The Hercules Text

by Jack McDevitt

  “Well,” she said, “it was a shaky night on the tube, too.” She laid aside the novel. Then the pained silence settled in on her. She looked from one to the other and sighed. “Gotta go, guys. Tommy’s fine. We spent most of the evening with Sherlock Holmes.” That was a reference to a role-playing game that Harry had discovered the previous summer. His son played it constantly, prowling with Watson through the tobacco shops and taverns of 1895 London.

  Harry could see that Ellen knew about their problem. It figured that Julie would have confided in her. Or maybe their situation was more apparent that he thought. Who else knew?

  Ellen kissed him and held him a degree tighter than usual. Then she was out the door, talking on the walkway with Julie. Harry shut off the television, went upstairs, and looked into his son’s room.

  Tommy was asleep, one arm thrown over the side of the bed, the other lost beneath a swirl of pillows. As usual, he’d kicked off the spread, which Harry adjusted. A collection of hardbound Peanuts comic strips lay on the floor. And his basketball uniform hung proudly on the back of the closet door.

  He looked like a normal kid. But the upper right-hand drawer of the bureau contained a syringe and a vial of insulin. Tommy was a diabetic.

  The wind had picked up somewhat: it whispered through the trees and the curtains. Light notched by a Venetian blind fell across the photo of the Arecibo dish his son had bought a few weeks before on a visit to Goddard. Harry stood a long time without moving.

  He’d read extensively over the last year about juvenile-onset diabetes, which is the most virulent form of the disease. Tommy faced a high probability of blindness, an army of other debilities, and a drastically shortened life expectancy. No one knew how it had happened: there was no sign of the disease in either of their families. But there it was. Sometimes, the doctors had said, it just happens.

  Son of a bitch.

  He would not give up the child.

  But before he got to his bedroom, he knew he would have no choice.

  It began to rain about 2:00 A.M. Lightning quivered outside the windows, and the wind beat against the side of the house. Harry lay on his back staring straight up, listening to the rhythmic breathing of his wife. After a while, when he could stand it no more, he pulled on a robe and went downstairs and out onto the porch, Water rattled out of a partially blocked drainpipe. The sound had a frivolous quality, counterpointing the deep-throated storm. He sat down on one of the rockers and watched the big drops splash into the street. A brace had fallen off, or blown off, the corner streetlight. Now the lamp danced fitfully in gusts of wind and water.

  Headlights turned off Maple. He recognized Hal Esterhazy’s Plymouth. It bounced into the driveway across the street, paused while the garage door rolled open, and vanished inside. Lights blinked on in Hal’s house.

  Sue Esterhazy was Hal’s third wife. There were two more wandering around out there somewhere, and five or six kids. Hal had explained to Harry that he remained on good terms with his former wives and visited them when he could, though he admitted it wasn’t very often. He paid alimony to both. Despite all that, he seemed perfectly content with life. And he owned a new van and a vacation home in Vermont.

  Harry wondered how he did it.

  Inside, the telephone was ringing.

  Julie had picked it up on the extension before he got to it. He climbed the stairs and found her waiting at the bedroom door. “It’s Goddard,” she said.

  Harry nodded and took the phone. “Carmichael.”

  “Harry, this is Charlie Hoffer. The Hercules signal changed tonight. I just got off the line with Gambini. He’s pretty excited.”

  “So are you,” said Harry.

  “I thought you’d want to know,” he said awkwardly.

  Hoffer was the duty officer at the Research Projects Lab. “Why?” asked Harry. “What’s going on?”

  “Have you been following the operation?”

  “A little.” That was an exaggeration. Harry was assistant director for administration, a personnel specialist in a world of theoretical physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians. He tried hard to stay on top of Goddard’s various initiatives in an effort to retain some credibility, but the effort was pointless. Cosmologists tended to sneer at particle physicists, and both groups found it hard to take astronomers, perceived as restricted to confirming the notions of the theorists, seriously. Harry’s M.B.A. was, at best, an embarrassment.

  His job was to ensure that NASA hired the right people, or contracted out to the right people, to see that everyone got paid, and to keep track of vacation time and insurance programs. He negotiated with unions, tried to prevent NASA’s technically oriented managers from alienating too many subordinates, and handled public relations. He’d stayed close to Donner and the comet, but had paid little attention to any of Goddard’s other activities over the past few weeks. “What sort of change?”

  At the other end, Hoffer was speaking to someone in the background. Then he got back on the line. “Harry, it stopped.”

  Julie watched him curiously.

  Harry’s physics wasn’t very good. Gambini and his people had been observing an X-ray pulsar in Hercules, a binary system composed of a red giant and a suspected neutron star. The last few months had been a difficult period for them, because most of Goddard’s facilities had been directed toward the comet. “Charlie, that’s not all that unusual, is it? I mean, the goddam thing rotates behind the other star every few days, right? Is that what happened?”

  “It’s not due to eclipse again until Tuesday, Harry. And even when it does, we don’t really lose the signal. There’s an envelope of some sort out there that reflects it, so the pulse just gets weaker. This is a complete shutdown. Gambini insists something must be wrong with the equipment.”

  “I assume you can’t find a problem?”

  “The Net’s fine. NASCOM has run every check it can think of. Harry, Gambini’s in New York and won’t get back for a few hours. He doesn’t want to fly into National. We thought it might be simplest if we just sent the chopper.”

  “Do it. Who’s in the operations center?”

  “Majeski.”

  Harry squeezed the phone. “I’m on my way, Charlie,” he said.

  “What is it?” asked Julie. Usually she was impatient with late calls from Goddard; but tonight her voice was subdued.

  Harry explained about Hercules while he dressed. “It’s an X-ray pulsar,” he said. “Ed Gambini’s group has been listening to it on and off for the last eight months or so.” He grinned at his own joke. “Charlie says they aren’t picking it up anymore.”

  “Why is that important?”

  “Because there’s no easy explanation for it.” He strolled into his bedroom and grabbed an armful of clothes.

  “Maybe it’s just some dust between the source and the Net.” She shrugged the nightshirt off and slipped into bed in a single fluid gesture.

  “SKYNET isn’t affected by dust. At least not the X-ray telescopes. No, whatever it is, it’s enough to bring Gambini back from New York in the middle of the night.”

  She watched him dress. “You know,” she said, striving for a casual tone, but unable to keep the emotion entirely out of her voice, “this is what we’ve been talking about all evening. The Hercules Project is Gambini’s responsibility. Why do you have to go running down there? I bet he doesn’t head for your shop when some labor relations crisis breaks out.”

  Harry sighed. He hadn’t got where he was by staying home in bed when major events were happening. It was true he didn’t have direct responsibility for Hercules, but one never knew where these things might lead, and a rising bureaucrat needed nothing so much as visibility. He resisted the impulse to suggest that she was no longer entitled to an opinion anyway, and asked instead that she lock the door after him.

  The X-ray pulsar in Hercules is unique: it’s a free-floater, the only known stellar configuration not attached to a major system of some sort. More than a million and a half ligh
t-years from Goddard, it is adrift in the immense void between the galaxies.

  It is also unusual in that neither of the components is a blue giant. Alpha Altheis, the visible star, is brick red, considerably cooler than Sol, but approximately eighty times larger. If it were placed at the center of our solar system, it would engulf Mercury.

  Altheis is well along in its helium-burning cycle. Left to itself, it would continue to expand for another ten million years or so before erupting into a supernova.

  But the star will not survive that long. The other object in the system is a dead sun, a thing more massive than its huge companion, yet so crushed by its own weight that its diameter probably measures less than thirty kilometers: the distance between the Holland Tunnel and Long Island Sound. Two minutes by jet, maybe a day on foot. But the object is a malignancy in a tight orbit, barely fifteen million miles from the giant’s edge, so close that it literally rolls through its companion’s upper atmosphere, spinning violently, dragging an enormous wave of superheated gas, dragging perhaps the giant’s vitals. It is called Beta Altheis, a peculiarly mundane name, Harry thought, for so exotic a body.

  It is the engine that drives the pulsar. There is a constant flow of supercharged particles from the normal star to the companion, hurtling downward at relativistic velocities.

  But the collision points are not distributed randomly across Beta: rather, they are concentrated at the magnetic poles, which are quite small, a kilometer or so in diameter and, like Earth’s, not aligned with the axis. Consequently, they also are spinning, at approximately thirty times per second. Incoming high-energy particles striking this impossibly dense and slippery surface tend to carom off as X-rays. The result is a lighthouse whose beams sweep the nearby cosmos.

  Harry wondered, as his Chrysler plowed through a sudden burst of rain, what kind of power would be needed to shut down such an engine.

  The gate guards waved him through. He made an immediate left, and headed for Building 2, the Research Projects Laboratory. Eight or nine cars were parked under the security lights, unusual for this time of night. Harry pulled in alongside Cord Majeski’s sleek gray Honda (the Chrysler looked boxlike and dull in contrast with the turbocharged two-seater) and hurried under dripping trees into the rear entrance of the long, utilitarian structure.

  The Hercules Project had originally been assigned a communication center with an adjoining ADP area. But Gambini was politically astute, and his responsibilities, and staff, tended to grow. He’d acquired two workrooms, additional computer space, and three or four offices. The project itself had begun as a general-purpose investigation of several dozen pulsars. But it had quickly narrowed in on the anomaly in the group, which was located five degrees northeast of the globular cluster NGC6341.

  Harry strolled into the operations center. Several technicians sat in the green glow of monitors; two or three, headphones pushed off their ears, drank Cokes and whispered over newspapers. Cord Majeski leaned frowning against a worktable, scribbling on a clipboard. He was more linebacker than mathematician, all sinew and shoulder, with piercing blue eyes and a dark beard intended to add maturity to his distressingly boyish features. He was a grim and taciturn young man who nevertheless, to Harry’s bewilderment, seemed inordinately successful with women. “Hello, Harry,” he said. “What brings you in at this hour?”

  “I hear the pulsar’s doing strange things. What’s going on?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Maybe,” said Harry, “it ran out of gas. That happens, doesn’t it?”

  “Sometimes. But not like this. If the pulsar were losing its power source, we’d have detected a gradual decline. This thing just stopped. I don’t know what to think. Maybe Alpha went nova.” Majeski, who seldom showed emotion, flipped the clipboard across the table. “Harry,” he said, “we need access to Optical. Can’t you pry Donner loose for a few hours? He’s been looking at that goddam comet for three months.”

  “Submit the paper, Cord,” said Harry.

  Majeski tugged at his beard and favored Harry with an expression that suggested his patience was in short supply. “We’re supposed to be able to observe a target of opportunity.”

  “Observe it tomorrow night,” said Harry. “It won’t be going anyplace.” He turned on his heel and walked off.

  Harry had no serious interest in pulsars. In fact, on this night, nothing short of a black hole bearing down on Maryland could have roused him. But he had no inclination to go home.

  The rain had slackened to a cold drizzle. He drove north on Road 3 and eased into the parking lot outside Building 18, the Business Operations Section. His office was on the second floor. It was a relatively Spartan place, with battered chairs and bilious green walls and government wall hangings, mostly cheap art deco that GSA had picked up at a cutrate price from one of its bargain basement suppliers. Photos of Julie and Tommy stood atop his desk, between a Cardex and a small framed reproduction of a lobby card from The Maltese Falcon. Tommy was in a Little League uniform; Julie stood in profile, thoughtful against a gray New England sky.

  He lit the desk lamp, turned off the overhead lights, and fell heavily into a plastic sofa that was a little too short for him. Maybe it was time to quit. Find a deserted lighthouse somewhere along the coast of Maine (he’d seen one advertised in Providence once for a buck, but you had to move it), maybe get a job in the local general store, change his name, and drop out of sight altogether.

  His years with Julie were over. And in the terrible unfairness of things, he knew he’d lost not only his wife but Tommy as well. And a sizable portion of his income. He felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for Alpha, burdened with the neutron star it couldn’t get rid of. He was forty-seven, his marriage was a wreck, and, he suddenly realized, he hated his job. People who didn’t know what it was like envied him: he was, after all, part of the Great Adventure, directing the assault on the planets, working closely with all those big-shot physicists and astronomers. But the investigators, though few were as blunt, or as young, as Majeski, did not recognize him as one of them.

  He was a compiler of schedules, the guy who answered questions about hospitalization and retirement benefits and other subjects so unutterably boring that Gambini and his associates could barely bring themselves to discuss them. He was, in the official terminology, a layman. Worse, he was a layman with a substantial amount of control over operational procedures at Goddard.

  He slept fitfully. The wind died, and the rain stopped. The only sound in the building was the occasional hum of the blowers in the basement.

  At about eight, the phone rang, “Harry.” It was Hoffer’s voice again. “The pulsar’s kicked back in.”

  “Okay,” said Harry, trying to focus on his watch. “Sounds like equipment. Make sure you haven’t overlooked anything, okay? I’ll get Maintenance to run some checks later. Gambini get here yet?”

  “We expect him any time.”

  “Tell him where I am,” said Harry. He hung up, convinced that the night’s events would, indeed, eventually be traced to a defective circuit board.

  The Center was peaceful on Sunday mornings; and the truth was that, although he tried not to examine his motives too closely, he was always happy for sufficient reason to sleep in his office. Odd: despite his passion for Julie, there was something in the surrounding hills, in the mists that rose with the sun, in the solitude of this place and its direct connection, perhaps, with the night sky, that drew him. Even now. Maybe especially now.

  MONITOR

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  British Say Troop Withdrawal from Ulster Not Connected

  Civil Strife Continues; 600 Hurt in Rioting

  SENATE SINKS ABM BILL

  (Washington Post News Service)—A coalition of northern Democrats and farm belt Republicans today voted down the Sentinel ABM System, handing the President another setback…

  TAIMANOV PROPOSES JOINT MEASURES AGAINST NUCLEAR TERROR

  Polish Dissidents Reported
to Have Bomb

  SOLAR SYSTEM AGE REVISED TO 5 BILLION YEARS

  Samples recovered from Daiomoto Comet last month are at least a billion years older than expected…

  SOVIET SUBMARINE BASE

  REPORTED AT CAMRANH BAY

  U.S. DISASTER AID TO ARGENTINA GOES ASTRAY

  Food, Medical Supplies Show Up on Black Market;

  More Quakes Expected; Typhus Raging

  COCAINE HAUL IN DADE COUNTY BIGGEST EVER

  DIVORCE RATE UP AGAIN

  (New York)—Nearly two-thirds of all marriages now end in the courts, according to a recent study completed by the National Council of Churches…

  NEW TV SEASON HERALDS RETURN TO WESTERN

  2

  IF EDWARD GAMBINI had been awake all night, it didn’t show. He scurried around the operations center, driven by restless energy, a thin birdlike man with a sparrow’s quick eyes. He possessed a kind of avian dignity, a strong sense of his position in life, and the quality that politicians call charisma, and actors, presence. It was this characteristic, combined with a superb sense of timing in political matters, that had resulted in his appointment the previous summer, over more seasoned candidates, to manage the pulsar project. Although Harry was considerably the taller of the two men, persons familiar with both might not have been aware of it.

  Unlike most of his colleagues, who reluctantly recognized the advantage of befriending administrators, Gambini genuinely enjoyed Harry Carmichael. When Carmichael occasionally lamented his lack of formal training (he’d begun life as a physics major at Ohio State), Gambini assured him that he was better off. Although of course he never explained why, Harry understood his meaning: only a mind of the first water (like Gambini’s own) could survive extensive work in the disciplines without losing its intellectual edge. Harry’s dry sense of humor and occasional outrageous perspectives would never have emerged intact from detailed study of the Schmidt-Hilbert Method or the Bernoulli Theorem.