“Let’s say that this is the case, and that those adjacent subloops are here.” He pointed to the top of the first major loop. “Assume that arrangements and preparations make the effective duration of any single jump a matter of a few hours. How long would it take to reach Alpha Centauri from Earth?”
“That depends on its position and the configuration. It might be possible in a single hop, or it might require several months of jumping. By the same token, it might be as easy to traverse the entire galaxy — if this representation of the nature of space is accurate.”
“The macroscope suggests this is the case.”
She caught on rapidly. “So the destroyer origin is theoretically within reach?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him, life coming into her face. She, like Beatryx, had lost weight, but she was lovely yet. “How long have you worn that shirt?”
He stuttered, caught completely by surprise. “I — I don’t know. What — ?”
“Too long. May I?”
“I—”
She walked around him, pulling out his shirt and unbuttoning it. She removed it and bundled it under her arm. She kissed him lightly on the cheek and departed, leaving him somewhat stupefied.
It had been forcibly brought home to him who, if this were a game, had the ranking hand.
A mouse born into Leo was still a mouse, he remembered. Afra, however low she might sink, remained a stronger personality than he.
Six hours later his shirt was back, clean and fragrant.
He looked for Afra, not knowing what to say or whether to say it — and found her kneeling beside Brad’s grave, sweet-pea flowers in her hand, tears coursing down her cheeks.
And what had he expected?
Earth: city: “disadvantaged” neighborhood.
Children played in a tiny dirt yard, throwing rocks at a broken bottle. Their clothing was dirty and sodden with sweat; their feet were bare. All were thin, and posture and appearance hinted at malnutrition.
Inside the house, a sick child slept restlessly, flies crawling across his cheek and buzzing up whenever he moved. He lay on a ragged mattress, refuse collected beneath it. Roaches peered from the hole in the wall where the yellow plaster had fallen away.
In the next room a grizzled man sprawled before a bright television set, swigging now and then from a concave whisky bottle. He was as grimy as the children.
Ivo imagined the dialogue he might have with this man, were conversation possible:
“You’re going to pot here. Why don’t you move to a better neighborhood?”
“Can’t afford it. I’m in hock now.”
“Why don’t you look for a better job, then? The economy is booming; you could make a lot more money.”
“I tried that. Man said I needed more education.”
“Why don’t you go back to school, then? To one of the free technical universities?”
“They have a quota system; only so many per district, and this one’s full up until 1985.”
“Well, why don’t you move, then… oh, I see.”
Ivo removed the helmet and goggles and shook his head. This was the age of affluence, with a record GNP and excellent jobs begging for personnel. Yet the macroscope showed the truth: whether because of this particular vicious circle or some variant of it, people were living in poverty. The residence he had just viewed was typical of a growing — not shrinking — segment of the population.
There had been a time, not so very long ago, when only nonwhite Americans lived this way. There would come a time, not so very far removed, when only the affluent lived any other way.
Why should he have any regrets about leaving this area of space?
He did, though.
Groton watched the screen as Ivo guided the image into the disk of Neptune. The mighty vapors boiled at an apparent distance of a thousand miles, throwing up great gouts of color.
Five hundred miles, four hundred, and it was easy to fancy that they were aboard a ship actually coming in for a landing, and to feel the fierce spume of the methane storm. The dark dot he had centered on had now been clarified as the eye of a hurricane — the eye alone three hundred miles in diameter and awesomely deep. Hydrogen gas swirled thinly in its center, and thick methane weighted with ammonia crystals rushed around the rim. The wind velocity at the surface they could presently see was four hundred miles per hour.
The cliffs of the cloudwall rose up, titanic, translucent, deadly. Then shadow as he lost the funnel, recovered it, lost it again. A hundred miles down, the tube was only a few tens of miles across, narrowing rapidly, and it wavered. Finally it was gone for good: either too thin to pinpoint or dissipated in the thickening atmosphere five hundred miles below the opening. Some light remained, but it was fading rapidly with depth.
A thousand miles down: still the turbulent gases and flying storm crystals. Two thousand: the same. Three thousand — and no solid surface.
“Does this planet have a surface?” Ivo demanded in frustration.
“Got to,” Groton said. “Somewhere. Too dense overall to be all gas.”
Four thousand. Five.
“Sure your settings are tuned? Maybe we’re not as deep as we thought.”
“I’m sure. It’s the damn planet that’s wrong!”
Six, seven.
At eight thousand miles below the visible surface they encountered the first solid materiaclass="underline" caked ammonia ice. The macroscope readings were becoming vague; in this cold there was too little radiation in the proper range.
At nine, genuine water-ice: rock-hard, opaque.
Ten: the same.
“We’re two-thirds of the way to the core — and nothing but ice?” Ivo demanded.
The traces were almost unreadable — but at almost twelve thousand miles depth they struck rock.
“Do you realize,” Groton whispered, “that Neptune proper is smaller than Earth? Less than an eight-thousand mile diameter core—” He looked at the indications, that abruptly showed clear. “But what a core! Tungsten, gold, platinum, iridium, osmium — the heaviest elements of the universe are packed in here! Think of what a gold mine this place is!” He paused. “Gold? Throw it away! The stuff here—” He gave up.
“Is it all precious metal?”
“Sorry — got excited. No, it’s seventy percent iron, and the rest mostly oxygen and silicon. The heavy stuff just leaped out at me. But there is a lot of it, compared to what we’re used to, and the proportion is bound to increase with depth. Mighty solid lithosphere. But then, it has to be. As I make it, something like two-thirds the mass of this planet has to be in the core — and the core’s no larger than our Earth. My God — I didn’t think! This core — it has to be ten, eleven times the average density of Earth, to make that mass. Nothing’s that solid.”
“Going down,” Ivo said.
It was that solid. The multiple heavy elements on the core-ball’s “surface” were floating there because the interior was several times their density.
It was composed of partially collapsed matter: the refuse, possibly, of an extinct dwarf star. Protons and neutrons were jammed together with only imperfect electron layers holding them apart.
“It seems,” Groton remarked, “that half our job has been done for us.”
Ivo nodded, satisfied.
Ivo began to explain their intent to the women.
“The idea is to utilize the principle of gravitational collapse. We have obtained schematics for a rather sophisticated variant of the gravity focuser, though this resembles what we have here on Triton about the way a hydrogen bomb resembles a matchstick. Assembly of the generators alone will take months, even with a full crew of waldoes, and the related safeguards—”