Eater

by Gregory Benford

  “Nope,” he said merrily, “I saw this right away, of course, and got back to them. They looked it over, say it’s all right.”

  “Must be Doppler shifts.”

  “Plausible.” An emitter moving toward them would seem to give off hydrogen light slightly shifted up in frequency, toward the blue. One traveling away would seem red. “This guy gives us both at once? Makes no sense.”

  “Ummm. The blue shift is strongest.”

  They looked at each other and grinned. “This is the strangest damn thing I’ve ever seen,” Benjamin said happily.

  “Me, too. And it’s real.”

  Nobody had to say anything more. Not a gamma-ray burster, not a galactic jet—something strange and bright and mysterious. Astronomers lived to find a wholly new class of object, and this looked a lot like one. And it had just fallen into their laps. It helped being bright, Benjamin thought, but being lucky would do just fine, thank you.

  “Glad to hear it” came a voice from over his shoulder. Brisk, British, and even after many years, instantly recognizable. He turned and looked into the face of Kingsley Dart. “Caught a whisper of this while I was over on Honolulu,” Dart went on in his quick, clipped accent. “Sounded intriguing. Thought I’d nip over and have a look.”

  Benjamin felt his face tighten. He could not make himself say a word. Amy jumped in with a startled salutation and Benjamin found himself shaking Dart’s hand under shelter of her gusher of greetings, but he could not force his grinding mind to think of anything at the moment beyond an incident decades before.

  The question had come out of the colloquium audience like a lance, clear and sharp and cutting. Benjamin had just finished speaking, his last overhead image still splashed up on the screen. As well, both blackboards were covered with equations and quick sketches he had made when he found the confines of language too much.

  A moment before he had stepped back and acknowledged the loud round of applause. It was not the mere pro forma pattering of palms, carrying the quality of gratitude that the speaker was finished and soon would come the after-colloquium tea or wine and cheese. They liked the ideas, and some genuine smiles reassured that they liked him. The colloquium chairman had then asked, as customary, “Any questions?” Swiftly the Oxbridge-accented sentences spiked out and Benjamin knew that he was in trouble.

  His heart was already tripping fast. This was his first colloquium presentation, an unusual honor. At twenty-six, he was the bright boy of the astrophysics group at U.C. Berkeley, but even the best graduate students seldom got an invitation to speak in the Astronomy Department’s most elevated venue. There were fifty, maybe sixty people in the audience, mostly graduate students, but with all the senior faculty in the first few rows. He had counted the crowd as it grew, been gratified; the heavy hitters had all turned out, not cutting it because Benjamin was in their minds still just a graduate student, or nearly so. It was an honor to be here and he had prepared for weeks, rehearsing with Channing, tailoring his viewgraphs, making up four-color computer graphics to show sinuous flows and ruby-red plasma currents.

  His talk had been about the energetic jets that shoot out from the disks around black holes, a recurring hot topic in the field. As new windows opened for telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum, the jets showed more detail, fresh mysteries.

  In his talk he had used the entire modern arsenal of theoretical attack: calculations, computer simulations, and finally, to truly convince, some easily digested cartoons. Nobody really felt that they understood something unless they carried away a picture of how it worked. “Get it right in the ‘cartoon approximation’ and all else follows,” his thesis adviser had sagely said.

  Benjamin had shown that the jets were very probably confined by their own magnetic fields. This could only be so if they carried a net current out from their source, presumably a large black hole and its churning neighborhood. He had ended up with a simple declaration: “That is, in a sense the flows are self-organized.” In other words, they neatly knit themselves up.

  Then the knife question came from a figure Benjamin did not know, an angular face halfway back in the rows of chairs. Benjamin felt that he should know the face, there was something familiar about it, but there was no time to wonder about identity now. A quick riposte to an attack was essential in the brisk world of international astrophysics. Ideas had their moment in the sun, and if the glare revealed a blemish, they were banished.

  The question subtly undermined his idea. In a slightly nasal Brit accent, the voice recalled that jets were probably born near the disk of matter rotating about black holes, but after that were at the mercy of the elements as they propagated outward, into the surrounding galaxy.

  Smoothly the questioner pointed out that other ways to confine and shape the jets were easily imagined—for example, the pressure of the galaxy’s own gas and dust—and “seemed more plausible, I should imagine.” This last stab was within the allowed range of rebukes.

  Benjamin took a second to assume an almost exaggerated pose of being at ease, putting his hands in his pockets and rocking back on one foot, letting the other foot rise, balanced on its heel. “Lack of imagination is not really an argument, is it?” he said mildly.

  A gratifying ripple of laughter washed through the room. Those already half out of their seats paused, sensing a fight. Benjamin quickly went on, catching the momentum of the moment. “To collar a jet and make it run straight demands something special about the medium around it, some design on its part. But if the jet is self-managed, right from the moment it was born, back on the accretion disk—that solves the confinement problem.”

  Nods, murmurs. His opponent cast a shrewd look and again Benjamin could almost place that face, the clipped, precise English accent. The man said casually, “But you have no way of knowing if a disk will emit that much current. And as well, I should think that no relativistically exact result could tell you that in general.” A smirk danced at the edges of the man’s mouth. “And you do realize that the black hole region must be treated in accordance with general relativity, not merely special relativity?”

  The audience had turned to hear this, eyes casting back, and Benjamin knew that this was somebody important. The shot about relativity was a clear put-down, questioning his credentials. A nasty insinuation to make about a fresh Ph.D., the ink barely dry on his diploma. He drew in a long breath and time slowed, the way it does in a traffic accident, and suddenly he realized that he was frightened.

  His was the second colloquium of the academic year, a prestigious spot in itself. The Astronomy Department liked to get the year off with a bang, featuring bold, invigorating topics. The air was crisp with autumn smells, the campus alive with edgy expectation, and Channing was in the tenth row in her blue good-luck sweater.

  Act. Say something. But what?

  He caught her eyes on him and stepped forward, putting his hands behind his back in a classic pontifical pose, the way he had seen others signal that they were being thoughtful. In fact, he did not need to think, for the answer came to him out of nowhere, slipping into words as he began a sentence, not quite knowing where it was going.

  “The disk dynamo has to give off a critical level of current,” he said easily, getting the tone of bemused thought. “Otherwise it would not be able to coherently rotate.”

  He let the sentence hang in air. The senior figures in the department were watching him, waiting for further explanation, and he opened his mouth to give it. His nostrils flared and he saw with crystalline clarity that he should say nothing, leave the tantalizing sentence to sink in. Bait. This guy in the back was a Brit, dish out some of his own style to him.

  He had gotten everyone’s attention and now the audience sensed something, heads swiveling to watch the Englishman. Stand pat? No.

  Benjamin decided to raise the stakes. A cool thrill ran through him as he added, “I would think that was physically clear.”

  Half the audience had already turned toward the back rows and w
hen he spoke they quickly glanced around like a crowd at a tennis match following a fast volley.

  The face in the back clouded, scowling, and then seemed to decide to challenge. “I should think that unlikely” came the drawl, lifting at the last word into a derisive lilt, un-like-ly.

  Benjamin felt a prickly rush sweep over him. Gotcha.

  “It follows directly from a conservation theorem,” Benjamin said smoothly, savoring the line, striding to the overhead projector and slapping down a fresh viewgraph. He had not shown it in the talk because it was an arcane bit of mathematics, not the sort of thing to snag the attention of this crowd. No eye-catching graphics or dazzling data-crunching, just some lines of equations with double-integral signs, ripe with vector arrows over the symbols. A yawner—until now.

  “Starting with Maxwell’s equations,” he began, pointing, then glanced up. “Which we know to be relativistically correct, yes?”

  This jibe made a few of the theorists chuckle; everybody had learned this as undergraduates, but most had forgotten it long ago.

  “So performing the integrals over a cylindrical volume…” He went through the steps quickly, knowing that nobody this late in the hour wanted to sit through five minutes of tedious calculations. The cat was out of the bag, anyway. Springing a crisp new viewgraph—and then two more to finish the argument, all tightly reasoned mathematics—tipped his hand. He had anticipated this question and prepared, deliberately left a hole in his argument. Or so the guy in the back would think—was thinking, from the deepening frown Benjamin saw now on the distant, narrow face—and knew that he had stepped into a trap.

  Only it wasn’t so. Benjamin had not really intended it that way, had left the three viewgraphs out because they seemed a minor digression of little interest to the hard-nosed astrophysicists who made up most of the audience.

  “So we can see that this minimum level is quite enough to later on confine the jets, keep them pointing straight, solve the problem.” He added this last little boast and stepped back.

  The Brit face at the back curled up a lip, squinted eyes, but said nothing. A long moment passed as the colloquium chairman peered toward the back, rocking forward a little, and then saw that there would be no reply. Game, point, match, Benjamin thought, breathing in deeply of air that seemed cool and sharp.

  There were two more questions, minor stuff about possible implications, easy to get through. In fact, he let himself strut a little. He expanded on some work he contemplated doing in the near future, once he and Channing had the wedding business over with and he could think, plan the next step in his career. He felt that he could get away with a slight, permissible brag.

  Then it was over, the ritual incantation from the chairman, “There is wine and cheese in the usual place, to which you are all invited. Let us thank our speaker again…”

  This applause was scattered and listless, as usual as everybody got up, and the crowd left. His major professor appeared at his elbow and said, “You handled that very well.”

  “Uh, thanks. Who is that guy?” Benjamin glanced at the crowd, not letting any concern into his face.

  “Dart. Kingsley Dart.”

  “The similarity solutions guy from Oxford?”

  “Right. Just blew in yesterday afternoon, visiting for a few days. Thought you had met him.”

  “I was squirreled away making viewgraphs.”

  “You sure nailed Dart with those last three.”

  “I hadn’t really planned it that way—”

  An amused grin. “Oh, sure.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Nobody gets timing like that without setting it up.”

  “Well, my Benjamin did,” Channing said, slipping an arm around his. “I know, because he had them in the very first version of the talk.”

  Benjamin smiled. “And you told me to drop them.”

  “It worked perfectly, didn’t it?” she said, all innocence.

  He laughed, liking the feeling of release it brought, liking that she had made him seem a lot more the savvy Machiavellian than he was, liking the whole damned thing so much it clutched at his heart somehow in the frozen moment of triumph. Off to the side two of the big names of the department were talking about the implications of his work and he liked the sound of that, too, his name wafting pleasantly in the nearly empty room. He could smell the aging, polished wood, the astringent solvent reek of the dry markers from the blackboard, a moist gathering in the cloying air of late afternoon. Channing kept her arm in his and walked proudly beside him up the two flights to the wine and cheese.

  “You were great.” She looked up at him seriously and he saw that she had feared for him in this last hour. Berkeley was notorious for cutting criticisms, arch comments, savage seminars that dissected years of research in minutes of coldly delivered condemnation.

  She had kept close to him through the aftermath, when white-haired savants of the field came up to him, holding plastic glasses of an indifferent red wine, and probed him on details, implications, even gossip. Treating him like a member of the club, a colleague at last. She had tugged at his arm and nodded when Dart came into view, earnestly talking to a grand old observing astronomer. Dart had a way of skating over a crowd, dipping in where he wanted, like a hummingbird seeking the sweet bulbs. Eventually he worked his way around to Benjamin, lifting eyebrows as he approached, his face in fact running through the entire suite of ironic messages, very Euro, before shooting out a hand and saying, “Kingsley Dart. Liked the talk.”

  Firm handshake. “You seemed to disagree with most of it.”

  A shrug. “Testing the ideas, just testing.”

  He said, a little testily, Benjamin thought. “I had dropped those viewgraphs, the proof, out of the talk. I didn’t think most of the audience would care.”

  Abrupt nods, three very quick, then a long one, as though deliberating. “Probably right. Only people like me and thee care.”

  Ah, Benjamin thought, instant inclusion in the fraternity of people-like-us. “It’s a major point, I should have brought it up.”

  “No, you were right, would’ve blunted your momentum.”

  Why is he being so chummy? Channing’s glance asked, eyebrows pinched in. He had no idea. Not knowing where to go with this conversation, he said, “My fiancée, Channing Blythe,” and they went through the usual presentations. But Kingsley kept eyeing him with a gaze that lapsed into frowning speculation, as though they were still feeling each other out. And maybe they were. Within minutes they were at it, throwing ideas and clipped phrases back and forth, talking the shorthand of those who spent a lot of time living in their heads and were glad to meet someone who shared the same interior territory. It was the start of a formal friendship and a real, never acknowledged rivalry, two poles that defined them in the decades that followed.

  Twenty years. Could it have been that long?

  And now here he was, the famous Royal Astronomer, first on the scene when something potentially big was breaking. Perfect timing was a gift, and Kingsley had it.

  Forcing a smile onto his stiff face, Benjamin felt a sharp, hot spike of genuine hatred.

  4

  Channing planned her invasion of the High Energy Astrophysics Center carefully. First, what were the right clothes to stage a dramatic reappearance at work, after a month away, presumed by all to be no longer a real player?

  When she had worked at NASA Headquarters the dress code had been easy: modified East Coast style, basically a matter of getting her blacks to match. Did a mascara-dark midlength skirt go with a charcoal turtleneck? Close enough and she was okay for either NASA’s labyrinths, the opera, or a smoky dive.

  But amid tropical glare and endless vibrant bougainvillea, her outfits had seemed like dressing as a vampire at an Easter egg hunt. Here, slouchy sweaters and scuffed tennis shoes appeared at “dressy casual” receptions, right next to Italian silk ties, subtle diamond bracelets, and high heels sinking into the sandy sod. She had seen jeans worn with a tiara, “leis
ure gowns” looking like pajamas, and a tux top with black shorts. Yet finding a studied casual look took her an hour of careful weighing, all to seem as though she had thrown them on fifteen minutes ago without a second thought. On top of that, you never knew how the day would proceed later, whether you were dressing for an evening on a humid, warm patio or inside, in air-conditioning set for the comfort zone of a snow leopard. Maddening.

  She eyed herself carefully in the mirror. Now, thanks to weight loss, she had a great, tight butt: Gluteus to the Maximus! But her breasts, once ample enough, thank you, were sagging, or as she preferred to think in TV terms, losing their vertical hold.

  Getting over vanity had been the hardest part of adjusting to the cancer. A vain man would check himself out passing a mirror. An absolutely ordinary woman could pick out her reflections in store windows, spoons, bald men’s heads. Channing, as a photogenic astronaut type, had been ever-aware of How She Looked. All women faced the Looks Issue, as she had thought of it as a teenager, whether as a positive element or a negative one. Not that it had not done her good now and then. At NASA it had helped her through earnest committee meetings in which she was the only woman in the room. Now, thank God, all that was behind her.

  Still, she was not at all ready to enter the working bay, looking for Benjamin, and find Kingsley Dart in his uniform: slightly pouchy brown suit, white shirt, tie drawn tight in a knot of unknown style. Down-market Oxford, so utterly out of place that his attire advertised Dart’s unconcern for such trivial matters. Since she had seen him in a tux when the situation demanded, and yet he had somehow achieved the same effect of unconscious indifference, she was sure it was all quite conscious.

  She went through the clothes analysis automatically while trying to absorb the shock. She was suddenly self-conscious, and then angry about being so. He still had the power to throw her into momentary confusion. And the way he lifted his head to smile, with just a whiff of hauteur, still delighted her. Damn him.