Come In, Collins

by Bill Patterson

  He found a pulse, and Vito's breathing was otherwise normal, so McCrary stayed with him until he came around.

  “Sorry,” Vito said. “Last time I passed out like that was when I was seven. Clown jumped out from behind a tree during Halloween and scared the crap out of me.”

  “What scared you this time?” asked McCrary. “Last thing you said was something about a lot of neutrons in a small space.”

  ***

  Billy John was no nuclear physicist, but Ms. Fenester knew several and she arranged for an in-depth discussion with the Observatory. Given how hazardous flying was these days, video conferencing was the best solution. She rented an office in nearby Greenville, and brought her staff down to the office for the call. The environment around the Observatory was getting a bit too crowded with media to ensure that discussions like these were carried out in strictest privacy.

  She did well to worry. It wasn't just the media that was interested in what her institution was generating. Other, wealthier institutions were not above eavesdropping on them to generate news and papers before she could. She would not be surprised to find any of the major observatories trying to bug their offices. Thus, the off-site operation.

  “Everyone here has signed the Non-Disclosure Agreement. I want to particularly remind you that items discussed here are the intellectual property of the Spartanburg Observatory, and leaks will be aggressively prosecuted.”

  She introduced her staff to the experts and vice versa, then the meeting got down to brass tacks in earnest. Billy John found himself a major participant.

  To an outside observer, they seemed to be arguing and theorizing on the flimsiest of evidence—small lines of pixels in the output of the spectrograph. But for the participants, those lines were vital—they represented the energy discharged when electrons dropped form one energetic level in an atom to the one lower down. Each type of atom was different, and each electron level gave a unique emission line. The lines could be affected by a number of conditions: temperature of the atom, velocity of the atom, the number of neutrons—and thus—isotope number of the atom. It was very tangled, and it was a very abstruse branch of nuclear physics.

  At the end, though, there were a number of conclusions that everyone agreed on:

  The temperature of the shiny blob was easily in the hundreds of thousands of degrees Celsius

  The blob itself had a high number of radioactive isotopes in it, primarily, but not limited to, Sodium-24 and its daughter isotope, Magnesium-24.

  The light in the 'line' was from fluorescing Lunar dust which also appeared to have some radioactivity

  The discussion then began about radioactivity. Could there have been a 'radioactive terrane' in the same sense as the KREEP terranes in the Oceanus Procellarum? Could some physical process during the formation of the Moon concentrate radioactive elements in the South Polar region?

  “Not a chance,” said Illana Proskevey, a geologist who specialized in pitchblende and related uranium ores. “The isotopes we are dealing with here have very short half-lives. Even if something had concentrated radioactive ores on the Moon, they would never have yielded the kinds of isotopes that have shown up on your spectra.”

  “Then what formed these?” wondered Billy out loud. “Something did.”

  “My colleagues think I am nuts,” said Ruth Halverstein, a nuclear theoretician from a small Israeli thinktank. “But I can't think of anything else that fits.”

  Billy looked around the table in Greenville, then at the screen filled with puzzled faces. “Might as well tell us. Nobody here has a clue.”

  “Neutronium.”

  ***

  “It was a bull session during those long watches while I was at nuclear reactor operator training,” began Vito. He sipped at the bottle of water that McCrary handed him when he came to. “We were speculating about aliens. Nothing else to do except watch gauges, and wait for the instructors to spring something on you. We counteracted the boredom by discussing supermarket tabloid articles as if they were real. Kept the mind flexible.”

  “Go on,” said McCrary.

  “Well, we were wondering what kinds of weapons aliens would bring. If you think of it, it's silly for some alien ship to drag missiles or bombs dozens of light years. The best kind of weapons to use against another alien species are the kinetic kind. Planets and Moons don't move, and you can calculate where they are with extreme accuracy.”

  McCrary laughed. “You still have to hit them with something.”

  “Sure you do. But that something can just be a rock. That's just what I said. 'Take a steel cradle, fill it with rock, throw it down something like The Flinger here, and you're all set!

  “Then, what's his name? Damn, it's been so long, I wonder if he's still alive. Silver. We used to call him 'Hi-yo', like in The Lone Ranger. Pissed him off. Hiyo got this strange look in his eyes. 'The thing about aliens,' he said, 'is they're alien!', then he muttered something about Clarke's Law.”

  “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” quoted McCrary.

  “That's the one. Hiyo said 'Imagine a force field that could crush things down until the matter became super dense.' Degenerate, I think he said.”

  “Where the pressure forces the electrons into the protons,” said McCrary. “Oh, no, I think I know where you're going with this.”

  “Yeah. Now you know why I took a nap. Hiyo said if he was an alien bent on war, he'd have a ship that would hang out in some asteroid belt, use this force field to make a load of kinetic rounds the density of neutronium, and fire them at the enemy. Ship, moon, planet, made no difference. When you crush matter down that far, it doesn't just stay there—it wants to bounce back into regular matter when the field goes off.”

  McCrary felt the blood leave his face. “If one of those rounds hit a moon, for instance, depending on the speed, it would burrow in a very narrow hole, almost like a bullet. When the field turned off, all the neutrons would blast into the surrounding matter.”

  “You guys all think alike,” said Vito. “The pressure and heat, along with the sudden blast of neutrons, equals fusion. That, I bet, is what happened down at the South Pole. We got hit by one of these rounds.”

  “But how?” asked McCrary. “Neutrons have a really short half-life. I can't see them making it all this way unless, uh-oh.”

  “They're travelling the speed of light, yeah. But I don't think that was the case, boss. If it were, we'd be clutching a very small bit of Moon. Something like that would shatter this globe like a bullet shatters a glass sphere. No, the thing about alien weapons is that they're alien. No idea how this worked. Maybe they have some kind of time warping tech, or the force field was self-regenerating. Hell, it could be any number of processes. Thing is—we're stuck with the results. The neutrons 'activated' a bunch of normally safe isotopes, making them radioactive as hell, blew a chunk out of this ball of rock, and are raining fire all over Earth.

  “Thing is…what are we gonna do about it?”

  ***

  The conversation in Greenville eerily paralleled that in McCrary's office. It was known that the atmospheric radioactivity had increased substantially with each new impact. An array of weird, never-seen isotopes were making their appearances, forcing officials to scramble and creating opportunities for hucksters the world over to sell anything to a gullible public.

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  ***

  The nuclear experts were offline after batting around the neutronium idea for twenty minutes with no resolution. The Observatory staff were still discussing the idea.

  “It's the only thing that fits,” said Billy. “I might not be a nuke guy, but I know basic physics. I can't see any other possible way whereby we can account for everything that we've observed.”

  Jama was torn. “Yeah, but neutronium? Aliens? Do we really want to be mocked, after all the good science we've done?”

  “Then leave out the aliens,” said Billy. “Leave in the neutronium. It really doesn't matter—science, so I've been told, is a matter of proposing hypotheses, conducting experiments, and measuring phenomena. For all we know, it really might be aliens. It's pretty definitely neutronium, or some other kind of degenerate matter. Maybe a stringlet. Who knows? The thing is, something happened on the Moon, and it's up to us to figure out what it was, how to detect any more that are coming in, and know how to deal with the effects.”

  Jama smiled. “I remember the first time I ran into you. You were so freaked about meeting me, you could barely talk. Now you're lecturing me on the scientific method.” She raised her hands. “No, no, no offense taken. I just think the situation is amusing, that's all. Still, you reminded me of our purpose here.”

  “Last thing on the feed before I came over here was some nut at the hospital, getting his intestines flushed out because he ate a bucket of that Jersey mud. We've got to talk to someone in charge and tell them what's real.”

  Jama stood up, ending the conversation. “We could bat this around for a week, and we'd be no further along. Here's what we're going to do: go back to our regular observations. Billy, that means you're going to produce the best spectra possible. The reason why should be obvious—we're going to have to back up the neutronium idea with hard, verifiable data. In addition, I don't want anyone researching this question. Just collect data, form hypotheses, and stay off the observatory intranet with anything along these lines. Oh, speculate on any other theory you want, but stay away from neutronium, exotic matter, or anything along that line.

  “Remember the panic sixty years ago when they fired up one of those atom smashers? They said the world was going to get converted into strange matter and we were all going to die. All you need is one of the tabloids to hear a whisper of the word neutronium, and we'll be hearing stories about how a single speck is going to cause Earth to contract into a bowling ball or something equally stupid.

  “Look, you all might be thinking I'm nuts, or that I'm trying to save the reputation of the observatory, or that I'm trying to preserve priority in publication. Not at all. I'm trying to keep evil people from stampeding the credulous. People have been known to die because of rumors and lies. I won't have anyone's blood on my hands.”

  “Harsh,” muttered Billy.

  “Damn right it's harsh,” said Jama. “And I mean it. Can you say 'unemployment'? Just keep your head down and your mouth closed. That's all I am saying.”

  ***

  “McCrary! Better get in here!” Ashley Boardman read the lines on the screen with a sense of foreboding. She hesitated only a moment before rousing her commander.

  McCrary rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked at the chronometer set in the wall. Three hours of sleep. Well, one-sixth gravity helped, but he had been looking forward to at least a solid six hours.

  “Physics doesn't care about sleep,” he muttered, floating out of his narrow bunk. “Acknowledged,” he called to the communications console. “Please state the nature of your emergency,” he said, mocking the usual tones of all computer answering services.

  “Major impactor detected,” she replied. “We've got six to eight passes before it hits.”

  “On my way,” he said, pulling the previous nights' clothing on. He had only a moment or two now, but would definitely have time after he assessed the situation to come down to his bunk to change properly.

  In Operations, the air was charged with foreboding. The larger screen at the end of the compartment showed several graphs with one big image in the center: a view down on the Moon with its North Pole centered in the circle. On it, various circles showed the known orbits of the larger chunks of debris.

  “Report,” he said. He pitched it just loud enough to be heard over the various conversations in Ops, but not so loud as to interrupt them. Ashley looked up at McCrary, then motioned to the large diagram on the screen.

  “The latest telemetry from the laser radar sensors has been integrated. We have an impactor, about two hundred meters in its long axis, headed our way. It looks to hit somewhere north of us, but not by much. Momentum measurements indicate that impact will generate a Richter seven point six magnitude moonquake.”

  McCrary took it in. “So. That's enough to wreck most of what we've done. That's, what, almost ten times Mighty Thor's maximum limit?”

  “Yes, sir,” she reported. “I've asked the department heads to give us the major impacts on their operations. Agronomy indicates that it will wreck both greenhouses.”

  “Grim. Options?”

  Ashley Boardman was used to this. As soon as she realized the danger, she was polling her fellow controllers and had solicited opinions from several of the senior staff. In a sense, this was a concrete application of something they had been discussing for some time.

  “Three options, sir. First. We can hunker down and take it. Two, we can move to the surface and take it there. The lunar night will help, but we would probably shelter in the cave you were in the last time. Three, we can do something about it.”

  “Understood,” said McCrary. “What does the staff favor?”

  “They're tired of being victims, sir. They want to do something about it.”

  “So do I. What can we do?”

  “We have a few things, sir. We don't have the explosives to affect the impactor's orbit. But we do have the lasers.”

  McCrary frowned. “The only thing the lasers can do is ablate the surface of the impactor. It's certain to be spinning or tumbling, so all the incoming energy gets spread around.” He peered at the plot on the screen. “That thing seems to be in an elliptical orbit. Figures, though. What's its period?”

  “This is where we get the joker, sir,” she said. “It's in a three-week orbit, but its perilune is shifting with each orbit until it impacts us. We don't see it in the sky to hit it except when it's passing right over us, and that's the fastest part of its orbit.”

  “I'm sure you're running simulations,” he said.

  “Of course, sir. It's just barely possible to shift the impact point further north, but I wouldn't count on it.”

  “Get me Vito,” said McCrary.

  ***

  “You're insane,” said Vito. “We could never do it in time.”

  “I disagree. All I ask is if it's plausible.”

  Vito frowned. “Mighty Thor was only licensed because it had incredible amounts of proliferation resistance in the first place,” he said. “What you are asking me to do is to disable the safeguards and assemble twenty kilos of uranium-233.”

  “Yes,” said McCrary. “And I know you can do it. You are our best physicist. Can it be done?”

  Vito looked down at his hands. “Never thought I'd turn into Enrico Fermi.”

  ***

  “Bubba, you and I, we have now become the Lunar Manhattan Project.”

  Bubba looked up from his commpad and frowned. “We're going to build a
bomb?”

  Vito nodded. “I can't believe it myself. But, yes. We've got to build one quickly, too, or we're all dead.” He got Bubba up to speed on the threat of the impactor.

  “All right, we've got a bomb, how are we gonna git 'er up to this hunk of rock?” asked Bubba.

  “Sandy. Or what will be left of her after the boys get done chopping her up.”

  Bubba looked shocked, then thoughtful, then determined. “If we gotta send 'er on a suicide mission, best we make the best bomb ever. Tell me about this bomb.”

  Vito sat down. “This is gonna take a bit. Get yourself comfortable, I'll watch the panel. Five minutes.”

  ***

  “Bubba, we're going to have to violate a million safety rules here to make this weapon, and we have to do it quickly, too. So, I'm going to give you the basics in one big blast, heh, and we'll go over the specifics later. OK?”

  “I guess. Can't transfer into hydroponics now, I guess.”

  “Not at all.”

  Bubba deliberately turned away from the panel and looked at Vito. “If you think we can do it, let's give it our best shot. I am guessing this is also top secret, like the original project.”

  “Yup. Now, here's how it works.

  “Making a nuclear weapon is not the easiest thing in the world. Once you get past the obvious hazards of handling radioactive materials, you have other problems. One of the more subtle is avoiding the problem of criticality. Simply put, if you put too much of the wrong kinds of radioactive elements too close together, they will heat up rather instantly and 'explosively disassemble' as accident reports call it.”

  Bubba chuckled. “Explosively disassemble. Funny.”

  “Don't interrupt, I don't want to miss anything. We're lucky in a lot of ways. For instance, if we had to work with plutonium, and we grind it too finely, it will self-ignite in an oxygen atmosphere. Work in vacuum, and it's just so much dust. Dangerous, radioactive dust, to be sure, but without the flammability hazard. But we're going to have to be very careful about dust—we don't have a lot of ways to take care of it, and if we go through the regular scrubbers, we start loading the bins with plutonium or uranium dust, get a critical mass, and boom.