It hadn't sounded funny when Lear was telling me about it. The rich variety of the universe ... but when Childrey talked about the black hole in Lear's Anything Box, it sounded hilarious.
Please note: Childrey did not misunderstand anything Lear had said. Childrey wasn't stupid. He merely thought Lear was crazy. He could not have gotten away with making fun of Lear, not among educated men, without knowing exactly what he was doing.
Meanwhile the work went on.
There were pools of Marsdust, fascinating stuff, fine enough to behave like viscous oil, and knee deep. Wading through it wasn't dangerous, but it was very hard work, and we avoided it. One day Brace waded out into the nearest of the pools and started feeling around under the dust. Hunch, he said. He came up with some eroded plastic-like containers. The aliens had used the pool as a garbage dump.
We were having little luck with chemical analysis of the base materials. They were virtually indestructible. We learned more about the chemistry of the alien visitors themselves. They had left traces of themselves on the benches and on the communal waterbed. The traces had most of the chemical components of protoplasm, but Arsvey found no sign of DNA. Not surprising, he said. There must be other giant organic molecules suitable for genetic coding.
The aliens had left volumes of notes behind. The script was a mystery, of course, but we studied the photographs and diagrams. A lot of them were notes on anthropology!
The aliens had been studying Earth during the first Ice Age.
None of us were anthropologists, and that was a damn shame. We never learned if we'd found anything new. All we could do was photograph the stuff and beam it up to Lowell. One thing was sure: the aliens had left very long ago, and they had left the lighting and air systems running and the communicator sending a carrier wave.
For us? Who else?
The alternative was that the base had been switched off for some six hundred thousand years, then come back on when something detected Lowell approaching Mars. Lear didn't believe it. “If the power had been off in the communicator,” he said, “the mass wouldn't be in there any more. The fields have to be going to hold it in place. It's smaller than an atom; it'd fall through anything solid."
So the base power system had been running for all that time. What the hell could it be? And where? We traced some cables and found that it was under the base, under several yards of Marsdust fused to lava. We didn't try to dig through that.
The source was probably geophysical: a hole deep into the core of the planet. The aliens might have wanted to dig such a hole to take core samples. Afterward they would have set up a generator to use the temperature difference between the core and the surface.
Meanwhile, Lear spent some time tracing down the power sources in the communicator. He found a way to shut off the carrier wave. Now the mass—if there was a mass—was at rest in there. It was strange to see the Forward Mass Detector pouring out straight lines instead of drastically peaked sine waves.
We were ill-equipped to take advantage of these riches. We had been fitted out to explore Mars, not a bit of civilization from another star. Lear was the exception. He was in his element, with but one thing to mar his happiness.
* * * *
I don't know what the final argument was about. I was engaged on another project.
The Mars lander still had fuel in it. NASA had given us plenty of fuel to hover while we looked for a landing spot. After some heated discussion, we had agreed to take the vehicle up and hover it next to the nearby dust pool on low thrust.
It worked fine. The dust rose up in a great soft cloud and went away toward the horizon, leaving the pond bottom covered with other-worldly junk. And more! Arsvey started screaming at Brace to back off. Fortunately Brace kept his head. He tilted us over to one side and took us away on a gentle curve. The backblast never touched the skeletons.
We worked out there for hours, being very finicky indeed. Here was another skill none of us would own to, but we'd read about how careful an archaeologist has to be, and we did our best. Traces of water had had time to turn some of the dust to natural cement, so that some of the skeletons were fixed to the rock. But we got a couple free. We put them on stretchers and brought them back. One crumbled the instant the air came hissing into the lock. We left the other outside.
The aliens had not had the habit of taking baths. We'd set up a bathtub with very tall sides, in a room the aliens had reserved for some incomprehensible ritual. I had stripped off my pressure suit and was heading for the bathtub, very tired, hoping that nobody would be in it.
I heard the voices before I saw them.
Lear was shouting.
Childrey wasn't, but his voice was a carrying one. It carried mockery. He was standing between the supporting pillars. His hands were on his hips, his teeth gleamed white, his head was thrown back to look up at Lear.
He finished talking. For a time neither of them moved. Then Lear made a sound of disgust. He turned away and pushed one of the buttons on what might have been an alien typewriter keyboard.
Childrey looked startled. He slapped at his right thigh and brought the hand away bloody. He stared at it, then looked up at Lear. He started to ask a question.
He crumpled slowly in the low gravity. I got to him before he hit the ground. I cut his pants open and tied a handkerchief over the blood spot. It was a small puncture, but the flesh was puckered above it on a line with his groin.
Childrey tried to speak. His eyes were wide. He coughed, and there was blood in his mouth.
I guess I froze. How could I help if I couldn't tell what had happened? I saw a blood spot on his right shoulder, and I tore the shirt open and found another tiny puncture wound.
The doctor arrived.
It took Childrey an hour to die, but the doctor had given up much earlier. Between the wound in his shoulder and the wound in his thigh, Childrey's flesh had been ruptured in a narrow line that ran through one lung and his stomach and part of his intestinal tract. The autopsy showed a tiny, very neat hole drilled through the hipbones.
We looked for, and found, a hole in the floor beneath the communicator. It was the size of a pencil lead, and packed with dust.
“I made a mistake,” Lear told the rest of us at the inquest. “I should never have touched that particular button. It must have switched off the fields that held the mass in place. It just dropped. Captain Childrey was underneath."
And it had gone straight through him, eating the mass of him as it went.
“No, not quite,” said Lear. “I'd guess it massed about 1014 grams. That only makes it 10-6 Angstrom across, much smaller than an atom. It wouldn't have absorbed much. The damage was done to Childrey by tidal effects as it passed through him. You saw how it pulverized the material of the floor."
Not surprisingly, the subject of murder did come up.
Lear shrugged it off. “Murder with what? Childrey didn't believe there was a black hole in there at all. Neither did many of you.” He smiled suddenly. “Can you imagine what the trial would be like? Imagine the prosecuting attorney trying to tell a jury what he thinks happened. First he's got to tell them what a black hole is. Then a quantum black hole. Then he's got to explain why he doesn't have the murder weapon, and where he left it, freely falling through Mars! And if he gets that far without being laughed out of court, he's still got to explain how a thing smaller than an atom could hurt anyone!"
But didn't Dr. Lear know the thing was dangerous? Could he not have guessed its enormous mass from the way it behaved?
Lear spread his hands. “Gentlemen, we're dealing with more variables than just mass. Field strength, for instance. I might have guessed its mass from the force it took to keep it there, but did any of us expect the aliens to calibrate their dials in the metric system?"
Surely there must have been safeties to keep the fields from being shut off accidentally. Lear must have bypassed them.
“Yes, I probably did, accidentally. I did quite a lot of fiddling to find out h
ow things worked."
It got dropped there. Obviously there would be no trial. No ordinary judge or jury could be expected to understand what the attorneys would be talking about. A couple of things never did get mentioned.
For instance: Childrey's last words. I might or might not have repeated them if I'd been asked to. They were: “All right, show me! Show it to me or admit it isn't there!"
* * * *
As the court was breaking up I spoke to Lear with my voice lowered. “That was probably the most unique murder weapon in history."
He whispered, “If you said that in company I could sue for slander."
“Yeah? Really? Are you going to explain to a jury what you think I implied happened?"
“No, I'll let you get away with it this time."
“Hell, you didn't get away scot-free yourself. What are you going to study now? The only known black hole in the universe, and you let it drop through your fingers."
Lear frowned. “You're right. Partly right, anyway. But I knew as much about it as I was going to, the way I was going. Now ... I stopped it vibrating in there, then took the mass of the entire setup with the Forward Mass Sensor. Now the black hole isn't in there anymore. I can get the mass of the black hole by taking the mass of the communicator alone."
“Oh."
“And I can cut the machine open, see what's inside. How they controlled it. Damn it, I wish I were six years old."
“What? Why?"
“Well ... I don't have the times straightened out. The math is chancy. Either a few years from now, or a few centuries, there's going to be a black hole between Earth and Jupiter. It'll be big enough to study. I think about forty years."
When I realized what he was implying, I didn't know whether to laugh or scream.
“Lear, you can't think that something that small could absorb Mars!"
“Well, remember that it absorbs everything it comes near. A nucleus here, an electron there ... and it's not just waiting for atoms to fall into it. Its gravity is ferocious, and it's falling back and forth through the center of the planet, sweeping up matter. The more it eats, the bigger it gets, with its volume going up as the cube of the mass. Sooner or later, yes, it'll absorb Mars. By then it'll be just less than a millimeter across. Big enough to see."
“Could it happen within thirteen months?"
“Before we leave? Hm-m-m.” Lear's eyes took on a faraway look. “I don't think so. I'll have to work it out. The math is chancy ... “
Inconstant Moon, by Larry Niven
Copyright ©1971 by Larry Niven
First published in All the Myriad Ways, Ballantine, 1971
I
I was watching the news when the change came, like a flicker of motion at the corner of my eye. I turned toward the balcony window. Whatever it was, I was too late to catch it.
The moon was very bright tonight.
I saw that, and smiled, and turned back. Johnny Carson was just starting his monologue.
When the first commercials came on I got up to reheat some coffee. Commercials came in strings of three and four, going on midnight. I'd have time.
The moonlight caught me coming back. If it had been bright before, it was brighter now. Hypnotic. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the balcony.
The balcony wasn't much more than a railed ledge, with standing room for a man and a woman and a portable barbecue set. These past months the view had been lovely, especially around sunset. The Power and Light Company had been putting up a glass-slab style office building. So far it was only a steel framework of open girders. Shadow-blackened against a red sunset sky, it tended to look stark and surrealistic and hellishly impressive.
Tonight...
I had never seen the moon so bright, not even in the desert. Bright enough to read by, I thought, and immediately, but that's an illusion. The moon was never bigger (I had read somewhere) than a quarter held nine feet away. It couldn't possibly be bright enough to read by.
It was only three-quarters full!
But, glowing high over the San Diego Freeway to the west, the moon seemed to dim even the streaming automobile headlights. I blinked against its light, and thought of men walking on the moon, leaving corrugated footprints. Once, for the sake of an article I was writing, I had been allowed to pick up a bone-dry moon rock and hold it in my hand...
I heard the show starting again, and I stepped inside. But, glancing once behind me, I caught the moon growing even brighter—as if it had come from behind a wisp of scudding cloud.
Now its light was brain-searing, lunatic.
* * * *
The phone rang five times before she answered.
“Hi,” I said. “Listen—”
“Hi,” Leslie said sleepily, complainingly. Damn. I'd hoped she was watching television, like me.
I said, “Don't scream and shout, because I had a reason for calling. You're in bed, right? Get up and ... can you get up?”
“What time is it?”
“Quarter of twelve.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Go out on your balcony and look around.”
“Okay.”
The phone clunked. I waited. Leslie's balcony faced north and west, like mine, but it was ten stories higher, with a correspondingly better view. Through my own window, the moon burned like a textured spotlight.
“Stan? You there?”
“Yah. What do you think of it?”
“It's gorgeous. I've never seen anything like it. What could make the moon light up like that?”
“I don't know, but isn't it gorgeous?”
“You're supposed to be the native.” Leslie had only moved out here a year ago.
“Listen, I've never seen it like this. But there's an old legend,” I said. “Once every hundred years the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clear as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it.”
“I used to know all that stuff. Well, listen, I'm glad you woke me up to see it, but I've got to get to work tomorrow.”
“Poor baby.”
“That's life. ‘Night.”
“'Night.”
Afterward I sat in the dark, trying to think of someone else to call. Call a girl at midnight, invite her to step outside and look at the moonlight ... and she may think it's romantic or she may be furious, but she won't assume you called six others.
So I thought of some names. But the girls who belonged to them had all dropped away over the past year or so, after I started spending all my time with Leslie. One could hardly blame them. And now Joan was in Texas and Hildy was getting married, and if I called Louise I'd probably get Gordie too. The English girl? But I couldn't remember her number. Or her last name.
Besides, everyone I knew punched a time clock of one kind or another. Me, I worked for a living, but as a freelance writer I picked my hours. Anyone I woke up tonight, I'd be ruining her morning. Ah, well...
The Johnny Carson Show was a swirl of gray and a roar of static when I got back to the living room. I turned the set off and went back out on the balcony.
The moon was brighter than the flow of headlights on the freeway, brighter than Westwood Village off to the right. The Santa Monica Mountains had a magical pearly glow. There were no stars near the moon. Stars could not survive that glare.
I wrote science and how-to articles for a living. I ought to be able to figure out what was making the moon do that. Could the moon be suddenly larger?
...Inflating like a balloon? No. Closer, maybe. The moon, falling?
Tides! Waves fifty feet high ... and earthquakes! San Andreas Fault splitting apart like the Grand Canyon! Jump in my car, head for the hills ... no, too late already...
Nonsense. The moon was brighter, not bigger. I could see that. And what could possibly drop the moon on our heads like that?
I blinked, and the moon left an afterimage on my retinae. It
was that bright.
A million people must be watching the moon right now, and wondering, like me. An article on the subject would sell big ... if I wrote it before anyone else did...
There must be some simple, obvious explanation.
Well, how could the moon grow brighter? Moonlight reflected sunlight. Could the sun have gotten brighter? It must have happened after sunset, then, or it would have been noticed....
I didn't like that idea.
Besides, half the Earth was in direct sunlight. A thousand correspondents for Life and Time and Newsweek and Associated Press would all be calling in from Europe, Asia, Africa ... unless they were all hiding in cellars. Or dead. Or voiceless, because the sun was blanketing everything with static, radio and phone systems and television ... television: Oh my God.
I was just barely beginning to be afraid.
All right, start over. The moon had become very much brighter. Moonlight, well, moonlight was reflected sunlight; any idiot knew that. Then ... something had happened to the sun.
II
“Hello?”
“Hi. Me,” I said, and then my throat froze solid. Panic! What was I going to tell her?
“I've been watching the moon,” she said dreamily. “It's wonderful. I even tried to use my telescope, but I couldn't see a thing; it was too bright. It lights up the whole city. The hills are all silver.”
That's right, she kept a telescope on her balcony. I'd forgotten.
“I haven't tried to go back to sleep,” she said. “Too much light.”
I got my throat working again. “Listen, Leslie love, I started thinking about how I woke you up and how you probably couldn't get back to sleep, what with all this light. So let's go out for a midnight snack.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“No, I'm serious. I mean it. Tonight isn't a night for sleeping. We may never have a night like this again. To hell with your diet. Let's celebrate. Hot fudge sundaes, Irish coffee—”
“That's different. I'll get dressed.”
“I'll be right over.”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One Page 454