Gregory Benford: A Worm in the Well

Their jet wash blurred the wormhole’s ebony curves. Like a black tennis ball in blue-white surf, it bobbed and tossed on magnetic turbulence. Nothing was falling into it, she could see. Plasma streamers arced along the flux tubes, shying away. The negative curvature repulsed matter—and would shove Silver Metal Lugger’s hull away, too.

But magnetic fields have no mass.

Most people found magnetic forces mysterious, but to pilots and engineers who worked with them, they were just big, strong ribbons that needed shaping. Like rubber bands, they stretched, storing energy—then snapped back when released. Unbreakable, almost.

In routine work, Silver Metal Lugger grabbed enormous ore buckets with those magnetic fingers. The buckets came arcing up from Mercury, flung out by electromagnetic slingshots. Claire’s trickiest job was playing catcher, with a magnetic mitt.

Now she had to snag a bucket of warped space-time. And quick.

WE CANNOT REMAIN HERE LONG. INTERNAL TEMPERATURE RISES AT 19.3 DEGREES PER MINUTE.

“That can’t be right. I’m still comfortable.”

BECAUSE I’M ALLOWING WATER TO EVAPORATE, TAKING THE BULK OF THE THERMAL FLUX AWAY.

“Keep an eye on it.”

PROBABLE YIELD FROM CAPTURE OF A WORMHOLE, I ESTIMATE, IS 2.8 BILLION.

“That’ll do the trick. You multiplied the yield in dollars times the odds of success?”

YES. TIMES THE PROBABILITY OF REMAINING AUVE.

She didn’t want to ask what that number was. “Keep us dropping.”

Instead, they slowed. The arch’s flux tubes pushed upward against the ship. Claire extended the ship’s magnetic fields, firing the booster generators, pumping current into the millions of induction loops that circled the hull. Silver Metal Lugger was one big circuit, wired like a slinky toy, coils wrapped around the cylindrical axis.

Gingerly she pulsed it, spilling more antimatter into the chambers. The ship’s multipolar fields bulged forth. Feed out the line….

They fought their way down. On her screens she saw magnetic feelers reaching far below their exhaust plumes. Groping.

Claire ordered some fast command changes. Erma switched linkages, interfaced software, all in a twinkling. Good worker, but spotty as a personality sim, Claire thought.

Silver Metal Lugger’s fields extended to their maximum. She could now use her suit gloves as modified waldoes—mag gloves. They gave her the feel of the magnetic grapplers. Silky, smooth, field lines slipping and expanding, like rubbery air.

Plasma storms blew by them. She reached down, a sensation like plunging her hands into a stretching, elastic vat. Fingers fumbled for the one jewel in all the dross.

She felt a prickly nugget. It was like a stone with hair. From experience working the ore buckets, she knew the feel of locked-in magnetic dipoles. The worm had its own magnetic fields. That had snared it here, in the spiderweb arch.

A lashing field whipped at her grip. She lost the black pearl.

In the blazing hot plasma she could not see it.

She reached with rubbery fields, caught nothing.

OUR ANTI MATTER BOTTLES ARE IN DANGER. THEIR SUPERCONDUCTING MAGNETS ARE CLOSE TO GOING CRITICAL. THEY WILL FAIL WITHIN 7.4 MINUTES.

“Let me concentrate! No, wait—Circulate water around them. Buy some time.”

BUT THE REMAINING WATER IS IN YOUR QUARTERS.

“This is all that’s left?” She peered around at her once-luxurious living room. Counting the bedroom, rec area and kitchen—“How… long?”

UNTIL YOUR WATER BEGINS TO EVAPORATE? ALMOST AN HOUR.

“But when it evaporates, it’s boiling.”

TRUE. I AM MERELY TRYING TO REMAIN FACTUAL.

“The emotional stuff’s left to me, huh?” She punched in commands on her suit board. In the torpid, warming water her fingers moved like sausages.

She ordered bots out onto the hull to free up some servos that had jammed. They did their job, little boxy bodies lashed by plasma winds. Two blew away.

She reached down again. Searching. Where was the worm?

Wispy flux tubes wrestled along Silver Metal Lugger’s hull. Claire peered into a red glare of superheated plasma. Hot, but tenuous. The real enemy was the photon storm streaming up from far below, searing even the silvery hull.

She still had worker-bots on the hull. Four had jets. She popped their anchors free. They plunged, fired jets, and she aimed them downward in a pattern.

“Follow trajectories,” she ordered Erma. Orange tracer lines appeared on the screens.

The bots swooped toward their deaths. One flicked to the side, a sharp nudge. “There’s the worm! We can’t see for all this damned plasma, but it shoved that bot away.”

The bots evaporated, sprays of liquid metal. She followed them and grabbed for the worm.

Magnetic field lines groped, probed.

WE HAVE 88 SECONDS REMAINING FOR ANTIMATTER CONFINEMENT.

“Save a reserve!”

YOU HAVE NO PLAN. I DEMAND THAT WE EXECUTE EMERGENCY—

“OK, save some antimatter. The rest I use—now.”

They ploughed downward, shuddering. Her hands fumbled at the wormhole. Now it felt slippery, oily. Its magnetic dipoles were like greasy hair, slick, the bulk beneath jumping away from her grasp as if it were alive.

On her screens she saw the dark globe slide and bounce. The worm wriggled out of her grasp. She snaked inductive fingers around it. Easy, easy… There. Gotcha.

“I’ve got a good grip on it. Lemme have that antimatter.”

Something like a sigh echoed from Erma. On her ship’s operations screen, Claire saw the ship’s magnetic vaults begin to discharge. Ruby-red pouches slipped out of magnetic mirror geometries, squirting out through opened gates.

She felt a surge as the ship began to lift. Good, but it wasn’t going to last. They were dumping antimatter into the reaction chamber so fast, it didn’t have time to find matching particles. The hot jet spurting out below was a mixture of matter and its howling enemy, its polar opposite. This, Claire directed down onto the flux tubes around the hole. Leggo, damn it.

She knew an old trick, impossibly slow in ordinary free space. When you manage to force two magnetic field lines close together, they can reconnect. That liberates some field energy into heat and can even blow open a magnetic structure. The process is slow—unless you jab it with turbulent, rowdy plasma.

The antimatter in their downwash cut straight through flux tubes. Claire carved with her jet, freeing field lines that still snared the worm. The ship rose further, dragging the worm upward.

It’s not too heavy, Claire thought. That science officer said they could come in any size at all. This one is just about right for a small ship to slip through—to where?

YOU HAVE REMAINING 11.34 MINUTES COOLING TIME—

“Here’s your hat—” Claire swept the jet wash over a last, large flux tube. It glistened as annihilation energies burst forth like bonfires, raging in a place already hot beyond imagination. Magnetic knots snarled, exploded. “—What’s your hurry?”

The solar coronal arch burst open.

She had sensed these potential energies locked in the peak of the arch, an intuition that came through her hands, from long work with the mag gloves. Craftswoman’s knowledge: Find the stressed flux lines. Turn the key.

Then all hell broke loose.

The acceleration slammed her to the floor, despite the water. Below, she saw the vast vault of energy stored in the arch blow out and up, directly below them.

YOU HAVE MADE A SOLAR FLARE!

“And you thought I didn’t have a plan.”

Claire started to laugh. Slamming into a couch cut it off. She would have broken a shoulder, but the couch was water-logged and soft.