Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 18

"The numbers are fine, very solid. It's your conclusions I don't like."

"There's no question at all about the conclusions."

"There is in my mind," Lucian shouted, trying to be heard over the air rushing past them. "But back to the numbers. I pulled together a last update just before you landed. The Earthpoint black hole ma.s.sis definitely 1.054 terrestrial, no appreciable accretion since appearance, though we're starting to see a nice little debris field. We've used the optical scalar technique to nail down the spin rate.

The north magnetic and spin poles are definitely pointed south. But are you that solid on what the figures mean? I'm still a little hesitant about going public with them."

"If the numbers are right, then we go," Larry shouted back, a bit heatedly. "If they've called a crash meeting, we can't waste time quadruple-checking just because you have a gut reaction against the answers. Give me an alternative explanation and I'll hold back."

"Okay, okay. I guess I'm convinced, but just barely. The other researchers will have to make up their own minds."

In the backseat, Sondra couldn't hear half the words, but she didn't much care. The two of them had been going back and forth over this ground for weeks. The runcart burst out of the tunnel into what a sign said was the Amundsen SubBubble, and there was suddenly a lot more to look at than rock wall. She recorded a brief impression of a city that had been rattled about a bit, and people here and there working on the cleanup. There wasn't time to note much before Lucian stood on the brakes nearly hard enough to throw them all over the front of the cart. Presumably, they had arrived at Armstrong University, though Sondra hadn't seen a sign. "Here we are," Lucian announced, and hopped out of the cart. He led them into a long, low, academic-looking building. They hurried down a long corridor. The door at the end of the hall was open, and Lucian ushered them right inside.

Larry was the last one into the room, and at first it seemed to him that the place was full of nothing but eyes sitting around an oblong table. Everyone in the room was staring straight at him, getting a good look at the man who destroyed Earth. Larryfelt like he had been moving at breakneck speed and had just slammed into a brick wall. A brick wall made out of eyes.

He heard the door swing shut and latch behind him, and did not feel rea.s.sured.

Larry felt a gentle hand on his arm and turned to see a gnomish-looking little man in a rather severely cut lime green frock coat that lived up to the Lunar reputation for garish dress. "Welcome to you all,"

he said. "I am Pierre Daltry, chancellor of the university and, it would appear, the de facto head of our group, at least for the time being. If you would take your seats, we can begin. Mr. Chao, Dr.

Berghoff, Dr. Raphael?" They sat down in the chairs reserved for them at the head of the long table, Larry for one wishing for a less prominent place to sit.

Chancellor Daltry took his place at the middle of the table, but remained standing. "I will not waste too much time on introductions," he said, "but let me note a few of the other princ.i.p.al speakers for the day. These are the people who have done the most to study our present situation. Lucian Dreyfuss you have all met. Tyrone Vespasian, also of the Orbital Traffic Control Center. Marcia MacDougal and Hiram McGillicutty from VISOR." He pointed each of them out, and then gestured to include the entire table.

"Every major government in the Solar System is represented here-including Earth, I might add.

Nancy Stanton, the U.N. amba.s.sador to the Lunar Republic, is here. And we are here to make decisions. Simon Raphael and Larry Chao suggested this meeting some days ago, and things have happened quickly since then, enlarging the importance-and the responsibility-of this conference. As the time for deliberation is short, and the need for action urgent, the various governments have agreed to authorize this joint committee to speak and to act. What we decidearound this table will not be mere recommendations, but the orders of the day. So let us consider well what we do."

Daltry paused and looked around the table.

"A moment from the Moon's history comes to my mind. About a century ago, the political situation between the Earth and Moon on one side, and the rest of the Solar System on the other, came dangerously close to interplanetary war. In the midst of that crisis, an asteroid that was to be placed in Earth orbit came horribly close to striking the Earth, a disaster that would have made a nuclear war seem trivial by comparison. The Moon bore the brunt of that crisis, and we have Morrow Crater in the center of Farside-and our independence from Earth-to remind us of those days.

"Up until a few days ago, we all imagined such an asteroid impact to be the worst possible catastrophe that could befall humanity, or the Earth. Now we know better.

"We as a race have often imagined that we knew the worst that could befall us-and time after time we have found something worse that could happen.

Famine, flood, ecologic disaster, nuclear winter, asteroidal impact. Every time, a new worst has supplanted the old, imagined worst. Can we now be sure the worst is behind us?"

There was silence around the table.

"I call upon Mr. Chao to open the substantive discussion."

Larry Chao wondered whether to stand up or not, and decided not to; he felt exposed enough just sitting there. He had never even been to the Moon before. What the h.e.l.l was he doing here now, addressing all these big shots? Had it really been worth all the money and effort to get him here so fast just so he could talk?

The h.e.l.l with it. Larry squared his shoulders andlaunched into his talk, hoping to get it over with as soon as possible. "Ah, thank you once again, Chancellor, and, ah, members of the joint committee." He wasn't even quite sure if that was what this group should be called.

He pulled some notes from his pocket and shuffled through them without comprehension, trying to stall long enough to order his thoughts.

"Let me start by settling the first and foremost issue before the group: Is the black hole now where Earth once was actually the Earth? Did our-did my -experiment somehow cause Earth to be crushed down into nothingness?" There, I've said it, he thought. His heart was pounding in his chest. There was a slight rustle around the table as Larry confessed his own part in the disaster.

Yes, I was the one who did it, he thought. I admit it. He knew he had no choice in the matter but to accept the facts. He could never hide from what had happened, from what he had done. He was going to travel under a cloud for the rest of his days. Pretending it wasn't there would not improve the situation.

Sondra sat next to him, watching her friend.

Even through his nervousness, she could see that he had grown, changed, matured in these past days. As he spoke, he sat up a little straighter, returned the gaze of his audience with a bit more confidence.

The shy half-child was not yet gone, but there was much more of the adult about him, too.

Larry went on. "During our journey in from Pluto, I was in constant contact with the Orbital Traffic Control Center here on the Moon. As you all no doubt know, that facility came up with excellent data on the situation here in the Earth-Moon system-or perhaps calling it Lunar s.p.a.ce might make more sense now." Again, a small stir in the audience. "Lucian Dreyfuss of OTC has collated the OTC information on the black hole. Both he and I have a.n.a.lyzed that data and come to the sameconclusions."

Larry saw Lucian at the far end of the table, returning Larry's gaze evenly, doing nothing to signal agreement or disagreement. Larry found himself forced to admire Lucian's cool.

"We modeled what Earth would look like as a black hole, and compared it to what we can measure of the black hole that is now sitting where Earth used to be."

Warming to his subject, Larry forgot his shyness.

"The trouble is, very few properties of a black hole can be measured. In many senses, a black hole isn't there at all. It has no size, no color, no spectrum. Its density is infinite. But there are certain things we can get readings on. First and most obvious is the hole's ma.s.s. The first thing we knew about the hole was how much it weighed.

"You will also recall that it weighed five percent more than Earth. That may not sound like much, but bear in mind, the Moon only has one-point-two percent of the Earth's ma.s.s. And remember, the black hole's ma.s.s was measured only eight hours after Earth vanished. It could not have acc.u.mulated that much more ma.s.s that quickly. For the Earthpoint black hole to be Earth, it would have to be removed, compressed down into a singularity, fed the equivalent of four Moon ma.s.ses, and then returned to its starting point, all in eight hours. To my mind that makes it all but impossible that the black hole truly is the Earth."

Larry found himself remembering his days as a teaching a.s.sistant. He had always enjoyed lecturing.

"Now I've got to jump into some slightly complicated areas. For the sake of clarity, I'm going to be something less than a purist about my nomenclature. Forgive me if I oversimplify a bit, but I won't hand out any wrong data, just make it a bit easier to follow.

"There are a few things we can measure in ablack hole: spin attributes; electric charge and magnetic field, if any; event horizon; ma.s.s; and of course the strength of the gravity field itself. These are not independent variables, of course. For example, the magnetic field, or lack of it, depends on both the electrical charge of the hole, and on its spin.

"We can measure spin, charge, and the magnetic field effects-and they can tell us useful things. Let me start with spin. We can get a reading on the hole's rotation from the movement of its magnetic fields, and from what is called the optical scalar technique. The black hole's axis of spin is precisely ninety degrees from the plane of its...o...b..t. As you know, Earth's axis is canted 23.5 degrees from its...o...b..tal plane. It would require tremendous energy to move Earth's axis into the vertical and then hold it there. The planet would resist the motion, the way a gyroscope resists any effort to change its axis of spin. I doubt that you could force Earth toward the vertical without cracking the planetary crust and flinging large amounts of debris into s.p.a.ce. We did not see that debris.

"But that is only the first point concerning spin.

In order to conserve momentum, an object must spin faster if it gets smaller, the way a skater in a pirouette spins faster and faster as he draws his arms in toward his body.

"If you crush Earth into a black hole, the resultant hole would have to spin at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed. This hole is rotating far too slowly for it to be Earth. It is only rotating at about one percent of the velocity that an Earth-derived hole would turn. I might add that it is also spinning in the wrong direction.

"This black hole also exhibits a ma.s.sive negative electric charge. Earth was-is-electrically neutral.

Another point: the north and south magnetic poles of the hole are reversed.

"In ma.s.s, spin data, electric charge and magneticproperties-in every way that we can measure-this black hole is drastically different from what the Earth would be like if the Earth were made into a black hole.

"For all these reasons, I feel confident that this black hole is not the Earth."

A murmur of relief whispered about the room.

Larry let it die down before he went on. "What then has happened to Earth? Earth is either somewhere else, or has been destroyed. If it has been destroyed, where was the rubble it should have left behind, the debris? Where was the energy pulse? If the Earth had been smashed to rubble, or blown up, or disintegrated into elementary particles or pure energy, we would know about it-if we survived the event. There would be nothing subtle about the effects. The Moon would have been pelted with a ma.s.sive amount of debris or roasted in the energy release, or both.

"I believe that the Earth has been transported to another place, and was not destroyed."

"Now hold on a minute!" A strident voice broke in from halfway down the table. "There is not the slightest bit of information in the data to support that claim. I know! I gathered most of the data myself." It was McGillicutty, sputtering mad. "I didn't watch your precious black hole close up. But you've just made the high-and-mighty argument that no technology could wreck a planet without a trace-but then you go and say, casual as you please, that it's possible to steal a planet without any fuss? What technology makes that possible?"

Sondra leaned in. "The wormhole, dammit!

That's what the black hole is. A wormhole gateway to where Earth is."

"Wormhole, that's d.a.m.ned ridiculous!"

McGillicutty snorted. "They don't exist. They can't exist. And for my money, neither can black holes.

Certainly not black holes this small."Sondra felt her temper beginning to fray. "For G.o.d's sake-you've seen asteroid-sized bodies popping out of those blue flashes-and you provided the images of that blue flash sweeping up from behind Earth, engulfing it."

"I recorded that image," McGillicutty snapped, "but I do not support that interpretation of it.

There is clearly a compact ma.s.s in Earth's old position, but you are merely a.s.suming this compact ma.s.s is a black hole. I haven't seen any evidence that supports that idea. Suppose it is merely very dense, with no event horizon, and a surface gravity low enough for physical matter to escape? I haven't run the figures yet, but it seems to me that an Earth ma.s.s could be a thousandth the density of a black hole and still only be a few meters across, far too small to see from this distance. It could be that the beam shifted Earth from normal matter into strange-quark matter. A strange-quark body of Earth ma.s.s might only be a few kilometers across, and extremely dark in color. I suggest that is the situation, and the asteroid-sized bodies are being blown off the strange-matter compact body's surface somehow. By violent transitions back into normal matter."

"And the blue flashes?" Sondra asked.

"Energy discharges related to whatever is blasting the gee points off the strange-matter surface."

"But how are they being blown off?" Larry asked.

"What's the mechanism?"

"I don't know yet, sonny," McGillicutty snapped.

"But that's the only unexplained feature of my theory. Your black hole idea is nothing but unexplained features. My idea makes sense. Yours doesn't."

With that, a dozen voices joined in, offering their own opinions.

Larry listened to the shouting with a sinkingheart. They had been willing-even eager-to believe in evidence that the Earth had not been destroyed.

But suddenly, he sensed something different around the table. McGillicutty's theory had a dozen major flaws in it, was contradicted by the available evidence. But perhaps it was more palatable than something with the terrifying power to drop the Earth into a wormhole.

Larry watched the argument storm around him.

They had been with him up until McGillicutty interrupted. But he had lost them when they'd been given something more like what they wanted to hear.

Larry shrank back in his chair, feeling very much like a little child lost in a sea of doubting grown-ups. He thought back to the last full science staff meeting of the Gravities Research Station.

How long ago had it been? Just seventeen days ago?

Eighteen? He had made a very long, strange trip indeed just to come and feel lost again. He sat there, feeling young and alone.

But then a new voice, strong and determined, cut through the welter of voices. "All this is a side issue," Simon Raphael said in a stern voice. "Black hole, worm-hole, compact ma.s.s-just before we left Pluto, Mr. Chao reminded me that none of that truly matters. What matters is that our homeworld has been stolen, and our Solar System invaded by an alien force." Raphael stood up, leaned his hands on the table, and looked about the room. There was silence.

"How that has happened does not matter. In a strange way, it is almost comforting to get lost in technical arguments over how it happened-because then we could get so lost in the details of the situation that we never have to look at these larger, and more terrifying issues. Our Solar System has been invaded. In some unknown way, our gravity-wave experiment appears to have been the signal for that invasion."I know as well as all of you how absurd that sounds-attack from beyond the stars-but what other explanation fits the facts? Do you have an idea, Dr. McGillicutty? Some other interpretation that does not contradict any of the very few facts we do have?" Raphael looked around the table. "The quiet in this room tells me there is no other explanation. But we cannot reject the only answer we have simply because it is difficult to accept. I know of what I speak when I say that. Refusing to accept a challenge is an old man's failing, and one of which I have been much guilty in recent days.

"We have been attacked, that is obvious. And yet no one asks, 'By whom?' We are so reluctant to accept this incredible disaster that we cannot go even one step further and ask who did this, or why they did it. It seems to me that those questions are far more important than how they did it, or whether their technology seems to violate this or that pet theory. I don't know what their motives are, but I cannot imagine that a fleet of thirty thousand asteroid-sized s.p.a.cecraft are headed toward all our worlds with the intention of doing good deeds.

"And yet how they do what they do is important, because we must fight them, whoever they are.

Before we can do that, we must learn more about them. If Earth has been removed, where was it taken? What do the aliens intend here in the Solar System? How, precisely, are the other planets threatened? And why?

"The latest reports estimate thirty-two thousand large objects, which we've been calling gee points, all of them on constant-boost courses headed straight for every one of the major planets-but not for the Moon. So let's talk about why, if we can."

"Ah, maybe this is the place for me to jump in,"

said a bald, heavyset man sitting next to Lucian.

"I'm Tyrone Vespasian, and I've been concentrating on the gee points."Raphael nodded and sat down. "By all means."

"Okay, I guess the big questions about the gee points are one, what are they, and two, why is the Moon exempt? Let me talk about the first. Some of the fastest-moving gee points have reached Venus and Mercury. Unfortunately we don't know what happened to them on arrival. Quicksilver Station on Mercury just saw large radar blips go below the horizon, and VISOR also lost the gee points as they went in. There weren't any big seismic events on either world, which suggests that the gee points managed to make soft landings somehow.

"I don't know if it's good news or bad, but we ought to have landings on Mars in a few days. We should be able to get better information from there when that happens. The Venus and Mercury arrivals are from gee points moving out from the Earthpoint black hole." Vespasian looked up and glared at McGillicutty. "Or compact ma.s.s, if you need to call it that. Anyway, there are a few gee points moving from Earth-s.p.a.ce toward the outer planets, but they have farther to go. The gee points moving from the Asteroid Belt and Oort Cloud are moving slower and have the longest distances to travel.

"Some of the gee points are moving toward the gas giants. What they plan to do when they get there, we don't know. We don't know if they're interested in the planets, the satellites, or both.

"If you take a look at the Asteroid Belt gee points through a long-range camera, they look just like ordinary asteroids. In fact, a few of them were mined as asteroids for some time. Except asteroids aren't supposed to contain point-source gravity-wave systems.

"The objects coming out of the Earthpoint black hole look totally different, as far as we can tell. It's hard to get good imagery on them. They're a little smaller, and look more like artificial objects. Their surfaces are more reflective, and they seem to bevery regular in shape. The Earthpoint gee points are moving too fast for any of our ships to match velocity with them real easy, though there are four or five missions already on the way. On the other hand, they seem to behave just like the asteroidal gee points. I think they're all really the same thing."

"And what is that?" Chancellor Daltry asked gently.

Vespasian's face turned sad, and he was silent for a long moment before he spoke. "I thought a lot about that," he said. "I think they're s.p.a.ceships.

Really big s.p.a.ceships. The ones coming from the Outer System have been waiting, hidden, camouflaged as asteroids and comets. Hiding from what, I don't know. Once these things start accelerating, moving, it's obvious they aren't what they seem. Disguise is pointless. So, since the ones coming through Earthpoint are accelerating from the start, there's no sense in disguising them. The Earthpoint ones are accelerated on the other side of the wormhole somehow-given a high initial speed.

Plus they have a slightly higher boost rate. That makes them seem different from the Outer System jobs, but I think they're really all the same thing.

Big ships."

He hesitated one last time, and then said it.

"Invasion ships. I've tried to come up with some other explanation, but nothing else fits. They're ships. What sort of crews they have aboard, I don't know.

"But we're going to find out when the first one lands on Mars."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

Empire of the SunsMaybe the world hadn't ended, but Gerald MacDougal found himself in paradise, after all. Or at least in California.

But then, California, Vancouver, and in fact all of Earth were suddenly an exobiologist's paradise.