The Ring of Charon the-1 Read online

  Strictly speaking, the primary subject of Gerald MacDougal’s work did not exist. One of his career goals was to wipe out anything that resembled it.

  Gerald was an exobiologist, a student of life off the planet Earth. The flaw, of course, was that there wasn’t any life beyond Earth. Except, of course, such Earth-evolved life that continued to evolve even off planet. Every human being, every plant, every animal brought along to the Settlements carried microscopic life-forms by the billions.

  Anywhere humans went, viruses, bacteria, and other microbes, disease-causing and benign, traveled as well. Normal medical practice was enough to keep most of the nasties at bay inside the sealed colonies—but some microbes escaped the domes, tunnels, ships and habitats to the outside environments. Virtually all of them died the moment they left the controlled environment. But a few survived. And of those survivors, a very few managed to reproduce, and evolve, often at a ferocious rate.

  Earth-derived microbes lurked in the soil around Martian cities, living off dome leakages of air, moisture and organics; lived inside the rock of mining asteroids, dining on a witches’ brew diet of complex hydrocarbons; lived as mildew-like patches in airlocks all over the Solar System, absorbing air, moisture and bits of organic matter whenever the locks were pressurized, encysting when they went into vacuum.

  Even to Gerald, who should have been used to such things by now, the tenacity of life in such circumstances was incredible. It was proof to Gerald that there was a God. No random sequence of events could have produced living things capable of such feats. Evolution existed, yes; Gerald was no creationist. But there was a divine hand guiding evolution.

  A divine hand that worked in mysterious and sometimes horrifying ways. For a few, a terrifying few, of the outsider organisms came back inside the domes and the spacecraft. Most such Returnees were wiped out by the drastically different environment, but some readapted to life back inside. That was when terror struck. Hardened by their generations outside air, light and pressure, some Returnee organisms bred hellaciously back inside, carrying in their genes the ability to digest unlikely things. Plastics, metal, resin compounds, semiorganic superconductors. And some of them, ancestors of disease organisms, retained the ability to infect the human body.

  There were microorganisms that could cause disease in humans and also eat through pressure suits and air domes from the inside. Or dissolve the superconducting wires of power grids. Or jam valves in fusion systems.

  From a human perspective, the Returnees were a nightmare. But God, Gerald had long since decided, did not have a human perspective. The Good Lord wanted all life, everywhere, to have a chance. Humans and microbes were equally His children, equally miraculous. He wanted all His children to have a chance at life, from the most high unto the least. If some individuals of one species had to die so another species might survive, was that not the way of all Nature? Why should humanity be exempt?

  He did not see any contradiction between admiring the dogged survival skills of the Returnees and coldbloodedly seeking to destroy them. The wolf lives at the expense of the deer, and the buck may kill the wolf to defend his herd. Neither is right or wrong. Even the lamb lives at the expense of the foliage it crops—and many a thorn will stab at a lamb unwary enough to dine on the wrong plant. All that lives must draw life from others, and must defend itself against the assault of other species. So too with humanity.

  Gerald’s goal was to wipe out all off-planet microscopic life outside the human-made environments. He knew he could never achieve his goal, and this knowledge gave him a certain strange comfort. But it was not enough. The destruction of life, however needful, did not fulfill Gerald.

  He wanted to create life, be God’s tool in the work of making a whole new world full of life—but now that dream was fading. The circumstances were so frustrating.

  The terraforming of Venus was technically possible. No one questioned that any longer.

  Gerald’s work would have played a part in it, too. The Isolated Exobiology Facility would have been an ideal source of terraforming microbes. The simplest of gene engineering would have produced microbes to break down the noxious atmosphere, to fix nitrogen to soil, to remove carbon dioxide and produce water, to convert the acid-leached rocks to soil.

  But the era of grand projects, of great visions, was fading before it had gotten properly under way. The Terra Nova starship project had been canceled, and now the word was that the Ring of Charon was being shut down. What hope could there be for a plan to rebuild a world? More than likely, the microbes stored at Gerald’s Isolated Exobiology Facility would never get their chance to seed Venus.

  He looked up from the valley, into the late-night sky. Venus would not rise for hours yet, but he knew it was there. And Marcia was there, aboard VISOR as it circled that hell-hot world. He had spent much of the last year preparing to join her there—but now the two of them were forced to face the likelihood that it would be Marcia returning here, as humanity retreated from the challenge of Venus.

  The comm center bleeped, and Gerald rushed over to it, sat down and powered up the screen. The countdown clock appeared, ticked down to zero, and then was replaced by Marcia’s dark exquisite face.

  “Hello, Gerald,” she said, her voice warm and loving. “Thank heavens I got through—we just got word of a big experiment that we’ll need all our transmission bandwidth for. There was supposed to be a ten o’clock cutoff on personal messages, but Lonny knew I was scheduled and stretched the rules for me. He’ll keep me on as long as he can, but I might get cut off abruptly. Nothing to worry about—they just need this vision channel. Lonny’s sending a text message from me on a sideband right now. It tells what the experiment is so I don’t waste view time talking about it. Sorry, but the text message isn’t much—just a data dump on what we’ve been told about the experiment. I haven’t had time to write a real letter. I’m working on one. I should be able to send it tonight.”

  The printer bin buzzed and a thin sheaf of papers dropped into it. Gerald ignored the document, reached out a hand and touched the screen. These few moments with her image were all he had, and now even this contact was being rationed. Never again, he decided. Once he got there, or she came here, never again would they be separated.

  “There isn’t much excitement beyond this experiment run,” Marcia’s image said. “McGillicutty’s driving us all even madder than usual, but I suppose I should be used to that by now. The work is going well—though we’re all watching the news and hoping we’re not in it.” There was a muffled voice from off camera, and Marcia glanced away. “Oh damn!” she said, cursing with the sincerity of someone who didn’t do it often. “Lonny says I’ve got ten seconds. I love you, Gerald. I can’t wait for your next message to me. Finish up all your business and get here. I love you. Good-bye—”

  The screen cut off, and Gerald felt a lump in his throat. There was only so much of this separation that he could take. Thank God it would be over soon, one way or the other.

  * * *

  Aboard VISOR, Marcia MacDougal forced a smile, thanked Lonny, and hurried out into the corridor. But where to go? she wondered. She felt lost, empty. Gerald gone, the project dying. What did it matter? To the wardroom, she decided, almost at random. Maybe there would be people there, someone to talk to, someone to take her mind away from loneliness.

  She went into the corridor and walked the short distance. But the wardroom was empty. McGillicutty must have pulled everyone in to help observe the gravity experiment. No doubt she’d get drafted herself, sooner or later.

  Finding herself alone, Marcia MacDougal made the best of it. She stepped over to the wardroom’s big observation port, and looked down at the planet’s glaring cloud tops.

  She was a striking woman, seeming taller than she really was by virtue of her determined character. She had clear, flawless skin the color of dark mahogany, and her face was round and expressive. Her eyes were dark brown, bright and clear; eyes that seemed to see everything. But there w
as nothing at all to see out the observation window.

  To the naked eye, dayside Venus was blindingly bright, a featureless wall of cloud. She could have fixed that: the observation windows could be controlled, the contrast, brightness, and spectrum manipulated. With the right settings, pattern and order appeared in the cloud tops.

  But right now, to Marcia, a blank, staring, featureless globe seemed most appropriate. The light was so bright that nothing could be seen. So much information was coming in that nothing could be understood. The metaphors seemed apt to the era of the Knowledge Crash. And VISOR seemed likely to be the next Crash victim.

  Venus Initial Station for Operational Research— VISOR—had been meant to be the stuff that dreams were made of. The headquarters for the creation of a brave new world—a new Venus, cooled, watered, made new with life.

  No one knew exactly how it was to be done, how a world would be brought to life. That was what VISOR was for—to find the answers. There had been some wild ideas: VISOR dropping huge probes and seeder ships onto the planet, manhandling ice-bearing asteroids and monstrous atmosphere skimmers into place. Huge sunshades orbiting the planet, floating chemical factories built under enormous dirigibles and set loose in the upper atmosphere.

  Some of the more wild-eyed miners in the Asteroid Belt had their own ideas. They had quite seriously offered to blow up the planet Mercury with a fearsome device named the Core Cracker. With a second asteroid belt close to Sun, they would really get some use out of solar power. Venus didn’t really have much to do with the idea, but the Belt Community crowd had tried to sell its plans to VISOR, pointing out the Mercury Belt would be an ideal place to build those massive sunshades or rotation-enhancement impact bodies.

  There were other schemes, not quite so mad, and VISOR would have tried some or all of them. At the present time, of course, no one had the faintest idea how to do any of those things. And that was the whole point. VISOR was built to last for centuries, built to grow, change, evolve. The station designers expected that it would have to handle technologies whose inventors were not yet born.

  VISOR. The last two words in the acronym were the key. Operational Research. Before Venus could be remade, the scientists and engineers had to learn how the task could be done. A lot could be resolved with computer models and small-scale simulations, but when dealing with a massive planetary environment, those techniques simply weren’t enough. The engineers and scientists needed a whole planet to play with, a whole planet to make mistakes on. Terraforming required on-the-job training.

  Couldn’t the United Nations see that? Couldn’t they see how vital the station was? How disastrous a shutdown, or even a temporary mothballing, would be? Venus was a task for decades, generations. It could not be done in fits and starts.

  Suddenly the intercom hooted at her. A high-pitched slightly peevish voice that Marcia had learned to dread spoke. “MacDougal! Get on up to Main Control!” McGillicutty’s voice said. “I need you to monitor some low-end radio for me.”

  Marcia shut her eyes and counted to ten before turning away from the window and heading up to the lab. She was willing to bet that even her husband’s patience would be worn thin by Hiram McGillicutty. She’d have to try the experiment, once Gerald got here.

  * * *

  Hiram McGillicutty was the staff physicist of the Venus Initial Station for Operational Research. Most days, that job made Mcgillicutty as useful as a parachute on a fish.

  No one disputed that VISOR needed a physicist, but only in the sense that a small town needed a fire department. You had to have one around, just in case something unexpected happened.

  McGillicutty did not think much of his colleagues on the station. Mere engineers. Give them the numbers to plug into the equations, and they were perfectly happy. Never mind what the numbers meant, or how they were derived. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they not only would not need to know how the numbers came to be there, they would positively resent your wasting their time with such petty details.

  Hiram McGillicutty imagined himself as accepting his lot philosophically—though no one else on the station would ever describe his attitude in such terms. Most of them would come up with arrogant, or self-absorbed.

  But today was different. Today this was his station, thanks to those bad boys on Pluto. McGillicutty chuckled under his breath, shook his shaggy head, and bared his snaggled teeth in a rueful grin. He had seen the prelim data from Ganymede and Titan. What a stunt the gravity boys were pulling!

  He checked the sequencer clock and worked out the speed-of-light delay. According to the experiment plan Pluto had transmitted, the gravity beam should have started targeting Venus just over five and a half hours ago. So if the experiment was indeed running on schedule, the gravity beam should be arriving any—

  “Jesus jumping Christ willya lookit that!” he cried. Hiram McGillicutty was of an excitable sort, but for once he would seem to be entitled. The gravity-wave meter, a piece of incredibly delicate hardware that had rarely given off so much as a quiver, was now spiking high, slamming into the high end of the scale. McGillicutty adjusted the graphic display scale by a factor of a hundred.

  Marcia MacDougal shook her head in wonderment. It was real. After hundreds of years as a minor curiosity— a sideshow in the world of high-energy physics—gravitic research was suddenly coming alive, right before her very eyes.

  “It’s a gravity beam,” someone said. “Shouldn’t we feel heavier, or lighter, or something? I don’t feel a thing.”

  “How powerful is that beam?” one of the biologists asked, a bit nervously. “It’s not going to start pulling us toward Pluto, is it?”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” McGillicutty explained testily. “What they’ve managed to do—somehow, God only knows how—is use a phase relation to make half the wave repulse instead of attract. The effect cancels itself out overall. And the beam is damn weak before it gets here.”

  McGillicutty licked his lips greedily. “God I’d love to know how they do it. But if they’ve figured out how to manipulate gravity fields that well, they can’t be more than a few steps from true gravity control—if they could fiddle the harmonics somehow and establish a standing wave front—they could create whatever gravity field they wanted.”

  “That’s the sort of little ‘if’ that takes another hundred years to crack,” Marcia said. “I’d bet gravity waves are just a parlor trick for a long, long time.”

  “Maybe,” McGillicutty said. “But as parlor tricks go, this is a pretty major one. Gravity waves ought to provide a whole new way of looking at the Universe. Matter should be practically transparent to gee waves! Tune the waves right, and we ought to be able to use them to see right through the Sun and the planets, look down into them as deep as we want. Put a gee-wave sender on one side of Venus, and a detector on the other, and we’d be able to examine its internal structure in real time. Like radar. There are big times ahead. Big times.”

  “For the gravity crowd,” Chenlaw said mournfully. “The research pie is getting mighty small. So what do you think will happen to our funding if this Ring gets sexy and starts gobbling up all the money? What we have to do is come up with a way to get involved in gravity if we want to see a dime.”

  Marcia glanced up at the sequence clock. “Eight more minutes here. Then they switch the beam to Earth.” She watched her displays, and wondered what the new world would be like.

  * * *

  McGillicutty was also glad when the beam shifted off Venus.

  Oh, those ten minutes when the beam had been directed at them, at VISOR, those were blissful, fantastic. But they were almost too much. The signal was so powerful it threatened to overwhelm his instruments. But now he could direct his gear at a remote target, at Earth. No one had ever done this sort of sensing before. It was an entirely different challenge, an entirely different opportunity.

  You needed some range before you gained any perspective. Besides, there were all the secondary effects you could only obse
rve at range. How did the gee waves warp radio? Lightwaves? In theory, modulated gravity waves should alternately blueshift and redshift electromagnetic radiation. Would that really happen? And what effect would the beam have on existing and interacting gravity sources? Would there be induced resonance waves in the Earth-Moon system’s gravity patterns?

  McGillicutty wanted to know it all. That in itself was nothing new—he spent his entire life, every waking minute, wanting to know all the answers. What was different about today was that he was getting the chance to find out.

  Still, he would have to move fast to get it. The gravity-wave beam had shifted off Venus only a few minutes ago. He had only about five minutes to reorient the station’s sensors toward Earth and reconfigure them for distant sensing. Fortunately, the rest of the staff was there to assist him on the job.

  He checked the main control board one more time. A few of the instruments still weren’t in position. “Marcia, swivel in that damn boom antenna. We’ll need the twenty-one-centimeter band on this job. I want to see if there’s any ripple in the neutral hydrogen band.”

  “Yes sir, boss. Right away boss. You bet, boss,” Marcia growled as she activated the antenna system. Personally, she could not imagine a more useless task than watching the twenty-one-centimeter band. It seemed to her that twenty-one centimeters never showed anything.

  McGillicutty wanted to see if the gravity wave would distort space-time enough to show a ripple in the carrier.

  So what, either way? She watched as the indicator showed the antenna directing itself at Earth. She switched her monitor to oscilloscope mode. Yep, there it was. Twenty-one centimeters was showing a virtually flat carrier wave, as usual. She powered up the audio gain and was rewarded with a faint hiss. “Ready to go, boss,” she said, “and I’m real excited about it.”