Fletcher gave a quick nod of acknowledgment in Noldt’s direction and then addressed himself to Runyan. “If it is a hole, Alex, how fast is it growing?”
“That depends rather sensitively on how massive it is and the structure of the material it passes through,” Runyan replied. “The time to double in mass could be several thousand years.”
“As short as that!” exclaimed Noldt.
“I could easily be off by a factor of ten. It could be longer.” He looked Noldt in the eye. “Or it could be shorter.” He glanced around at the group. “This is a crucial point that Carl has raised. Any estimate of the time scale will require a knowledge of the mass, which makes the effort to measure the mass even more important. In any case, if we are dealing with a black hole, it will only grow at an ever increasing rate. We’ll never have any longer to figure out what to do about it than we have right now.”
“Do you have any idea how quickly it will become dangerous?” Fletcher wanted to know.
“Again, I can make some guesses as to what will happen,” replied Runyan, “but I can’t say just when without more information.
“If it is a black hole and we can’t get rid of it, it will continue to consume the matter of the Earth. We’ll have to look at the details more closely. This will be part of the orbit calculations I just mentioned. It may, for instance, eat the liquid core faster than the solid mantle, although it’s traveling faster in the core and that may mute the effect. In any case, it’s riddling the mantle with small holes. Either consuming the core or weakening the mantle will induce earthquakes of increasing magnitude. The drag associated with its motion will eventually cause it to settle into the center of the Earth. Not only will it then be irrevocably out of reach, but the core will be rapidly consumed.
“As the molten core of the Earth is consumed, the Earth will shrink. That in turn will remove the pressure support that holds up the giant continental plates. They will begin to rapidly shift and collide, in turn giving rise to another source of destructive Earthquakes. All of this seismic activity will cause severe volcanic activity and tidal waves. As the hole gets to be near the mass of the Earth, the Earth will begin to oscillate in orbit, as it revolves around a common center of mass with the hole. This will drastically enhance the destruction.
“Finally, the hole will grow so large that it will rapidly ingest the last of the core and large chunks of mantle. The outcome will be a black hole with the mass of the present Earth, but only the size of my thumb.” He made a fist with extended thumb for illustration. “In the end there will be nothing but the Moon orbiting a small black nothingness, maybe along with a ring of rocks that managed to avoid being pulled in.”
The group of people in the room sat silently, mesmerized by this gloomy prediction. Caught up in the story he was spinning, Runyan paused, but then proceeded on an afterthought.
“I’m sure it’s of only academic interest, but one can carry the story to its end. This small black hole and its Moon would continue to orbit the Sun. After several billion years, the Sun will swell to become a red giant and will engulf the hole. If the Earth still existed at that point it would be vaporized in the fire. But if the black hole has done its work, the tables will be turned. The process will begin again, but with the Sun the victim. The hole will slowly spiral down through the matter of the Sun. It will settle to the center and consume the whole Sun in the space of a few years. That black hole, now immensely massive but only a few miles across, and its remnant planets, if any, will then proceed through space until the end of time.”
Chapter 12
Konstantin Naboyev climbed into the helicopter with a feeling of grim pleasure. It was not much of a revolt, but it was his, and he was so bored he could eat the hinges off a hatch cover. He had to do something to scratch this itch; there was nothing else in sight, so this was it.
He went through the pre-flight check quickly and lifted off the helipad as the control started to give him permission. The voice squawked that he had not maintained procedures. Up yours, he thought to himself. What are you going to do, send me back to Afghanistan?
He longed to return to that incredible challenging mountain terrain. There your ass was on the line every second of the day. Even when you were asleep, those tricky, fierce bastards could figure some way to get to you. In Afghanistan, you were either a man, or you were dead. In a way he loved those tough rebels who fought like stubborn terriers and kept him on the razor’s edge, every nerve throbbing with awareness. But most of all he loved to find them scrabbling over the rocks in the high country, in places where it was impossible to fly, where the passes were too narrow, the air too thin, the cross winds too vicious. He would fly there anyway! He would find them, bring his great machine whining up over a ridge, catch them in his sights, and rip them to bloody shreds.
And so what was he doing now? Flying off a ship in the middle of the flattest, most boring god-awful expanse of ocean known to the mind of man. The mindless routine was driving him absolutely berserk. Stop in the ocean, lower the small boats, rig the large aluminum plate between them, sail around trying to see if something coming out of the sea would punch a hole in the plate. Naboyev, now he was really lucky. He got to take off, fly in a lazy circle about the small boats below, not see a goddamn thing, then land back on the ship, so they could sail a few hundred kilometers and then perform the same idiotic routine the next day. Well today, by god, he was at least going to find out a little about what was coming out of the ocean.
The rumors making the rounds were that they had gotten pretty good at positioning the plate so whatever it was came up and made the silly little hole. Since that was the only action around, Naboyev was determined to play the game and find out what they were all up to. He’d just kind of break formation at the right time and fly on over that plate and see what he could see.
He went into his standard circular pattern, listening to the radio traffic. He had learned to time the scattered information that came over his frequencies and knew when to kick the rudder and head for the platform. He wanted to get there in time to hover over the platform at a couple of thousand feet for thirty seconds or so before the hole got punched. That way he would have time to get stabilized and oriented before anything happened. With any luck there would be a circus. There would sure be one when he got back on ship. To hell with them!
Naboyev listened to signals being relayed to the small boats carrying the plate from some sonar installation in the mother ship. When he heard the call for them to hold position, he broke off and headed for the knot of boats. He took up position over the boats and peered down. He saw a small turbulence and a rising plume in the water next to one of the boats. If that’s what they were after, he thought, they missed it today. He strained, but couldn’t see anything else, nothing came up in the air toward him.
The helicopter bucked and Naboyev felt he had been hit by a shell. His craft began to shake as if caught in a gigantic paint mixing machine. Naboyev fought the controls of the ship like a madman. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a half-meter long slab of metal go arcing gracefully out and down toward the ocean below. Without knowing how it happened, he recognized that the tip of one of his rotor blades had been sheared, and that the vibration from the imbalance of the rotors would make it impossible to land even if the chopper didn’t shake itself apart.
Naboyev throttled down to reduce the centrifugal force on the blades. He changed the pitch to decrease the lift and the machine dropped like a rock. The shaking was eased minutely, but the ocean came up with terrifying speed. At the last possible second, Naboyev restored the pitch and opened the throttle. The craft halted its plunge ten meters above the gentle swells, but began to vibrate more fiercely than ever. Naboyev kept a death grip on the stick with his right hand, and opened the hatch door next to him with his left. He took his feet off the pedals and stuck his butt out the door, leaning, straining to keep the wobbling ship on even keel with the stick. He got his feet on the rim of the hatch as the craft began to rotate, and then in one swift desperate movement, he released the stick, kicked it with his foot and used the leverage to eject himself out the doorway. The effect was to knock the stick to the right as he hurled himself to the left. The helicopter followed the lead of the stick and lurched to the right as Naboyev fell clear, hurtling to the water below.