Gregory Benford - A Worm in the Well

“Right, and you lost it.”

He studied his fingers again. Strong, wiry, yet thick. Maybe he was in love with them. She allowed herself to fill the silence by imagining some interesting things he could do with them. She had learned that with many negotiations, silence did most of the work. “We… are behind in our mandated exploration.”

Ah, a concession. “They always have to hand-tune everything, Lunaside.”

He nodded vigorously. “I’ve waited months. And the worm could fall back into the Sun any moment! I keep telling them—”

She had triggered his complaint circuit, somehow. He went on for a full minute about the bullheaded know-nothings who did nothing but screen-work, no real hands-on experience. She was sympathetic, and enjoyed watching his own hands clench, muscles standing out on the backs of them. Business first, she had to remind herself.

“You think it might just, well, go away?”

“The worm?” He blinked, coming out of his litany of grievances. “It’s a wonder we ever found it. It could fall back into the Sun at any moment.”

“Then speed is everything. You, uh, have control of your local budget?”

“Well, yes.” He smiled.

“I’m talking about petty cash here, really. A hundred mil.”

A quick, deep frown. “That’s not petty.”

“OK, say seventy-five. But cash, right?”

The great magnetic arch towered above the long, slow curve of the Sun. A bowlegged giant, minus the trunk.

Claire had shaped their orbit to bring them swooping in a few klicks above the uppermost strand of it. Red flowered within the arch: hydrogen plasma, heated by the currents which made the magnetic fields. A pressure cooker thousands of klicks long.

It had stood here for months and might last years. Or blow open in the next minutes. Predicting when arches would belch out solar flares was big scientific business, the most closely watched weather report in the Solar System. A flare could crisp suited workers in the asteroid belt. SolWatch watched them all. That’s how they found the worm.

The flux tubes swelled. “Got an image yet?”

I SHOULD HAVE, BUT THERE IS EXCESS LIGHT FROM THE SI TE.

“Big surprise. There’s nothing but excess here.”

THE SATELLITE SURVEY REPORTED THAT THE TARGET IS SEVERAL HUNDRED METERS IN SIZE. YET I CANNOT FIND IT.

“Damn!” Claire studied the flex tubes, following some from the peak of the arch, winding down to the thickening at its feet, anchored in the Sun’s seethe. Had the worm fallen back in? It could slide down those magnetic strands, thunk into the thick, cooler plasma sea. Then it would fall all the way to the core of the star, eating as it went. That was the real reason Lunaside was hustling to “study” the worm. Fear.

“Where is it?”

STILL NO TARGET. THE REGION AT THE TOP OF THE ARCH IS EMITTING TOO MUCH LIGHT. NO THEORY ACCOUNTS FOR THIS—

“Chop the theory!”

TIME TO MISSION ONSET: 12.6 SECONDS.

The arch rushed at them, swelling. She saw delicate filaments winking on and off as currents traced their find equilibria, always seeking to balance the hot plasma within against the magnetic walls. Squeeze the magnet fist, the plasma answers with a dazzling glow. Squeeze, glow. Squeeze, glow. That nature could make such an intricate marvel and send it arcing above the Sun’s savagery was a miracle, but one she was not in the mood to appreciate right now.

Sweat trickled around her eyes, dripped off her chin. No trick of lowering the lighting was going to make her forget the heat now. She made herself breathe in and out.

Their slag shield caught the worst of the blaze. At this lowest altitude in the parabolic orbit, though, the Sun’s huge horizon rimmed white-hot in all directions.

OUR INTERNAL TEMPERATURE IS RISING.

“No joke. Find that worm!”

THE EXCESS LIGHT PERSISTS—NO, WAIT. IT IS GONE. NOW I CAN SEE THE TARGET.

Claire slapped the arm of her couch and let out a whoop. On the wall screen loomed the very peak of the arch. They were gliding toward it, skating over the very upper edge—and there it was.

A dark ball. Or a worm at the bottom of a gravity well. Not like a fly, no. It settled in among the strands like a black egg nestled in blue-white straw. The ebony Easter egg that would save her ass and her ship from Isataku.

SURVEY BEGUN. FULL SPECTRUM RESPONSE.

“Bravo.”

YOUR WORD EXPRESSES ELATION BUT YOUR VOICE DOES NOT.

“I’m jumpy. And the fee for this is going to help, sure, but I still won’t get to keep this ship. Or you.”

DO NOT DESPAIR. I CAN LEARN TO WORK WITH ANOTHER CAPTAIN.

“Great interpersonal skills there, Erma old girl. Actually, it wasn’t you I was worried about.”

I SURMISED AS MUCH.

“Without this ship, I’ll have to get some groundhog job.”

Erma had no ready reply to that. Instead, she changed the subject.

THE WORM IMAGE APPEARS TO BE SHRINKING.

“Huh?” As they wheeled above the arch, the image dwindled. It rippled at its edges, light crushed and crinkled. Claire saw rainbows dancing around the black center.

“What’s it doing?” She had the sudden fear that the thing was falling away from them, plunging into the Sun.

I DETECT NO RELATIVE MOTION. THE IMAGE ITSELF IS CONTRACTING AS WE MOVE NEARER TO IT.

“Impossible. Things look bigger when you get close.”

NOT THIS OBJECT.

“Is the wormhole shrinking?”

MARK!—SURVEY RUN HALF COMPLETE.

She was sweating and it wasn’t from the heat. “What’s going on?”

I HAVEN’T ACCESSED RESERVE THEORY SECTION.

“How comforting. I always feel better after a nice cool theory.”

The wormhole seemed to shrink, and the light arch dwindled behind them now. The curious brilliant rainbows rimmed the dark mote. Soon she lost the image among the intertwining, restless strands. Claire fidgeted.

MARK!—SURVEY RUN COMPLETE.

“Great. Our bots deployed?”

OF COURSE. THERE REMAIN 189 SECONDS UNTIL SEPARATION FROM OUR SHIELD. SHALL I BEGIN SEQUENCE?

“Did we get all the pictures they wanted?”

THE ENTIRE SPECTRUM. PROBABLE YIELD, 75 MILLION.

Claire let out another whoop. “At least it’ll pay a good lawyer, maybe cover my fines.”

THAT SEEMS MUCH LESS PROBABLE. MEANWHILE, I HAVE AN EXPLANATION FOR THE ANOMALOUS SHRINKAGE OF THE IMAGE. THE WORMHOLE HAS A NEGATIVE MASS.

“Antimatter?”

NO. IT S SPACE-TIME CURVATURE IS OPPOSITE TO NORMAL MATTER.

“I don’t get it.”

A wormhole connected two regions of space, sometimes points many light-years away—that she knew. They were leftovers from the primordial hot universe, wrinkles that even the universal expansion had not ironed out. Matter could pass through one end of the worm and emerge out the other an apparent instant later. Presto, faster-than-light-travel.

Using her high-speed feed, Erma explained. Claire listened, barely keeping up. In the fifteen billion years since this wormhole was bom, odds were that one end of the worm ate more matter than the other. If one end got stuck inside a star, it swallowed huge masses. Locally, it got more massive.

But the matter that poured through the mass-gaining end spewed out the other end. Locally, that looked as though the mass-spewing one was losing mass. Space-time around it curved oppositely than it did around the end that swallowed.

“So it looks like a negative mass?”

IT MUST. THUS IT REPULSES MATTER. JUST AS THE OTHER END ACTS LIKE A POSITIVE, ORDINARY MASS AND ATTRACTS MATTER.

“Why didn’t it shoot out from the Sun, then?”

IT WOULD, AND BE LOST IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE. BUT THE MAGNETIC ARCH HOLDS IT.

“How come we know it’s got negative mass? All I saw was—” Erma popped an image into the wall screen.