“But—”
“But me no buts, Larry. When they see those figures coming after the shutdown announcement, everyone will assume you cooked them up to cancel the shutdown. If we release them now, at least there’ll be the argument that you wouldn’t have had the time to fabricate the figures. The longer you wait the weaker that argument will get.”
“But those figures are right,” Larry objected. “They’re not faked.”
“I know that, and you know that—but who else will buy it? These figures are five hundred thousand times larger than they ought to be. Use Occam’s razor. What’s the simplest explanation—a perfectly timed breakthrough, or a fraud?”
Larry thought for a moment, then grabbed his note-pack and typed in a series of commands. For a long moment, there was no sound in the little room but the low chuckle of the keyboard. Sondra stared intently at Larry, and she realized that her heart was racing, that sweat had broken out on her forehead.
I’m scared, she told herself, wondering what in the world there was to be frightened of.
And then the answer came to her. She was scared of the power Larry had found. He had stabilized it across a microscopic volume, and only for a few seconds. But inside that tiny time and space, he had produced a gravity field a thousand times more powerful than the Sun’s. He had produced force great enough to crush whole worlds.
Surely that should be enough to frighten anyone.
I’m coming home, Jessie. Home. Simon Raphael set down his old-fashioned pen and felt his eyes mist over for a moment. The foolish tears of an old man. But that didn’t matter. No need to be ashamed. That was the whole point of the journal, of course. To let his emotions out in private, where they could do no harm. To tell everything to the one woman he had ever loved.
There were times, many of them, when he questioned the wisdom, indeed the sanity, of writing his journal down in the form of letters to his dead wife. But sanity was in short supply on Pluto. Best not to spend his hoarded supply on private thoughts. Best to have it in reserve for his dealings with the others.
The final notice came by lasergram last night, he wrote. Soon, soon now, I will walk again under an open blue sky. Soon, once again, I shall visit you. Her grave was a lovely place, nestled into the side of a quiet hillside, looking down on the green fields of Shenandoah Valley, looking out over the cool uplands of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I will leave this place and come home to you.
He set down his pen, sighed, and closed his eyes. He imagined that he could smell the cool forest air wafted over the valley. It was incredible to him that others would chose to stay here. Fantastic that they would struggle to find reasons to stay. Even make them up. Perhaps this boy Chao seriously thought he had discovered something worthwhile. Perhaps it was not deliberate fraud.
Too bad. The moment was past for wasting time on harebrained theories.
Raphael knew Chao was wrong. Chao could not have found anything, for there was nothing to find. Gravity research was a dead end. That, when all was said and done, was Simon Raphael’s reason for giving up.
He smiled, a wan and thin creasing of his lips, and took up his pen again. I feel no regret in leaving here, he wrote. I have done all I could, tried as hard as I might. Now there is nothing left but to remember what W. C. Fields said. Jessie had always loved the ancient comedy films, even if Raphael himself had not. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then give up. No sense being a damn fool about it.”
CHAPTER THREE
From Pawn to Player
The observer’s slumbers, heretofore measured in unbroken millennia, were now irrevocably disturbed. Rest, sleep were not to be. That small ray of hope would not be stilled. The Observer stirred restlessly, unable to ignore any longer the tantalizing energies it felt.
Something was happening in the depths of space. Now that it had been awakened by the not-quite-correct signal, its sensitivity was increased. It could detect many faint twitches and whispers emanating from the far reaches of the Solar System, from a source moving slowly in a distant orbit.
It formed a first theory, though the process by which it did so could not precisely be called thinking. Rather, it was a memory search, an attempt to match new input against the results of previous experience.
It examined its heritage memory, calling forth not only its own lengthy, if somewhat uneventful, experience, but the recollections of all its forebears. It found a circumstance that came close to matching the present one, in the life of a distant ancestor. Perhaps the results of that ancient event could provide an explanation for the current odd situation.
With something like a pang of disappointment, it played back the outcome of the old event. If that precedent was a guide, then this flurry of gravity signals was nothing more than one of its own group malfunctioning, erroneously radiating random gravity signals.
To set its conclusions in two human analogs, each useful and neither entirely accurate, it conjectured that an alternate phenotype of its own genotype had taken ill. Or else that a distant subsystem, another component of the same machine of which it was apart, had broken down.
Was perhaps one of its own breed orbiting in that space? It consulted its memory store and found the scans relating to that part of the sky.
It had expected to find a small, asteroid-sized body reported as orbiting there, another subtype of its breed placed in orbit. To its utter shock, it instead discovered records of a natural body, a frozen planet, accompanied by an outsized moon.
A planetary body emitting modulated gravity waves? That could not be. This was outside not only its own experience, but beyond any circumstance any of its kind had ever reported. Its denial of the situation went beyond any human ability to gainsay a set of facts. In the Observer’s universe, if it had not happened before, it was physically impossible for it to happen now.
The anomaly must be investigated. It focused its senses as precisely as possible, examining the target planet.
Further shock. Insupportable. The planet’s satellite now sported a ring, quite unrecorded in memory store. A ring flickering intermittently with every sort of energy.
A ring that might have been the Observer’s own twin.
Larry sat outside Raphael’s office, sweating bullets. The “invitation” to meet with the station head immediately had come a half hour ago, but Raphael seemed to want his rebellious underling to cool his heels for a while before being granted an audience.
Larry knitted his fingers together nervously. He had known what he was doing when he ran his million-gee experiment. That was physics, natural law, controlled and understandable. Once inspiration hit, once he could see the answer and set up the run properly—then of course it would work. It was inevitable. His experiment could no more help working than the Sun could help coming up in the morning.
But the human commotion his experiment had set off— that he did not understand at all. Four hours after his summary report had hit the station’s datanet, the whole station was turned upside down.