by Unknown
Why did we do it? For most it was the money. A contract on the Wildcatter paid a 3% share of discovery, less expenses, to every man and woman in a crew of twenty. And it didn’t matter if you were a pilot or a scrub-downer. That was better by tenths than the other independents offered. And like I said, the Wildcatter had a good record.
Hell, there were a handful of people around living damn fine after just one tour on board her. I’m talking about the crew who discovered that two ton nugget of molybdenum hiding in the Belt, of course. That was before I joined. In fact, it was during one of Cal’s forced absences. I don’t think Calever forgave Snyder for doing that to him.
Old Man Snyder could have cashed it all in then and been set for life. But he used the credits to outfit five more Wildcatters and went straight back out again. The stylized wildcat symbol on the hulls of Wildcatter Corporation ships were recognized throughout the System. I don’t know if it was greed or escape that kept him out there. Generally, no one got a chance to ask him about it. He pretty much stayed to himself in his private module when we weren’t on a work site.
Anyway, if landing on Hawking was your idea of lucky, Wildcatter earned her reputation for being at the right place at the right time this time out. Just a month earlier we’d come home dry after nearly a year of prospecting around Saturn. But I was convinced, and I had convinced Snyder, that the ay-eye had discovered a liquid biomass lurking beneath the sludge on Titan. He was determined to go back and have another look. The Ganymedean “oil” uncovered by the crew of the I.S. Exxon the year before had turned out to be a previously unknown hydrosilicon, and Exxon’s labbies back at L5 were feverishly analyzing the implications.
The Old Man had guarded his own claim like a hungry mongrel. He ordered Wildcatter IV outfitted with armament and sent her out to stand guard. We had to station-keep out there for four months before she showed up to relieve us. All of us were bone tired and just plain sick of free-fall when we finally got home. But to a person, everyone signed on to ship back out as soon as Wildcatter could be refitted for drilling. None of us wanted to lose our stake on that find. So there we were, scrubbed, dry, and smiling, and about to set sail from Konstantine for the Big Belted Beauty, when the Japanese survey data on Hawking came in.
Extra-solar in origin.
Anomalous lack of axial rotation.
Unusual heavy metal composition. Bore samples indicate hot central core surrounded by multiple accretion layers built up over extremely long interval.
Age between 10 and 13 billion years.
Tectonics of significant proportions, likely driven by extremely dense object at center surrounded by liquid mantle.
Probable candidate: Hawking singularity.
Hypothesis consistent with mass, size, gravitational and tidal effects, temperature, age, and interstellar origin.
Hypothesis inconsistent with stability of solid material surrounding object, and with apparent slow accumulation of accreted material.
No resolution at present.
There it was, a quantum black hole! A tiny—and damn heavy—cinder of nothing left over from the Original Fireworks. It was that Japanese survey report that gave Hawking its name.
The Old Man was on the bridge reviewing the prelaunch checklist when the news came in. McRae told us that he just stood there, eyes flicking back and forth across the infoscreen absorbing the report. His jowls were set; the cigar smoldered in his mouth; nothing showed on his face. He removed the cigar and stared at the ashes for a couple of seconds. Then he turned to McRae and said, “File a flight plan for Hawking,” and left the bridge.
We all got pissed when we heard the news. A lot of ships and lots of crew-hours have been wasted nosing around the asteroid belt, hoping to find one of these microscopic buggers hiding there. No one knew for sure that they even existed, though the theorists had predicted them over seventy years ago. It wasn’t just scientific curiosity that sent all those people on a snipe hunt though. If a quantum hole could be dragged back to earth orbit the Terries would have a power source that would allow them to air-condition the African Continent. There were even rumors that several countries were trying to synthesize one of the damn things.
But wasn’t it just like Mama Nature to confirm the theories by grandstanding. Nothing for seventy years and then the Big Muthah of quantum holes comes by to say “hello” at 170 decibels. The problem was there was no way to slow down Hawking let alone to cart it off to Earth. The singularity itself, hiding in the middle of its spaceborne haystack, was probably only a centimeter or so in diameter. But it massed in at several billion trillion tons—it weighed more than Mars—and with the amount of momentum it packed, it could have dragged the Earth off into the wild void with it.
Still, I suppose something that old, that massive, and that had spent its lifetime wandering around the universe, might have picked up some interesting lint in its coat. None of the survey probes had been equipped for more than shallow surface samples. My belief then and now is that Snyder got obsessed with being the first one to find out if anything was hidden in its pockets. It’s the only reason I can come up with to explain why he abandoned a certain gold mine for this risky, dangerous, and low-probability venture. Maybe he was a visionary, though we mostly thought he was just crazy. He certainly didn’t make any points with the crew—and he didn’t start out with many in the bank.
So we got there. Not just the first ones but the only ones. None of the industrials could be redirected so quickly. None of the other spec ships were prepared. And no one had much time to act. Frankly, I’m not sure any other commercial rigs even gave a damn—Hawking had been regarded pretty much as a scientific curiosity from the start.
Hawking had shown enough good manners to arrive more or less in-plane, so rendezvous was possible for a ship of our class. But the singularity wasn’t staying around for long. It was hustling toward Sol on a hyperbolic, gathering speed as it fell, and there’d only be a few weeks at the outside when the surface temperature would be within Wildcatter’s limits. We’d have just enough time to jump aboard, take a long sip with our straw, and get the hell out again.
Maybe someone could have caught up with it on the downhill side after perihelion, but apparently no one tried. The colony of Rockheads out in the Belt nearly took a direct hit on the outbound pass, but I figured most of them went scrambling for cover. A body of that mass, nudging the planets around like it did, made predicting its orbit a little dicey. I don’t know of any other outfit but ours who had the combination of speed, maneuverability, tools, and just plain rotten luck of being in position to reach her. I was just hoping that Hawking wasn’t filled with Confederate dollar bills.
We had the drilling site set up within six hours.
On the day of the accident, we’d been over the drill site for about a hundred hours. We had two teams working twelve hour shifts around the clock and the strain was just beginning to get to us. The tidal shear was making everyone dizzy, and the damned asteroid was earthquaking every few minutes. Not only were we stumbling around and bumping into one another, but Wildcatter’s hull screeched and moaned constantly. We had a hell of a time concentrating.
The site was set up directly beneath the ship itself. We had the shield walls down to keep the sun out and the atmosphere in, which added claustrophobia to the rest of our problems. But at least that way we only wore insul-skin while we worked, which was a lot more pliable than the vacuum suits. I know it sounds like I’m rationalizing, but it wasn’t the easiest assignment we had ever pulled.
The accident was Pat Talbot’s fault, no question about that. I have to give her credit though; she never made any excuses. She knew what she was doing, and she should have known better. Cal, McRae, Singh and all the rest had a dozen theories later to explain Pat’s mistake. I have a few ideas of my own.
This was Pat’s first tour on the Wildcatter. She had signed on with us at Konstantine Station, just after the news of Hawking came in. She had the credentials of an experienced tool
dresser; Bartley had checked her out himself before he hired her on as his assistant. The Old Man had insisted on a second dresser on this crew because of the amount of drilling we would likely be facing.
No one else on board had ever met her before, though that was not especially unusual. She was reasonably good looking, in an unglamorous sort of way. None of us were much to look at, not while on tour. I guessed her age to be around forty. Her hair was mostly the color of ground coffee, though she had tipped the ends white in sort of a keyboard pattern. She wore it thick on top and cut close to her neck, like most spacer women did. Long hair tended to get in the way of things in freefall, and couldn’t be kept neat anyway. Her looks were standard issue Anglo and no imbedded cosmetics.
I could tell that she had a nice body under her jump suit, and that became more important to me as we coasted sunward on our intercept ellipse. This was the first time we had shipped with only one female crew member in as long as I could remember. Space tours, like long business trips spent in hotel rooms, produced horniness exponentially. I’ve always believed it was something they put in the air conditioning.
Shipboard sexism died a hasty death when commercial space ops started, even if it is still breathing on Terra and her children. But body chemistry isn’t suspended in space. I was hoping that Pat’s air conditioning was having the same effect on her as mine was on me.
Pat seemed to be a pleasant person. She was friendly enough on duty and during lounge time, though I don’t remember her talking about herself much. She spoke well. Although many of the crew had advanced degrees, education had been grafted onto her and had flourished. I relished having an intelligent conversation after listening to Bartley body-slam the language all day.
I hadn’t had a chance to talk with her before we collided with Hawking and we had been busy as hell since. It wasn’t until the night before the accident that I happened on her alone and not on duty. I’d come down to the galley several hours after the end of my shift to scrounge up some caffeine and carbohydrates. The galley was usually deserted at that hour; I liked having one meal a day in privacy.
Pat was sitting by herself at one of the tables, intently sorting through some stuff she had dumped out of a large plastic box; she didn’t hear me come in. It was hard to hear anything over the constant grinding and screeching of Wildcatter’s hull being assaulted by solar wind and tidal sheer. I spoke to her as I crossed over to the coffee dispenser.
“Hello,” I said, trying not to startle her.
She turned toward me in sort of a twisting motion, shoulders first, head reluctantly following, and eyes finally dragged along. It looked like the upper body motion in a golf swing, and for exactly the same reason.
“Oh, hi,” she said. “You’re Clarence, um, Stroemann?”
She was being polite, though she clearly was preoccupied with what she had been doing.
“Mowboata,” I said, “Clarence Mowboata. You’re thinking of Nick Stroemann, the drill suction operator. I only do surveys.”
She smiled at me and shifted the rest of the way around in my direction. I was encouraged.
“Glad to meet you—again—Clarence Mowboata.” She got the pronunciation and the inflection exactly right, not many do that. I smiled appreciatively. Her eyes widened a little in acceptance. I came over to her table and leaned against the edge, facing her. I wanted to be close enough to detect any pupil dilation; it’s important to read the signs early in this dance.
She offered her hand. “I’m Pat…”
“Talbot,” I finished. I shook her hand gently. “It was easier for me to keep you straight. What is it that keeps you so fascinated?” I gestured toward the odd assortment of rocks that were scattered on the table.
They were a jumble of shapes and sizes, all dull grey. Several were split in two or sheared at angles, and the exposed facets had an oily luster. A geologist’s mallet and chisel lay nearby. Pat looked back at them, almost exactly reversing her earlier motion.
“Well…I’m not sure exactly what these are. Hawking’s nail clippings, I suppose.”
“Hawking’s…?” My focus shifted to the rocks. I reached over and picked up one the size of a walnut. It was deceptively heavy.
“You picked these up here?”
She nodded and reached for one of the larger ones that had been cut.
“We drilled them out yesterday, actually. I found them in the effluent filter. They are each peculiar in their own way. I thought we might get some clues that the assay ay-eye missed.”
I put down the first rock and she handed the second one to me. I turned it over and studied the cleft face. It was a deep steel grey and was sealed with a natural transparent glaze. It felt dry and smooth like the inside surface of a shell. There were some imperfections in the underlying grayness; small yellow beads of what looked like fused glass were imbedded at random. They were multifaceted little fullerenes, spheres made up of flat hexagonal planes—like miniature soccer balls. Their color shifted in hue as I stared at them. There appeared to be some natural luminescence in the impurities. Crystalline sulfur compounds fused in muscovite, most likely, with a few phosphors stirred in. An unusual specimen, but probably not very interesting if the ay-eye had ignored it. I said so and handed it back to her.
“Mmm,” was her reply, then she said, “What do you know about quantum holes, naked singularities—that sort of stuff?”
“Things my mother never told me,” I said.
She didn’t react.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know much. We covered that in Cosmology 101, I think. But there was this cute undergrad named Phyllis who sat next to me in that class—I was into the two body problem that semester. I saw the stuff that was on the vidpress just after Hawking was discovered.”
She turned the stone over in her hand and stared at the face with the little yellow soccer balls.
“There’s been a lot of speculation about them,” she said. “Physical laws inside of one are totally different.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” I replied. I was getting a little bored with this subject and there were only five hours left in my off-shift.
“Listen,” I said, “I’ve been hoping I’d get a chance to meet you like this.” I’ve always had success with the direct approach.
“And things can get out too,” she said. She hadn’t been listening.
“Out too, hum?” I said half-heartedly.
“Yes,” she said. “A lot of people think stuff only falls into black holes—like the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. But with micro-holes like Hawking, the Mad Hatter can pack up his tea party and pay us a visit. Anything can come popping out of one—our laws don’t even make sense in there.”
This wasn’t going well. I tried another approach.
“Naked singularities, big bangs, black holes: cosmology uses a lot of sexual symbolism, doesn’t it?”
At least she smiled a little when she answered. “I think you’re pushing it a bit,” she said.
“Come on, encourage me,” I said. “Can’t we find something friendlier to talk about than a wind of improbability that comes whistling up a rabbit hole?”
“Very impressive,” she said. She paused a long time, and then she gave me this little impish look and said, “I suppose you’ve earned a change of topics—in return for being so poetic.”
This was going better. If only I hadn’t said what I did next. I never did know when to quit.
“Besides, I think if those rocks were the keys to fantasyland, the ay-eye would have been the first to know.”
Her pupils contracted.
“You keep bowing to that ay-eye,” she said. “Which one has the artificial intelligence, you or that program?”
Shit! I thought. I knew I’d blown it and should try to recover. But that crack had pissed me off.
“That program is my tool,” I said. “I underestimated it several times early on and it cost me dearly. Believe me, it knows what it is doing.”
“It infers fro
m its knowledge base,” she said. “How can it be qualified to judge the unknowable? That’s one of the few remaining conceits of human beings.”
“It has very extensive knowledge. There is probably no human expert that could match its abilities in this field. I suppose that in the interest of being human I should ignore it and go back to my calculator.”
“You aren’t using it, you’re deferring to it.”
“I’ll bet you’re one of those ‘no computers in grade school’ fanatics, too,” I said.
“As a matter of fact I am. I happen to think it’s important for people to learn the why of things first, before they learn just how—like automatons.”
“If we all thought like you,” I said, “we’d still be sharpening wooden sticks so we could hunt down dinner.”
“Don’t resort to outrageous statements,” she snapped. “It makes you sound like you’re grasping at straws.”
She was right, I was, but I felt outraged.
“And what makes you an expert on geology, quantum holes and artificial intelligence?” I shot at her. “Aren’t those hobbies a bit unusual for a tool dresser?”
“They’re not hobbies,” was all she said. She turned her eyes back toward those damn rocks and fell silent.
I realized what I had done and I felt foolish.
“Pat,” I said, trying to sound apologetic.
Nothing.
“Uh, I was thinking of queuing up a movie in the lounge. Would you like to join me for Bogie, Bacall and buttered popcorn?”
She waved her hand a little in my direction. “No thanks,” she said. She didn’t look up. She started chiseling away at another of the stones.
I stood there for probably two minutes but she never seemed to notice me again. I had to hand it to her, the woman had concentration. I gave up and left.
An hour later, after I’d climbed into my bunk to get what sleep I could, I was still mentally replaying my blunder.