by Hal Clement
She turned away and quickly doffed the rest of her space armor, while Tikaki tried vainly to think of the right thing to say. He failed, and wisely said nothing.
However, he left the lock bay at the same time the captain did. Even appearing to stay around to wait for Garabed seemed tactless at the moment.
Nothing more was said directly—Tikaki reported the gist of the conversation to several of his fellows, and the word spread rapidly enough to the other researchers. However, twelve hours later a watch reassignment was published, putting the two other instrument workers alternately on outside duty and assigning Garabed to liaison with the researchers who had equipment to be mounted on the finished umbrella. It occurred to Tikaki that his pressure might actually have been a favor for Sarjuk, giving her an excuse to do something she had wanted to do anyway, but he decided that any experimental check of this hypothesis would be too much like trying to find the taste of monofluoroacetic acid.
Over four days were spent outside by the space-suited engineers, with Sarjuk watching them closely two thirds of the time and sleeping most of the rest. Then, the umbrella assembled, attached, and electrically proven, a tiny change was made in the Manzara’s velocity. The result was obvious only to people like Sforza, who could read the vector symbols in the ballistics tank as readily as a novel. Sirius B had already become a dazzlingly brilliant point of light, while A was blazing well to one side; but it would be days yet before unaided human senses could convince their owners that the ship was in a B-centered orbit.
The velocity change as such was no more apparent to the Longline’s pilot than to the human beings on the Manzara, but the neutrino flux from the Solar vessel’s hydrogen fusers was another matter. It was tiny in amount compared to the flood from Sirius A, even after inverse square decrement, but it was well above the noise level of the Longline’s instruments, and Wattimlan, still casting outward from the neutron star with completely unhuman patience, detected it and was properly confused.
Another pseudo-star? Did they come this small? Or was it really small—perhaps the feebleness meant distance. But did stars suddenly wink into existence like that? He had never heard of such a thing. Maybe Feroxtant would know . . .
So the Longline paused in her endless casting, and the young pilot searched the neutron star calling rather frantically for his chief. Feroxtant was amusing himself in a fashion quite beyond the possibility of describing to a human being, and did not particularly wish to be found at the moment. Consequently, even though the Manzara’s acceleration lasted a very long time by tachyon standards, it had ended by the time Wattimlan found him, convinced him that something was strange, and got him back to the ship to see for himself. The peculiar neutrino flux had ceased—the Manzara’s general operations were powered by chemical accumulators, since operating fusers at what amounted to trickle power was inherently wasteful. Feroxtant saw nothing, and Wattimlan had to admit that there was now nothing to see. The net result was that Feroxtant, deciding that his assistant needed a rest, took over at piloting the Longlane’s casts. Neither he nor Wattimlan gave any thought whatever to the fact that the neutrino bursts from their own vessel’s acceleration would have appeared similar in intensity, though far briefer in duration, to any nearby ship.
Jeb Garabed was kept very, very busy. Neither the captain nor anyone else had mentioned a word about the Tikaki argument to him; he had, indeed, taken the reassignment almost for granted. He was not offensively conceited, but had a perfectly realistic awareness of his own competence. If the change had given him and the captain any more time together off-watch than before, he might have been slightly suspicious of an ulterior motive; but it had no such effect.
All three of the instrument workers were now occupied every waking moment. Everything the Manzara carried whose analytical range much exceeded that of a chemist’s test tube was now in use, probing the white dwarf itself and groping for the still invisibly small neutron star whipping around it. The name of Garabed or one of his colleagues echoed over the intercom whenever something failed to operate properly—and, as he complained occasionally, whenever an unexpected reading was recorded and the researcher involved was afraid his machine was working improperly.
Consequently, while Garabed was not actually the first to detect impulses from the Longline, he was certainly the first to believe that those impulses constituted genuine, objective data rather than instrumental artifacts.
To him, the neutrino telescopes were just another set of instruments which he knew intimately. They would not have been recognized a century or so earlier; they were far more sophisticated than the original tank of cleaning fluid in a mine. They still did not approach ordinary optical equipment in resolving power, but the word “telescope” was far more appropriate than it had once been. They even reported their data in the form of visual images on very conventional electron tubes, though their “optical” parts were warp fields.
Jeb Pardales, the physicist who made most use of the neutrino equipment, was never surprised to see ghost images on the tube, but he was never happy about them.
“Find it, please, Jeb,” he said in a rather tired voice. “It’s bad enough to have neutrinos at all from a supposedly dead white dwarf. It’s worse when they come in separate bursts. It’s worst of all when I can’t tell whether they’re actually coming from the dwarf or from some place as much as a million kilometers away from it. At least, though, I’d like to be sure that half of what I see isn’t originating right in that circuit box.”
“It shouldn’t be.” Garabed’s voice was almost as tired. “I had it apart less than five days ago. What’s the pattern that makes you worry?”
“Doubling of the image.”
“That does sound embarrassing for me. What’s the pattern? Horizontal? Vertical? Same brightness? Energy difference?”
“Energy about the same in original and ghost. Time difference varies from too close to distinguish—which may mean no ghost at all—up to just about one second. Position difference seems random—but at this range my resolving power in angle means more than one light-second.”
Garabed frowned. “That doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever seen happen inside one of these things. Have you checked it out on the A star?”
“Yes. Nothing surprising. A steady image of what might be its active nucleus, blurred by resolution limit at this distance.”
“Then I suggest you believe what you’re getting here. I can’t take apart everything on the ship every time someone is surprised by what he sees.”
Embarrassment supplemented the fatigue on Pardales’ face. “I know, Jeb. I wouldn’t ask, except I’ve gone over it all myself, and can’t find anything wrong with the telescope, and all of us have been beating our brains out without even a whisper of an idea of what could emit neutrinos in any such way. I’m not so much asking you whether there’s anything wrong with the ‘scope as I am asking what you can do to improve its resolution. In theory, inside tuning should give us another power of ten. I know we’ll be that much closer in a couple of weeks, but if we have to wait that long some of us may not be in shape to work. I mean it.”
Jeb’s eyebrows started to imitate those of his former watchmate Sforza before he remembered and controlled them.
“That bad? I suppose that means one of you came up with the demon theory and no one else can think of anything to replace it—but you don’t want to admit it.”
“Just help us measure, please, Jeb.” Garabed said nothing more; he nodded sympathetically and opened the case of the telescope. He understood perfectly. For Cro-Magnon man, it could be taken for granted that lightning was produced by a living being—one with special powers, but not entirely beyond man’s comprehension. A few millennia later, the notion that disease was a divine punishment for sin was equally acceptable. Then the idea of an essentially human universe—one in which man was not only of central importance but of typical powers—began to fade as a more coherent concept of natural law was developed. Intelligent creat
ors of the Martian canals, though popular as a concept, were not universally accepted; the flying saucer phenomenon a few decades later saw the “little green men” accepted by a minority, composed largely of the less disciplined imaginations. Very, very few seriously considered the pulsars as possible space beacons planted by star-faring races. And scarcely anyone interpreted the regular crystal-growth patterns, whose images were first transmitted to Earth by unmanned probes from the moons of Jupiter, as the remains of cities. Blaming things on intelligence had simply gone out of style. This, of course, put the Manzara’s researchers at a profound disadvantage.
It also put Jeb Garabed to a great deal of unnecessary work. “I can’t get you ten times the resolution,” he said at last. “You’ll have to settle for about seven, and get the rest by waiting. Look, I’m no psychologist, but why should you let this worry you now? Can’t you just collect your measures, and not worry about explaining them until you’ve recorded everything you can expect to get? That’s what Min would certainly advise, and—”
“And you would naturally be inclined to take her advice. I admit it’s good; I just doubt that it’s possible to follow. All right, Jeb. I’ll be calling for you shortly, I’m sure.”
“Not until that thing has been run for at least six hours,” Garabed said firmly. “Unless you actually do go overboard and hit it with a torch, I refuse to believe that it can go wrong before then. Just get all your nice measures on the tapes, and don’t—what do you scientists call it—theorize ahead of your data.” He left hastily—there were two other calls for his services already.
He mentioned the conversation some hours later to the captain, not as a complaint or even an official report, but as an example of how things were going, in one of their rare private conversations. She proved more concerned than he had expected.
“I’ve heard a little about it,” she agreed. “The star people seem terribly bothered at the idea of a white dwarf’s putting out neutrinos, and even more so at the thought of their coming from the neutron star. The idea is that such bodies should be past that stage. I’d have thought that a real scientist would be delighted at the chance to discover something really new, but this crowd seems short on self-confidence; they can’t convince themselves that the data aren’t mistakes.”
“That’s what it looked like to me,” agreed her husband. “I suggested to Jeff that he just collect measures for a while, hoping that the bulk of material would convince him there must be something to it, but I don’t know whether it’ll work.”
Sarjuk pondered for a minute or two. “I can’t think of anything better, myself,” she admitted finally, “except that you’d better do everything you can to keep up their confidence in the equipment—even if it takes more than its fair share of your time. If necessary, I’ll juggle watch assignments even further.”
“Hmph. I hope it won’t be. I like my work, but enough is as good as too much. That telescope is working; there are bursts of neutrinos coming from somewhere near that whirligig pair, whether Jeff and his friends want to believe it or not.”
“I’m willing to take your word for it—so far.” He looked at her sharply as she made the qualification. She smiled. “I just hope you don’t have to do their work as well, and come up with a theory to satisfy them. But forget all that for a few hours—no one can work all the time.”
Sarjuk did not actually have to reassign watches, but Garabed spent a great deal of time on the neutrino telescope during the next ten days. By that time, every one of its component modules had been replaced at least once, and the decreasing distance had improved image resolution to the point where it began to look as though at least some of the bursts were centered on, if not actually originating in, the neutron star.
By that time, also, the Manzara had made two minor—very minor—orbit corrections. The fusers had been used, and Feroxtant had seen for himself that his assistant had not been hallucinating. He did not stop his casts, however; there seemed no point in debating the matter until more data could be secured. Therefore, the Longline continued to emit its own neutrino bursts as it left the neutron star and when it made its reversal some three hundred thousand kilometers away.
To the surprise of Garabed and the relief of the captain, the physicists were beginning to accept the reality of their data, and were eagerly awaiting the completion of the capture maneuvers. The plan was to place the Manzara at the mass center of the white dwarf-neutron star pair, holding the umbrella toward the dwarf; in effect, this would place the ship’s instruments at the origin of a system-centered coordinate set, and the observers relative motion should be zero. This would avoid a lot of variables . . .
The capture maneuver was artistic, though hard for nonspecialists to appreciate. Sforza cut as closely as he could first to one of the bodies and then the other, choosing his vectors so that the inevitable gain in kinetic energy as he approached each would be more than offset by the loss as he withdrew, and combining this with an initial approach direction which caused each nearparabolic deflection to carry the Manzara from one body towards the other. It would have been elegant, as Sforza admitted, to do the whole job with a single application of steering power to get them into the proper initial approach curve; unfortunately, it was impossible. The period of the system remained just below thirteen minutes—which cut things tight enough as it was—while that of the ship was constantly decreasing as it surrendered energy to the little stars.
The job was finally finished, with the umbrella warding off the radiation flood from the hot star some twenty thousand miles off the bow and the vessel’s stem pointing toward the invisible mystery a little more than twice as far away. The data continued to flood in.
Feroxtant had also received a flood of data. It was not easy to interpret; one fact common to both his and the human universe is that the number of independent equations must equal or exceed the number of unknowns before any certainty is possible. The actual power drain on the Manzara’s fusers had been varying in complex fashion; so had the ship’s distance from the neutron star. Hence, the neutrino flux recorded by the Longline’s sensing equipment had varied widely and erratically during the many minutes of Sforza’s maneuvering. Feroxtant felt subjectively that the variation was not random, but could find no pattern in it. He had stopped casting very quickly, and called Wattimlan back aboard. The youngster was equally mystified, though happy that his commander had also seen the strange readings.
“No star ever acted like that.” Feroxtant was firm. “I don’t know what we’ve found—well, what you’ve found, to be honest—but it’s new.”
“But—stars aren’t the only things that give off neutrinos,” Wattimlan pointed out rather timidly. “Ship’s accelerators—food factories—”
“I thought of that. Of course artificial processes emit neutrinos, too; but what imaginable process would produce them in a pattern which varies like this?”
Wattimlan had no answer.
Oddly enough, Garabed’s work load eased off; the physicists were accepting the information and had turned back into scientists. Sarjuk felt that the earlier problem must have been mere inertia—their minds had been running free, except for the planning of possible experiments, for nearly a year and a half; they had simply slipped clutches briefly at the first contact with reality in so many months.
She might have been right. Garabed wasn’t sure, but didn’t argue; he enjoyed the respite, and listened with interest to the questions flying about. Why should a neutron star emit neutrinos at all? Why in separate bursts? Why, if the Sirius system had started as a single unit, had its least massive member reached the neutron star stage first? Why were the white dwarf and its companion so close together—so close that when both were main sequence stars their radii would have overlapped? Why, if its magnetic field meant anything, was the neutron star in locked rotation facing the dwarf rather than spinning several times a second like all the others known?
Answers were not forthcoming. Physical data—size, mass, detailed
motion, even temperature and conductivity—were flowing in nicely; but any question beginning with “why” remained wide open.
The white dwarf was being very cooperative, though it was not much to look at through a filter—no sunspots, no corona, no prominences or faculae; simply a featureless disc, Nevertheless, information about its internal structure was coming in very well, and none of it was very surprising. It was now clear that the neutrino bursts were not coming from this body; as far as nuclear activity was concerned, it was dead.
The neutrino telescope had been shut down during the capture maneuvers, and the pause when Feroxtant had stopped casting for a time had been missed.
It was equally clear that not all of the bursts were coming from the neutron star, either. Just half of them were—or at least, from a region within about eight hundred kilometers of it, that being the resolution limit of the telescope at this distance. The other half appeared to originate randomly at any point within about a light-second of the same center. They still came in pairs, one of each pair at the center and one away from it, with pauses of a few seconds every ten to twenty minutes—not completely random, but not orderly enough for anyone to have worked out a system yet.
“You have the betting look on your face again. I thought you were going to stop until the work let up.” Garabed looked at the captain, trying to decide how serious she might be.