Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

The countdown clock came on and started marking the passage of time. Eight minutes left.

Larry sighed and rubbed his weary eyes. Now it came down to one last set of checks to make, and one last button to push.

One last button.

They could have programmed those last checks on the automatic sequencer as well, even told the computer to start the actual firing of the system. If the experiment had been dependent on split-second timing, they would have.

But timing wasn’t that vital here. Besides, letting the computer do the work would not have been right . This was a human moment, the triumph both of human ingenuity over a technical and scientific problem, and of human cussedness over damn-fool rules. It was a way to proclaim a breakthrough to all humanity—and, equally important to Larry, it was a way to thumb his nose at Raphael. No computer could be programmed to do that properly.

Seven minutes left.

Still, there was something about the moment that surpassed even Larry’s deep-seated need to defy the director. It was dawning on Larry that this wasn’t just an experiment, not just an attention-getting device for saving their careers. This was history. No one had ever attempted such a thing. This was gravity control on a grand scale. Crude, limited—yes. But this one moment could change everyone’s lives.

Six minutes.

Just how ready was he to change the course of history? Larry licked his dry lips and glanced nervously over at Sondra. She nodded once, without looking up from her readouts. Everything was ready. In nervous silence, the last few minutes slid away to seconds. And then it came to the time itself.

For a brief moment, a frightened voice in Larry’s head told him no, told him not to do this thing. He ignored the voice of fear, of caution, and stabbed the button down.

Thousands of kilometers over his head, the Ring activated the gravity containment, and then pulsed the first waves of gravity power toward Saturn. Larry pulled his finger from the button and looked around blankly, feeling the moment to be a bit anticlimactic. There should have been some dramatic effect there in the lab to make them know it had happened. Maybe I should have programmed the lights to dim or something , he told himself sarcastically.

Of course, nothing happened in the control room. The action was far away overhead, at the axis, the focal point, of the Ring of Charon.

But by now, the action was rushing its way down toward Saturn. The first pulse was already millions of kilometers along its way.

From here on, the automatics did take over. The sequencer fired again. The second millisecond pulse leapt from the Ring. And the third, the fourth. It was too late to bring it back. Far too late. There was nothing they could do but press on. They would catch hell no matter what they did now.

The Observer had no concept of free choice. All that it did, or thought, or decided, it was compelled to do, each stimulus producing the appropriate response. There would not be , could not be, any situation not provided for. In its memory and experience, going back far beyond its own creation, all was supposed to be categorized, understood, known. There should have been nothing new under this or any other star.

It could not fear the unknown, because such a concept was beyond it. To it, the unknown was inconceivable.

Thus, it struggled to force new phenomena into old categories—for example, choosing to see the alien ring as a mutation, a modification of its own form.

Having reached this flawed identification, it accessed the concept of change and mutation as recorded in its memory store. It explored the possible forms change might take, and the results of those changes. As best it could tell, the alien fit within the possible parameters. That was enough data to satisfy the Observer.

It only remained to determine what its distant cousin was doing. But then, the answer arrived, full-blown and complete, from its heritage memory store.

It was a relay. It was echoing a message from home, announcing that it was time. Perhaps the normal means of contact had failed, and this new ring had sailed between the stars to bring its message.

Of course. What else could it be? The Observer searched the length and breadth of its memory, and did not find an alternative answer.

To one of the Observer’s kind, memory was all. Finding no other answer in its memory proved there was no other answer .

It was a way of being that had always worked.

Jupiter was next, or rather Ganymede. Larry told himself he must remember not to treat the inhabited satellites as mere appendages of the planets. The residents of the gas-giant satellite settlements were always annoyed by that sort of thing. After all, no one referred to the Moon as being part of Earth. Titan, Ganymede and the other inhabited satellites were worlds in their own right. Larry knew he had best bear that in mind—if things worked out the way they might, he would have a lot of contact with the gravity experts on Titan and Ganymede.

Yeah, those are vital points right now , Larry thought sarcastically. He was finding other things to worry about, trying to avoid the big picture. He had caught himself doing that all night, again and again. He was unable to face the meaning, the consequences of what he was doing. He did not want to be in charge of changing the world. The hell with it. Larry plunged in the start button again. The beam regenerated itself and leapt toward Jupiter’s satellite.

At least, they hoped it was heading toward Ganymede. Though Sondra had run graser experiments before, they were at a ten-millionth of this power. She was finding the collimated gravity beam difficult to control even with computer-automated assistance and Larry to backstop her.

And, be it confessed, she too was more than a bit nervous about dealing with such massive amounts of power. Even with all the signal loss and fade-outs of their crude directionalizing system, they were still pulsing bursts of three hundred thousand gravities out from a point source—albeit a point source smaller than an amoeba, a point source that went unstable after a few seconds. A million kilometers from the Pluto-Charon system, the pulse had lost half its power, and lost half again in another million.

By the time it reached even the closest of its targets, the beam had lost virtually all its power, was reduced to a one-millisecond tenth-gee wisp of nothing. And since it was phased with the repulser beam, the net gravitational energy directed at a target was exactly zero. The beam pushed exactly as hard as it pulled. It was physically impossible for the beam to be anything but harmless. Besides, each beam firing only lasted a millisecond and acted on the entire target body as a whole. The beam was a push-pull type, she told herself again. The push-pull couldn’t fail, not without the entire system failing utterly. It was impossible for this beam to hurt anyone or anything.

But such reassurances weren’t enough to keep her from getting nervous. “How’s it going, Larry?” she asked for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“Still fine,” Larry replied, more than a bit distracted himself. The amplified gravity source still collapsed every thirty seconds or so, and Larry had to regenerate the point source. The strain was getting to him. He had hoped to automate the process, but he had rapidly discovered that he barely had time to look up from his primary controls before the source would go unstable again.

It wasn’t until halfway through the Jupiter run that he had the time to set up the automation system. He instructed the computer to look over his shoulder, figuratively speaking, and watch the regeneration procedure he used.