The Ring of Charon

CHAPTER ONE The End

One million gravities, and climbing. Larry O’Shawnessy Chao grinned victoriously and leaned back in his seat to watch the show. They hadn’t shut the Ring down, not yet. Maybe this would change some minds. One million ten thousand gravities. One million twenty. One million twenty-five. One million thirty. Leveling off there. Larry frowned, reached forward and twitched the vernier gain up just a trifle, working more by feel and intuition than by calculation.

It was lonely, deathly quiet in the half darkness of Control Room One of the Gravities Research Station. But then all this world of Pluto was silence. Larry ignored the stillness, the gnawing hunger in his stomach, the bleariness in his eyes. Food and sleep could come later.

The numbers on the readout stuttered downward for a moment, then began their upward climb once again. One million fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety—

One million one hundred thousand gravities. Eleven hundred thousand times more powerful than Earth-normal gravity. Larry looked at the number gleaming on the control panel: 1,100,000.

He glanced up, as if he could see through the ceiling of the control room, through the station’s pressure dome, through the cold of space to the massive Ring hanging in the sky. The Ring was where the action was, not here in this control room. He was merely poking at switches and dials. It was out there, on the Ring orbiting Pluto’s moon Charon, thousands of kilometers overhead, that the work was being done.

A feeling of triumph washed over him. He had used that Ring, and done this. Granted, he was working in a volume only a few microns across, and the thing wasn’t stable, but what the hell. Generating a field this powerful put the whole team back on track. Now even Dr. Raphael would have to admit they were well on the way to generating Virtual Black Holes, to spinning wormholes and stepping through them.

More immediately, a viable VBH would be impressive enough to solve a hell of a lot of budget problems. Maybe even enough to make Raphael happy. Larry, though, had a hard time even imagining the director as anything but distant, cold, stiffly angry. Larry’s father had been like that. There was no pleasing him, no effort that could be great enough to win his approval.

But all things were possible—if Larry could achieve a Virtual Black Hole. Even with this 1.1 million field, that was still a long way off. Field size and stability were still major headaches. Even as he watched, the numbers on the gravity meter flickered and then abruptly dropped to zero. The microscopic field had gone unstable and collapsed.

Larry shook his head and sighed. There went yet another massless gravity field, evaporating spontaneously. But damn it, this one had reached 1.1 million gees and had lasted all of thirty seconds. Those were breakthrough numbers, miracle numbers, no matter how much work was still left to do.

Too bad the rest of the staff was asleep. That was the trouble with getting an inspiration at 0100 hours: no witnesses, no one to celebrate with, no one to be inspired by this success and dream up the next screwball idea. But then he barely knew anyone on the staff. Even after five months here, and with such a glorious reason for doing it, he couldn’t think of anyone he would dare wake up at this hour. Lonely place to be, low man on the totem pole.

Never mind. Tomorrow would be time enough. And maybe this little run would earn him enough attention so he could get to know some people. Larry stood up, stretched and made sure all the logging instruments had recorded the figures and the procedures. He ordered the computer system to prep a hard-copy report for the next day’s science staff meeting, and then powered the system down.

The Observer felt something.

Brief, far-off, tantalizing. Weak, fleeting. But unquestionably, the feeling was there. For the first time in uncounted years, it felt the touch it had awaited.

The Observer did not sense with vision, and the energy was not light, but the Observer’s sensations were analogous to vision. It had been in standby, in watchkeeping mode, for a long time. The something it felt was, to it, a brilliant pinpoint in the darkness, a bright but distant beacon. It correctly interpreted this to mean the source was a small, intensely powerful point of energy at great distance.

The Observer became excited. This was the signal it had waited for for so long.

And yet not precisely the signal. Not powerful enough, not well directed enough. The Observer backed down, calmed itself.

It longed to respond, to do the thing it had been bred and built to do, but the signal stimulus Was not strong enough. It was under the rigid control of what, for lack of a better term, might be called its instincts, or perhaps its programming—and it had no discretion, whatsoever in choosing to respond or not. It had to respond to precisely the right stimulus, and not to any other.

A quiver of emotion played over it as it struggled against its inborn restraints.

But now was not the time. Not yet.

At least, not the time for action. But certainly the time to awaken, and watch more closely. Perhaps the moment for action was close.

It directed its senses toward the source of the power, and settled in to watch carefully.

Ten minutes after the run was over, Larry was out in the corridor, bone weary and feeling very much alone. The excitement of a new idea, the thrill of the chase, was starting to fade away, now that the idea had worked. Larry always felt a letdown after a victory.

Perhaps that was because even his greatest victories were hard to explain. In the world of subatomic physics, the challenges were so obscure, the solutions so tiny and intricate, that it was almost impossible for Larry to discuss them with anyone outside the field. For that matter, Larry was working so far out on the edge of theory he had trouble talking shop with most people in the field.

The price you pay for genius, he thought to himself with a silent, self-deprecating laugh. Larry was twenty-five, and starting to feel a bit long in the tooth for a boy wonder. He looked younger than his age, and the Chinese half of his ancestry showed in his face far more than the Irish half. He was a short, slender, delicate-looking young man. His skin was pale, his straight black hair cut short, his almond eyes wide and expressive. He was one of the few people aboard the station who occasionally chose to wear the standard-issue coveralls instead of his own clothes. The gray coveralls were a bit too large for him, and made him seem younger and smaller than he was. His fondness at other times for Hawaiian shirts didn’t help him seem more mature. It never occurred to Larry that his appearance helped make others underestimate him.

He planted his slippered feet carefully on the Velcro carpet and started walking. Pluto’s gravity, only four percent of Earth’s, was tricky when you were tired. The Gravities Research Station would be an ideal place to put artificial gravity to use, if such a fairy-tale technology were ever possible.

Fat chance of that—but the popular press had latched on to the everyday use of artificial gravity as one of the reasons for funding the station in the first place. There had been all sorts of imaginative “artist’s conceptions” put about, of a research station floating on Jupiter’s surface, hovering on antigravity, of full-gravity space habitats that did not have to spin. Those were at best far-off dreams, at worst spectacular bits of nonsense that made everyone look foolish as it became obvious they were all impossible.

The researchers still hadn’t learned to generate a stable point-source gravity field yet. How could they hope to float a shielded one-gee field in Jupiter’s atmosphere?

Nonsensical though the idea might be, Larry would have welcomed an artificial gee field under his feet just then. He was thoroughly sick of shoes with Velcro. Four-percent gravity was a nuisance, combining the worst features of zero gee and full gravity, without the merits of either. In zero gee you couldn’t fall down; in a decent gee field, your feet stayed under you. Neither was true here.

Larry felt a wave of exhaustion sweep through him. He was suddenly much aware that it was three-thirty in the morning and he was billions of kilometers from home. Unbidden, the image of his hometown street back in Scranton, Pennsylvania, popped into his head. A vague depression sank down on him.

It was when he was deep in the problem that he felt happy. Solutions meant the game was over. It was like the math problems back at school. From grade school, to high school, to college and grad school, math had been his special love. Algebra, trig, calculus, and beyond. Larry had gobbled them all up. The first time he demonstrated a proof, or calculated a function, it was fun, challenging. Puzzlement would give way to understanding and triumph. But afterwards—afterwards the problems were dead to him, static, unchanging. He knew how they worked. From then on, working on that whole type of problem was anticlimactic, redundant. It was as if he were condemned to reading the same mystery novel over and over again, when he already knew the ending.

While the rest of his classmates would struggle through example after example, practicing their skills, he would be bored, rattling through the second problem, and the third, and hundredth, at record speed, while the other kids dragged behind.

Only when the professor deemed it time to move on to the next kind of problem could Larry experience even a new, brief moment of excitement.

Postgrad school and the field of high-energy physics had given him a new freedom, a place where all the problems were new, not only to him, but to everyone. There was no longer the slightly mocking knowledge that the answers were there to be found in the back of the book. But still, when he cracked the problem at hand, the letdown came.

Larry was not an introspective person, and even spotting such an obvious pattern in his behavior was an accomplishment for him. But before anyone got sent to Pluto, the psychiatrists worked hard to make that person more aware of how the mind worked. Put a bit less formally, they made damn sure that you didn’t drive yourself crazy on Pluto. People kept a close eye on sanity on Pluto, watching it the way a man in his pressure suit kept an eye on his air supply.

A tiny leak in the suit could be fatal, and just so with the human mind on Pluto. One tiny weakness, one microscopic break in the armor between you and the cold and the dark, was all it took to leave good men and women watching helplessly as their own sanity dribbled away, evaporating out into the frozen wastes.

Sanity was a scarce commodity on Pluto, easily used up, carefully rationed. The oppressive sense of isolation—of being trapped in this remote place, locked away with 120 other edgy souls, with no escape possible—that was what gnawed at reason.

Not just the grimness of the planet but the knowledge that there was no way home, for months or years at a time, drew nightmares close to so many souls here.

True, there was the supply ship from home every six months. But when it departed, the denizens of the station were stranded for another half year. There was one, count it, one, ship capable of reaching the Inner System stationed at Pluto. The Nenya could, at need, bear the entire station staff home, but it would be a long and grueling flight of many months. Alternatively, she could gun for Earth and get there in sixteen days—but with a maximum of only five people aboard, which meant everyone else would be utterly stranded while she was gone. So far, the Nenya was insurance no one had used.

She could also function as an auxiliary control station for the Ring. But without the anchor of Pluto’s mass to provide calibration, the Nenya’s Ring Control Room was not capable of the sort of fine measurement the station could get. The Nenya’s real value was psychological. She represented a way home, knowledge that it was possible to get back to Earth.

The Gravities Research Station was the only human-habitable place for a billion kilometers in any direction, and every waking moment of their lives, everyone at the station was aware of that fact.

In the silence of the Plutonian night, Larry could imagine that the planet itself resented the presence of humans. Life, light, warmth, activity weren’t welcome here, in this land of unliving cold. Larry shivered at the mere thought of the frigid desolation outside the station.

Without making any conscious decision to go there, he found himself walking toward the observation dome. He needed to get a look outside, a look at the sky.

The darkness, the emptiness, the coldness that surrounded the windowless station preyed on all their minds. The station designer had known all that, and had made sure the station was brightly lit and painted in cheery colors. But the designers had also known it was important for the staff to be able to look on the empty landscape, the barren skyscape; perhaps more importantly, the station staff needed to be able to look toward the distant Sun, needed to use the small telescope in the observation dome to spot the Earth, needed to be able to prove to themselves that light and life and the warm, busy, lively homeworld were still there.

And so is all the weirdness, Larry reminded himself. All the raucous, angry pressure groups, unsure of what they were for, but certain of what they were against. They were a big part of his memory of MIT, and they had frightened him. And scared him worse when they had showed up back home in Pennsylvania. But then, they frightened a lot of people. And in the wake of the half-imaginary Knowledge Crash, the rad groups were spreading.

Larry made his way down the darkened access tunnel to the dome building. The route was long, and he had to find his way there by touch. The way to the dome was deliberately left in darkness, so that a person’s eyes would have the length of time it took to pass through the tunnel to adapt to the gloomy darkness of the Plutonian surface.

At last he stepped out into the large, domed room. It was a big place, big enough for the entire staff to crowd in for important meetings.

Larry stepped to the edge of the room and looked through the transparent dome at the world around him.

In stillness, in silence, the sad gray landscape of Pluto was laid out before him, dimly seen by the faintness of starlight.

Virtually all of the land he could see would have been liquid or gas, back on Earth. Pluto’s surface was made of frozen gases—methane, nitrogen, and traces of a few other light elements. All the surface features were low and rounded, all color subdued. To the west, a slumped-over line of yellowish ammonia-ice hills had somehow thrust its way up out of the interior.

Elsewhere on Pluto, a thin, bright frosting of frozen methane blanketed the land. Only at perihelion, a hundred years from now, would the distant Sun be close enough to sublimate some of the methane back out into a gas.

But here, on this plain, the methane snow was cooked away by waste heat from the station, exposing the dismal grayish brown landscape below. Here, water ice, carbon compounds, veins of ammonia ice, and a certain amount of plain old rock made up the jumbled surface of Pluto, just as they made up the interior. No one yet had developed a theory that satisfactorily explained how Pluto had come to be made that way, or accounted for the presence of Pluto’s moon, Charon.

Larry stared out across the frozen land. The insulation of the transparent dome was not perfect. He felt a distinct chill. Ice crystals formed on the inside of the dome as he exhaled.

Not all the landscape was natural. Close to the horizon, the jagged, shattered remains of the first and second attempts to land a station lay exposed to the stars. Larry knew the tiny graveyard was there as well, even if it was carefully hidden, out of sight of the dome.

The design psychologists had protested vehemently against building again in view of the first two disastrous attempts, but there had been no real choice in the matter. Both of the “earlier” stations had collapsed to the ground and shattered, like red-hot marbles dropped into ice water. But cleaning up the wreckage would have been prohibitively expensive and dangerous—and perhaps not possible at all.

This small valley was the only geothermically stable site in direct line of sight with the Ring. Here was an upthrust belt of rock that, unlike the water-ice and methane, could support the weight of the station without danger of melting. Even with the best possible insulation and laser-radiative cooling, the station’s external skin temperature was a hundred degrees Kelvin. That was cold enough to kill a human in seconds, freeze the blood in the veins—but flame hot compared to the surrounding surface, hot enough to boil away the very hills.

This was the only site where the underlayer of rock was close enough to the surface to serve as a structural support. Anywhere else, the heat of the station would have melted the complex straight through the surface.

If this station held together long enough to sink, Larry reminded himself, staring at the sad wreckage on the horizon. The first two didn’t.

But this station had been here fifteen years. So far, the third try had been the charm.

So far.

Larry tore his eyes away from the wreckage strewn about the landscape and glanced toward the telescope. It was a thirty-centimeter reflector, with a tracking system that kept it locked on the tiny blue marble of Earth whenever the planet was above the local horizon. You could bring up the image on any video monitor in the station, but nearly everyone felt the need to come here on occasion, bend over the eyepiece, and see the homeworld with his or her own eyes.

There was something reassuring about seeing Earth direct, without any electronic amplification, without any chance of looking at a tape or a simulation, to see for certain that Earth, and all it represented, was truly there, not a mad dream spun to make Pluto endurable.

Larry leaned over and took a look. The telescope was set on low magnification at the moment. There she was, a tiny dot of blue, the bright spark of Earth’s Moon too small to form a disk. Larry stepped away from the telescope after only a moment. He was looking for something else in the sky tonight. He needed to see the Ring. The mighty Ring of Charon.

Pluto does not travel the outer marches of the Solar System by himself. The frozen satellite Charon bears the god of the Underworld company. Charon, with an average diameter of about 1,250 kilometers, is, in proportion to the planet it circles, larger than any other satellite. It rides a very close orbit around Pluto, circling the ninth planet every 6.4 days.

The rotation of both satellite and world are tidally locked: just as Earth’s Moon always shows the same face to Earth, so Charon always shows the same face to Pluto. The difference is that Pluto’s rotation is likewise affected, its rotation synchronized to match its satellite’s orbit. Viewed from Charon, Pluto does not seem to rotate, but presents one unchanging hemisphere.

Thus, from those points on the surface where Charon is visible at all, Charon hangs motionless in Pluto’s sky. The satellite is so close to the planet that it sits below the horizon from more than half the planet’s surface.

None of that mattered to Larry. He did not even notice the dark shadow of Charon brooding there, blotting out the stars. He had eyes for only one object in that sky.

Encircling Charon was the Ring, its running lights gleaming in the dark sky, a diadem of jewels set about Pluto’s moon. Sixteen hundred kilometers in diameter, the largest object ever built by humans, it girdled the tiny world of Charon.

Larry felt the wonder of it all steal over him again. It was a remarkable piece of engineering, no matter how much it cost. It was the reason so much time and treasure, so much effort, so many lives had been spent landing the Gravities Research Station on Pluto and making it operational. Compared to the cost of the Ring, the cost of placing the station on Pluto was pocket change. An orbital facility would have been cheaper, but the need for precise measurement forced them to operate the Ring from a planetary surface, a stabilized reference point.

The Ring was face-on to Pluto, showing a perfect circle around the gloom-dark gray of Charon, a gleaming band of gold about a gloomy, lumpen world, a world so small and light that it had never completely formed into a sphere. Indeed, its tidal lock with Pluto had distorted its shape, warping it into an egg-shaped thing, with one long end pointed at Pluto.

The Ring was the largest particle accelerator ever built—all but certainly the largest that ever would be built. Designed to probe the tiniest, most subtle intersections of matter and energy, it was so large and powerful that it had to be built here, on the borderlands of the Solar System. It was around Charon not only to escape the disturbing influence of the Sun’s radiation and the strong, interwoven gravity fields of the Inner System, but also to prevent its interfering with the inner worlds: it was capable of achieving enormous energies.

And, as Larry had proven once again tonight, it was capable of generating and manipulating the force of gravity.

No other machine ever built was capable of that. The ability to manipulate gravity should have been enough to keep the research station going. Basic research could be done here that would be impossible anywhere else.

But try convincing the funding people back at the U.N. Astrophysical Foundation. They were too focused on the pie-in-the-sky dreams of near-term gravity control.

Larry blamed Dr. Simon Raphael for that. When he had been appointed director, back when Larry was in elementary school, Raphael had made some pretty rash promises. Most of those damned artist’s conceptions were based on Raphael’s predictions of what would be possible once the research team on Pluto was able to solve the secret of gravity. Raphael had all but guaranteed a workable artificial gravity system—and now both he and the funding board were beginning to see that it wasn’t going to happen.

Up until tonight, the Ring of Charon hadn’t been able to maintain a gravity field of more than one gee, and even that was only ten meters across. Worse, the fields collapsed in milliseconds.

If, the U.N. Astrophysical Foundation asked, it took a piece of hardware 1,600 kilometers across to generate a puny, unstable gravity source a few meters across, and if even that giant generator was so delicate it had to be as far out from the Sun as Pluto in order to work at all, then what possible use could artificial gravity be? What conceivable purpose could gravity waves serve when they had to come from Pluto?

And Raphael wanted to go home. Everyone knew that. Larry Chao was very much afraid that the good doctor had figured out that the quickest way to do that was to shut the damn place down.

One million one hundred thousand gravities, sustained for thirty seconds. Larry stared harder at the Ring overhead and felt a thrill of pride. He had tweaked that monster’s tail, and forced that much power from it. Surely there could be no stronger argument in favor of staying on.

The Gravities Research Station was not at its best in the morning. Perhaps it was some holdover from the long-lost days when astronomers were Earthbound and forced to work at night.

Whatever the reason, mornings were not a pretty sight at the station. Maybe that was why Raphael scheduled science staff meetings for 0900. Maybe he enjoyed the sight of twenty or so science staff members grumbling and squinting in the morning. The hundred administrative, maintenance and technical staff workers were no doubt glad to miss them.

Dr. Simon Raphael sighed wearily as he pushed open the door to the conference room and sat down at the head of the table for this last full staff meeting. He echoed the chorus of greetings from the staff without really hearing them. He spread his papers out in front of him, relief and regret playing over him.

Strange, to be thinking in lasts already. The last meeting, the last experimental schedule to prepare, and then the last science summary report to prepare. Then time to pack up and download, power down and close up. Time to go home. Soon it would all be over and done with.

His hands clenched themselves into fists, and he forced them to relax, open out. Slowly, carefully, he lay his open hands palm down on the table. The voices fell silent around the table as the others waited for him to begin, but he ignored them. A few bold souls returned to their conversations. Low voices filled the room again. Raphael tried to stare a hole through a memo that sat on the table before him, a piece of paper full of words he didn’t care about.

There was something dull and angry deep inside him, a sullen thing sitting on his soul. A sullen something that had grown there, all but unnoticed, as the years had played themselves out.

It was hate: he knew that. Hatred and anger for all of it. For the station that might as well have been a prison, for the pointless chase after gravity control, for the waste of so much of his life in this fruitless quest, for his own failure. Hatred for the funding board that was forcing him to quit, anger at the people here around this table who were fool enough to have faith in him. Hatred for the damned frozen planet and the damned Ring that had sucked the life out of him and wrecked his career.

And hatred for the Knowledge Crash. If you could hate something that might not even have happened. That was perhaps the surpassing irony: no one was ever quite sure if the Knowledge Crash had even taken place. Some argued that the very state of being uncertain whether or not the Crash had occurred proved that it had.

Briefly put, the K-Crash theory was that Earth had reached the point where additional education, improved (but more expensive) technology, more and better information, and faster communications had negative value.

If, the theory went on, there had not been a Knowledge Crash, the state of the world information economy would be orderly enough to confirm the fact that it hadn’t happened. That chaos and uncertainty held such sway therefore demonstrated that the appropriate information wasn’t being handled properly. QED, the Crash was real.

An economic collapse had come, that much was certain. Now that the economy was a mess, learned economists were pointing quite precisely at this point in the graph, or that part of the table, or that stage in the actuarial tables to explain why. Everyone could predict it, now that it had happened, and there were as many theories as predictions. The Knowledge Crash was merely the most popular idea.

But correct or not, the K-Crash theory was as good an explanation as any for what had happened to the Earth’s economy. Certainly there had to be some reason for the global downturn. Just as certainly, there had been a great deal of knowledge, coming in from many sources, headed toward a lot of people, for a long time.

The cultural radicals—the Naked Purples, the Final Clan, all of them—were supposed to be a direct offshoot of the same info-neurosis that had ultimately caused the Crash. There were Whole communities who rejected the overinformed lifestyle of Earth and reached for something else—anything else—so long as it was different. Raphael did not approve of the rads. But he could easily believe they were pushed over the edge by societal neuroses.

The mental institutions of Earth were full of info-neurotics, people who had simply become overwhelmed by all they needed to know. Information psychosis was an officially recognized—and highly prevalent—mental disorder. Living in the modern world simply took more knowledge than some people were capable of absorbing. The age-old coping mechanisms of denial, withdrawal, phobic reaction and regression expressed themselves in response to brand-new mental crises.

Granted, therefore, that too much data could give a person a nervous breakdown. Could the same thing have happened to the whole planet?

The time needed for the training required to do the average technical job was sucking up the time that should have gone to doing the job. There were cases, far too many of them, of workers going straight from training program to retirement, with never a day of productive labor in between. Such cases were extreme, but for many professions, the initial training period was substantially longer than the period of productive labor—and the need for periodic retraining only made the situation worse.

Not merely the time, but the expense required for all that training was incredible. No matter how it was subsidized or reapportioned or provided via scholarship or grant program, the education was expensive, a substantial drain on the Gross Planetary Product.

Bloated with information, choked with the needs of a world-girdling bureaucracy required to track information and put it to use, strangled by the data security nets that kept knowledge out of the wrong hands, lost in the endless maze of storing and accessing all the data required merely to keep things on an even keel, Earth’s economy had simply ground to a halt. The world was so busy learning how to work that it never got the chance to do the work. The planet was losing so much time gathering vital data that it didn’t have a chance to put the data to use. Earth’s economy was writhing in agony. Both the planet generally, and the U.N. Astrophysical Foundation specifically, could scarcely afford necessities. They certainly could not afford luxuries—especially ones that could only add to the knowledge burden. Such as the Ring of Charon.

His heart pounding, Raphael’s vision blurred for a moment, and he glared unseeingly at the paper clenched in his fist. Anger. Hatred. For the Crash, for the Board, for the Ring, for the staff—

And for himself, of course. Hatred for himself.

Marooned out here all these years, with but the rarest and briefest of pilgrimages home, trapped all that time on this rotting iceball, with that damned Ring staring down at him, the satellite Charon framed inside it, the dark blind pupil of a sightless eye, pinning him to the spot in its unblinking gaze, a relentless reminder of his failure.

The project, the station, the Ring had failed to crack the problem he had staked his reputation on. Practical gravity control was flat-out impossible. That fact he was sure of. He had certainly paid enough for that knowledge. Paid for it with his life’s work.

He forced himself to be calm and looked around the table at the people. He knew that he should think of them as his people; he had tried for a long time to do so. But they were the ones that he, Raphael, had failed. They were the source of his guilt, and he hated them for it. For in his chase after artificial gravity, he had dragged their lives down with his.

They were the ones most harmed by his failure. The last transport ship had arrived and immediately departed for home five months before, delivering the newest recruits and taking home a lucky few. Raphael remembered few things as clearly as the faces of the stay-behinds, watching the transport head for home, leaving them behind, stranded on Pluto until the next ship came, a few wistful glances skyward at the Nenya’s parking orbit.

Now they would all be going home.

Going home marked as failures, on a four-month journey that would offer them little more than time to brood.

Another wave of anger washed over him, and he called the meeting to order. “Ladies and gentlemen, if we could please get started,” he said. There was something that bespoke patience above and beyond the call of duty in his gravelly voice, as if he had been sitting there waiting for order for far longer than was proper. The people around the table, chastened, stopped their low conversations.

Sondra Berghoff leaned back in her seat and watched the man go to work. Raphael-watching was something of a hobby for her. She knew what was coming, or at least she had made a fairly shrewd guess. She was interested in seeing how Raphael would handle it, how he would play the room. The man was a past master of emotional blackmail, a prize manipulator—there was no question about that.

“I propose to dispense with the normal meeting procedures today, if that is acceptable to you all,” Raphael said, pausing just a bit too briefly for anyone to have a chance to object. “I have a rather significant announcement to make, which I believe ought to take precedence over other matters. As per the lasergram I received from Earth this morning, I must now direct you to commence shutdown of this facility.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then a buzz of voices raised in protest. Sondra sighed. She had expected it, but she wasn’t happy about it. Dr. Raphael started speaking, a calculated half beat early once again, before someone had the chance to collect his or her wits enough to speak up. “If I could continue,” he went on, with a warning edge to his voice. “As you all know, shutdown has been a serious possibility for some time, and I have pursued every means of preventing it. But economic problems back home—and I might add the distraction caused by certain political movements in the Earth-Moon system—are simply too much for us to overcome. The funding board feels that the massive expense of this station is not justified by the quantity or quality of your work—of our work.” He corrected himself with great magnanimity, a gently pained expression on his face. Sondra read the meaning easily. As your leader, I must of course willingly associate myself with your work, however inadequate it might be. Such are the trials of leadership. Everyone in the room understood that subtext. “The people back home simply expected too much. Unrealistic promises were made.” Two or three people shifted uncomfortably in their seats, and angry scowls clouded more than one face.

Sondra herself had a bit of trouble resisting the temptation to lean across the table and punch him. Just who made those promises, Sunshine? she thought.

Raphael scanned the faces about the table and continued. “Of course this is unfair, and shortsighted of the board. We have done great things, and when the history of science in this century is written, the Ring will figure prominently.” Nice little blind side there, Sondra decided. Blame the funding board, blame the staff, but don’t blame yourself, Raffy, she thought.

Obviously, Raphael wanted to keep them off balance, avoid substantive debate and open discussion while being careful to maintain the appearance of those things. “We can all be proud of what we did here.” Sondra noticed that Raphael was already talking about the station in the past tense. It was over already. “Some had the dream of conquering gravity, bending it to our will as electricity, fission, fusion have been put to use. But that was not to be.”

It wasn’t you who tried to sell that dream, no not at all. Sondra was growing weary of the charade. No doubt whipsawing people was a reflex for him, automatic, unconscious by now. Still, at some level or another, Raphael had to know what he was doing. He must know he wasn’t fighting fair with that kind of buck-passing crack.

Sondra glanced around the room. Men and women bright enough to run a particle accelerator the size of a small planet likewise had to be at least somewhat aware that they were being manipulated, even as they let it happen. Surely Raphael had figured out that they knew, and surely most members of the staff had figured out that Raphael knew they knew, and so on and on in a weary spiral.

Possession of that knowledge did not seem to bother Raphael. Why should it? The staff members always folded, always allowed Raphael to manipulate them. Dr. Simon Raphael had been running this station by such means from day one, and it had always worked. No doubt it had worked equally well at every other operation he had ever managed. Raphael had had decades of practice bullying and manipulating.

But the questions remained: why did these people put up with it? Perhaps some calculated that cooperation was easier than battling slippery insinuations. Others had learned the hard way that going along was simpler than arguing with an unreasonable request made in a wounded tone, or disputing an impossible order dressed up to sound like the voice of long-suffering reason.

Probably most of them simply responded with the guilt-stricken impulse of a small boy accused of unspecified sins by his parents. There is something in human nature that wants authority to be just. It is easier to discover imagined faults in yourself rather than accept real flaws in the people that you count on, the people you have to trust. How many children find ways to blame themselves for their parents’ divorce? But very few parents deliberately try to induce that guilt as a means of control—the way Raphael did.

“We must accept the fact that we have come to a dead end. Therefore,” Raphael went on, “the time has come to retreat as gracefully as possible, and move on to other things.”

But a new voice spoke up. “Ah, sir, perhaps not. I think I might have found an approach.” Sondra looked around in surprise, and spotted the speaker at the far end of the table. That new kid, Larry Chao.

Every head in the room swiveled around to find the person who had dared to speak out. Dr. Raphael’s eyes bulged out of his head, and his face went pale with anger.

“Well, that is, I haven’t solved everything, but I ran an experiment last night—and well, maybe…” The poor kid felt the eyes on him. He was visibly running out of steam, deathly embarrassed. “I just thought that maybe my results might be good enough to impress the board, let us keep going…” Larry’s voice faded away altogether, and he stared helplessly at Raphael.

“Chao, isn’t it?” Raphael asked in the angry tones of a schoolmaster interrupted by a naughty little boy. “I am not aware of any experiment scheduled for last night.”

“It… it wasn’t scheduled, sir,” Larry said. “It was just an idea that came to me in the middle of the night. I tried it and it worked.”

“Are you aware, Chao, of the regulations regarding unauthorized use of the station’s equipment? No? I thought not. You will provide me with a complete list of equipment and materials used, and the precise length of time you operated that equipment. The costs of your experiment will be calculated at the standard basis, and the total amount will be deducted from your next pay deposit. If the amount is higher than your pay—and I won’t be surprised if it is—appropriate arrangements will be made to garnishee your pay for as long as is required.”

Larry’s face flushed and he gestured helplessly. “But sir, the results! It’s got to be enough to convince them.”

“I seriously doubt that a funding board that has decided to shut this facility down as an economy move will be persuaded to change its mind because a junior researcher saw fit to waste even more money. That will be quite enough from you, Mr. Chao.”

Catch that real subtle point, Larry? Sondra thought. You’re still a mere mister. Don’t you know no one is capable of actual thought unless they have at least one doctorate?

Raphael looked around the table with a ferocious expression on his face. “Unless someone else has an equally vital contribution to make, I think we must now proceed to the logistics of the shutdown. I intend to launch the evacuation ship no later than one month from today. I propose that all department heads report back in three days, having in the meantime set the work priorities. We are instructed by the board to leave the station, the Ring, and all our facilities in standby mode. We are to ‘mothball’ the station, as the lasergram puts it, in the hopes that it might be reoccupied and reactivated at some future date. As there is a great deal to do, and very little time, I propose that we close this meeting now and set about planning the task ahead.” Raphael hesitated a moment, as if there were the slightest chance of anyone disagreeing. “Very well, then. Department heads will meet here at 0900 hours, three days from now, with preliminary shutdown schedules prepared.”

The meeting broke up, but Sondra Berghoff kept her seat, and watched the people go, all of them moving carefully in the low gravity.

None of them had spoken up.

With the whole project about to crash down about their ears, none of them had so much as lodged a protest. What, exactly, did they have to lose, if the station was lost anyway? And what sort of madness was it to ignore the Chao kid? Sure, it was a long shot, but what harm could possibly come from listening?

Probably Chao’s improvements wouldn’t be enough. At a guess, Chao had managed to force some minor increase in gee-force generation, to two or three gravities, or held the field together for something more than the current record of ten seconds. Well, if he had, that would be a real accomplishment and bully for him. It wouldn’t be enough to change any minds, but why couldn’t anyone speak up, and at least demand that he be heard?

Sondra drummed her fingers on the table. Just to pull an example out of the air, why hadn’t she spoken up herself?

CHAPTER TWO Bills to Pay

Gone. The bright beacon in the dark was gone After only the briefest moment. The Observer strained itself to find the signal again, but it was not there.

How could it be gone? A pang of sorrow, of loneliness, washed over it. Abandoned. Abandoned again after such a long time. It struggled to calm itself, and resume its aeons-long sleep.

But there was a small part of itself that would not allow complete rest. A small part of it watched still.

And hoped.

Sondra stood in front of her mirror. There she was, for what it was worth. Pudgy figure, chubby face, red hair a mass of tight curls. She was dressed in her usual style: a rumpled shirt of indeterminate color, shapeless sweatpants, and Velcro-bottom slippers. But she wasn’t at the mirror to check her appearance. The point here was to try an age-old test. Most people meant it figuratively, but her family had made it literal. She tried to look herself in the eye.

And failed.

She remembered the first time that had happened, when she had fibbed about dipping into the cookie jar at age five. Her father had marched her into the bathroom, stood her on the sink, and forced her to look in the mirror as she repeated her childish lie. She hadn’t been able to do it then, and she couldn’t do it now. Of course this time she hadn’t lied. But she failed to do right—and that came to the same thing.

She turned and left her cabin, determined to make it up.

Five minutes later, she tapped at the door to Larry’s room, more than a little embarrassed, and quite unsure what she was there for. She had a guilty conscience, and Sondra had been brought up to believe in doing something about feeling guilty. Any action, any gesture to make amends, however pointless, was better than letting guilt feelings fester.

She should have spoken up at the meeting, and she hadn’t. She had to do something to fix that, even if she didn’t know what that something might be.

“Come in,” a muffled voice said through the thin door. She pushed the door open and stepped into the little compartment. Larry was sitting up on the bed, a portable notepack computer in his lap. He looked up in surprise. “Uh, hello, Dr. Berghoff.”

“Hello, Larry.”

He tossed the notepack to one side of the bed and stood up, not quite sure how to make his guest welcome.

“Um, let me pull a chair out for you.” He reached behind her and yanked a fold-out seat from the wall. Larry sat back down on the narrow single bed, and Sondra sat down opposite him. She had always thought of him as young, a wide-eyed kid. Probably that was true, even if it wasn’t fair. Sondra herself was twenty-six, and Larry couldn’t be more than a year or two younger. Sondra had unconsciously pegged him at about seventeen or so. That was patently impossible, now that she thought about it.

The station was the province of highly specialized researchers. High-energy physics was full of whiz kids— but not even a whiz kid could make it here earlier than twenty-four. It would take a certifiable genius, the sort who skipped every other grade all through his schooling, even to get here that young. Sondra herself had been the youngest-ever fellow at the station when she had arrived here two years ago. With a start, she realized Larry was just about the same age she had been at arrival.

Had she been this much of an innocent then?

She looked more closely at him. Certainly there was something about his face that made him look more youthful than he was. His wide, solemn eyes, his jet black hair trimmed in the station’s standard amateur bowl-over-the-head style, his smooth, unlined skin, the oversized coveralls added to the appearance of extreme youth. Sondra was willing to bet he didn’t need to shave more than once a week.

But there was more to it than that. Life had not yet put a line upon his face, or touched his expression, his eyes, his soul. There was no hint of incident, of tragedy, of pain’s lessons or sorrow’s teachings in his eyes.

She had no idea where he was from. He had a strong American accent to Sondra’s ear, for whatever that was worth. Was he born there, or did he merely learn English from an American tutor? So much she didn’t know.

And he was one of only 120 people within a billion kilometers of here! One of only twenty scientists who sat around that science staff table at the damned weekly meetings. How could she have lived in such a small community for so long and know so little about one of the people in it? Sondra thought for a moment about some of the other people at the station, and was stunned to realize she could not put names to several of the faces.

She had once been such a people person. Pluto had turned her into a sour recluse, even as it poisoned Raphael. But it didn’t seem to have touched Larry Chao at all. She looked at him and wondered what to say.

“I’m just trying to work up my usage figures for the Ring,” Larry said, trying to find something to fill up the silence. His voice sounded most unhappy. “It looks like I spent the planetary debt last night. I don’t know what the hell to do.”

“I’ll bet. Can I see your figures?” Sondra asked, grateful that Larry had given her something to talk about.

Larry shrugged. “Sure, I guess. I can’t get in any deeper than I am now.”

Sondra wrinkled her brow and looked at him oddly. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, the director sent you, didn’t he? To check on me?”

Sondra opened her mouth in surprise, shut it and had to start over again before she was able to speak. “Send me! Raphael sending me! The only place he’d tell me to go is outside without a heater or a suit.”

It was Larry’s turn to look surprised. “I thought you were one of his favorites. You always sit so close to him at the meetings.”

Sondra grinned wickedly. “There are always plenty of seats at that end. Besides, if I sit close I can keep an eye on him. I’ve sort of made a hobby out of watching how he handles things.”

“He sure as hell handled me,” Larry said mournfully. “Now I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll never be able to pay this back. It’s more than I’ll earn in my whole life. Hell, I still haven’t paid back all my loans to MIT.”

“Let me see how bad it is,” Sondra said gently. Larry handed the notepack over to Sondra. She took one look at the figures and gasped. “Five million BritPounds! How the hell could you possibly run up that high a tab? That’s more than the monthly budget for the whole station.”

Larry nodded miserably. “I know. It’s all down there.”

Sondra paged through the cost estimate and started to feel a little better. This guy might be a genius at what he did, but he obviously didn’t know from cost estimating. His price figures were astronomically high, even for an honest cost report—though Sondra did not intend Raphael to get an honest report. “This can’t be right. You’ve got yourself down for six full hours of Ring time.”

“That’s how long I was at it last night. Ring time is most of the cost. I checked the accounting records in the main computer. Ring time is billed at seven hundred thousand pounds an hour.”

“First off, that’s the figure we use when we bill to an external experimenter. Let me check the rate for staff experimenters.” Sondra worked the controls on the note-pack, powered up the radio link to query the main station computers, and pulled down the answer. “Thought so. Inside work is billed out at five hundred thousand. Besides, even that’s an artificial rate set up for accounting purposes. It’s got nothing to do with actual costs.”

“Great. That knocks one-point-two million off my tab,” Larry said. He flopped back on the bed and sighed. “I should be able to scrape up the other four-point-eight million from somewhere. Ha ha. Big laugh.”

Sondra looked up from her figures with a smile. The joke wasn’t funny, but the attempt to make it was promising. “Secondly,” she said, “you billed yourself for power and materials when those are supposed to be covered by the hourly rate. It’s not a big chunk, but we can subtract that out too. Third, six hours isn’t how long you were running the Ring, it’s how long you were in the control room, according to the logging report on the instruments. You couldn’t possibly have been operating the Ring for that six hours straight. You’d have gone through a month’s power allocation. I bet ninety-five percent of that time was in computer time and setting up the experiment, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Okay, how long was the Ring itself powered up, actually taken out of standby mode and cooking?”

Larry thought for a second. “Seven, maybe eight minutes. I’d have to check the experiment log file.”

“We’ll check it in a second, but let’s assume we’re talking eight minutes. At the internal experimenter’s rate of five hundred thousand pounds an hour, that comes to sixty-six thousand, six hundred sixty-six BritPounds.”

“That’s still two years’ pay for me!” Larry protested.

“So we fudge together a ten-year garnisheeing plan and submit that,” Sondra said. “You pay the first month’s installment like a good little boy—and by the second month the whole Institute shuts down. If the station shuts down, how can it dock your pay—especially when it isn’t paying you anymore? And while we’re at it, we arrange to have it paid off in Israeli shekels. That’s the convertible currency with the highest inflation rate right now. The debt will lose half its value in a year.”

Larry thought about it for a moment and frowned. “It doesn’t sound exactly honest to me.”

Sondra muttered a curse under her breath. “It’s bad enough that Raphael wants to penalize you for showing initiative and being inspired. Why the hell do you have to cooperate with him when he does it?”

“But he’s got a point. I wasn’t authorized to run the test. I didn’t get it scheduled.”

People want authority to be just, Sondra thought. “Three-quarters of the experiments here aren’t scheduled. That rule is on the books to prevent people from doing side jobs for commercial labs. We’re supposed to be working in the public interest and our data is public domain. Without a rule to cover moonlighting, private companies could hit a researcher up for secret experiment runs. The rule wasn’t meant to punish you for thinking, and Raphael is wrong to use it against you. We couldn’t get anywhere complaining directly to him, so we have to find backdoor ways around the rule. Give me a chance and I bet I can whittle the charges down even further.”

Larry thought for a minute. “Hell, there’s no way I’m going to be able to pay anything more anyway. All right; I’ll do it your way.”

“Great. Glad to hear it.” Sondra set the notepack to one side. “The real reason I came in was to apologize for not sticking up for you today. Let me fudge the figures for you, just to make it up.”

“Why should you have done anything today? You barely know me.”

“Yeah, but by this time, I should know you. The old-timer is supposed to show the new kid around. Besides, every one of us around that table should have spoken up, and none of us did. We’re all too browbeaten by Raphael.”

Larry sat up again. “That much I can believe. He reminds of my Uncle Tal. Tal always managed to find a way to let me know I wasn’t sufficiently grateful to my parents. Nothing I did was ever enough. I don’t know how many times I wanted to face up to him, but I never worked up the nerve. And Dr. Raphael is a hundred times worse.”

Sondra felt a twinge of guilt, a legitimate one this time. Much as she hated to admit it, there was a part of her that admired Raphael’s cussedness, that felt some sympathy for him. “Don’t be too hard on him. He hasn’t had it easy. He’s spent practically his whole life being an old man in a young person’s game. It took him a few extra years to get his doctorate for some reason. He fell behind the current theories and research, and never really got caught up. That was twenty-five years ago. He’s lived all that time watching boy and girl wonders like us make all the big strides.

“Imagine what a whole life like that would be—always a little bit behind the curve, forever condemned to be a bright man in a field where the average worker is a genius. No wonder he gets frustrated.” She paused, and shrugged. “Even so, he shouldn’t take it out on the rest of us.”

“And we shouldn’t let him get away with it,” Larry said with surprising firmness. “If we didn’t cooperate, he couldn’t push us around.”

“I’ve been telling myself that for a long time,” Sondra agreed. “But if we’re going to close up shop in a month, it’s a little late to stage a revolt.”

A shy, tentative smile played over Larry’s face. “There’s still my results. They might be worth something.”

Sondra smiled indulgently. It would take miracle numbers to do any good. Mere refinement, another tweakup in performance wouldn’t help. But she wasn’t going to say that to Larry. What good could it do to dash all his hopes? “Yeah, you’re right. They might be something.”

“Wanna see them?” Larry asked eagerly. He bounded off the bed without waiting for an answer, shot over Sondra’s head and caromed off the ceiling, much to her startlement. He made a perfect landing in front of his desk and wrapped his legs around the chair legs. Obviously he had practiced a lot moving in Pluto’s weak gravity. He dug through the papers clipped to the desktop, and pulled a single sheet out of the thick sheaf. “This is the summary,” he said. “I’ve got a preliminary detail report, but the computer is still doing some number crunching.”

Sondra took the paper without looking at it. “Why so long to run the calculations?” she asked.

Larry shrugged. “I didn’t have a chance to start it running until after the meeting, and it’s a complicated problem that’ll suck up a lot of processing time. Too big for a remote terminal. I’ve got the Ring control computer slipstreaming pieces of my job in between legitimate work, in small enough hunks that it won’t get flagged on the accounting system. I don’t want Raphael nailing me for sucking up computer time too.” He grinned shyly.

Sondra laughed. “You’re learning,” she said, and glanced casually at the summary sheet. Then she blinked, and looked at it again, more carefully. She had to read it twice more before she was certain she had read the numbers correctly. They couldn’t be right. They couldn’t be. “This has got to be wrong,” she objected. “You can’t have gotten that kind of gee field. Even if we knew how to do it, we don’t have the power to generate even one percent that much force.”

“The numbers are right,” Larry said. “And I didn’t generate that gravity force—I focused and amplified an existing gravity field. Charon’s gravity field.”

Sondra looked at him. His voice was calm, steady. There was nothing defensive in his tone, and he looked her straight in the eye. He believed in the figures. She looked at the page again and checked the time stamp on the experiment. Hours before Raphael had dropped his bombshell. No, Larry could not have faked the numbers in some sort of mad attempt to cancel the closing with a spectacular success. Besides, these numbers were too spectacular. They were too good for anyone to try to fake them. No one would believe it. They had to be real.

She realized that she had been staring blankly at the summary sheet. She put it down and took a good hard look at Larry. He was not the sort to make a good liar. If he had been trying to put something over, he would have blushed and stammered, his eyes would have shifted away from hers. Either the data were right, or Larry had made a spectacular error.

He believed. But no one else would.

“Has Raphael seen this?” she asked, tapping a finger on the sum sheet.

“I haven’t worked up the nerve to send the data to his terminal yet. I was going to present it at the meeting, but I didn’t,” Larry admitted unhappily.

“Damn it.” If Larry had sent them in before the meeting, they would have had at least some credibility. “Send it right now. Not just to his terminal. Copy to every researcher on the station. Now.”

“But—”

“But me no buts, Larry. When they see those figures coming after the shutdown announcement, everyone will assume you cooked them up to cancel the shutdown. If we release them now, at least there’ll be the argument that you wouldn’t have had the time to fabricate the figures. The longer you wait the weaker that argument will get.”

“But those figures are right,” Larry objected. “They’re not faked.”

“I know that, and you know that—but who else will buy it? These figures are five hundred thousand times larger than they ought to be. Use Occam’s razor. What’s the simplest explanation—a perfectly timed breakthrough, or a fraud?”

Larry thought for a moment, then grabbed his note-pack and typed in a series of commands. For a long moment, there was no sound in the little room but the low chuckle of the keyboard. Sondra stared intently at Larry, and she realized that her heart was racing, that sweat had broken out on her forehead.

I’m scared, she told herself, wondering what in the world there was to be frightened of.

And then the answer came to her. She was scared of the power Larry had found. He had stabilized it across a microscopic volume, and only for a few seconds. But inside that tiny time and space, he had produced a gravity field a thousand times more powerful than the Sun’s. He had produced force great enough to crush whole worlds.

Surely that should be enough to frighten anyone.

I’m coming home, Jessie. Home. Simon Raphael set down his old-fashioned pen and felt his eyes mist over for a moment. The foolish tears of an old man. But that didn’t matter. No need to be ashamed. That was the whole point of the journal, of course. To let his emotions out in private, where they could do no harm. To tell everything to the one woman he had ever loved.

There were times, many of them, when he questioned the wisdom, indeed the sanity, of writing his journal down in the form of letters to his dead wife. But sanity was in short supply on Pluto. Best not to spend his hoarded supply on private thoughts. Best to have it in reserve for his dealings with the others.

The final notice came by lasergram last night, he wrote. Soon, soon now, I will walk again under an open blue sky. Soon, once again, I shall visit you. Her grave was a lovely place, nestled into the side of a quiet hillside, looking down on the green fields of Shenandoah Valley, looking out over the cool uplands of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I will leave this place and come home to you.

He set down his pen, sighed, and closed his eyes. He imagined that he could smell the cool forest air wafted over the valley. It was incredible to him that others would chose to stay here. Fantastic that they would struggle to find reasons to stay. Even make them up. Perhaps this boy Chao seriously thought he had discovered something worthwhile. Perhaps it was not deliberate fraud.

Too bad. The moment was past for wasting time on harebrained theories.

Raphael knew Chao was wrong. Chao could not have found anything, for there was nothing to find. Gravity research was a dead end. That, when all was said and done, was Simon Raphael’s reason for giving up.

He smiled, a wan and thin creasing of his lips, and took up his pen again. I feel no regret in leaving here, he wrote. I have done all I could, tried as hard as I might. Now there is nothing left but to remember what W. C. Fields said. Jessie had always loved the ancient comedy films, even if Raphael himself had not. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then give up. No sense being a damn fool about it.”

CHAPTER THREE From Pawn to Player

The observer’s slumbers, heretofore measured in unbroken millennia, were now irrevocably disturbed. Rest, sleep were not to be. That small ray of hope would not be stilled. The Observer stirred restlessly, unable to ignore any longer the tantalizing energies it felt.

Something was happening in the depths of space. Now that it had been awakened by the not-quite-correct signal, its sensitivity was increased. It could detect many faint twitches and whispers emanating from the far reaches of the Solar System, from a source moving slowly in a distant orbit.

It formed a first theory, though the process by which it did so could not precisely be called thinking. Rather, it was a memory search, an attempt to match new input against the results of previous experience.

It examined its heritage memory, calling forth not only its own lengthy, if somewhat uneventful, experience, but the recollections of all its forebears. It found a circumstance that came close to matching the present one, in the life of a distant ancestor. Perhaps the results of that ancient event could provide an explanation for the current odd situation.

With something like a pang of disappointment, it played back the outcome of the old event. If that precedent was a guide, then this flurry of gravity signals was nothing more than one of its own group malfunctioning, erroneously radiating random gravity signals.

To set its conclusions in two human analogs, each useful and neither entirely accurate, it conjectured that an alternate phenotype of its own genotype had taken ill. Or else that a distant subsystem, another component of the same machine of which it was apart, had broken down.

Was perhaps one of its own breed orbiting in that space? It consulted its memory store and found the scans relating to that part of the sky.

It had expected to find a small, asteroid-sized body reported as orbiting there, another subtype of its breed placed in orbit. To its utter shock, it instead discovered records of a natural body, a frozen planet, accompanied by an outsized moon.

A planetary body emitting modulated gravity waves? That could not be. This was outside not only its own experience, but beyond any circumstance any of its kind had ever reported. Its denial of the situation went beyond any human ability to gainsay a set of facts. In the Observer’s universe, if it had not happened before, it was physically impossible for it to happen now.

The anomaly must be investigated. It focused its senses as precisely as possible, examining the target planet.

Further shock. Insupportable. The planet’s satellite now sported a ring, quite unrecorded in memory store. A ring flickering intermittently with every sort of energy.

A ring that might have been the Observer’s own twin.

Larry sat outside Raphael’s office, sweating bullets. The “invitation” to meet with the station head immediately had come a half hour ago, but Raphael seemed to want his rebellious underling to cool his heels for a while before being granted an audience.

Larry knitted his fingers together nervously. He had known what he was doing when he ran his million-gee experiment. That was physics, natural law, controlled and understandable. Once inspiration hit, once he could see the answer and set up the run properly—then of course it would work. It was inevitable. His experiment could no more help working than the Sun could help coming up in the morning.

But the human commotion his experiment had set off— that he did not understand at all. Four hours after his summary report had hit the station’s datanet, the whole station was turned upside down.

He had used the Ring to unleash fantastic power, but that power was under control. Pull the plug and it would stop. Not so with this uproar. This controversy was a genie he could not stuff back in the bottle.

Everyone in the station was excited, or infuriated, or both. They were taking sides, all of them, and no one was shy about expressing his or her feelings, right to Larry’s face. He was a hero. He was a liar. He was a genius. He was a fool. The Nobel Prize wasn’t good enough. They ought to make Tycho a prison again, because a life term anywhere else wasn’t bad enough. Larry found himself as alarmed by the adulation as by the excoriation.

The whole station was stampeding, running roughshod over normal procedure in the excitement. Larry’s own complete analysis of his experimental results was still running whenever it could grab processing time, but it got pushed off the main computer’s job queue altogether as researchers with higher access rights barged into the system on priority status to try their own simulations.

Raphael himself sanctioned a computer simulation by two of the senior scientists. Larry wasn’t a bit surprised to learn that Raphael’s sim had “proven” Larry’s results were impossible. A rival simulation by a cadre of more junior scientists (with Sondra conspicuous by her presence) demonstrated the Chao Effect was real. (Larry himself wasn’t exactly sure who had named it that, but he suspected Sondra.)

Larry didn’t quite dare say anything, but from what he could see, both computer runs were based on incorrect assumptions.

But the excitement went deeper than a need to see whose figures were right. Lines were being drawn. People were being required to take sides—and not just on the objective question of whether Larry was right or wrong. Other issues were getting entangled. Were you for or against Raphael? Were you for or against closing the station? Are you on our side or theirs? In a matter of hours, the results of a scientific experiment had become politicized, had crystallized all the complex, swirling antagonisms and personality conflicts, all the morale problems at the station into one simple question: Do you believe? A question of science was reduced to a judgment of one’s faith, a choice between orthodoxy or heresy.

At which point, Larry told himself, it ceased to be science at all. Very little of this had anything to do with the quest for knowledge.

The intercom box clicked on and Raphael’s voice said, “Come in,” in peremptory tones. Larry stood up, a bit uncertainly. The man had not even checked to see if Larry was waiting. He glanced up, looking for a camera. If there was one, it was concealed. Or was the point of the exercise to show Larry how confident Raphael was that his commands would be followed? Raphael’s word was law, and therefore Larry would be there.

It occurred to Larry that if he hadn’t been there, Raphael would have lost nothing by his little power play, for there would be no one mere to hear it. Larry was half-tempted to just sit there and see what Raphael would do. But that wouldn’t be good strategy.

He stood, opened the door, and walked into Raphael’s office.

Raphael sat behind his desk, seemingly engrossed by some sort of report on his computer screen. He did not glance up or acknowledge Larry in any way. Larry stopped in front of the man’s desk, and hesitated for a moment.

But Larry had had enough. If Raphael was going to turn this into a game, then Larry would rather be a player than a pawn. With a slightly theatric sigh, he sat down and pulled out his own notepack. There was some work he could be getting on with. Or at least pretend to get on with.

He opened up the little computer, switched it on, and called up a work file. His face was calm, his heart pounding. The gesture was eloquent, brazen, impudent. Larry had never done anything in his life even remotely as contemptuous of a superior. His father would have said his mother’s Irish temper was making a rare appearance, and maybe that wasn’t far wrong.

There was a moment, a half moment, in which Raphael could have gotten the upper hand by looking up from his work and leveling his visitor with a withering comment.

But the moment passed, and the director continued at his desk pretending to read his files, while Larry sat in the visitor’s chair, pretending to be engrossed in his work.

With each passing second, it was becoming more and more impossible for Raphael to play the scene as he had planned.

Larry thought Raphael was taking quick sidelong glances at him, but he didn’t dare look up from his notepack’s screen to be sure. He began to wonder how the old man would recoup. At last Raphael stood, carrying a book, and walked over to his bookshelf. He put the book on the shelf. No doubt the book didn’t belong on the shelf, but at least the gesture broke the stalemate. He turned back to his desk and then sat on its corner, a remarkably informal pose for Raphael. It did not pass Larry’s notice that it placed Raphael in the position of looking down on Larry. “Mr. Chao?” he asked in a calm, if steely, voice.

Larry closed his notepack and looked up to see Raphael glaring balefully down at him.

The older man nodded, stood, and returned to sit down at his own desk. Now that he had Larry’s attention he could sit wherever he pleased. “I see no reason to waste time with pleasantries or delicate words,” Raphael began. “You have disrupted this station and its work for the last twenty-four hours. I cannot permit any further disruption. We have performed the computer simulation needed to confirm the fraudulent nature of your so-called experiment, and that should satisfy whatever duty we might have had to examine your absurd claims.

“I see no need to waste any further staff time or effort chasing this chimera, to say nothing of Ring time or other access to experimental facilities. I have ordered that all further work on testing your claim, no matter who performs it, be canceled immediately, so that this station can return to its proper work. I might add that I do not yet know who the appropriate legal and professional authorities are in cases of fraud such as this, but I intend to find out and report your actions to them.”

Larry opened his mouth and tried to speak. But there were no words. His boss, his own boss, was calling him a liar to his face and threatening to turn him in for the high crime of making a breakthrough.

At last he found his voice again. “You want this station to return to its proper work?” Larry asked. “What’s that? Getting ready for shutdown?” Larry shook his head in bewilderment. “Why is it easier to think that one of the staff you yourself hired is a liar and a cheat, rather than to accept that I might have discovered something? Did you even look at the data, the real data and not your simulations?”

Raphael smiled contemptuously. “The only thing you have discovered, Mr. Chao, is how to end your career. Our simulation was quite sufficient to confirm your results were flatly impossible. There was not anything like the power required available to the system.”

“I’ve seen your simulation equations,” Larry replied in a hard-edged voice. He stood up and leaned over Raphael’s desk. “They don’t even attempt to account for the effects of amplifying and focusing outside gravity fields. Of course that power wasn’t available from inside the Ring’s power system—it came from the outside, from tapping Charon’s gravity field! I grabbed a piece of Charon’s gravity and compressed it in one locus. The gravity equations are still balanced. That was the whole point of the test. You might as well run a simulation of a radio receiver without accounting for a radio signal. Obviously it can’t work without something to work on. The results of my test run will stand up. It’s your work that’s flawed, Doctor.”

Larry stared down into the blazing fury of the old man’s eyes, and then turned and left the director’s office without another word, without looking back for Raphael’s reaction. Anger, real anger, cold hard adult anger gripped him, for the first time in his life.

He realized he was angry not at Raphael’s baseless accusations, but angry at the man’s stupidity, his rigidity.

It was the man’s assault against truth, against the discoveries they had all been sent here to make, that infuriated Larry. Larry had the computer records, the numbers, the readings that could prove he was right. But all those would be cold comfort back on Earth, billions of kilometers away from the Ring. Cold comfort when the Ring was mothballed for a generation, and there was no other facility available that could possibly follow up on the results.

That was what angered Larry—the blind and needless waste, the opportunity being thrown away!

If Larry’s test results were accepted and confirmed, it would be impossible to shut down the Ring. Even with the recession back on Earth, the funding board would have to come up with some sort of operating budget. Maybe even the Settlements on Mars and the outer satellites would finally contribute. Hell, that was too timid a thought. Everyone would throw money at the Ring, in the hope of sharing in the fruits of the research. What might not be possible if artificial gravity were real? Whole new avenues of research would open up on every side, now that the initial problem had been cracked. A lifetime of work, of exciting new challenges and discoveries, would lie open in front of Larry.

And all that stood between him and that bright future was one cranky old man’s bruised ego. It was not to be tolerated.

He had a strong impulse to find Sondra and ask her what he should do. But letting her call the shots would be as bad as letting Raphael roll over him. He would have to decide for himself. Once he had chosen a course of action he could ask her advice, her guidance, as to how to do it. But Larry knew he would have to decide what to do for himself, if he was going to go on respecting himself!

Without realizing where he was headed, he found himself back at the door of his own cabin. He shoved open the door, went in, and locked the door behind him. He needed some calm and quiet time alone. Time to think. Time to play the damned games, all of them.

Larry needed another experiment, a rush experiment not only to get some science done, but for career reasons, publicity reasons. Something that might make a big enough splash to prevent the shutdown.

Failing that, he had his own career to think of. The million-gee Ring run was spectacular, but it would be as discounted by the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation on Earth as it was here. Earth would listen to Raphael over Larry.

If things broke the wrong way, if Raphael did manage to cause trouble, Larry could not afford to have that one unreplicated run be his only claim to fame. He needed something further to publish, something he could bring home to Earth and base further research on. Hell, he needed an experiment that would get him a job. He scowled unhappily. Politics.

Acting the good pure little scientist, interested only in the Truth, would ensure that his discovery would be thrown away. Only by getting bogged down in politics and gamesmanship could he truly serve Truth. This situation called for scheming, not naive idealism.

Everyone gets caught justifying the means to their ends sometimes, Larry told himself, a bit uncomfortably.

Okay, then. He had a goal and a fallback goal: saving the station and/or his career. Now how to go about reaching one of both of those?

He needed to know the state of play. Had all the tests of his results had been canceled? He had a hard time believing that the entire research staff would meekly go along with the cease-work order. On the other hand, Raphael undoubtedly expected some of the staff to try to circumvent the ruling. So anyone trying for a test would have to disguise the run as something else.

Larry used his notepack computer to check the Ring experiment schedule. It was certainly much heavier than usual, with experiments scheduled around the clock. Of course, that could be explained by the planned closing, and people rushing to get their runs made before the shutdown came—but perhaps some of that scheduled time was actually intended to test Larry’s theory.

People working on the Chao Effect would have the sense to hide their work from Raphael. And a lot of people might well be doing that very thing. But who?

There was only one name he could be sure of. One of those covert experimenters was going to be, had to be, Sondra Berghoff. Maybe there would be other malcontents willing to do more than mouth off, actually willing to wade in and break some rules. But Sondra was the only one Larry knew who would take the chances involved.

Larry worked over the experiment roster, looking for experiments in which Sondra was involved.

There were three, only one of which listed her as primary researcher. That was likewise the only one of the three that had been scheduled after Larry had shown her his test results. He rejected it as too obvious. Raphael would certainly monitor that experiment closely. Besides, it wasn’t due to be run for another week. He couldn’t afford to wait that long.

One of the others seemed perfect. It had been scheduled weeks ago, and was supposed to run on the graveyard shift, 0200 GMT tonight. Sondra was listed as the technical operator, not an experimenter.

Better still, Larry noted that Dr. Jane Webling was the primary investigator. Webling, nominally the science chief of the station, was getting on in years, to put it charitably. Probably she would go to bed before the experiment ran, and simply check with her “assistant” the next morning. In all likelihood, therefore, Sondra would be on the board by herself.

So. If Sondra were going to pull something, that would be her moment. Okay, but what was the purpose of the run? Larry checked the title of the experiment: “Test of a Revised Procedure for Gravitic Collimation.” Just the sort of pompous name people learned to hang on a test when Raphael was running things, Larry thought.

Gravitic collimation. He had seen an earlier paper by Webling on the subject—in fact, he had gotten a few ideas from it. Webling had been working for some time on developing a focused beam of gravity waves—a “graser.” Like light, gravity was usually radiated in all directions from its source. But, like light, it could be manipulated, focused down into a one-dimensional beam. Larry’s own techniques of gravity focusing relied on similar techniques.

A laser was a perfectly collimated light beam. Webling’s graser project sought to develop a focused beam of gravity, albeit of microscopic power, and beam it at detectors on the other planets. Strange thought, Larry told himself, since gravity could be defined as a curve in space. A beam of curved space.

Actually, the basic technique produced two beams, pointed one hundred eighty degrees apart from each other-one aimed at the target, the other outgoing in exactly the opposite direction. Webling’s greatest success was in creating a “push-pull” beam by warping the outgoing beam around, changing its direction of travel without affecting its direction of attraction. In effect, the outgoing beam signal became a repulser. Merged with the targeted beam, it had exactly zero net attractive power, because the two beams canceled each other out. The beam should be detectable, but effectively powerless.

But suppose, Larry thought, he boosted the power rating a bit? Say, by a factor of one million? It still would be self-canceling, and thus not have any effect on the target worlds—but it would sure prove Larry was on to something. Hell, it would melt the readouts right off the gravity detectors.

That should get them some off-planet attention.

CHAPTER FOUR The Finger on the Button

The observer did not understand the strange ring at the edge of the Solar System. The ring should have been perfectly familiar, its actions as familiar as the Observer’s own. Yet the stranger seemed to break every law, every control that should have been burned into its very being.

Why did it behave so strangely? Why did it orbit a frozen, useless world at the very borderlands of this system? Why did it not hide itself? Why, indeed, did it radiate wasted, dissipated power, advertising its presence? Hourly, the stranger permitted cumulative leakage greater than what the Observer had allowed in the last million years.

And in spite of the leakage, the stranger radiated uselessly small amounts of effective gravity power. Why did it do so with such clumsiness, such inefficiency?

So many things were quite unlike a proper ring. Only in its shape, size, and attempt to use gravity did the stranger truly resemble the Observer.

But the obvious conclusion that this was a new thing, unknown to the Observers heritage memory, never occurred to the Observer.

The Observer was congenitally incapable of asking the rather obvious question, Where did it come from? It knew, beyond any possibility of contradiction, that there was only one possible ultimate source for a gravity ring.

The Observer knew, to a certainty, that the mystery ring was at least in some degree akin to the Observer itself.

That was the error that wrecked its entire edifice of logic.

It assumed that this alien structure was of its own kind. But then why was the mystery ring so strange? Why were its procedures, its behavior so wildly unknown ?

The answer was suddenly clear, brought up from some ancient memory of a forebear lost to time.

The alien was a massively modified derivative model, a mutant. Built by a related or ancestral sphere system long, long ago.

That was the Observer’s second error.

On this was based its third error, which would, in time, send its entire universe reeling, and threaten a way of being millions of years old.

But for it, disaster was yet far off.

Earth was not as lucky.

“Well, Dr. Berghoff, it’s a pity we could only arrange such a late-night experiment time, but I think you have matters well in hand,” Dr. Webling said. “It should be a fairly straightforward experiment run. Quite routine. I think I might as well head on off to bed. I’ll be looking forward to seeing your results in the morning. I suppose we won’t have the last return signals from Earth until after lunchtime.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sondra said distractedly. She had her mind on other things than pleasantries.

“Treat yourself to that extra cup of coffee tonight,” Webling said playfully. “You’ll need it. Good night, then, Dr. Berghoff.”

“Good night, Dr. Webling.”

Dr. Webling cautiously eased her way out of the lab, as if she were afraid of a fall. A lot of the older scientists never did master the tricks of moving in low gravity.

Sondra watched the door close behind Webling and breathed a sigh of relief. She had thought the old girl would never get moving. She stood up and locked the door behind Webling. Sondra definitely did not want to be disturbed.

She glanced up at the main control display. Just four hours until the scheduled start of Webling’s experiment. Damn! Barely time to scrap the preliminary setup for Webling’s run and reset the center’s controls to replicate Larry Chao’s results. And there was no slack time in the system tonight, either. The other three control rooms were full and busy. Control Room One was running a test now, and Two and Three were waiting their turns to get command of the Ring. Sondra’s, Control Room Four, got its shot at the ring only after Three was done—and there was an experimenter already signed up for the 0300 slot in Control Room One.

Once she got command of the Ring, she would have an hour to make her run. No time to correct mistakes if she got it wrong.

Of course Webling would discover the change and see to it that Raphael handed Sondra her head the next morning, but that couldn’t be helped. Nor would it matter. After all, the station was shutting down. What could they do? Fire her?

This experiment run might well be her only chance to replicate Larry’s results. That was important.

Maybe others would try to duplicate his run, but this was her only shot at it. She couldn’t trust the cowering sheep-scientists of this place to take the risk of pursuing this line of inquiry.

Even if she had known for certain of other runs, she still would have had to know for herself that it really worked, that the million gees were really out there waiting to be controlled. That could happen only if she set the run herself, trusting no one else to get it right.

She sat down and started to adjust the controls, reprogramming the system to Larry’s specs. Larry’s notes were thorough and complete, but it was a highly complex setup. She almost immediately found herself getting wrapped up in the job. Working down there at the level of controls, of meters and dials, she began to understand Larry’s thinking. She had never been strong on theory— but hardware was something she could deal with.

She was so focused on the job she jumped nearly into the ceiling when the door chime sounded. Earth reflexes could be downright hazardous under such light gravity.

She punched the intercom switch. “Who… who is it?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. She glanced quickly at the control panel and allowed herself a reassuring thought. It would take an expert to tell she was cross-setting the system. Everything was fine. Nothing to worry about.

“It’s me, Larry,” a muffled voice replied. He was talking through the door rather than using the intercom. Was he afraid of Raphael bugging the place?

Sondra let her breath out, not even realizing that she had been holding it. The feeling of genuine relief that swept over her told Sondra how much she had been kidding herself a moment before. She stood up and unlocked the door.

Sondra knew she should not have been surprised that Larry had shown up. He had a brain, after all. He could look at a schedule sheet and know she’d be here. And she had offered herself as an ally—even if he had not immediately accepted the offer.

Larry stepped into the room and looked around thoughtfully. Sondra stepped back from him, more than a bit taken aback by his manner. There was something more determined, harder edged, more self-assured about him than there had been a few hours ago.

Larry went to the front of the control panel and glanced over the settings. “You’re halfway through dumping Webling’s run settings,” he announced. It was not a question.

“Ah, well, yes,” Sondra said, awkwardly fidgeting her hands. Well, here was the expert.

“Well, we’ve got to put it back,” Larry said.

“But I need to confirm your results,” Sondra protested. “That’s a hell of a lot more important than the graser right now.”

“Where are the gravity-wave detectors you’ll be sending to?” Larry asked.

There was something in his tone of voice that told her she had better give a direct answer. “Ah, Titan, Ganymede, VISOR—that’s the big Venus orbital station—and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Earth. Ten minutes of pulse sending to each. A millisecond pulse every second.”

“How powerful?” Larry asked.

“Well, power is one thing we’re trying to measure. We start with a spherical one-gee field one kilometer across here, which we can hold stable for about a millisecond. By the time we concentrate it, collimate and pulse it, we’ve lost most of the power. The wave front spreads as well, weakening the field strength. We’d be happy to end up delivering maybe a ten-millionth of a gee at the other end, but we don’t know what we’ll get.

“In fact the job tonight is to find out what we can deliver at the other end. The beam isn’t all that well collimated and there’s a hell of a lot of leakage. In theory we should be sending a perfect column of parallel gravity waves. In practice, we’re sending a conical beam, narrow at this end but broadening rapidly as it moves out. And the gee waves aren’t exactly parallel either. We’re guessing that we can deliver a ten-millionth gee, but we’d settle for anything within a factor of ten of that.”

“And they can detect gravity pulses that small?”

“We send to those stations because they have the best detectors, the same type we use. The Titan and Ganymede stations are studying the interactions of the gravity fields of Saturn and Jupiter’s satellite families. The Venus station is mapping the gravity field there, trying to use the Solar tidal effect to deduce the planet’s internal structure. And JPL is where they designed the sensors they’re all using. Their detection gear is good, and they use a range of sensitivities. One at low end, a middle range, and a heavy-duty job,” Sondra concluded.

“Could they measure, say, a millisecond one-tenth push-pull gee burst? Something like that, a million times more powerful that what they’re used to getting from us?”

Suddenly Sondra understood. “You want to amplify the gee field with your process and then beam it to them!”

Larry grinned wickedly. “That’ll make them sit up and take notice, won’t it?”

Sondra thought for a moment, and the more she thought, the more she liked the idea. By its very nature, the experiment would attract attention to Larry’s amplification effect. Attention, hell! It would blow the doors off gravity detectors all over the System. Every gravity researcher between here and the Sun would be certain to hear about it within hours, and all of them would be clamoring for more information, more verification.

That was Larry’s idea, obviously, to get the news of the Chao Effect off Pluto, spread out as far and wide as possible.

“It ought to work, Larry,” she said. “No doubt about it, it ought to work. If we can set up the Ring to amplify the gravity field, modulate it, and collimate the gravity waves.”

“That side of it I know we can do. I’m just worried about their seeing it at the other end and being able to measure it.”

“Don’t worry about it. All of those labs run their detectors twenty-four hours a day, recording their reading constantly. The detectors are built to operate and record automatically, to prevent a sloppy operator from missing something. If we can send it, they’ll see it.”

“Then let’s give them something to see,” Larry said, sitting down at the controls.

Long before the Ring of Charon was first powered up, astrophysics had ceased to be a strictly observational science. Active experiments, involving massive energies, were common. Not only at the Ring, but at facilities large and small across the System, powerful forces were being explored.

Unfortunately, there were also many observatories, on Earth and in space, designed to detect incredibly weak signals from millions of light-years away. Too much input could destroy them easily. The high-energy experimenters had it beaten into their heads that they must give broad notification of their plans, offering plenty of time to shut down delicate gear. Failure to do so risked destroying some colleague’s delicate detection gear halfway across the Solar System.

There was another, more complex reason for thorough warnings of experiments. Back in the old days, when all the observatories were on Earth, or within the orbit of the Moon, it was always possible to call on the phone with late-breaking news, so as to get a second observation of the phenomenon in question. Coordinating observations between two or more observatories was at least reasonably straightforward. Even in cases where the observation had to be synchronized to the nanosecond, there was no great problem when the two points were tiny fractions of a light-second apart. However, the speed of light had changed the forms of etiquette: phones and easy synchronization were out of the question once there were observatories orbiting every planet from Mercury to Saturn. A wave of light energy that passed Saturn might not cross Earth’s path for four hours. A two-way contact, query and reply, would take eight hours.

Communications workers invented the event radius to handle this sort of problem, and the astronomers eagerly took it up.

Consider how electromagnetic signals move. All of them move at the speed of light, and unless manipulated by a focusing device, all types of electromagnetic radiation (for example, lightwaves or radio signals) radiate out from a given point on the surface of a sphere that is expanding at the speed of light. Think of a dot drawn on the surface of an inflating balloon. The dot, representing a signal, moves outward, riding the skin of the balloon as it expands.

The distance between that dot and the center of the balloon, between the surface of the radiative sphere and the center of radiation, is an event radius.

No data about a given event can be received until the dot, the information, passes through the observer as the information sphere expands at the speed of light. Event radii can be measured in conventional linear measures, but it is generally more convenient to refer to them in light-time. Thus, Earth’s distance from the sun, one hundred fifty million kilometers, is an event radius of about eight light-minutes. If the Sun blew up, Earth would not know it for eight minutes.

But knowing the light-time distance was not the only problem. At times the situation grew even more frustrating as the movement and gravity wells of the planets themselves introduced slight redshifting problems and microscopic time-dilation effects. More than once, careers were saved or wrecked by the discovery of an error in compensating for those effects.

Webling had sent out a standard notice of her planned experiment hours before. Larry and Sondra knew they had to send out advance warning of their modifications of the experiment, but they were nervous about doing it. Yet without the warning, they would infuriate any number of other experimenters. Not a good idea for an experiment that was half public relations.

Sondra drafted the notice to JPL:

ALERT TO JPL GRAVITY LAB: THIS WILL SERVE AS NOTICE OF A MODIFIED COLLIMATED GRAVITY-WAVE PROCEDURE. TIMES OF TRANSMISSION TO YOU AND OTHER SENSOR LABS UNCHANGED, BUT NEW TECHNIQUE SHOULD PERMIT 10 TO SIXTH INCREASE IN POWER TRANSMISSION. PLEASE RIG FOR MORE POWERFUL INPUT AND ADVISE AFFECTED LABS.

They sent similar messages to the other participating labs, warning them of the high-power pulse on the way, requesting relay to other facilities that might be affected.

It seemed more than a bit foolhardy to be doing a secret experiment while providing a general warning that it was about to happen. The speed of light came to their rescue. Sondra was careful to send the alerts through the station’s automated signal system, without any human intervention. Many eyes on many worlds would read their messages, but no one on Pluto would know what was up until queries and replies came back from those labs. And by then, of course, it would be far too late to stop the experiment.

Figuring in speed-of-light delays, there would be nearly an eight-hour lag between the send-off of the warning to the closest lab on Saturn, and the earliest possible response back to Pluto.

That should serve as protection enough, so long as no one at the base noticed what they were up to in real time. To avoid that problem, Sondra and Larry agreed to stay as close as possible to Webling’s original experiment design, in the hope of avoiding premature attention.

Given the difficulties of aiming the untested graser system, Webling had designed the original run to hit the closest, easiest target first and work out to longer range from there. The positions of the planets dictated that Saturn be the first target. Sondra used the original aiming data as she set up the run.

It was a complicated job. She glanced again at the chronometer when she was halfway through it. Three hours until this control room had its shot at the Ring. She sighed and went back to the complex job of resetting the controls.

With a beep and a flashing green light, the control panel announced that the Ring was ready for the graser run.

With ten minutes to spare, the myriad magnets, coolant pumps, mass drivers, particle accelerators and other components of the Ring system were configured to form a Chao Effect-amplified gravity well, to modulate and to collimate the gravity waves from it, and to fire tight pulses of collimated gravity power toward Titan.

Or at least, Sondra thought they were ready. She took another look at the control system. This was definitely a wild setup. No wonder the station’s old fogies hadn’t been able to believe it.

The countdown clock came on and started marking the passage of time. Eight minutes left.

Larry sighed and rubbed his weary eyes. Now it came down to one last set of checks to make, and one last button to push.

One last button.

They could have programmed those last checks on the automatic sequencer as well, even told the computer to start the actual firing of the system. If the experiment had been dependent on split-second timing, they would have.

But timing wasn’t that vital here. Besides, letting the computer do the work would not have been right. This was a human moment, the triumph both of human ingenuity over a technical and scientific problem, and of human cussedness over damn-fool rules. It was a way to proclaim a breakthrough to all humanity—and, equally important to Larry, it was a way to thumb his nose at Raphael. No computer could be programmed to do that properly.

Seven minutes left.

Still, there was something about the moment that surpassed even Larry’s deep-seated need to defy the director. It was dawning on Larry that this wasn’t just an experiment, not just an attention-getting device for saving their careers. This was history. No one had ever attempted such a thing. This was gravity control on a grand scale. Crude, limited—yes. But this one moment could change everyone’s lives.

Six minutes.

Just how ready was he to change the course of history? Larry licked his dry lips and glanced nervously over at Sondra. She nodded once, without looking up from her readouts. Everything was ready. In nervous silence, the last few minutes slid away to seconds. And then it came to the time itself.

For a brief moment, a frightened voice in Larry’s head told him no, told him not to do this thing. He ignored the voice of fear, of caution, and stabbed the button down.

Thousands of kilometers over his head, the Ring activated the gravity containment, and then pulsed the first waves of gravity power toward Saturn. Larry pulled his finger from the button and looked around blankly, feeling the moment to be a bit anticlimactic. There should have been some dramatic effect there in the lab to make them know it had happened. Maybe I should have programmed the lights to dim or something, he told himself sarcastically.

Of course, nothing happened in the control room. The action was far away overhead, at the axis, the focal point, of the Ring of Charon.

But by now, the action was rushing its way down toward Saturn. The first pulse was already millions of kilometers along its way.

From here on, the automatics did take over. The sequencer fired again. The second millisecond pulse leapt from the Ring. And the third, the fourth. It was too late to bring it back. Far too late. There was nothing they could do but press on. They would catch hell no matter what they did now.

The Observer had no concept of free choice. All that it did, or thought, or decided, it was compelled to do, each stimulus producing the appropriate response. There would not be, could not be, any situation not provided for. In its memory and experience, going back far beyond its own creation, all was supposed to be categorized, understood, known. There should have been nothing new under this or any other star.

It could not fear the unknown, because such a concept was beyond it. To it, the unknown was inconceivable.

Thus, it struggled to force new phenomena into old categories—for example, choosing to see the alien ring as a mutation, a modification of its own form.

Having reached this flawed identification, it accessed the concept of change and mutation as recorded in its memory store. It explored the possible forms change might take, and the results of those changes. As best it could tell, the alien fit within the possible parameters. That was enough data to satisfy the Observer.

It only remained to determine what its distant cousin was doing. But then, the answer arrived, full-blown and complete, from its heritage memory store.

It was a relay. It was echoing a message from home, announcing that it was time. Perhaps the normal means of contact had failed, and this new ring had sailed between the stars to bring its message.

Of course. What else could it be? The Observer searched the length and breadth of its memory, and did not find an alternative answer.

To one of the Observer’s kind, memory was all. Finding no other answer in its memory proved there was no other answer.

It was a way of being that had always worked.

Jupiter was next, or rather Ganymede. Larry told himself he must remember not to treat the inhabited satellites as mere appendages of the planets. The residents of the gas-giant satellite settlements were always annoyed by that sort of thing. After all, no one referred to the Moon as being part of Earth. Titan, Ganymede and the other inhabited satellites were worlds in their own right. Larry knew he had best bear that in mind—if things worked out the way they might, he would have a lot of contact with the gravity experts on Titan and Ganymede.

Yeah, those are vital points right now, Larry thought sarcastically. He was finding other things to worry about, trying to avoid the big picture. He had caught himself doing that all night, again and again. He was unable to face the meaning, the consequences of what he was doing. He did not want to be in charge of changing the world. The hell with it. Larry plunged in the start button again. The beam regenerated itself and leapt toward Jupiter’s satellite.

At least, they hoped it was heading toward Ganymede. Though Sondra had run graser experiments before, they were at a ten-millionth of this power. She was finding the collimated gravity beam difficult to control even with computer-automated assistance and Larry to backstop her.

And, be it confessed, she too was more than a bit nervous about dealing with such massive amounts of power. Even with all the signal loss and fade-outs of their crude directionalizing system, they were still pulsing bursts of three hundred thousand gravities out from a point source—albeit a point source smaller than an amoeba, a point source that went unstable after a few seconds. A million kilometers from the Pluto-Charon system, the pulse had lost half its power, and lost half again in another million.

By the time it reached even the closest of its targets, the beam had lost virtually all its power, was reduced to a one-millisecond tenth-gee wisp of nothing. And since it was phased with the repulser beam, the net gravitational energy directed at a target was exactly zero. The beam pushed exactly as hard as it pulled. It was physically impossible for the beam to be anything but harmless. Besides, each beam firing only lasted a millisecond and acted on the entire target body as a whole. The beam was a push-pull type, she told herself again. The push-pull couldn’t fail, not without the entire system failing utterly. It was impossible for this beam to hurt anyone or anything.

But such reassurances weren’t enough to keep her from getting nervous. “How’s it going, Larry?” she asked for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“Still fine,” Larry replied, more than a bit distracted himself. The amplified gravity source still collapsed every thirty seconds or so, and Larry had to regenerate the point source. The strain was getting to him. He had hoped to automate the process, but he had rapidly discovered that he barely had time to look up from his primary controls before the source would go unstable again.

It wasn’t until halfway through the Jupiter run that he had the time to set up the automation system. He instructed the computer to look over his shoulder, figuratively speaking, and watch the regeneration procedure he used.

After the seventh or eighth time, the computer had “learned” the regen procedure in most of its permutations and was able to take over the job itself. Larry breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back in his chair. They were on their way.

He wondered what their reactions would be—especially what the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would think.

The speed of light was the limiting factor now. Gravity waves moved at lightspeed, just like any other kind of radiation. At the moment, Pluto, Saturn, and Jupiter were all roughly lined up one side of the Sun, with Venus and Earth on the other sides of their orbits, only a few degrees away from the Sun. Of the planets in question, Saturn was currently the closest to Pluto, and Earth the furthest away.

Larry frowned and scribbled a quick diagram on a scratch pad to help him keep it all straight. After a few brief calculations, he added the round-trip-signal time in hours for each planet.

Those were round-trip-signal times. So Titan Station, orbiting Saturn, would receive its dose of gravity waves in just over four hours. Even if Titan signaled back to Pluto immediately when the gravity waves arrived, it would still take more than four more hours for Pluto to get the word.

It worked out to over eleven hours between firing the beam at Earth and getting a reply back from JPL.

JPL was the key to it all. JPL had run the first deep-space probe 450 years before, and from that time to this, it had retained it preeminence in the field of deep-space research. JPL was the big time. It was the field leader on Earth, and that made it the leader, period. JPL was big enough to lean on the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation. And the UNAF was the one with the checkbook.

Six billion kilometers to Earth. Twelve billion, round-trip.

One hell of a long way to go for funding, Larry thought.

A timer beeped. That was the end of the Ganymede beam sequence. Time to retarget again, point the beam at Venus. Larry flexed his fingers and watched his board as Sondra laid in the new targeting data.

“All set, Larry,” she said.

Larry nodded and pressed the button again. Venus. There were dreams of terraforming the planet—indeed, that idea was VISOR’s reason for being there in the first place.

Now there was a project that could benefit from artificial gravity on a large scale. Orbit a Virtual Black Hole around the planet and let it suck away ninety percent of the atmosphere. Use lateral-pull gravity control to speed up the planet’s spin. Pipe dreams. Wonderful pipe dreams.

Those were for tomorrow. Right now a millisecond burst of a tenth gee was victory enough. By now the computer had the hang of the graser control. It likewise seemed to be handling the point-source regeneration without much need for guidance. The ten minutes targeted on Venus passed quickly.

Earth was next. Earth. Not just JPL, but half the major science centers in the system were still there.

Larry watched eagerly as Sondra set up the revised targeting data. Thirty seconds ahead of time, she nodded at him. The new coordinates were locked in. Over their heads, the Ring had adjusted itself, in effect setting up a lens to focus the point source at Earth, the home planet.

Larry grinned eagerly and pressed home the fire button.

Eleven hours, he thought. Five and a half for the beam to get there, and another five and a half for us to hear the results. Then we ‘II know what Earth thinks of this little surprise.

Eleven hours.

With a whimper, not a bang, with a three-in-the-morning sense of anticlimax, the run ended. It was over, but it hadn’t started yet. Larry turned to Sondra and smiled. “Ready for the excitement tomorrow?”

She shook her head and stretched, struggling to stifle a yawn. “I haven’t really thought about it yet. But all hell is going to break loose when Raphael sees what we’ve done.”

Larry winced. “Yeah. That’s going to be the tough part. If he hates me now, tomorrow he’ll want to throw me out the nearest hatch without a suit.”

Sondra looked at Larry’s face, watching the expressions play over it. Fear, apprehension—guilt. Like a son who knows he’s about to disappoint his father again.

She thought for a moment, and then spoke in a gentle voice. “I think it might be best if I do the talking with Raphael.”

Larry looked up at her, surprised. “No,” he said. “This is between me and him.”

“No it isn’t,” Sondra said, “and that’s just the point.” She patted the control console, waved her hand to indicate the whole station. “This is science and politics. It’s not just two people having a private argument. And if we treat it that way, as if you two having a spat was the only issue, we’re going to lose what really matters. We’ll lose our focus on what you and I have done tonight.”

He closed his eyes and leaned back. A boy, no, a man, trying to clear his mind, think when his brain was soaked with exhaustion. “Okay. Okay. I see what you’re saying. But you remind me of another question. And not just what buttons we’ve pushed. For the whole future: what, exactly, have we done tonight? I mean, gravity control.” Larry opened his eyes, and leaned forward. Even at the end of this sleepless night, Sondra could feel the excitement in him, feel it catching at her.

“Think to the future,” he said. “And think about what we’ve set loose.”

CHAPTER FIVE Results

Certainty. The strange signal came from a relay,a mutant or modified relay, distantly related to the Observer’s own line and design. Normal contact had collapsed. The relay had traveled here across the depths of normal space, searching for an Observer, to tell it the time had come to Link.

Certainty. It was a mere hypothesis, and a badly flawed one at that. Any number of observations contradicted the Observer’s explanation. But the Observer was sure it was the answer, the solution.

It barely mattered that the Observer was utterly wrong. For it could not ignore a stimulus, no matter what its source. No matter what conclusion it reached, it would respond to the stimulus of powerful modulated gravity waves.

And now the alien Ring, the spurious relay, was sending massive amounts of power, obviously directed at the other worlds in this star system, beaming power first at one, then another. Even though the beam was not directed at the Observer, the beam leaked atrociously. Furthermore, the gravity patterns of the target worlds refracted the beam in subtle but distinct ways. Thus the Observer detected the beams and their targets easily.

The Observer considered the targeting pattern and projected it inward: the alien was scanning in toward the Inner System, one world after another.

The alien Ring was searching for something.

And that something could only be the Observer. It would find the Observer, stimulate it—force the Observer to act, to reveal itself, to perform the task it had been waiting to perform for millions of years.

The Observer knew it would have no choice but to respond, react to that beam if it struck this place.

Something like excitement, like fear, coursed through it.

Seismographs all over the Moon recorded its spasm of feeling.

But it wanted to believe. It wanted to respond. It was lonely, eager to renew contact with the outside Universe, eager to begin a new phase of its own existence. It began to prepare for the beam, activating subsystems that had long been dormant. It drew down power from its reserves, determined to be ready the moment the beam touched.

Wolf Bernhardt breathed in the cool California air and told himself it was right that there was a Berliner involved. Berlin was the ancestral home of physics, after all. All this grand work would never have happened if not for the great minds that had labored in that city so long ago.

And it required at least a quick, agile mind to respond to this situation quickly. He had listened to the pre-experiment broadcast from Pluto, and that had been enough. Others would have hesitated, he congratulated himself. Not Herr Doktor Bernhardt.

The first word that the effect was real, that powerful, controllable artificial gravity had been detected had arrived only a quarter hour ago, from Titan Station. Wolf checked his watch. He had to go on the air in another five minutes. Plenty of time. Lucky indeed that his quarters were close to the main control station.

He smoothed his shirt down and examined himself in the bathroom mirror. Herr Doktor Wolf Bernhardt, age thirty, ambitious and determined, looked back out at him, blue eyes gleaming, blond hair combed back off the high forehead, angular jaw jutted just slightly forward. His suit immaculate, the fabric a pale powder blue that set off his slightly ruddy complexion. His smooth skin glowed with health and the warmth of the shower he had just had. He ran a hand over his jaw. Yes, perfectly shaved. No one could suspect he had been in rumpled clothing dozing by the duty-scientist panel fifteen minutes ago. Now he was ready for the world.

He looked again at the mirror. Yes, it was a face appropriate to history. It was 1:25 in the morning, local time, but he was fresh, sharp. And that was important. Tonight, now, he would be talking to only the scientists on Pluto, with perhaps a relay to the other off-planet stations. But tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, Earth would see the recordings of those messages over the newsnets. And the reporters—they would need a spokesman to talk to, someone who could answer their questions from here, not from the other side of an event radius light-hours across.

And he, Wolf Bernhardt, would be there, ready to talk, all the figures and results at his fingertips.

Quite literally at his fingertips—for he would be relying on the computer to educate him on the topic of gravity research. He would need to work the databases hard to get up to speed quickly.

But he would be there, he would learn, he would be ready. This was the moment he had waited for. His moment in the sun.

He turned and left his room, hurrying a bit, as if fame and history were impatient for him to arrive.

Sondra stumbled through the cafeteria the next morning. After a bare four hours’ sleep, her thought processes were not as sharp as they should have been. She looked around the room and spotted Webling, indecently awake and cheerful, tucking into her fruit salad.

Webling, Sondra thought. With the damage already done, maybe now was the time to turn a potential enemy around. Time to admit what we’ve done, Sondra thought. Webling was a woman of sudden enthusiasms. If Sondra could get her excited about the amplified graser before word leaked out, then perhaps she would help blunt any attack Raphael might make. The next step, Sondra decided, was to suck Webling into the game.

She collected her own breakfast and a large cup of coffee, then shuffled wearily over to the older scientist’s table, struggling to calculate the time dynamics in her head. Titan’s initial response message ought to arrive back at Pluto in about twenty minutes. Larry was probably already in the observatory bubble, the traditional place to await messages from the Inner System.

The main comm board was patched through to the bubble, so that any public message that arrived at the station would automatically be echoed there. The early-morning shift in the computer center would have seen the overnight science and experimentation reports already.

Those reports were supposed to be strictly confidential, but the computer team was a noted den of gossips, masters of hinting at things they could not say directly. The rumors were probably flying already, at least in the station’s lower echelons, if not in the circles where Webling and Raphael were likely to hear anything. Sondra thought she noticed a face or two turned toward her, and wondered if it was just her imagination.

Of course, the moment the Titan message came in, rumor would turn into fact and all hell would break loose. Everyone would know what Larry and she had done. After that, it would be too late to turn Webling around.

The trick was to tell Webling about the revised experiment, and get her excited about the probable results, before the message came—and before Raphael found out.

Anyway, it was worth a try. Sondra walked over to the table where the older woman was sitting. “Good morning, Dr. Webling!” she said, with as much false cheeriness as she could manage.

“Why, good morning, Sondra. I didn’t expect to see you up and about so early,” Webling replied in her slightly reedy voice. “How did the experiment run go last night?”

“Very well. Very well indeed,” Sondra said. “But I’m afraid I have a confession to make about it.”

Webling, whose closest attention had been focused on a slice of grapefruit, looked up sharply at Sondra. “Go on,” she said in a careful voice.

Sondra bit her lip and started talking, hoping that Larry would understand the need to downplay his part in the experiment just now. The truth needed a few coarse adjustments. “I got a little inspired last night. I made an adjustment to the graser settings. Nothing that would affect the primary experiment goals, of course. Even so, I suppose I should have awakened you before I made the adjustment. It’s just that the idea came to me so suddenly that there was barely time to set it up as it was. And with Ring time suddenly so limited, I didn’t want to take the risk of losing the run altogether. And it seems as if your experiment was a dazzling success.” She made a show of checking her watch and seeing what time it was. “We ought to be getting the first response back from Titan soon.”

“Why a ‘dazzling’ success?” Webling asked. “It was a fairly routine experiment run.” She checked the time herself. “And why expect such an immediate response? If we get a message now, they would have had to have sent it the moment they received our graser beam. Why would they be so eager?”

“Because if our—my—figures were right, then Titan should have received a series of one-millisecond push-pull gravity-wave pulses, sent from here at a strength of one-tenth gee.”

Webling’s eyes widened. “One-tenth gee…”

Sondra stood up from the table and Webling got up as well, automatically following the younger woman’s lead. “I left a record of your experiment’s output figures in the observation dome, Dr. Webling. Perhaps you’d be interested in seeing them while we wait to see what Titan has to say?”

The beam was moving again.

First directed at the sixth planet, then shifted toward the fifth, now sweeping over the second planet. Soon now, soon, it would sweep this way, toward the third world, and the Observer and its hiding place.

Close. The moment was close. After all the endless millennia, the wait was down to mere minutes, seconds.

The Observer all but quivered with anticipation.

When Larry walked into the dome, he instantly noticed two things: one, a much larger number of people than usual “just happened” to be eating breakfast there, instead of in the cafeteria, and many were lingering over their coffee; and two, a murmur of conversation sprang up when he walked in—though no one had the nerve to go up and talk to him. When Sondra and Webling walked into the dome soon after, the murmur rose to a veritable buzz of excitement. Obviously, news traveled fast through the station, and rumor even faster. True to form, the computer center had leaked like a sieve when the Webling experiment had come through. Someone down there had seen and understood the significance of the readings—and that someone had a wagging tongue.

Sondra crossed the room and sat down at the table across from Larry, Webling beside her. “Larry,” she said with forced casualness, “tell Dr. Webling about that experiment modification we worked up.”

Webling stared hard at Larry and blinked once or twice. “You!” she said. “You’re the one who faked the gravity-field results!”

Sondra winced. Ouch. Off on the wrong foot. “No, Dr. Webling,” she said gently. “He’s the one they’ve accused of faking the results. But that doesn’t make the figures less true. Go ahead, Larry. Tell the doctor how you did it. Convince her that it really happened.”

Larry swallowed hard and pulled out his notepack computer. “Well,” he said doubtfully, “the main idea was to use the Ring’s gravity power to focus and amplify an existing gravity field.”

Webling’s eyes widened. “Amplify an existing field. How on earth did you…” Her voice trailed off as she looked at the math that was already on Larry’s notepack screen.

Within half a minute, the old woman and the young man were completely immersed in a complex mathematical argument, rattling off hideously convoluted formulas into the notepack’s voiceport.

Sondra tried to follow their arguments on the pack’s tiny screen, knowing that she was supposed to understand gravitic calculation and notation—but these two were just going too fast for her. Every time she thought she caught the sense of their discussion, they rocketed off onto a new topic before she had the chance to digest the last point.

Her attention wandered and she happened to glance up. Someone must have made a whole series of intercom calls. Virtually the entire station staff was there, and not just the scientists. The tech and admin and maintenance people were all there too. By now no one was even pretending to have a good reason for being there. They were simply an audience waiting for the show to begin.

If they were waiting for Raphael to show, they didn’t have long to wait. Not more than ten minutes after Sondra and Webling arrived, Raphael burst in.

He stalked up to Larry, leaned over him, and glared malevolently down at him. “I should like to know the meaning of this,” he said, obviously struggling to keep his voice calm.

Larry and Webling both looked up in surprise. “Meaning of what?” Larry asked, his voice nervous and subdued.

“Don’t play me for the fool,” the director snapped. He waved an experiment procedure form at Larry. “This is the standard report generated by the operations computer after every experiment run, showing how the equipment was configured and used. It describes the work done by these two”—he gestured in annoyance at Webling and Sondra—“last night. This absurd ‘modification’ to Webling’s intended experiment stands out like a sore thumb. This was your work. You have acted in direct and deliberate contravention of my orders!” he sputtered. “You have completely violated my every instruction. Every dollar, every cent expended by this ridiculous ‘experiment’ is coming out of your pay. Every cent.”

Larry stole a sidelong glance at Sondra. Now was the time for their plan from the night. Last night, he hadn’t much liked the idea of hiding behind Sondra’s skirts, no matter how sensible it was. Now, Sondra’s taking over was fine with him. Raphael practically had smoke coming out of his ears. Anyone who wanted to deal with him was welcome to the job. Larry glanced at Webling, and saw the sweat starting to pop out on her forehead, too. She wasn’t going to be much use as protective cover. No, if anyone was going to handle the director, it would have to be Sondra.

“Violated orders? But that’s just not so, Dr. Raphael,” Sondra cut in smoothly, dredging up a low, winsome, southern-belle accent from somewhere. Larry dimly recalled that she was from the American South, but he had certainly never heard that tone of voice from her. “I’m sure there must be some slight misunderstanding.” Larry glanced around. Sondra was obviously playing to the crowd, using the public audience as a screen against Raphael’s anger.

“Mr. Chao here was simply assisting Dr. Webling and myself in our graser system tests. I suppose he did help us augment our signal power, but I can’t see how that constitutes violating orders. For that matter, I don’t see how you could issue him orders as to what to work on in the first place. You are the administrative director, but that doesn’t give you any control over research operations. Mr. Chao is a full research fellow.

“Last time I checked the station’s charter, research fellows have complete access to the Station’s facilities. In fact, according to the station charter, the administrator is specifically excluded from authorizing experiments. That’s supposed to be up to the chief scientist, Dr. Webling.”

From the look on Webling’s face, it was apparent that even she had forgotten she was chief scientist. Raphael had gathered all the de facto power to himself so long ago that no one remembered the official de jure arrangements. Sondra saw Raphael’s quick glance toward Webling. That brief, nervous look told her she had won. She had found a vulnerable spot in Raphael’s armor. A bully who breaks the rules cannot use the rules to bully. “Unless, of course, I have it wrong. What, exactly, is your authority for controlling Mr. Chao’s work? Has Dr. Webling ceded the power of her office to you?”

Raphael opened his mouth and shut it without speaking. Before he could come up with anything more cogent, Webling chimed in. “I most certainly did not cede my authority—not to Dr. Raphael or to anyone else. But that does not excuse your impertinence, Dr. Berghoff.” Webling turned and addressed Raphael. “But that to one side, Simon, right protocol or wrong, young Mr. Chao seems to have his numbers right. It would be criminal to reject such a promising claim out of hand over some breach of scientific etiquette. The first response from Titan should arrive at any moment. It seems to me that we are about to receive either a confirmation or a refutation of these theories. Shouldn’t that be the basis for our reaction to Mr. Chao’s work?”

Sandbagged, Sondra thought gleefully. The old goat just got blown out of the water by his closest ally, in front of the entire staff. Larry seemed about to say something, but she kicked him under the table. This was no time to let Raphael off the hook. Let him squirm.

But Sondra didn’t get to see Raphael’s reaction. A low beeping began, a sound that seemed to come from everywhere all at once. It took Sondra a moment to realize it was her notepack, alerting her that a message was incoming for her. Larry’s pack was beeping too—and so were Webling’s and Raphael’s.

Titan! She pulled her pack out of its belt pouch and punched in the Read Message command.

The screen cleared and displayed the text of the message. Even as she read to herself, Webling stood and read it aloud to the entire staff.

“from: tistat commcent personal and immediate.

“to: raphael, webling, berghoff, chao.

“message reads: titan station, sakharov physics institute sending for pluto, gravitics research station. warmest congratulations to raphael and entire team. incredible! grav meters here recorded indisputable reception of pulsed, modulated gravity waves of remarkable power as per your preexperiment transmission. we are honored to be first to congratulate your lab for this great achievement. we are processing initial detailed analysis and will transmit same to you at earliest convenience. this is a breakthrough of the first importance. we toast you here with the true stoli vodka. well done, simon. proud regards, m. k. popolov, director, message concludes.”

A burst of applause followed, and a dozen people reached in to shake hands with Larry. Sondra could not keep a wry smile from her face. Well done, Simon, indeed. Director Popolov had assumed that Dr. Simon Raphael had been responsible for doing the experiment, rather than busy attempting to squelch it. Never mind. She could see the growing knot of people swarming over Larry. They could see where the real credit lay. And there would be no keeping the true word from spreading. Well done, Simon. Sondra looked up to where Raphael had been and discovered he wasn’t there anymore. She looked toward the door just in time to see him ducking through it, escaping his humiliation while the attention was off him. For a moment, for a brief moment, she found it in herself to feel sorry for the man.

But then the crowd jostled her, and swept her into the swirl of people surrounding Larry.

Shy, blushing, smiling, Larry accepted the congratulations of his colleagues, even those who had not believed him only hours before. There was a general clamor for information of all kinds. Everyone seemed to have a notepack out, trying to link into Larry’s files in the central computer. They all found the files in question had privacy blocks on them. The computer commlink system actually shut down for a minute, overwhelmed by too many people asking for a look at too many files and datasets. Larry used his own notepack to remove the blocks from every file he controlled.

The whole business was too much for him. Pride, excitement, his usual awkwardness in public situations, worry over what Raphael would do next—all of those feelings and a half dozen more besides were jumbled up inside him—and were forced to take a backseat to the endless questions from Webling and the other staff scientists. There wasn’t time for anything but the moment itself, the event.

Someone—Larry thought it was Hernandez, the microgravity expert, but he wasn’t sure—was shoving a notepack in his face, asking him to explain a flowchart display. Larry offered up a mental shrug, took the pack, and started trying to make sense of the graph. Maybe if he cooperated, they would all calm down sooner.

But his answer only prompted another question from someone else, started another argument. There were too many possibilities, too many theories. There wasn’t room in the dome for it all.

In part because the observation dome was getting too crowded, and in part because it was easier to explain things in front of the switches and dials and screens, the throng seemed to migrate from the observation dome to the primary Ring control room. Afterwards, Larry had no recollection of actually going there.

There was something about the buttons and dials and instruments of the control room that made people remember their professionalism. Voices got lower, and people actually waited for each other to finish talking.

The room was small, and there were too many people in it. The environmental system couldn’t keep up, and the air grew hot and stuffy. Nobody seemed to notice or care. If anything, the closeness of the room added to the intensity of the moment. People got sharper, more focused, and started acting more like rational scientists. Larry found himself perched on the back of a chair, running an impromptu seminar.

But just when the situation seemed to be calmed down again, the next message came in, from Ganymede station. If anything, it was more effusive than Titan’s signal. Then Titan checked in again, with a more complete report, and their enthusiasm seemed to have doubled, if such a thing were possible.

When Ganymede made its complete report, they had a real set of numbers to work with for the first time. They knew the power of the gravity beam when it had left Pluto-Charon, and now they had measurements, from two locations, of its power, intensity, wave shape and frequency at arrival—in effect giving them hard data on how the beam had been affected as it moved through space.

The data not only confirmed that Larry’s gravity beam was real, it also told volumes about the nature of gravity itself—and about how it interacted with the fabric of space-time, about the matter and the gravity fields it passed through and near, how it affected and was affected by the velocity of the objects it encountered. Hernandez was able to prove that gravity was subject to Doppler effects. That was no great surprise; theory had predicted it. But for the first time the matter was settled, confirmed, and not a mere assumption.

There was a lesson in there, and somewhere in the middle of the tumult that day, Larry spotted it: Before you can fully understand a force of nature, you must be able to manipulate it. Never before had scientists been able to fiddle with gravity, in effect turn it on and off to see what would happen. Now they could, and the floodgates were open. In that first four hours they learned more about gravity than all of humanity had learned in all history.

And they had some power to play with, too. That helped. Science always needed more power than nature conveniently provided. How far would humans have gotten in the study of magnetism if all they had been allowed to work with was Earth’s natural magnetic fields, and the occasional lodestone?

Size for size, nature’s force generators were not very strong or efficient. It takes a whole thunderstorm to produce lightning, something as huge as Earth to create a natural one-gee field, a mass the size of the Sun to start fusion. Now humans could match all those power levels, or at least come close, using much smaller devices.

It was not a time for contemplation. Still the messages came, from Ganymede and Titan, informing that VISOR and JPL had been advised. Events were happening too rapidly, over too great a span of distance.

Larry imagined the radio and laser signals that must be crisscrossing the Inner System, chasing each other, sending new information that was old by the time it arrived. By now, as word was arriving at Pluto from Titan, saying that Titan had advised Earth—by now Earth had already received the gravity beam.

JPL would send a message as soon as someone there knew what was up. That was the signal to watch for. Larry watched the clocks and calculated the signal delay a dozen times over. Twenty minutes before a return signal from Earth could possibly arrive, he stood up and stretched. “Look,” he said, “there’s a lot more to cover, but we should be hearing from JPL soon, and I want to be in the dome when the message comes.”

With a renewed gabble of voices, the entire group migrated back to the dome. After all, everyone else wanted to see the message arrive as well. This discovery was going to save their jobs as well. Larry managed to duck away long enough to sneak back to his quarters, grab his toilet kit, go to the head and freshen up a bit. This was his second day more or less without sleep. If he couldn’t have rest, he could at least have a two-minute shower and a shave.

By the time he arrived at the dome, a few minutes before Earth was due to check in, the show had already begun. The lights had been dimmed in the dome, and the stars gleamed forth overhead. Charon and the mighty wheel of the Ring dominated the sky.

Larry could not look up at that sight without being inspired. That tool, that device, one of the mightiest generators ever made, and he had put it to use, commanded it toward a breakthrough.

Larry moved carefully into the darkened room, waited for his eyes to adjust, and looked around. The comm staff had been at work, rigging a series of large view screens at one side of the dome and rearranging the chairs to face the screens. One screen showed a countdown clock, displaying the time remaining until the receipt-of-beam signal could arrive from Earth. The second display was clicking through screen after screen of results and reports already derived from the experiment, with data from Titan, Ganymede and VISOR.

Larry realized that he must have missed the Venusian signal while he was in the shower. The third screen showed the dome telescope’s view of the Earth-Moon system, the two planets glowing like fat stars in the firmament. But it was the fourth screen that surprised Larry. It showed a handsome young man, nattily dressed, talking into the camera. An ID line across the bottom said he was Wolf Bernhardt, the spokesman for JPL, talking on a live feed. Given the expense and difficulty of punching a television signal through to Pluto, that in itself told Larry that the folks back home were taking him seriously.

Larry ducked his way into the rows and found an empty seat next to Sondra. “You haven’t missed much,” she told him in a stage whisper that had to carry halfway across the room. “Right now this guy is talking about the results from Venus.”

Larry nodded vaguely and glanced at the countdown clock. Three minutes to go. There was a slight stir from the other side of the dome. Larry glanced over and saw Dr. Simon Raphael coming in. Raphael paused at the doorway and looked around. Their eyes locked for a moment.

Larry’s heart sank, just the way it had back in grade school when the principal’s gimlet eyes bored into him. Justly or unjustly, fairly or not, Larry the child and Larry the adult both knew what that look meant. He was in trouble. Again. Still. Forever. Raphael was going to find some way of punishing him.

Larry thought again of Raphael’s threat to take “every cent” of the experiment’s cost out of his pay. That look told Larry that the threat was still good. Raphael would find some way of making it stick. And making it hurt. If not for punishment, then for revenge.

Raphael broke eye contact and moved into the room, sidling along the far wall, to watch the action from as far away as possible.

Larry breathed a sigh of relief. Raphael was not going to cause a scene just now. This moment, here and now would belong to Larry. That was something.

The beam shifted off the second planet, focusing on the third. Inevitably, the Observer was caught in the spill-over. The gravity beam passed through the solid mass of the Moon like light through glass. But if the Moon was transparent to gravity waves, the Observer was not. Lurking far beneath the Moon’s surface, a huge torus girdling the satellite’s core, the Observer shuddered as the beam played over it.

And that was the signal, the alert, the command it had been born and built to receive.

It responded as reflexively as a human jerking away from an electric shock, as instinctively as a lover at the moment of climax. There was no possibility of controlling the response. The beam set off an incredibly rapid chain of events far outside the control of what served as higher consciousness for the Observer.

Power long stored was drawn in, channeled, focused. But not enough power for the job at hand, merely enough to bring the Link up to full power. The Observer felt a surge of irrepressible pleasure as half-forgotten power poured through the new-born hole in space. The long-dormant Link bloomed back to life.

Power. Now it had the power. An overwhelming sense, a potency, of potential, of mission and purpose coursed through its being. Now. Now was the time for its destiny.

Now it could turn its attentions toward Earth.

The Observer drew massive, surging power through the Link and grabbed.

Larry turned his attention back to the countdown clock and realized with a start that there were only a few seconds left. He started listening to the announcer. “We have received further confirmation of a powerful signal from Venus. The beam moved off Venus ninety seconds ago in real time, and we are awaiting it here. We are standing by for scheduled reception of your beam at Earth.” There was a rustle of anticipation in the room. This was it, not only for Larry, not only for the experiment, but for the whole station.

If JPL was suitably impressed, the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation would be impressed. And if the UNAF was impressed, there was no way they could shut down the Gravities Research Station. At least that was what Larry hoped.

The announcer looked away from the camera toward a timer display on his desk. “Twenty seconds now,” he said, obviously relishing the moment.

Larry swallowed hard and leaned forward in his seat. Silly to be nervous, silly to be excited. He knew it had worked. But the seconds were sliding away.

“T minus five, four, three, two, one, zero. We are getting the first—”

The commlink from JPL went dead.

In the middle of view screen three, Earth flashed out of existence.

The Moon hung in the telescope view.

Alone.

Larry sat there, watching the monitor screen in frozen horror. The comm people were already jumping up, checking their gear. “It’s everything,” one of them said. “All commlinks with Earth just went dead.”

“That’s crazy. Check back at central.”

Everything. Larry sat, motionless, his heart pounding. They would search for an answer, a malfunction in their gear.

But Larry knew. No evidence, no explanation, but he knew. Somehow, impossibly, the beam, the harmless gravity-wave beam, so weakened at that range it could not have squashed a fly or mussed a child’s hair—

Somehow it had vaporized the Earth.

Eyes began to turn toward Larry. Eyes that were no longer friendly, or excited. Yes, he thought, they ‘ll all be willing to admit it was my experiment now.

Eyes bored into his head. One pair of eyes in particular. Raphael, behind him, seething with terror and rage. Larry could feel the director’s malevolent stare drilling into the back of his skull.

Two thoughts echoed in his head, one incredible, the other simply insane.

Larry Chao had destroyed the Earth.

And somehow, Simon Raphael was going to see to it that it came out of Larry’s pay.