"The only kind of doctor I am is honorary, and Klara's good enough."
She bobbed her head. "Anyway, of course you're welcome here any time. I guess you wanted to see for yourself how we're coming along."
"Well, I did want that, yes. I also wanted to set something up, if you don't mind." That was me returning courtesy for courtesy, however unnecessary it was in either direction. "Do you know who Wilhelm Tartch is?"
She thought for a moment. "No."
So much for his galaxy-wide fame. I explained. "Bill's a kind of a roving reporter. He has a program that goes out all over, even to the Heechee in the Core. It's kind of a travelogue. He visits exciting and colorful places and reports on them for the stay-at-homes." He was also my present main lover, but there wasn't any reason to mention that to Terple; she would figure it out for herself fast enough.
"And he wants to do Phoenix?"
"If you don't mind," I said again. "I did clear it with the board."
She grinned at me. "So you did, but I sort of lost track of it. We've been deploying the mirror-builder drones, so it's been kind of busy." She shook herself. "Anyway, Hans tells me your shipmind displayed the actual supernova explosion to you on the way out—"
"That's right, she did." In my ear Hypatia was whispering that Hans was the name of their shipmind, as though I couldn't figure that out for myself.
"And I suppose you know what it looks like from Earth now?"
"Well, sort of."
I could see her assessing how much "sort of" amounted to, and deciding to be diplomatic to the money person. "It wouldn't hurt to take another look. Hans! Telescopic view from Earth, please."
She was looking toward one end of her office. It disappeared, and in its place we were looking out at a blotchy patch of light. "That's it. It's called the Crab Nebula. Of course, they named it that before they really knew what it was, but you can see where they got the name." I agreed that it did look a little like some sort of deformed crab, and Terple went on. "The nebula itself is just the gases and stuff that the supernova threw off, a thousand years or so later. I don't know if you can make it out, but there's a little spot in the middle of it that's the Crab pulsar. That's all that's left of the star. Now let's look at the way it was before it went super. Real-time. From here."
Hans wiped the nebula away and we were looking into the same deep, black space Hypatia had shown me already. There were the same zillion stars hanging there, but as the shipmind zoomed the picture closer, one extraordinarily bright one appeared. "Bright" didn't do it justice. It was a blazing golden yellow, curiously fuzzy. It wasn't really hot. It couldn't be; the simulation was only optical. But I could almost feel its heat on my face.
"I don't see any planet," I offered.
"Oh, you will, once we get all the optical segments in place." Then she interrupted herself. "I forgot to ask. Would you like a cup of tea or something?"
"Thanks, no. Nothing right this minute." I was peering at the star. "I thought it would be brighter," I said, a little disappointed.
"Oh, it will be, Klara. That's what we're building that 500-kilometer mirror for. Right now we're just getting the gravitational lensing from the black hole we're using—there's a little camera in the mirror. I don't know if you know much about black holes, but—oh, shit," she interrupted herself, suddenly stricken. "You do know, don't you? I mean, after you were stuck in one for thirty or forty years...."
She looked as though she had inadvertently caused me great pain. She hadn't. I was used to that sort of reaction. People rarely brought up the subject of black holes in my presence, on the general principle that you don't talk about rope when there's been a hanging in the house. But the time when I had been trapped in one of the things was far back in the past. It had gone like a flash for me in the black hole's time dilution, however many years it was on the outside, and I wasn't sensitive about it.
On the other hand, I wasn't interested in discussing it one more damn time, either. I just said, "My black hole didn't look like that. It was a creepy kind of pale blue."
Terple recovered quickly. She gave me a wise nod of the head. "That would have been Cérenkov radiation. Yours must have been what they call a naked singularity. This one's different. It's wrapped up in its own ergosphere and you can't see a thing. Most black holes produce a lot of radiation—not from themselves, from the gases and stuff they're swallowing—but this one has already swallowed everything around it. Anyway." She paused to recollect her train of thought. Then she nodded. "I was telling you about the gravitational lensing. Hans?"
She didn't say what she wanted from Hans, but evidently he could figure it out for himself. The stars disappeared and a sort of wall of misty white appeared in front of us. Terpel poked at it here and there with a finger, drawing a little picture for me:
"That little dot on the left, that's the Crabber planet we want to study. The circle's the black hole. The arc on the right is our mirror, which is right at the point of convergence—where the gravitational lensing from the black hole gives us the sharpest image. And the little dot next to it is us, at the Cassegrain focus of the mirror. I didn't show the Crabber sun— actually we have to avoid aiming the camera at it, because it could burn out our optics. Am I making sense so far?"
"So far," I agreed.
She gave me another of those assessing looks, then said, "We'll actually be doing our observing by looking toward the mirror. There too we'll have to block out the star itself, or we won't see the Crab planet at all, but that's just another of the things we'll be adjusting. We'll actually be looking diametrically away from the planet in order to observe it."
I hadn't been able to resist the temptation with Hypatia, and I couldn't now with June Terple. "For four or five days," I said in my friendliest voice.
I guess the tone wasn't friendly enough. She looked nettled. "Listen, we didn't put the damn black hole where it is. It took us two years of searching to find one in the right position. There's a neutron star that we could've used. Orbitwise it was a better deal because it would have given us nearly eighty years to observe, but it's just a damn neutron star. It wouldn't have given us anywhere the same magnification, because a neutron star just doesn't have anywhere near as much mass as a black hole, so the gravitational lensing would've been a lot less powerful. We'll get a lot more detail with our black hole. Anyway," she added, "once we've observed from here we'll move this whole lashup to the neutron star for whatever additional data we can get—I mean, uh, if that seems advisable we will."
What she meant by that was if I was willing to pay for it. Well, I probably was. The capital costs were paid already. It would only mean meeting their payroll for another eighty years or so, and none of them were getting big bucks. Hypatia had seen to that.
But I wasn't ready to make that commitment. To take her mind off it, I said, "I thought we were supposed to have almost thirty days of observing right here."
She looked glum. "Radio observing. That's why we built the mesh dish. But it turns out there's no artifactual radio coming from the Crabber planet, so we had to get mirror plates so we could convert it to optical. Took us over three weeks, which is why we lost so much observing time."
"I see," I said. "No radio signals. So there might not be any civilization there to observe, anyway."
She bit her lip. "We know definitely that there's life there. Or was, anyway. It's one of the planets the Heechee surveyed long ago, and there were advanced living organisms there at the time—pretty primitive, sure, but they certainly looked as though they had the potential to evolve."