“Who the hell—” He blinked and shook his head and limped around the desk to meet me. “Sandy! It’s you!”
He looked far older than I recalled him, bent and shriveled but alert. He seized my hand, moved as if to hug me, but checked himself to stand back and stare again. “Your mother? How did you leave her?”
“Well,” I said. “She’s tried to keep the foundation alive, but she’s had to shut it down. We came to evacuate the station.”
“A little late.” He grinned through the beard. “The crew bugged out on Nine, two years ago.”
“And left you alone? How could they?”
A wry shrug.
“They tried to take me. Called me crazy. I had to hide in an old space suit till they were gone.”
I looked at him again. Haggard, unkempt, something bright in his hollowed eyes. I wondered what NBH had done to him.
“Your last chance to leave,” I told him. “The pilot’s waiting, not very patiently. He gave me three hours to find you.” I looked at my watch. “Half of it already gone. Let’s get moving.”
“Thank you, Sandy.” He reached to take my hand again. “It’s noble of you to come.
Noble of your mother to give you up.” He shook his head, with a wistful smile. “But my work’s not done.”
“Father! Please!” I gripped his hand. “We can’t leave you here.”
“I can’t go now.” His seamed face set hard, he raised a shaking hand to stop my questions. “Sit down and let me tell you.”
He lifted a carton of ration packs off a folding chair, motioned me to it, and sat deliberately back at his desk.
“If you can make it quick.”
“Okay, quick it is.” Yet he paused for a moment, staring at the chessmen, before he shrugged and went on. “I’ll skip over my first years here. Pretty much what you might expect. We studied what there was to study. Measured NBH for mass, electric charge, spin. Studied the orbits of captured objects. Looked for the Hawking radiation.”
“So?” I had to humor him. “What did you find?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “Nothing really new until after Three had come and gone. But I stayed and kept at it till I got what I call my eureka moment.”
“What was that?”
“A revelation.” He glanced away at the end of the room, where I saw an easel under a paint-splotched cover, and paused for a long sigh. “It happened during my search for the radiation. A quest I had almost given up. If I’d left on Nine—”
He shook his head and stopped again to glance at his unfinished chess game, long enough to let me wonder about his opponent and to wonder how sane he was.
“Black holes decay,” he went on abruptly. Hawking did the math. I’ve found the evidence. And established a new principle of physics.” He sat straighter as if to challenge me with it. “The conservation of information.”
He scowled when I peered at my watch.
“The decay process is slow, the radiation feeble, with no distinctive spectral signature. It took me two years and a new antenna to pick it up. A faint hum, often drowned in thunder from the accretion zone. Nothing exciting till I got the signals it carried.”
“Signals?”
“Information!” He saw my disbelief. His old voice went shrill. “Clicks in my headphones. Three clicks. A pause. Three more clicks. Another three, till there were twelve. A longer pause. Then they began the series again. I answered with echoes and got a reply. A pattern of clicks and pauses that made pixels for simple graphics, twelve by twelve. A circle. A square. An equilateral triangle. A diagram to show the hypotenuse as the sum of squares.
“Contact with intelligence!” His hollowed eyes lit. “We’ve invented a common language, good for math and science, though so far we’ve found no Rosetta stone for the humanities—”
“We?” I had to interrupt. “Who?”
“A question.” He seemed amused at my bewilderment. “I don’t know who or where or even when. I’m still searching for the answers. The signals do come out of the Schwarzchild bubble, carried on the Hawking radiation. They may originate in the central singularity. They may come through it. They may come around it.”
He sighed and let his thin body sag as if from long exhaustion.
“There’s no way to know. I’ve found no common point of reference. The quantum nature of the singularity upends all our commonsense ideas of space and time.” He saw me start to rise. “Sandy, please! Give me a few more minutes.”
“Can’t we talk on the ship?”
“We’re talking now.” Impatiently, he beckoned me back to the chair and limped across the room to uncover the easel. “You’ve got to see this.”
His painting held me for a moment. No scene from the asteroid or anywhere on Earth, it was a seascape. Waves foamed in the foreground. Blue water stretched to a far horizon beyond, with no land in sight. Above them the frame was almost filled with something that took my breath.
I had to stare. It was an island, flying high above the sea. A forest of green plumes like giant bamboo grew along the shore. Inland, red-roofed buildings surrounded a spiral dome the color of gold. It floated on an enormous platform streamlined like the hull of an ocean liner. Tiny mirror-bright globes swarmed around it.
“A glimpse of their world, as I’ve seen it from there.” He pointed to a chalked circle on the floor in front of the easel. “I know nearly nothing of its history, but it was one that NBH swallowed. Its people had no way to save anything material, but a few of them were able to preserve their minds.”
He reached to touch the chessboard.
“The individual who reached me has told me all he can. I call him Mr. Other. We’ve worked out a language for math and physics, but found no words for such complexities as gender—”
I was on my feet.
“One more minute!” He raised his hand to hold me. “Mr. Other has given me a warning you must hear. NBH may be quiescent now, but it’s the ultimate bomb.”
“Father, please!”
His voice sharpened, the way it did when he had to scold me long ago.
“Here’s my news for Earth. As a black hole grows, it contracts. Pressure and temperature in the singularity rise toward infinity. In NBH, they are still contained in the magnetic web woven by increasing spin. The capture of another stray sun could rupture that web at the poles of rotation. Superluminous plumes and bursts of beamed radiation could explode, strong enough to burn the nearer planets and even sear the Earth—”
He stopped at last, frowning at my face.
“I see you don’t believe.”
“I can’t.” At the door, I had to turn back. “You’ve put me in an impossible spot. The pilot will be taking off, with me or without me. I can’t leave you here alone.”
“You’d better go.” He gulped and wiped at his hollow eyes. “I must stay to learn what I can, and hope to get that warning back to Earth.” He limped around the easel to give me a quick embrace. “I always loved you, Sandy. It’s great that I know enough to solve that problem for you.”
He gestured me away from the easel. When I looked back, he was standing on that white-chalked circle. He waved a quick farewell. I caught a glimpse of some object in his hand. I heard a click, and he was gone.
I searched and failed to find him anywhere. I ran back to the ship and got there gasping for breath, with nine minutes to spare. We took off at once. The first long skip brought us in sight of the sun. The second let us pick out Jupiter and Saturn. The third revealed the tiny point of Earth. The last brought it close enough to let us see the whole blue globe, the bright lace of clouds, the familiar continents.
“It looks too green.” McKane made a sour face. “I see no cities. I think we’ve been gone too long.”
My own eagerness to see the fruit of change was edged with pain as I recalled all I’d known and loved that the centuries must have erased. He called Earth from low orbit.