Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 3

CHAPTER THREE

From p.a.w.n 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 circ.u.mstance 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 a.n.a.logs, each useful and neither entirely accurate, itconjectured 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 s.p.a.ce? 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...o...b..ting 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 circ.u.mstance 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 anaudience.

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 n.o.bel 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 computersimulation 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 a.s.sumptions.

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 powerplay, 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 p.a.w.n. 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sing 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 wonderhow 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sault 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 provehe 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. h.e.l.l, 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 d.a.m.ned 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. h.e.l.l, 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 circ.u.mvent the ruling. So anyone trying for a test would have to disguise the run as something else.

Larry used his notepack computer to check theRing 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 "a.s.sistant" the next morning. In alllikelihood, 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 t.i.tle 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 s.p.a.ce. A beam of curved s.p.a.ce.

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 thepower 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. h.e.l.l, it would melt the readouts right off the gravity detectors.

That should get them some off-planet attention.

CHAPTER FOUR.

The Finger on the b.u.t.ton 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 c.u.mulative 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 ofasking 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 a.s.sumed 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 ma.s.sively 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.