“But Orpheus failed because, like all pakeha, he just couldn’t keep his mind on one thing at a time.”
• CORE
Sitting in front of his holographic display — sole illumination in the deserted lab — Alex recalled George Hut-ton’s performance at the celebration, earlier in the evening, reciting Maori legends to the tired but happy engineers by firelight. Especially appropriate had been the tale of Rangi-rua’s, speaking as it did of fresh hope, snatched from the very gates of hell.
Later, though, Alex found himself drawn back to the underground laboratory. All the machinery, so busy earlier in the day, now lay dark and dormant save under this pool of light, which spilled long shadows onto the nearby limestone walls.
Rangi’s legend had touched Alex, all right. It might apply to his present state of mind.
Don’t look back. Pay attention to what’s in front of you.
Right now what lay before him was a depiction of the planet, in cutaway view. A globe sliced like an apple, revealing peel and pulp, stem and core.
And seeds, Alex thought, completing the metaphor.
The eye couldn’t make out Earth’s slight deviations from a sphere. Mountain ranges and ocean trenches — exaggerated on commercial globes — were mere dewy ripples on this true-scale representation. So thin was the film of water and air compared to the vast interior.
Inside that membrane, concentric shells of brown and red and pink denoted countless subterranean temperatures and compositions. With a word, or by touching the holo’s controls, Alex could zoom through mantle and core, following rocky striations and myriad charted rivers of magma.
Okay. George, he thought. Here’s a pakeha allegory for you. We’ll start by cutting a hole straight through the Earth.
From the surface of the globe, he caused a narrow line to stab inward, through the colored layers. Drill a tunnel, straight as a laser, with mirror-smooth walls. Cover both ends and drop a ball inside.
It was an exercise known to generations of physics students, illustrating certain points about gravity and momentum. But Alex played the scenario in earnest.
Assuming that inertial and gravitational mass balance, as they tend to do, anything dropped at Earth’s surface accelerates nine point eight meters per second, each second.
His ringers stroked knobs, releasing a blue dot from the outer rim. It fell slowly at first, even with the time rate magnified. A millimeter here stood for an awful lot of territory in the real world.
But after the ball falls a good distance, acceleration has changed.
In 1687, Isaac Newton took several score pages to prove what smug sophomores now demonstrated on a single sheet — ah, but Newton did it first! — that only the spherical portion “below” a falling object continues to apply net gravity, until acceleration stops altogether as the ball hurtles through the center at a whizzing ten kilometers per second.
It can’t fall any farther than that. Now it’s streaking upward.
(Answer a riddle — where is it you can continue in a straight line, yet change directions at the same time?)
Now more and more mass accumulates “below” the rising ball. Gravity clings, draining kinetic energy. Speed slackens till at last — neglecting friction, coriolis effects, and a thousand other things — our ball lightly bumps the door at the other end.
Then it falls again, hurtling once more past sluggish, plasti-crystal mantle layers, past the molten dynamo of the core, plummeting then climbing till finally it arrives “home” once more, where it began.
Numbers and charts floated near the giant globe, telling Alex the round trip would take a little over eighty minutes. Not quite the schoolboy perfect answer, but then schoolboys don’t have to compensate for a real planet’s varying density.
Next came the neat trick. The same would be true of a tunnel cut through the Earth at any angle! Say, forty-five degrees. Or one drilled from Los Angeles to New York, barely skimming the. magma. Each round trip took about eighty minutes — the period of a pendulum with the same span as the Earth.
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It’s also the period of a circular orbit, skimming just above the clouds.
Alex soon had the cutaway pulsing with blue dots, each falling at a different angle, swiftly along the longer paths, slowly along shorter ones. Besides straight lines there were also ellipses, and many-petaled flower trajectories. Still, to a regular rhythm, they all recombined at the same point on the surface, labeled PERU.
Of course, things change when you include Earth’s rotation… and the pseudo-friction of a hot object pushing against material around it…
Alex was procrastinating. These simulations were from his first days in New Zealand. There were better ones.
His hands hesitated. The palms were still blotchy from skin grafts after that helium explosion debacle. Ironically, they hadn’t trembled half as much, then, as after today’s astonishing news.
Alex wiped away all the whirling dots and called another orbit from memory cache. This figure — traced in bright purple — was smaller than the others — a truncated ellipse subtly twisted from Euclidean perfection by irregularities in the densely-packed core. It didn’t approach Peru anymore.
This was no theoretical simulation. When their first gravity scans had shown the thing’s awful shadow, horror had mixed with terrible pride.
It didn’t evaporate immediately, he had realized. I was right about that.
It was awful news. And yet, who in his position wouldn’t feel heady emotions, seeing his own handiwork still throbbing, thousands of miles below the fragile crust?
It lived. He had found his monster.
But then it surprised him yet again.
After Pedro Manella’s headlines had made him the worlds latest celebrated bad-boy, it naturally came as a relief when the World Court dismissed all charges on a technicality of the Anti-Secrecy Laws. Alex was seen as the dupe of unscrupulous generals, more fool than villain.
It might have been better had they jailed and reviled him. Then, at least, people in authority might have listened to him. As it was, his peers dismissed his topological arguments as “bizarre, overly complex inventions.” Worse, special interest groups on the World Data Net made him a gossip centerpiece overnight.
“… classic symptoms of guilt abstraction, used by the subject to disguise early childhood traumas…” one correspondent from Peking had written. Another in Djakarta commented, “Lustig’s absurd hints that Hawking’s dissipation model might be wrong mesh perfectly with the shame and humiliation he must have felt after Iquitos…”
Alex wished his Net clipping service were less efficient, sparing him all the amateur psychoanalyses. Still, he had made himself read them because of something his grandmother once told him.
A hallmark of sanity, Alex, is the courage to face even unpleasant points of view.
How ironic then. Here he was, vindicated in a way he could never have imagined. He now had proof positive that the standard model of micro black holes was flawed… that he had been on the right path with his own theories.
Right and wrong, in the best combination of ways.
Then why can’t I leave this cave? he wondered. Why do I feel it isn’t over yet?
“Hey, you stupid pakeha bastard!” A booming voice ricocheted off the limestone walls. “Lustig! You promised to get drunk with us tonight! Tama meamea, is this any way to celebrate?”
Alex had the misfortune to be looking up when George Hutton switched on the lights. His world, formerly confined to the dim pool of the holo tank, suddenly expanded to fill the cavern-lab Hutton’s wealth had carved under the ancient rock.