The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories

Old-fashioned

Ben Estes knew he was going to die and it didn't make him feel any better to know that that was the chance he had lived with all these years. The life of an astro-miner, drifting through the still largely uncharted vastness of the asteroid belt, was not particularly sweet, but it was quite likely to be short.

Of course, there was always the chance of a surprise find.that would make you rich for life, and this had been a surprise find all right. The biggest surprise in the world, but it wasn't going to make Estes rich. It would make him dead.

Harvey Funarelli groaned softly from his bunk, and Estes turned, with a wince of his own as his muscles creaked. They had been badly mishandled. That he wasn't hit as viciously as Funarelli had been was surely because Funarelli was the larger man, and had been closer to the point of near-impact.

Estes looked somberly at his partner and said, "How do you feel, Harv?"

Funarelli groaned again. "I feel broken at every joint. What the hell happened? What did we hit?"

Estes walked over, limping slightly, and said, "Don't try to stand up."

"I can make it," said Funarelli, "if you'll just reach out a hand. Wow! I wonder if I've got a broken rib. Right here. What happened, Ben?"

Estes pointed at the main portview. It wasn't a large one, but it was the best a two-man astro-mining vessel could be expected to have. Funarelli moved toward it very slowly, leaning on Estes' shoulder. He looked out.

There were the stars, of course, but the experienced astronautic mind blanks those out. There are always the stars. Closer in, there was a gravel bank of boulders of varying size, all moving slowly relative to their neighbors like a swarm of very, very lazy bees.

Funarelli said, "I've never seen anything like that before. What are they doing here?"

"Those rocks," said Estes, "are what's left of a shattered asteroid, I suspect, and they're still circling what shattered them, and what shattered us."

"What?" Funarelli peered vainly into the darkness.

Estes pointed. "That!" There was a faint little sparkle in the direction he was pointing.

"I don't see anything."

"You're not supposed to. That's a black hole." Funarelli's close-cropped black hair stood on end as a matter of course, and his staring dark eyes added a touch of horror. He said, "You're crazy."

"No. Black holes can come in all sizes. That's what the astronomers say. That one is about the mass of a large asteroid, I think, and we're moving around it. How else could something we can't see be holding us ill orbit?"

"There's no report on any-"

"I know. How can there be? It can't be seen. It's massOoops, there comes the Sun." The slowly rotating ship had brought the Sun into view and the portview automatically polarized into opacity. "Anyway," said Estes, "we discovered the first black hole actually to be encountered anywhere in the Universe. Only we won't live to see ourselves get the credit."

Funarelli said, "What happened?"

"We got close enough for the tidal effects to smash us up."

"What tidal effects?"

Estes said, "I'm not an astronomer, but as I understand it, even when the total gravitational pull of a thing like that isn't large, you can get so close to it that the pull becomes intense. That intensity falls off so rapidly with increasing distance that the near end of an object is pulled far more strongly than the far end. The object is therefore stretched. The closer and bigger an object is, the worse the effect. Your muscles were torn. You're lucky your bones weren't broken."

Funarelli grimaced. "I'm not sure they aren't…What else happened?"

"The fuel tanks were destroyed. We're stuck here in orbit…It's just lucky we happened to end in one far enough away and circular enough to keep the tidal effect down. If we were closer, or if we even zoomed in closely at one end of the orbit-"

"Can we get word out?"

"Not a word," said Estes. "Communications are smashed."

"You can't fix it?"

"I'm not really a communications expert, but even if I were-It can't be fixed."

"Can't something be jury-rigged?"

Estes shook his head. "We've just got to wait-and die. That's not what bothers me so much."

"It bothers me," said Funarelli, sitting down on his bunk and placing his head in his hands.

"We've got the pills," said Estes. "It would be an easy death. What's really bad is that we can't get word back about -that." He pointed to the portview, which was clear again as the Sun moved out of range.

"About the black hole?"

"Yes, it's dangerous. It seems to be in orbit about the Sun, but who knows whether that orbit is stable. And even if it is, it's bound to get larger."

"I guess it will swallow stuff."

"Sure. Everything it encounters. There's cosmic dust spiraling into it all the time, and giving off energy as it spirals and drops in. That's what makes those dim sparkles of light. Every once in a while, the hole will swallow up a large piece that gets in the way and there'll be a flash of radiation, right down to X rays. The larger it gets, the easier it is for it to drag in material from a greater and greater distance."

For a moment, both men stared at the portview, then Estes went on. "Right now it can be handled maybe. If NASA can maneuver a fairly large asteroid here and send it past the hole in the proper way, the hole will be pulled out of its orbit by mutual gravitational attraction between itself and the asteroid. The hole can be made to curve itself into a path that could head it out of the Solar System, with some further help and acceleration."

Funarelli said, "Do you suppose it started very small?"

"It could have been a micro-hole formed at the time of the big bang, when the Universe was created. It may have been growing for billions of years and if it continues to grow, it may become unmanageable. It will then eventually become the grave of the Solar System."

"Why haven't they found it?"

"No one's been looking. Who would expect a black bole in the asteroid belt? And it doesn't produce enough radiation to be noticeable, or enough mass to be noticeable. You have to run into it, as we did."

"Are you sure we have no communications at all, Ben?…How far to Vesta? They could reach us from Vesta without much delay. It's the largest base in the asteroid belt."

Estes shook his head. "I don't know where Vesta is right now. The computer's knocked out, too."

"God! What isn't knocked out?"

"The air system is working. The water purifier is on. We've got plenty of power and food. We can last two weeks, maybe more."

A silence fell. "Look," said Funarelli after a while. "Even if we don't know where Vesta is exactly, we know it can't be more than a few million kilometers away. If we could reach them with some signal, they could get a drone ship out here within a week."

"A drone ship, yes," said Estes. That was easy. An unmanned ship could be accelerated to levels that human flesh and blood would not endure. It could make trips in a third the time a manned vessel could.

Funarelli closed his eyes, as though blocking out the pain, and said, "Don't sneer at a drone ship. It could bring us emergency supplies, and it would have stuff on board we could use to set up a communications system. We could hold out till the real rescuers came."

Estes sat down on the other bunk. "I wasn't sneering at a drone ship. I was just thinking that there's no way to send a signal, no way at all. We can't even yell. The vacuum of space won't carry sound. "

Funarelli said stubbornly, "I can't believe you can't think of something. Our lives depend on it. "

"The lives of all mankind depend on it, maybe, but I still can't think of anything. Why don't you think of something?"

Funarelli grunted as he moved his hips. He seized the hand grips on the wall next to his bunk and pulled himself up to a standing position. "I can think of one thing," he said, "why don't you turn off the gravity motors and save the power and put less strain on our muscles?"

Estes muttered, "Good idea." He rose and moved to the control board, where he cut the gravity.

Funarelli floated upward with a sigh and said, "Why can't they find the black hole, the idiots?"

"You mean like we did? There's no other way. It's not doing enough."

Funarelli said, "I still hurt, even with no gravity to fight…Oh well, if it keeps on hurting like this, it won't matter so much when it comes to pill-taking time…Is there any way we can make that black hole do more than it's doing?"

Estes said grimly, "If one of those bits of gravel should take it into its head to drop into the hole, a burst of X rays would shoot out."

"Would they detect that on Vesta?"

Estes shook his head. "I doubt it. They're not looking for such a thing. They'd be sure to detect it on Earth, though. Some of the space stations keep the sky under constant surveillance for radiation changes. They'd pick up astonishingly small bursts."

"All right, Ben, reaching Earth would be just as well. They'd send a message to Vesta to investigate. It would take the X rays about fifteen minutes to get to Earth and then it would take fifteen minutes for radio waves to get to Vesta. "

"And how about the time between? The receivers may automatically record a burst of X rays from such and such a direction, but who's to say where it's from? It could be from a distant galaxy that happens to lie in this particular direction. Some technician will notice the bump in the recording and will watch for more bursts in the same place and there won't be any and it will be crossed off as unimportant. Besides, it won't happen, Harv. There must have been lots of X rays when the black hole broke up this asteroid with its tidal effect, but that may have been thousands of years ago when no one was watching. Now what's left of these fragments must have fairly stable orbits."

"If we had our rockets-"

"Let me guess. We could drive our ship into the black hole. Use our deaths to send a message. That wouldn't do any good either. It would still be one pulse from anywhere."

Funarelli said indignantly, "I wasn't thinking of that. I'm not in the market for heroic death. I meant, we've got three engines. If we could rig them on to three pretty large size rocks and send each one into the hole, there would be three bursts of X rays and if we did them a day apart, the source would move detectably against the stars. That would be interesting, wouldn't it? The technicians would pick that up at once, wouldn't they?"

"Maybe, and maybe not. Besides, we don't have any rocketry left and couldn't put them on the rocks if we-" Estes fell silent. Then he said in an altered voice, "I wonder if our space suits are intact."

"Our suit radios," said Funarelli excitedly.

"Hell, they don't reach out more than a few kilometers," said Estes. "I'm thinking of something else. I'm thinking of going out there." He opened the suit locker. "They seem all right."

"Why do you want to go out?"

"We may not have any rockets, but we still have muscle power. At least I have. Do you think you can throw a rock?"

Funarelli made a throwing gesture, or the beginning of one, and a look of agony came over his face. "Can I jump to the Sun?" he said.

"I'll go out and throw some…The suit seems to check out. Maybe I can throw some into the hole…I hope the air lock operates."

"Can we spare the air?" said Funarelli anxiously.

"Will it matter in two weeks?" said Estes wearily.

Every astro-miner has to get outside the ship occasionally -to carry out some repair, to bring in some chunk of matter in the vicinity. Ordinarily, it's an exciting time. In any case, it's a change.

Estes felt little excitement, only a vast anxiety. His notion was so damned primitive, he felt foolish to have it. It was bad enough dying without having to die a damn fool.

He found himself in the black of space, with the glittering stars he had seen a hundred times before. Now, though, in the faint reflection of the small and distant Sun, there was the dim glow of hundreds of bits of rock that must once have been part of an asteroid and that now formed a tiny Saturn's ring about a black hole. The rocks seemed almost motionless, as all drifted along with the ship.

Estes judged the direction of wheel of the stars and knew that ship and rocks were moving slowly in the other direction. If he could throw a rock in the direction of the star motion, he would neutralize some of the rock's velocity relative to the black hole. If he neutralized not enough of the velocity, or too much, the rock would drop toward the hole, skim about it, and come back to the point it had left. If he neutralized just enough, it would come close enough to be powdered by the tidal effect. The grains of powder, in their motions, would slow each other and spiral into the hole, releasing X rays as they did so.

Estes used his miner's net of tantalum steel to gather rocks, choosing them fist size. He was thankful that modern suits allowed complete freedom of motion and were not the virtual coffins they had been when the first astronauts, over a century ago, had reached the Moon.

Once he had enough rocks, he threw one, and he could see it glimmer and fade in the sunlight as it dropped toward the hole. He waited and nothing happened. He didn't know how long it might take to fall into the black hole-if it fell in at all, that is-but he counted six hundred to himself and threw again.

Over and over he did so, with a terrible patience born of searching for an alternative to death, and finally there was a sudden blaze in the direction of the black hole. Visible light and, he knew, a burst of higher-energy radiation as far as X rays at least.

He had to stop to gather more rocks, and then he got the range. He was hitting it almost every time. He oriented himself so that the soft glimmer of the black hole would be seen just above the midportion of the ship. That was one relationship that didn't change as the ship circled and rolled on an axis-or changed least.

Even allowing for his care, however, it seemed to him he was making too many strikes. The black hole, he thought, was more massive than he knew and would swallow up its prey from a larger distance. That made it more dangerous, but increased their chance of rescue.

He worked his way through the lock and back into the ship. He was bone-weary and his right shoulder hurt him.

Funarelli helped him off with the suit. "That was terrific. You were throwing rocks into the black hole."

Estes nodded. "Yes, and I'm hoping my suit has been stopping the X rays. I'd just as soon not die of radiation poisoning."

"They'll see this back on Earth, won't they?"

"I'm sure they will," said Estes, "but will they pay attention? They'll record it all and wonder about it. But what's going to make them come out here for a closer look? I've got to work out something that will make them come, after I have just a little time to rest."

An hour later, he lifted out another space suit. No time to wait for the recharge of the solar batteries in the first one. He said, "I hope I haven't lost the range."

He was out again, and it had become clear that even allowing a fairly wide spread of velocities and direction, the black hole would suck up the slowing rocks as they moved inward.

Estes gathered as many rocks as he could manage and placed them carefully on an indentation in the hull of the ship. They didn't stay there, but they drifted only exceedingly slowly, and even after Estes had collected all he could, those he had placed there first had spread out no more than billiard balls on a pool table.

Then he threw them, at first tensely, and then with growing confidence, and the black hole flashed-and flashed-and flashed.

It seemed to him that the target became steadily easier to hit and that the black hole was growing madly with each impact and that soon it would reach out and suck him and the ship into its never-sated maw.

It was his imagination, of course, and nothing more. Finally all the rocks were gone and he felt he could throw nothing more in any case. He had been out there, it seemed, for hours.

When he was within the ship again he said, as soon as Funarelli had helped him off with his helmet, "That's it. I can't do anything more."

"You had plenty of flashes there," said Funarelli.

"Plenty, and they should surely be recorded. We'll just have to wait now. They've got to come."

Funarelli helped him off with the rest of his suit as best his muscle-torn body would allow. Then he stood, grunting and gasping, and said, "Do you really think they'll come, Ben?"

"I think they've got to," said Estes, almost as though he were trying to force the event by the sheer power of wishing. "I think they've got to."

"Why do you think they've got to?" said Funarelli, sounding like a man who wanted to grasp at straws but didn't dare.

"Because I communicated," said Estes. "We're not only the first people to encounter a black hole, we're the first to use it to communicate; we're the first to use the ultimate communication system of the future, the one that might send messages from star to star and galaxy to galaxy, and that might be the ultimate energy source as well-" He was panting, and he sounded a little wild.

"What are you talking about?" said Funarelli.

"I threw those rocks in rhythm, Harv," said Estes, "and the X-ray bursts came in rhythm. It was flash-flash-flash-flash-flash-flash-flash-flash-flash, and so on."

"Yes?"

"It's old-fashioned; old-fashioned, but that's one thing everyone remembers from the days when people communicated by electric currents running through wires."

"You mean the photograph-phonograph-"

"The telegraph, Harv. Those flashes I produced will be recorded and the first time someone looks at that record, all hell will break loose. It's not just that they'll be spotting an X-ray source; it's not just that it will be an X-ray source moving very slowly against the stars so that it has to be within our Solar System. What it is, is that they'll be seeing an X-ray source going on and off and producing the signal sos-sos-And when an X-ray Source is shouting for help, you'll bet they'll come-as fast as they can-if only to see-what's-there-that-"

He was asleep.

— And five days later, a drone ship arrived.

Incidentally, it may occur to some of my Gentle Readers that there is a certain similarity between the story and my very first published story, MAROONED OFF VESTA, which appeared in print thirty-seven years earlier. In each story, two men are trapped on a spaceship wrecked in the asteroid belt and must use their ingenuity to devise a way of escaping what looked like certain death.

Of course, the resolutions are completely different, and it was in my mind to demonstrate some of the changes in our outlook on the Universe that took place in those thirty-seven years by producing in 1976 a resolution that would have been inconceivable in 1939.

In the fall of 1975, Fred Dannay (better known as Ellery Queen) approached me with a very intriguing idea for the August 1976 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which would be on the stands at the time of the Bicentennial. He planned to publish a mystery dealing with the Bicentennial itself, and another dealing with the Centennial in 1876. What he needed now was one for the Tricentennial in 2076 and, of course, that meant a science fiction story.

Since I have been writing numerous mystery stories for the magazine in recent years, he thought of me and proposed that I tackle the job. I agreed and got to work on November 1, 1975. I ended with uncompromising science fiction which I feared might make a little heavy going for mystery readers. Fred thought otherwise, apparently, for he took the story and was even kind enough to pay me a bonus.