Hiram McGillicutty imagined himself as accepting his lot philosophically—though no one else on the station would ever describe his attitude in such terms. Most of them would come up with arrogant, or self-absorbed.
But today was different. Today this was his station, thanks to those bad boys on Pluto. McGillicutty chuckled under his breath, shook his shaggy head, and bared his snaggled teeth in a rueful grin. He had seen the prelim data from Ganymede and Titan. What a stunt the gravity boys were pulling!
He checked the sequencer clock and worked out the speed-of-light delay. According to the experiment plan Pluto had transmitted, the gravity beam should have started targeting Venus just over five and a half hours ago. So if the experiment was indeed running on schedule, the gravity beam should be arriving any—
“Jesus jumping Christ willya lookit that!” he cried. Hiram McGillicutty was of an excitable sort, but for once he would seem to be entitled. The gravity-wave meter, a piece of incredibly delicate hardware that had rarely given off so much as a quiver, was now spiking high, slamming into the high end of the scale. McGillicutty adjusted the graphic display scale by a factor of a hundred.
Marcia MacDougal shook her head in wonderment. It was real. After hundreds of years as a minor curiosity— a sideshow in the world of high-energy physics—gravitic research was suddenly coming alive, right before her very eyes.
“It’s a gravity beam,” someone said. “Shouldn’t we feel heavier, or lighter, or something? I don’t feel a thing.”
“How powerful is that beam?” one of the biologists asked, a bit nervously. “It’s not going to start pulling us toward Pluto, is it?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” McGillicutty explained testily. “What they’ve managed to do—somehow, God only knows how—is use a phase relation to make half the wave repulse instead of attract. The effect cancels itself out overall. And the beam is damn weak before it gets here.”
McGillicutty licked his lips greedily. “God I’d love to know how they do it. But if they’ve figured out how to manipulate gravity fields that well, they can’t be more than a few steps from true gravity control—if they could fiddle the harmonics somehow and establish a standing wave front—they could create whatever gravity field they wanted.”
“That’s the sort of little ‘if’ that takes another hundred years to crack,” Marcia said. “I’d bet gravity waves are just a parlor trick for a long, long time.”
“Maybe,” McGillicutty said. “But as parlor tricks go, this is a pretty major one. Gravity waves ought to provide a whole new way of looking at the Universe. Matter should be practically transparent to gee waves! Tune the waves right, and we ought to be able to use them to see right through the Sun and the planets, look down into them as deep as we want. Put a gee-wave sender on one side of Venus, and a detector on the other, and we’d be able to examine its internal structure in real time. Like radar. There are big times ahead. Big times.”
“For the gravity crowd,” Chenlaw said mournfully. “The research pie is getting mighty small. So what do you think will happen to our funding if this Ring gets sexy and starts gobbling up all the money? What we have to do is come up with a way to get involved in gravity if we want to see a dime.”
Marcia glanced up at the sequence clock. “Eight more minutes here. Then they switch the beam to Earth.” She watched her displays, and wondered what the new world would be like.
McGillicutty was also glad when the beam shifted off Venus.
Oh, those ten minutes when the beam had been directed at them, at VISOR, those were blissful, fantastic. But they were almost too much. The signal was so powerful it threatened to overwhelm his instruments. But now he could direct his gear at a remote target, at Earth. No one had ever done this sort of sensing before. It was an entirely different challenge, an entirely different opportunity.
You needed some range before you gained any perspective. Besides, there were all the secondary effects you could only observe at range. How did the gee waves warp radio? Lightwaves? In theory, modulated gravity waves should alternately blueshift and redshift electromagnetic radiation. Would that really happen? And what effect would the beam have on existing and interacting gravity sources? Would there be induced resonance waves in the Earth-Moon system’s gravity patterns?
McGillicutty wanted to know it all. That in itself was nothing new—he spent his entire life, every waking minute, wanting to know all the answers. What was different about today was that he was getting the chance to find out.
Still, he would have to move fast to get it. The gravity-wave beam had shifted off Venus only a few minutes ago. He had only about five minutes to reorient the station’s sensors toward Earth and reconfigure them for distant sensing. Fortunately, the rest of the staff was there to assist him on the job.
He checked the main control board one more time. A few of the instruments still weren’t in position. “Marcia, swivel in that damn boom antenna. We’ll need the twenty-one-centimeter band on this job. I want to see if there’s any ripple in the neutral hydrogen band.”
“Yes sir, boss. Right away boss. You bet, boss,” Marcia growled as she activated the antenna system. Personally, she could not imagine a more useless task than watching the twenty-one-centimeter band. It seemed to her that twenty-one centimeters never showed anything.
McGillicutty wanted to see if the gravity wave would distort space-time enough to show a ripple in the carrier.
So what, either way? She watched as the indicator showed the antenna directing itself at Earth. She switched her monitor to oscilloscope mode. Yep, there it was. Twenty-one centimeters was showing a virtually flat carrier wave, as usual. She powered up the audio gain and was rewarded with a faint hiss. “Ready to go, boss,” she said, “and I’m real excited about it.”
“Good,” McGillicutty said, completely missing the sarcasm. “Chenlaw, what’s with the microwave receiver? I need it now, not next week!”
“For God’s sake, Hiram, give me more than thirty seconds.”
“Why?” McGillicutty asked. “It shouldn’t take anywhere near that long to swing it around twenty degrees.”
“I have to swing it around the other way, through three hundred forty degrees, or point it straight at the power generators as it slews around,” Chenlaw replied through clenched teeth. “Do you want it blown out when it gets into position?”
But McGillicutty wasn’t even listening anymore. He was on the intercom to one of the other labs, chattering on about neutrino backscatter. Chenlaw turned and shook her head at Marcia. Marcia shrugged back. What could you do? The man was utterly impossible.
“Okay, boys and girls,” McGillicutty said in a loud, cheerful voice, patently unaware how many of his co-workers wanted to strangle him. He checked his chronometers. “Earth should be under the beam already, and has been for seven minutes. The event radius is moving toward us. Stand by to receive results data in three minutes—mark! All instruments and recorders should be operating now to establish pre-event background levels.”