Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 10

Lucian, standing in the middle of the rubble-strewn road, looking at the hubbub around the hotel, felt something being shoved into hisfingers. He looked into his hand. A British twenty-pound note. He realized Mrs. Chester was standing next to him.

"Thank you so much, young man," she said. "I'm so glad we're all down safely."

Lucian looked at her blankly. A tip. The woman had tipped him for saving her life. Without him, they'd still be a panicky mob up in a leaking dome.

At least it served to tell him he had discharged this responsibility. They don't tip you until the job is over. He dropped the twenty-pound note, let it flutter to the ground, and walked away without saying a word.

And he had actually been thinking of tourists as people.

To h.e.l.l with being a guide, he thought, glad that he had the day job to fall back on. He upped his pace to a dogtrot. He had to get to Traffic Control.

From the Aldrin Inn, Orbital Traffic Control should have been an easy five-minute walk. But the quake had turned everything upside down: even at a brisk jog, it took Lucian nearly half an hour to thread his way through the jammed intersections, powered-down slideways, and accessways cut by sealed airlocks.

Jesus Christ, Earth. Lucian stopped in his tracks and stared at nothing. Earth. He had managed to forget about the planet for a moment in the panic of the quake. Down here, they won't know. Even if they did happen to see it through a monitor, they won't believe it. n.o.body knows. No one at Traffic Control will understand what's happening.

Orbital Traffic Control was a madhouse. He couldsee that much through the smoked-gla.s.s windows that divided the control center proper from the administrative area. Too many people were standing, waving their arms, arguing silently into their headsets behind the soundproof gla.s.s. Too many consoles were on, too many lights glowed flame red instead of green.

Lucian flashed his ID at the control center entrance. By the time the sentry system cleared him through to the interior, Vespasian had spotted him and was on the way over, waving for Lucian's attention. Lucian ignored him, grabbed a headset out of the rack and looked for an empty console.

There, in the corner. There were things he had to check.

But Vespasian cornered him before he got halfway across the room. "G.o.ddammit to h.e.l.l, Lucian," he began without preamble. "We're in a h.e.l.luva spot. All our navigation systems crashed all at once, right after the quake. Primary, backup, tertiary. All of them. Every d.a.m.n ship is off course out there-the ones that haven't vanished off the radar altogether. None of our course corrections work. We can't figure out what-"

"The system's working, Vespy," Lucian cut in.

"It's just trying to compute for a gravity well that isn't there anymore. Earth's gone."

Tyrone Vespasian was a short, heavy man of uncertain Mitteleuropean origins and very certain opinions. "What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" he snapped. "That's ridiculous!"

"I mean the d.a.m.ned planet's not there anymore!"

Lucian walked over to the console with Vespasian right behind him. He ignored the older man, sat down at the console and powered it up. He found himself staring straight ahead, concentrating hard on the job at hand, excluding everything from his thoughts except the need to get this console on line.

"Earth can't just vanish," Vespasian objected. "Imean, jeez, sometimes I wish the d.a.m.n groundhogs would go away, but-"

Lucian jumped back up out of his chair, grabbed his boss around the shoulders, and stared straight into his face through eyes half-mad with fear.

"Earth is gone, dammit. I saw it happen with my own two eyes. I was on the surface, in the ob-dome, looking at it when it vanished. That's what set off the quake. The tidal stresses vanished and the whole surface spasmed. There'll probably be major aftershocks."

Vespasian looked at him and swallowed hard. His face was sweating, and Lucian could see the light of fear in his eyes as well. "Planets just don't vanish, Lucian," he said in some sort of attempt at normal tones.

"This one did!" Lucian shouted. He gripped the older man's shoulders harder, and then relaxed his grip, slumped down into his seat. He shut his eyes and forced himself to calm down. A planet. Yes, a planet. And everything on it. Eight billion people.

All the oceans, all the ice caps and forests and animals, all the volcanoes and weather and deserts and trees. The molten core, the bottom of the ocean, the prairies and mountains. All of it gone.

No. No. He forced the thoughts, the fear, the panic from his thoughts. Don't think about the Earth. Think about what we must do to save ourselves.

He opened his eyes and punched up the exterior surface camera that was permanently aimed at Earth.

"Look," he said, not expecting to be believed.

"That's the camera locked down and targeted at Earth. Nothing there but stars."

"So the camera was jostled in the quake,"

Vespasian said in calming tone. "Dreyfuss, listen, I can use everybody I can get hold of right now, and I know maybe you've just been through a quake onthe surface, but I don't have time for this kind of-"

"Look at the background stars!" Lucian snapped.

"That's Gemini. Earth's supposed to be in Gemini right now. Check with Celestial if you don't remember." Vespasian frowned and looked again at the camera. Lucian ignored him and punched up the playback on the camera. "Here we go. This is a replay off that camera for the last hour, in fast forward."

Earth, or at least the recorded image of Earth, popped back into existence on the monitor screen.

Clouds chased themselves across the surface, the terminator advanced over the globe as the playback rushed forward at high speed-and then, in a flash of blue-white, the planet wasn't there anymore.

"Holy mother of G.o.d," Vespasian said. "That can't have happened. It's got to be a camera malfunction."

"Dammit, Tyrone, I saw it with my own eyes, and so did twenty-eight other people with me."

"It's nuts. It's nuts. Optical illusion then."

"Prove it. I'd love to be wrong," Lucian said.

"I'll do that," Vespasian said. "Key this console to main ranging-radar output." He punched a b.u.t.ton on the intercom panel clipped to his belt loop.

"Ranging radar, this is Vespasian," he said into his headset. "Janie, scram your other operations for a moment and fire a high-power ranging pulse at Earth. Yes, now. I don't care what the f.u.c.k else you got on your hands, you do it now." Lucian switched in the radar operator's audio and display screen.

"-kay, for Christ sake, here's your d.a.m.n pulse, Vespasian," the operator's voice announced angrily.

The screen, cluttered with displays of dozens of craft in orbit, cleared as the radar op wiped her screen. A message flashed on the screen: ranging pulse fired. The display grid itself was blank.

And it stayed that way. After ten seconds, a newmessage flashed on the screen, no return, recycling.

"Jesus Christ, what the h.e.l.l kind of malfunction have we got here?" the radar operator asked. "We should have gotten a return in two-point-six seconds." Now the radar operator's voice was fearful.

"We don't know, Janie," Vespasian said in a hoa.r.s.e voice. "Lucian here says Earth ain't there no more. Do me a favor, recheck your gear and prove he's crazy."

He shut off the link and punched up another channel. "Comm, this is Vespasian. What's your status on Earth comm channels?"

"Dead, every single one of them," another disembodied voice announced from the speaker.

"Must have been the quake. We're running diagnostics now."

Vespasian shoved Lucian out of the console chair and punched up an exterior optical circuit. The camera's image of the surface popped up on one side of the screen while Vespasian did a celestial almanac lookup on the other side. He queried Earth's current sky position as per the computer's memory and fed it to the camera. The camera tracked smoothly, the current and ordered coordinates showing in a data line across the bottom of the screen. When the two matched, the field of view stopped moving-and displayed the same empty starfield Lucian had punched up three minutes before, as seen from another surface camera.

Lucian leaned over Vespasian and spoke in a steel-edged voice. "I don't believe it either. I just know I saw it happen. Why, how, who or what did it, I don't know. What I do know is that without Earth's gravity as an anchor, every orbit and trajectory within a million kilometers of here is seriously screwed up. We've got to recalculate the orbit of every G.o.dd.a.m.n ship, satellite and habitat before they all start piling into each other. You getback to your own console and convince yourself. I've got to work on what we do next once you are convinced."

Vespasian swelled himself up, as if ready to explode- and then stopped. He knew he was a tyrant, and sometimes a bully with his people-but he prided himself on knowing the truth when he heard it, and on accepting a little bullying himself when it was necessary.

Earth was gone. Getting people to believe that news was going to be a full-time job for Vespasian.

He was having trouble enough convincing himself.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Tears for the Earth Second by second, millisecond by millisecond, in slow motion, Earth disappeared again. The cloud of blue-white appeared, swelled up and engulfed Earth. Hiram ran the key frames back and forth again. Wait a second. It was tough to tell at this resolution and this angle, but it didn't look like that cloud was a globe forming around Earth, but rather a disk-shaped body forming behind the planet, between the Earth and Moon. Hiram watched the monitor as the cloud moved forward, toward the camera and away from the Moon, sweeping over Earth, and then winked out of existence, leaving no trace of Earth behind.

What the devil was the cloud?

Hiram sat alone in the main control room, hunched over his computer panels, glad for the peace and quiet. He didn't quite know or care what had happened to the rest of the staff. For a gifted scientist, there were a lot of things Hiram McGillicutty didn't notice or understand. Like otherpeople, for starters.

It was, in a way, a family trait. He had been born into one of the old pioneer families on Mars, and his greatgrandfather had been one of the earliest-and most obstreperous-of the Settlement World leaders way back when.

Hiram had not inherited his ancestor's political skills, or even his marginal ability to understand people, but Hiram had certainly gotten the old boy's single-mindedness. He had also gotten a full dose of another unfortunate family trait-an almost complete inability to see the other person's point of view.

The rest of the station was in shock, struggling to come to terms with an incalculable loss. But Hiram was from Mars. He had never even visited Earth.

If the rest of humanity was stunned and terrified, Hiram McGillicutty was merely fascinated. No known mechanism could do this to a planet. Clearly there was a new principle at work here. And he would be the one to crack it. On that, he was determined.

If the silence in the station meant anything at all to him, it was that he had a leg up on the compet.i.tion. Here was the greatest scientific puzzle in history-and he was well ahead of the pack. After all, if his station mates weren't working, who else would be?

He sat alone in the main control room, pleased that every instrument and data record was, for the moment, his and his alone. He ran the visual record on the right screen again, throwing a new set of data overlays on the left-side screen.

He watched the infrared image track up against the visible-light image of Earth. In visible light, that blue-white cloud bloomed up out of nowhere, but in infrared, there was nothing. It wasn't there at all.

No IR activity at all-except of course the Earth's infrared image, vanishing when Earth did.Or maybe he just didn't have good enough data to see the IR from here. He racked up the near-ultraviolet image and ran it against visible light again. Too bright. The event, whatever it was, positively glowed in UV. But then, VISOR had very sensitive UV detectors, far better than its IR stuff.

Maybe the signal strengths he was seeing were artifacts of his own instruments' relative sensitivity.

He would have to compensate for that. But later.

Later. Now he just had to look at the raw data. All of it.

He stared hard at the visible-light image. VISOR was not intended as an astronomical observatory, of course, and the long-range optics used to get the last images of Earth did not provide very high resolution. Unfortunate, but no matter. Some sort of camera would have been running on the Moon.

Sooner or later, he could see that imagery.

He pulled up far UV and ran that. A bright, fuzzy image that told him nothing. d.a.m.n it, he would need better images of Earth! For now he would have to settle for the view from VISOR of a slightly smeary Earth about the size of a golf ball at arm's length. He watched the playback again and again, tracking the vanishment against every data line he had recorded. This was the third time he had run through the complete dataset.

The amplitude lines and false-color images for UV, visual, infrared, magnetism, and radio marched across the right-side screen, one after the other, and then again in various combinations-while on the left-hand screen, the visible-light Earth vanished again and again. It was a crude technique, and no doubt the computer system could have found any and all corollaries between the various datasets within a few milliseconds. Later he would use the computer to do just that. But speed was not the only issue here.

Hiram wanted to be immersed in the data, wanted to understand each b.u.mp and twist of it backwardsand forwards. Then, when he ran it through the computer, perhaps he could understand what the computer's findings were telling him.

Even without a computer, he had already learned two or three fascinating things not readily apparent.

One, Earth vanished not at the moment the gravity beam struck it, but 2.6 seconds afterwards-which, interestingly enough, was the period of time it took for light to travel between Earth and the Moon and back.

Two, simultaneous with the vanishment came the first of a ma.s.sive series of gravity-wave pulses-far more powerful than the Pluto beam, and continuing long after Earth was gone. Indeed, VISOR's gear was still detecting gee waves from the vicinity of Earth's former orbit. Those waves had to be coming from somewhere-presumably someplace fairly large, as it would require a Ring of Charon-size generator to create them.

Three, that squeal on the twenty-one-centimeter band had started at the moment Earth vanished, and it likewise was continuing, long after the Earth was gone. As best his direction-finding gear could tell, it was coming from the Moon, though no known Lunar transmitter worked on that frequency.

All of which strongly suggested that the Moon had something to do with what had happened.

There was another point, a rather obvious prediction. The orbits of every planet in the Solar System were going to be very slightly shifted.

Nothing very dramatic, of course. There would be minor changes to Venus's...o...b..t, and Mars's. Enough to throw off navigation a bit, that was all. The big changes would be in the area of the Moon.

Which was probably more than anyone on the Moon had realized yet, McGillicutty told himself proudly.

McGillicutty cackled to himself. Nice to be aheadof the pack. But in science, it was important not just to be ahead, but to prove it, to the world at large.

He ordered the computer to summarize his finding and transmit the text and images to all the public-access channels on the Moon, Pluto, Mars and the major satellites.

That ought to give them something to think about. He read over the computer-generated summary, made one or two changes, adjusted a few of the graphs, and told the computer to send it. He grinned and started running the playbacks again.

He was having a wonderful time.

Orbital Traffic Control had its own tunnel-and-airlock system leading to the Lunar surface. OTC had a lot of instruments topside, and it made sense to have direct access to them without having to deal with the munic.i.p.al locks.

But Tyrone Vespasian was not going to check on his instruments, except, quite literally, in the most basic possible way. For all scientific instruments are merely extensions of the human senses. The instruments Vespasian needed to check were his eyes. He needed to see for himself.

There was always the faint chance, the faint hope that a camera, a lens, an electronic image system would have malfunctioned. He had to eliminate that possibility. He needed to know there was nothing but his own bare-a.s.sed eyeb.a.l.l.s between himself and what he was looking at. He needed to go up to the surface, look in the sky, and see for himself.

He knew Earth was gone, but this was not about knowing. He needed to believe.

The outer airlock door opened and Vespasian, huge and squat in his pressure suit, steppedawkwardly out onto the Lunar surface.

Look to the skies, he told himself, but somehow his gaze stayed determinedly staring at the ground.

Strange thoughts ran through his head. What, exactly, would happen to the Moon without the Earth? Vespasian found his eyes scanning the horizon, not the zenith. He could not bring himself to look up. Lucian's computer models showed the Moon merely retaining its previous Solar orbit with a somewhat increased eccentricity that would gradually damp out, eventually leaving the Moon riding secure, square on the former barycenter, the old center of gravity for the Earth-Moon system.

Look to the skies. What would happen to the Moon's rotation? Would it retain its old once-a-month spin? Still he could not force his eyes to look up, toward Gemini, to where Earth should have been. Would the Moon's spin speed up? Slow down?

Look to the skies. At last he turned his gaze upward, and looked-at nothing. A blankness, an empty spot where Earth had always been. He felt his knees about to give way, and leaned backward in time to land on his ample rump, rather than flat on his face.

He sat there, legs splayed out in front of him, head thrown back, staring at the sky, for hours, or days, or seconds. The lifeless hills of the Moon, the gray, cratered landscape no longer graced by the blue-white marble in the sky. He felt a tear in his eye, and was glad for some reason that he could not reach through his helmet and brush it away.

Another tear fell, and another. These were tears for Earth, tears that deserved to flow.