Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Wolf Bernhardt breathed in the cool California air and told himself it was right that there was a Berliner involved. Berlin was the ancestral home of physics, after all. All this grand work would never have happened if not for the great minds that had labored in that city so long ago.

And it required at least a quick, agile mind to respond to this situation quickly. He had listened to the pre-experiment broadcast from Pluto, and that had been enough. Others would have hesitated, he congratulated himself. Not Herr Doktor Bernhardt.

The first word that the effect was real, that powerful, controllable artificial gravity had been detected had arrived only a quarter hour ago, from Titan Station. Wolf checked his watch. He had to go on the air in another five minutes. Plenty of time. Lucky indeed that his quarters were close to the main control station.

He smoothed his shirt down and examined himself in the bathroom mirror. Herr Doktor Wolf Bernhardt, age thirty, ambitious and determined, looked back out at him, blue eyes gleaming, blond hair combed back off the high forehead, angular jaw jutted just slightly forward. His suit immaculate, the fabric a pale powder blue that set off his slightly ruddy complexion. His smooth skin glowed with health and the warmth of the shower he had just had. He ran a hand over his jaw. Yes, perfectly shaved. No one could suspect he had been in rumpled clothing dozing by the duty-scientist panel fifteen minutes ago. Now he was ready for the world.

He looked again at the mirror. Yes, it was a face appropriate to history. It was 1:25 in the morning, local time, but he was fresh, sharp. And that was important. Tonight, now, he would be talking to only the scientists on Pluto, with perhaps a relay to the other off-planet stations. But tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, Earth would see the recordings of those messages over the newsnets. And the reporters—they would need a spokesman to talk to, someone who could answer their questions from here, not from the other side of an event radius light-hours across.

And he, Wolf Bernhardt, would be there, ready to talk, all the figures and results at his fingertips.

Quite literally at his fingertips—for he would be relying on the computer to educate him on the topic of gravity research. He would need to work the databases hard to get up to speed quickly.

But he would be there, he would learn, he would be ready. This was the moment he had waited for. His moment in the sun.

He turned and left his room, hurrying a bit, as if fame and history were impatient for him to arrive.

Sondra stumbled through the cafeteria the next morning. After a bare four hours’ sleep, her thought processes were not as sharp as they should have been. She looked around the room and spotted Webling, indecently awake and cheerful, tucking into her fruit salad.

Webling , Sondra thought. With the damage already done, maybe now was the time to turn a potential enemy around. Time to admit what we’ve done , Sondra thought. Webling was a woman of sudden enthusiasms. If Sondra could get her excited about the amplified graser before word leaked out, then perhaps she would help blunt any attack Raphael might make. The next step, Sondra decided, was to suck Webling into the game.

She collected her own breakfast and a large cup of coffee, then shuffled wearily over to the older scientist’s table, struggling to calculate the time dynamics in her head. Titan’s initial response message ought to arrive back at Pluto in about twenty minutes. Larry was probably already in the observatory bubble, the traditional place to await messages from the Inner System.

The main comm board was patched through to the bubble, so that any public message that arrived at the station would automatically be echoed there. The early-morning shift in the computer center would have seen the overnight science and experimentation reports already.

Those reports were supposed to be strictly confidential, but the computer team was a noted den of gossips, masters of hinting at things they could not say directly. The rumors were probably flying already, at least in the station’s lower echelons, if not in the circles where Webling and Raphael were likely to hear anything. Sondra thought she noticed a face or two turned toward her, and wondered if it was just her imagination.

Of course, the moment the Titan message came in, rumor would turn into fact and all hell would break loose. Everyone would know what Larry and she had done. After that, it would be too late to turn Webling around.

The trick was to tell Webling about the revised experiment, and get her excited about the probable results, before the message came—and before Raphael found out.

Anyway, it was worth a try. Sondra walked over to the table where the older woman was sitting. “Good morning, Dr. Webling!” she said, with as much false cheeriness as she could manage.

“Why, good morning, Sondra. I didn’t expect to see you up and about so early,” Webling replied in her slightly reedy voice. “How did the experiment run go last night?”

“Very well. Very well indeed,” Sondra said. “But I’m afraid I have a confession to make about it.”

Webling, whose closest attention had been focused on a slice of grapefruit, looked up sharply at Sondra. “Go on,” she said in a careful voice.

Sondra bit her lip and started talking, hoping that Larry would understand the need to downplay his part in the experiment just now. The truth needed a few coarse adjustments. “I got a little inspired last night. I made an adjustment to the graser settings. Nothing that would affect the primary experiment goals, of course. Even so, I suppose I should have awakened you before I made the adjustment. It’s just that the idea came to me so suddenly that there was barely time to set it up as it was. And with Ring time suddenly so limited, I didn’t want to take the risk of losing the run altogether. And it seems as if your experiment was a dazzling success.” She made a show of checking her watch and seeing what time it was. “We ought to be getting the first response back from Titan soon.”

“Why a ‘dazzling’ success?” Webling asked. “It was a fairly routine experiment run.” She checked the time herself. “And why expect such an immediate response? If we get a message now, they would have had to have sent it the moment they received our graser beam. Why would they be so eager?”

“Because if our— my— figures were right, then Titan should have received a series of one-millisecond push-pull gravity-wave pulses, sent from here at a strength of one-tenth gee.”

Webling’s eyes widened. “ One-tenth gee…”

Sondra stood up from the table and Webling got up as well, automatically following the younger woman’s lead. “I left a record of your experiment’s output figures in the observation dome, Dr. Webling. Perhaps you’d be interested in seeing them while we wait to see what Titan has to say?”

The beam was moving again.

First directed at the sixth planet, then shifted toward the fifth, now sweeping over the second planet. Soon now, soon, it would sweep this way, toward the third world, and the Observer and its hiding place .

Close. The moment was close. After all the endless millennia, the wait was down to mere minutes, seconds.

The Observer all but quivered with anticipation.

When Larry walked into the dome, he instantly noticed two things: one, a much larger number of people than usual “just happened” to be eating breakfast there, instead of in the cafeteria, and many were lingering over their coffee; and two, a murmur of conversation sprang up when he walked in—though no one had the nerve to go up and talk to him. When Sondra and Webling walked into the dome soon after, the murmur rose to a veritable buzz of excitement. Obviously, news traveled fast through the station, and rumor even faster. True to form, the computer center had leaked like a sieve when the Webling experiment had come through. Someone down there had seen and understood the significance of the readings—and that someone had a wagging tongue.