Funarelli grimaced. "I'm not sure they aren't…What else happened?"
"The fuel tanks were destroyed. We're stuck here in orbit…It's just lucky we happened to end in one far enough away and circular enough to keep the tidal effect down. If we were closer, or if we even zoomed in closely at one end of the orbit-"
"Can we get word out?"
"Not a word," said Estes. "Communications are smashed."
"You can't fix it?"
"I'm not really a communications expert, but even if I were-It can't be fixed."
"Can't something be jury-rigged?"
Estes shook his head. "We've just got to wait-and die. That's not what bothers me so much."
"It bothers me," said Funarelli, sitting down on his bunk and placing his head in his hands.
"We've got the pills," said Estes. "It would be an easy death. What's really bad is that we can't get word back about -that." He pointed to the portview, which was clear again as the Sun moved out of range.
"About the black hole?"
"Yes, it's dangerous. It seems to be in orbit about the Sun, but who knows whether that orbit is stable. And even if it is, it's bound to get larger."
"I guess it will swallow stuff."
"Sure. Everything it encounters. There's cosmic dust spiraling into it all the time, and giving off energy as it spirals and drops in. That's what makes those dim sparkles of light. Every once in a while, the hole will swallow up a large piece that gets in the way and there'll be a flash of radiation, right down to X rays. The larger it gets, the easier it is for it to drag in material from a greater and greater distance."
For a moment, both men stared at the portview, then Estes went on. "Right now it can be handled maybe. If NASA can maneuver a fairly large asteroid here and send it past the hole in the proper way, the hole will be pulled out of its orbit by mutual gravitational attraction between itself and the asteroid. The hole can be made to curve itself into a path that could head it out of the Solar System, with some further help and acceleration."
Funarelli said, "Do you suppose it started very small?"
"It could have been a micro-hole formed at the time of the big bang, when the Universe was created. It may have been growing for billions of years and if it continues to grow, it may become unmanageable. It will then eventually become the grave of the Solar System."
"Why haven't they found it?"
"No one's been looking. Who would expect a black bole in the asteroid belt? And it doesn't produce enough radiation to be noticeable, or enough mass to be noticeable. You have to run into it, as we did."
"Are you sure we have no communications at all, Ben?…How far to Vesta? They could reach us from Vesta without much delay. It's the largest base in the asteroid belt."
Estes shook his head. "I don't know where Vesta is right now. The computer's knocked out, too."
"God! What isn't knocked out?"
"The air system is working. The water purifier is on. We've got plenty of power and food. We can last two weeks, maybe more."
A silence fell. "Look," said Funarelli after a while. "Even if we don't know where Vesta is exactly, we know it can't be more than a few million kilometers away. If we could reach them with some signal, they could get a drone ship out here within a week."
"A drone ship, yes," said Estes. That was easy. An unmanned ship could be accelerated to levels that human flesh and blood would not endure. It could make trips in a third the time a manned vessel could.
Funarelli closed his eyes, as though blocking out the pain, and said, "Don't sneer at a drone ship. It could bring us emergency supplies, and it would have stuff on board we could use to set up a communications system. We could hold out till the real rescuers came."
Estes sat down on the other bunk. "I wasn't sneering at a drone ship. I was just thinking that there's no way to send a signal, no way at all. We can't even yell. The vacuum of space won't carry sound. "
Funarelli said stubbornly, "I can't believe you can't think of something. Our lives depend on it. "
"The lives of all mankind depend on it, maybe, but I still can't think of anything. Why don't you think of something?"
Funarelli grunted as he moved his hips. He seized the hand grips on the wall next to his bunk and pulled himself up to a standing position. "I can think of one thing," he said, "why don't you turn off the gravity motors and save the power and put less strain on our muscles?"
Estes muttered, "Good idea." He rose and moved to the control board, where he cut the gravity.
Funarelli floated upward with a sigh and said, "Why can't they find the black hole, the idiots?"
"You mean like we did? There's no other way. It's not doing enough."
Funarelli said, "I still hurt, even with no gravity to fight…Oh well, if it keeps on hurting like this, it won't matter so much when it comes to pill-taking time…Is there any way we can make that black hole do more than it's doing?"
Estes said grimly, "If one of those bits of gravel should take it into its head to drop into the hole, a burst of X rays would shoot out."
"Would they detect that on Vesta?"
Estes shook his head. "I doubt it. They're not looking for such a thing. They'd be sure to detect it on Earth, though. Some of the space stations keep the sky under constant surveillance for radiation changes. They'd pick up astonishingly small bursts."
"All right, Ben, reaching Earth would be just as well. They'd send a message to Vesta to investigate. It would take the X rays about fifteen minutes to get to Earth and then it would take fifteen minutes for radio waves to get to Vesta. "
"And how about the time between? The receivers may automatically record a burst of X rays from such and such a direction, but who's to say where it's from? It could be from a distant galaxy that happens to lie in this particular direction. Some technician will notice the bump in the recording and will watch for more bursts in the same place and there won't be any and it will be crossed off as unimportant. Besides, it won't happen, Harv. There must have been lots of X rays when the black hole broke up this asteroid with its tidal effect, but that may have been thousands of years ago when no one was watching. Now what's left of these fragments must have fairly stable orbits."
"If we had our rockets-"
"Let me guess. We could drive our ship into the black hole. Use our deaths to send a message. That wouldn't do any good either. It would still be one pulse from anywhere."
Funarelli said indignantly, "I wasn't thinking of that. I'm not in the market for heroic death. I meant, we've got three engines. If we could rig them on to three pretty large size rocks and send each one into the hole, there would be three bursts of X rays and if we did them a day apart, the source would move detectably against the stars. That would be interesting, wouldn't it? The technicians would pick that up at once, wouldn't they?"
"Maybe, and maybe not. Besides, we don't have any rocketry left and couldn't put them on the rocks if we-" Estes fell silent. Then he said in an altered voice, "I wonder if our space suits are intact."
"Our suit radios," said Funarelli excitedly.
"Hell, they don't reach out more than a few kilometers," said Estes. "I'm thinking of something else. I'm thinking of going out there." He opened the suit locker. "They seem all right."
"Why do you want to go out?"
"We may not have any rockets, but we still have muscle power. At least I have. Do you think you can throw a rock?"
Funarelli made a throwing gesture, or the beginning of one, and a look of agony came over his face. "Can I jump to the Sun?" he said.
"I'll go out and throw some…The suit seems to check out. Maybe I can throw some into the hole…I hope the air lock operates."
"Can we spare the air?" said Funarelli anxiously.
"Will it matter in two weeks?" said Estes wearily.
Every astro-miner has to get outside the ship occasionally -to carry out some repair, to bring in some chunk of matter in the vicinity. Ordinarily, it's an exciting time. In any case, it's a change.