Doctor How and the Rings of Uranus

by Mark Speed

  Author’s note

  Doctor How asked me to write this series in British English. Original manuscripts in Gaelfreyan and Squill will be available when your civilisation reaches the necessary level. Similarly, the Imperial system of measurement is used, rather than the Metric: the French were wrong on a truly cosmic scale.

  “Great, that’s all I need,” said the Doctor.

  “What’s up, Doc?” asked Kevin, who was reading Particle Physics for Dummies on his Sliver™, translated into English by the Spectrel from the original Squill pan-universe classic edition. He was reclining, having told his seat in the Spectrel to transform into a steamer-style chair. He was recovering from a bone-shaking ride on a horse and carriage the previous day. The noise and discomfort of the experience had made him want to throttle the producers of any film which portrayed romantic scenes in such vehicles. A house-bot was massaging his feet.

  “All this buggering around in the seventeen-eighties has had ramifications.”

  “Uh-oh, I don’t like the sound of that. What’s happened?”

  “It’s what’s not happened that I’m bothered about.”

  “What’s not happened, then?”

  “Uranus’s gamma ring is missing.”

  “Huh?”

  “The gamma ring – the reddish one – is missing from Uranus. That’s the seventh planet of your solar system, in case you were wondering – not part of your anatomy.”

  “No big deal, surely?”

  “Believe me, it is a big deal, lad.”

  “Look, before you get onto that, is it really true that the Higgs Boson doesn’t exist?” He held up his wafer thin Sliver™ and flapped it in the Doctor’s direction.

  “Of course. Why on Earth would you think that it did exist?”

  “I remember it being on the news. The Large Hadron Collider. You know. Then they had that Higgs guy on the news and that former pop-star Astrophysicist all the women rave about. The guy with –”

  “Oh, him,” sneered the Doctor. “Mr Smiley with the smooth voice.”

  “I think you’ll find he’s actually a professor.”

  The Doctor snorted. “You know fine-well what I think of people on television. Particularly those who endeavour to popularise subjects like astrophysics by dumbing it down.”

  “Jeez, let it go, man. Don’t have a go at Brian Cox because of the sins your brother committed.”

  “Alright, alright. Anyway, please be assured that the Higgs Boson doesn’t exist.”

  “But didn’t some people get Nobel Prizes an’ stuff for it?”

  “Sure.”

  “But if it doesn’t exist…?”

  “There is a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences,” said the Doctor. “To my amazement, the oxymoronic term ‘economic sciences’ is not used in an ironic way. The whole area of study is complete and utter bunkum, which is why it’s only a Nobel Memorial Prize – having been set up by a bunch of bankers, rather than Nobel himself. So the fact that an honest Physicist might get a prize for something that was thought to be true and later turns out to be wrong isn’t such a bad thing, is it? An economist would probably call that wealth redistribution. Anyway, why are you so emotionally attached to the Higgs Boson?”

  “Well, it’s like… It was the big thing, you know? This big British contribution to nuclear physics. On a par with what Einstein did. You get me?”

  “Hmph. I think the very year of its theoretical existence should be warning enough for you. 1964.”

  “Oh. Right. The year after your brother spilled the beans with his supposedly fictional TV series about a time-travelling superhero scientist.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But I don’t understand how they could have been fooled into thinking it existed. I mean, they say they found all the evidence, didn’t they? And it fitted the Standard Model.”

  “Your Ph.D. in Astrophysics is ever-elusive, isn’t it, lad? What can you tell me about the behaviour of photons? What happens when you fire a single photon at two slits?”

  “Erm… It goes through both slits and interferes with itself like waves would?”

  “Excellent. And I’m so glad you’ve finally dropped the sexual innuendo from such sentences.”

  “Uh?”

  “Never mind. In short, subatomic particles can be terribly obliging. A great many of them could be characterised as being rather British in their behaviour.”

  “You what? Like, you’ve completely lost me there.”

  “They’re very polite, and they get a little embarrassed if they disappoint you. Ever heard of charm quarks? Aptly named. So at a superficial level they’ll behave any way the observer’s expecting, so as not to disappoint or embarrass. Even to the point of being completely different.”

  “So you’re saying the Higgs Boson was kinda there, but not there?”

  “Of course. The well-meaning physicists at CERN were looking for the Higgs Boson and, well…”

  “The subatomic particles kinda clubbed together and gave them… what, exactly, if it wasn’t the Higgs Boson itself?”

  “They gave them the experience of discovering the Higgs Boson, of course. Otherwise the whole Large Hadron Collider would have been a very embarrassing waste of a colossal sum of public money.”

  Kevin relaxed back down onto his steamer chair with a heavy sigh, and let the Sliver™ hang in the air in front of him. “No. Freakin’. Way.”

  “I thought you’d been reading up on particle physics?”

  “Reading up on it is one thing, believing this weird stuff is another, Doc. You know it still makes me uncomfortable knowing that the Spectrel consists of nothing whatsoever.”

  “It’s not nothing. It’s forces without the tiresome encumbrance of any matter at all. There’s a subtle difference. Now that you understand a bit more, can you see why I got rid of the pesky subatomic particles almost completely when building this thing? I mean, why bother if you can go straight for the forces? Now put your book away and I’ll brief you.”

  “Hang on. Almost completely?”

  “Yes, almost completely. I have a few of the most obliging subatomic particles hanging around to let me project the forces. I could do without them, I suppose. But they really are so terribly nice.”

  Kevin folded up his Sliver™, tucked it into his pocket and ordered his seat to change back into a regular shape so that he could look as alert as possible.

  “Thank you. Doubtless you’re wondering why the existence of the gamma ring is important.”

  Kevin nodded. “Indulge me.”

  The Doctor ignored his assistant’s deadpan answer.

  “Everything has to be in its proper place, that’s why. I’ve told you about this before. The slightest thing being different can have a massive knock-on effect.”

  “So has someone half-inched it?”

  “Just possibly, but probably not. The simpler explanation is that someone’s been a bit careless, that’s all.”

  “Careless?”

  “Yes. When we were setting things up here we had to do a bit of mining on Uranus.”

  “Mining? But I thought it was a gas giant?”

  “Well, I say mining, but in its broadest sense it’s the recovery of a natural resource.”

  “What were you mining?”

  “Helium-3.”

  “You’ll have to remind me, Doc. Helium-3 is…?”

  “Helium-3 is helium-4 minus one of the neutrons. So the nucleus has two protons and a single neutron, unlike normal helium which has two neutrons.”

  “Gotcha. And you were mining helium-3 because…?”

  “Great fuel for nuclear fusion. Let’s just say it’s all the power without the pesky excess
neutrons. The protons it produces can be contained and used to generate electricity. Very clean burn, you see? And you can do all sorts of other fun stuff with helium-3 that you can’t do with your standard helium-4. The atomic mass is a whopping twenty-five percent less than the four version.” The Doctor was enthusing. “And it’s a great substrate for neutron detectors because it can absorb an extra neutron so easily.”

  “Sounds wonderful. Sorry not to catch your helium-3 bug, Doc.”

  “Oh, you’ll come round to appreciating it.”

  “I still don’t get what it has to do with the rings of Uranus.”

  “Someone made a little slip. There’s a chunk of mining equipment up there we were supposed to have removed or destroyed. Under the terms of the galactic agreement covering your solar system, nuclear fusion is forbidden technology, so it can’t be left lying around.”

  “Tell that to the sun.”

  “Except the sun, smartipants. But I’m glad you at least understand that nuclear fusion is what powers it. As the specialist in charge of technology conveyance, I have to take care of it.”

  “And, like what exactly will that entail?”

  “A bit of interplanetary exploration, Kevin. You’ve been harping on enough about wanting to go off-world, so now’s the time.”

  “The moon of a gas giant. The cold-assed back-end of my solar system. I read somewhere that Uranus is even colder than Neptune, even though it’s closer in.”

  “Well you’d better wrap up warm then, hadn’t you?”

  Kevin rolled his eyes. “Like, I was expecting you’d be able to help me with that, Doc. Although there are a lot of spaced-out people in South London, the spacesuit is not yet the sartorial choice of the mind-blown. And the two-hundred quid you occasionally throw me for new threads won’t stretch no further than Brixton market, never mind the Kennedy Space Center. You get me?”

  “I’m sure the house-bots will kit you out appropriately at my expense as usual. However, I anticipate that we shall be spending much of our time indoors as we decommission the mining equipment.” The Doctor adjusted some dials on the console.

  “That sounds fun,” said Kevin, returning to Particle Physics for Dummies. “Wake me up when we’re there.”

  “We’re there,” said the Doctor. “Care to join me?”

  “Woah, Doctor. Can I not see a projection of all this stuff before I step outside? You know I hate going into situations without at least some idea of the bigger picture.”

  “Of course,” said the Doctor. A three-foot diameter projection of the planet Uranus appeared in front of the Doctor’s control console. The Spectrel’s cabin lights dimmed.

  “Aw, man… That’s beautiful.”

  Uranus was a pale, luminescent blue, with banded rings of different hues, and only the faintest hint of cloud formations visible in its atmosphere. The tiny moon system blinked into existence; a few larger moons, and a couple of dozen tiny specs of light. The bands of the atmosphere ran from left to right from Kevin’s point of view, and the plane of the orbits of the moons was up-down, but he decided not to say anything about it.

  “That’s Titania,” said the Doctor, pointing at the largest of the moons. “Much smaller than your own moon. The other big ones are Miranda, Umbriel, Ariel and Oberon.

  Oberon, the outermost of the larger moons was close to Kevin. The cratered detail of its grey surface transfixed him.

  “That big crater you see is a couple of hundred kilometres across,” said the Doctor. “See the things that look like bright rays coming out of it? The surface is all dusty and dirty, so when anything hits the surface, the brighter sub-surface material – ice in this instance – gets blown out and causes that. Sometimes you have planets where there’s perhaps a red substrate, and you get a rather stunning effect, like patterned wallpaper. Except that it tends to exterminate all higher life-forms. Can’t have it all, eh?”

  A couple of seconds later the complex ring system was added to the projection and Kevin gasped in wonder at the detail. If he looked hard at the rings he thought he could make out individual specs. He could see why the Spectrel had turned each projection on separately – the smaller inner moons were almost lost.

  “I could stare at this for hours, Doc.”

  “It is rather stunning, isn’t it? So much more understated than Saturn. Some of those rings are just a hundred and fifty metres thick. Don’t get me wrong – there’s some lovely detail on Saturn’s rings, but the whole thing is rather overwhelming. Uranus is beautiful in a rather understated way, don’t you think?”

  “Like, I don’t want to complain or nothing, but there’s just one little fly in the ointment.”

  “Really? What’s that?”

  “You’ve got it tipped on its side. The rings are up-down, and so are the moons. No offence, but when you project something like this you should always have the north pole on top and the equator in the middle, so the rings would be coming out at the side. It’s the convention, innit?”

  “I think you’ll find that Uranus is unique amongst the solar planets in having its axis pointing towards the sun. There’s a very good reason for that.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really. It made it easier for us to dispose of the nuclear waste in the solar wind when we were generating the fusion power.”

  “So you actually put a planet on its side just to make sure the waste could be dumped?”

  “Yes. Rather ingenious, don’t you think?”

  “And you don’t think there’s something wrong with just dumping nuclear waste in our solar system?”

  The Doctor sighed heavily. “We’ve been through this before. Most of what you’re made of is nuclear waste from dead stars. The sun is a fusion bomb, and it produces far more waste and radiation in a second than we did during all the years we were mining Uranus. The entire universe is immersed in and traversed by radiation lethal to most life-forms.”

  “Okay, okay. I have no idea how much energy it must have taken to flip a planet on its side.”

  “You’re absolutely right about that, Kevin. Just you think about how much effort it takes to turn a little toy gyroscope. Now, come on. We have work to do.”

  “Hold your horses, Doc. Can you, like, just give me an outline of what we’re up to?”

  “Of course. Uranus was ‘discovered’ by the British astronomer Herschel, in 1781. Prior to that, you folks had thought it was something other than a planet because it behaved like a member of a boy-band who’s been kicked out for taking drugs.”

  “Come again?”

  “Not that bright, and seemed to behave erratically. And definitely not a star.”

  “Oh, humour. You caught me off guard.”

  “Anyway, in 1789 Herschel observed the ring system. For nearly two hundred years no other astronomer saw it until an airborne NASA observatory did so, almost by accident. So guess where we are?”

  “Knowing you and your insistence on details, I’m gonna say we’re somewhere around 1789, just prior to Herschel observing the rings.”

  “Excellent, Kevin. Now, do you see this moon here? Hang on, I’ll just let the Spectrel zoom in on this bit of the moon system and add some dotted lines to show the orbits. Ah, there we are. Between the orbits of these two little moons Portia and Rosalind, you can see there’s another small one.”

  “Gotcha. It’s kinda cute. Little red thing. What’s it called?”

  “Called? It’s nameless.”

  “How come?”

  “No one ever gave it a name.”

  “Yeah, I get that, but why not?”

  “I think you’ll find the clue is in the fact that the gamma ring is red, and it’s missing from our current view. Savvy? As you would put it in your parlance.”

  “You mean you’re going to destroy a perfectly harmless moon just so that this Herschel guy can see a red ring?”

  “Of course.”

  “That sucks, Doc!”

  “I wish you’d lose this illogical sentimental
ity, Kevin. Half an hour ago, Uranus meant nothing to you. Now you have some kind of bizarre emotional attachment to a minor piece of space-debris in orbit around it.”

  “It’s not a minor piece of space-debris, Doc. It’s a moon belonging to a planet!”

  “Kevin, the planet doesn’t care. It’s not even a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn. It’s what’s called an ice giant. It’s a lump made mostly of water and ammonia ice, with a bit of metal at its core. It doesn’t have feelings. And if it had a heart it’d have frozen by now. No one lives there. No one has lived there. No ever will live there.”

  “The helium-3 miners did.”

  “No they didn’t. They lived on the bit of space-debris.” The Doctor was becoming agitated.

  “You’re trying to take away its rights by calling it space-debris. Call it what it is, Doc. Call it a moon.”

  “For the love of God, Kevin, it is not a moon! It really is a piece of space-debris. It’s an old hulk of a mining ship a few millennia old, left abandoned and adrift between two moons, and causing an anachronism in your human historical record by its continued existence. Do. You. Understand?”

  “Alright,” said Kevin. “Just sayin’. But, like, a ship’s got feelings too, innit?”

  The Doctor groaned.

  “Well it has,” insisted Kevin. “People always refer to ships as having characters.”

  “You people even refer to those lifeless death-traps you call cars as having feelings,” said the Doctor. “But they’re just bits of metal pausing on their way to their inevitable demise in a scrapyard. A ship does not have feelings.”

  “Your Spectrel has feelings. So do all the others.”

  “Kevin, Spectrels are not ships. This is a helium-3 mining ship. The closest thing you can probably relate it to in your experience is a ruddy great big oil refinery without the flares. Does an oil refinery look like it has feelings to you, Kevin?”

  “Well –”

  “Please don’t tell me you think oil refineries have feelings, laddie.”

  Kevin locked eyes with the Doctor. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You’re right.”

  “Fine. Now, can we please just get on with the job?”

  “So the job is to blow up the oil refinery?”