Never Again

by M. A. Rothman

  Bella smiled as she noticed the flicker of wry amusement on Dave’s face.

  “I suppose I should explain what all of those trillions of dollars that I supposedly wasted at the ISF were for, and how they relate to saving all of our bacon.”

  Dave’s expression became serious as he placed his hands on Burt and Neeta’s shoulders, briefly making eye contact with everyone in the room, and then finally settling his gaze on the president. “What does any reasonable person do when their neighborhood suddenly becomes hostile and you have some awful neighbors moving in?”

  With a confused expression, the president replied, “I suppose you could move.”

  Dave smiled brilliantly. “Exactly right.” He turned to everyone and explained, “This solar system isn’t going to be very pretty once that black hole is done with it, so that’s exactly what we’ll be doing before the riffraff comes too close.

  “You, me, and the entire planet, we’re all moving out.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Nearly everyone’s jaws dropped at what Dave had said. He patted the air, trying to calm the silent shock of everyone in the room. After all, it’s not every day that someone tells you that you’ll be leaving your solar system. “I know it sounds crazy,” he said, “but I’ll explain.

  “I knew there was nothing anyone had conceived of that would let us nudge a black hole from its current trajectory. Given that we can’t move it, deflect it, or blow it up, what could we do? The only answer that made any sense was to get out of its way.”

  A man on the far side of the room exclaimed, “But there aren’t enough rockets or fuel to get us anywhere. We don’t have—”

  “I know we don’t have a way to transport everyone off the planet,” Dave said, waving the comment aside. “Remember when I said I was haunted by the images of our destruction? I began to look into that seventy-year-old paper about ... let’s just call it a gravity bubble. It took me weeks of pondering the problem before my eureka moment. That paper wasn’t the answer, but it set me on the path.”

  Dave walked to the table along one of the walls, picked up a strawberry from one of the platters, and held it up for everyone to see. “Imagine if I plowed a tremendous amount of power into a ring-shaped disc around an object ... let’s say, this strawberry. Mind you, that the amount of power we’re talking about is tremendous, much more than you’re likely thinking. But if we did this, I could envelop this strawberry in a bubble that literally allows me to warp the fabric of space. Imagine you could contract space ahead of this bubble and expand space behind it—and from that, inch this strawberry forward across space itself.” He paused for a moment, seeing everyone focused intently on him, many with confused expressions.

  Pursing his lips, Dave struggled to come up with an analogy to help explain an immensely complex topic to his audience. “Forget about space for a moment. Just imagine that this strawberry was in a bubble, kind of like when you’re underwater in a submarine. If I tweak how some of the power is used to create the bubble, it will begin to move in the direction I choose, as if I have an engine. But instead of a physical engine, it’s one constructed out of the gravitational forces surrounding us.”

  Dave held the strawberry in mid-air and walked with it.

  “However, if you moved in a submarine like this strawberry is moving, you’d feel the change in momentum. You’d feel yourself accelerate and decelerate. That’s because your submarine is affected by the surrounding gravity, and you can feel yourself moving against it. Yet imagine if this strawberry were within a gravity bubble. Other than watching things move around, it wouldn’t be able to feel its own motion because it’s isolated from the Earth’s gravity. If your submarine was in such a bubble, I’d be able to launch you across the room, and you would see the motions all around you, but you wouldn’t feel a thing. You wouldn’t have felt yourself being launched, nor would you have felt yourself suddenly stop, either.”

  With his right hand, Dave dangled the strawberry, then let it drop into his other hand. “I’ll have you know, that I was able to model this exact experiment in my lab at the ISF nearly nine years ago.” Dave looked at the strawberry in his left hand and gave his audience a lopsided smile. “However, when I dropped the strawberry, it never fell. Imagine a strawberry very much like this one hovering in mid-air.”

  “For you, my dear.” Dave tossed the strawberry to Bella. Surprised, she cupped her hands and just managed to catch the fruit.

  “I proceeded to do more experiments. Accelerometers trapped within the bubble didn’t register any changes, no matter how quickly I moved the bubble around.”

  Dave walked toward one of the doors and knocked on its wooden frame. “Knock on wood, that’s how I plan on moving us out of the way. We’ll need an unimaginable amount of energy. From my calculations, it would require nearly seventy-five percent of the world’s total energy output. Using the same mechanisms, we’ll be able to envelope the Earth in the same type of bubble I put around my strawberry.”

  Half the room immediately began talking, all at once.

  “Quiet down,” shouted a loud voice from the corner of the room, and everyone immediately quieted. The old man with the booming voice nodded in the direction of the president and smiled. “Madam President.”

  Dave felt surprisingly calm, despite having just told a roomful of people what he’d been keeping secret for nearly a decade. He looked at the President of the United States, and surprisingly, she held a determined expression.

  With a firm voice, she said, “It’s going to take a lot of arm-twisting to get everyone to consume only twenty-five percent of the power that they do today.”

  Burt, who sat just to the right of the president, leaned closer. “Madam President, I’m thinking that when faced with the choice of human extinction or making sacrifices for a chance at life, the answer is going to be predictable.”

  The president raised her eyebrows. “Remember what you and I talked about. You’ll be the one explaining all this crap to everyone.”

  Burt rolled his eyes and gave Dave a look as if to say, “Look what you’ve done to me.”

  Glancing at the president, Dave asked, “Madam President, do you think I’ll be able to get access to a lab facility, preferably my old lab? I need to test a few things before we deploy the scaffolding for the warp bubble.”

  She turned her attention toward Burt. “Can you make that happen?”

  Burt nodded as Dave patted his shoulder. “Just remember, this has to begin almost right away. I know Bella said we have about nine months before the first possible impacts. That means we need to be on our way two months before that, so we can get out of the way.”

  “Everyone,” the president announced loudly. “I should have said this at the beginning, but obviously this is a special access intelligence briefing, so I shouldn’t have to remind everyone. But I will. None of you are allowed to say anything to anyone unless they’re on the read-in list, and you’re in a secure location. Each of you will be briefed separately on the things that need to be done. Clearly there are some things that are already underway, such as the stockpiling of emergency rations, but there are a variety of things that will need quick action.”

  “Madam President,” Walker Keane, the Secretary of Defense said with a frown. “It strikes me that the welfare of Doctor Holmes is a matter of national security. Heck, international security. At some point, this all will become public, and we’ll need to make sure the crazies don’t get access to someone so critical to our welfare. Should I make arrangements for his security?”

  Dave sat down in his seat and pondered what had just been said. Despite being on the run for years, it hadn’t dawned on him that anyone would truly want to harm him. He’d always assumed it had been Hildebrand who’d been the idiot in charge of his career’s demise, but he’d never believed that he’d be anyone else’s target. It dawned on him that, no matter how ridiculous and counterproductive it would seem, he might actually become a ta
rget for someone’s anger.

  “Thank you, Walter, for the reminder.” The president nodded. “Please have some troops available in case they’re needed, but I’ve already talked to the Secret Service, and there’ll be a detail waiting for Doctors Holmes, Patel, and Radcliffe.” She smiled at Bella and added, “And I’ll make sure that the agents assigned to Doctor Holmes also include Mrs. Holmes in their assignments.”

  Dave leaned forward in his seat and gazed across the table at the president. “Madam President, there’s really a lot that needs to be done, and I’m afraid some of it will require me to get started right away. Do you think—”

  “I understand perfectly.” Everyone in the room immediately rose as the president stood. “Doctor Radcliffe, whatever Doctor Holmes needs, make sure he gets it. You have my full authority.” She pointed at everyone collected around the long conference room table. “I’m sure that each of you have a bunch of questions for Doctor Holmes. Let me be clear, none of you are to disturb the scientists in their work. Doctor Radcliffe has thankfully agreed to become my Chief Science Advisor, but he’s much more than that. Most of you will arrange time with Doctor Radcliffe to best figure out what, if anything, you and yours can do.” Her gaze focused on a man with a large mustache. “Jim, I need my Secretary of State to reach out to ... well, to everyone. There’s a lot of convincing we’re going to have to do.”

  Burt leaned closer to Dave, the haggard expression etched deeply on his face. “Dave, you and I will need to talk about all sorts of things if I’m going to be able to fend off all the crazy questions I’m about to get asked.”

  Dave nodded and leaned back in his chair, his mind racing ahead, planning.

  Burt glanced at Neeta. “Please make sure that Dave gets a cell phone. That’ll make my life infinitely easier.”

  Thinking about all of the things he had left to do, the item that rose to the top was the need to actually launch a network of space elevators, thus building the scaffolding for the giant gravity bubble. Creating the space elevators had been a success on the Moon, with its lighter gravity. However, he’d only had a chance for a single practice run on Earth before he’d gone into hiding. He had no time left for practice; he had to get it right. With a nervous energy building within him, he worried, recalling the results of that first practice run.

  “I just hope the graphene-based tether doesn’t snap this time.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Along with the rest of the Security Council, Margaret stared breathlessly at the video image projected above the Situation Room’s conference table. Jupiter loomed large, like a striped marble, against the pitch-black background of space. Every minute or so, a bright white flare erupted from its surface, giving the upper atmosphere of the solar system’s largest planet what looked like yet another in a series of dark, circular scars. To Margaret, it looked like Jupiter had a bad case of the measles.

  Walter Keane pointed at the image and spoke with an ominous tone. “That’s all heading our way.”

  Through the video feed, a scientist, whose name Margaret had already forgotten, began narrating the scene being received through a secure channel from the Mount Palomar observatory. “President Hager, what you’re seeing is a portion of the first large wave of debris as it crosses Jupiter’s orbit. Each of those flares we’re seeing is the equivalent of about 150,000 megatons of TNT.”

  “Good God,” Walter exclaimed. “Just one of those would wipe us all out.”

  Suddenly, a flare of white light brightened the right-hand side of the video screen, and the disembodied voice of the scientist proclaimed, “Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons, has just been struck....”

  As the light dimmed, Margaret noticed a cluster of glowing rocks slowly tumbling away from what had been the point of impact.

  “Spectrographic readings show what look to be elements of Ganymede’s exposed core. We’ll need to do further analysis to determine the size of the object that impacted Jupiter’s largest satellite, but it looks like Ganymede has been destroyed.”

  A chill raced through Margaret as she watched the devastation unfold in front of her eyes. “Palomar, how far out is the first wave?”

  “At its current rate, the leading edge of the first wave of debris will cross our orbit in approximately 245 days.”

  Margaret turned in her chair and curled her finger at the head of her security detail.

  The dark-haired member of the Secret Service approached, and as he leaned down, Margaret whispered, “Where is Holmes now?”

  Without hesitation, the agent responded, “He’s at the ISF headquarters in Ithaca, NY. I believe they’re running some kind of tests.”

  “Let them know I’ll be there tomorrow. I want to see what they’re doing firsthand.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll make the arrangements.”

  ###

  Every muscle in Margaret’s body ached with tension as she walked through the halls of the ISF’s headquarters in Ithaca. The thought of hanging the fate of the world on a solution she’d never seen and had trouble understanding was beyond stressful. She was willing to accept certain things on faith, but this she needed to see for herself.

  Just as she approached the end of the dimly lit concrete hallway, the double-doors swung outward, and Margaret spied the tall figure of Burt Radcliffe riffling through the pockets of his lab coat.

  Burt glanced up and his eyes widened. “President Hager! I didn’t realize you’d arrived already.” He glanced at the pack of cigarettes in his hand, and with a regretful expression placed them back into his pocket. “Welcome to the ISF’s Environmental Test Laboratory.”

  “Burt!” A woman’s voice called from beyond the doorway. Neeta suddenly raced into the hallway and nearly slammed face-first into Burt’s back. Several lab coats were draped over her right arm. “I was supposed to tell you that the Secret Service called and—”

  “Let me guess ... the president has arrived.” Burt chuckled, grabbed the lab coats from Neeta and began handing them out to Margaret and her Secret Service escorts.

  Margaret donned her lab coat and followed the two scientists as they turned and walked through the doorway into an enormous room. Margaret panned her gaze around, taking in the immensity of the chamber. The lights from the ceiling were well over thirty feet above, yet they illuminated every inch of the lab. The room itself was easily three-hundred-feet long and just as wide.

  Burt pointed toward the far wall, and Margaret spied a tall, circular metal door. “That’s the actual environmental chamber where the ISF does its space simulations. They can emulate the conditions in space by pumping out the air and either raising or lowering the temperatures, depending on what that day’s test requires.”

  He motioned for Margaret to follow him and said, “You’re just in time to watch the graphene tension test that Doctor Holmes is conducting.”

  Margaret walked across the room, her medium-heeled shoes clacking loudly on the poured concrete floor as she spied the lower half of someone working under something that looked like a large hydraulic press. Between her and the machinery was a series of large see-through barriers on wheels that she guessed were meant for protection of some sort. With a loud grunt, the man scooted out from underneath the equipment, and she immediately recognized Doctor Holmes. Sweat dripped down the sides of his face, and he held a two-foot-long metal wrench in his right hand.

  He cast a brilliant smile at Margaret, shoved one of the transparent barriers aside, and approached. “I’m glad you’re here. We’re about to see whether or not some of the new rolls of graphene are going to work out for the scaffolding we need.”

  She extended her hand and said, “You look like you’re getting a workout.”

  Dave hesitated, wiped his palm on his lab coat, and shook Margaret’s hand. “Sorry about the sweat. I didn’t want to take any chances, especially when I’m about to have the equipment begin tension testing in excess of 100,000 pounds. Any mistakes and it could get ugly
pretty quick.” He glanced at Neeta. “Can you check on how Bella’s doing on the recharging of the capacitors? Now that the president is here, we’ll need that sooner versus later.”

  Neeta nodded and walked quickly toward one of the chamber’s half-dozen exits.

  Margaret motioned toward the test equipment that Dave had been adjusting. It looked a bit like a long steel table with large metal clamps on either side; attached to each clamp was a long piston. “So tell me what you’ve got set up here.”

  Dave rolled another one of the shields out of the way and strolled over to the right-hand side of the table.

  Margaret noticed for the first time that attached to the clamp was a clear film stretching over the length of the table. The film was kept taut by the other clamp on the far side.

  Dave tapped on the clear film and it made an odd wooden sound, almost as if he’d knocked on a door. “This is graphene. It’s one of the lightest and strongest substances we know of, and it has a variety of amazing attributes. However, the only thing we’ll be focused on for this sample is its tensile strength.”

  Margaret ran her fingers over the nearly transparent film and tapped her nails on it. She’d never imagined such an odd stiffness to something that looked no different from the cling wrap she used to wrap sandwiches with. “It’s so thin. How strong is it?”

  “Well, that’s what we’re about to find out.” Dave motioned for Margaret to take a few steps back.

  Margaret stepped behind the clear shields, where a group of nearly a dozen others had collected to watch the experiment.

  As Dave pushed the shields back into place, he explained, “Graphene has historically been very tough to manufacture in massive quantities while maintaining a good quality. It’s just like the old saying, ‘You’re only as strong as your weakest link.’ The same can be said for the graphene we’re using. The strength of the material comes from the quality of manufacture, and what we’re testing is a sample of many layers of graphene sandwiched together into a matrix. So even though we’re tolerant of some imperfections in the manufacturing process, I can’t exactly know if what we’ve got is good enough without stress testing it. After all, the last time I did this kind of test was a little over four years ago, and the test failed. Well … it didn’t completely fail, it was good enough for the lower gravity demands of the Moon, but it wasn’t good enough for what we need here on Earth.”