to correct mistakes if she got it wrong.

  Of course Webling would discover the change and see to it that Raphael handed Sondra her head the next morning, but that couldn’t be helped. Nor would it matter. After all, the station was shutting down. What could they do? Fire her?

  This experiment run might well be her only chance to replicate Larry’s results. That was important.

  Maybe others would try to duplicate his run, but this was her only shot at it. She couldn’t trust the cowering sheep-scientists of this place to take the risk of pursuing this line of inquiry.

  Even if she had known for certain of other runs, she still would have had to know for herself that it really worked, that the million gees were really out there waiting to be controlled. That could happen only if she set the run herself, trusting no one else to get it right.

  She sat down and started to adjust the controls, reprogramming the system to Larry’s specs. Larry’s notes were thorough and complete, but it was a highly complex setup. She almost immediately found herself getting wrapped up in the job. Working down there at the level of controls, of meters and dials, she began to understand Larry’s thinking. She had never been strong on theory— but hardware was something she could
deal with.

  She was so focused on the job she jumped nearly into the ceiling when the door chime sounded. Earth reflexes could be downright hazardous under such light gravity.

  She punched the intercom switch. “Who… who is it?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. She glanced quickly at the control panel and allowed herself a reassuring thought. It would take an expert to tell she was cross-setting the system. Everything was fine. Nothing to worry about.

  “It’s me, Larry,” a muffled voice replied. He was talking through the door rather than using the intercom. Was he afraid of Raphael bugging the place?

  Sondra let her breath out, not even realizing that she had been holding it. The feeling of genuine relief that swept over her told Sondra how much she had been kidding herself a moment before. She stood up and unlocked the door.

  Sondra knew she should not have been surprised that Larry had shown up. He had a brain, after all. He could look at a schedule sheet and know she’d be here. And she had offered herself as an ally—even if he had not immediately accepted the offer.

  Larry stepped into the room and looked around thoughtfully. Sondra stepped back from him, more than a bit taken aback by his manner. There was something more determined, harder edged, more self-assured about him than there had been a few hours ago.

  Larry went to the front of the control panel and glanced over the settings. “You’re halfway through dumping Webling’s run settings,” he announced. It was not a question.

  “Ah, well, yes,” Sondra said, awkwardly fidgeting her hands. Well, here was the expert.

  “Well, we’ve got to put it back,” Larry said.

  “But I need to confirm your results,” Sondra protested. “That’s a hell of a lot more important than the graser right now.”

  “Where are the gravity-wave detectors you’ll be sending to?” Larry asked.

  There was something in his tone of voice that told her she had better give a direct answer. “Ah, Titan, Ganymede, VISOR—that’s the big Venus orbital station—and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Earth. Ten minutes of pulse sending to each. A millisecond pulse every second.”