I mean, they can argue about whether Pluto or those other icy bodies should be considered planets. But from the gravitational flux I’d detected, this one had to be a real, sizeable planet. Bigger than Earth, most likely.
Astronomers had been searching for Planet X since before Percival Lowell’s time, but I had worked out exactly where it should be, me and the CalTech/MIT/Osaka linked computers. And Sam Gunn had furnished the money and the ship to go out and find it.
Only, it wasn’t there.
“It’s gotta be there.” Sam orbited past me again.”Gotta be.”
The first time I met Sam, I thought he was nuts. Chunky little guy. Hair like a nest of rusted wire. Darting, probing eyes. Kind of shifty. The eyes of a politician, maybe, or a confidence man.
“Fly out there?” I had asked him. “Why not just rent time on an orbital telescope, or use the lunar observa—”
“To claim it, egghead!” Sam had snapped. “A whole planet. I want it.”
He couldn’t have been that dumb, I thought. He’d amassed several fortunes, and lost all but the latest one. To fly out beyond Pluto would cost every penny he had, and more.
“You can’t claim a planet,” I explained patiently. “International agreements from back in …”
“Puke on international agreements!” he shouted. “I’m not a national government. I’m S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. And a whole planet’s gotta be worth a fortune.”
Sam had a reputation for shady schemes, but I couldn’t for the life of me see how he planned to profit from claiming Planet X. Nor any reason for me to leave my home and job at the university to go out to the end of the solar system with him.
I didn’t reckon on Sam’s persuasiveness. He didn’t have a silver tongue. Far from it. His language was more often crude, even obscene, rather than eloquent. But he was a nonstop needier, wheedler, pleader, seducer. In the language of my forefathers, he was a nudge. His tongue didn’t have to be silver; it was heavy-duty, long-wearing, blister-proof, diamond-coated solid muscle.
So I found myself ducking through the hatch of the special ship he had commissioned. Only the two of us as crew; I was to do the navigating, while Sam did everything else, including the cooking. Before I could ask myself why I was doing this, I was being flattened into the acceleration couch as we roared out into the wild black yonder.
But Planet X wasn’t there.
Sam slowed down, puffing, until he was dangling right behind me, his feet half a meter off the floor. My softboots were locked in the foot restraints and still he barely came up to my height. He was wheezing, and I realized there was a lot of gray in his reddish hair. His face looked tired, old, eyes baggy and sad.
“Of all the eggheads in all the universities in all the solar system,” he groaned, “you’ve …”
Suddenly I realized what the instruments were telling me. I shouted, “It’s a black hole!”
“And I’m the tooth fairy.”
“No, really! It’s not a planet at all. It’s a black hole. Look!”
Sam snarled, “How in hell can I see something that’s invisible by definition?”
With trembling fingers I pointed to the gravitational flux meters and the high-energy detectors. We even went over to the optical telescope and bumped our heads together like Laurel and Hardy, trying to squint through the eyepiece together.
Nothing to see. Except a faint violet glow, the last visible remains of the thin interplanetary gas that was being sucked into the black hole on a one-way trip to oblivion.
It really was a black hole! The final grave of a star that had collapsed, God knows how many eons ago. A black hole! Practically in our backyard! And I had discovered it! Visions of the Nobel Prize made me giddy.
Sam sprang straight to the communications console and started tapping frantically at its keyboard, muttering about how he could rent time to astronomers to study the only black hole close enough to Earth to see firsthand.
“It’s worth a freakin’ fortune,” he chortled, his fingers racing along the keys like a concert pianist trying to do Chopin’s Minute Waltz in thirty seconds. “A dozen fortunes!”
He filed his claim and even gave the black hole a name: Einstein. I grinned and nodded agreement with his choice.
It took nearly eleven hours for Sam’s message to get to Earth, and another eleven for their reply to reach us. I spent the time studying Einstein while Sam proclaimed to the universe how he was going to build an orbiting hotel just outside Einstein’s event horizon and invent a new pastime for the danger nuts.
“Space surfing! A jetpack on your back and good old Einstein in front of you. See how close you can skim to the event horizon without getting sucked in! It’ll make billions!”
“Until somebody gets stretched into a bloody string of spaghetti,” I said. “That grav field out there is powerful, Sam, and I think it fluctuates….”
“All the better,” said Sam, clapping his hands like a kid in front of a Christmas tree. “Let a couple of the risk freaks kill themselves and all the others will come boiling out here like lemmings on migration.”
I shook my head in wonder.
When the comm signal finally chimed I was still trying to dope out the basic parameters of our black hole. Yes, I was thinking of Einstein as ours; that’s what being near Sam does to you.
His round little face went pugnacious the instant he saw the woman on the screen. I felt an entirely different reaction. She was beautiful, with thick platinum blonde hair and the kind of eyes that promised paradise.
But her voice was as cold as a robot’s. “Mr. Gunn, we meet again. Your claim has been noted and filed with the Interplanetary Astronautical Authority. In the meantime, I represent the creditors from your most recent bankruptcy. To date …”
She droned on while Sam’s face went from angry red to ashy grey. This far from Earth, all messages were one-way. You can’t hold a conversation with an eleven-hour wait between each transmission. The blonde went into infinite detail about how much money Sam owed, and to whom. Even though I was only half listening, I learned that our ship was not paid for, and my own university was suing Sam for taking my instrumentation without authorization!
Finally she smiled slightly and delivered the knockout. “Now Mr. Gunn—aside from all the above unpleasantness, it may interest you to realize that your claim to this alleged black hole is without merit or substance.”
Sam made a growl from deep in his throat.
“International law dating back to 1967 prohibits claiming sovereignty to any body found in space….”
“I’m not claiming sovereignty,” Sam snapped to the unhearing screen. “And this ain’t a body, it’s a black hole.”
She serenely continued,”… although it is allowed to claim the use of a body found in space, I’m afraid that the law clearly states that you must establish an operational facility on the body in question before such a claim will be recognized by the Interplanetary Astronautical Council.”
Sam snorted like a bull about to charge. Me, I thought about establishing an operational facility on the body attached to that incredibly beautiful face.
“So I’m afraid, my dear Mr. Gunn,” her smile widened to show dazzlingly perfect teeth, “that unless you establish an operational facility on your so-called black hole, your claim is worthless. And, oh yes! one more thing—an automated ship is on its way to you, filled with robot lawyers who will have authorization to take possession of your ship and all its equipment, in the name of your creditors. Good-bye. Have a nice day.”