Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

Wolf Bernhardt’s New York office was not anywhere near as far aboveground as the MRI main level was below, but it seemed that way. It was in a twenty-third-century monstrosity of a NeoGoth tower on Columbus Avenue, about twenty-five blocks south of Columbia. The office itself was huge, a big, sparsely furnished space. The floor was gleaming hardwood, and the walls plain white. Bernhardt’s desk, easily the size of Sianna’s whole office, was an immaculate slab of polished white wood.

There were no pictures on the wall, no shelves, no decoration. It was a room perfect for a man given over to neatness. But insofar as Sianna was interested, the key fact was that the door into the room was on the north side of the room, and the south wall, behind Bernhardt’s desk, was a single huge pane of non-reflective glass, affording a completely unobstructed view that took in the whole Manhattan skyline from a hundred meters up. The spires and towers of the city gleamed in the morning light, framed by a perfect blue sky beyond.

Every fear Sianna had ever had of enclosed spaces vanished, at least for the moment, to be replaced instantly by acute agoraphobia, before she settled down. It was all right. It was all right. Just a spectacular view. Nothing to be afraid of. After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped through the door into the room. At first her eyes were fixed on the emptiness, and the glorious city beyond, where a wall was supposed to be. But then she tore her eyes away and looked around the room.

Wally and Sakalov were already there, sitting in two of the visitor’s chairs. Wally had a pocket computer out, and seemed ready to read something off the screen. But of course, it would have been more remarkable if he didn’t have some sort of hardware with him. Sakalov had a notepack as well, the sort that was mostly used to show flat images.

A tray full of coffee things, pastries and fruit and breads, sat on Bernhardt’s desk, and all three men had been helping themselves. That in and of itself was incredible.

For a man like that to be in this celebratory a mood was amazing. For Wolf Bernhardt to put out coffee and danish, exposing his immaculate office to the risk of crumbs and coffee spills, was right up there with the Pope leading a conga line. But be that as it may, all three men were quite plainly happy and relaxed, leaning back in their chairs.

She realized that she had her arms folded up tight in front of her chest. She forced her arms to her sides.

“Ah, Miss Colette,” Bernhardt said, his voice buoyant and expansive. He did not take his feet down off the desk, let alone stand up to greet her. Instead, he kept his comfortable position and waved her toward the chair closest to the window. “You’re just in time. Mr. Sturgis and Dr. Sakalov were just expounding a bit on your idea about the Earth being held in a sort of stasis orbit for those missing thirty-seven minutes. Sit, sit. Have some coffee.”

Sianna forced herself to move toward the desk and the coffee things, certain that everyone in the room was watching her every move and could tell just how self-conscious she was. Moving with what she hoped was studied casualness, she took a cup and poured for herself. She took her cup and saucer, crossed to her chair, and sat down, swiveling around in the chair to partially hide her face from Bernhardt without being rude. She hoped.

She looked toward Wally and tried to look as if she were paying attention to what he was saying, instead of being scared to death of Bernhardt and a trifle over-aware of the invisible glass wall and the sheer drop-off behind it, a mere two meters behind her back.

“—of course, most wormhole links are instantaneous,” Wally was saying. “That only makes sense if you were trying for fast transportation. But you don’t have to make wormholes that way. Suppose you, ah, were after something else, like a holding tank, say. Some way to hold something—say, a planet.

“Everyone’s always assumed the Sphere was ready and waiting for Earth. They figured that since the Sphere managed to get Earth into an orbit and get the Moonpoint Ring set up for Earth in just a few seconds—the few seconds it took for Earth to come through the hole. The trouble with that theory is that Earth’s new orbit isn’t very stable . It’s a major anomaly.”

“What do you mean?” Bernhardt asked.

“Well, most of the Captive Worlds around the other Captive Suns in the Multisystem move in orbits that should be good for at least several million years. But Earth was dropped too close to the orbits of a lot of other planets that orbit the Sunstar. Dr. Sakalov showed that the Sunstar system was stable before Earth was dropped into it.”

Dr. Sakalov nodded and spoke, looking at Bernhardt. “Those same simulations show that the Sunstar’s system of planets was rendered highly unstable by Earth’s arrival. The interaction of all the gravitational forces throws things off. Earth’s orbit, and the orbits of the neighboring planets, will start deteriorating within about three hundred years at the outside—maybe a lot less. The Sphere will have to do constant active maintenance on the orbits to keep them under control.

“At first we assumed that was the norm for the Multisystem. We’ve proved it’s the exception. All the other Captive Worlds are in far more stable orbits. But why? Why did the Sphere put us in an unstable, unsuitable orbit, without waiting until such time as it could arrange a more stable pattern?

“Miss Colette’s theory answers that problem,” Sakalov went on, answering his own question. “It allows the Sphere enough time to do some preparation—but not enough to do a perfect job. If she is right, then the Sphere put Earth in this stasis orbit while it rushed to prepare a place for it. Thirty-seven minutes is not much time, of course, but it is more than the forty or fifty seconds of elapsed time recorded on Earth between the moment of Abduction and arrival in our present orbit. I suspect that holding Earth in a stasis orbit put great demands on the Sphere, or else it would have maintained the stasis longer and prepared a more stable orbit.”

“But what the devil is a stasis orbit?” Bernhardt demanded.

“You catch the Earth in a wormhole, and then use the Mtabe modal transformation sequence model,” Wally said, in a tone of voice that made it clear how obvious it was. Sianna almost expected him to add of course . “The modal transformation causes the wormhole itself to move through space as a standing wave front.”

“Huh?” Sianna said, making her first contribution to the discussion.

“It’s simple,” Wally said, without a trace of irony in his voice. “Drop the Earth into the wormhole, pinch the endpoints of the wormhole, seal the ends to form a closed volume, and you’ve got the Earth inside a singularity that can be manipulated. Viewed from the outside, you have a supermassive charged particle that can be guided electromagnetically. If you then create magnetic lines of force between Ring-and-Hole sets co-orbiting with the Lone World, you have what amounts to a huge storage ring, one large and powerful enough to hold an Earth-mass pinched wormhole particle.” Wally shrugged. “Trouble is, the pinched wormhole particle will tend to evaporate spontaneously. It won’t last long. Of course, if you accelerate the hole to near light velocity, then relativistic time dilation kicks in and the hole lasts longer.”

“Of course,” Bernhardt said, with amused sarcasm.

But that sort of thing went right past Wally. He went on with his explanation, completely unaware that even Sakalov’s eyes were showing signs of glazing over. “The main thing is, the pinched hole won’t last long. You have to drop Earth out of the hole before it evaporates, get Earth back into normal space, and then drop the planet down into a new hole, pinch that one off, and send it back along the next leg of the storage ring. Keep repeating the procedure as long as you want.”