Eater. Part 7

Benjamin had to settle several immediate personnel problems, holding a quick general meeting to announce the "structural change," which included a layering of Deputy Administrators, Action Team Leaders, and Section Heads in a chart neatly printed for prominent display. With Kingsley and Arno beside him he answered a few questions, but thankfully most fell to Martinez.

Then he had to patrol the Center corridors as the U Agency types moved in, finding office s.p.a.ce and mediating. It was like two different species having to suddenly share the same territory. "Colleagues," Arno had said, and this proved to mean that some of the U Agency people were faces he recognized. Apparently they had been hired as consultants, perhaps quite recently. Some of them seemed faintly embarra.s.sed, but they moved with the same crisp efficiency as the others. Was there prior training to do this sort of thing?

It would have been easy to blame Kingsley for this, to see him as Benjamin's primary antagonist. But within three hours of this shock, the two men were bound down the mountain in Benjamin's car, headed for a dinner they had planned days before. They drove in silence, the aroma of burning sugarcane drifting up from the fields toward Hilo. They quite deliberately spoke only of Hawaii itself as Benjamin took the slope at high speed, tires howling on the curves, bamboo forests flickering past with their dry smells.

Kingsley seemed able to relax and truly enjoy the ride down to their beachfront home. After taking off their shoes in standard island good manners, Kingsley stopped to admire the photos in the entrance hall of Channing's career: aboard the s.p.a.ce station, on an EVA, taking data in blazing sunlight. As he did, Benjamin sought out Channing and embraced her with a fervor that surprised him.

Channing sensed the soured mood of the men and quickly deflected it with drinks of mango and papaya and rum, amid soft j.a.panese music, all counterpointed by the wind chimes in their back garden. The air seemed layered with fragrances and talk ran to island gossip. But then she wanted to be kept up on the gossip and it all came out.

"I don't think you fully appreciate why I acted," Kingsley said at last, once the describing was done.

"You bet bet I don't," Benjamin shot back. He had been holding his tongue because the last few hours had drastically s.h.i.+fted the power balance between the two men, and he was unsure how to deal with it. "Neither does Martinez." I don't," Benjamin shot back. He had been holding his tongue because the last few hours had drastically s.h.i.+fted the power balance between the two men, and he was unsure how to deal with it. "Neither does Martinez."

"She does not know my methods, but you, with our ancient a.s.sociation, might have guessed my intention well before I was ready to reveal it."

"I'm afraid I'm being sidelined after the first few plays."

"That will not happen, I a.s.sure you." Kingsley sat back and wrapped both hands around one knee, leaning back as though to relieve knotted muscles. He carries tension that way, same as me He carries tension that way, same as me, Benjamin thought. But doesn't show it in the face or voice But doesn't show it in the face or voice.

"I'm pretty d.a.m.ned mad."

"With good reason, given what you know. Let me say I appreciated your not giving voice to that at the Center. It would have done no good."

Channing had let them go through the first quick rush of it, their words coming out in machine-gun volleys. Now she made a show of fetching some nibble food, leaving them with a lingering observation: "I'm impressed that a U.S. agency will spring so quickly on the advice of a Brit astronomer."

"I've been functioning as a sort of scientist-diplomat since well before the Astronomer Royal appointment," Kingsley called after her. "My good fortune that I've made the right contacts."

"I admire your understatement," she called from the kitchen.

"Why not tell me?" Benjamin demanded, irked at her cavalier nonchalance at this whole abrupt maneuver.

"Because it would have compromised a delicate transition."

Benjamin sat back and crossed his arms, demanding, "Explain. Better be good, too."

"I've been asking people around the world to work on this intruder problem, sending e-mails and calling-any idea why?"

"To get them involved?" Channing ventured when Benjamin just shook his head. "So these U Agency types would have have to come in?" to come in?"

"Dead right. I want this controlled by the United States, not by some United Nations committee."

Benjamin nodded. "A nation can act quickly, a committee, never."

"And there's more, isn't there?" Channing bore in on Kingsley, leaning forward, her hostess skills giving way to her professional ones.

"You could always spot my motives," Kingsley laughed. "The U Agency fellows will pull in some 'foreign advisers' right away."

Benjamin saw it. "And the people you e-mailed the most, brought into the discussion earliest-"

"They'll be the ones recruited." Kingsley smiled.

"And the astronomers I saw today working for the Agency-"

"Exactly. They were brought in the traditional way, a consultancy for a sum they could scarcely decline."

"They know what we're doing?"

"Of course. Some have been monitoring our work-which impresses them, I'm happy to say-since the first week."

Channing said, "You make it sound like moving chess pieces."

Kingsley looked reflective. "I suppose it is. All done very diplomatically, of course, through all the proper channels. I was afraid I was being a bit obvious, but so far Arno has not caught on."

"You believe," Benjamin said, sitting back and gazing up at the hard, bright stars visible through the softly rattling fronds of palm trees.

"I wanted bright people here, people I knew from my work. Screens are going to start coming down soon, I'll wager."

"Really?" Channing chewed her lip, her face pale in the gloom.

"This is the calm before the storm-a very long storm, quite probably," Kingsley finished morosely, taking a long pull at his drink.

Benjamin told her about the trajectory Kingsley had displayed. "It's moving faster, cutting the time to reach Jupiter."

"And that provokes the U Agency?" she asked wonderingly.

Kingsley studied the leafy garden with a skewed slant to his mouth. "I felt bound to let those above know, as did Victoria. We spoke of it the second day I was here. I did not include you two in my thoughts because, frankly, I felt it was a side issue, just a reporting up the chain of command sort of thing. But quite quickly it caught the attention of certain people at the NSF, then DARPA-my sources tell me."

Benjamin disliked both what he was learning and getting it from Kingsley. The man had mastered astronomy, international diplomacy, and-no doubt, they would soon learn-figure skating. Now he knew how laymen felt when confronting the complex weave of astronomy with only newspaper-level knowledge. He hated playing straight man here, but stifled that and asked, "Why in the world would the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency have connections to NSF's astronomy office?"

"There is a standing procedure, ever since the Air Force began detecting what turned out to be gamma-ray bursters, remember?" Kingsley smiled. "Their satellites designed to detect nuclear explosions found signals coming from the sky. Bursters bequeathed us this alliance of interests."

"And from there on, let me guess," Benjamin said, "it went to the National Security Council, then the President's Science Adviser."

Kingsley raised an eyebrow in appreciation. "You know more of this labyrinth than I expected. Pretty nearly so, yes."

"So we're stuck having to work with those Chicken Littles, huh?" Channing said.

Kingsley gave her a puzzled glance. "Uh, Chicken..."

"The U Agency's purpose is to stop disasters before they grow, mostly by taking action across national and even continental boundaries. They're a quietly accepted part of global integration," she rattled off knowledgeably.

Benjamin was surprised at how much she knew. When she had a mind to, she showed as much acuity as Kingsley. And he, in turn, had small blind spots, like not remembering who Chicken Little was. The man's concentration upon his career had swept all else from his mind. Most astronomers were distracted sorts, unable to recognize many of the faces on the magazines next to the checkout line in markets. Kingsley took this to an extreme, but his footing among the corridors of power was deft and firm.

With lacerating sarcasm, Channing made fun of the U types, reminding them that she had some dealings with the Agency in her "s.p.a.cesuit days." Her eyes danced with memories. "The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity, and they've got plenty of both."

Benjamin felt their home around them like a warm coc.o.o.n and hoped that it could be a quiet refuge from the growing tumult outside as word inevitably spread. Something big was coming, and he was not ready. Above he saw the spray of glimmering that was the plane of the galaxy, the Milky Way, and wondered from which, of all those stars, this thing had come. It had been gobbling up iceteroids for some time, no doubt, so its initial incoming direction was no clue. It could be from anywhere. Given the vast s.p.a.ces between the suns, it could have been traveling for centuries, millennia. And what unimaginable technology lay behind the downright weird signatures of the intruder?

Stars.h.i.+p? The word seemed inadequate for the energies the thing poured forth. They needed a better term, a name that carried the mystery of it.

4.

Channing gave it a name that stuck, within a week. One much better than "X-1" or "intruder."

To concentrate and save her energy, she worked in the quiet of her home study. A doctor had told her that fighting this disease would be like the late career of a fading boxer: pacing yourself, resting when you could, so you could go a few hard rounds when you had to. She had a countdown to heed, and now the Center had one, too, with the intruder.

A few days after the entrance of the U Agency, she noticed a small detail in the high-resolution pictures of the intruder's spectacular collisions.

The hottest region had an extended magnetosphere, a glowing dot that kept expanding with each collision. She compared images from all available kinds of telescopes-starting with the radio's spindly jet, up through an infrared blur of hot gas, on into the visible spectra that revealed sharp streamers of agitated atoms arcing like geysers from the core, and finally on into the X rays that showed a white-hot center of intense heat, a seething central furnace that grew larger with every collision.

The entire range of deep s.p.a.ce telescopes now sent images to the Center, a gusher of data each time the intruder devoured another hapless chunk of matter in its path. One collision had decidedly different spectral signatures. Careful a.n.a.lysis showed emission lines from silicon, carbon, iron. It had struck an asteroid. With the same outcome-a jet of microwave-emitting electrons, hot gas, and plasma, trailing the intruder, a neon sign seen all the way across the solar system.

Overlaying all these results with some sophisticated graphics, she got a consistent picture.

The strong magnetic field was building in a huge active region, lighting up brilliantly, growing. She suggested some adroit observations, brought them to Kingsley's attention, and soon enough the big-dish "ears" of Earth's radio telescope net were mapping the moving magnetic region in intricate detail. They were the first to see a bull's-eye disk, with circular lanes of varying luminosity centered on an unresolved blur.

So she took it into the Center and the Gang of Four. "Looks like a target," Benjamin said. "A bull's-eye."

"An accretion disk," Kingsley observed dryly, his expression showing his lifelong dislike of homey a.n.a.logies for astrophysical objects. "The ma.s.s it has acquired is spiraling in. It collides, rubs, and gets warm. Hot enough and the matter emits radiation." He nodded to Channing, who sat at the controls of one of their big-screen displays-a fresh compensation for their enforced collaboration with the U Agency, who had just installed higher-power computers and flat-screen displays of eye-opening quality. "Your working hypothesis is proved."

"I'm that obvious?" Channing was slightly miffed at having her thunder stolen.

Benjamin called up from the ma.s.sive Center computers his compilation of the radio telescope data. Using Channing's discovery of the high magnetic fields, they had been able to take quick snapshot-like radio maps of the inner region.

"Here, I've made it into a film," Benjamin said. "It even has a plot, sort of."

The view opened far out in deep s.p.a.ce, our sun a mere glimmering spark. In an overlay, Channing saw vast swarms of rock and iceteroids...o...b..ting. Suddenly a strange glowing disk like an uncoiling silvery snake plunged across the field of view. It struck an iceteroid with a brilliant flash. Gaudy luminous streamers clasped the doomed mile-wide chunk of ice.

"They were lucky enough to get a series of maps and optical images when it hit its latest victim," Benjamin said to the darkened room. "I've blended them here."

The snake coiled up and deformed, becoming all mouth. Blue-hot, it gnawed its way through the ice. Channing knew that at its speeds, these had to be images made in slices finer than a millisecond. The eerie beauty of it was captivating, the lapping strands of magnetic fields flickering among the flying fragments.

Then something luminous emerged like a wasp from a coc.o.o.n at the other side of an expanding ball of hot gas. The intruder moved on, now bearing a halo like an immense multicolored rainbow around a central bright hoop. But within the inner ring lay an utterly black core. The rainbow was a momentarily expanded disk of matter, she guessed, a hundred-kilometer-wide firework accelerating inward.

"So we have seen the beast at last," she murmured into the shocked silence of the room as the images faded to black.

Benjamin stood next to the big screen, his suntan giving him an odd bronzed look in the small lamp of the speaker's podium. A casual audience of astronomers who had come in for the show peppered him with questions and he fielded them well, the distances and times and resolutions at his fingertips.

She let the moment wash over her. To her surprise, she had not been surprised. It looked just the way she had seen it in her dreams. Fevered, troubled dreams.

Finally Kingsley got her attention by addressing a public question to her. "You hinted by e-mail that you had a name for the object," Kingsley said with amus.e.m.e.nt.

"I suggest we call it the Eater of All Things."

"Because it is a black hole," Kingsley finished for her.

"Exactly," Benjamin put in. "I kept the secret pretty well while she ma.s.saged her data, but I'll bet half the people here have been thinking the same thing-without saying so."

This was the first truly public announcement. They looked at each other silently, so it was left to Amy Major to say, "You don't want to alarm the U people, correct?"

"Right," Benjamin said. "The spectral s.h.i.+fts-those reds and blues we found early on, remember? They fit the black hole idea. Now we can see it trapping ma.s.s. Case closed."

Channing leaned back and regarded their Gang of Four in the Big Screen Room, as the U types had labeled it. They had slapped labels on rooms all over the Center. "I hope we're under no illusions that all this data isn't being copied by the U computers they just installed. They'll have this processed shot of Benjamin's by now."

"And they are far from dumb," Kingsley agreed. "Particularly the newest fellow, Randall. Knew him on a visiting appointment at Harvard, before he went 'underground,' as the U people say."

"Into cla.s.sified work," Benjamin supplied for Amy.

"Oh." Amy seemed startled that an astronomer would go into any other line. Her expression plainly said, Once you understand how big and wonderful the universe is, how could you do anything else Once you understand how big and wonderful the universe is, how could you do anything else?

Channing permitted herself a nostalgic smile, remembering when she had worn just such an earnest expression-and had meant it.

5.

Benjamin had a pad mounted on a tree in the garden, ostensibly for a dartboard. He and Kingsley had a game or two in the next few days, Kingsley casually tossing with his unerring accuracy born of a thousand pub crawls, winning easily. Afterward Benjamin took the board back inside to keep it out of the dependable tropical rain showers and then had considerable use for the cus.h.i.+on's other, secret purpose. Often when he got home he would take a stroll in the garden while Channing finished making dinner, her favorite daily task. When he reached the portion out of view of the house, he would approach the cus.h.i.+on and give it half a dozen good, solid punches. He had discovered this outlet years before and realized quite well that his need of it told him something about his feelings.

He made good use of the cus.h.i.+on every evening now. As the flood of data deepened, he staked out a clear position that learning more is the best short-term goal. In this the Center staff backed him solidly.

"Ummm," Channing said over a dinner of baked ono in papaya-ginger sauce, "and good ol' savvy Kingsley sees this as a power clash from which he can profit."

"Uh, yes. I was going to put it a little more delicately-"

"To that Arno guy you can be diplomatic, but it's wasted on me, dear. Kingsley is just staying in character. The U Agency isn't using a hobnailed boots approach; they're smarter than that. It's more what we used to call at NASA a 'soft presence' style-you know they're there and can take over the operation in a millisecond, and they convey that without saying anything."

Benjamin admired how she could sum up what had taken him days to realize. "Yup, subtle they are."

"So far."

"Meaning?"

"They don't have to stay that way."

He was having trouble river-rafting in the fast administrative U Agency waters. They operated as if they knew what mattered before they asked questions, so the answers had better fit their expectations. And p.r.o.nto. He heard "cut to the chase" several times a day. "I keep getting signals like that," he admitted.

"I'm not there all the time, so maybe I can see it in a clearer perspective. Everybody's getting more tense and the whole thing is going to crack open pretty soon."

"I hope not."