The Ring of Charon the-1

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Larry looked at Lucian in surprise. “That’s it!” he cried. “That’s what I’ve been trying to get my finger on.”

  “What?” Lucian grinned sardonically at Larry. “Trying to talk to them? Let me tell you, friend, they won’t listen.”

  “No! Trying to talk with Earth! It’s on the other side of that hole. After all, if they can send radio signals through the wormhole, why can’t we?”

  Part Four

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Names of the Saints

  “I am expendable. He is not. The first journey down there is too dangerous to risk more than one person. I should go. He shouldn’t.” Lucian Dreyfuss resisted the impulse to reach across Chancellor Daltry’s desk and shake some sense into the man. “How much simpler could it be?”

  “He’s making me seem essential when I’m not,” Larry said, trying to keep his voice steady. “The Nenya’s repairs have been delayed, so I can’t leave for another seven days anyway. I’ve told the science teams here as much as I know, and they’re making progress on their own. And if I do know so much about gravity generators, doesn’t it make sense to send me down to get a look at this one?”

  Chancellor Daltry said nothing, and looked at each of the young men in turn. The silence stretched for a long moment. “Do you each want to go around the circle one last time, or shall I speak now?” Neither Lucian nor Larry seemed ready to take the bait, and Daltry went on. “This is not about logic, or sensible reasons. This is ego, and anger, and guilt. And quite frankly, if I did not view you both as essential to our light against this enemy, I would not waste my time on your trivial bickering.

  “There are, after all, one or two other claims on my time. It was a bit of miracle that the Martians agreed to sit at the same conference table with you. They were willing to talk with me only because I was not part of the government and thus not associated with this imaginary attack. They wanted you clapped in irons, Mr. Chao, and tried for crimes against humanity. It took a great deal of work to convince them otherwise.”

  “Maybe they were right the first time,” Lucian muttered, half under his breath.

  Daltry snapped his head around and glared at Lucian with a gimlet eye. “Were they indeed? For what it is worth, Mr. Dreyfuss, I thought so too, at first. I share all your anger and fear. But I have studied the matter, and concluded that Mr. Chao merely stumbled into a trip wire set long before humanity was born. It was chance, nothing more, that made him the one to do what he did. I choose to direct my anger and fear toward whoever set that trip wire, and the hideous trap it set off.”

  “You live in Central City,” Lucian said. “Do you know how many dead there were in the quake? How many buildings were destroyed?”

  “I do. And I mourn. But Mr. Chao is not guilty of their deaths. If he is, then so are all the people connected with the design and construction of the Ring of Charon, and its researches over the past fifteen years. His amplification technique would have been impossible without their work.”

  Daltry turned his attention back to Larry. “And you, Mr. Chao. I know something of you. As I have said, I have examined all the data concerning you. Including your psychiatric profile. Having read that, and having met you, I believe I know what might be motivating you to volunteer for this duty. A sense of guilt. A need for atonement. And a desperate need to prove to persons such as Lucian Dreyfuss that you are not a monster. You seek to prove your innocence, your decent intentions, with a display of valor.”

  Larry reddened, lifted his hand in protest. “Of course I feel guilty. Of course I want to help. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. That is precisely the trouble. I am faced by two admirable young men, far more like each other than they realize, each courageous, each willing to offer up his life in the cause, each armed with logical reasons for following his desired course of action.

  “You are right, Mr. Dreyfuss. Although we need your skills, they are more easily replaced than Mr. Chao’s intuitive understanding of gravities. You are more expendable. Nor should we risk more than one person on this job.

  “And you are right, Mr. Chao. It may well be wise to get a gravities man down there.” Daltry looked down at his notepack again. “I notice one other thing in your file. You are experienced with teleoperators?”

  Larry hesitated a moment. “Well, yes. I am. We use them at the Gravities Station for doing maintenance on the Ring.”

  “Wait a second,” Lucian said. “A teleoperator. A remote-control robot? Those things don’t give you the dexterity or the reflexes you need for this kind of job.”

  “I agree,” Daltry said. “We can’t send a T.O. down by itself. But they do have advantages. They can do heavy lifting. They can carry telemetry. And they are expendable. Of course, we haven’t found the entrance to this so-called Rabbit Hole yet. Maybe we won’t find it in time for Mr. Chao to run the T.O. from the surface. Maybe we’ll never find it. But if we do, it seems to me, Mr. Dreyfuss, that we could send a T.O. down with you.”

  Lucian glared at the chancellor. Trust a guy like Daltry to make sure no one got what he wanted.

  * * *

  How did it go? Coyote Westlake tried to remember the lessons from her old pilot’s physics course text on the differences between rockets and gravity.

  No matter where in the system you measure, a rocket-propelled system shows acceleration in the same direction and at the same strength. Not so with gravity. Gravity pulls in from all directions, radially, toward a central point. The further you get from the source, the weaker it gets. So measurements at different points inside a gravity field should reveal different values for both direction and strength of acceleration.

  That clear in her mind, Coyote set to work experimenting. She dropped weights from the ceiling and timed the fall to measure rate of acceleration. She hung other weights on lines to measure direction. Crude stuff, but the answers they gave were damn confusing. Things dropped from the side of the cylinder furthest from the asteroid fell at virtually the same speed as things dropped from closer in, but nothing dropped in a straight line. Everything curved in toward the asteroid as it fell, and curved more sharply when dropped on the rockward side of the shed. Weighted cords did not hang straight up and down the way plumb lines were meant to. Instead, they curved throughout their lengths in strange, disturbing patterns, as if they were drawing the gee-field lines of force in midair. It was as if she were in a cross-breed field, somewhere between linear acceleration and a gravity field.

  Directionalized gravity. Suppose someone, somehow, had put a gravity source—a powerful one—just in front of the asteroid, and then set the gee source moving, accelerating? And suppose that someone focused the gee source’s gravity field, somehow, so its entire force was directed through the body of the asteroid, and with just a little of it slopping over to pass through her hab shelter, for example. Think of it as a tractor beam, she told herself. The asteroid would be set to falling, pulled toward the moving gee source, and her hab shelter, outside the path of the beam but physically attached to the asteroid, would experience forward linear acceleration as it was dragged along, with the result that things inside the shed would fall backwards. Plus a little leakage from the tractor beam, pulling in toward the rock. It fits the facts of her situation. Maybe it was even true. That ancient and mythical patron of engineers, Saint Ruben of Goldberg, would have loved it.

  The whole theory depended, however, on there being something to provide a gravity field just ahead of the asteroid. And her exterior camera revealed that there was nothing there.

  Okay then. Run through the facts. There was no rocket pushing the asteroid from behind. And nothing visible to produce the tractor beam that seemed to be pulling it from in front. What did that leave?

  How about something inside the rock, some projector or gadget that produced and accelerated the focused gravity field that seemed to be pulling the asteroid along? A gizmo that in effect pulled the asteroid along by its own bootstraps.

  Just as she
came up with that idea, the seismo alarm bleeped again. Not as if she needed the alert. She could feel the whole asteroid shuddering. At first she had thought—or at least had hoped—that the microquakes were just the asteroid reaching a new equilibrium, a normal reaction to a most abnormal source of acceleration.

  If that were the case, the quakes should have faded away after a while. She checked the seismometer. This quake was precisely as powerful as the first one had been—and the quakes were coming at regular intervals, too. She had timed it: one rumble every 128 seconds. Something about the microquakes reminded her of the street rumbling as a subway train passed beneath her feet.

  So maybe there was something moving around inside the asteroid. Coyote found herself with a sudden need to know where it was, exactly. She realized that she wanted a peek at this gizmo. Maybe she had a bad case of cabin fever, but she had the sudden urge to get out, to drill her way in through the rock and give the whatever-it-was a look-see. But first she needed to know where it was.

  The seismometer. She could get readings from it from different points in the hab shed and triangulate back to locate the epicenter inside the rock. She set to work.

  She spent the next several hours methodically getting as many readings as possible on the epicenter of the quake. It felt good to have something to do.

  She didn’t really start getting scared until she had a good solid position. Until she had the chance to face this thing, whatever it was. Forcing herself not to think about what she was doing, she loaded the gee source’s position into her inertial tracker’s memory and got ready to go look at the thing in the rock. She climbed into her pressure suit and cycled through the airlock to the surface of the asteroid.

  Outside, that five-percent acceleration was a positive menace. Make one wrong move, fall off the asteroid, and there would be no way back. No big deal as long as you’re careful, Coyote told herself, and tried to believe it. Back when this was just another rock to mine, Coyote had bolted any number of handholds to the rock. Now she kept herself clipped to a safety line at all times, and she made sure the line was always looped through at least two handholds. At least the borer was where she had left it last, carefully secured to its storage stand.

  But the tunnel borer wasn’t meant to be horsed around by just one person under these conditions. It was tough going to fuel it up while keeping the fat exhaust tube from getting completely out of control.

  Once she had the borer fueled and primed, she drilled into the rock more or less at random, just to get inside the asteroid and put some rock under her feet. It was hot work. The borer, really just a pocket fusion torch, worked by vaporizing and ionizing a small percentage of the rock. That broke the chemical bonds that held the rock together, making it collapse into powder. The borer’s exhaust system used an electric charge to pull the rock dust out of the tunnel, taking the heat along with it, but nonetheless the heat and dust were everywhere. Coyote’s suit could not dump the heat fast enough and she was bathed in sweat. Her faceplate was instantly coated with dust, and Coyote whispered a prayer of thanks to Saint Ruben and whoever it was who had thought of putting wipers on the outside of suit helmets.

  Once inside the rock, the heat and dust were a bit more tolerable. Even so, no one but a miner would have been able to endure it. The roar of the fusion jet was conducted through the borer’s handles to her suit. She was engulfed in a deafening roar, and the supposedly shielded glare from the fusion jet frequently flickered a tongue of flame out. Her helmet lamp and the occasional dazzling flare from the borer were the only light. The darkness seemed to close in all around her, like a live thing hovering just over the shadows on her shoulder.

  But she was moving. With the inertial tracker clamped to the top of the borer, she could watch her progress inward toward her goal, moving at a snail’s pace over the tiny display. It took her two long weary days to cut her way close to her target. Then she started using the thumper, a combination noisemaker and listener that showed hollows in the rock. She got a positive result on her second try. The thumper’s echolocator showed a large area of very low density only a meter ahead.

  Not wishing to bathe the hollow’s interior with a fusion flame, Coyote retreated back up her tunnel with the borer, glad to be done with it.

  She came back down the tunnel with a zero-gee jack-hammer. It was a far slower and less powerful tool than the borer, but it wouldn’t vaporize her prize either. Coyote was not interested in taking chances; she did not know what, if any, atmosphere was behind that last meter of rock. Time for the bubblelock.

  The lock was a simple gadget, an inflatable double-walled cylinder made of tough plastic, with three hatches in it. It was meant to form an airtight seal in a tunnel, and thus allow a miner to shed her suit and work in atmosphere. It would serve for current purposes. Coyote dragged it into the tunnel, and pumped up the airspace between the inner and outer cylinders. The plastic formed itself against the tunnel walls. Coyote climbed through all the hatches and inflated both chambers behind her. That ought to hold air pressure—if there was any pressure to hold.

  She set to work with the jackhammer, carefully bracing its legs against the tunnel walls, rigging the protective skirting, and setting the hammer blade to work. The trouble with a zero-gee jack was that you needed the skirting between you and the workface to keep the rock chips from slicing your suit open. The snappier models had armored video cameras under the skirting, but Coyote ran a low-budget operation. She had to work by feel, pausing frequently to dig the broken rock out.

  When the jackhammer nearly skipped out of her hands, she knew she was through. A jet of green, smoky air shot past her, filling the tunnel back up to the airlock.

  There was gas pressure in that cavity, all right. She shut the hammer down and forced herself to move slowly as she pulled it out of the way and cleared out the last of the rubble. Her helmet lamp revealed a small hole, the size of her fist, punched in the rear wall of the tunnel. Pressure had equalized now. Not a whisper of air moved past her. Though she had doubts that these gases were air in any human sense. The light of her helmet lamp shone through them with an off-putting smoky greenish pallor.

  Her mind tingling with fear and excitement, her body limp with exhaustion, Coyote cleared the last of the rock chips out of the way and set to work enlarging the hole with a heavy-duty cutting laser. In a few minutes she had widened it enough to poke her helmet through.

  She screwed up her courage and stuck her head into the hole.

  But for the light from her lamp, the huge hollow space was utterly dark. At a guess, the hollow was forty meters across and eighty from end to end, a football-shaped void carved from the living rock. Coyote’s drillhole had breached the cavern wall about midway down the long axis, perhaps a bit toward the aft end. At first Coyote thought the hollow was truly empty, but then her eyes caught a flicker of movement through the hazy greenish gas. A huge something sat, somehow looking slumped over, at the aft or bottom end of the cavern.

  Something that moved.

  Eyes are merely lenses and light receptors: in a very real sense, seeing actually takes place in the brain, where images are processed and analyzed. But the human brain cannot easily see what it does not understand. It tries to force the unfamiliar into previously recorded patterns, or to compare it to objects that are in some way similar. Once in some manner understood, the new thing can be catalogued in memory alongside the old and familiar.

  These techniques are successful well over ninety-nine percent of the time, but they fail utterly when the brain is confronted with something that does not fit into any previous category, and does not even resemble anything in a previous category.

  Coyote saw fluid movement, huge size, dark color, the gleam of a shiny-wet surface—and thought she saw a whale. For a half moment of time, she wrestled with the impossible question of how a blue whale could have come to be here, and even, absurdly, worked up a moment of righteous indignation that someone would have so cruelly treated a member of a pr
otected species.

  But then her helmet lamp caught the glittering metallic cable sprouting from the brow of the dimly seen thing. She followed the cable upward toward the forward end of the hollow, and saw it join with a massive spherical object that hung there, supported by heavy braces that bound it to the surrounding rock on all sides. That heavily braced sphere had to be the source of the gravity drive. But it was hooked up to the whale thing. Why would a massive cable be implanted in a living creature? Or was it alive? Was it controlling the gravity drive?

  She swung her light around again and wondered that she had even thought of it as a whale. At second glance, and with the idea of machinery instead of life in mind, she saw the smooth lines of a sleek machine. More cables terminated at it, coiling here and there to other devices around the cavern. And there, sprouting from the skin of the thing, was a manipulator arm, obviously mechanical. That was the movement she had seen. She adjusted the helmet lamp to give a wider-angle beam and now saw a perfect forest of manipulator arms, busy about unknowable tasks, all of them sprouting from the featureless, shapeless blue-gray surface of the huge object that lay huddled at the base of the cavern. Strange gadgets littered its surface, dropped there by the arms. The surface itself seemed to move and quiver a bit, as if other devices beneath its surface were in action. But there was nothing there but machines, all machines. Nothing here was alive. Of that much she was certain.

  Until one of the manipulator arms extruded a cutting blade, bent over the surface of the massive body it sprang from, and sliced the skin open. Crimson blood splattered for a second and then was gone. Gleaming, pink underflesh peeled away under the knife, and a flaccid tentacle with a bulbous end to it floated up out of the gore. Before the tentacle was wholly unfurled, two new arms were at work, somehow sealing up the wound the first arm had made.