Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

A burst of applause followed, and a dozen people reached in to shake hands with Larry. Sondra could not keep a wry smile from her face. Well done, Simon , indeed. Director Popolov had assumed that Dr. Simon Raphael had been responsible for doing the experiment, rather than busy attempting to squelch it. Never mind. She could see the growing knot of people swarming over Larry. They could see where the real credit lay. And there would be no keeping the true word from spreading. Well done, Simon . Sondra looked up to where Raphael had been and discovered he wasn’t there anymore. She looked toward the door just in time to see him ducking through it, escaping his humiliation while the attention was off him. For a moment, for a brief moment, she found it in herself to feel sorry for the man.

But then the crowd jostled her, and swept her into the swirl of people surrounding Larry.

Shy, blushing, smiling, Larry accepted the congratulations of his colleagues, even those who had not believed him only hours before. There was a general clamor for information of all kinds. Everyone seemed to have a notepack out, trying to link into Larry’s files in the central computer. They all found the files in question had privacy blocks on them. The computer commlink system actually shut down for a minute, overwhelmed by too many people asking for a look at too many files and datasets. Larry used his own notepack to remove the blocks from every file he controlled.

The whole business was too much for him. Pride, excitement, his usual awkwardness in public situations, worry over what Raphael would do next—all of those feelings and a half dozen more besides were jumbled up inside him—and were forced to take a backseat to the endless questions from Webling and the other staff scientists. There wasn’t time for anything but the moment itself, the event.

Someone—Larry thought it was Hernandez, the microgravity expert, but he wasn’t sure—was shoving a notepack in his face, asking him to explain a flowchart display. Larry offered up a mental shrug, took the pack, and started trying to make sense of the graph. Maybe if he cooperated, they would all calm down sooner.

But his answer only prompted another question from someone else, started another argument. There were too many possibilities, too many theories. There wasn’t room in the dome for it all.

In part because the observation dome was getting too crowded, and in part because it was easier to explain things in front of the switches and dials and screens, the throng seemed to migrate from the observation dome to the primary Ring control room. Afterwards, Larry had no recollection of actually going there.

There was something about the buttons and dials and instruments of the control room that made people remember their professionalism. Voices got lower, and people actually waited for each other to finish talking.

The room was small, and there were too many people in it. The environmental system couldn’t keep up, and the air grew hot and stuffy. Nobody seemed to notice or care. If anything, the closeness of the room added to the intensity of the moment. People got sharper, more focused, and started acting more like rational scientists. Larry found himself perched on the back of a chair, running an impromptu seminar.

But just when the situation seemed to be calmed down again, the next message came in, from Ganymede station. If anything, it was more effusive than Titan’s signal. Then Titan checked in again, with a more complete report, and their enthusiasm seemed to have doubled, if such a thing were possible.

When Ganymede made its complete report, they had a real set of numbers to work with for the first time. They knew the power of the gravity beam when it had left Pluto-Charon, and now they had measurements, from two locations, of its power, intensity, wave shape and frequency at arrival—in effect giving them hard data on how the beam had been affected as it moved through space.

The data not only confirmed that Larry’s gravity beam was real, it also told volumes about the nature of gravity itself—and about how it interacted with the fabric of space-time, about the matter and the gravity fields it passed through and near, how it affected and was affected by the velocity of the objects it encountered. Hernandez was able to prove that gravity was subject to Doppler effects. That was no great surprise; theory had predicted it. But for the first time the matter was settled, confirmed, and not a mere assumption.

There was a lesson in there, and somewhere in the middle of the tumult that day, Larry spotted it: Before you can fully understand a force of nature, you must be able to manipulate it. Never before had scientists been able to fiddle with gravity, in effect turn it on and off to see what would happen. Now they could, and the floodgates were open. In that first four hours they learned more about gravity than all of humanity had learned in all history.

And they had some power to play with, too. That helped. Science always needed more power than nature conveniently provided. How far would humans have gotten in the study of magnetism if all they had been allowed to work with was Earth’s natural magnetic fields, and the occasional lodestone?

Size for size, nature’s force generators were not very strong or efficient. It takes a whole thunderstorm to produce lightning, something as huge as Earth to create a natural one-gee field, a mass the size of the Sun to start fusion. Now humans could match all those power levels, or at least come close, using much smaller devices.

It was not a time for contemplation. Still the messages came, from Ganymede and Titan, informing that VISOR and JPL had been advised. Events were happening too rapidly, over too great a span of distance.

Larry imagined the radio and laser signals that must be crisscrossing the Inner System, chasing each other, sending new information that was old by the time it arrived. By now, as word was arriving at Pluto from Titan, saying that Titan had advised Earth—by now Earth had already received the gravity beam.

JPL would send a message as soon as someone there knew what was up. That was the signal to watch for. Larry watched the clocks and calculated the signal delay a dozen times over. Twenty minutes before a return signal from Earth could possibly arrive, he stood up and stretched. “Look,” he said, “there’s a lot more to cover, but we should be hearing from JPL soon, and I want to be in the dome when the message comes.”

With a renewed gabble of voices, the entire group migrated back to the dome. After all, everyone else wanted to see the message arrive as well. This discovery was going to save their jobs as well. Larry managed to duck away long enough to sneak back to his quarters, grab his toilet kit, go to the head and freshen up a bit. This was his second day more or less without sleep. If he couldn’t have rest, he could at least have a two-minute shower and a shave.

By the time he arrived at the dome, a few minutes before Earth was due to check in, the show had already begun. The lights had been dimmed in the dome, and the stars gleamed forth overhead. Charon and the mighty wheel of the Ring dominated the sky.

Larry could not look up at that sight without being inspired. That tool, that device, one of the mightiest generators ever made, and he had put it to use, commanded it toward a breakthrough.

Larry moved carefully into the darkened room, waited for his eyes to adjust, and looked around. The comm staff had been at work, rigging a series of large view screens at one side of the dome and rearranging the chairs to face the screens. One screen showed a countdown clock, displaying the time remaining until the receipt-of-beam signal could arrive from Earth. The second display was clicking through screen after screen of results and reports already derived from the experiment, with data from Titan, Ganymede and VISOR.