“How canbe that?” Eyekill said. “Can’t quite believe it’d take Earth-smash to clobber that thing. Wally, Adversary is what size, tops?”
“No way to know,” Wally said. “My really rough guess is that it is about the size of a very small asteroid. Say, less than a kilometer across. Maybe a lot less.”
“How massive is it?” Captain Steiger asked.
“Well,” Wally said, “We’ve tracked a bunch of debris within orbits perturbed by near passes of the Adversary. We can work from there directly into a computation of its gravitation, and thus its mass. It comes out to something on the order of a lunar mass.”
“It weighs as much as the Moon and it’s too small to see?” Steiger asked.
Wally shrugged and smiled. “Strange matter is pretty strange,” he said.
“There is not much funny about this, Sturgis,” Steiger said. “A mass the size of the Moon striking the Earth is not a joking matter.”
“But would it even work?” MacDougal asked. “I mean, would it kill the Adversary? It seems to me that this Adversary has taken a lot of punishment.”
“Should work great,” Eyeball said. “Charos accelerate Earth to high-nuff speed, you bet. Force equal mass times acceleration. Big enough mass, enuff accel, no prob.”
“Nuff to zap strange matter?” the Windbag asked. “Turn it to normal matter or mebbe energy? E-equals-MC-square it?”
E = MC2. That phrase tickled something in Sianna’s memory. Not the formula itself. But sometime, somewhere, when someone had said it. What had it been about? Suddenly this meeting seemed very familiar, as if she had been through all this before. Some other meeting, or bull session, or whatever, when someone had not been believed and that equation had come up in conversation.
“Don’t think so,” Eyeball was saying. “But you can kill me without turning my body into energy pulse. High-speed impact with Earth oughta benuff to break bonds between strange atoms, reduce Adversary to thin cloud of by-themself atoms. Kill it bigtime.”
“Sides, if it don’t work, Earth death anyho,” the Windbag pointed out. “Adversary kills Sphere, Earth loses orbit, and whammo.”
“That’s getting just a bit off the point, isn’t it?” Steiger said. “I really don’t care how Earth would die. I don’t want Earth to die in the first place.”
“Which brings us,” the Autocrat said, “back, once again, to the question of alternatives. Is there anything we can do?”
“How about wrecking the wormhole?” Sondra Berghoff asked. “We could blow up the Ring around the black hole so it couldn’t be used to tune and amplify the wormhole signal.”
Gerald MacDougal shook his head. “If that would do any good,” he said, “then the Charonians would have done it long ago.”
“The Ring’s dormant anyway,” Sianna said. “We can detect a few trace signals to show it could be activated, but it didn’t power up at all when the SCOREs or our ships came through. The other side provided all the power and control.” Something in her own words teased at the idea in the back of her head. Dormant. Not dead. Dormant.
“And presumably the Adversary would do the honors for its own transit,” Captain Steiger said. “Besides, I don’t know that we could rig up powerful enough bombs to be sure of destroying the ring—and the SCOREs on guard duty around the wormhole aperture would take out our missiles anyway.”
“How about some sort of particle beam at the Adversary?” MacDougal suggested. “Something with enough directed energy to do some damage. Maybe induce the strange matter to reform into normal matter.”
“Sure, no problem, if we had a twenty-year research schedule and an unlimited budget and a hell of a lot of luck,” Steiger replied. “Besides, none of us are particle physicists. Where would we even begin?”
“Could we be diverting?” Eyeball asked.
The Autocrat frowned and turned to look at her. “I beg your pardon?”
“Divert it. Shunt the Adversary some other way ’sides through the wormhole?”
Yes. Yes. That was it. Or at least it was close. Sianna looked from one face to the next. One more hint, one more notion from the outside, and she would have it. She knew she would.
“How?” the Autocrat asked.
Sianna looked hard at Eyeball, willing her to give an answer that would set free the idea Sianna was trying to have.
Eyeball shrugged. “Dunno.”
Oh, hell. No joy there. All illusion anyway. There was no idea— just the wish for one, so strong it made her think she was really close to something.
“Could we divert to the Solar System?” the Autocrat asked. “Find some way to retune the wormhole so the Adversary came out there instead of the Multisystem?”
There was a moment’s shocked silence, no one quite sure what to say. But then Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on found words. “You cold fish or loonie? Set that thing loose in Solar Area? How many it kill there?”
“I see no reason for it to kill anyone at all in the Solar System,” the Autocrat said, rather primly. The Purps obviously irritated him deeply. For some reason, their determination to call it the Solar Area seemed to be the thing that grated most on him. “It is in search of the sort of energy source the Charonians’ Spheres contain. There is no such there.”
“But what’s to stop the Adversary from using the Ring of Charon or the Lunar Wheel and the Earthpoint Singularity to link back to the Multisystem?” Sondra asked. “It knows where the Multisystem is now, and it doesn’t seem like the sort to give up easy.”
“And it’s awfully optimistic to assume it would do no damage in the Solar System. How do we know that it wouldn’t decide it could dine on the Sun in a pinch? Suppose you’re wrong?” Captain Steiger asked.
“Then many people might well die, including many of my own citizens—but far fewer than if the Earth were destroyed. But let me ask again. Do we have the capacity to change the coordinates on the wormhole aperture, and send the Adversary to some other location?”
“Well, yes, I suppose,” Sondra Berghoff said. “We can’t shut it off altogether, but we might be able to change the settings—but only to a valid tuning. And the only tuning we know is the Ring of Charon.”
“With all due respect,” Gerald MacDougal said, “that’s not a solution. It’s gambling with mass murder. Suppose we divert the Adversary to the Solar System and it wreaks havoc there, and then it heads for the Multisystem. Your solution might result in the last surviving humans being those of us here in the Shattered Sphere system.”
The Autocrat’s face grew stern and angry, and he nodded rather curtly. “Your points are all well taken. But these are desperate times, and we may well be forced to make desperate choices. I will withdraw my suggestion—for now.”
There was silence again in the room, and the definite feel of tension rising. Tempers were starting to fray.
“I still have trouble believing in the damned Adversary,” Steiger said, in a tone of voice that suggested she was speaking as much to change the subject as anything else. “Is there any chance that we’ve got this wrong? That there’s something else going on? Something we’ve missed?”
Sondra Berghoff shook her head. “Not that I can see. Believe me, I want to be wrong. Up until we got here and heard about this invisible object smashing SCOREs to dust, we didn’t have any direct proof besides the data Larry got out of the Lunar Wheel. But everything here corroborates those images.”