“We’ve got to help her!” he heard Ben shout over the roar of static, preparing to launch himself toward the castaway.
Realization came instantly, but too late. “No, Ben!” Mark cried out. “Grab something. Anything!” Mark fumbled and found a stanchion by the cargo bay door. This he now gripped for all his life.
“Hold tight!” he screamed.
At that moment his helmet seemed to fill with a terrible song, and the world exploded with colors he had never known.
When it was all over, quivering from sore muscles and wrenched joints, Mark gingerly reeled in his copilot’s frayed, torn tether. He searched for Ben everywhere. Radar, lidar, telemetry … but no instrument could find a trace. Of the hapless Russian diver, also, there was no sign.
Perhaps they have each other for company, wherever they’re going, he thought at one point. It was a strange solace.
He did detect other things nearby … objects that command insisted he pick up for study. These were bits of flotsam … a mud-filled vodka bottle … a piece of weed … a fish or two.
Then, preparing to head home, he went through the retro protocols several times, double-checking until Command accused him of stalling.
“Can it!” he told them sharply. “I’m just making sure I know exactly where I am and where I’m going.”
As the pyrotechnics of reentry erupted around the cockpit windows, Mark later realized he’d spoken exactly as Teresa Tikhana would have. To the mission controllers, he must have sounded just like her.
“Hell, Rip,” he muttered, apologizing to her in absentia. “I never knew how you felt about that, till now. I promise, I won’t ever make fun of you again.”
Even much later, when he was once more on the steady ground, Mark walked cautiously toward the crowd of anxious, waiting officials with a cautious gait, as if the tarmac weren’t quite as certain a platform as the others believed. And even when he began answering their fevered questions, Mark kept glancing at the horizon, at the sun and sky, as if to check and check again his bearings.
Although claiming they have now completely resolved the technical errors that led to the tragedy of 2029, the governments of Korea and Japan nevertheless today delayed reopening the Fukuoka-Pusan Tunnel. No explanation was given, although it’s known a recent spate of unusual seismic activity has caused concern. The temblors do not fit the commission’s Computer models, and no opening will take place until these discrepancies are explained.
In regional social news, 26-year-old Yukiko Saito, heiress to the Taira family fortune, announced her betrothal to Clive Blenheim, Earl of Hampshire, whose noble, if impoverished line stretches back to well before the Norman Conquest.
The most recent planetological survey indicates that the islands of Japan contain approximately ten percent of all the world’s volcanoes.
• EXOSPHERE
How much difference could a month make? The last time Teresa had sat at this table, deep inside the secret warrens of Waitomo, her personal world had only recently crashed in on her. Now her grief was stabilized. She could look back at her passionate interlude in Greenland as part of a widow’s recovery, and begin thinking about other things than Jason.
Of course, last time she had also been numb from a completely different shock—learning about Earth’s dire jeopardy. That fact hadn’t changed.
But at least we’re doing Something about it now. Futile or not, their efforts were good for the spirit.
George Hutton was just finishing his overall status report. Their limited success so far was visible in the large-scale display where their foe could now be seen swinging about on an elongated orbit, rising briefly out of the crystalline inner sphere into the second layer—the outer core of liquid metal. No longer a complacent eater, squatting undisturbed amid a banquet of high-density matter, the purple dot now seemed to throb angrily.
Teresa approved. We’re coming after you, beast. We’ve begun defending ourselves.
That was the good news. Give or take a few panicky moments, all four resonators had commenced firing sequences of tandem pulses to convert the planet’s own stored energy into beams of coherent gravity, recoiling against Beta and gradually shoving it outward toward—
Toward what? We still haven’t figured out what to do with the damned thing. Push until its growing orbit takes it out of the Earth, I suppose. But then what? Let a decaying singularity, blazing at a million degrees, keep whizzing round and round, entering and leaving, entering and leaving till it dissipates at last in a huge burst of gamma rays?
Teresa shrugged. As if by then the choice will still be in our hands. That was one reason the mood at the table was somber.
Another cause was visible on the outermost shell of the planetary model … a pattern of lights signifying where gazer beams had emerged at land or sea.
Actually, most of the beams pulsed at modes and wavelengths interacting not at all with surface objects. Often, the only effect was a local wind shift or eddies in an ocean current. Still, from a quarter of the sites came rumors of strange colors or thunderclaps in a clear blue sky. Hearsay about water spouts or disappearing clouds. Accounts of dams destroyed, of circular swirls cut in wheat fields, of aircraft vanishing without a trace.
Teresa glanced over at Alex Lustig. He had already told of his efforts to avoid population centers, and she didn’t doubt his sincerity. Still, something had changed in the man since she had seen him last. By now, in all honesty, she had expected to find him a wreck. Tossed by guilt as he had been when they first met, Teresa figured him due for a nervous breakdown when the toll of innocent victims began to rise.
Oddly, he now seemed at peace listening patiently to each speaker as the meeting progressed, exhibiting none of the nervous gestures she recalled. His expression appeared almost serene.
Maybe it isn’t so odd at that, Teresa thought. Beyond the pool of light cast by the display, she saw June Morgan move over behind Lustig and start massaging his shoulders. Teresa’s nostrils flared. They deserve each other, she thought, and then frowned, wondering what she meant by that.
“We’ve tried to avoid predictable patterns,” George Hutton was saying. “So it would be hard to track down our resonators’ locations. No doubt several major nations and alliances and multinationals already suspect the disturbances are of human origin. In fact, we’re counting on a suspicious reaction. So long as they’re blaming each other, they’ll not go looking for a private group.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Teresa asked. “What if someone panics? Especially one of the deterrence powers? It doesn’t take much effort to break the treaty seals on a squadron of cruise missiles, you know. Just hammers and some simple software.”
Pedro Manella leaned into the light. “That’s under control, Captain. First, the seismic occurrences are taking place impartially, worldwide. The only organized pattern anyone will notice is that the disturbances statistically avoid major population centers.
“Second—I’ve taken care to deposit sequestered announcements with a secret registration service, triggered for net release the instant any power goes to yellow alert.”
Alex shook his head. “I thought we weren’t going to trust any of the services.”
Manella shrugged. “After your own unpleasant experience, Lustig, I don’t blame you for feeling that way. But there’s no chance of premature release this time. Anyway, the announcement only gives enough hints to get some trigger-happy crisis team to slow down and consult their geologists.”
George Hutton touched a control, dimming the globe display and bringing up the room lights. Alex squeezed June Morgan’s hand and she returned to her seat. Teresa looked away, feeling at once voyeuristic and resentful. She’s a collector, Teresa thought. How can a woman who once wanted Jason also be attracted to a man like Lustig?
She suppressed an urge to turn around and look at him again, this time in frank curiosity.
“Besides,” George Hutton added. “There’s a limit to how long we can keep this secret
anyway. Sooner or later someone’s going to track us down.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Pedro countered. “Our weakest link is the Net, but I have some very bright people working for me in Washington. By keeping traffic to a minimum and using tricks like your Maori mountain-iwi dialect, we could mask our short blips for as long as six months, even a year.”
“Hmph.” George sounded doubtful and Teresa agreed. Manella’s optimism seemed farfetched. There were too many bored hackers out there with free time and kilobit parallel correlators, looking for any excuse to stir up a sensation. Frankly, she wasn’t at all sure whether she’d be greeted by her tame NASA flunkies when she got back to Houston or by a pack of security boys, wearing total-record goggles and slapping her with inquiry warrants.
Even so, she looked forward to the trip, riding a stratoliner again under her own name. I’ve had it with zeps and aliases for a while.
“Don’t you think the secret will come out when Beta finally emerges through the surface?” George asked. “We won’t be hiding from just ferrets then. The whole pack of hounds will be baying for blood.”
“Conceded. But by then we’ll have our report ready to present to the World Court, won’t we, Alex?”
Lustig looked up, as if his thoughts had been far away. “Um. Sorry, Pedro?”
Manella leaned toward him. “We’ve been after you about this for months! Second only to getting rid of Beta is our need to find out who made the cursed thing. It’s not just revenge—though making an example of the bastards will be nice. I’m talking about saving our own skins!”
Teresa blinked. “What do you mean?”
Manella groaned as if he were the only one in the room able to see the obvious. “I mean that, after all the havoc we’ve set off, and are going to set off in the future, do you think people will simply take our word we just found the awful thing down there?
“Hell no! Here we are, led by the one man ever caught building an illegal black hole on Earth. Who do you think they’ll blame for Beta? Especially if the real villains are powerful men, eager to divert responsibility.”
Teresa swallowed. “Oh.”
All the illegal things they had done—including maintaining secrets and harming innocents—all those she was willing to stand to bar for. The salvation of Earth was powerful justification, after all. But it hadn’t occurred to her that that very defense might be denied them … that their group might actually be blamed for causing Beta in the first place!
“Shit,” she said, in a low voice. Now she understood how Alex Lustig must have felt when he seemed so bitter, last time. Which made it even harder to comprehend the man’s tranquil expression right now.
“I hadn’t thought of that either,” June Morgan said, looking at her as if she’d read her mind. Teresa found herself recalling their friendship, back before things started getting so damned messy. The flux of contrary emotions made her quickly turn away to avoid June’s eyes.
Manella concluded. “Beyond all thought of revenge, we need the real culprits to hand over to the mob in our stead. So I ask again, Lustig. Who are they?”
On the tabletop Alex’s hands lay folded. “We’ve learned a lot lately,” he said in a low voice. “Though I do wish Stan Goldman were here to help. Yes, surely he’s needed in Greenland. But what I’m trying to say is, despite many handicaps, I think we’ve made progress.
“For instance, with June’s assistance, we’ve now got a much better idea how matters must have been when the singularity first fell through the most intense regions of magnetism, which must have trapped the thing for some time before chaotic interactions finally let its apo-axis decay.”
“Chaos? You mean you can’t ever tell …?”
“Forgive me. I was imprecise. The word ‘chaos’ in this sense doesn’t mean randomness. The solution isn’t perfect, but it can be worked out.”
Manella leaned forward again. “So you’ve traced its orbit back? To the fools who let it go?”
Teresa sat up, feeling chilled. A strange light seemed to shine in Alex Lustig’s eyes.
“It’s not easy,” he began. “Even a tiny, weighty object like Beta must have suffered deflections. Besides magnetic fields, there were inhomogeneities in the crust and mantle—”
Manella would have none of it. “Lustig, I know that look on your face. You’ve got something. Tell us! Where and when did it fall? How close can you pinpoint it?”
The British physicist shrugged. “Within approximately two thousand kilometers in point of entry—”
Manella moaned, disappointed.
“—and within nine years, plus or minus, for date of initial impact.”
“Years!” Pedro stood up. He slapped the tabletop. “Nine years ago, nobody on Earth was capable of building singularities! Cavitronics was still a harmless theory. Lustig, your results are worse than useless. You’re saying that while we’re still likely to be destroyed, there’s no way to track and punish the guilty ones!”
For the first time, Teresa saw Alex smile openly, a look both empathic and feral, as if he had actually been looking forward to this. “You’re right on one count, but wrong on two,” he told Manella. “Can’t blame you, really: I made the same faulty assumptions myself.
“You see I, too, figured Beta had to have entered the Earth sometime since cavitronics became a practical science. Only after tracing Beta’s rate of growth and correcting for some hairy internal topologies did I realize it just has to be a lot older than we’d thought. In fact, those error bars I mentioned are pretty damn good.
“The date of entry was probably 1908. The region, Siberia.”
Teresa brought a hand to her breast. “Tunguska!”
George Hutton looked at her. “Do you mean …?” he prompted. But Teresa had to swallow before finding her voice again. “It was the greatest airburst explosion in recorded history—even including that electromagnetic pulse thing the Helvetians set off. Barometers picked up pressure waves all the way round the world.”
Everyone watched her. Teresa spread her hands. “Trees were flattened for hundreds of kilometers. But nobody ever found a crater, so it wasn’t a regular meteorite. Theorists have suggested a fluffy comet, exploding in the atmosphere, or a bit of intergalactic antimatter, or …”
“Or a micro black hole.” Alex nodded. “Only now we know it wasn’t simply a black hole, but a far more complex construct. A singularity so complex and elegant, it couldn’t be an accident of nature.” He turned to face the others. “You see our problem. Our models say the thing has to come from a time before mankind possessed the ability to build such things … if we could do so even now.”
This time both Teresa and Pedro were speechless, staring. George Hutton asked, “Are you absolutely certain no natural process could have made it?”
“Ninety-nine percent, George. But even if nature did stumble onto just the right topology, it’s absurd to imagine such an object just happening to arrive when it did.”
“What do you mean?”
Alex closed his eyes briefly. “Look. Why would something so rare and terrible just happen to strike the planet at the very time we’re around to notice? Earth has been here four and one half billion years, but humans only a quarter million or so. And for less than two centuries have we been capable of noticing anything at all but the bitter end. That coincidence stretches all credulity! As my grandmother might say—it’s ridiculous to claim an impartial universe is performing a drama solely for our benefit.”
He paused.
“The answer, of course, is that the universe isn’t impartial at all. The singularity arrived when we’re here because we’re here.”
Silence stretched. Alex shook his head. “I don’t blame you for missing the point. I, too, was trapped by my modern, Western-masochistic conceit. I assumed only humans were clever or vicious enough to destroy on such a scale. It took a reminder from the past to show me what a stupid presumption that is, after all.
“Oh, I can give you the date and point o
f entry now. I can even tell you something about the thing’s makers. But don’t ask me how to take vengeance on them, Pedro. I suspect that’s far beyond our capabilities at present.”
Some of the others looked at each other in confusion. But Teresa felt queasy. She fought the effects, breathing deeply. No physical crisis could affect her as this series of abstract revelations had.
“Somebody wants to destroy us,” she surmised. “It’s … a weapon.”
“Oh yes,” Alex said, turning to meet her eyes. “It is that, Captain Tikhana. A slow but omnipotent weapon. And the coincidence of timing is easily enough explained. The thing arrived only a decade or two after the first human experiments with radio.
“Actually, the idea’s rather old in science fiction, a horror tale of paranoia that’s chillingly logical when you work it out. Somebody out there got into space ahead of us and doesn’t want company. So it—or they—fashioned an efficient way to eliminate the threat.”
“Threat?” Manella shook his head. “What threat? Hertz and Marconi make a few dots and dashes, and that’s a threat to beings who can make a thing like this?” He pointed to one of the flat screens, where Alex’s latest depiction of the cosmic knot writhed and wriggled in malefic, intricate splendor.
“Oh yes, certainly those dots and dashes represented a threat. Given that some lot out there doesn’t want competition, it would make sense to eliminate potential rivals like us as early and simply as possible, before we develop into something harder to deal with.”
He gestured upward, as if the rocky ceiling were invisible and the sky were all around them. “Consider the constraints such paranoid creatures have to work under, poor things. It may have taken years for our first signals to propagate to their nearest listening post. At that point they must fabricate a smart bomb to seek and destroy the source.
“But recall how difficult it is to send anything through interstellar space. If you want to dispatch it anywhere near the speed of light, it had better be small! My guess is they sent a miniature cavitron generator, one just barely adequate to make the smallest, lightest singularity that could do the job.