Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Larry realized that he must have missed the Venusian signal while he was in the shower. The third screen showed the dome telescope’s view of the Earth-Moon system, the two planets glowing like fat stars in the firmament. But it was the fourth screen that surprised Larry. It showed a handsome young man, nattily dressed, talking into the camera. An ID line across the bottom said he was Wolf Bernhardt, the spokesman for JPL, talking on a live feed. Given the expense and difficulty of punching a television signal through to Pluto, that in itself told Larry that the folks back home were taking him seriously.

Larry ducked his way into the rows and found an empty seat next to Sondra. “You haven’t missed much,” she told him in a stage whisper that had to carry halfway across the room. “Right now this guy is talking about the results from Venus.”

Larry nodded vaguely and glanced at the countdown clock. Three minutes to go. There was a slight stir from the other side of the dome. Larry glanced over and saw Dr. Simon Raphael coming in. Raphael paused at the doorway and looked around. Their eyes locked for a moment.

Larry’s heart sank, just the way it had back in grade school when the principal’s gimlet eyes bored into him. Justly or unjustly, fairly or not, Larry the child and Larry the adult both knew what that look meant. He was in trouble. Again. Still. Forever. Raphael was going to find some way of punishing him.

Larry thought again of Raphael’s threat to take “every cent” of the experiment’s cost out of his pay. That look told Larry that the threat was still good. Raphael would find some way of making it stick. And making it hurt. If not for punishment, then for revenge.

Raphael broke eye contact and moved into the room, sidling along the far wall, to watch the action from as far away as possible.

Larry breathed a sigh of relief. Raphael was not going to cause a scene just now. This moment, here and now would belong to Larry. That was something.

The beam shifted off the second planet, focusing on the third. Inevitably, the Observer was caught in the spill-over. The gravity beam passed through the solid mass of the Moon like light through glass. But if the Moon was transparent to gravity waves, the Observer was not. Lurking far beneath the Moon’s surface, a huge torus girdling the satellite’s core, the Observer shuddered as the beam played over it.

And that was the signal, the alert, the command it had been born and built to receive.

It responded as reflexively as a human jerking away from an electric shock, as instinctively as a lover at the moment of climax. There was no possibility of controlling the response. The beam set off an incredibly rapid chain of events far outside the control of what served as higher consciousness for the Observer.

Power long stored was drawn in, channeled, focused. But not enough power for the job at hand, merely enough to bring the Link up to full power. The Observer felt a surge of irrepressible pleasure as half-forgotten power poured through the new-born hole in space. The long-dormant Link bloomed back to life.

Power. Now it had the power. An overwhelming sense, a potency, of potential, of mission and purpose coursed through its being. Now. Now was the time for its destiny .

Now it could turn its attentions toward Earth.

The Observer drew massive, surging power through the Link and grabbed.

Larry turned his attention back to the countdown clock and realized with a start that there were only a few seconds left. He started listening to the announcer. “We have received further confirmation of a powerful signal from Venus. The beam moved off Venus ninety seconds ago in real time, and we are awaiting it here. We are standing by for scheduled reception of your beam at Earth.” There was a rustle of anticipation in the room. This was it, not only for Larry, not only for the experiment, but for the whole station.

If JPL was suitably impressed, the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation would be impressed. And if the UNAF was impressed, there was no way they could shut down the Gravities Research Station. At least that was what Larry hoped.

The announcer looked away from the camera toward a timer display on his desk. “Twenty seconds now,” he said, obviously relishing the moment.

Larry swallowed hard and leaned forward in his seat. Silly to be nervous, silly to be excited. He knew it had worked. But the seconds were sliding away.

“T minus five, four, three, two, one, zero. We are getting the first—”

The commlink from JPL went dead.

In the middle of view screen three, Earth flashed out of existence.

The Moon hung in the telescope view.

Alone.

Larry sat there, watching the monitor screen in frozen horror. The comm people were already jumping up, checking their gear. “It’s everything,” one of them said. “All commlinks with Earth just went dead.”

“That’s crazy. Check back at central.”

Everything . Larry sat, motionless, his heart pounding. They would search for an answer, a malfunction in their gear.

But Larry knew . No evidence, no explanation, but he knew . Somehow, impossibly, the beam, the harmless gravity-wave beam, so weakened at that range it could not have squashed a fly or mussed a child’s hair—

Somehow it had vaporized the Earth.

Eyes began to turn toward Larry. Eyes that were no longer friendly, or excited. Yes , he thought, they ‘ll all be willing to admit it was my experiment now .

Eyes bored into his head. One pair of eyes in particular. Raphael, behind him, seething with terror and rage. Larry could feel the director’s malevolent stare drilling into the back of his skull.

Two thoughts echoed in his head, one incredible, the other simply insane.

Larry Chao had destroyed the Earth.

And somehow, Simon Raphael was going to see to it that it came out of Larry’s pay.

Gerald MacDougal reached out and slapped the alarm buzzer. Two in the morning. Vancouver, British Columbia, was a lovely city, but it had a major flaw: it was in the wrong time zone. Like the Moon and the domed Settlements and virtually all the other space installations, VISOR worked on Universal Time. Greenwich Mean Time as they insisted on calling it here.

Two a.m. here. That was ten in the morning on VISOR, ignoring the speed-of-light delays. Ten a.m., Tuesdays and Saturdays, were Marcia’s assigned slots for sending view messages home. If she even got that much chance. She had sent a twenty-word-text message the night before warning about watching some gravity experiment from Pluto, just after 1000 UT. Right on top of her sending time slot.

Gerald stretched and yawned. Venus was about ninety degrees from conjunction at the moment, which worked out to a ten-minute speed-of-light delay, plus a split second or two while the Earth-orbiting comsat picked it up and relayed it around to his receiver. He had time to wake up a bit before Marcia’s weekly message came in. He could have let his comm system pick it up and could have played it back later, of course, but he preferred to see the view message immediately, the moment it came down. That way he would know what Marcia had been doing and saying ten short minutes before. It was the one time when that was possible. God, he missed her.

He stood up, walked to the window, and looked down at the splendid city laid out before him. His hometown. Aside from the time zone, there was no place on Earth he’d rather be. And, as far as his work was concerned, no place on Earth was where he ought to be. Gerald was a big man, tall, muscular and tough, with curly brown hair and a solid jaw. He got restless waiting, and was too often forced to convince himself that patience was a virtue.