Beyond the Event Horizon - Episode Four

by Albert Sartison

  “All right. Let’s return to the array of portals. Do you have any ideas about its purpose?”

  “Yes. But before that, I have to go back to the first ship’s visit. As you know, we are inclined to think that that ship, apart from making contact with us, had the mission of setting up the portal. We only became aware of the portal after its visit, when we began systematically scanning the ether in the gravity band. Although it is possible, of course, that the portal existed before the visit, we just hadn’t noticed it. After all, it does not have sufficient mass to influence the movement of planets in the Solar System, even though it radiates quite powerful gravity waves.

  “So during the first visit, the aliens set up the portal. It appears that although the portals enable great distances to be overcome in a short time, they have at least one serious fault. To connect two points in space through them, physical access to both points is required. This puts limitations on the use of the portals: they only allow you to go to places where ships have already been, moving in space in the classical way, that is at a speed considerably less than that of light.

  “But Steve put forward a very interesting supposition. If you recall, our first visitor entered the field of our telescopes moving at very low speed. It only picked up speed as it approached the centre of the Solar System after crossing the orbit of Pluto.

  “We noticed this strange flight trajectory, but being unable to find a logical explanation, we put off solving this question till later. Today we are inclined to think that the portals are capable not only of reducing their distance from each other, but also of acting in isolation. If you like, they can ‘throw’ ships, acting like a sort of space catapult.

  “We do not know how this functions, we can only put forward theories. The one that seems most intuitively right runs like this: by changing the characteristics of the space-time continuum, the portal picks up a ship and throws it into hyperspace, where it moves independently.

  “Motion in hyperspace involves gigantic costs in terms of energy, which the ship cannot generate itself; so once it has been thrown, it covers a certain part of its route and then falls back into our space-time continuum as its kinetic energy becomes exhausted. In this regard, it is obvious that the distance of the ‘throw’ depends on the thrown object’s own speed. And since the engine power of the aliens’ ships is limited, the ‘throwing’ range also has its limit.”

  “Hang on a minute, let me get all this straight. So, if there are two portals, you can fly into one and out of the other, without any limit on distance. But if there is only one, you can use it as a catapult, throwing a ship a great deal further, but with limited range. Right?”

  “Absolutely right.”

  “I don’t understand why in the second case you say the range is limited. If one ship can set up a portal here, these devices must be portable enough to fit into a small ship. Why should the aliens not throw a ship from a portal so that after its jump it can set up the next one, through which another ship jumps with the next portal on board, and so on?”

  “We don’t yet have a clear explanation of that, general, but possibly a throw involves considerable energy costs, making such an approach impossible.”

  “A matter of cost? If the aliens are so keen on expanding, cost is a secondary consideration.”

  “Perhaps the cost is so high that it exceeds their budget. We do not know the consequences of the conditions involved in using a portal as a catapult or what conditions limit such use. We can’t rule out the possibility that this only works in certain conditions which can’t always be found everywhere.”

  “OK. Back to the main subject.”

  “Now we come to the question: why did the portals have to be connected into an array? Arrays have a positive quality, in that their structure makes it possible to understand the direction in which they are used. The portal array is no exception, and we are confident that it was created to concentrate the power of the individual arrays in the geometric centre of the octagon.”

  MacQueen glanced briefly at the map of the galaxy, on which the octagonal figure was still displayed. He moved his hand to draw a line on the screen passing through the centre of the figure. He then stopped in the centre, where he made several circular movements to denote its location.

  “The geometric centre is here, right?”

  “Precisely.”

  “It appears to coincide with the centre of the Milky Way.”

  “That’s also true.”

  “OK, so what do we have there that is of such interest that this great portal array should be focused on it?”

  “In the centre of the galaxy, there is a particularly dense concentration of stars, as compared to the periphery. It is this concentration which forms the centre.

  “Compression of material since the time the galaxy was created means that matter there is extremely dense. As a result, concealed behind a sea of radiation from bright suns and hot gas is a super-massive black hole.”

  11

  The glow front continued to creep towards the apex of the hemisphere. As it climbed to higher and higher Northern latitudes, its diameter naturally decreased. It was now no more than half a million kilometres.

  “That glowing ring is now about the size of the Moon’s orbit,” said Clive.

  Steve glanced at the top of the screen, where the dimensions and other characteristics of the bright ring were illuminated, and gave a slight nod of approval.

  He had suddenly realised just how vast this temporary energy supply structure was. On the surface of the hemisphere, just a short distance from the Sun and trapping its radiation from above, the half-million-kilometre ring appeared only as a small spot. He tried to envisage the true scale of the structure by building a comparison picture in his mind, but he couldn’t do it. The dimensions were too great.

  Meanwhile, the ring had almost reached the apex and looked more like a point of light than a ring. Suddenly the alien drones gathered over it, as if assessing the result of their work, and then abruptly scattered to spread over the entire surface of the structure again. The illumination of the ring-point began to dim like red-hot metal left in cold air.

  “Chris, what’s going on over there?” he asked the operator of the lunar and orbital gravity sensors.

  “Nothing. The portals are operating in their normal mode. We have not seen anything new so far.”

  “OK, don’t take your eyes off the portals and the centre of the galaxy.”

  “Attention, magnetic anomaly registered in the region of the Sun,” came the computer’s voice.

  Steve turned towards the screen displaying the central star. From several images in various bands of the spectrum being relayed from the tracking satellites, he selected the one on which the protuberances were most clearly visible. He put it in the centre of the screen and enlarged it.

  “Visualise Sun’s magnetic field. Project visualisation onto enlarged image,” ordered Steve.

  On the picture, broken green lines denoting the magnetic field lines began to shoot out rapidly. There became more and more of them, until the star looked like a ball covered in hairs. Some of the hairs were almost standing on end, going away into space. Others formed loops of various sizes, great and small. They came out of the hot surface in the form of uniform near-parabolas, bent around and fell back in again. The sunspots, which were particularly numerous this year, were like breaks in the photosphere, from which hairs wound into a loop were also stretching out.

  Steve spent several seconds studying the picture. His eyes ran over the screen, looking for anything unusual, but in vain.

  “Indicate location of anomaly,” he ordered the computer, which drew an arrow in the centre of the screen, made it wink a few times to attract attention and moved it upwards, where it made several circular motions, denoting the anomaly zone. Apparently the magnetic perturbation was too weak to be seen in the standard visualisation. He would have to go through the table of values, and there was no time for such niceties.


  “Simulate movement of protuberances for next six hours. Scale one second per thousand. Go!” commanded Steve.

  The computer obeyed, stating in the corner of the screen that it was going over from a live picture to a simulation and calculating the estimated movement of the protuberances on the basis of the anomaly it had just noticed. The Sun began rotating much more rapidly around its axis. The protuberances also seemed to come alive as they moved about its surface. Some of them shot out into space at great speed, scattering and disappearing; others, on the contrary, rotated near the surface, constantly changing shape.

  At the place where the computer had detected the anomaly, some sort of movement began, slowly at first, but getting faster and faster. Initially, it was made up of protuberances located rather closer to each other than usual, but these soon merged into an upturned tornado with its trunk towards the hemisphere. Its density and rate of rotation around its own axis were increasing all the time, and the wide end of the funnel, losing itself somewhere in the Sun’s photosphere, became wider and wider.

  The tornado was apparently sucking in solar matter and transporting it to the hemisphere. By the end of the simulation, the funnel covered something like a quarter of the Sun’s surface. The simulation ended.

  “What are they doing? Have they decided to suck material from our Sun?” exclaimed Clive in dismay. “We didn’t agree to that!”

  “Calm down, matter is very sparse in the upper layers,” replied Steve “They need solar material for their construction, but I don’t think they’ll take much.”

  “But we were talking about the natural solar wind. They didn’t say anything about intending to create an artificial tornado.”

  “All right. Calm down, Clive. Nothing is going to happen to the Sun,” replied Steve in an imperturbable tone. Clive always liked to exaggerate. Steve then addressed the computer. “What is the rate of loss of material due to the vortex induced by the magnetic anomaly?”

  “Indicate time period,” asked the computer, seeking clarification.

  “Six hours.”

  “Over this period, the loss will be on average from 100 to 120 megatons of material per second, sir.”

  “Let’s take the mean value, 110. That means that in six hours, the Sun will lose an extra...” Clive rolled his eyes to the ceiling, calculating the value in his head.

  “The loss will be a quantity of mass equivalent to the natural loss of solar wind for 27.5 days, sir,” said the computer, which had assumed Clive was addressing it.

  Clive’s face expressed annoyance.

  “Thank you. I could have calculated that myself, no-one asked you.”

  “It will survive. Normally it ejects about a million tons a second, but this is only hundreds an hour. It’s a lot, but nothing terrible,” said Steve.

  “Why do you think it will be limited to a few hours?”

  “Because the hemisphere can’t be too thick, and at this rate it will increase weight rapidly.”

  “That’s if it uses all the material to build itself.”

  “Where would it put the material other than into building its own body?”

  “It’s easy to lose matter in space. Or they could annihilate it, transform it into energy, that’s also possible.”

  “In theory, yes, but it’s simpler to use radiant energy. That way the internal fitting out of the hemisphere would be much simpler,” objected Steve.

  “Attention, local seats of falling temperature registered on external surface of hemisphere,” warned the computer’s voice.

  “It looks as if they’ve started supplying energy to the portal,” said Clive.

  “It’s started, lads. Activity in the portal,” reported Chris, who had been observing the gravity sensors.

  Clive rushed to the microphone standing on the table and sharply turned it towards him.

  “What sort of activity?” he shouted into the microphone.

  “Change of axis of rotation. The portal is preparing for activation.”

  Steve turned to the auxiliary monitor and, with a quick gesture, ran through the list of available data flows. Finding a stream from Chris’s sensors, he moved it onto the large screen.

  “Use the data flow to visualise the portal’s axis of rotation. Lay it on a map of the galaxy, mark the position of the central black hole,” he ordered the computer, which displayed the required map and marked on it the position of the Solar System and the direction of the portal’s axis of rotation.

  “Looks as if they can’t wait” said Steve, without taking his eyes off the screen.

  “Let’s hope our theory about their plans is right,” said Clive.

  “Now we’ll find out.”

  Since Steve had connected to the flow from the gravity sensors, the axis had made a quarter turn and was now aiming almost at the centre of the galaxy.

  “Mark the geometrical centre of the singularity,” ordered Steve.

  The screen added the requested information along with the difference between the actual direction of the axis and the centre of the black hole. The difference was quickly being reduced. Suddenly the axis stopped, without having reached zero. The portal was not aimed directly at the centre of the black hole, though it was very close to it.

  “What’s up?” asked Steve.

  “Could it be an error?” suggested Chris.

  “Ours or theirs?”

  Clive silently shook his head.

  “No, no, no, it isn’t an error. It’s deliberate. The portal is not directed at the centre because their ship will not be in the centre, but will pass through next to the event horizon; that’s where it’s aimed.”

  “That’s logical,” replied Chris.

  “I agree,” said Steve in his support.

  They stared at the screen as if mesmerised. A minute of tense expectation elapsed, but everything remained unchanged.

  “How long do we have to wait?” asked Chris impatiently.

  “Who knows? Maybe a minute, maybe a day, maybe even a week,” replied Steve, surprised at such a naïve question. How could any of them know?

  “The open portal must be consuming a great deal of energy. When the aliens came to us through it, it was only open for a short time. I think something’s about to happen,” said Clive.

  “That was when two portals were connected via hyperspace. But now they’re going to use them as a catapult,” objected Steve.

  “Also true,” agreed Clive, barely audibly.

  “It’s started! I can see gravity ripples in the region of the black hole!” Chris almost shouted.

  Steve and Clive, as if on command, turned their heads towards the monitor visualising the gravity map of the galaxy, where irregularities in the topology of the field were marked in different colours. The whole galaxy was coloured just like a kaleidoscope – the galaxy’s mass distorted the initially uniform space-time continuum, as flat as the surface of a lake in wind-free weather, by scattering grooves and pits all over it. A light rippling, starting from the galactic centre where the black hole was, could be clearly seen on the map.

  “Wow, their toys are shaking the whole galaxy!” exclaimed Steve in amazement. “They’re powering up for a throw!”

  “Damn!” swore Chris.

  “What have you got?” was Clive’s reaction.

  “System failure! Not one gravity model works! Just a second, the AI is reinitialising... OK, it’s calculating. It won’t take long... Now everything will be put right!”

  Steve and Clive awaited Chris’s result with bated breath.

  “Almost finished... and... Damn! Calculation error! The AI’s reinitialising again. What the hell’s going on?” cried Chris.

  Clive jumped up. “Chris, for God’s sake, what’s going on there? Have you forgotten how to use a computer or something?” he shouted indignantly.

  Steve gripped his arm.

  “Clive, it’s not his fault if the system crashes. And your insults are obviously not helping,” he said in a calm tone.

 
; Clive at once cooled down and sat back in his chair.

  “You’re right,” he said, speaking quite calmly now. “Sorry, Chris, I just got het up, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Chris was too busy to pay any attention to Clive’s reply. He was rapidly going through the system setup, seeking the reason for the failure.

  The super-computer to which all the data from the gravity sensors went calculated the gravity map of the galaxy in real time in accordance with the physico-mathematical models stored in it. The system was administrated not by a human, but by the AI, which monitored the plausibility, and in the event of a marked difference between the calculated data and the mean values, it intervened in the system, making corrections to the calibration of the instruments.

  This system always gave an exceptionally accurate result, but now, for some reason, it refused to work. The AI kept cancelling the calculation results and forcing the super-computer to put the sensor data through its processors all over again. After the fourth failed attempt, Chris cut the AI off and took control himself.

  After quickly checking the error logs, he zeroised the basic values and started reinitialisation of the system, then returned monitoring to the AI. This time the sensor data was not compared with the previous results, and therefore did not take the huge deviation as a calculation error. The error reports on the numerous screens were now replaced by tables of values and the usual graphics and visualisations.

  Steve and Clive heard Chris sigh with relief.

  “OK, the system’s back online. Give me a second to take a look...” he began, but suddenly stopped.

  “What? Has it happened again?” asked Steve.

  “It looks as if... the portals no longer exist,” replied Chris, who was clearly bewildered.

  12

  “But why should the aliens need to concentrate the power of the portals scattered all over the galaxy specifically on that black hole?” asked MacQueen.

  “There could be several explanations, but we think it would be most logical to assume that they are trying to create a super-powerful star catapult,” answered Shelby.