Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“It didn’t happen,” Larry announced, staring down into the carpet. “It didn’t happen.”

Denial , Sondra thought. “Larry, I wish that were true, but it isn’t. Earth isn’t there anymore.”

Larry looked up at her sharply, a blazing gleam in his eye. “I know that,” he snapped. “But Earth was not destroyed.”

Sondra looked up helplessly at Dr. Webling. But she seemed further gone than anyone. She wouldn’t be of any use for a long time. Only by the slightest of connections was she involved in this at all. They had hijacked her perfectly innocent experiment, and destroyed the home-world. Thanks to them, the name Webling would go down in history as one of the maniacs who destroyed Earth.

Sondra felt her mind wandering, bouncing from one question to another. History? Why worry about that now?

If indeed there was any more history after this. Were the surviving human settlements, on Mars and the Moon and elsewhere, really self-sufficient enough to survive without Earth? And suppose whatever happened to Earth happened to them, too?

Bingo . That was what her mind was trying to tell her. That was what gave this crisis urgency, why Raphael had set them to work now. It wasn’t over yet. They had to solve this problem fast, to protect whatever was left of human civilization. That was why Larry had to face the truth now . He was the best chance at finding the answer. They could not afford to wait for him to recover. “Larry, Earth is gone . Lost. Destroyed. We have to figure out why before it happens to the rest of the Solar System. Earth is gone. Accept it.”

“Without debris? Without any residual heat?” he demanded. “There isn’t any way to wreck a world without leaving something behind. You can’t destroy matter or energy. If the Earth was instantly converted into energy somehow, the flashover would at least have melted the Moon. From here it would be like a temporary second Sun, at least. The nuclear radiation would probably kill us. If Earth was simply smashed, there would be debris. Earth had— has— a mass greater than a hundred Asteroid Belts, and we can detect the Belt, certainly. Where is the rubble of Earth ? There ought to be debris pieces from the size of the Moon down through asteroid size, right down to molecules. There isn’t any way to wreck a world without leaving behind something. Even if the planet had been reduced to a gas cloud, single molecules, we’d be able to detect it. It would block the Sun, dim the sky. None of that happened. Therefore Earth was not destroyed.”

Sondra stood up and walked to the far end of the room.

It sounded coldly logical, but she was in no condition to judge. Nor was Larry in any shape to make sense. Sondra knew she was in no state to tell if someone else was thinking clearly right now. But it almost sounded as if Larry were offering hope, and she could certainly use some.

“Then what happened?” she asked. “We didn’t see it move anywhere. It… it just went .”

“Wormhole,” Webling said.

Sondra drew back, startled. She had almost forgotten Webling was there.

The old woman looked up from whatever blue funk she was in and repeated the one word. “Wormhole.”

Larry nodded absently and Sondra frowned. “Huh? How the hell do you bring wormholes into this?” she demanded. “They’re just some bit of theoretical fluff. No one’s even proved they exist.”

Larry rubbed his eyes and dropped his hands into his lap. He sat there, knitting his fingers together, staring straight ahead. “I was working on gravity as a step toward something else,” he said in a quiet voice. “As a step on the way to creating a wormhole transit pair. I wanted to create a stable Virtual Black Hole, an artificial gravity field powerful enough to make space-time cave in on itself.

“According to theory, if you create a pair of VBHs tuned to each other, exactly matching each other in mass, charge, spin, velocity, you might be able to induce them to link up, in effect to become one black hole that exists in two places at once. Induce the black hole to enclose a plane of normal space at each end, and those two normal-space planes become contiguous—you’ve got a wormhole link. The two Virtual Black Holes can be ten meters apart, or a thousand light-years from each other. It doesn’t make any difference. The two planes of normal space are effectively next to each other. You can move from one to another without moving through any of the normal space in between. A wormhole transit pair. Maybe I stimulated a natural wormhole. God knows how.”

Webling stirred again, seeming to come out of herself. “But that’s impossible, isn’t it? I know I suggested it— but it doesn’t make sense. I remember reading a calculation showing that a natural wormhole was just barely theoretically possible, on about the same order of probability as every air molecule in a given room rushing out the window all at once and leaving the room in vacuum. Quantum theory says both are possible. The odds on each happening are about as realistic—and the two conditions would be about as stable. And how could a wormhole the size of a planet appear? I can’t accept Earth being snatched away by something that incredibly unlikely.”

Larry nodded, and a bit of his hardness seemed to fade away, as if he were letting some of the barriers down. “I know, you’re right. But something about all this says wormhole to me. After all, it was touched off by a gravity wave.”

Sondra blinked and looked at Larry. “Wait a second. Gravity wave . Gravity has been interacting with Earth for four billion years—but this is the first time a powerful modulated gravity wave has been aimed at the planet. Maybe the fact that it was a modulated tensor gravity wave is the important thing. Could a gravity wave stimulate that black-hole linkup somehow?”

Larry shrugged. “I think so. Ask me after I have some black holes of my own to play with. You need a pair of them. One here, and one there. Wherever ‘there’ is.”

Sondra turned her palms up in a gesture of confusion. “So maybe Earth’s core has been an imprisoned black hole right along, for four billion years, and our gravity wave just touched it off somehow.”

Larry frowned. “That might work insofar as supplying a black hole to induce a wormhole. Maybe . So long as you kept the main mass of Earth far enough away from the hole so that the hole couldn’t suck any mass down into itself. A black hole is mass like anything else. If the Earth were a hollow shell with a black hole at the center, there would still be one Earth-gravity at the surface. Though you’d give any geologist fits if you suggested any such thing. To allow for a black hole in the Earth’s core, you’d have to have a layer of vacuum somewhere in the planet’s interior.”

Sondra was a little hazy on geology, but that didn’t sound reasonable. “Could that be possible?”

“No!” Webling said vehemently. “Unless every theory of geology in the past four hundred years is wrong. Every time there’s an earthquake the geologists examine the shock waves, use them to map the Earth’s interior, like reading a radar signal. Don’t you think they’d have detected something as obvious as a hollow Earth and a black hole in all this time? Besides, all you’ve done is add another incredibly unlikely thing on top of your first one. A black hole inside the Earth, plus your natural wormhole. It doesn’t explain anything, it just creates more and more ridiculous questions. Where did the black hole come from? Why didn’t it suck Earth down into itself? How did our gravity beam induce it to form a wormhole? I can’t accept any of this.”