Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 35

But he couldn't have known. No one could have known. The search for gravity control had started before he was born. Sooner or later someone would have found a way to make a graser beam, and would have brushed the Moon with it. Someone would have pushed that b.u.t.ton. Dr. Raphael had said quite clearly that the entire Gravities Research Station had to bear its share of the blame...

No. Larry looked up again, caught his own eye in the mirror, and stared back at himself. All of it, in his favor and against him, was true, but now was not the time. Now he had to push it all away, the guilt and the justification. He would have his whole life for that. Wallowing in either right now would interfere with the amends he had to make.

He stared again at his hands. But his act of atonement would itself be a terrible crime. No one else knew that, no one knew what he had planned, and no one would, not until it was too late to stop.

This crime, this guilt, this sin he was determined to carry on his own shoulders alone, without ambiguity, fully aware of exactly what he was doing.

For Larry had realized that, in the event he got it wrong, it was that ambiguity, far more than the guilt itself, that he feared.

It had been a long and lonely wait on Pluto. One hundred twenty people at the edge of the Solar System, struggling to clean up after the geniuses.

The science staff had been working around the clock, trying to keep up with the torrents of gravities data pouring in. They had learned a great deal-in fact, too much. There had been no time to a.s.similate any of the information, to ponder it. a.s.soon as one new discovery was made, a dozen new and urgent mysteries would pop up, requiring more urgent overtime and study.

And now it could only get harder. Chao and Raphael were returning.

There! A flare of brightness halfway across the sky from Charon and the Ring. Jane Webling watched as the Nenya performed her final braking burn.

But Webling frowned. There was something strange about that burn. She pulled out her notepack. Strange indeed. The Nenya was not dropping into her normal parking orbit, but instead placing herself into the bary-center of the Pluto-Charon system. The barycenter was the balance point, the center of gravity for the whole Pluto-Charon system, the point in s.p.a.ce around which both planet and satellite rotated.

But the Nenya was never placed in the barycenter, for the very good reason that it could interfere with communication between the Ring and the Gravities Station. It only made sense if the Ring was to be controlled from the ship, instead of the Station.

But why the h.e.l.l would they need to run the Ring from there? And why hadn't the situation been explained? Jane Webling found a seat in the deserted observation dome and sat down. What the h.e.l.l was Larry Chao hoping to accomplish here? She knew the official explanation, that Larry hoped to use the Ring to control the Lunar Wheel, and thus shut down the Charonian attack on the Solar System.

Ironically, the Charonian Landers had beat the Nenya home. The first of them had arrived a few days ago. Now there were dozens of the huge things, dotting the surface of Pluto and Charon, home to their namesake.

The Nenya had been gone a long time, strandingthe entire staff in the cold and the dark. It was a quite distinct relief to have her back home again.

They had a way out again-even if home, if Earth, was no longer there.

With Larry, Dr. Raphael, and Sondra Berghoff away, she was the only scientist at the Gravities Research Station who fully understood Larry's work.

In order to take over the Wheel, the Ring would have to send it a more powerful signal than the Dyson Sphere was sending. The Ring of Charon did not have more than a tiny fraction of the power needed to overcome the Sphere.

Therefore if Larry was not lying to everyone, he was at least misleading them. Which suggested he was up to something.

But what, and why? It was a question of some importance. After all, here was a young man who had acted on his own, in secret, once before-and torn the Solar System apart. She could produce proofs, demonstrate to the other scientists that Larry's stated plan of action was impossible. Until Raphael returned a few hours from now, she was the acting director of the station. And if she could demonstrate that Raphael was part of the plot, then she would have every right and duty to prevent him from taking over the job again. And perhaps she ought to clap the two of them in irons.

Yes, beyond question, there were many things she could do. But should she do them? What did Larry intend?

Jane Webling did not know Larry well, but she had gotten a good look at his character in those chaotic first days after Earth vanished. He had seemed a very open and decent young man under incredible pressure. She had sensed nothing venal in him, nothing underhanded.

No, the most dangerous possibility was that he meant well, but had some plan, some scheme in mind he knew would not be permitted, some ideahe thought would be the answer to everything and solve all their problems. Under cover of the experiment he professed to be running, he would instead do whatever it was he did not wish anyone to know about.

In other words, Webling concluded, he would do exactly what had gotten them all into this mess in the first place, when he had suborned her graser experiment and fired that d.a.m.ned beam at Earth.

And he had meant well then, too.

d.a.m.n it! What the h.e.l.l was she supposed to do?

Think. Think. That was what she had to do. All right then. Larry was up to something, because his stated plan could not possibly work, and he knew it.

However, he meant to do something that would do what the stated plan was meant to do: stop the Charonian attack on the Solar System.

And no doubt he was hiding his real plan because no one would let him near the Ring if they knew what he was really scheming.

And then she figured it out. She pulled out her notepack, ran through a series of calculations, and got the answers she knew she would get. She stared at them, utterly shocked that Larry would do such a thing.

She knew. She knew the answer. There was no other possible explanation.

But that left her with her original problem. What was she going to do about it?

She sat there, alone, with only Charon and the Ring bulking in the sky for company, and thought for a cold and lonely time. Larry Chao, for whatever reason-choice, necessity, guilt, panic, mischievousness or a cold, hard, adult feeling of responsibility, was playing G.o.d with the survival of the Solar System. Again. And by second-guessing him, deciding what to do about it, she found herself playing a little G.o.d all by herself. Suppose, strangeand impossible as it seemed, Larry had it right, and she moved to stop him? Or suppose he were wildly, disastrously wrong, and she stood by and did nothing?

The Nenya was meant to double as a bare-bones, extremely barren backup to the station in an emergency- and this situation certainly qualified.

The ship could house the entire staff, albeit under rather Spartan and crowded conditions. With the external tanks installed on the Moon, she could begin taking on pa.s.sengers immediately, without reconverting the ship first. But was that the right choice?

Jane Webling knew she had to choose, and time was running out. At last she stood up, returned to the Director's office, and used the intercom station there to give her orders. She could have done it anywhere on the station, but even the modest trapping of an office made her feel as if she had more authority.

Pushing the intercom b.u.t.ton, she drew in her breath, and spoke as slowly and clearly as she could, resisting the temptation to blurt her words out all at once.

"This is Acting Director Webling," she said. "All personnel are to prepare for the immediate and permanent evacuation of this station. Pack your personal items and prepare copies of all data for transfer to the Nenya. Work as quickly as you can, take only what you need- and work on the a.s.sumption that we are never coming back."

She shut down the intercom.

"Because we never can come back," she whispered. The station wasn't going to be there very long, a very high price to pay-but if she understood the situation, that station's destruction would be the cheapest of prices.

Or should she instead call it a down payment?

For if the race survived, humanity would bepaying the balance on this bill for a long, long time.

Another feature to the Nenya's design that reflected its purpose as a backup: the ship had a Ring control room, a duplicate of the four control rooms on the station. Larry, unaware of the station evacuation, sat there, working a simulation of his plan. It ought to work. All of it ought to work. And maybe that was what troubled him. Each step in the sequence seemed logical, sensible. But when he stepped back and looked at the entirety, it seemed ridiculous. Insane.

A knock at the control room door, and Simon Raphael came in. "Something interesting has come up," he said quietly. "I was just about to order the immediate evacuation of the station's staff up onto to the Nenya, when a message came in from Dr.

Webling, saying that she had just ordered the very same thing." Raphael lowered himself into a seat by the wall, and pulled the belt across his lap, as if he planned to stay there a long time.

Larry felt his blood running cold, felt confusion sweep over him. "What's that?" he asked.

"Sometimes if you give two people the same problem with the same set of clues, they come up with the same answer." There was a pause. "And sometimes, even three people can come up with it."

"You and Dr. Webling both saw right through me," Larry said. "No point in even trying to hide it."

"Yes," Dr. Raphael said, staring very intently at a point just over Larry's left shoulder.

The silence dragged for a long time, until it became apparent that the older man wasn't going to say anything else."Can I take it from the fact that you haven't stopped me, that you both approve of my actions?"

Larry asked, in a voice that was struggling to be calm and steady.

"No one," Dr. Raphael said, with an effort, "no one is ever going to approve of your plans, especially given recent events. They seem too much like a disaster we have already witnessed. But neither Dr. Webling nor myself see any choice in the matter.

"You obviously planned not to tell anyone until it was too late. Just out of curiosity, how were you going to string us along? What were you going to say or do to allay our suspicions?"

Larry shook his head, his expression blank. "I don't know. That was the thing I hadn't figured out."

"Then I suggest," Raphael said coldly, "that you get on with the parts you did figure out."

Power, Larry told himself.

Power. That was what it was all about. Power, gravity power, was what the Charonians had. Power allowed them to take over solar systems, steal planets, tear worlds apart-without any thought of objections from the inhabitants.

Larry checked the next step on his list. Shift the override control to manual. It was the absence of power that left the people of the Solar System helpless.

So, the question came back, how to get some of that power into humanity's hands? Rotate colliding beam focus transfer to 270 degrees. Ultimately, of course, the Dyson Sphere was the source of thatpower, and there was not a hope, not a dream of matching that.

But even the Sphere needed conduits to send its power outward. Fusion boosters to third-stage warming. Larry was deep into his work now, barely aware that the outside world, that anything outside the Ring, its control room, and his intellect existed.

As far as power was concerned, the Lunar Wheel barely entered into the issue. It used the power, yes.

Directed it and controlled it. But all its power came from elsewhere.

The power could not come from the Earthpoint black hole, either. By definition, nothing could come out of a black hole, except through the process of its own evaporation. The stream of elementary particles caused by that process was nowhere near enough to drive the vast operations going on in the Solar System.

The only other possible source for the power was the Dyson Sphere itself, using the Earthpoint black hole in wormhole mode as power conduit, relaying power to the Wheel. For three seconds out of every 128, Earthpoint flicked open into a wormhole, a link between the worlds. And it was then, when the huge asteroid-sized physical objects were sent, that the power had to be sent as well. Gravity power, modulated gravitational energy. How the Dyson Sphere produced it, Larry did not know, or care. He would worry about that tomorrow.

If there was a tomorrow.

Larry forced that thought from his mind, determined to focus on the problem at hand. He did not notice as Webling slipped into the room and sat down next to Raphael. High-power channel rotators in operational position. The power got to the Wheel. That was the important thing. When the Ring was in gravity-scope mode, you could see the Wheel laden with that power, watch it absorb, store, transmit it out across the Solar System to allthe monsters tearing the worlds apart. You could see it sending out the command-images ordering the Venusian Landers to build that hideous thing pumping core matter out of the world, ordering the Ganymede Landers to dig in deeper.

That was the power and command cycle that gave the Charonians their strength.

Suppose that mere humans were able to tap into that power cycle? Were able to draw down gravitic power, and so deny it to the Wheel? Cut in on the communications circuits and order the invaders to stop what they were doing?

Suppose humanity had its own black hole?

But black holes were made out of ma.s.s. Lots of it.

Board ready. Ring ready in new configuration.

Ready for manual activation. Larry stared for a long moment at the sequence indicator. He realized that he could have configured for an automatic start this time, too. But no, once again, he had set it up to take a manual start, a human finger pushing a b.u.t.ton to start the whole desperate gamble rolling.

"Go ahead, Mr. Chao," a gruff old man's voice said. "Do what you must do to Charon."

Larry flinched in startlement. He turned around to see Dr. Raphael and Dr. Webling there. He had no idea how long they had been there. "It is Charon first, is it not?" Raphael asked.

"Yes... yes sir. But ah, well, I really don't have any good models on how much time we'll have. Once we have a momentum of accretion, we really shouldn't stop-"

"The station has been evacuated, Mr. Chao," Dr.

Webling said, her voice strained and under tight control. What emotions was she struggling to mask? Fear? Awe? Anger?

And toward what or whom were those emotions directed? No, ask the plain question, Larry toldhimself. Just how afraid of me is she? Will they all fear me, forevermore?

"Everyone is aboard the Nenya?" he asked in surprise. How wrapped up in his work had he been, that he had missed the comings and goings of the shuttle craft? Good G.o.d, isn 't there anything in my life besides work? Isn't there even anything else I can see?

"It's time to begin this," Dr. Raphael said.

"And end it," Webling agreed, in a tense whisper.

Larry lifted his finger, held it over the b.u.t.ton, and pressed it down.

A signal, a simple radio signal of only a few watts in power, leapt across the depths of s.p.a.ce toward the Ring.

Simplicity, and smallness ended there.

The immensely powerful Ring that girdled Charon sprang to life, shifting and channeling gravitic energy in ways that its designers had never imagined. Perhaps in some nomenclatures it would be more accurate to say the Ring bent s.p.a.ce, realigned the areas of potential, but this a.s.sault on a world was too violent to be described by a mere bending and folding. The Ring crushed the s.p.a.ce around Charon, beating it into a new form like red-hot iron on an anvil. It grabbed at Charon's gravity field and focused it, creating a gravitic lensing effect, concentrating the entire worldlet's gravitic potential at one point.

But not a point in the interior. A point on the surface, directly in the center of the hemisphere facing Pluto. It was Larry's old experiment in focusing and amplifying gravity. But this time the point of million-gee force was stable, and solid. Now Larry knew how to maintain such a point source for as long as he wanted, draining the gravitic potential out of the entire world and focusing it in one tiny point.For a time, a brief time, the satellite held firm, retained its near-spherical shape. But then the new and violent tidal stresses on it began to take hold.

The core, for billions of years at the focus of Charon's gravity field, was suddenly at the gravity field's periphery. Like a ship that has lost its anchor, Charon was suddenly a world cut adrift from the ancient gravity well that had molded it, formed it over all the lonely aeons of its existence.

With the loss of gravity's anchoring effects, the worldlet began to crumble. First the surface matter, and then more and more core material began to fall upward, toward the new gravitic locus.

Ancient crater fields trembled, shuddered, smashed themselves to pieces as impossible landslides slumped sideways over the surface, pounding and tumbling toward the locus. Deep in the interior, layers of frozen gas and rock that had not moved in a billion years began to shift, bulge upward toward the locus on the surface. Heat, caused by compression and friction, warmed ice and rock that had slumbered near absolute zero since long before the first living thing had emerged from Earth's primordial sea. The heated ice and rock expanded, hissed, boiled, exploded. Vast sheets of the tortured surface suddenly blasted forth, streamers of glowing gas and pulverized rock arcing out into s.p.a.ce, then falling down onto the hungry locus of gravity.

The Charonian Landers that had landed on their namesake world began to die, beaten and pummeled by the ever-growing violence that ripped at the frozen landscape.

With each infall of matter, the locus grew stronger, grasping greedily for more and more ma.s.s. The Ring monitored the locus, refocusing and amplifying it down to an ever-tighter, smaller, more powerful point source.

Now the Ring began the second phase of the operation, slowly dragging the new locus back downinto the center of the dying satellite, twisting the knife in the wound, tearing a deeper hole in the surface, forcing a second wave of compression and heating to start moving back down into the interior, so that the old and new compression waves slammed directly into each other.

The satellite's surface shuddered and cracked wide open, the heated ices of the interior blasting forth as gases and liquids.

The Ring took hundreds, thousands of minor impacts from the shower of artificial volcanic activity. But it had been built to withstand ma.s.sive stresses, and Larry's control program managed to focus most of the convulsions well away from the Ring plane.

The locus of gravity bore down into the center of the little world. By now, a solid pinpoint of matter, already close to the density of a neutron star, had gathered around the locus, and was eagerly sucking more and more matter down into itself. Under Charon's tortured surface, the volume of infalling matter began to make itself felt. The locus ma.s.s swallowed up material and compressed it down into a tiny fraction of its previous volume. With more and more matter compressing into a smaller and smaller s.p.a.ce, Charon began to fall in on itself.

The heat of collapse began to increase, even as the ma.s.s and volume of matter available for heating started to shrink.

Temperatures began to rise. Chemical bonds that had been stable for billions of years split apart.

Hotspots began to glow on the surface, horrid splotches of red and white spreading like some ghastly plague on the land. More and more surface volatiles sublimated away. Gas geysers blasted free, plumes of steam roiled up through vents and from the bubbling cauldrons of the hotspots. Clouds of pink and green, chemical compounds new-formed in the turmoil below, twisted and knotted through the tempestuous air. For the first time in all its longhistory, Charon's skies bore an atmosphere.