Figuring in speed-of-light delays, there would be nearly an eight-hour lag between the send-off of the warning to the closest lab on Saturn, and the earliest possible response back to Pluto.
That should serve as protection enough, so long as no one at the base noticed what they were up to in real time. To avoid that problem, Sondra and Larry agreed to stay as close as possible to Webling’s original experiment design, in the hope of avoiding premature attention.
Given the difficulties of aiming the untested graser system, Webling had designed the original run to hit the closest, easiest target first and work out to longer range from there. The positions of the planets dictated that Saturn be the first target. Sondra used the original aiming data as she set up the run.
It was a complicated job. She glanced again at the chronometer when she was halfway through it. Three hours until this control room had its shot at the Ring. She sighed and went back to the complex job of resetting the controls.
With a beep and a flashing green light, the control panel announced that the Ring was ready for the graser run.
With ten minutes to spare, the myriad magnets, coolant pumps, mass drivers, particle accelerators and other components of the Ring system were configured to form a Chao Effect-amplified gravity well, to modulate and to collimate the gravity waves from it, and to fire tight pulses of collimated gravity power toward Titan.
Or at least, Sondra thought they were ready. She took another look at the control system. This was definitely a wild setup. No wonder the station’s old fogies hadn’t been able to believe it.
The countdown clock came on and started marking the passage of time. Eight minutes left.
Larry sighed and rubbed his weary eyes. Now it came down to one last set of checks to make, and one last button to push.
One last button.
They could have programmed those last checks on the automatic sequencer as well, even told the computer to start the actual firing of the system. If the experiment had been dependent on split-second timing, they would have.
But timing wasn’t that vital here. Besides, letting the computer do the work would not have been right. This was a human moment, the triumph both of human ingenuity over a technical and scientific problem, and of human cussedness over damn-fool rules. It was a way to proclaim a breakthrough to all humanity—and, equally important to Larry, it was a way to thumb his nose at Raphael. No computer could be programmed to do that properly.
Seven minutes left.
Still, there was something about the moment that surpassed even Larry’s deep-seated need to defy the director. It was dawning on Larry that this wasn’t just an experiment, not just an attention-getting device for saving their careers. This was history. No one had ever attempted such a thing. This was gravity control on a grand scale. Crude, limited—yes. But this one moment could change everyone’s lives.
Six minutes.
Just how ready was he to change the course of history? Larry licked his dry lips and glanced nervously over at Sondra. She nodded once, without looking up from her readouts. Everything was ready. In nervous silence, the last few minutes slid away to seconds. And then it came to the time itself.
For a brief moment, a frightened voice in Larry’s head told him no, told him not to do this thing. He ignored the voice of fear, of caution, and stabbed the button down.
Thousands of kilometers over his head, the Ring activated the gravity containment, and then pulsed the first waves of gravity power toward Saturn. Larry pulled his finger from the button and looked around blankly, feeling the moment to be a bit anticlimactic. There should have been some dramatic effect there in the lab to make them know it had happened. Maybe I should have programmed the lights to dim or something, he told himself sarcastically.
Of course, nothing happened in the control room. The action was far away overhead, at the axis, the focal point, of the Ring of Charon.
But by now, the action was rushing its way down toward Saturn. The first pulse was already millions of kilometers along its way.
From here on, the automatics did take over. The sequencer fired again. The second millisecond pulse leapt from the Ring. And the third, the fourth. It was too late to bring it back. Far too late. There was nothing they could do but press on. They would catch hell no matter what they did now.
The Observer had no concept of free choice. All that it did, or thought, or decided, it was compelled to do, each stimulus producing the appropriate response. There would not be, could not be, any situation not provided for. In its memory and experience, going back far beyond its own creation, all was supposed to be categorized, understood, known. There should have been nothing new under this or any other star.
It could not fear the unknown, because such a concept was beyond it. To it, the unknown was inconceivable.
Thus, it struggled to force new phenomena into old categories—for example, choosing to see the alien ring as a mutation, a modification of its own form.
Having reached this flawed identification, it accessed the concept of change and mutation as recorded in its memory store. It explored the possible forms change might take, and the results of those changes. As best it could tell, the alien fit within the possible parameters. That was enough data to satisfy the Observer.
It only remained to determine what its distant cousin was doing. But then, the answer arrived, full-blown and complete, from its heritage memory store.
It was a relay. It was echoing a message from home, announcing that it was time. Perhaps the normal means of contact had failed, and this new ring had sailed between the stars to bring its message.
Of course. What else could it be? The Observer searched the length and breadth of its memory, and did not find an alternative answer.
To one of the Observer’s kind, memory was all. Finding no other answer in its memory proved there was no other answer.
It was a way of being that had always worked.
Jupiter was next, or rather Ganymede. Larry told himself he must remember not to treat the inhabited satellites as mere appendages of the planets. The residents of the gas-giant satellite settlements were always annoyed by that sort of thing. After all, no one referred to the Moon as being part of Earth. Titan, Ganymede and the other inhabited satellites were worlds in their own right. Larry knew he had best bear that in mind—if things worked out the way they might, he would have a lot of contact with the gravity experts on Titan and Ganymede.
Yeah, those are vital points right now, Larry thought sarcastically. He was finding other things to worry about, trying to avoid the big picture. He had caught himself doing that all night, again and again. He was unable to face the meaning, the consequences of what he was doing. He did not want to be in charge of changing the world. The hell with it. Larry plunged in the start button again. The beam regenerated itself and leapt toward Jupiter’s satellite.
At least, they hoped it was heading toward Ganymede. Though Sondra had run graser experiments before, they were at a ten-millionth of this power. She was finding the collimated gravity beam difficult to control even with computer-automated assistance and Larry to backstop her.