Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

And all that stood between him and that bright future was one cranky old man’s bruised ego. It was not to be tolerated.

He had a strong impulse to find Sondra and ask her what he should do. But letting her call the shots would be as bad as letting Raphael roll over him. He would have to decide for himself. Once he had chosen a course of action he could ask her advice, her guidance, as to how to do it. But Larry knew he would have to decide what to do for himself, if he was going to go on respecting himself!

Without realizing where he was headed, he found himself back at the door of his own cabin. He shoved open the door, went in, and locked the door behind him. He needed some calm and quiet time alone. Time to think. Time to play the damned games, all of them.

Larry needed another experiment, a rush experiment not only to get some science done, but for career reasons, publicity reasons. Something that might make a big enough splash to prevent the shutdown.

Failing that, he had his own career to think of. The million-gee Ring run was spectacular, but it would be as discounted by the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation on Earth as it was here. Earth would listen to Raphael over Larry.

If things broke the wrong way, if Raphael did manage to cause trouble, Larry could not afford to have that one unreplicated run be his only claim to fame. He needed something further to publish, something he could bring home to Earth and base further research on. Hell, he needed an experiment that would get him a job . He scowled unhappily. Politics.

Acting the good pure little scientist, interested only in the Truth, would ensure that his discovery would be thrown away. Only by getting bogged down in politics and gamesmanship could he truly serve Truth. This situation called for scheming, not naive idealism.

Everyone gets caught justifying the means to their ends sometimes , Larry told himself, a bit uncomfortably.

Okay, then. He had a goal and a fallback goal: saving the station and/or his career. Now how to go about reaching one of both of those?

He needed to know the state of play. Had all the tests of his results had been canceled? He had a hard time believing that the entire research staff would meekly go along with the cease-work order. On the other hand, Raphael undoubtedly expected some of the staff to try to circumvent the ruling. So anyone trying for a test would have to disguise the run as something else.

Larry used his notepack computer to check the Ring experiment schedule. It was certainly much heavier than usual, with experiments scheduled around the clock. Of course, that could be explained by the planned closing, and people rushing to get their runs made before the shutdown came—but perhaps some of that scheduled time was actually intended to test Larry’s theory.

People working on the Chao Effect would have the sense to hide their work from Raphael. And a lot of people might well be doing that very thing. But who?

There was only one name he could be sure of. One of those covert experimenters was going to be, had to be, Sondra Berghoff. Maybe there would be other malcontents willing to do more than mouth off, actually willing to wade in and break some rules. But Sondra was the only one Larry knew who would take the chances involved.

Larry worked over the experiment roster, looking for experiments in which Sondra was involved.

There were three, only one of which listed her as primary researcher. That was likewise the only one of the three that had been scheduled after Larry had shown her his test results. He rejected it as too obvious. Raphael would certainly monitor that experiment closely. Besides, it wasn’t due to be run for another week. He couldn’t afford to wait that long.

One of the others seemed perfect. It had been scheduled weeks ago, and was supposed to run on the graveyard shift, 0200 GMT tonight. Sondra was listed as the technical operator, not an experimenter.

Better still, Larry noted that Dr. Jane Webling was the primary investigator. Webling, nominally the science chief of the station, was getting on in years, to put it charitably. Probably she would go to bed before the experiment ran, and simply check with her “assistant” the next morning. In all likelihood, therefore, Sondra would be on the board by herself.

So. If Sondra were going to pull something, that would be her moment. Okay, but what was the purpose of the run? Larry checked the title of the experiment: “Test of a Revised Procedure for Gravitic Collimation.” Just the sort of pompous name people learned to hang on a test when Raphael was running things , Larry thought.

Gravitic collimation. He had seen an earlier paper by Webling on the subject—in fact, he had gotten a few ideas from it. Webling had been working for some time on developing a focused beam of gravity waves—a “graser.” Like light, gravity was usually radiated in all directions from its source. But, like light, it could be manipulated, focused down into a one-dimensional beam. Larry’s own techniques of gravity focusing relied on similar techniques.

A laser was a perfectly collimated light beam. Webling’s graser project sought to develop a focused beam of gravity, albeit of microscopic power, and beam it at detectors on the other planets. Strange thought , Larry told himself, since gravity could be defined as a curve in space. A beam of curved space .

Actually, the basic technique produced two beams, pointed one hundred eighty degrees apart from each other-one aimed at the target, the other outgoing in exactly the opposite direction. Webling’s greatest success was in creating a “push-pull” beam by warping the outgoing beam around, changing its direction of travel without affecting its direction of attraction. In effect, the outgoing beam signal became a repulser. Merged with the targeted beam, it had exactly zero net attractive power, because the two beams canceled each other out. The beam should be detectable, but effectively powerless.

But suppose, Larry thought, he boosted the power rating a bit? Say, by a factor of one million? It still would be self-canceling, and thus not have any effect on the target worlds—but it would sure prove Larry was on to something. Hell, it would melt the readouts right off the gravity detectors.

That should get them some off-planet attention.

The observer did not understand the strange ring at the edge of the Solar System. The ring should have been perfectly familiar, its actions as familiar as the Observer’s own. Yet the stranger seemed to break every law, every control that should have been burned into its very being.

Why did it behave so strangely? Why did it orbit a frozen, useless world at the very borderlands of this system? Why did it not hide itself? Why, indeed, did it radiate wasted, dissipated power , advertising its presence? Hourly, the stranger permitted cumulative leakage greater than what the Observer had allowed in the last million years .

And in spite of the leakage, the stranger radiated uselessly small amounts of effective gravity power. Why did it do so with such clumsiness, such inefficiency?

So many things were quite unlike a proper ring. Only in its shape, size, and attempt to use gravity did the stranger truly resemble the Observer.

But the obvious conclusion that this was a new thing, unknown to the Observers heritage memory, never occurred to the Observer.

The Observer was congenitally incapable of asking the rather obvious question , Where did it come from? It knew, beyond any possibility of contradiction, that there was only one possible ultimate source for a gravity ring .