'It was somewhat irregular,' Gantt conceded. 'Why don't you check out the camp and the other sites to see if everything is all right. I'll see what I can figure out from the data we collected.'
The man knew he was being put off, but could see nothing to do about it. He paused a moment until it was clear that Gantt had nothing further to say, then departed with an aggressive stride, nearly colliding with Danielson, who rushed in as he left.
She hurried across the tent floor and pulled up a chair to sit at right angles to Runyan. His arm was draped on the chair. Danielson grasped his hand in both of hers and gave it a strong, almost painful, squeeze.
Barely aware of Danielson beside him, squeezing his arm, Runyan was caught up in a maelstrom of fragmentary thoughts. He couldn't grasp the details: they moved too fast, too lightly, wafted away like floating cottonwood seeds if he tried to grab at them. Somehow, though, he caught enough glimpses through the swirl. Us? Them? He couldn't see who, but he knew the answer.
'You were right, Alex,' Danielson said in a tense hissing whisper. 'I don't see any sign of a tunnel outside the tent, but I know you were right. That force! It could only have been the gravity! It is a black hole!' As she said the last words she raised his hand in hers and banged it back down on the arm of the chair. Runyan winced slightly.
Danielson had been looking at his face without seeing. As the grimace passed briefly over Runyan's features, she suddenly became cognizant of the black desolation reflected there. She stared at his impassive face as her own tenseness and excitement abated. She turned her head to look briefly at Gantt and read the same feeling of devastation on his face. Her mind spun with conflicting emotions as she released her grip on Runyan's slack hand and slumped back in her chair.
My god, she thought, it's like being torn apart, elation and terror at the same time. She recognized that she had been completely committed to this project, that she craved for her passion to be justified. The frightening encounter had been so real, so visceral, she felt — vindicated! But something in her mind cowered like a timid creature, beset by a raging beast. Her mind froze, resisting the full implications of what had transpired here. Where had it come from? What were they going to do? They had done what they had come to do. But were they better off, or worse?
She grabbed at a straw. Take a step, a small step. We've get to move on.
'Professor Gantt?' she inquired. 'I've got to call Bob Isaacs.'
Chapter 14
The satellite, square-rigged with solar panels, sailed a smooth, circular, polar orbit every hour and a half. The rotation of the earth beneath it brought every square inch of the surface within viewing range in a twelve-hour period. Its eye was a large, finely-honed mirror, bigger than most earth-bound telescopes. This eye, like many cousins, would never witness the stark glories of the universe. It was dedicated to peering at the human scurryings below.
Normally, the twenty minutes spent passing from the North Pole down over Canada and the continental United States to the equator were downtime devoted to signal relaying and reprogramming. This orbit, the gyres hummed and locked the telescope on several spots in a dead east— west line running through the high mountains of southern New Mexico. If the computer knew slang, it would have called this operation a piece of cake. The signal carrying orders from the ground had not called for highest resolution, the capability to distinguish letters on a licence plate, only enough detail to discern a car from a house.
Light from the sun scattered in the earth's atmosphere, bounced off the New Mexico landscape and was reflected upward. The mirror in the satellite gathered a tiny portion of this light and focused it as an image on a photocathode. A sweeping electron beam converted the lights and darks of the image into electrical impulses and the on-board computer converted the impulses to immutable numbers. A beam of radiation, modulated and encoded with those numbers, shot to a receiving station on the ground at the speed of light. This signal was relayed to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade , Maryland where it received routine preliminary computer processing to decode the signal and remove the worst of the spurious electronic noise. Without pause, the signal was then relayed by special laser-driven glass fibre cable, immune to interception, to receiving equipment and a computer in CIA headquarters. This computer produced an electronic signal which reproduced a picture of the mountainous terrain on a special TV screen. A hard-copy photograph was taken of the screen, suitable for humans to scan and bicker over. Scarcely half an hour had passed from the time the special order had been sent up to the satellite to the time the camera shutter clicked.
As the photograph moved through the automatic developing process, the satellite coasted over the equator above the eastern Pacific Ocean. It would rest over the Pacific and Antarctica except for occasional records of ships. Things would pick up as it tried to collect data on the movement of the Soviet fleet in the Indian Ocean. There would be several frantic minutes in the vain attempt to monitor troops and rebels in Afghanistan , then the well-established routine over mother Russia herself. As the Arctic ice cap slipped underneath, the cycle would begin again.
Wednesday evening Isaacs sat in his study, the smells of supper beginning to romance his nostrils.
'Dad!' Isabel's young girl volume resounded down the corridor. 'It's for you!'
He reached for the extension.
Even before she came on the line, from the long-distance hollow echo, broken by occasional radiophone static, he knew.
'Bob?' Her voice was tense, excited.
'Pat?' His flat reply.
'Bob, he was right!' It's got to be a black hole! It almost hit us, came up right outside the tent. You could feel it, Bob! The pull, from its gravity, it knocked me over. Ellison is starting to analyse the computer records, but I just don't see how there can be any doubt.'
Silence.
'Bob?'
'Sorry. That's — good work.' He was suffused with a bone-weary fatigue. 'It's just so hard to accept. I was trying to think of what to do next.' How was he going to explain this to Drefke, to the President? Damn! Why had he brought the Russians, Korolev, into this? He certainly didn't want to hassle with them now.
'Have you started the site survey?'
'Yeah,' he confirmed. 'We got the satellite time on an emergency basis, shots of every site on the trajectory, north and south latitude, at the right altitude. The satellite should be working now, and we should have the first cut tomorrow morning. Then we can go back to anything that looks promising.'
'I wonder what we'll find?' She asked the question slowly, rhetorically.
'Pat, right now I haven't the faintest damn idea. Let me know if Gantt's analysis turns up anything interesting. I'll get hold of the Director tonight and see if I can explain all this to him.'
'Okay, good luck. You'll let me know what the site survey turns up?'
'Right.'
'Bye.'
'G'bye.'
He hung up the phone and stared at it, unseeing. He knew he should eat before calling Drefke, but his appetite had vanished.
Pat Danielson slipped back into the tent and took a chair next to Runyan who leaned over Gantt's shoulder, watching numbers do formation exercises on the terminal.
'Did you get him?' Runyan swivelled his neck to look at her.
'Yes. He didn't sound too happy.'
'Not the kind of thing you get happy about.' Runyan paused a moment, contemplating. 'I guess I feel relief. The peril is real and immense. I don't think any of us really appreciate in our guts the danger we're in. But I'm relieved that it's out in the open now so we can deal with it head on.' He turned back to the terminal. 'Ellison's finding out what our friend is really like.'