Eater. Part 4

MARCH.

1.

The pinnacle of Mauna Kea stands a full mile above a deck of marshmallow clouds that at sunset turn salmon pink. In late afternoon the sun seems to lower into a softly burning plain that stretches to the horizons. When the volcanoes that built the island belch, the underbellies of the clouds take on a devilish cast where they hover over the seethe of lava. Beneath these, black chunks of razor-sharp, cooled lava render the landscape stark, brooding, and ominous. Nature here seems blunt, brutal, and remorseless.

Yet above all this churn, three hundred tons of gleaming steel and gla.s.s pirouette as gracefully as-and far more precisely than-any ballerina. No dancer has ever been required to set herself to within a tiny fraction of a millimeter.

Once in position, the biggest optical telescope in the world then commands the two jaws of the covering hatches to yawn, their slow grind echoing as the 'scope drinks the first light of evening. Here is where the best and brightest come to find the farthest and dimmest. That Hawaii is the most isolated landma.s.s on Earth with the highest pinnacle gives it an advantage in the steadiness of its air. The flat ocean keeps the air stably warm over the islands. Air's usual small flutters cause stars to dance like shiny pennies seen at the bottom of a swimming pool. Over the peak of Mauna Kea air flows more smoothly than above any other high site in the world. The trade winds blow steady and level far beneath the realm of the telescopes.

These conditions drew astronomers, the only major life-form at this height. Up a road left deliberately rough they brought their white observing pods, immaculate domes like enormous pale mushrooms. The venerable twin Keck telescopes had ruled over this realm since their construction in the 1990s, though they were no longer the largest of their breed. An even larger dome stood in the distance, but Benjamin thought the Kecks were the more beautiful. With two thirty-three-foot mirrors made from thirty-six segments, each such light-bucket was separately movable, swiveling in an echo to the dance of the heavens above. The two mirrors were in tubes eight stories tall, each floating so precisely on oil bearings that a single hand could move them.

Not that such maneuvers were left to mere human means. Elaborate systems guided these tubes, for the human mind operating at 13,800 feet quickly lost its edge. That was why Benjamin seldom came to this height, yet today, on a whim, he had driven up. To clear his head, he had explained to others, whereas the alt.i.tude had the opposite effect. He gasped for air after even a modest climb. Pointless, really, to think that he could mull over an idea up here, where his brain was losing cells every moment to oxygen starvation.

But today there was something about the perspective, in the slanted rays of late afternoon, that seemed to fit the scale of the idea he was carrying. Intelligence and technology ruled these barren heights. Against the cruel powers of vulcanism, which had shaped the islands, mere men had set up here a citadel of intricate artifice, dedicated to pure knowledge and the expansion of horizons. In the face of the world's raw rub, and especially whenever he allowed himself to truly think about what was coming for Channing, the view from this majestic height was enn.o.bling.

Right now, he needed that. He drank it in.

If life could work its wonder upon so hostile a place, what other forbidding sites in the universe could play host to mentality? The 'scopes around him were preparing for the coming night, to chip away at answers to such questions. Eternal questions-until now.

Then his portable phone rang, dragging him back into the momentary world. It was a double ring, one of the codes they had introduced at the Center to get priority attention.

Well, it was about time, anyway. His walk up here had left him panting and somehow had clarified his resolve.

On his way down, he distracted himself by trying to find the FM station that played rock from the decade when you cared about it-the working definition of the Good Old Days.

Channing had insisted on being there when he presented his idea. Br.i.m.m.i.n.g now with resolve, he called her on the way down. She sounded quite cheery, her tone lifting at the end of sentences, a good sign. He had become fairly good at detecting when she was covering up. So when she came into the seminar room, he was startled at the drawn gray pallor of her face. Plainly it had cost her considerably to come up to the Center for this, a drive of several miles in the usual clogged traffic on narrow two-lane blacktop.

Above the gray cast her eyes sparkled with an energy that was intellectual, not physical-all that seemed capable of driving her now. He felt a pang of guilt; he should have driven home and picked her up. In fact, he had offered to, but she had shrugged it off, saying that she wanted to do some shopping later, anyway. This now looked completely implausible; he doubted that she would have the energy. But then, she had surprised him before with her desire to still visit dress shops, searching for just the right little item that would "cover the damage," as she put it. He embraced her gingerly, felt an answering throb in her body. Or at least he hoped it meant that, and was not one of the tremors he sometimes felt pa.s.s through her while she was asleep in bed, like an impersonal ocean wave bearing all before it.

He had decided to limit this to the usual four people, plus Victoria Martinez. If he proved utterly wrong, which he had to admit was quite probable, at least the number of witnesses to his embarra.s.sment would be manageable.

He got Channing a cup of tea and she took three of her pills along with it. By then the other three were gathered around the seminar table and he began, trying not to seem unsure, though he was.

"How many bursts from the intruder, this 'X-1' object, have we recorded so far, Amy?" He knew, of course, but like a lawyer in a courtroom, a seminar speaker should never ask a question whose answer was not readily at hand.

"Seven." She held out the trace printouts and he waved them aside.

"Far too many. That's my argument in a nutsh.e.l.l." Benjamin had wanted to create a dramatic effect, but saw instantly that this was too much of a jump. Victoria and Amy looked puzzled, Channing startled. He would have to be more orderly, he saw; one of his many speaking faults was a tendency to get ahead of himself. A closed mouth gathers no feet A closed mouth gathers no feet.

Kingsley frowned, his lips drawn into a thin skeptical line. "Since we don't know the mechanism..."

"But we all have one in mind, don't we?" Channing chimed in. "The energetic intruder smashing into iceteroids."

"Haven't heard that term before. Ice asteroids, is it?" Kingsley said amiably as he turned toward her, his face quickly changing to solicitous concern, voice filling with warmth. "True enough, I had been making a few calculations a.s.suming that-"

"And they work out, don't they?" Benjamin said. "Order of magnitude, anyway."

Kingsley said, "I can get the gamma rays, all right. It's the radio tail I'm having trouble with. How does it form?"

Amy said, "Can't it be made pretty much the way galactic jets do?"

Benjamin was bemused by this, for he had not known Amy to venture into that realm of astrophysics. Apparently, like the rest of them, she had been doing a lot of homework. He nodded. "It could. We can get to that. But let's stick to my main point. How often should should we see a burst, if the iceteroid idea is right?" we see a burst, if the iceteroid idea is right?"

"Depends on the thing's speed," Kingsley said.

"Which we know from the Doppler shifts to be about a hundredth of the speed of light," Amy said. "I just finished pulling that number out of the data. The spectral fields were sorta messed up, plenty of broad lines, a real jungle."

"Before we get to my reasoning, let's hear Amy's results." She should have her chance to shine She should have her chance to shine, he thought, and then I can get a fresh start myself and then I can get a fresh start myself. She got up with a few viewgraphs, blushing becomingly.

If the entire solar system, including dim Pluto, were reduced to the size of a human fingertip, the bulk of the Oort cloud of iceb.a.l.l.s would lie ten yards away from that finger. s.p.a.ce was indeed vast-and empty. But contrary to their first guesses, the intruder was not so far away. Amy had located it pretty decisively by timing the movements of bright parts of the radio tail and then making plausible arguments about how fast such radio-emitting plasma b.a.l.l.s could move. She had showed that the intruder was only a bit beyond the distance of Pluto from the sun, or forty times the Earth-sun distance. A cometary nucleus would take years to fall inward 41 Astronomical Units, but this thing was moving much faster.

"Good work, yes," Kingsley said. He then offered his own reprise of her results-"to see if I've gotten it straight."

Benjamin noted how Kingsley often used the flattering conversational manner of beginning his next sentence by repeating another's words, peppering his talk with references to others' contributions and generally seeming modest. It paid off; scientists were stingy with praise and a few strokes worked wonders on their mood. After thrashing through the data a bit more, everyone present seemed settled.

The intruder was about 50 Astronomical Units out, somewhat beyond the range of Pluto's...o...b..t. It was coming in at about a thirty-degree angle with respect to the plane the planets...o...b..ted in, the ecliptic. As Channing put it, "The thing's pretty close-and closing fast."

They all looked at each other. Unspoken was their growing sense of strangeness.

Now it was his turn. Benjamin began writing on the blackboard. Style mattered in bringing forth an argument, and he set the stage with numbers, bringing out the underlying contradiction.

The belt of iceteroids just beyond Pluto had been first imagined by Gerard Kuiper at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. The intruder could be hitting those. Little was known of them, despite their being much closer than the larger swarm in the Oort cloud farther out.

Benjamin drew out the point carefully. Models of the Kuiper Belt showed that the icy chunks were on average an Astronomical Unit apart-quite thinly spread. Typically they were a kilometer or two in size, about the same size as the apparent core dimension of the intruder, as seen in visible light.

"A coincidence, of course, their being about the same size," Benjamin said. "They can't be the same kind of thing. Point is, the odds of hitting an iceteroid in all that s.p.a.ce are tiny." He followed with two viewgraphs giving the statistical argument, thick lines of calculations.

"If it's randomly hitting obstructions, then even at its colossal speed"-he paused to emphasize-"nearly a hundredth the speed of light!-then it would not strike one in a million years."

Gasps. They saw the point; a bullet fired into a light snowstorm had a far better chance of hitting a snowflake.

Kingsley looked up from scribbling in his leatherbound notebook, its ornate binding his only affectation. "In fact, it should take this intruder at least a day to fly from one iceteroid to the next-at the speed Amy worked out. Something is quite seriously wrong here."

"I believe there are two ways out"-Benjamin went on almost as if Kingsley had not spoken-"if we want to save our idea that the thing is striking iceteroids and processing their ma.s.s into highly energetic stuff. First, as Channing pointed out-"

"It's processing their ma.s.s in stages, holding some to chew later," she said for herself. "That would mean it can somehow save pieces of ice."

"Can't imagine how," Kingsley said laconically, looking down at his notes as if to avoid any conflict with her.

Amy said brusquely, "Me, either. But I think I see your second idea, Ben. It's not hitting these iceteroids at random. It's aiming for the next one, using the velocity change it got from consuming the last one."

Benjamin nodded. There it was, a clear leap into the unknown. Much better to have Amy make the jump. A genuinely crazy idea, however much he had tried to couch it in terms of times and distances and statistical probabilities.

"The 'starship hypothesis' again," Kingsley said incredulously. "Keeps popping up, despite its absurdity." This time he looked Benjamin full in the eye.

"How so?" Benjamin asked with a real effort at keeping his tone polite, though he knew what was coming.

"Calculate the flux of gamma radiation from the source. It's very bright. Any starship pa.s.sengers near that flare would be crisped."

"I thought about that," Benjamin said, trying not to sound defensive, though of course that was just what he was. "As yet I have no answer-"

"Except that the ship need not be crewed at all," Channing put in smoothly, as though they had planned it this way. "Machines could tolerate gamma rays pretty well, if necessary."

Benjamin had not thought of this possibility. He smiled at her in silent thanks.

Kingsley waved this away with a quick flap of his wrist. "I'd hate to try to keep electronics alive in such an environment. Nothing Nothing could withstand it." could withstand it."

"I didn't use the term 'starship.' You did," Benjamin said hotly. "And-"

"I used it," Channing put in, grinning, "but only as a metaphor."

Kingsley looked irked but said levelly, "Metaphor for what?"

"Something unexpected, maybe obeying rules we haven't thought of yet," she said brightly. Benjamin could see the price she was paying for this in the darkening rims around her eyes.

"Or no rules at all," Kingsley said curtly.

"How else can you explain that it is. .h.i.tting objects far more often than it should?" Benjamin pressed him.

"I look for another idea," Kingsley shot back, "one with some rules to bound it."

Benjamin saw suddenly a c.h.i.n.k in the man's armor. Just when you thought you were winning the rat race, along came faster rats Just when you thought you were winning the rat race, along came faster rats. Kingsley was unaccustomed to having his back to the wall in an argument. Perhaps his reputation kept him out of such sc.r.a.pes now. Well, not here. "We don't need rules, we need ideas."

"Either we have a discussion hinged at one end by plausibility, or else-"

"Now, don't get-"

"Look," Amy said loudly. The two men stopped, both open-mouthed, and looked at her as if remembering where and who they were. Amy pretended not to notice and went on in the measured tones of one aware of being surrounded by her superiors, "The point is, this thing is decelerating at a rate we can't account for. Maybe it's ejecting its own ma.s.s to slow itself. Maybe it's a runaway neutron star-like that one Channing was talking about the other day, remember? The Mouse?" She looked around the seminar table; her long hair was pulled back and knotted, so she seemed more austere. "That could act pretty peculiarly. So let's not get pushed out of shape by this mystery, okay?"

Benjamin nodded, rueful that he had let the discussion take so personal a turn. They were all under a lot of pressure, but that did not justify rubbing rhetorical salt into old wounds.

The talk swerved to other aspects of the problem. Data was pouring in from ground observers and s.p.a.ce-based alike. The astronomical data streams on the Internet were thick with discussions and endless inquiries.

Already, theorists were demanding that they publish their findings on the Internet. Worse, some had written papers explaining various pieces of the puzzle, posting their hasty work to the high-display Net showcases. There were advantages to "publishing" electronically: considerable speed, nailing down credit for an idea, while not waiting for the reviewing process. Indeed, the more hot-topic areas of science now resembled a shouting mob more than a scholarly discourse, thanks to instant democratic communication.

They were all besieged by colleagues through e-mail. Others had simply b.u.t.tonholed them in the Center corridors. Everyone local was working on sifting the data stream, but few knew what was up, overall, because there were so many pieces of the puzzle to a.s.semble. And the Gang of Four arrangement had not facilitated communication, either, Benjamin had to admit, though it was efficient at giving ideas a thorough thrashing over before they escaped into the larger community. In a media-saturated culture, cloisters of reflection were invaluable.

"So what'll we do?" Amy asked the older and presumably wiser heads.

"Get out a paper?" Channing asked wanly. Plainly she had no desire to write it. The hunt was all for her, not talking about it afterward.

"I think not," Victoria Martinez said, jaw set firmly.

Benjamin had nearly forgotten that she was in the room. She sat at the far end of the table and had taken many notes, but she had added nothing until now. He was again embarra.s.sed that she had seen the cut and thrust between him and Kingsley.

"Definitely not," she said, carefully looking at each of them in turn. "This is an enormously energetic object, behaving strangely, and if it continues at its present velocity, it will reach the inner solar system within a month. Am I correct?"

"Yes," Kingsley answered, "though remember, it is decelerating."

Benjamin became aware of a tension between Victoria and Kingsley, whose mouth had compressed into a thin line. The intruder's incredible velocity had moved it the distance between the Earth and the sun in about half a day. They all knew this, but the consensus among the Gang of Four had been that worrying about future effects was pointless until they got a good handle on what the thing was. Plainly Victoria did not feel the same.

"One point you've skipped over, I believe, is that it appears to be headed straight inward."

Amy said, "Well, yes, there's no sign of sideways movement yet. But at these velocities it would be hard to detect right away."

"But I take your drift," Kingsley said. "A possible danger."

Benjamin blinked. He had not thought along these lines in detail. "Of what? Chances of it coming near the Earth-"

"Are impossible to estimate, since it changes velocity with every encounter-correct?" Victoria Martinez said incisively.

Amy answered quietly, "Well, maybe. There's a little Doppler shift in the lines after every collision. If the gamma-ray bursts do represent collisions."

"Let's a.s.sume they do, until we have some better idea," Martinez said. "How else can it find its next iceteroid, unless it changes velocity?"

"Quite true," Kingsley said in his pontifical drawl, "but not yet cause for alarm."

"I agree, Dr. Dart, that it is hard to accept some of the ideas I've heard bandied about the room this last hour. But we have nothing more in the pot, and it's time to cook."

This metaphor went past Benjamin. "'Cook'?"

"I have to get back to a lot of people about this. Word gets around. The NSF and NASA both fund this Center, and they do like to be kept in the loop. I've been shielding you folks while you worked, but I have to start speaking for you now. Unless you'd rather do it yourself?"

"Oh no," Benjamin said, knowing this was what she wanted. "You do it."

"Good. Then I'll be answering a lot of phone calls I've been stalling. And you four start writing up a statement."

"Statement?" Benjamin felt uncomfortably that he was asking stupid questions whose answers were obvious to the others.

"For the media," Kingsley said offhandedly. "Quite so."

Martinez said, "At its present speed, it could reach us within a month."

"I suggest we not emphasize that aspect," Benjamin said, choosing his diction so that it echoed Kingsley's precision. "Especially since it is not headed for us at all."

"Oh?" Martinez looked surprised.

He realized he had not shown his trajectory plots around yet. "It's curving in and downward, heading at an angle to the ecliptic plane. I can't pick out any destination. It will pa.s.s through the solar system and leave, as it is unbound. It is moving very fast."