Thus, from those points on the surface where Charon is visible at all, Charon hangs motionless in Pluto’s sky. The satellite is so close to the planet that it sits below the horizon from more than half the planet’s surface.
None of that mattered to Larry. He did not even notice the dark shadow of Charon brooding there, blotting out the stars. He had eyes for only one object in that sky.
Encircling Charon was the Ring, its running lights gleaming in the dark sky, a diadem of jewels set about Pluto’s moon. Sixteen hundred kilometers in diameter, the largest object ever built by humans, it girdled the tiny world of Charon.
Larry felt the wonder of it all steal over him again. It was a remarkable piece of engineering, no matter how much it cost. It was the reason so much time and treasure, so much effort, so many lives had been spent landing the Gravities Research Station on Pluto and making it operational. Compared to the cost of the Ring, the cost of placing the station on Pluto was pocket change. An orbital facility would have been cheaper, but the need for precise measurement forced them to operate the Ring from a planetary surface, a stabilized reference point.
The Ring was face-on to Pluto, showing a perfect circle around the gloom-dark gray of Charon, a gleaming band of gold about a gloomy, lumpen world, a world so small and light that it had never completely formed into a sphere. Indeed, its tidal lock with Pluto had distorted its shape, warping it into an egg-shaped thing, with one long end pointed at Pluto.
The Ring was the largest particle accelerator ever built—all but certainly the largest that ever would be built. Designed to probe the tiniest, most subtle intersections of matter and energy, it was so large and powerful that it had to be built here, on the borderlands of the Solar System. It was around Charon not only to escape the disturbing influence of the Sun’s radiation and the strong, interwoven gravity fields of the Inner System, but also to prevent its interfering with the inner worlds: it was capable of achieving enormous energies.
And, as Larry had proven once again tonight, it was capable of generating and manipulating the force of gravity.
No other machine ever built was capable of that. The ability to manipulate gravity should have been enough to keep the research station going. Basic research could be done here that would be impossible anywhere else.
But try convincing the funding people back at the U.N. Astrophysical Foundation. They were too focused on the pie-in-the-sky dreams of near-term gravity control.
Larry blamed Dr. Simon Raphael for that. When he had been appointed director, back when Larry was in elementary school, Raphael had made some pretty rash promises. Most of those damned artist’s conceptions were based on Raphael’s predictions of what would be possible once the research team on Pluto was able to solve the secret of gravity. Raphael had all but guaranteed a workable artificial gravity system—and now both he and the funding board were beginning to see that it wasn’t going to happen.
Up until tonight, the Ring of Charon hadn’t been able to maintain a gravity field of more than one gee, and even that was only ten meters across. Worse, the fields collapsed in milliseconds.
If, the U.N. Astrophysical Foundation asked, it took a piece of hardware 1,600 kilometers across to generate a puny, unstable gravity source a few meters across, and if even that giant generator was so delicate it had to be as far out from the Sun as Pluto in order to work at all, then what possible use could artificial gravity be? What conceivable purpose could gravity waves serve when they had to come from Pluto?
And Raphael wanted to go home. Everyone knew that. Larry Chao was very much afraid that the good doctor had figured out that the quickest way to do that was to shut the damn place down.
One million one hundred thousand gravities, sustained for thirty seconds. Larry stared harder at the Ring overhead and felt a thrill of pride. He had tweaked that monster’s tail, and forced that much power from it. Surely there could be no stronger argument in favor of staying on.
The Gravities Research Station was not at its best in the morning. Perhaps it was some holdover from the long-lost days when astronomers were Earthbound and forced to work at night.
Whatever the reason, mornings were not a pretty sight at the station. Maybe that was why Raphael scheduled science staff meetings for 0900. Maybe he enjoyed the sight of twenty or so science staff members grumbling and squinting in the morning. The hundred administrative, maintenance and technical staff workers were no doubt glad to miss them.
Dr. Simon Raphael sighed wearily as he pushed open the door to the conference room and sat down at the head of the table for this last full staff meeting. He echoed the chorus of greetings from the staff without really hearing them. He spread his papers out in front of him, relief and regret playing over him.
Strange, to be thinking in lasts already. The last meeting, the last experimental schedule to prepare, and then the last science summary report to prepare. Then time to pack up and download, power down and close up. Time to go home. Soon it would all be over and done with.
His hands clenched themselves into fists, and he forced them to relax, open out. Slowly, carefully, he lay his open hands palm down on the table. The voices fell silent around the table as the others waited for him to begin, but he ignored them. A few bold souls returned to their conversations. Low voices filled the room again. Raphael tried to stare a hole through a memo that sat on the table before him, a piece of paper full of words he didn’t care about.
There was something dull and angry deep inside him, a sullen thing sitting on his soul. A sullen something that had grown there, all but unnoticed, as the years had played themselves out.
It was hate: he knew that. Hatred and anger for all of it. For the station that might as well have been a prison, for the pointless chase after gravity control, for the waste of so much of his life in this fruitless quest, for his own failure. Hatred for the funding board that was forcing him to quit, anger at the people here around this table who were fool enough to have faith in him. Hatred for the damned frozen planet and the damned Ring that had sucked the life out of him and wrecked his career.
And hatred for the Knowledge Crash. If you could hate something that might not even have happened. That was perhaps the surpassing irony: no one was ever quite sure if the Knowledge Crash had even taken place. Some argued that the very state of being uncertain whether or not the Crash had occurred proved that it had.
Briefly put, the K-Crash theory was that Earth had reached the point where additional education, improved (but more expensive) technology, more and better information, and faster communications had negative value.
If, the theory went on, there had not been a Knowledge Crash, the state of the world information economy would be orderly enough to confirm the fact that it hadn’t happened. That chaos and uncertainty held such sway therefore demonstrated that the appropriate information wasn’t being handled properly. QED, the Crash was real.
An economic collapse had come, that much was certain. Now that the economy was a mess, learned economists were pointing quite precisely at this point in the graph, or that part of the table, or that stage in the actuarial tables to explain why. Everyone could predict it, now that it had happened, and there were as many theories as predictions. The Knowledge Crash was merely the most popular idea.