Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Larry didn’t quite dare say anything, but from what he could see, both computer runs were based on incorrect assumptions.

But the excitement went deeper than a need to see whose figures were right. Lines were being drawn. People were being required to take sides—and not just on the objective question of whether Larry was right or wrong. Other issues were getting entangled. Were you for or against Raphael? Were you for or against closing the station? Are you on our side or theirs? In a matter of hours, the results of a scientific experiment had become politicized, had crystallized all the complex, swirling antagonisms and personality conflicts, all the morale problems at the station into one simple question: Do you believe ? A question of science was reduced to a judgment of one’s faith, a choice between orthodoxy or heresy.

At which point, Larry told himself, it ceased to be science at all. Very little of this had anything to do with the quest for knowledge.

The intercom box clicked on and Raphael’s voice said, “Come in,” in peremptory tones. Larry stood up, a bit uncertainly. The man had not even checked to see if Larry was waiting. He glanced up, looking for a camera. If there was one, it was concealed. Or was the point of the exercise to show Larry how confident Raphael was that his commands would be followed? Raphael’s word was law, and therefore Larry would be there.

It occurred to Larry that if he hadn’t been there, Raphael would have lost nothing by his little power play, for there would be no one mere to hear it. Larry was half-tempted to just sit there and see what Raphael would do. But that wouldn’t be good strategy.

He stood, opened the door, and walked into Raphael’s office.

Raphael sat behind his desk, seemingly engrossed by some sort of report on his computer screen. He did not glance up or acknowledge Larry in any way. Larry stopped in front of the man’s desk, and hesitated for a moment.

But Larry had had enough. If Raphael was going to turn this into a game, then Larry would rather be a player than a pawn. With a slightly theatric sigh, he sat down and pulled out his own notepack. There was some work he could be getting on with. Or at least pretend to get on with.

He opened up the little computer, switched it on, and called up a work file. His face was calm, his heart pounding. The gesture was eloquent, brazen, impudent. Larry had never done anything in his life even remotely as contemptuous of a superior. His father would have said his mother’s Irish temper was making a rare appearance, and maybe that wasn’t far wrong.

There was a moment, a half moment, in which Raphael could have gotten the upper hand by looking up from his work and leveling his visitor with a withering comment.

But the moment passed, and the director continued at his desk pretending to read his files, while Larry sat in the visitor’s chair, pretending to be engrossed in his work.

With each passing second, it was becoming more and more impossible for Raphael to play the scene as he had planned.

Larry thought Raphael was taking quick sidelong glances at him, but he didn’t dare look up from his notepack’s screen to be sure. He began to wonder how the old man would recoup. At last Raphael stood, carrying a book, and walked over to his bookshelf. He put the book on the shelf. No doubt the book didn’t belong on the shelf, but at least the gesture broke the stalemate. He turned back to his desk and then sat on its corner, a remarkably informal pose for Raphael. It did not pass Larry’s notice that it placed Raphael in the position of looking down on Larry. “Mr. Chao?” he asked in a calm, if steely, voice.

Larry closed his notepack and looked up to see Raphael glaring balefully down at him.

The older man nodded, stood, and returned to sit down at his own desk. Now that he had Larry’s attention he could sit wherever he pleased. “I see no reason to waste time with pleasantries or delicate words,” Raphael began. “You have disrupted this station and its work for the last twenty-four hours. I cannot permit any further disruption. We have performed the computer simulation needed to confirm the fraudulent nature of your so-called experiment, and that should satisfy whatever duty we might have had to examine your absurd claims.

“I see no need to waste any further staff time or effort chasing this chimera, to say nothing of Ring time or other access to experimental facilities. I have ordered that all further work on testing your claim, no matter who performs it, be canceled immediately, so that this station can return to its proper work. I might add that I do not yet know who the appropriate legal and professional authorities are in cases of fraud such as this, but I intend to find out and report your actions to them.”

Larry opened his mouth and tried to speak. But there were no words. His boss, his own boss, was calling him a liar to his face and threatening to turn him in for the high crime of making a breakthrough.

At last he found his voice again. “You want this station to return to its proper work?” Larry asked. “What’s that? Getting ready for shutdown?” Larry shook his head in bewilderment. “Why is it easier to think that one of the staff you yourself hired is a liar and a cheat, rather than to accept that I might have discovered something? Did you even look at the data, the real data and not your simulations?”

Raphael smiled contemptuously. “The only thing you have discovered, Mr. Chao, is how to end your career. Our simulation was quite sufficient to confirm your results were flatly impossible. There was not anything like the power required available to the system.”

“I’ve seen your simulation equations,” Larry replied in a hard-edged voice. He stood up and leaned over Raphael’s desk. “They don’t even attempt to account for the effects of amplifying and focusing outside gravity fields. Of course that power wasn’t available from inside the Ring’s power system—it came from the outside, from tapping Charon’s gravity field! I grabbed a piece of Charon’s gravity and compressed it in one locus. The gravity equations are still balanced. That was the whole point of the test. You might as well run a simulation of a radio receiver without accounting for a radio signal. Obviously it can’t work without something to work on . The results of my test run will stand up. It’s your work that’s flawed, Doctor.”

Larry stared down into the blazing fury of the old man’s eyes, and then turned and left the director’s office without another word, without looking back for Raphael’s reaction. Anger, real anger, cold hard adult anger gripped him, for the first time in his life.

He realized he was angry not at Raphael’s baseless accusations, but angry at the man’s stupidity, his rigidity.

It was the man’s assault against truth , against the discoveries they had all been sent here to make, that infuriated Larry. Larry had the computer records, the numbers, the readings that could prove he was right. But all those would be cold comfort back on Earth, billions of kilometers away from the Ring. Cold comfort when the Ring was mothballed for a generation, and there was no other facility available that could possibly follow up on the results.

That was what angered Larry—the blind and needless waste , the opportunity being thrown away!

If Larry’s test results were accepted and confirmed, it would be impossible to shut down the Ring. Even with the recession back on Earth, the funding board would have to come up with some sort of operating budget. Maybe even the Settlements on Mars and the outer satellites would finally contribute. Hell, that was too timid a thought. Everyone would throw money at the Ring, in the hope of sharing in the fruits of the research. What might not be possible if artificial gravity were real? Whole new avenues of research would open up on every side, now that the initial problem had been cracked. A lifetime of work, of exciting new challenges and discoveries, would lie open in front of Larry.