The screen went blank.
Sam gave a screech that would make an ax-murderer shudder and flung himself at the dead screen. He bounced off and scooted weightlessly around the control center again, gibbering, jabbering, screaming insults and obscenities at the blonde, the IAA, the whole solar system in general, and all the lawyers on Earth in particular.
“I’ll show ’em!” he raged. “I’ll show ’em all!”
I stayed close to my instruments—actually, they were still the university’s instruments, I guess.
After God knows how many orbits around the control center, screaming and raging, Sam propelled himself toward the hatch in the floor that led down to the equipment bay.
“They want an operational facility, they’ll get an operational facility!”
I wrenched my feet free so fast I twisted an ankle, and went diving after him.
“Sam, what the hell are you thinking of?”
He was already unlocking the hatch of our EVA scooter, a little one-man utility craft with a big bubble canopy and so many extensible arms it looked like a metal spider.
“I’m gonna pop an instrument pod down Einstein’s throat. That’s gonna be our operational facility.”
“But it’ll just disappear into the black hole!”
“So what?”
“It won’t be an operational facility.”
“How do you know what it’ll be doing inside the event horizon? The gravity field will stretch out its signals, won’t it?”
“Theoretically,” I answered.
“Then we’ll be getting signals from the probe for years, right? Even after it goes past the event horizon.”
“I guess so. But that doesn’t prove the probe will be operating inside the black hole, Sam.”
“If the mother-humping lawyers want to prove that it’s not working, let ’em jump into the black hole after it. And kiss my ass on the way down!”
I argued with him for more than an hour while he got the instrument pod together and revved up the EVA craft. What he wanted to do was dangerous. Maybe adventure freaks would like to skim around the event horizon of a black hole. Me, I don’t feel really safe unless there’s good California soil shaking beneath my feet.
But Sam would not be denied. Maybe he was a danger freak himself. Maybe he was desperate for the money he thought he could make. Maybe he just wanted to screw all the lawyers on Earth, especially that blonde.
He didn’t even put on a pressure suit. He just clambered up into the cockpit of the EVA craft, slammed its hatch, and worked one of its spidery arms to pick up the instrument pod.
Reluctantly I went back to the control center to monitor Sam’s mission.
“Stay well clear of the event horizon,” I warned him over the radio. “I don’t know enough about Einstein to give you firm parameters….”
Sam was no fool. He listened to my instructions. He released the instruments well clear of the event horizon. But the pod just orbited around the faint violet haze that marked Einstein’s position. It didn’t go spiraling into it.
“Goddam mother-humping no-good son of a lawyer!”
Sam jockeyed the EVA craft into a matching orbit and gave the pod a push inward. Not enough. Then another, swearing a blue streak every instant.
“That’s close enough,” I yelled into the microphone, sweating bullets. “The event horizon fluctuates, Sam. You mustn’t…”
I swear the black hole reached out and grabbed him. The event horizon sort of burped and engulfed Sam’s craft. I know it’s impossible, but that’s what happened.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Heyyyyyy!”
According to everything we knew about black holes up to that moment, Sam was being squeezed by Einstein’s immense gravitational forces, torn apart, crushed, mashed, squashed, pulverized.
“What’s going onnnn?” Sam’s radio voice stretched out eerily, like in an echo chamber.
“What’s going on?” I asked back.
“It’s like sliding down a chuuute!”
“You’re not being pulled apart?”
“Hell nooo! But I can’t see anything. Like falling down an elevator shaaaft!”
Sam should have been crushed. But he wasn’t. His radio messages were being stretched out, but apparently he himself was not. He was falling into the black hole on a one-way trip, swallowed alive.
I started to laugh. We had named the black hole exactly right. Inside the event horizon space-time was being warped, all right. But Sam was now part of that continuum and to him, everything seemed normal. Our universe, the one we’re in, would have seemed weirdly distorted to him if he could see it.
It had all been there in old Albert’s equations all along, if we had only had the sense enough to realize it.
Sam Gunn, feisty, foulmouthed, womanizing, fast-talking Sam Gunn had discovered a shortcut to the stars, a space-time warp that one day would allow us to get around the limits of speed-of-light travel. That black hole was not a dead-end route to oblivion; it was a space-time warp that opened somewhere/somewhen else in the universe. Or maybe in another universe altogether.
But it was a one-way route.
Sam gave his life to his discovery. He was on a one-way trip to God knows where. Maybe there’d be kindly aliens at the other end of the warp to greet him and give him their version of the Nobel Prize.
I got the terrestrial Nobel, of course. And now I’m heading up an enormous team of scientists who’re studying Einstein and trying to figure out how to put black hole warps to practical use.
And Sam? Who knows where he is?
But you can still hear him. Thanks to Einstein’s time-stretching effects, you can hear Sam swearing and cussing every moment, all the way down that long, long slide to whatever’s on the other side of the warp.
And according to Einstein (Albert), we’ll be able to hear Sam yelling forever. Forever.
Surprise, Surprise
Jade leaned back in the yielding warmth of the form-shaping chair, suddenly weary and drained. She turned off the computer on her lap. The interview with Professor Goodman was on its way to Selene. The final interview. Her long trek after Sam Gunn’s story was at last finished.
She felt as if she had been struggling all her life to reach the top of a mountain, and now that she had done it, there was nothing to see, nothing more to do. The challenge had been met, and now she was surrounded by emptiness. There was no feeling of triumph, or even accomplishment. She was merely tired and empty and alone on a pinnacle with nowhere else to go.
She leaned her head back into the chair’s comforting warmth. The dormitory room that the university had given her was more luxurious than most of the hotels she had slept in. The chair adjusted itself to her body shape and temperature, enfolding her like a gently pulsating womb. How pleasant it would be, Jade thought, to just close my eyes and sleep—forever.
But the smart screen on the wall of the small room showed a view of Titan’s spaceport out on the murky surface, and the sleek torch ship that had landed there only minutes earlier. The retractable dome was rising silently over it. Soon the ship would be disgorging its payload of passengers and cargo. In another two days it would start back toward the big scientific base in Mars orbit. And Jade would be on it, heading back toward Selene, toward the habitats crowding the Earth-Moon system, toward the world of her birth.
And what then? she asked herself. What then?
She drifted into an exhausted dreamless sleep. When the phone buzzed it startled her; her nerves jumped as if an emergency klaxon were hooting.
Her laptop had slipped to the thickly carpeted floor. Thinking idly that the university life had all sorts of unwritten perquisites, Jade picked up the tiny box and pressed its ON switch.