The Observer felt something.
Brief, far-off, tantalizing. Weak, fleeting. But unquestionably, the feeling was there. For the first time in uncounted years, it felt the touch it had awaited.
The Observer did not sense with vision, and the energy was not light, but the Observer’s sensations were analogous to vision. It had been in standby, in watchkeeping mode, for a long time. The something it felt was, to it, a brilliant pinpoint in the darkness, a bright but distant beacon. It correctly interpreted this to mean the source was a small, intensely powerful point of energy at great distance.
The Observer became excited. This was the signal it had waited for for so long.
And yet not precisely the signal. Not powerful enough, not well directed enough. The Observer backed down, calmed itself.
It longed to respond, to do the thing it had been bred and built to do, but the signal stimulus Was not strong enough. It was under the rigid control of what, for lack of a better term, might be called its instincts, or perhaps its programming—and it had no discretion, whatsoever in choosing to respond or not. It had to respond to precisely the right stimulus, and not to any other.
A quiver of emotion played over it as it struggled against its inborn restraints.
But now was not the time. Not yet.
At least, not the time for action. But certainly the time to awaken, and watch more closely. Perhaps the moment for action was close.
It directed its senses toward the source of the power, and settled in to watch carefully.
Ten minutes after the run was over, Larry was out in the corridor, bone weary and feeling very much alone. The excitement of a new idea, the thrill of the chase, was starting to fade away, now that the idea had worked. Larry always felt a letdown after a victory.
Perhaps that was because even his greatest victories were hard to explain. In the world of subatomic physics, the challenges were so obscure, the solutions so tiny and intricate, that it was almost impossible for Larry to discuss them with anyone outside the field. For that matter, Larry was working so far out on the edge of theory he had trouble talking shop with most people in the field.
The price you pay for genius, he thought to himself with a silent, self-deprecating laugh. Larry was twenty-five, and starting to feel a bit long in the tooth for a boy wonder. He looked younger than his age, and the Chinese half of his ancestry showed in his face far more than the Irish half. He was a short, slender, delicate-looking young man. His skin was pale, his straight black hair cut short, his almond eyes wide and expressive. He was one of the few people aboard the station who occasionally chose to wear the standard-issue coveralls instead of his own clothes. The gray coveralls were a bit too large for him, and made him seem younger and smaller than he was. His fondness at other times for Hawaiian shirts didn’t help him seem more mature. It never occurred to Larry that his appearance helped make others underestimate him.
He planted his slippered feet carefully on the Velcro carpet and started walking. Pluto’s gravity, only four percent of Earth’s, was tricky when you were tired. The Gravities Research Station would be an ideal place to put artificial gravity to use, if such a fairy-tale technology were ever possible.
Fat chance of that—but the popular press had latched on to the everyday use of artificial gravity as one of the reasons for funding the station in the first place. There had been all sorts of imaginative “artist’s conceptions” put about, of a research station floating on Jupiter’s surface, hovering on antigravity, of full-gravity space habitats that did not have to spin. Those were at best far-off dreams, at worst spectacular bits of nonsense that made everyone look foolish as it became obvious they were all impossible.
The researchers still hadn’t learned to generate a stable point-source gravity field yet. How could they hope to float a shielded one-gee field in Jupiter’s atmosphere?
Nonsensical though the idea might be, Larry would have welcomed an artificial gee field under his feet just then. He was thoroughly sick of shoes with Velcro. Four-percent gravity was a nuisance, combining the worst features of zero gee and full gravity, without the merits of either. In zero gee you couldn’t fall down; in a decent gee field, your feet stayed under you. Neither was true here.
Larry felt a wave of exhaustion sweep through him. He was suddenly much aware that it was three-thirty in the morning and he was billions of kilometers from home. Unbidden, the image of his hometown street back in Scranton, Pennsylvania, popped into his head. A vague depression sank down on him.
It was when he was deep in the problem that he felt happy. Solutions meant the game was over. It was like the math problems back at school. From grade school, to high school, to college and grad school, math had been his special love. Algebra, trig, calculus, and beyond. Larry had gobbled them all up. The first time he demonstrated a proof, or calculated a function, it was fun, challenging. Puzzlement would give way to understanding and triumph. But afterwards—afterwards the problems were dead to him, static, unchanging. He knew how they worked. From then on, working on that whole type of problem was anticlimactic, redundant. It was as if he were condemned to reading the same mystery novel over and over again, when he already knew the ending.
While the rest of his classmates would struggle through example after example, practicing their skills, he would be bored, rattling through the second problem, and the third, and hundredth, at record speed, while the other kids dragged behind.
Only when the professor deemed it time to move on to the next kind of problem could Larry experience even a new, brief moment of excitement.
Postgrad school and the field of high-energy physics had given him a new freedom, a place where all the problems were new, not only to him, but to everyone. There was no longer the slightly mocking knowledge that the answers were there to be found in the back of the book. But still, when he cracked the problem at hand, the letdown came.
Larry was not an introspective person, and even spotting such an obvious pattern in his behavior was an accomplishment for him. But before anyone got sent to Pluto, the psychiatrists worked hard to make that person more aware of how the mind worked. Put a bit less formally, they made damn sure that you didn’t drive yourself crazy on Pluto. People kept a close eye on sanity on Pluto, watching it the way a man in his pressure suit kept an eye on his air supply.
A tiny leak in the suit could be fatal, and just so with the human mind on Pluto. One tiny weakness, one microscopic break in the armor between you and the cold and the dark, was all it took to leave good men and women watching helplessly as their own sanity dribbled away, evaporating out into the frozen wastes.
Sanity was a scarce commodity on Pluto, easily used up, carefully rationed. The oppressive sense of isolation—of being trapped in this remote place, locked away with 120 other edgy souls, with no escape possible—that was what gnawed at reason.
Not just the grimness of the planet but the knowledge that there was no way home, for months or years at a time, drew nightmares close to so many souls here.