It had been a long and lonely wait on Pluto. One hundred twenty people at the edge of the Solar System, struggling to clean up after the geniuses. The science staff had been working around the clock, trying to keep up with the torrents of gravities data pouring in. They had learned a great deal—in fact, too much. There had been no time to assimilate any of the information, to ponder it. As soon as one new discovery was made, a dozen new and urgent mysteries would pop up, requiring more urgent overtime and study.
And now it could only get harder. Chao and Raphael were returning.
There! A flare of brightness halfway across the sky from Charon and the Ring. Jane Webling watched as the Nenya performed her final braking burn.
But Webling frowned. There was something strange about that burn. She pulled out her notepack. Strange indeed. The Nenya was not dropping into her normal parking orbit, but instead placing herself into the bary-center of the Pluto-Charon system. The barycenter was the balance point, the center of gravity for the whole Pluto-Charon system, the point in space around which both planet and satellite rotated.
But the Nenya was never placed in the barycenter, for the very good reason that it could interfere with communication between the Ring and the Gravities Station. It only made sense if the Ring was to be controlled from the ship, instead of the Station.
But why the hell would they need to run the Ring from there? And why hadn’t the situation been explained? Jane Webling found a seat in the deserted observation dome and sat down. What the hell was Larry Chao hoping to accomplish here? She knew the official explanation, that Larry hoped to use the Ring to control the Lunar Wheel, and thus shut down the Charonian attack on the Solar System.
Ironically, the Charonian Landers had beat the Nenya home. The first of them had arrived a few days ago. Now there were dozens of the huge things, dotting the surface of Pluto and Charon, home to their namesake.
The Nenya had been gone a long time, stranding the entire staff in the cold and the dark. It was a quite distinct relief to have her back home again. They had a way out again—even if home, if Earth, was no longer there.
With Larry, Dr. Raphael, and Sondra Berghoff away, she was the only scientist at the Gravities Research Station who fully understood Larry’s work. In order to take over the Wheel, the Ring would have to send it a more powerful signal than the Dyson Sphere was sending. The Ring of Charon did not have more than a tiny fraction of the power needed to overcome the Sphere.
Therefore if Larry was not lying to everyone, he was at least misleading them. Which suggested he was up to something.
But what, and why? It was a question of some importance. After all, here was a young man who had acted on his own, in secret, once before—and torn the Solar System apart. She could produce proofs, demonstrate to the other scientists that Larry’s stated plan of action was impossible. Until Raphael returned a few hours from now, she was the acting director of the station. And if she could demonstrate that Raphael was part of the plot, then she would have every right and duty to prevent him from taking over the job again. And perhaps she ought to clap the two of them in irons.
Yes, beyond question, there were many things she could do. But should she do them? What did Larry intend?
Jane Webling did not know Larry well, but she had gotten a good look at his character in those chaotic first days after Earth vanished. He had seemed a very open and decent young man under incredible pressure. She had sensed nothing venal in him, nothing underhanded.
No, the most dangerous possibility was that he meant well, but had some plan, some scheme in mind he knew would not be permitted, some idea he thought would be the answer to everything and solve all their problems. Under cover of the experiment he professed to be running, he would instead do whatever it was he did not wish anyone to know about.
In other words, Webling concluded, he would do exactly what had gotten them all into this mess in the first place, when he had suborned her graser experiment and fired that damned beam at Earth.
And he had meant well then, too.
Damn it! What the hell was she supposed to do?
Think. Think. That was what she had to do. All right then. Larry was up to something, because his stated plan could not possibly work, and he knew it. However, he meant to do something that would do what the stated plan was meant to do: stop the Charonian attack on the Solar System.
And no doubt he was hiding his real plan because no one would let him near the Ring if they knew what he was really scheming.
And then she figured it out. She pulled out her notepack, ran through a series of calculations, and got the answers she knew she would get. She stared at them, utterly shocked that Larry would do such a thing.
She knew. She knew the answer. There was no other possible explanation.
But that left her with her original problem. What was she going to do about it?
She sat there, alone, with only Charon and the Ring bulking in the sky for company, and thought for a cold and lonely time. Larry Chao, for whatever reason—choice, necessity, guilt, panic, mischievousness or a cold, hard, adult feeling of responsibility, was playing God with the survival of the Solar System. Again. And by second-guessing him, deciding what to do about it, she found herself playing a little God all by herself. Suppose, strange and impossible as it seemed, Larry had it right, and she moved to stop him? Or suppose he were wildly, disastrously wrong, and she stood by and did nothing?
The Nenya was meant to double as a bare-bones, extremely barren backup to the station in an emergency— and this situation certainly qualified. The ship could house the entire staff, albeit under rather Spartan and crowded conditions. With the external tanks installed on the Moon, she could begin taking on passengers immediately, without reconverting the ship first. But was that the right choice?
Jane Webling knew she had to choose, and time was running out. At last she stood up, returned to the Director’s office, and used the intercom station there to give her orders. She could have done it anywhere on the station, but even the modest trapping of an office made her feel as if she had more authority.
Pushing the intercom button, she drew in her breath, and spoke as slowly and clearly as she could, resisting the temptation to blurt her words out all at once.
“This is Acting Director Webling,” she said. “All personnel are to prepare for the immediate and permanent evacuation of this station. Pack your personal items and prepare copies of all data for transfer to the Nenya. Work as quickly as you can, take only what you need— and work on the assumption that we are never coming back.”
She shut down the intercom.
“Because we never can come back,” she whispered. The station wasn’t going to be there very long, a very high price to pay—but if she understood the situation, that station’s destruction would be the cheapest of prices.
Or should she instead call it a down payment?
For if the race survived, humanity would be paying the balance on this bill for a long, long time.
Another feature to the Nenya’s design that reflected its purpose as a backup: the ship had a Ring control room, a duplicate of the four control rooms on the station. Larry, unaware of the station evacuation, sat there, working a simulation of his plan. It ought to work. All of it ought to work. And maybe that was what troubled him. Each step in the sequence seemed logical, sensible. But when he stepped back and looked at the entirety, it seemed ridiculous. Insane.