The Ring of Charon the-1 Read online

  Raphael opened his mouth and shut it without speaking. Before he could come up with anything more cogent, Webling chimed in. “I most certainly did not cede my authority—not to Dr. Raphael or to anyone else. But that does not excuse your impertinence, Dr. Berghoff.” Webling turned and addressed Raphael. “But that to one side, Simon, right protocol or wrong, young Mr. Chao seems to have his numbers right. It would be criminal to reject such a promising claim out of hand over some breach of scientific etiquette. The first response from Titan should arrive at any moment. It seems to me that we are about to receive either a confirmation or a refutation of these theories. Shouldn’t that be the basis for our reaction to Mr. Chao’s work?”

  Sandbagged, Sondra thought gleefully. The old goat just got blown out of the water by his closest ally, in front of the entire staff. Larry seemed about to say something, but she kicked him under the table. This was no time to let Raphael off the hook. Let him squirm.

  But Sondra didn’t get to see Raphael’s reaction. A low beeping began, a sound that seemed to come from everywhere all at once. It took Sondra a moment to realize it was her notepack, alerting her that a message was incoming for her. Larry’s pack was beeping too—and so were Webling’s and Raphael’s.

  Titan! She pulled her pack out of its belt pouch and punched in the Read Message command.

  The screen cleared and displayed the text of the message. Even as she read to herself, Webling stood and read it aloud to the entire staff.

  “from: tistat commcent personal and immediate.

  “to: raphael, webling, berghoff, chao.

  “message reads: titan station, sakharov physics institute sending for pluto, gravitics research station. warmest congratulations to raphael and entire team. incredible! grav meters here recorded indisputable reception of pulsed, modulated gravity waves of remarkable power as per your preexperiment transmission. we are honored to be first to congratulate your lab for this great achievement. we are processing initial detailed analysis and will transmit same to you at earliest convenience. this is a breakthrough of the first importance. we toast you here with the true stoli vodka. well done, simon. proud regards, m. k. popolov, director, message concludes.”

  A burst of applause followed, and a dozen people reached in to shake hands with Larry. Sondra could not keep a wry smile from her face. Well done, Simon, indeed. Director Popolov had assumed that Dr. Simon Raphael had been responsible for doing the experiment, rather than busy attempting to squelch it. Never mind. She could see the growing knot of people swarming over Larry. They could see where the real credit lay. And there would be no keeping the true word from spreading. Well done, Simon. Sondra looked up to where Raphael had been and discovered he wasn’t there anymore. She looked toward the door just in time to see him ducking through it, escaping his humiliation while the attention was off him. For a moment, for a brief moment, she found it in herself to feel sorry for the man.

  But then the crowd jostled her, and swept her into the swirl of people surrounding Larry.

  Shy, blushing, smiling, Larry accepted the congratulations of his colleagues, even those who had not believed him only hours before. There was a general clamor for information of all kinds. Everyone seemed to have a notepack out, trying to link into Larry’s files in the central computer. They all found the files in question had privacy blocks on them. The computer commlink system actually shut down for a minute, overwhelmed by too many people asking for a look at too many files and datasets. Larry used his own notepack to remove the blocks from every file he controlled.

  The whole business was too much for him. Pride, excitement, his usual awkwardness in public situations, worry over what Raphael would do next—all of those feelings and a half dozen more besides were jumbled up inside him—and were forced to take a backseat to the endless questions from Webling and the other staff scientists. There wasn’t time for anything but the moment itself, the event.

  Someone—Larry thought it was Hernandez, the microgravity expert, but he wasn’t sure—was shoving a notepack in his face, asking him to explain a flowchart display. Larry offered up a mental shrug, took the pack, and started trying to make sense of the graph. Maybe if he cooperated, they would all calm down sooner.

  But his answer only prompted another question from someone else, started another argument. There were too many possibilities, too many theories. There wasn’t room in the dome for it all.

  In part because the observation dome was getting too crowded, and in part because it was easier to explain things in front of the switches and dials and screens, the throng seemed to migrate from the observation dome to the primary Ring control room. Afterwards, Larry had no recollection of actually going there.

  There was something about the buttons and dials and instruments of the control room that made people remember their professionalism. Voices got lower, and people actually waited for each other to finish talking.

  The room was small, and there were too many people in it. The environmental system couldn’t keep up, and the air grew hot and stuffy. Nobody seemed to notice or care. If anything, the closeness of the room added to the intensity of the moment. People got sharper, more focused, and started acting more like rational scientists. Larry found himself perched on the back of a chair, running an impromptu seminar.

  But just when the situation seemed to be calmed down again, the next message came in, from Ganymede station. If anything, it was more effusive than Titan’s signal. Then Titan checked in again, with a more complete report, and their enthusiasm seemed to have doubled, if such a thing were possible.

  When Ganymede made its complete report, they had a real set of numbers to work with for the first time. They knew the power of the gravity beam when it had left Pluto-Charon, and now they had measurements, from two locations, of its power, intensity, wave shape and frequency at arrival—in effect giving them hard data on how the beam had been affected as it moved through space.

  The data not only confirmed that Larry’s gravity beam was real, it also told volumes about the nature of gravity itself—and about how it interacted with the fabric of space-time, about the matter and the gravity fields it passed through and near, how it affected and was affected by the velocity of the objects it encountered. Hernandez was able to prove that gravity was subject to Doppler effects. That was no great surprise; theory had predicted it. But for the first time the matter was settled, confirmed, and not a mere assumption.

  There was a lesson in there, and somewhere in the middle of the tumult that day, Larry spotted it: Before you can fully understand a force of nature, you must be able to manipulate it. Never before had scientists been able to fiddle with gravity, in effect turn it on and off to see what would happen. Now they could, and the floodgates were open. In that first four hours they learned more about gravity than all of humanity had learned in all history.

  And they had some power to play with, too. That helped. Science always needed more power than nature conveniently provided. How far would humans have gotten in the study of magnetism if all they had been allowed to work with was Earth’s natural magnetic fields, and the occasional lodestone?

  Size for size, nature’s force generators were not very strong or efficient. It takes a whole thunderstorm to produce lightning, something as huge as Earth to create a natural one-gee field, a mass the size of the Sun to start fusion. Now humans could match all those power levels, or at least come close, using much smaller devices.

  It was not a time for contemplation. Still the messages came, from Ganymede and Titan, informing that VISOR and JPL had been advised. Events were happening too rapidly, over too great a span of distance.

  Larry imagined the radio and laser signals that must be crisscrossing the Inner System, chasing each other, sending new information that was old by the time it arrived. By now, as word was arriving at Pluto from Titan, saying that Titan had advised Earth—by now Earth had already received the gravity beam.

  JPL would send a message as soon as someone there kn
ew what was up. That was the signal to watch for. Larry watched the clocks and calculated the signal delay a dozen times over. Twenty minutes before a return signal from Earth could possibly arrive, he stood up and stretched. “Look,” he said, “there’s a lot more to cover, but we should be hearing from JPL soon, and I want to be in the dome when the message comes.”

  With a renewed gabble of voices, the entire group migrated back to the dome. After all, everyone else wanted to see the message arrive as well. This discovery was going to save their jobs as well. Larry managed to duck away long enough to sneak back to his quarters, grab his toilet kit, go to the head and freshen up a bit. This was his second day more or less without sleep. If he couldn’t have rest, he could at least have a two-minute shower and a shave.

  By the time he arrived at the dome, a few minutes before Earth was due to check in, the show had already begun. The lights had been dimmed in the dome, and the stars gleamed forth overhead. Charon and the mighty wheel of the Ring dominated the sky.

  Larry could not look up at that sight without being inspired. That tool, that device, one of the mightiest generators ever made, and he had put it to use, commanded it toward a breakthrough.

  Larry moved carefully into the darkened room, waited for his eyes to adjust, and looked around. The comm staff had been at work, rigging a series of large view screens at one side of the dome and rearranging the chairs to face the screens. One screen showed a countdown clock, displaying the time remaining until the receipt-of-beam signal could arrive from Earth. The second display was clicking through screen after screen of results and reports already derived from the experiment, with data from Titan, Ganymede and VISOR.

  Larry realized that he must have missed the Venusian signal while he was in the shower. The third screen showed the dome telescope’s view of the Earth-Moon system, the two planets glowing like fat stars in the firmament. But it was the fourth screen that surprised Larry. It showed a handsome young man, nattily dressed, talking into the camera. An ID line across the bottom said he was Wolf Bernhardt, the spokesman for JPL, talking on a live feed. Given the expense and difficulty of punching a television signal through to Pluto, that in itself told Larry that the folks back home were taking him seriously.

  Larry ducked his way into the rows and found an empty seat next to Sondra. “You haven’t missed much,” she told him in a stage whisper that had to carry halfway across the room. “Right now this guy is talking about the results from Venus.”

  Larry nodded vaguely and glanced at the countdown clock. Three minutes to go. There was a slight stir from the other side of the dome. Larry glanced over and saw Dr. Simon Raphael coming in. Raphael paused at the doorway and looked around. Their eyes locked for a moment.

  Larry’s heart sank, just the way it had back in grade school when the principal’s gimlet eyes bored into him. Justly or unjustly, fairly or not, Larry the child and Larry the adult both knew what that look meant. He was in trouble. Again. Still. Forever. Raphael was going to find some way of punishing him.

  Larry thought again of Raphael’s threat to take “every cent” of the experiment’s cost out of his pay. That look told Larry that the threat was still good. Raphael would find some way of making it stick. And making it hurt. If not for punishment, then for revenge.

  Raphael broke eye contact and moved into the room, sidling along the far wall, to watch the action from as far away as possible.

  Larry breathed a sigh of relief. Raphael was not going to cause a scene just now. This moment, here and now would belong to Larry. That was something.

  * * *

  The beam shifted off the second planet, focusing on the third. Inevitably, the Observer was caught in the spill-over. The gravity beam passed through the solid mass of the Moon like light through glass. But if the Moon was transparent to gravity waves, the Observer was not. Lurking far beneath the Moon’s surface, a huge torus girdling the satellite’s core, the Observer shuddered as the beam played over it.

  And that was the signal, the alert, the command it had been born and built to receive.

  It responded as reflexively as a human jerking away from an electric shock, as instinctively as a lover at the moment of climax. There was no possibility of controlling the response. The beam set off an incredibly rapid chain of events far outside the control of what served as higher consciousness for the Observer.

  Power long stored was drawn in, channeled, focused. But not enough power for the job at hand, merely enough to bring the Link up to full power. The Observer felt a surge of irrepressible pleasure as half-forgotten power poured through the new-born hole in space. The long-dormant Link bloomed back to life.

  Power. Now it had the power. An overwhelming sense, a potency, of potential, of mission and purpose coursed through its being. Now. Now was the time for its destiny.

  Now it could turn its attentions toward Earth.

  The Observer drew massive, surging power through the Link and grabbed.

  * * *

  Larry turned his attention back to the countdown clock and realized with a start that there were only a few seconds left. He started listening to the announcer. “We have received further confirmation of a powerful signal from Venus. The beam moved off Venus ninety seconds ago in real time, and we are awaiting it here. We are standing by for scheduled reception of your beam at Earth.” There was a rustle of anticipation in the room. This was it, not only for Larry, not only for the experiment, but for the whole station.

  If JPL was suitably impressed, the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation would be impressed. And if the UNAF was impressed, there was no way they could shut down the Gravities Research Station. At least that was what Larry hoped.

  The announcer looked away from the camera toward a timer display on his desk. “Twenty seconds now,” he said, obviously relishing the moment.

  Larry swallowed hard and leaned forward in his seat. Silly to be nervous, silly to be excited. He knew it had worked. But the seconds were sliding away.

  “T minus five, four, three, two, one, zero. We are getting the first—”

  The commlink from JPL went dead.

  In the middle of view screen three, Earth flashed out of existence.

  The Moon hung in the telescope view.

  Alone.

  Larry sat there, watching the monitor screen in frozen horror. The comm people were already jumping up, checking their gear. “It’s everything,” one of them said. “All commlinks with Earth just went dead.”

  “That’s crazy. Check back at central.”

  Everything. Larry sat, motionless, his heart pounding. They would search for an answer, a malfunction in their gear.

  But Larry knew. No evidence, no explanation, but he knew. Somehow, impossibly, the beam, the harmless gravity-wave beam, so weakened at that range it could not have squashed a fly or mussed a child’s hair—

  Somehow it had vaporized the Earth.

  Eyes began to turn toward Larry. Eyes that were no longer friendly, or excited. Yes, he thought, they ‘ll all be willing to admit it was my experiment now.

  Eyes bored into his head. One pair of eyes in particular. Raphael, behind him, seething with terror and rage. Larry could feel the director’s malevolent stare drilling into the back of his skull.

  Two thoughts echoed in his head, one incredible, the other simply insane.

  Larry Chao had destroyed the Earth.

  And somehow, Simon Raphael was going to see to it that it came out of Larry’s pay.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Amber of Time

  Gerald MacDougal reached out and slapped the alarm buzzer. Two in the morning. Vancouver, British Columbia, was a lovely city, but it had a major flaw: it was in the wrong time zone. Like the Moon and the domed Settlements and virtually all the other space installations, VISOR worked on Universal Time. Greenwich Mean Time as they insisted on calling it here.

  Two a.m. here. That was ten in the morning on VISOR, ignoring the speed-of-light delays. Ten a.m.
, Tuesdays and Saturdays, were Marcia’s assigned slots for sending view messages home. If she even got that much chance. She had sent a twenty-word-text message the night before warning about watching some gravity experiment from Pluto, just after 1000 UT. Right on top of her sending time slot.

  Gerald stretched and yawned. Venus was about ninety degrees from conjunction at the moment, which worked out to a ten-minute speed-of-light delay, plus a split second or two while the Earth-orbiting comsat picked it up and relayed it around to his receiver. He had time to wake up a bit before Marcia’s weekly message came in. He could have let his comm system pick it up and could have played it back later, of course, but he preferred to see the view message immediately, the moment it came down. That way he would know what Marcia had been doing and saying ten short minutes before. It was the one time when that was possible. God, he missed her.

  He stood up, walked to the window, and looked down at the splendid city laid out before him. His hometown. Aside from the time zone, there was no place on Earth he’d rather be. And, as far as his work was concerned, no place on Earth was where he ought to be. Gerald was a big man, tall, muscular and tough, with curly brown hair and a solid jaw. He got restless waiting, and was too often forced to convince himself that patience was a virtue.

  Back to space soon, he promised himself, not quite believing it. There was still hope. To Venus, and VISOR, and his wife and his work.