Size for size, nature’s force generators were not very strong or efficient. It takes a whole thunderstorm to produce lightning, something as huge as Earth to create a natural one-gee field, a mass the size of the Sun to start fusion. Now humans could match all those power levels, or at least come close, using much smaller devices.
It was not a time for contemplation. Still the messages came, from Ganymede and Titan, informing that VISOR and JPL had been advised. Events were happening too rapidly, over too great a span of distance.
Larry imagined the radio and laser signals that must be crisscrossing the Inner System, chasing each other, sending new information that was old by the time it arrived. By now, as word was arriving at Pluto from Titan, saying that Titan had advised Earth—by now Earth had already received the gravity beam.
JPL would send a message as soon as someone there knew what was up. That was the signal to watch for. Larry watched the clocks and calculated the signal delay a dozen times over. Twenty minutes before a return signal from Earth could possibly arrive, he stood up and stretched. “Look,” he said, “there’s a lot more to cover, but we should be hearing from JPL soon, and I want to be in the dome when the message comes.”
With a renewed gabble of voices, the entire group migrated back to the dome. After all, everyone else wanted to see the message arrive as well. This discovery was going to save their jobs as well. Larry managed to duck away long enough to sneak back to his quarters, grab his toilet kit, go to the head and freshen up a bit. This was his second day more or less without sleep. If he couldn’t have rest, he could at least have a two-minute shower and a shave.
By the time he arrived at the dome, a few minutes before Earth was due to check in, the show had already begun. The lights had been dimmed in the dome, and the stars gleamed forth overhead. Charon and the mighty wheel of the Ring dominated the sky.
Larry could not look up at that sight without being inspired. That tool, that device, one of the mightiest generators ever made, and he had put it to use, commanded it toward a breakthrough.
Larry moved carefully into the darkened room, waited for his eyes to adjust, and looked around. The comm staff had been at work, rigging a series of large view screens at one side of the dome and rearranging the chairs to face the screens. One screen showed a countdown clock, displaying the time remaining until the receipt-of-beam signal could arrive from Earth. The second display was clicking through screen after screen of results and reports already derived from the experiment, with data from Titan, Ganymede and VISOR.
Larry realized that he must have missed the Venusian signal while he was in the shower. The third screen showed the dome telescope’s view of the Earth-Moon system, the two planets glowing like fat stars in the firmament. But it was the fourth screen that surprised Larry. It showed a handsome young man, nattily dressed, talking into the camera. An ID line across the bottom said he was Wolf Bernhardt, the spokesman for JPL, talking on a live feed. Given the expense and difficulty of punching a television signal through to Pluto, that in itself told Larry that the folks back home were taking him seriously.
Larry ducked his way into the rows and found an empty seat next to Sondra. “You haven’t missed much,” she told him in a stage whisper that had to carry halfway across the room. “Right now this guy is talking about the results from Venus.”
Larry nodded vaguely and glanced at the countdown clock. Three minutes to go. There was a slight stir from the other side of the dome. Larry glanced over and saw Dr. Simon Raphael coming in. Raphael paused at the doorway and looked around. Their eyes locked for a moment.
Larry’s heart sank, just the way it had back in grade school when the principal’s gimlet eyes bored into him. Justly or unjustly, fairly or not, Larry the child and Larry the adult both knew what that look meant. He was in trouble. Again. Still. Forever. Raphael was going to find some way of punishing him.
Larry thought again of Raphael’s threat to take “every cent” of the experiment’s cost out of his pay. That look told Larry that the threat was still good. Raphael would find some way of making it stick. And making it hurt. If not for punishment, then for revenge.
Raphael broke eye contact and moved into the room, sidling along the far wall, to watch the action from as far away as possible.
Larry breathed a sigh of relief. Raphael was not going to cause a scene just now. This moment, here and now would belong to Larry. That was something.
The beam shifted off the second planet, focusing on the third. Inevitably, the Observer was caught in the spill-over. The gravity beam passed through the solid mass of the Moon like light through glass. But if the Moon was transparent to gravity waves, the Observer was not. Lurking far beneath the Moon’s surface, a huge torus girdling the satellite’s core, the Observer shuddered as the beam played over it.
And that was the signal, the alert, the command it had been born and built to receive.
It responded as reflexively as a human jerking away from an electric shock, as instinctively as a lover at the moment of climax. There was no possibility of controlling the response. The beam set off an incredibly rapid chain of events far outside the control of what served as higher consciousness for the Observer.
Power long stored was drawn in, channeled, focused. But not enough power for the job at hand, merely enough to bring the Link up to full power. The Observer felt a surge of irrepressible pleasure as half-forgotten power poured through the new-born hole in space. The long-dormant Link bloomed back to life.
Power. Now it had the power. An overwhelming sense, a potency, of potential, of mission and purpose coursed through its being. Now. Now was the time for its destiny.
Now it could turn its attentions toward Earth.
The Observer drew massive, surging power through the Link and grabbed.
Larry turned his attention back to the countdown clock and realized with a start that there were only a few seconds left. He started listening to the announcer. “We have received further confirmation of a powerful signal from Venus. The beam moved off Venus ninety seconds ago in real time, and we are awaiting it here. We are standing by for scheduled reception of your beam at Earth.” There was a rustle of anticipation in the room. This was it, not only for Larry, not only for the experiment, but for the whole station.
If JPL was suitably impressed, the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation would be impressed. And if the UNAF was impressed, there was no way they could shut down the Gravities Research Station. At least that was what Larry hoped.
The announcer looked away from the camera toward a timer display on his desk. “Twenty seconds now,” he said, obviously relishing the moment.
Larry swallowed hard and leaned forward in his seat. Silly to be nervous, silly to be excited. He knew it had worked. But the seconds were sliding away.
“T minus five, four, three, two, one, zero. We are getting the first—”
The commlink from JPL went dead.
In the middle of view screen three, Earth flashed out of existence.
The Moon hung in the telescope view.
Alone.