Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 11

? ? ?Dr. Simon Raphael paced back and forth, stalking up and down the carpet, completely ignoring the visitors in his office. No one in the room had spoken in the five minutes since Raphael brought them in.

Finally Raphael seemed to have run out of steam.

He slowed, turned, walked back behind his desk, and sat down. "Very well then. It's gone. Eight and a half hours ago in real time, and three hours ago to our awareness, the planet vanished. All our instruments confirm that, and all contacts with other stations confirm it as well.

"And it happened when Mr. Chao's magic beam touched the planet. All correct so far?" he asked, his voice frighteningly calm.

Sondra, Larry, and Webling said nothing.

Raphael stood up again, came around his desk, stood over Larry, raised his arm as if to strike the young man and then backed away. He stood there, breathing hard, with his arm raised, for a long moment. Then he slowly lowered his arm to his side. "I am actively restraining myself at this point, you know, trying to keep from screaming b.l.o.o.d.y murder at all of you, trying to keep from blaming Mr. Chao especially for this catastrophe. That is my first impulse. I expect everyone on this station-including all of you here-are harboring similar feelings. If not of anger, then of fear and horror.

"But my rational side, my scientific side, is holding me back." Raphael leaned over Larry, wrapped his hands on the armrests of Larry's chair, put his face close enough to Larry's so that Larry could feel the clean warmth of Raphael's breath on his face. "I want to blame you, Chao. I want to blame you very much. I don't like you. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I hate you right about now. My home is gone, Chao. My family, my grandchildren, my wife's grave. Eight billion souls are gone, vanished, destroyed. Because of that d.a.m.n-foolgravity beam you had to fire at Earth." Larry forced himself to look the director in the eye. The ruined patrician's face was pale, chalk white with fear and repressed rage.

Raphael stood up straight again and recommenced his pacing. He seemed incapable of keeping still, seemed to need to be in motion. All of them were in shock. None of them knew how to respond. At least Raphael was reacting, moving forward instead of staring into s.p.a.ce. "I want to blame you," he repeated, "except I understand gravity, and gravity waves.

"Nothing about this makes sense. But I do know enough to see one obvious fact: that your beam did not do this. I understand the power-or rather the absence of power-of that beam at that range.

Pa.s.sing asteroids and comets have more powerful gravity fields. Nor is this result the sort of thing that gravity could do. A powerful enough beam handled the right way might conceivably s.h.i.+ft Earth in its...o...b..t a bit, but no more. So why did your beam destroy a planet when so many other, stronger gravity sources have had no effect?"

Raphael turned and faced the three of them again. "We don't know, and we have to find out. The ironic thing is that I must turn to the people who have done the damage. You three are the most likely to get at the answers, for the very good reason that you understand gravity waves better than anyone else. I want you to figure out what happened. Was Earth destroyed? Then why is there no rubble? Did that force move the planet? But how? Did it produce the illusion of Earth vanis.h.i.+ng? Again, how?"

Raphael stopped pacing again and sat down at the edge of his desk with a deep sigh. "Find out.

Forgive me for bending the rules, Dr. Berghoff, but I am ordering you to figure out those things." He rubbed his face and slumped forward, a tired old man incapable of feeling any further shock, anyfurther emotion of any kind. Suddenly the angry director was gone, to be replaced by a lonely, frightened, tired old man. "The entire station and all its facilities are at your disposal," he said, in a voice that was suddenly weak and reedy.

The facade of strength and control was crumbling before their eyes. This man had suffered as deep a loss as any of them. He had held together long enough to do his job-but now, Sondra realized, he was at the end of his courage,: his endurance. "Now," Simon Raphael said, "if you will excuse me, I am going to go lie down."

Without another word, Raphael stood up, made at least a show of squaring his shoulders, and walked out of the room. Sondra watched him go, and thought how much she had underestimated the man. There were unknown depths of courage, of self-control, of cool intellect beneath all that pomposity. Her image of Raphael had been a mere caricature of the real man-but it struck her that Raphael had been acting like a caricature of himself. She had seen a strutting egotist because that was what Raphael chose to show the world. She closed her eyes and rubbed her brow. Not as if that mattered now.

She turned toward Larry. Another one she hardly knew. Here was another one deep in shock, and in mourning. Raphael managed his shock by calling forth the s.h.i.+eld of rationality and reason to hide behind. How would Larry react? "Well, Larry," she asked gently. "Earth is gone. What do we do?"

"It didn't happen," Larry announced, staring down into the carpet. "It didn't happen."

Denial, Sondra thought. "Larry, I wish that were true, but it isn't. Earth isn't there anymore."

Larry looked up at her sharply, a blazing gleam in his eye. "I know that," he snapped. "But Earth was not destroyed."

Sondra looked up helplessly at Dr. Webling. Butshe seemed further gone than anyone. She wouldn't be of any use for a long time. Only by the slightest of connections was she involved in this at all. They had hijacked her perfectly innocent experiment, and destroyed the home-world. Thanks to them, the name Webling would go down in history as one of the maniacs who destroyed Earth.

Sondra felt her mind wandering, bouncing from one question to another. History? Why worry about that now?

If indeed there was any more history after this.

Were the surviving human settlements, on Mars and the Moon and elsewhere, really self-sufficient enough to survive without Earth? And suppose whatever happened to Earth happened to them, too?

Bingo. That was what her mind was trying to tell her. That was what gave this crisis urgency, why Raphael had set them to work now. It wasn't over yet. They had to solve this problem fast, to protect whatever was left of human civilization. That was why Larry had to face the truth now. He was the best chance at finding the answer. They could not afford to wait for him to recover. "Larry, Earth is gone. Lost. Destroyed. We have to figure out why before it happens to the rest of the Solar System.

Earth is gone. Accept it."

"Without debris? Without any residual heat?" he demanded. "There isn't any way to wreck a world without leaving something behind. You can't destroy matter or energy. If the Earth was instantly converted into energy somehow, the flashover would at least have melted the Moon. From here it would be like a temporary second Sun, at least. The nuclear radiation would probably kill us. If Earth was simply smashed, there would be debris. Earth had-has-a ma.s.s greater than a hundred Asteroid Belts, and we can detect the Belt, certainly. Where is the rubble of Earth? There ought to be debris pieces from the size of the Moon down throughasteroid size, right down to molecules. There isn't any way to wreck a world without leaving behind something. Even if the planet had been reduced to a gas cloud, single molecules, we'd be able to detect it.

It would block the Sun, dim the sky. None of that happened. Therefore Earth was not destroyed."

Sondra stood up and walked to the far end of the room.

It sounded coldly logical, but she was in no condition to judge. Nor was Larry in any shape to make sense. Sondra knew she was in no state to tell if someone else was thinking clearly right now. But it almost sounded as if Larry were offering hope, and she could certainly use some.

"Then what happened?" she asked. "We didn't see it move anywhere. It... it just went."

"Wormhole," Webling said.

Sondra drew back, startled. She had almost forgotten Webling was there.

The old woman looked up from whatever blue funk she was in and repeated the one word.

"Wormhole."

Larry nodded absently and Sondra frowned.

"Huh? How the h.e.l.l do you bring wormholes into this?" she demanded. "They're just some bit of theoretical fluff. No one's even proved they exist."

Larry rubbed his eyes and dropped his hands into his lap. He sat there, knitting his fingers together, staring straight ahead. "I was working on gravity as a step toward something else," he said in a quiet voice. "As a step on the way to creating a wormhole transit pair. I wanted to create a stable Virtual Black Hole, an artificial gravity field powerful enough to make s.p.a.ce-time cave in on itself.

"According to theory, if you create a pair of VBHs tuned to each other, exactly matching each other in ma.s.s, charge, spin, velocity, you might be able to induce them to link up, in effect to become oneblack hole that exists in two places at once. Induce the black hole to enclose a plane of normal s.p.a.ce at each end, and those two normal-s.p.a.ce planes become contiguous-you've got a wormhole link.

The two Virtual Black Holes can be ten meters apart, or a thousand light-years from each other. It doesn't make any difference. The two planes of normal s.p.a.ce are effectively next to each other. You can move from one to another without moving through any of the normal s.p.a.ce in between. A wormhole transit pair. Maybe I stimulated a natural wormhole. G.o.d knows how."

Webling stirred again, seeming to come out of herself. "But that's impossible, isn't it? I know I suggested it- but it doesn't make sense. I remember reading a calculation showing that a natural wormhole was just barely theoretically possible, on about the same order of probability as every air molecule in a given room rus.h.i.+ng out the window all at once and leaving the room in vacuum.

Quantum theory says both are possible. The odds on each happening are about as realistic-and the two conditions would be about as stable. And how could a wormhole the size of a planet appear? I can't accept Earth being s.n.a.t.c.hed away by something that incredibly unlikely."

Larry nodded, and a bit of his hardness seemed to fade away, as if he were letting some of the barriers down. "I know, you're right. But something about all this says wormhole to me. After all, it was touched off by a gravity wave."

Sondra blinked and looked at Larry. "Wait a second. Gravity wave. Gravity has been interacting with Earth for four billion years-but this is the first time a powerful modulated gravity wave has been aimed at the planet. Maybe the fact that it was a modulated tensor gravity wave is the important thing. Could a gravity wave stimulate that black-hole linkup somehow?"

Larry shrugged. "I think so. Ask me after I havesome black holes of my own to play with. You need a pair of them. One here, and one there. Wherever 'there' is."

Sondra turned her palms up in a gesture of confusion. "So maybe Earth's core has been an imprisoned black hole right along, for four billion years, and our gravity wave just touched it off somehow."

Larry frowned. "That might work insofar as supplying a black hole to induce a wormhole.

Maybe. So long as you kept the main ma.s.s of Earth far enough away from the hole so that the hole couldn't suck any ma.s.s down into itself. A black hole is ma.s.s like anything else. If the Earth were a hollow sh.e.l.l with a black hole at the center, there would still be one Earth-gravity at the surface.

Though you'd give any geologist fits if you suggested any such thing. To allow for a black hole in the Earth's core, you'd have to have a layer of vacuum somewhere in the planet's interior."

Sondra was a little hazy on geology, but that didn't sound reasonable. "Could that be possible?"

"No!" Webling said vehemently. "Unless every theory of geology in the past four hundred years is wrong. Every time there's an earthquake the geologists examine the shock waves, use them to map the Earth's interior, like reading a radar signal. Don't you think they'd have detected something as obvious as a hollow Earth and a black hole in all this time? Besides, all you've done is add another incredibly unlikely thing on top of your first one. A black hole inside the Earth, plus your natural wormhole. It doesn't explain anything, it just creates more and more ridiculous questions. Where did the black hole come from? Why didn't it suck Earth down into itself? How did our gravity beam induce it to form a wormhole? I can't accept any of this."

Sondra walked back across the room and sat down next to the older woman. "The problem, Dr.Webling, is that we're stuck with a real-life question that's even more ridiculous-how do you make a planet disappear? Answer me that and I won't bother you anymore."

CHAPTER NINE.

The Fall of Lucifer The Observer felt good.

After all the endless years of waiting, it was doing what it had been created to do. Indeed, now it was ent.i.tled to a grander name than Observer.

Now the work had begun, and it was a true Caller.

Caller.

The new name felt good, too.

A rush of pride swept through its ma.s.sive form.

But proud moment or not, the effort of Calling, and Linking, was not without danger, not without strain. Though the new-named Caller was drawing ma.s.sive amounts of power through the Link, the mere act of establis.h.i.+ng that Link had drawn down its own energy reserves. The power required to create the necessary ma.s.sless gravity source had left it with just a few percent of its rated power remaining. Furthermore, the quakes were desperately uncomfortable, even painful.

They could be stopped only if the old gravitational balance was restored. Ma.s.sless gravity fields were inherently unstable. The Caller needed an anchor, a true gravity source to stabilize the Link at this end.

Help should come, must come through the Link.

There ought to be a reasonable number of its relations surviving in the outskirts of this system, and they would a.s.sist as much as they could, but the Caller knew that the chances of success werefar greater if help-and reinforcements- came through the Link.

First and foremost, it needed a true gravity source whose power it could tap. If that did not come, all was a failure. It would have surrendered its life planet for all time, and to no avail. Failure now would condemn the Caller to a slow, mournful death, trapped and powerless, watching its power reserves trickle away to nothing.

Help must come, the Caller told itself.

And then it did.

IMPACT ALERT IMPACT ALERT IMPACT.

ALERT IMPACT.

Vespasian nearly leapt out of his skin, then reached over and shut off the alarm. Jesus Christ, not another one.

Considering the crowded conditions of near-Earth s.p.a.ce, there had not been all that many collisions so far. But each collision was a catastrophe.

Who the h.e.l.l was going to hit now? The data snapped onto his screen. Oh, no. G.o.d no. Not again.

Lucifer. The formerly Earth-orbiting asteroid Lucifer was going to pile it in again. Lucifer had smashed into the High Dublin Habitat a few hours before. There had to be thousands dead there, and not a prayer of survivors. On any other day, it would have been the most horrifying of disasters. On the day when Earth died, it was merely a sideshow. The debris of station and asteroid were spiraling through s.p.a.ce, causing dozens of secondaryimpacts.

Even after the Dublin crash, Lucifer remained the most serious threat to the Moon and the orbiting habitats. Tamed by its human masters and towed into a stable path around the Earth over a century before, now it was free again, careering through s.p.a.ce in a random orbit, threatening other habitats. So what was Lucifer going to clobber now?

The computer drew the schematic for him, and the color drained from Vespasian's face as if he had seen a ghost.

And in a way, he had. The computers were projecting Lucifer to impact with Earth. The blue-and-white graphic image of the lost planet gleamed in the flatscreen, Lucifer's impact trajectory shown as spiraling in. No one had had time to reprogram this particular impact warning system to tell it that Earth was gone. The computer was warning that Lucifer would strike Earth-if Earth were still there.

If only it could be so, Vespasian thought. He'd settle for an asteroid strike on Earth if it meant getting the planet back again. He reached up a finger to dump the warning and then stopped.

Vespasian frowned. This particular impact-warning program was a trend-projection system for constant-boost systems. It a.s.sumed that all accelerations would continue, and projected forward in time under that a.s.sumption. This program did not a.s.sume Earth's gravity, or any other gravity field, as a constant. It merely watched radar tracks, calculated the forces preventing the track from moving on a straight line, and a.s.sumed those forces would continue.

So why hadn't it called this impact a long time ago? It should have been able to call it long before now, if Lucifer's...o...b..t had remained unchanged.

Vespasian had checked Lucifer's track an hour ago. Granted, they didn't have a precise path for therock yet, but it hadn't been moving anywhere near Earth's old location at that time. Now what the h.e.l.l was happening? He called up a backtrack on Lucifer, running its recent actual trajectory from the tracking system.

Sonnuvab.i.t.c.h. The thing had taken a hard left turn, toward Earth's old coordinates. But that was impossible. He checked the trajectory more carefully, examining not only direction of travel, but velocity.

The frigging thing was accelerating rapidly toward where Earth should have been. No, accelerating wasn't quite right. That was active, and this was pa.s.sive. No rockets on that rock. It was being accelerated by an outside force. It was acting like a falling body, moving toward a gravity source that was pulling it in.

Vespasian punched up the Earth-track camera, and had his wild hopes dashed. Earth was not there.

Vespasian leaned back, tried to think.

And got slammed out of his chair as the Moon's surface shuddered with new violence.

The second series of quakes was every bit as powerful as the first, and did every bit as much damage. It seemed as if every structure weakened in the first jolt collapsed altogether in the second. New explosions of shattered gla.s.s, new fires were everywhere. Somehow, all the SubBubbles rode out the second-wave shocks without breaching. Most people knew enough to expect aftershocks, and so the later temblors at least lost the element of surprise.

Besides, the Lunar population was preoccupied with the far more terrifying loss of Earth. By now,hours after the event, the truth was starting to filter through and be believed. With the homeworld gone, they had little capacity for being frightened by a mere tremor.

The second set of quakes could not have been timed more precisely to foul up Lucian's work. He had just begun to get a handle on the orbital tracking problem when Orbital Traffic Control lost power. The emergency battery power system was supposed to be able to run the whole traffic control complex during an outage. But it had been strained by the first quakes' outages already, and was showing signs of decay. The power-management program cut in immediately and went into conservation mode, cutting off all nonessential uses of electricity.

Unfortunately, hypothetical modeling of speculative orbital projections went under the heading of nonessential use as far as the automatic power-management software was concerned.

Lucian's panel went dead and stayed dead. He couldn't even program an override of the power-management system until his board came on.

All across cis-Lunar s.p.a.ce, s.p.a.cecraft and stationary facilities alike were out of control, tumbling through s.p.a.ce in unpredictable directions.

Through all the long years and centuries since the first manned stations were put up, whenever a new facility was placed in an orbit of the crowded Earth-Moon system, computers and engineers would labor long and hard to place it in a safe path, to keep it away from all the thousands of other orbiting craft and stations.

But all that fastidious timing and positioning had been overturned when Earth was suddenly not there to hold the reins. In the careful dance of the orbits, it had been Earth that had called the tune-and now the caller was gone, leaving the dancersthemselves to wheel and pitch about at random.

Lucian was trying to find out just how bad the situation was-a tricky job with a dead computer.

He sat there, staring at the blank screen, trying to think.

He had gotten far enough along in the problem to confirm his original fear. Earth's disappearance was no illusion. Working by hand, he had recalculated projected orbital trajectories for several of the larger habitats, factoring Earth's disappearance into the existing projection as stored in the navigational almanac system. He had fed his coordinates to the radar controllers, and radar had reported dead-on tracks for every habitat.

And the message was simple: without the Earth to anchor them, the Earth orbiters were careering across the sky. The Moon-orbiting satellites were not in much better shape-Earth's ma.s.sive gravity well was a major variable in their orbits as well.