Raphael opened his mouth and shut it without speaking. Before he could come up with anything more cogent, Webling chimed in. “I most certainly did not cede my authority—not to Dr. Raphael or to anyone else. But that does not excuse your impertinence, Dr. Berghoff.” Webling turned and addressed Raphael. “But that to one side, Simon, right protocol or wrong, young Mr. Chao seems to have his numbers right. It would be criminal to reject such a promising claim out of hand over some breach of scientific etiquette. The first response from Titan should arrive at any moment. It seems to me that we are about to receive either a confirmation or a refutation of these theories. Shouldn’t that be the basis for our reaction to Mr. Chao’s work?”
Sandbagged, Sondra thought gleefully. The old goat just got blown out of the water by his closest ally, in front of the entire staff. Larry seemed about to say something, but she kicked him under the table. This was no time to let Raphael off the hook. Let him squirm.
But Sondra didn’t get to see Raphael’s reaction. A low beeping began, a sound that seemed to come from everywhere all at once. It took Sondra a moment to realize it was her notepack, alerting her that a message was incoming for her. Larry’s pack was beeping too—and so were Webling’s and Raphael’s.
Titan! She pulled her pack out of its belt pouch and punched in the Read Message command.
The screen cleared and displayed the text of the message. Even as she read to herself, Webling stood and read it aloud to the entire staff.
“from: tistat commcent personal and immediate.
“to: raphael, webling, berghoff, chao.
“message reads: titan station, sakharov physics institute sending for pluto, gravitics research station. warmest congratulations to raphael and entire team. incredible! grav meters here recorded indisputable reception of pulsed, modulated gravity waves of remarkable power as per your preexperiment transmission. we are honored to be first to congratulate your lab for this great achievement. we are processing initial detailed analysis and will transmit same to you at earliest convenience. this is a breakthrough of the first importance. we toast you here with the true stoli vodka. well done, simon. proud regards, m. k. popolov, director, message concludes.”
A burst of applause followed, and a dozen people reached in to shake hands with Larry. Sondra could not keep a wry smile from her face. Well done, Simon, indeed. Director Popolov had assumed that Dr. Simon Raphael had been responsible for doing the experiment, rather than busy attempting to squelch it. Never mind. She could see the growing knot of people swarming over Larry. They could see where the real credit lay. And there would be no keeping the true word from spreading. Well done, Simon. Sondra looked up to where Raphael had been and discovered he wasn’t there anymore. She looked toward the door just in time to see him ducking through it, escaping his humiliation while the attention was off him. For a moment, for a brief moment, she found it in herself to feel sorry for the man.
But then the crowd jostled her, and swept her into the swirl of people surrounding Larry.
Shy, blushing, smiling, Larry accepted the congratulations of his colleagues, even those who had not believed him only hours before. There was a general clamor for information of all kinds. Everyone seemed to have a notepack out, trying to link into Larry’s files in the central computer. They all found the files in question had privacy blocks on them. The computer commlink system actually shut down for a minute, overwhelmed by too many people asking for a look at too many files and datasets. Larry used his own notepack to remove the blocks from every file he controlled.
The whole business was too much for him. Pride, excitement, his usual awkwardness in public situations, worry over what Raphael would do next—all of those feelings and a half dozen more besides were jumbled up inside him—and were forced to take a backseat to the endless questions from Webling and the other staff scientists. There wasn’t time for anything but the moment itself, the event.
Someone—Larry thought it was Hernandez, the microgravity expert, but he wasn’t sure—was shoving a notepack in his face, asking him to explain a flowchart display. Larry offered up a mental shrug, took the pack, and started trying to make sense of the graph. Maybe if he cooperated, they would all calm down sooner.
But his answer only prompted another question from someone else, started another argument. There were too many possibilities, too many theories. There wasn’t room in the dome for it all.
In part because the observation dome was getting too crowded, and in part because it was easier to explain things in front of the switches and dials and screens, the throng seemed to migrate from the observation dome to the primary Ring control room. Afterwards, Larry had no recollection of actually going there.
There was something about the buttons and dials and instruments of the control room that made people remember their professionalism. Voices got lower, and people actually waited for each other to finish talking.
The room was small, and there were too many people in it. The environmental system couldn’t keep up, and the air grew hot and stuffy. Nobody seemed to notice or care. If anything, the closeness of the room added to the intensity of the moment. People got sharper, more focused, and started acting more like rational scientists. Larry found himself perched on the back of a chair, running an impromptu seminar.
But just when the situation seemed to be calmed down again, the next message came in, from Ganymede station. If anything, it was more effusive than Titan’s signal. Then Titan checked in again, with a more complete report, and their enthusiasm seemed to have doubled, if such a thing were possible.
When Ganymede made its complete report, they had a real set of numbers to work with for the first time. They knew the power of the gravity beam when it had left Pluto-Charon, and now they had measurements, from two locations, of its power, intensity, wave shape and frequency at arrival—in effect giving them hard data on how the beam had been affected as it moved through space.
The data not only confirmed that Larry’s gravity beam was real, it also told volumes about the nature of gravity itself—and about how it interacted with the fabric of space-time, about the matter and the gravity fields it passed through and near, how it affected and was affected by the velocity of the objects it encountered. Hernandez was able to prove that gravity was subject to Doppler effects. That was no great surprise; theory had predicted it. But for the first time the matter was settled, confirmed, and not a mere assumption.
There was a lesson in there, and somewhere in the middle of the tumult that day, Larry spotted it: Before you can fully understand a force of nature, you must be able to manipulate it. Never before had scientists been able to fiddle with gravity, in effect turn it on and off to see what would happen. Now they could, and the floodgates were open. In that first four hours they learned more about gravity than all of humanity had learned in all history.
And they had some power to play with, too. That helped. Science always needed more power than nature conveniently provided. How far would humans have gotten in the study of magnetism if all they had been allowed to work with was Earth’s natural magnetic fields, and the occasional lodestone?