Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Orbital Traffic Control had its own tunnel-and-airlock system leading to the Lunar surface. OTC had a lot of instruments topside, and it made sense to have direct access to them without having to deal with the municipal locks.

But Tyrone Vespasian was not going to check on his instruments, except, quite literally, in the most basic possible way. For all scientific instruments are merely extensions of the human senses. The instruments Vespasian needed to check were his eyes. He needed to see for himself.

There was always the faint chance, the faint hope that a camera, a lens, an electronic image system would have malfunctioned. He had to eliminate that possibility. He needed to know there was nothing but his own bare-assed eyeballs between himself and what he was looking at. He needed to go up to the surface, look in the sky, and see for himself.

He knew Earth was gone, but this was not about knowing. He needed to believe.

The outer airlock door opened and Vespasian, huge and squat in his pressure suit, stepped awkwardly out onto the Lunar surface.

Look to the skies , he told himself, but somehow his gaze stayed determinedly staring at the ground. Strange thoughts ran through his head. What, exactly, would happen to the Moon without the Earth? Vespasian found his eyes scanning the horizon, not the zenith. He could not bring himself to look up. Lucian’s computer models showed the Moon merely retaining its previous Solar orbit with a somewhat increased eccentricity that would gradually damp out, eventually leaving the Moon riding secure, square on the former barycenter, the old center of gravity for the Earth-Moon system.

Look to the skies . What would happen to the Moon’s rotation? Would it retain its old once-a-month spin? Still he could not force his eyes to look up , toward Gemini, to where Earth should have been. Would the Moon’s spin speed up? Slow down?

Look to the skies . At last he turned his gaze upward, and looked—at nothing. A blankness, an empty spot where Earth had always been. He felt his knees about to give way, and leaned backward in time to land on his ample rump, rather than flat on his face.

He sat there, legs splayed out in front of him, head thrown back, staring at the sky, for hours, or days, or seconds. The lifeless hills of the Moon, the gray, cratered landscape no longer graced by the blue-white marble in the sky. He felt a tear in his eye, and was glad for some reason that he could not reach through his helmet and brush it away. Another tear fell, and another. These were tears for Earth, tears that deserved to flow.

Dr. Simon Raphael paced back and forth, stalking up and down the carpet, completely ignoring the visitors in his office. No one in the room had spoken in the five minutes since Raphael brought them in.

Finally Raphael seemed to have run out of steam. He slowed, turned, walked back behind his desk, and sat down. “Very well then. It’s gone. Eight and a half hours ago in real time, and three hours ago to our awareness, the planet vanished. All our instruments confirm that, and all contacts with other stations confirm it as well.

“And it happened when Mr. Chao’s magic beam touched the planet. All correct so far?” he asked, his voice frighteningly calm.

Sondra, Larry, and Webling said nothing.

Raphael stood up again, came around his desk, stood over Larry, raised his arm as if to strike the young man and then backed away. He stood there, breathing hard, with his arm raised, for a long moment. Then he slowly lowered his arm to his side. “I am actively restraining myself at this point, you know, trying to keep from screaming bloody murder at all of you, trying to keep from blaming Mr. Chao especially for this catastrophe. That is my first impulse. I expect everyone on this station—including all of you here—are harboring similar feelings. If not of anger, then of fear and horror.

“But my rational side, my scientific side, is holding me back.” Raphael leaned over Larry, wrapped his hands on the armrests of Larry’s chair, put his face close enough to Larry’s so that Larry could feel the clean warmth of Raphael’s breath on his face. “I want to blame you, Chao. I want to blame you very much. I don’t like you. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I hate you right about now. My home is gone, Chao. My family, my grandchildren, my wife’s grave. Eight billion souls are gone, vanished, destroyed. Because of that damn-fool gravity beam you had to fire at Earth.” Larry forced himself to look the director in the eye. The ruined patrician’s face was pale, chalk white with fear and repressed rage.

Raphael stood up straight again and recommenced his pacing. He seemed incapable of keeping still, seemed to need to be in motion. All of them were in shock. None of them knew how to respond. At least Raphael was reacting, moving forward instead of staring into space. “I want to blame you,” he repeated, “except I understand gravity, and gravity waves.

“ Nothing about this makes sense. But I do know enough to see one obvious fact: that your beam did not do this. I understand the power—or rather the absence of power—of that beam at that range. Passing asteroids and comets have more powerful gravity fields. Nor is this result the sort of thing that gravity could do. A powerful enough beam handled the right way might conceivably shift Earth in its orbit a bit, but no more. So why did your beam destroy a planet when so many other, stronger gravity sources have had no effect?”

Raphael turned and faced the three of them again. “We don’t know, and we have to find out. The ironic thing is that I must turn to the people who have done the damage. You three are the most likely to get at the answers, for the very good reason that you understand gravity waves better than anyone else. I want you to figure out what happened. Was Earth destroyed? Then why is there no rubble? Did that force move the planet? But how? Did it produce the illusion of Earth vanishing? Again, how?”

Raphael stopped pacing again and sat down at the edge of his desk with a deep sigh. “Find out. Forgive me for bending the rules, Dr. Berghoff, but I am ordering you to figure out those things.” He rubbed his face and slumped forward, a tired old man incapable of feeling any further shock, any further emotion of any kind. Suddenly the angry director was gone, to be replaced by a lonely, frightened, tired old man. “The entire station and all its facilities are at your disposal,” he said, in a voice that was suddenly weak and reedy.

The facade of strength and control was crumbling before their eyes. This man had suffered as deep a loss as any of them. He had held together long enough to do his job—but now, Sondra realized, he was at the end of his courage,: his endurance. “Now,” Simon Raphael said, “if you will excuse me, I am going to go lie down.”

Without another word, Raphael stood up, made at least a show of squaring his shoulders, and walked out of the room. Sondra watched him go, and thought how much she had underestimated the man. There were unknown depths of courage, of self-control, of cool intellect beneath all that pomposity. Her image of Raphael had been a mere caricature of the real man—but it struck her that Raphael had been acting like a caricature of himself. She had seen a strutting egotist because that was what Raphael chose to show the world. She closed her eyes and rubbed her brow. Not as if that mattered now.

She turned toward Larry. Another one she hardly knew. Here was another one deep in shock, and in mourning. Raphael managed his shock by calling forth the shield of rationality and reason to hide behind. How would Larry react? “Well, Larry,” she asked gently. “Earth is gone. What do we do?”