Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

There were dozens of complaints, perhaps two or three hundred. More complaint lights were appearing in the tank even as he watched. The pattern reminded him of something, some other representation of the Belt. Almost on a whim, he called a display of the Belt’s population density. The pattern matched the claim-jump display almost precisely. The more people in a given volume of space, the more reports of claim jumping and rock shifting. How could there be so many? Where would anyone be taking all of these rocks? No way to know that yet, not enough time had passed to establish any sort of vectors. But the Autocrat had a practiced eye for such things, and could tell the rocks weren’t all headed toward the same place.

Wait a moment. The claim jumping matched the population-density display. Why would someone go to the trouble of moving only claimed rocks, when there were millions more left unclaimed? He was not seeing a display of all the rocks that were moving, but only of the rocks people saw and cared about.

What about the other rocks?

He activated the voice command system. “Give me a radar track of the entire Ceres Sector,” he said. “Track and display all claimed and unclaimed asteroids that are maneuvering without authorization. Add the results to the display in front of me now.”

He leaned over the tank and watched the area around the dot of light representing Ceres. A whole forest of lights began to blaze around it. “Correlate this data with reports of unauthorized moves, assume similar numbers of maneuvering asteroids throughout the Belt, adjusting for population density in reporting moves, distribution of asteroids throughout the Belt and other standard interpretive factors, and display results.”

Suddenly the whole Belt was gleaming with light.

“My God,” the Autocrat said. “How many? What is your estimate?”

The answer appeared in bold numbers, floating in the center of the tank:

The Autocrat slumped back in his chair. Ten thousand. Over ten thousand asteroids were on the move.

No one, no one could do that.

And no one who could do it would have any reason to fear the Autocrat’s Justice.

How long without sleep ? Larry asked himself, trying to think back far enough to get an answer. It must be going on twenty hours by now, he realized. Or was it thirty? It was hard enough to keep track of time, in this place of artificial day and night, even when you had a normal routine to rely on.

He rubbed his weary eyes. It had taken forever to lay in the detector-mode settings by hand. At least, if it worked, he could bring them up automatically next time. But it would still take the Ring a while to set itself into the new mode.

He watched the monitors track the progress of the Ring toward scope mode, and let his mind step back a little, away from the narrow technical problem to the bigger picture.

Time to face the facts square on. Hundreds of years of searching, hundreds of years of silence had convinced everyone that there was no source of life except Earth. It was a given, an assumed fact. But no matter how firm the belief against extraterrestrial intelligence was, there was only one possible explanation for what had happened to Earth. An alien invasion.

The words seemed crazy even as he thought them. How mad would they seem when he worked up the nerve to say them?

And if he was right, then how the hell had his damn-fool experiment called the invaders up?

The monitor screen signaled that the reconfiguration was complete, and Larry powered up the display tank, his thoughts much more on aliens than on what he was doing.

It was as if Galileo’s mind had been on something else when he first looked through a telescope at the Moon. It never dawned on Larry that he had quite casually invented a whole new way of looking at the Universe. All he had been after was a practical way to examine the situation around Earth.

A strange place materialized in the three-dee tank. A ghostly dance of shadows gleamed up at him, black tendrils and ribbons floating in a sky field of cloud white, as if streamers of black ink were swirling through a milky sky, radiating out from a central blotch of darkness.

What the hell was he looking at? Larry glanced at the pointing instruments to check that the device was aimed and focused on the vicinity of the Moon. It was—but what was it seeing?

He was like the first person to look at an X ray, not understanding the strange, hidden, ghostly shapes and patterns revealed when the skin was transparent. Larry reminded himself that he was seeing not a solid, physical substance, but the invisible patterns of gravity waves as represented by a computer’s graphics system.

He reached for a control and adjusted the intensity of the image. The streamers faded away, and the central blotch of darkness resolved itself into two shapes: a single, pulsing point of darkness, and a spinning-wheel rim, jet black, tiny and perfect. Both shapes hovered in the tank. The point was easy to identify—it was the black hole, throbbing with gravitic potential. Even as he watched, a flash of black swept out from the hole, and a tiny dot of black moved away from it, Sunward. Jesus Christ . The only thing that would show in the tank was a gravity-wave generator. A gravity field by itself, un-manipulated, wouldn’t show at all. Which meant that that tiny dot was a gravity machine of some sort.

But what about the spinning wheel that hung in space, next to the black hole? What the hell was that?

Larry felt the hair on his neck rise. The Moon, good God, the Moon. Or no, something inside the Moon, hidden from view. Suddenly the strange shape was familiar. He checked the scale of the image, and the precise coordinates.

Shock washed over him. The Ring of Charon had a twin, a great wheel buried far below the Lunar surface, underneath the craters and the mountains of the Moon, wrapped around the Moon’s core.

He adjusted the tank controls to enlarge the ghostly shadow as far out as he possibly could, to the limits of resolution. He stared at the image for a long time. Jet black, a bit grainy, the image distorting for a moment or two as the Ring of Charon adjusted itself, correcting for its own orbital motion. The thing inside the Moon spun huge and dark in the milk white depths of the three-dee tank.

The huge thing lurking inside the Moon was not a smooth or perfect wheel, but ridged and edged, an open structure that resembled uncovered box girders. It reminded Larry of a Ferris wheel with the central supports removed, or the skeleton of an old spinning-wheel-style space station. Wheel was the right name for the thing. If nothing else, it distinguished the Lunar object from the Ring of Charon. The Lunar Wheel, then. It helped, somehow, to put a name to it.

But this Wheel was not solid, not real, not any image of a material structure. Larry was seeing the gravitic energies themselves, whirling impossibly through the Moon’s interior.

But there had to be a physical, nonrotating wheel-shaped structure hidden inside the Moon, a structure that somehow produced these energies.

Larry pulled back the image and shook his head. Now the black hole hung in space next to the Wheel. There was a moment of powerful activity Larry could not follow, and another tiny dot leapt away from the hole. Damn it, what were those things? No one had really focused on them yet.

All by themselves, they represented an incredible mystery: mountain-sized objects leaping out from the interior of a black hole. How? Why? From where? How many of them had jumped out of the black hole already? With the Earth itself vanished, even the greatest of puzzles could get lost in the shuffle.