Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“For the gravity crowd,” Chenlaw said mournfully. “The research pie is getting mighty small. So what do you think will happen to our funding if this Ring gets sexy and starts gobbling up all the money? What we have to do is come up with a way to get involved in gravity if we want to see a dime.”

Marcia glanced up at the sequence clock. “Eight more minutes here. Then they switch the beam to Earth.” She watched her displays, and wondered what the new world would be like.

McGillicutty was also glad when the beam shifted off Venus.

Oh, those ten minutes when the beam had been directed at them, at VISOR, those were blissful, fantastic. But they were almost too much. The signal was so powerful it threatened to overwhelm his instruments. But now he could direct his gear at a remote target, at Earth. No one had ever done this sort of sensing before. It was an entirely different challenge, an entirely different opportunity.

You needed some range before you gained any perspective. Besides, there were all the secondary effects you could only observe at range. How did the gee waves warp radio? Lightwaves? In theory, modulated gravity waves should alternately blueshift and redshift electromagnetic radiation. Would that really happen? And what effect would the beam have on existing and interacting gravity sources? Would there be induced resonance waves in the Earth-Moon system’s gravity patterns?

McGillicutty wanted to know it all. That in itself was nothing new—he spent his entire life, every waking minute, wanting to know all the answers. What was different about today was that he was getting the chance to find out.

Still, he would have to move fast to get it. The gravity-wave beam had shifted off Venus only a few minutes ago. He had only about five minutes to reorient the station’s sensors toward Earth and reconfigure them for distant sensing. Fortunately, the rest of the staff was there to assist him on the job.

He checked the main control board one more time. A few of the instruments still weren’t in position. “Marcia, swivel in that damn boom antenna. We’ll need the twenty-one-centimeter band on this job. I want to see if there’s any ripple in the neutral hydrogen band.”

“Yes sir, boss. Right away boss. You bet, boss,” Marcia growled as she activated the antenna system. Personally, she could not imagine a more useless task than watching the twenty-one-centimeter band. It seemed to her that twenty-one centimeters never showed anything.

McGillicutty wanted to see if the gravity wave would distort space-time enough to show a ripple in the carrier.

So what, either way? She watched as the indicator showed the antenna directing itself at Earth. She switched her monitor to oscilloscope mode. Yep, there it was. Twenty-one centimeters was showing a virtually flat carrier wave, as usual. She powered up the audio gain and was rewarded with a faint hiss. “Ready to go, boss,” she said, “and I’m real excited about it.”

“Good,” McGillicutty said, completely missing the sarcasm. “Chenlaw, what’s with the microwave receiver? I need it now, not next week!”

“For God’s sake, Hiram, give me more than thirty seconds.”

“Why?” McGillicutty asked. “It shouldn’t take anywhere near that long to swing it around twenty degrees.”

“I have to swing it around the other way, through three hundred forty degrees, or point it straight at the power generators as it slews around,” Chenlaw replied through clenched teeth. “Do you want it blown out when it gets into position?”

But McGillicutty wasn’t even listening anymore. He was on the intercom to one of the other labs, chattering on about neutrino backscatter. Chenlaw turned and shook her head at Marcia. Marcia shrugged back. What could you do? The man was utterly impossible.

“Okay, boys and girls,” McGillicutty said in a loud, cheerful voice, patently unaware how many of his co-workers wanted to strangle him. He checked his chronometers. “Earth should be under the beam already, and has been for seven minutes. The event radius is moving toward us. Stand by to receive results data in three minutes—mark! All instruments and recorders should be operating now to establish pre-event background levels.”

McGillicutty managed to shut up long enough to check his own control board. “Two minutes,” he announced at last.

Under the beam for seven minutes . Marcia suddenly found herself thinking of her husband, Gerald MacDougal, back on Earth, back home in the lab in Vancouver. Even at the speed of light, he was ten long minutes away. But it wasn’t numbers and seconds. It was that Gerald was in the past, his reality cut off from hers by the wall of time. No matter what he did, no matter what happened to him, she could not possibly know about it until the sluggish lightwaves crossed the void between the worlds.

He could die in the midst of sending her a live message and she would not know it for ten minutes.

If, for Marcia, Gerald was trapped in her past, then she was trapped in his past. Each in the other’s past. There was something deeply disturbing about that, as if both of them were frozen in place, like some insect trapped in Precambrian tree sap, imprisoned as the sap fossilized into crystal perfection, leaving its victim perfectly preserved, trapped in the amber of time.

“Twenty seconds,” McGillicutty announced. This weird pulsation and manipulation of gravity was not something she understood. She was more than a little afraid of it, to tell the truth. Somehow, it smacked of magic, of voodoo and mystery. How could there be a beam made of gravity waves? It even sounded like a nonsense phrase, a cheese made of xylophones, a cloud made of steel.

She blinked and forced herself to concentrate on the display screen. “Ten seconds.” Nine minutes and fifty seconds ago, the beam had struck her husband’s world, but that stroke of time would not pass through her frame of experience for another ten seconds, nine seconds, eight seconds—she fiddled with her tuning controls, sharpening the image—four, three, two, one, zero—

Her screen display went wild, and her terminal speaker was suddenly overwhelmed by a powerful screeching roar of noise. She cut off the audio and stared in astonishment at the oscilloscope trace on the screen. Something was producing a powerful and complex signal out there. There almost seemed to be a pattern to it, as if it were repeating over and over again.

It took her a moment to look up and realize that the rest of the people in the lab were more surprised than she was. Even McGillicutty seemed to be in shock. It took her significantly longer to realize that the squeal on the twenty-one-centimeter band was all that was left of Earth.

With a bump and a clunk, the Pack Rat undocked herself from the Moonside cargo port of the Naked Purple Habitat. Dianne Steiger glanced at the chronometer: 1001 GMT, just after ten in the morning, departure right on schedule, though it didn’t come soon enough for her. If there were weirder places than NaPurHab in the Solar System, she didn’t want to know about them. The Rat backed off with a cough from her control jets, engaged her gyros and came about to a new heading. The big bright ball of Earth swung into view through the starboard port.

With folded hands, Dianne Steiger sat at the control panel and watched the proceedings.

The massive, somehow scruffy bulk of NaPurHab loomed large in her forward port. NaPurHab flew a looping figure-eight orbit that shuttled back and forth around Earth and Moon. Right now the hab was headed down into the Earthside portion of its orbit. That was where the Rat got off, fired engines to circularize her orbit and get on course for her next port of call. Dianne keyed the comm panel and called NaPurHab comm and traffic. “NaPurHab, this is Foxtrot Tango thirty-four, call signal Pack Rat , departing for deadhead run to High New York Habitat. On auto departure, now sending departure vector data on side channel. Please acknowledge.”