Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 5

Having reached this flawed identification, it accessed the concept of change and mutation as recorded in its memory store. It explored the possible forms change might take, and the results of those changes. As best it could tell, the alien fit within the possible parameters. That was enough data to satisfy the Observer.

It only remained to determine what its distant cousin was doing. But then, the answer arrived, full-blown and complete, from its heritage memory store.It was a relay. It was echoing a message from home, announcing that it was time. Perhaps the normal means of contact had failed, and this new ring had sailed between the stars to bring its message.

Of course. What else could it be? The Observer searched the length and breadth of its memory, and did not find an alternative answer.

To one of the Observer's kind, memory was all.

Finding no other answer in its memory proved there was no other answer.

It was a way of being that had always worked.

Jupiter was next, or rather Ganymede. Larry told himself he must remember not to treat the inhabited satellites as mere appendages of the planets. The residents of the gas-giant satellite settlements were always annoyed by that sort of thing. After all, no one referred to the Moon as being part of Earth. t.i.tan, Ganymede and the other inhabited satellites were worlds in their own right.

Larry knew he had best bear that in mind-if things worked out the way they might, he would have a lot of contact with the gravity experts on t.i.tan and Ganymede.

Yeah, those are vital points right now, Larry thought sarcastically. He was finding other things to worry about, trying to avoid the big picture. He had caught himself doing that all night, again and again. He was unable to face the meaning, the consequences of what he was doing. He did not want to be in charge of changing the world. The h.e.l.l with it. Larry plunged in the start b.u.t.ton again. The beam regenerated itself and leapt toward Jupiter's satellite.At least, they hoped it was heading toward Ganymede. Though Sondra had run graser experiments before, they were at a ten-millionth of this power. She was finding the collimated gravity beam difficult to control even with computer-automated a.s.sistance and Larry to backstop her.

And, be it confessed, she too was more than a bit nervous about dealing with such ma.s.sive amounts of power. Even with all the signal loss and fade-outs of their crude directionalizing system, they were still pulsing bursts of three hundred thousand gravities out from a point source-albeit a point source smaller than an amoeba, a point source that went unstable after a few seconds. A million kilometers from the Pluto-Charon system, the pulse had lost half its power, and lost half again in another million.

By the time it reached even the closest of its targets, the beam had lost virtually all its power, was reduced to a one-millisecond tenth-gee wisp of nothing. And since it was phased with the repulser beam, the net gravitational energy directed at a target was exactly zero. The beam pushed exactly as hard as it pulled. It was physically impossible for the beam to be anything but harmless. Besides, each beam firing only lasted a millisecond and acted on the entire target body as a whole. The beam was a push-pull type, she told herself again.

The push-pull couldn't fail, not without the entire system failing utterly. It was impossible for this beam to hurt anyone or anything.

But such rea.s.surances weren't enough to keep her from getting nervous. "How's it going, Larry?"

she asked for what seemed like the hundredth time.

"Still fine," Larry replied, more than a bit distracted himself. The amplified gravity source still collapsed every thirty seconds or so, and Larry had to regenerate the point source. The strain was getting to him. He had hoped to automate theprocess, but he had rapidly discovered that he barely had time to look up from his primary controls before the source would go unstable again.

It wasn't until halfway through the Jupiter run that he had the time to set up the automation system. He instructed the computer to look over his shoulder, figuratively speaking, and watch the regeneration procedure he used.

After the seventh or eighth time, the computer had "learned" the regen procedure in most of its permutations and was able to take over the job itself. Larry breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back in his chair. They were on their way.

He wondered what their reactions would be-especially what the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would think.

The speed of light was the limiting factor now.

Gravity waves moved at lightspeed, just like any other kind of radiation. At the moment, Pluto, Saturn, and Jupiter were all roughly lined up one side of the Sun, with Venus and Earth on the other sides of their orbits, only a few degrees away from the Sun. Of the planets in question, Saturn was currently the closest to Pluto, and Earth the furthest away.

Larry frowned and scribbled a quick diagram on a scratch pad to help him keep it all straight. After a few brief calculations, he added the round-trip-signal time in hours for each planet.

planet position Earth Venus Sun Jupiter Saturn Pluto station JPL VISOR - Ganymede t.i.tan GRS round trip signal time in hours from Pluto 11.2 11.1 - 9.4 8.27 0 Those were round-trip-signal times. So t.i.tanStation, orbiting Saturn, would receive its dose of gravity waves in just over four hours. Even if t.i.tan signaled back to Pluto immediately when the gravity waves arrived, it would still take more than four more hours for Pluto to get the word.

It worked out to over eleven hours between firing the beam at Earth and getting a reply back from JPL.

JPL was the key to it all. JPL had run the first deep-s.p.a.ce probe 450 years before, and from that time to this, it had retained it preeminence in the field of deep-s.p.a.ce research. JPL was the big time.

It was the field leader on Earth, and that made it the leader, period. JPL was big enough to lean on the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation. And the UNAF was the one with the checkbook.

Six billion kilometers to Earth. Twelve billion, round-trip.

One h.e.l.l of a long way to go for funding, Larry thought.

A timer beeped. That was the end of the Ganymede beam sequence. Time to retarget again, point the beam at Venus. Larry flexed his fingers and watched his board as Sondra laid in the new targeting data.

"All set, Larry," she said.

Larry nodded and pressed the b.u.t.ton again.

Venus. There were dreams of terraforming the planet-indeed, that idea was VISOR's reason for being there in the first place.

Now there was a project that could benefit from artificial gravity on a large scale. Orbit a Virtual Black Hole around the planet and let it suck away ninety percent of the atmosphere. Use lateral-pull gravity control to speed up the planet's spin. Pipe dreams. Wonderful pipe dreams.

Those were for tomorrow. Right now a millisecond burst of a tenth gee was victory enough.By now the computer had the hang of the graser control. It likewise seemed to be handling the point-source regeneration without much need for guidance. The ten minutes targeted on Venus pa.s.sed quickly.

Earth was next. Earth. Not just JPL, but half the major science centers in the system were still there.

Larry watched eagerly as Sondra set up the revised targeting data. Thirty seconds ahead of time, she nodded at him. The new coordinates were locked in. Over their heads, the Ring had adjusted itself, in effect setting up a lens to focus the point source at Earth, the home planet.

Larry grinned eagerly and pressed home the fire b.u.t.ton.

Eleven hours, he thought. Five and a half for the beam to get there, and another five and a half for us to hear the results. Then we 'II know what Earth thinks of this little surprise.

Eleven hours.

With a whimper, not a bang, with a three-in-the-morning sense of anticlimax, the run ended. It was over, but it hadn't started yet. Larry turned to Sondra and smiled. "Ready for the excitement tomorrow?"

She shook her head and stretched, struggling to stifle a yawn. "I haven't really thought about it yet.

But all h.e.l.l is going to break loose when Raphael sees what we've done."

Larry winced. "Yeah. That's going to be the tough part. If he hates me now, tomorrow he'll want to throw me out the nearest hatch without a suit."

Sondra looked at Larry's face, watching the expressions play over it. Fear, apprehension-guilt.

Like a son who knows he's about to disappoint his father again.

She thought for a moment, and then spoke in a gentle voice. "I think it might be best if I do thetalking with Raphael."

Larry looked up at her, surprised. "No," he said.

"This is between me and him."

"No it isn't," Sondra said, "and that's just the point." She patted the control console, waved her hand to indicate the whole station. "This is science and politics. It's not just two people having a private argument. And if we treat it that way, as if you two having a spat was the only issue, we're going to lose what really matters. We'll lose our focus on what you and I have done tonight."

He closed his eyes and leaned back. A boy, no, a man, trying to clear his mind, think when his brain was soaked with exhaustion. "Okay. Okay. I see what you're saying. But you remind me of another question. And not just what b.u.t.tons we've pushed.

For the whole future: what, exactly, have we done tonight? I mean, gravity control." Larry opened his eyes, and leaned forward. Even at the end of this sleepless night, Sondra could feel the excitement in him, feel it catching at her.

"Think to the future," he said. "And think about what we've set loose."

CHAPTER FIVE.

Results Certainty. The strange signal came from a relay,a mutant or modified relay, distantly related to the Observer's own line and design. Normal contact had collapsed. The relay had traveled here across the depths of normal s.p.a.ce, searching for an Observer, to tell it the time had come to Link.

Certainty. It was a mere hypothesis, and a badly flawed one at that. Any number of observations contradicted the Observer's.e.xplanation. But the Observer was sure it was the answer, the solution.

It barely mattered that the Observer was utterly wrong. For it could not ignore a stimulus, no matter what its source. No matter what conclusion it reached, it would respond to the stimulus of powerful modulated gravity waves.

And now the alien Ring, the spurious relay, was sending ma.s.sive amounts of power, obviously directed at the other worlds in this star system, beaming power first at one, then another. Even though the beam was not directed at the Observer, the beam leaked atrociously. Furthermore, the gravity patterns of the target worlds refracted the beam in subtle but distinct ways. Thus the Observer detected the beams and their targets easily.

The Observer considered the targeting pattern and projected it inward: the alien was scanning in toward the Inner System, one world after another.

The alien Ring was searching for something.

And that something could only be the Observer.

It would find the Observer, stimulate it-force the Observer to act, to reveal itself, to perform the task it had been waiting to perform for millions of years.

The Observer knew it would have no choice but to respond, react to that beam if it struck this place.

Something like excitement, like fear, coursed through it.

Seismographs all over the Moon recorded its spasm of feeling.

But it wanted to believe. It wanted to respond. It was lonely, eager to renew contact with the outside Universe, eager to begin a new phase of its own existence. It began to prepare for the beam, activating subsystems that had long beendormant. It drew down power from its reserves, determined to be ready the moment the beam touched.

Wolf Bernhardt breathed in the cool California air and told himself it was right that there was a Berliner involved. Berlin was the ancestral home of physics, after all. All this grand work would never have happened if not for the great minds that had labored in that city so long ago.

And it required at least a quick, agile mind to respond to this situation quickly. He had listened to the pre-experiment broadcast from Pluto, and that had been enough. Others would have hesitated, he congratulated himself. Not Herr Doktor Bernhardt.

The first word that the effect was real, that powerful, controllable artificial gravity had been detected had arrived only a quarter hour ago, from t.i.tan Station. Wolf checked his watch. He had to go on the air in another five minutes. Plenty of time.

Lucky indeed that his quarters were close to the main control station.

He smoothed his shirt down and examined himself in the bathroom mirror. Herr Doktor Wolf Bernhardt, age thirty, ambitious and determined, looked back out at him, blue eyes gleaming, blond hair combed back off the high forehead, angular jaw jutted just slightly forward. His suit immaculate, the fabric a pale powder blue that set off his slightly ruddy complexion. His smooth skin glowed with health and the warmth of the shower he had just had. He ran a hand over his jaw. Yes, perfectly shaved. No one could suspect he had been in rumpled clothing dozing by the duty-scientist panel fifteen minutes ago. Now he was ready for theworld.

He looked again at the mirror. Yes, it was a face appropriate to history. It was 1:25 in the morning, local time, but he was fresh, sharp. And that was important. Tonight, now, he would be talking to only the scientists on Pluto, with perhaps a relay to the other off-planet stations. But tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, Earth would see the recordings of those messages over the newsnets.

And the reporters-they would need a spokesman to talk to, someone who could answer their questions from here, not from the other side of an event radius light-hours across.

And he, Wolf Bernhardt, would be there, ready to talk, all the figures and results at his fingertips.

Quite literally at his fingertips-for he would be relying on the computer to educate him on the topic of gravity research. He would need to work the databases hard to get up to speed quickly.

But he would be there, he would learn, he would be ready. This was the moment he had waited for.

His moment in the sun.

He turned and left his room, hurrying a bit, as if fame and history were impatient for him to arrive.

Sondra stumbled through the cafeteria the next morning. After a bare four hours' sleep, her thought processes were not as sharp as they should have been. She looked around the room and spotted Webling, indecently awake and cheerful, tucking into her fruit salad.

Webling, Sondra thought. With the damage already done, maybe now was the time to turn a potential enemy around. Time to admit whatwe've done, Sondra thought. Webling was a woman of sudden enthusiasms. If Sondra could get her excited about the amplified graser before word leaked out, then perhaps she would help blunt any attack Raphael might make. The next step, Sondra decided, was to suck Webling into the game.

She collected her own breakfast and a large cup of coffee, then shuffled wearily over to the older scientist's table, struggling to calculate the time dynamics in her head. t.i.tan's initial response message ought to arrive back at Pluto in about twenty minutes. Larry was probably already in the observatory bubble, the traditional place to await messages from the Inner System.

The main comm board was patched through to the bubble, so that any public message that arrived at the station would automatically be echoed there.

The early-morning shift in the computer center would have seen the overnight science and experimentation reports already.

Those reports were supposed to be strictly confidential, but the computer team was a noted den of gossips, masters of hinting at things they could not say directly. The rumors were probably flying already, at least in the station's lower echelons, if not in the circles where Webling and Raphael were likely to hear anything. Sondra thought she noticed a face or two turned toward her, and wondered if it was just her imagination.

Of course, the moment the t.i.tan message came in, rumor would turn into fact and all h.e.l.l would break loose. Everyone would know what Larry and she had done. After that, it would be too late to turn Webling around.

The trick was to tell Webling about the revised experiment, and get her excited about the probable results, before the message came-and before Raphael found out.

Anyway, it was worth a try. Sondra walked overto the table where the older woman was sitting.

"Good morning, Dr. Webling!" she said, with as much false cheeriness as she could manage.

"Why, good morning, Sondra. I didn't expect to see you up and about so early," Webling replied in her slightly reedy voice. "How did the experiment run go last night?"

"Very well. Very well indeed," Sondra said. "But I'm afraid I have a confession to make about it."

Webling, whose closest attention had been focused on a slice of grapefruit, looked up sharply at Sondra. "Go on," she said in a careful voice.

Sondra bit her lip and started talking, hoping that Larry would understand the need to downplay his part in the experiment just now. The truth needed a few coa.r.s.e adjustments. "I got a little inspired last night. I made an adjustment to the graser settings. Nothing that would affect the primary experiment goals, of course. Even so, I suppose I should have awakened you before I made the adjustment. It's just that the idea came to me so suddenly that there was barely time to set it up as it was. And with Ring time suddenly so limited, I didn't want to take the risk of losing the run altogether. And it seems as if your experiment was a dazzling success." She made a show of checking her watch and seeing what time it was. "We ought to be getting the first response back from t.i.tan soon."

"Why a 'dazzling' success?" Webling asked. "It was a fairly routine experiment run." She checked the time herself. "And why expect such an immediate response? If we get a message now, they would have had to have sent it the moment they received our graser beam. Why would they be so eager?"

"Because if our-my-figures were right, then t.i.tan should have received a series of one-millisecond push-pull gravity-wave pulses, sentfrom here at a strength of one-tenth gee."

Webling's eyes widened. "One-tenth gee..."

Sondra stood up from the table and Webling got up as well, automatically following the younger woman's lead. "I left a record of your experiment's output figures in the observation dome, Dr.