It was as if Galileo’s mind had been on something else when he first looked through a telescope at the Moon. It never dawned on Larry that he had quite casually invented a whole new way of looking at the Universe. All he had been after was a practical way to examine the situation around Earth.
A strange place materialized in the three-dee tank. A ghostly dance of shadows gleamed up at him, black tendrils and ribbons floating in a sky field of cloud white, as if streamers of black ink were swirling through a milky sky, radiating out from a central blotch of darkness.
What the hell was he looking at? Larry glanced at the pointing instruments to check that the device was aimed and focused on the vicinity of the Moon. It was—but what was it seeing?
He was like the first person to look at an X ray, not understanding the strange, hidden, ghostly shapes and patterns revealed when the skin was transparent. Larry reminded himself that he was seeing not a solid, physical substance, but the invisible patterns of gravity waves as represented by a computer’s graphics system.
He reached for a control and adjusted the intensity of the image. The streamers faded away, and the central blotch of darkness resolved itself into two shapes: a single, pulsing point of darkness, and a spinning-wheel rim, jet black, tiny and perfect. Both shapes hovered in the tank. The point was easy to identify—it was the black hole, throbbing with gravitic potential. Even as he watched, a flash of black swept out from the hole, and a tiny dot of black moved away from it, Sunward. Jesus Christ. The only thing that would show in the tank was a gravity-wave generator. A gravity field by itself, un-manipulated, wouldn’t show at all. Which meant that that tiny dot was a gravity machine of some sort.
But what about the spinning wheel that hung in space, next to the black hole? What the hell was that?
Larry felt the hair on his neck rise. The Moon, good God, the Moon. Or no, something inside the Moon, hidden from view. Suddenly the strange shape was familiar. He checked the scale of the image, and the precise coordinates.
Shock washed over him. The Ring of Charon had a twin, a great wheel buried far below the Lunar surface, underneath the craters and the mountains of the Moon, wrapped around the Moon’s core.
He adjusted the tank controls to enlarge the ghostly shadow as far out as he possibly could, to the limits of resolution. He stared at the image for a long time. Jet black, a bit grainy, the image distorting for a moment or two as the Ring of Charon adjusted itself, correcting for its own orbital motion. The thing inside the Moon spun huge and dark in the milk white depths of the three-dee tank.
The huge thing lurking inside the Moon was not a smooth or perfect wheel, but ridged and edged, an open structure that resembled uncovered box girders. It reminded Larry of a Ferris wheel with the central supports removed, or the skeleton of an old spinning-wheel-style space station. Wheel was the right name for the thing. If nothing else, it distinguished the Lunar object from the Ring of Charon. The Lunar Wheel, then. It helped, somehow, to put a name to it.
But this Wheel was not solid, not real, not any image of a material structure. Larry was seeing the gravitic energies themselves, whirling impossibly through the Moon’s interior.
But there had to be a physical, nonrotating wheel-shaped structure hidden inside the Moon, a structure that somehow produced these energies.
Larry pulled back the image and shook his head. Now the black hole hung in space next to the Wheel. There was a moment of powerful activity Larry could not follow, and another tiny dot leapt away from the hole. Damn it, what were those things? No one had really focused on them yet.
All by themselves, they represented an incredible mystery: mountain-sized objects leaping out from the interior of a black hole. How? Why? From where? How many of them had jumped out of the black hole already? With the Earth itself vanished, even the greatest of puzzles could get lost in the shuffle.
What was that mass of streaming tendrils blooming out from the Moon? He thought for a moment, then pulled the focus back further. He adjusted the detection gain upwards a bit, and the inky tendrils radiating out from the Earth-Moon system materialized again.
He kept the detection level just high enough for the streaming beams of gravity power to be visible. With the power down low enough, he could see more clearly. The power beams were radiating out from the Moon’s centerpoint, the natural focus of the Lunar Wheel. One of the tendrils reached out and attached itself to the black dot that had just come through the Earthpoint black hole. Larry pulled back the view a bit, and saw other tendrils of gravity power reaching out to touch others of the black dots that were still close to the Moon. As he watched, the image of the Earthpoint black-hole gravity source suddenly swelled larger, another black dot appeared through the black hole—and a massive, jet black pulse of gravity power slammed from the hole into the Lunar Wheel.
The gravity power gets sent through the hole once every 128 seconds, Larry realized. The Wheel absorbs it, stores it, and beams it out to the things moving out from the black hole.
So those things in turn became point-source gravity-wave sources. Which according to theory, ought to be impossible, but never mind that now. Call them gee points. What about them? How many of them were there? He reset the gravity scope to its widest possible angle, and told it to present only point-source gravity generators.
He sat and thought for a moment as the program ran. How many could there be? One every two minutes or so, for the last fourteen hours. That was about right. Something over four hundred gee points by now. Where the hell were they all going?
The tank cleared itself and reset. Larry gasped. He saw a pattern similar to what the Autocrat had seen—but the ten thousand asteroids moving in the Belt were only the beginning.
The Ring of Charon was looking inward, toward the Inner System and the Sun. But it also looked out beyond the distant Sun, out past the far side of Pluto’s own orbit and beyond. At the far side of the Solar System, at the ragged edge of resolution, it could see a section of the Oort Cloud’s inner surface. The Oort Cloud, the hollow sphere of unborn comets that surrounds the Solar System and extends halfway to the nearest star.
The Oort Cloud was alive with purposeful black dots, all of them diving in uncountable numbers straight toward the Inner System.
* * *
Dr. Simon Raphael sat alone in his office.
Privacy.
Quiet.
He needed those things now. Leaning over his journal book, he set down his words in a slow and careful script. Perhaps his hand was slow, but his mind was moving fast. Too fast. He had found long ago that the journal did him the most good when he was in this state—tired, and yet upset, concerned about something. He had learned to relax his rigid self-control at these times, and let the pen find the words for him.
“Dearest Jessie,” he wrote.
“All has been lost. The Earth has vanished, and I am to blame.” The words came out of his soul and onto the page. He stopped, set down his pen, and stared at the words in astonishment. “I am to blame”? Why in the world had he written that? How could he be blamed?
He stared at the small three-dee image of Jessie, decades old, that sat on his desk. As if he could find the answers there.
But he already knew. The self-accusation had come from the warmest part of his heart, the part that had come nearest to dying with Jessie’s death. The part he had shielded with anger and bitterness.
He was to blame for squashing Larry’s first experiments, that was why. Simon knew, intellectually at least, that he was not responsible for the Earth’s loss, any more than Larry Chao was responsible. The burden Simon Raphael carried was that he had encouraged Larry’s sense of guilt, made it worse with his bullying and anger.
Larry was no more to blame for Earth’s loss than the first caveman to use fire was responsible for the first village of grass huts destroyed by fire. Discovering a new power meant uncorking a genie’s bottle. Larry happened to be the one to pull the cork out of gravity’s bottle. But it would have be
en pulled sooner or later. Once the Ring of Charon was built, that much was certain.
Raphael had kicked the boy when he was down. If he had been a proper leader, a proper guide for this scientific operation, he would have accepted Larry’s initial discovery, cultivated it and made it grow. The whole team should have focused on it. Even if it had come to nothing, what would there have been to lose?
If the whole staff been thrown into the effort, had examined the techniques for a million-gee accelerator, perhaps they would have learned about it in a more orderly fashion. Perhaps they would have learned enough to know the consequences and stop the experiment.
More than likely, of course, they would have fired a graser beam anyway, and Earth would have vanished just the same—but at least it would be shared guilt, and the entire staff would have understood Larry’s work well enough to expand on it after the disaster, rush into needed research to understand this incredible situation. A black hole replacing Earth! Fantastic.
For half a moment, the idea nearly excited him, instead of terrifying him. In the old days, that sense of wonder would have been stronger. He would have needed to know what had happened—instead of shutting himself in his office, wishing for catatonia. Simon Raphael bent over the page and continued his writing.
“This place has done things to me, Jessie. You never would have married the sour old man I have turned into. You were always truly my better half, no matter how trite a cliché that phrase might be. You encouraged the young, the weak, the small, and let them grow. You taught me to do so as well. I have forgotten that, and I must re-learn.”
A change came over him as he wrote, and not an unnoticed one. He could feel himself becoming less harsh, less angry, less bitter, feel a gentler part of his heart and soul reopen even as he wrote. He remembered the feelings he had lost, even as he set down the words describing how they were gone.
Larry angered him because Larry represented a successful version of a Simon Raphael that might have been, a lost Simon that he himself had never quite been able to become. He had never been quite bright enough, quite brave enough, quite innocent enough to make the dream-Simon work.
But did not all good fathers wish for their sons to be more than they themselves had been?
Father? Another strange thought. Yes, father. If all of his own children were suddenly lost to him, so too was Larry Chao’s family lost to Larry. The young man needed guidance, kindness. A father.
And humanity needed Larry Chao. The genius locked inside that head had gotten them into this mess. It might very well provide their only way out of it. Perhaps, Simon told himself, if you stop trying so hard to hate the boy, you might find a way to help him save us all. And what was there to hate about him anyway?
“I wish you could have met Larry,” he wrote to his dead wife. “I think you would have liked him.”
But then he set the pen down.
There was work to do. He reached for a button and punched up the intercom system.
* * *
Larry sat, lost and alone, watching the trajectories of the gee points, thinking, struggling to find any possible meanings, all the imaginable consequences he could. But it was too much for him. This was beyond him, beyond human capacity.
Raphael had to call him twice over the intercom before Larry even heard his name being called. He came to himself with a start. “Ah, yes, Dr. Raphael.”
“Mr. Chao. I wanted to apologize for being so short with you when you requested Ring time. We are all… all more than a bit under stress at the moment.”
“That’s all right sir.”
There was an awkward pause, as if Raphael had expected Larry to say more, and was now searching for words, if only to cover the silence. “I, ah, suppose it’s a bit premature to ask—but have you found anything? Anything that might help?”
Larry stared again at the three-dee tank. Thirty thousand asteroid-sized invaders on the move from the Asteroid Belt and the Oort Cloud. He felt a knot in his stomach. “Oh, I’ve found quite a bit, sir, but I don’t know if it will exactly be helpful. Perhaps you should come down here and see it.”
“I’m on my way. Thank you.”
The intercom cut out. Larry stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do. It suddenly struck him that he was making an official report to the director of the station. He had never done that before. What should he do? Documents. Records. That would at least be something. He instructed the computer to print a hard-copy summary of his findings. And an audiovisual record. That was standard operating procedure when making a major verbal presentation. He reached over and set the voice recorder on, powering up the mikes and cameras. A bright red panel lit on the console, flashing the words room recorder on. The computer had just finished printing the data summary when the door opened. Raphael stepped in.
The director looked subdued, drawn into himself, as if he had lost something he knew he would never find again. Which was of course precisely true, Larry reminded himself. Humanity was in mourning. But there was more to the expression on Raphael’s face. Larry wasn’t usually very good at understanding people, but he could see something here. With a degree of insight that Larry himself knew he rarely achieved, Larry sensed that a change had come over the old man. There was a hint of hope in him, as if he had also found something long missing.
Raphael went straight for the three-dee tank. He stood and stared at the image for a long time. He glanced at the scale display, and sucked in his breath as he realized how huge a volume of space was being represented. “What is it?” he asked.
“An image of all the gravity-wave sources in the Solar System, sir. As seen by the Ring in gravity-telescope mode.”
“The Ring doesn’t have a—” Raphael’s sharp tone of voice suddenly softened, as if he were forcing himself to be gentle. “Oh, I see. Now it does have such a mode. More of your work. Very good, Mr. Chao.”
Larry reddened with embarrassment. “Ah, thank you, sir. But I don’t understand these sources. All of them are very faint and small, as least relatively speaking. Not more than a few kilometers across. So small I can’t explain how they can generate the gravity waves in the first place. We need something the size of the Ring to do it.”
Larry hesitated, and then moved to the controls, adjusting them. “I’ve got a good image of the black hole as well. And there’s… there’s something inside the Moon.”
“Inside?”
“I printed out a data summary, sir,” Larry said, handing Raphael the stack of papers.
Raphael took the pages and skimmed them quickly, flipping through the pages. Larry switched the view to a close-up of the Lunar Wheel. He called up the output from the observation dome telescope and superimposed a transparent real-time image of the visible Moon over the Wheel hidden deep inside. The three-dee tank dimensionalized the Moon image, so that the Wheel hung perfectly inside it, spinning sedately through the solid mass of the Moon.
Raphael stared at the tank. “Something in the Moon,” he agreed. “So it would appear,” he said, in a faint, abstracted tone. “Something that bears a strong resemblance to our own little toy.”
“Yes sir. That spinning effect is the gravitic energy moving, and not the physical object itself. Obviously, the Wheel itself must be stationary.”
“Obviously,” Raphael said, in that same abstracted tone. He sat down at the control-panel operator’s seat and looked up at Larry. “You have made a whole series of rapid-fire, utterly remarkable discoveries here tonight. I ought to be astounded, or fearful—but I just feel… feel dead inside. I don’t have the capacity to react anymore. As God is my witness, I don’t know what that thing in the Moon is, or what we can do about it. You found it. What do you think?” There was an eerie steadiness in his voice, as if Raphael himself knew perfectly well that he was keeping up a false front of calm.
Larry stood there, looking first at the old man, and then at the strange, frightening images in the three-dee tank. He thought of the asteroids leaving their orbits, unaware and
unconcerned of the terrified Belters watching them go. He stared again at the rippling wheel of energy spinning through the solid mass of the Moon.
“I think that all my work is meaningless. It won’t help us one tiny bit, not by itself,” he said at last, a strange intensity in his voice. He stood over the old man, feeling tired, angry, defiant. The feeling washed over him and then faded away. Damn it, how could Raphael suddenly be so reasonable, just when Larry was finally feeling strong enough to fight him?
He took the mound of meaningless paperwork from Raphael and riffled through it. Useless. Utterly useless. He threw the thick sheaf of papers up in the air and ignored them as they fluttered slowly toward the floor in Pluto’s flimsy gravity field. Raphael stared at him quite solemnly, unable or unwilling to respond. “All this data means nothing by itself,” Larry said. “In the last twenty-four hours I’ve learned more about the mechanics of gravity than any human has ever known—but it’s not enough! It’s all irrelevant.
“Gravity is barely the start of what’s going on. This is something way beyond a freak lab accident, a strange natural phenomenon. Let’s face it: somehow or another, we—no, I—have touched off an alien invasion of our Solar System.”
Larry stopped, backed off from the desk, and looked around the room. “There. I finally said it. God knows it sounds absurd and melodramatic, but you tell me: what else do we call it? We’ve been skirting around that reality long enough. Somehow, I don’t know how, I summoned up that… that thing buried in the Moon, like the sorcerer’s apprentice accidentally summoning up the demons. I awakened it. I don’t know what it is, or how it works, or who put it there. But I do know it must be related to the asteroids and Oort Cloud objects that have suddenly started moving. And I think they are moving toward us, toward all the surviving planets.
“There are at least thirty thousand asteroid-sized objects moving in on the surviving planets of this Solar System. Do you honestly think they mean us no harm? I don’t know. I think maybe they got the Earth out of the way before the rough stuff begins. Maybe it’s not Earth that’s in danger. Maybe it’s Earth that’s being taken out of harm’s way.”
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