And, be it confessed, she too was more than a bit nervous about dealing with such massive amounts of power. Even with all the signal loss and fade-outs of their crude directionalizing system, they were still pulsing bursts of three hundred thousand gravities out from a point source—albeit a point source smaller than an amoeba, a point source that went unstable after a few seconds. A million kilometers from the Pluto-Charon system, the pulse had lost half its power, and lost half again in another million.
By the time it reached even the closest of its targets, the beam had lost virtually all its power, was reduced to a one-millisecond tenth-gee wisp of nothing. And since it was phased with the repulser beam, the net gravitational energy directed at a target was exactly zero. The beam pushed exactly as hard as it pulled. It was physically impossible for the beam to be anything but harmless. Besides, each beam firing only lasted a millisecond and acted on the entire target body as a whole. The beam was a push-pull type, she told herself again. The push-pull couldn’t fail, not without the entire system failing utterly. It was impossible for this beam to hurt anyone or anything.
But such reassurances weren’t enough to keep her from getting nervous. “How’s it going, Larry?” she asked for what seemed like the hundredth time.
“Still fine,” Larry replied, more than a bit distracted himself. The amplified gravity source still collapsed every thirty seconds or so, and Larry had to regenerate the point source. The strain was getting to him. He had hoped to automate the process, but he had rapidly discovered that he barely had time to look up from his primary controls before the source would go unstable again.
It wasn’t until halfway through the Jupiter run that he had the time to set up the automation system. He instructed the computer to look over his shoulder, figuratively speaking, and watch the regeneration procedure he used.
After the seventh or eighth time, the computer had “learned” the regen procedure in most of its permutations and was able to take over the job itself. Larry breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back in his chair. They were on their way.
He wondered what their reactions would be—especially what the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would think.
The speed of light was the limiting factor now. Gravity waves moved at lightspeed, just like any other kind of radiation. At the moment, Pluto, Saturn, and Jupiter were all roughly lined up one side of the Sun, with Venus and Earth on the other sides of their orbits, only a few degrees away from the Sun. Of the planets in question, Saturn was currently the closest to Pluto, and Earth the furthest away.
Larry frowned and scribbled a quick diagram on a scratch pad to help him keep it all straight. After a few brief calculations, he added the round-trip-signal time in hours for each planet.
Those were round-trip-signal times. So Titan Station, orbiting Saturn, would receive its dose of gravity waves in just over four hours. Even if Titan signaled back to Pluto immediately when the gravity waves arrived, it would still take more than four more hours for Pluto to get the word.
It worked out to over eleven hours between firing the beam at Earth and getting a reply back from JPL.
JPL was the key to it all. JPL had run the first deep-space probe 450 years before, and from that time to this, it had retained it preeminence in the field of deep-space research. JPL was the big time. It was the field leader on Earth, and that made it the leader, period. JPL was big enough to lean on the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation. And the UNAF was the one with the checkbook.
Six billion kilometers to Earth. Twelve billion, round-trip.
One hell of a long way to go for funding, Larry thought.
A timer beeped. That was the end of the Ganymede beam sequence. Time to retarget again, point the beam at Venus. Larry flexed his fingers and watched his board as Sondra laid in the new targeting data.
“All set, Larry,” she said.
Larry nodded and pressed the button again. Venus. There were dreams of terraforming the planet—indeed, that idea was VISOR’s reason for being there in the first place.
Now there was a project that could benefit from artificial gravity on a large scale. Orbit a Virtual Black Hole around the planet and let it suck away ninety percent of the atmosphere. Use lateral-pull gravity control to speed up the planet’s spin. Pipe dreams. Wonderful pipe dreams.
Those were for tomorrow. Right now a millisecond burst of a tenth gee was victory enough. By now the computer had the hang of the graser control. It likewise seemed to be handling the point-source regeneration without much need for guidance. The ten minutes targeted on Venus passed quickly.
Earth was next. Earth. Not just JPL, but half the major science centers in the system were still there.
Larry watched eagerly as Sondra set up the revised targeting data. Thirty seconds ahead of time, she nodded at him. The new coordinates were locked in. Over their heads, the Ring had adjusted itself, in effect setting up a lens to focus the point source at Earth, the home planet.
Larry grinned eagerly and pressed home the fire button.
Eleven hours, he thought. Five and a half for the beam to get there, and another five and a half for us to hear the results. Then we ‘II know what Earth thinks of this little surprise.
Eleven hours.
With a whimper, not a bang, with a three-in-the-morning sense of anticlimax, the run ended. It was over, but it hadn’t started yet. Larry turned to Sondra and smiled. “Ready for the excitement tomorrow?”
She shook her head and stretched, struggling to stifle a yawn. “I haven’t really thought about it yet. But all hell is going to break loose when Raphael sees what we’ve done.”
Larry winced. “Yeah. That’s going to be the tough part. If he hates me now, tomorrow he’ll want to throw me out the nearest hatch without a suit.”
Sondra looked at Larry’s face, watching the expressions play over it. Fear, apprehension—guilt. Like a son who knows he’s about to disappoint his father again.
She thought for a moment, and then spoke in a gentle voice. “I think it might be best if I do the talking with Raphael.”
Larry looked up at her, surprised. “No,” he said. “This is between me and him.”
“No it isn’t,” Sondra said, “and that’s just the point.” She patted the control console, waved her hand to indicate the whole station. “This is science and politics. It’s not just two people having a private argument. And if we treat it that way, as if you two having a spat was the only issue, we’re going to lose what really matters. We’ll lose our focus on what you and I have done tonight.”
He closed his eyes and leaned back. A boy, no, a man, trying to clear his mind, think when his brain was soaked with exhaustion. “Okay. Okay. I see what you’re saying. But you remind me of another question. And not just what buttons we’ve pushed. For the whole future: what, exactly, have we done tonight? I mean, gravity control.” Larry opened his eyes, and leaned forward. Even at the end of this sleepless night, Sondra could feel the excitement in him, feel it catching at her.
“Think to the future,” he said. “And think about what we’ve set loose.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Results
Certainty. The strange signal came from a relay,a mutant or modified relay, distantly related to the Observer’s own line and design. Normal contact had collapsed. The relay had traveled here across the depths of normal space, searching for an Observer, to tell it the time had come to Link.