Space Stations

BLACK HOLE STATION by Jack Williamson

MY father used to joke that he was four hundred years older than my mother. He was Esteban Fenway, copilot of Ian Arkwood’s Space Magellan when they discovered NBH Draconis, the quiescent black hole just two hundred light-years north of Earth. Arkwood died there. Off the ship, exploring its tiny iron asteroid, he was caught by a radiation burst from something falling in. My father got home with the news.

The drama of his escape from its invisible gravity well is among my first recollections, as I heard it at the bedtimes when he used to trot me on his knee. He never tried to make himself the hero, but I loved the story for his genial voice and the strange magic of its relativity paradoxes. I always shivered at the terrible mysteries of NBH and loved the thrills of his escape alive.

“It’s a fearful monster, Sandy. A demon nobody can see. It has a terrible strength and a terrible hunger. It eats people and planets and stars and even the light that could show where it is. It hides in a great dark cave it has dug for itself.”

“If you couldn’t see it, how did you find it?”

“Its own dreadful power gives it away. Like your pocket lens, it bends light to magnify anything beyond it. All we could see was that little patch of brighter stars.”

“Will it swallow us?”

“We’re safe,” he promised. “So long as we stay away.”

“But you could go back?” I was always frightened. “And get there in no time at all?”

“In none of my time.” He liked to dazzle me with the wonder of the skipships. “And skip back again in another instant. That’s what we did. Our whole cruise, to survey half a dozen stellar systems and find NBH, took us just a few months on the Magellan, but four hundred years passed here on Earth while we were away.”

When I wondered how that could be, he said something I didn’t understand about Einstein and the relativity of space and time.

“No need to vex your little head about it.” He laughed at my fears. “Or about any danger from NBH itself. It’s too far off to touch us, and I got away without a scar. It was coming home that nearly killed me. The Arkwood expedition had been forgotten. Nobody wanted to believe a black hole could be so near. People called me crazy, and I did feel driven half out of my mind. Your mother saved me.”

I heard more about that from her. A journalist assigned to do the story, she found him in a bar, overwhelmed by an Earth that seemed stranger than NBH and drinking to escape more questions than he had answers for. With her at his side, he made the best of his moment.

She helped him set up the Arkwood Foundation and find funds to build Black Hole Station. Every other year through my childhood and youth, a new Magellan took off to carry supplies for it and relieve half the six-man staff.

Of course nobody returned to report anything. Nobody could, not for another four hundred years. I remember sitting at the dinners my mother used to give for the foundation staff and my father’s scientific friends. Listening to their talk, I felt baffled by the riddles of NBH and haunted with dread of its invisible power.

Schwarchild bubbles? Event horizons? Anti-horizons? Singularies? Quantum geometries? Negative matter? Negative time? Black holes, white holes, wormholes?

What did the words mean? What dark magic let the black hole pull men off the Earth, not to return till all they had known was gone?

“Wormholes?” I asked my father once. “Are they really tunnels through space and time to other worlds?”

“Flying carpets?” He laughed at the question. “Not for spacecraft. Not even if they do exist. Tidal forces would tear your unlucky astronaut into superhot plasma, and matter that falls into the Schwarzchild bubble stays there. Nothing gets out except the Hawking hot-body radiation. And not much of that.”

“So what good is the station?”

“No way to know.” He shrugged, his bright blue eyes looking off beyond me. “No way for us, here and now. But I want to know what’s waiting for us, there inside the bubble.

NBH is a natural lab with a trillion times more power than anything we can build here on Earth.”

My mother may have known how impatient he was for that knowledge, but I was stunned on the morning at breakfast, the year I was twelve, when he pushed his plate aside and looked across the table at my mother. He told her he was taking the next relief ship out to the station.

Her face gone pale, she sank back in her chair.

“If you have to go.” Her lips were quivering when she finally gathered herself to speak.

“If you have to.”

Bravely, she helped him pack what he wanted to take and invited his friends to a farewell dinner. She had to wipe at her tears before she could kiss him farewell. My throat was aching when he gripped my hand and turned to leave, and my own eyes blurred at the eager spring in his step as he walked up the ramp to board Magellan Five.

“He loves us,” she whispered to me. “But NBH has caught him. It will never let him go.”

She took his place at the head of the foundation and kept the relief ships flying out. Over the years I met most of the volunteers when they came for training. All of them were men. She insisted very firmly that black holes were not for women.

Those men were a bright and lively lot. I admired them for many things: their abilities, their courage, their dedication to science. Yet I felt a sort of pity for them. Every one, in his own way, had suffered some painful loss. Disappointment in love, disaster in business, defeat of some driving ambition, failure of a dream.

“We’re all of us unhappy,” one of them confessed when I had bought him a farewell drink. “If we’d been content with Earth here and now, we wouldn’t be gambling our lives for the uncertain secrets of NBH. Or the chance we’ll get back to some fabulous Utopia four hundred years from now.” He made a bitter face. “The fact is, we’re diving into our own black holes.”

Wishing them well, I’d never wanted to follow. Yet I had never outgrown my longing to see my father again, or escaped my childhood fascination with the ominous riddles of NBH. Out of college, I came home with a degree in cosmogony, planning to join my mother at the foundation. She told me she was shutting it down.

“We can’t.” I felt dismayed. “Think of my father.”

“I do. Every day.” Her lips quivered. “But he’s had ten years at the station, if he stayed there. We’ll never know what he’s done or failed to do, but Magellan Ten has drained the last of our funding. This last mission will evacuate and abandon the station.”

“My father—” The decision seized me in an instant, “I’m going out on Ten.”

“I thought you might.” I saw her tears again, but she didn’t try to keep me. “Wherever you find him, still at the station or back on some future Earth, he may need you more than I do.”

There were just two of us on Ten; she had found no other volunteers. We met the pilot in the same bar where she had found my father. He was Colin McKane, a rawboned, hardbitten Scot who had abandoned his native heaths to scout a hundred planets and found none he cared to see again.

“My home, my family, all I ever loved—” Moodily, he sloshed another shot into his glass. “All thrown away in a crazy lust for new worlds and strange adventure. There’s nothing left I really care about. Matsu and LeBlanc were my last friends, fellow exiles from long ago. They went out on Nine. I promised to go out and bring them home.”

He shrugged, with a twisted grimace.

“If we can expect this wasted Earth to make a better future for us.”

Hiro Matsu and Jean LeBlanc. I’d known them in training. Both of them scientists of some distinction, they were both devoted to ideas science rejected. I’d helped Matsu load crates of equipment designed to test a conviction that he could reverse gravity by reversing the spin of cosmic anti-strings. LeBlanc’s project was to look for a way though the singularity, and backward in time.

“Crackpots, maybe,” McKane said. “But we can’t leave them there to die.”

We found NBH truly black, lost in the vast gulf created as it consumed the nearby stars.

All we could see was the brighter patch of magnified stars beyond it. Nodding at them on the monitor, McKane turned uneasily in his seat to shake his head at me.

“Feel it?”

Even there, trapped deep in its unforgiving grasp, there was really no force I could feel.

Spinning around the lowest safe orbit, we were still in free fall, the enormous gravity precisely balanced by the centrifugal force that held us there. Yet suddenly I was chilled by the recollection of a moment of terror in my childhood, when my father was tossing me high above his head and catching me as I fell. My mother heard my screams, sensed my fright, and made him stop.

That left me with a dread of high places. Now, even in the stable-seeming ship, I felt that was falling past the stars into an infinite and bottomless pit, with no support and no escape. A wave of sickness left me weak and cold with sweat. I had to grip the seat restraints and look away.

McKane grinned at me, and bent again to his flight computer. The asteroid was harder to find than the black hole. It had strayed away from the galactic coordinates Arkwood and my father recorded for it, and the starlight was far too faint to reveal it.

“A wild black cat,” McKane called it, “hiding from us in a big black cellar.”

Searching the spectrum for its locator beacon, he heard nothing. He made a dozen skips, with stops for radar searches. Earth was two long days behind us before a final jump brought it into searchlight range. A mass of dark iron a mile or so thick, ripped from the heart of some shattered planet, it was all jagged points and knife-sharp edges. We watched its slow spin till the dock came into view, a squat little tower jutting from a flat black fracture plane.

It showed no light. McKane called and got no reply.

“It looks dead. If you want my hunch, LeBlanc and Matsu found it already abandoned or dead. The safest thing for us is to get out now.”

“I came for my father.”

“There can’t be anybody here.”

“I’ve got to know.”

“If anybody’s alive, why don’t they have the radio beacon going? And a light flashing to show us in?”

“I want to dock and see.”

“A risk I was never paid to take.” Stubbornly, he shook his head at the telescreen, where a bright red star beyond NBH stared at us like a baleful eye. “If they’re gone, we’ll find ’em gone. If they’re dead, we’d likely join ’em.”

I persisted till he nudged us with the thrusters to overtake the tower and ease us to the dock. The station was tunneled deep into the asteroid, for whatever shelter it might offer.

The dock was on the spin axis, where we were weightless.

When we were coupled to it, he turned to scowl at me.

“Are you sure you want to take the risk?”

Nervously, I said I did.

He slid a sleek little handgun out of a shoulder holster and wanted me to take it. I refused it; I had never fired a gun. He found a flashlight for me and opened the air lock.

“Watch every step.” He looked at his watch and waved an ironic farewell. “Whatever you find, make it quick. I’ll give you three hours.”

The door thudded shut. Air hissed. My ears popped to a pressure change. The inner door opened into darkness. Listening, I heard no sound at all. The air was cold and still. The flashlight found a switch, and light came on in a narrow passage ahead.

I caught a guideline to pull myself into the station. A bleak and cheerless pit, it had been crudely carved with laser blades into the rock’s iron heart. I dived along the guideline and stopped again to listen. Somewhere a ventilator fan whispered faintly. I shouted and got no answer. I saw no motion, saw nothing green. Sniffing for the odor of death, all I caught was dusty staleness.

The lines led me on to a radial shaft and out to a level were rotation simulated gravity.

On my feet again, I explored an empty workshop, a silent kitchen, a vacant rec room, a long chamber filled with laboratory equipment, most of it mysterious to me, all idle and abandoned now.

On a big wall monitor, I found that magnified star, dimming now as it crept away from the focal point where the black hole hung, invisible, intangible, an eternal devourer of all creation. I stared and shuddered and went on down the tunnel. Doorways off it opened into what had been living space.

One by one, I looked into empty rooms. Abandoned perhaps in haste, they were cluttered with discarded boots and clothing, books and papers, bits of electronic gear, worn playing cards, a violin with broken strings, empty ration packs and dirty dishes, empty brandy bottles. I saw a bag lettered with Matsu’s name, a cap LeBlanc had worn, and cringed from a dread of whatever had driven them away.

Near the end of the tunnel, with only two or three more rooms to search, I heard faint sounds ahead. Squeals? Squeaks? Screams? I listened and crept nearer. Animal sounds, I thought, but not from any animal I knew.

They ceased. I heard a human voice, somehow familiar, yet aping those alien sounds. I tiptoed to the doorway and peered into the room. A gray-headed stranger with a wild white beard sat behind a long desk, looking up at a wall monitor and intoning that unearthly gibberish into a microphone.

Chessmen before him on the desk were set up in an unfinished game. Chessmen I remembered! They were carved of pale green jade and some jet-black stone. My mother had found them somewhere in Asia as a gift for my father. He had used them to teach me the game the year I was five. Swept by a tide of confused emotion, I had to catch my breath before I turned and spoke to the wild-bearded stranger.

“Sir?”

Jolted, he sprang to his feet, backed away, and stood for a long moment staring at me with deep-sunk eyes.

“Who the hell—” He blinked and shook his head and limped around the desk to meet me. “Sandy! It’s you!”

He looked far older than I recalled him, bent and shriveled but alert. He seized my hand, moved as if to hug me, but checked himself to stand back and stare again. “Your mother? How did you leave her?”

“Well,” I said. “She’s tried to keep the foundation alive, but she’s had to shut it down. We came to evacuate the station.”

“A little late.” He grinned through the beard. “The crew bugged out on Nine, two years ago.”

“And left you alone? How could they?”

A wry shrug.

“They tried to take me. Called me crazy. I had to hide in an old space suit till they were gone.”

I looked at him again. Haggard, unkempt, something bright in his hollowed eyes. I wondered what NBH had done to him.

“Your last chance to leave,” I told him. “The pilot’s waiting, not very patiently. He gave me three hours to find you.” I looked at my watch. “Half of it already gone. Let’s get moving.”

“Thank you, Sandy.” He reached to take my hand again. “It’s noble of you to come.

Noble of your mother to give you up.” He shook his head, with a wistful smile. “But my work’s not done.”

“Father! Please!” I gripped his hand. “We can’t leave you here.”

“I can’t go now.” His seamed face set hard, he raised a shaking hand to stop my questions. “Sit down and let me tell you.”

He lifted a carton of ration packs off a folding chair, motioned me to it, and sat deliberately back at his desk.

“If you can make it quick.”

“Okay, quick it is.” Yet he paused for a moment, staring at the chessmen, before he shrugged and went on. “I’ll skip over my first years here. Pretty much what you might expect. We studied what there was to study. Measured NBH for mass, electric charge, spin. Studied the orbits of captured objects. Looked for the Hawking radiation.”

“So?” I had to humor him. “What did you find?”

“Nothing.” He shrugged. “Nothing really new until after Three had come and gone. But I stayed and kept at it till I got what I call my eureka moment.”

“What was that?”

“A revelation.” He glanced away at the end of the room, where I saw an easel under a paint-splotched cover, and paused for a long sigh. “It happened during my search for the radiation. A quest I had almost given up. If I’d left on Nine—”

He shook his head and stopped again to glance at his unfinished chess game, long enough to let me wonder about his opponent and to wonder how sane he was.

“Black holes decay,” he went on abruptly. Hawking did the math. I’ve found the evidence. And established a new principle of physics.” He sat straighter as if to challenge me with it. “The conservation of information.”

He scowled when I peered at my watch.

“The decay process is slow, the radiation feeble, with no distinctive spectral signature. It took me two years and a new antenna to pick it up. A faint hum, often drowned in thunder from the accretion zone. Nothing exciting till I got the signals it carried.”

“Signals?”

“Information!” He saw my disbelief. His old voice went shrill. “Clicks in my headphones. Three clicks. A pause. Three more clicks. Another three, till there were twelve. A longer pause. Then they began the series again. I answered with echoes and got a reply. A pattern of clicks and pauses that made pixels for simple graphics, twelve by twelve. A circle. A square. An equilateral triangle. A diagram to show the hypotenuse as the sum of squares.

“Contact with intelligence!” His hollowed eyes lit. “We’ve invented a common language, good for math and science, though so far we’ve found no Rosetta stone for the humanities—”

“We?” I had to interrupt. “Who?”

“A question.” He seemed amused at my bewilderment. “I don’t know who or where or even when. I’m still searching for the answers. The signals do come out of the Schwarzchild bubble, carried on the Hawking radiation. They may originate in the central singularity. They may come through it. They may come around it.”

He sighed and let his thin body sag as if from long exhaustion.

“There’s no way to know. I’ve found no common point of reference. The quantum nature of the singularity upends all our commonsense ideas of space and time.” He saw me start to rise. “Sandy, please! Give me a few more minutes.”

“Can’t we talk on the ship?”

“We’re talking now.” Impatiently, he beckoned me back to the chair and limped across the room to uncover the easel. “You’ve got to see this.”

His painting held me for a moment. No scene from the asteroid or anywhere on Earth, it was a seascape. Waves foamed in the foreground. Blue water stretched to a far horizon beyond, with no land in sight. Above them the frame was almost filled with something that took my breath.

I had to stare. It was an island, flying high above the sea. A forest of green plumes like giant bamboo grew along the shore. Inland, red-roofed buildings surrounded a spiral dome the color of gold. It floated on an enormous platform streamlined like the hull of an ocean liner. Tiny mirror-bright globes swarmed around it.

“A glimpse of their world, as I’ve seen it from there.” He pointed to a chalked circle on the floor in front of the easel. “I know nearly nothing of its history, but it was one that NBH swallowed. Its people had no way to save anything material, but a few of them were able to preserve their minds.”

He reached to touch the chessboard.

“The individual who reached me has told me all he can. I call him Mr. Other. We’ve worked out a language for math and physics, but found no words for such complexities as gender—”

I was on my feet.

“One more minute!” He raised his hand to hold me. “Mr. Other has given me a warning you must hear. NBH may be quiescent now, but it’s the ultimate bomb.”

“Father, please!”

His voice sharpened, the way it did when he had to scold me long ago.

“Here’s my news for Earth. As a black hole grows, it contracts. Pressure and temperature in the singularity rise toward infinity. In NBH, they are still contained in the magnetic web woven by increasing spin. The capture of another stray sun could rupture that web at the poles of rotation. Superluminous plumes and bursts of beamed radiation could explode, strong enough to burn the nearer planets and even sear the Earth—”

He stopped at last, frowning at my face.

“I see you don’t believe.”

“I can’t.” At the door, I had to turn back. “You’ve put me in an impossible spot. The pilot will be taking off, with me or without me. I can’t leave you here alone.”

“You’d better go.” He gulped and wiped at his hollow eyes. “I must stay to learn what I can, and hope to get that warning back to Earth.” He limped around the easel to give me a quick embrace. “I always loved you, Sandy. It’s great that I know enough to solve that problem for you.”

He gestured me away from the easel. When I looked back, he was standing on that white-chalked circle. He waved a quick farewell. I caught a glimpse of some object in his hand. I heard a click, and he was gone.

I searched and failed to find him anywhere. I ran back to the ship and got there gasping for breath, with nine minutes to spare. We took off at once. The first long skip brought us in sight of the sun. The second let us pick out Jupiter and Saturn. The third revealed the tiny point of Earth. The last brought it close enough to let us see the whole blue globe, the bright lace of clouds, the familiar continents.

“It looks too green.” McKane made a sour face. “I see no cities. I think we’ve been gone too long.”

My own eagerness to see the fruit of change was edged with pain as I recalled all I’d known and loved that the centuries must have erased. He called Earth from low orbit.

Watching as he listened, I saw him frown and shake his head, frown and listen again. At last he passed the headphones to me.

“We’re expected,” he said. “A Director Ivor Cheung wants to talk to you.”

I heard a snatch of strange music and then a woman’s voice.

“Sir, will you hold for just a moment?”

In only a moment I heard a hearty boom.

“Sandor Fenway! I speak for the Arkwood-Fenway Foundation.” Accents had changed, and I begged him to slow his speech. “Your father told us to expect you.”

“My father? How? When?”

“After his return from NBH, two hundred years ago.”

I felt dazed. “With no ship?”

“With Arkwood science, he required no ship.” I heard a genial chuckle at my confusion.

“We’re here to welcome you home. A briefing has been prepared. It will cover Dr.

Fenway’s return and its historic aftermath. A pilot craft is now on the way to guide you in.”

The pilot craft was a little silver globe that spoke in a crisp robotic voice. It guided us down, but not to the shabby old brick-and-mortar building my father had leased for it on the outskirts of Atlantica. We landed on a flying island like the one my father had shown me on his easel. It floated over the Gulf Stream, a hundred miles off Sandy Hook. A final skip brought us low above it.

McKane held us there, staring. Its sleek white hull was a full mile long. Green parkways edged its decks. It had no funnels, but a gold-hued spiral dome towered out of its superstructure. Tiny silver globes whirled like birds around it. Our pilot craft brought us through them, down to an open platform.

McKane opened the lock. Rousing music greeted us, tantalizingly half familiar. A little group of men and women stood waiting. All wore neat white jackets with red-black patches on the breasts. Smiling, a tall, dark man advanced to greet us.

“Mr. Sandor Fenway? Captain McKane?” He paused to see which was which. “I am Director Cheung.” He turned to gesture at those behind him. “These are fellow foundation officials, all members of the Black Light Society.”

McKane muttered a question.

“You’ll be learning,” he said. “The society is devoted to the study and teaching of what Dr. Fenway knew of Ark-wood science and culture. Their mastery of space and time may surprise you. They were even conquering gravity, but too late to save themselves.”

He turned to me.

“We’ll be briefing you on the historic consequences of his return. Before we go in, however, we have a gift left for you.”

He stepped aside. A slender young woman came forward, holding a white plastic box.

She lifted it toward me, checked herself, and stepped back, flushing pink.

“Mr. Sandor—” She stopped to take a breath, and I had time to note how well the white jacket became her. “Your father left this message with his gift.” She read it from a strip of yellow plastic.

“‘Dear Sandy,

“‘I understood your doubts. Don’t brood about them. You’ll learn to like Mr. Other. You’ll find him a great science teacher and a master at the game.’”

She held the box for me to open. The lid snapped back at my touch, and I saw the jade-and-jet chessmen I had last seen on my father’s desk at Black Hole Station.

“Shall we take care of them for you?” she asked. “The update is ready for you now.”

Director Cheung took us through a little park where he showed me a statue of my mother, and on to the Lily Arkwood Hall. He spoke to us there, from a stage where the whole wall behind him became an enormous window that could look out on another city, a ship in space, another planet, even Black Hole Station.

Through the first centuries since we left, the skipships had carried colonists out to terraform new planets while Earth itself was in decline. With resources depleted and opportunities rare, it had been almost abandoned. Back from NBH, my father had been its savior.

“The Arkwood legacy.” Cheung turned to gesture at a strange-shaped spacecraft dropping out of an orange-red sky. “Arkwood science has reshaped human history. The science of truly instant flight has bypassed the relativity limit and unified the scattered and isolated planets into our great galactic civilization.”

He paused to let us watch the spacecraft landing in a city of golden spiral towers.

“The richest gift, however, has been the Arkwood philosophy. Our own evolution had left us driven by herd instincts, forever fighting for survival. We strove to be leaders, but most of us had to follow the winners. Chiefs and priests and prophets. Patriarchs, pharaohs, presidents. Captains of industry and heads of the house. When men were not enough; we invented autocratic gods.”

He bowed toward me.

“We honor your father, Mr. Fenway, most of all because he declined to become a god. Instead he helped us grow up. We had aspired to conquer nature and rule the universe. With NBH, he showed us the folly of such infantile illusions.

“The omnipotent destroyer! Itself a dark god, it has taught us our true place in the universal process. The cosmos has neither master nor slaves. It is simply a river of energy where we are droplets of life, or better the climbers of an infinite stair that can take us up forever.”

He touched the black circle on his jacket.

“That’s the Arkwood way, the gospel of the Black Light Society. We are not a religion, though our message may reflect ancient faiths. We follow no doctrine and enforce no commandments. All we preach is understanding as your father gave it to us, truth instead of illusion, altruism instead of aggression, love instead of hate, peace instead of terror.”

The Arkwood way has made sense to me. Though this altered Earth often seems as alien to me as our old one must have been to my father four centuries ago, I’ve found contentment here. Loving friends have asked me to join the Black Light Society. At the foundation academy, I have begun to learn Arkwood science and Arkwood culture.

I want to discover more. The foundation has restored Black Hole Station. When my studies here on Earth are finished, I plan to go back there and try to reach my father’s Mr. Other. NBH has no sun in its ravenous grasp, and that old dread of high places has left me. Looking down from the skyship’s rail at the Atlantic whitecaps a mile below, I can hardly recall my terror of falling toward that baleful red star at the bottom of its dark pit.