Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

But how the devil could a dumb rock accelerate that fast? Or even at all? Coyote sure as hell would have noticed if someone had landed on RA45 and rigged it for acceleration. The fusion engines required would have been twice the size of her hab shelter. Even if it had happened under her local horizon, it would have been a massive engineering job and she would have felt the vibration of the work rattling RA45. But even the high-end miners who routinely maneuvered their rocks into more convenient orbits never got their boost up over one or two percent of a gee. Asteroids were just too massive to make any better headway than that. Even then, the vibration was nearly enough to shake the rock apart.

Except this baby was cooking along at about three times that velocity without so much as a quiver. She hung in the restraint straps, staring at the range gun’s tiny control panel, utterly baffled.

And starting to get very scared. This was a budget hab shelter. It had no radio powerful enough to call for help. No escape pod, either. And without a ship, she had no way off this rock.

Where in gambler’s hell was this rock going ?

And who was taking it there?

Larry sat alone in Control Room Four, staring at nothing.

The message from the Moon was perfectly straightforward: Earth had returned, in the form of a black hole.

A black hole . The shocks were coming too fast, too hard.

Larry felt like a fool, a Pollyanna who could not face bad news. How could the Earth vanish without leaving debris, he had demanded. Well, he had his answer now. Simple. All you do is crush the planet down into a black hole. And in some incredible way, his damnable gravity wave had done just that.

Larry clenched his hands hard into the armrests of his chair. He should have seen this answer, should have predicted it. Instead, he and Webling had shouted it down when Sondra suggested a black hole. Because they could not face the truth.

Earth was not now merely missing, but destroyed. So much for his clutching at straws, saying that the planet had merely been moved in some mysterious way.

But his arguments had seemed so logical , his chain of reasoning so strong. Had he truly been rationalizing that hard?

It didn’t matter now. However good or bad his theories had been, they didn’t match the facts—they were wrong. The gravity beam had induced Earth to collapse into a black hole, period. The home planet was destroyed. Details not yet resolved, main fact undeniable.

No one at the station seemed able to respond to the news. Larry felt it himself—a numbness, a shock that seemed to freeze him to his seat. Well, how could they react? What possible way was there for any of them to respond? No one knew what to say or do.

Larry winced, and faced a deeper truth. His situation was a bit different from Sondra’s or Dr. Webling’s. It had been his finger on the button. It was he who had designed the experiment and set it in motion. Alone, among all humanity, he bore that responsibility. Intentional, accidental, that didn’t matter. It was his action that doomed Earth, smashed it into a bottomless gravitational pit, crushed it down into a single point in space, surrounded by an event horizon no larger than a pebble on the beach.

Damn it, how ! Larry felt some part of himself rebel at the thought. How could his gravity beam have done that? It was flat-out impossible. He shut his eyes and visualized the gravity-beam system, traced it through the Ring of Charon’s circuitry, examined every step of the procedure. No, it was impossible. There was no room in its observed behavior, no mysterious unaccounted-for data, that would allow for the beam to touch off a gravity collapse into a black hole.

And how had the other planets escaped the same fate when the beam had touched them? How could his beam crush Earth and yet leave Venus unharmed?

And where had Earth’s gravity field gone for those eight hours between the vanishment and Lucifer’s crash? Naturally occurring gravity was a function of mass, pure and simple. It did not matter what form the mass was in. Earth, or a black hole of Earth’s mass—or Earth’s mass in Swiss cheese—would all produce the same gravity field. It wouldn’t switch on and off as the matter switched from one state to another, or vanish for eight hours.

And why were there still gravity waves and that damned twenty-one-centimeter radio source coming from the Moon?

And how the hell had Earth gained five percent in additional mass during those missing eight hours? Larry was willing to bet that an Earth-mass black hole couldn’t absorb matter that fast. The mass wouldn’t just dive straight in. It would form into an accretion disk, and then spiral inward from the disk. Lucifer’s rubble had already been forming into a disk before the end came. Larry checked the data. Sure enough, as long as Lucifer’s rubble lasted, the black hole had absorbed Lucifer’s mass at a fairly steady rate—and at a rate a hundred times slower than it would need to gobble up five percent in bonus mass in eight hours.

And what the hell were those blue flashes, and the large masses ejecting from them? The masses seemed to be coming from inside the black hole, but that was impossible. Nothing could escape from a black hole, light included, except the hole’s own decay products. So what were the flashes?

Larry stood up and left the room.

What the hell could the blue flashes be, if not a worm-hole aperture opening and shutting?

The Ring was not merely an accelerator. In theory, it could be configured as a gravity-imaging system, a gravity telescope of enormous sensitivity. Such a scope could do more than collect gravity waves. It could form images out of them. No one had ever tried it. Larry decided it was time to test the theory.

He needed an imaging sequence of the Moon and vicinity. The facilities on Venus, Ganymede and Titan were all picking up strong gravity waves from the Moon, but their gear was not powerful or sensitive enough to resolve that data into a clear picture. The Lunar gravity sensors were, of course, completely swamped by the mystery gee waves. In short, none of the other gravity-sensor-equipped stations were able to form a useful image.

Nor did they have the benefit of Larry writing their imaging programs. Larry wasn’t vain—not especially so—but he knew what he was good at.

Something had to be producing those massive gravity waves emanating from the Moon. Larry needed to see whatever was forming those waves—and he needed to see the gravity fields around that damnable black hole. Better still, he needed some sort of readings of all the hole’s properties. Armed with those, he ought to be able to demonstrate that the hole could not possibly be Earth.

They already knew the black hole’s mass was wrong. That was enough to convince Larry, but not the outside world. If Larry could demonstrate that the hole’s other properties—direction of spin, electric charge, angular momentum, axis of rotation, or magnetic fields—did not match what a black hole made out of Earth would have, then that would be convincing proof that Earth had not been destroyed.

Or at least that the black hole the Moon now orbited was not the corpse of Earth.

He set to work reconfiguring the Ring. It took him two or three hours of simulation time even to confirm the idea was possible. It was hard work, complex calculation involving dozens of variables. Larry was shocked to find that he was having fun working out the problem.

But he had always loved cracking a problem. Maybe the human race would have been better off if he had stuck to jigsaw puzzles.

The sims confirmed that the job was doable—but then it occurred to Larry he had better get some authorization on this one. True, the director had offered complete access, but even so… He punched up the director’s office on the intercom.