Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

“A proposition,” Larry said, and suddenly the words were spilling out of him. “A proposition I think you’re going to like. The odds on it are a little long, and a lot of things have to go right, but—”

“But what?” Marcia said, her expression halfway between puzzled and alarmed. “What?”

Larry paused, calmed himself. “Marcia, it’s long odds and a lot of guesses, but… but I think they’re going to be able to use the ring to punch open a wormhole link, and I think they’re going to do it soon, very soon. When they do, they’ll send a ship through and… and…”

“And what?” Marcia asked.

“And how would you like to see your husband again?” Larry asked.

Computers , Sondra thought, are good at what is known and stays the same . People are good at what changes and becomes different . Plodding through the pattern-recognition results files would have told her that much, if she hadn’t known it already. The Ring of Charon’s detectors had recorded dozens and dozens of wormhole passages by now. The computers had recorded reams of data about each and every event. The pattern-recognition software had massaged all the data, finding differences and similarities between the various events. The software had come to a rather unremarkable conclusion about the wormhole events: they were all pretty much the same.

But it was in the variance, the spread of values, the outliers, that Sondra hoped to find more useful data.

In theory, the team at the Ring now had enough tuning information to tune the Ring to the resonance patterns themselves, pump enough power into the Ring, and open up a wormhole link to the target location.

In practice, things were not so easy. There were hardware problems, for starters. Tech crews were working around the clock, finding ways to reconfigure the Ring so it could in fact form a wormhole link.

Sondra had confidence in her people. But hardware wasn’t the only problem. Sooner or later—probably sooner—the Ring would be capable of opening a wormhole link to whatever was on the other side of those tuning parameters.

But did they want to open such a wormhole? Large masses were being moved through a wormhole somewhere, but Sondra was nowhere as convinced as Larry Chao that Earth was involved. In her opinion, Larry was reading too much into the evidence. He wanted it to be Earth, and therefore it was.

All that being said, she’d be damned glad to get Larry the hell back here, if he could finagle the powers-that-be to let the Graviton make the run. She’d send all the gravity beams they wanted to get Larry back here. He might be one of the few people around who could actually give her some worthwhile advice.

But leaving Larry to one side for the moment, even if Earth were on one side or the other of the wormhole link, opening a link to the same target point might not be such a good idea. Did she, Sondra, really want to open a door that might let monsters like the Adversary loose into the Solar System?

If and when they got a hole open, what would they do? Merely look through it? Send a probe, or a ship? The Charonians knew how to make safe wormhole links—but did the Ring of Charon team? Might there not be, say, some unexpected source of radiation formed by the wormhole link? For that matter, could they be certain that the Ring of Charon itself would be safe? Might there not be some unexpected danger that could damage or destroy the ring? Granted, there were no such known dangers, but that really wasn’t much comfort. Mother Nature loved surprises.

They would, therefore, take it slowly. They would slog through all the data, looking for the tiny clues, the microscopic hints, that might add up to some sort of idea about what was on the other side. Then she would decide.

She would decide. That was a startling thought. No one else had authority over the Ring of Charon, and the Ring was the only game in town so far as gravities was concerned. The Autocrat could try and impose a decision, with the bully-boys in his crew there to serve as enforcers, but the Autocrat seemed serious about keeping the Ring out of his jurisdiction.

Good God. She would make the call on what might be the most important decision for humanity since the Abduction. Should she leave Pandora’s box closed, keep all the evils safely on the other side? Or was this the Lady or the Tiger? Was Larry right that Earth was in mortal danger even now? Suppose that danger was real, and there was something the Solar System could do to stop it? Leaving the worm-hole shut could doom the Earth. Or opening the wormhole could bring the same danger to the Solar System.

Or suppose opening the wormhole now, in a hurried, unconsidered rush, would bring some other danger home to the Solar System—or wreck the Ring of Charon beyond repair, and thus destroy the last hope of some future contact with the Earth?

Or suppose that this was it, the last best chance to use the Ring? Suppose this wormhole activity ceased, and the Charonians cut the link or destroyed it, and the Ring of Charon never, ever, detected another usable tuning frequency?

And she had to decide.

She was nearly at the last of the gibberish interpretations the pattern-matchers kept offering up, when something that seemed orderly scrolled past the screen, almost too fast for her to see it.

She frowned, and moved the scrollbar back. Forty zeroes and ones run together, repeated three times. The pattern matcher had broken the string out in various ways. Two twenty-digit numbers, four ten-digit numbers, eight five-digit binary numbers and so on.

Five digits… Not a very useful length. The largest number you could express in five binary digits was 11111, or 31. So why did the computer bother to break it out that way?

And then it hit her. Because of 26. Because 26 was smaller than 31, and you only needed 26 numbers to express a certain rather useful symbol set…She started working in her head—but no, this was no time to drop a digit and get confused. She punched a few mindlessly simple commands into the pattern matcher and the answer popped up on the screen.

And all of a sudden, her decision was much simpler.

Dianne sat at the captain’s chair in the briefing room as Gerald MacDougal stood by the wall screen, using the wall controls to stop the playback again.

He locked onto one frame of the images sent back by NaPurHab, a slightly blurry picture of a small grey world lit in half-phase, hanging over a cracked and pitted red-black surface that filled the background. What looked to be a SCORE was visible toward the right edge of the frame. “Once they entered the wormhole, we only got about ten seconds of video and other data before we lost the signal,” he said. “Earth didn’t do any better. Nowhere near as much as we’d hoped for, and that’s the single best image.”

“Why so little data?” Dianne asked. “Five years ago, when the Saint Anthony went through the wormhole from the Solar System to the Multisystem, we got hours and hours of data.”

“They had time to set things up for a proper line-of-sight relay straight through the wormhole,” Gerald said. “NaPurHab didn’t manage to launch a relay, or else the relay failed immediately. Without a relay, we had to have direct line-of-sight with NaPurHab to get a signal—and the moment the aft end of the hab entered the wormhole, the signal was cut off.”