Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Raphael had to call him twice over the intercom before Larry even heard his name being called. He came to himself with a start. “Ah, yes, Dr. Raphael.”

“Mr. Chao. I wanted to apologize for being so short with you when you requested Ring time. We are all… all more than a bit under stress at the moment.”

“That’s all right sir.”

There was an awkward pause, as if Raphael had expected Larry to say more, and was now searching for words, if only to cover the silence. “I, ah, suppose it’s a bit premature to ask—but have you found anything? Anything that might help?”

Larry stared again at the three-dee tank. Thirty thousand asteroid-sized invaders on the move from the Asteroid Belt and the Oort Cloud. He felt a knot in his stomach. “Oh, I’ve found quite a bit, sir, but I don’t know if it will exactly be helpful . Perhaps you should come down here and see it.”

“I’m on my way. Thank you.”

The intercom cut out. Larry stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do. It suddenly struck him that he was making an official report to the director of the station. He had never done that before. What should he do? Documents. Records. That would at least be something. He instructed the computer to print a hard-copy summary of his findings. And an audiovisual record. That was standard operating procedure when making a major verbal presentation. He reached over and set the voice recorder on, powering up the mikes and cameras. A bright red panel lit on the console, flashing the words room recorder on. The computer had just finished printing the data summary when the door opened. Raphael stepped in.

The director looked subdued, drawn into himself, as if he had lost something he knew he would never find again. Which was of course precisely true, Larry reminded himself. Humanity was in mourning. But there was more to the expression on Raphael’s face. Larry wasn’t usually very good at understanding people, but he could see something here. With a degree of insight that Larry himself knew he rarely achieved, Larry sensed that a change had come over the old man. There was a hint of hope in him, as if he had also found something long missing.

Raphael went straight for the three-dee tank. He stood and stared at the image for a long time. He glanced at the scale display, and sucked in his breath as he realized how huge a volume of space was being represented. “What is it?” he asked.

“An image of all the gravity-wave sources in the Solar System, sir. As seen by the Ring in gravity-telescope mode.”

“The Ring doesn’t have a—” Raphael’s sharp tone of voice suddenly softened, as if he were forcing himself to be gentle. “Oh, I see. Now it does have such a mode. More of your work. Very good, Mr. Chao.”

Larry reddened with embarrassment. “Ah, thank you, sir. But I don’t understand these sources. All of them are very faint and small, as least relatively speaking. Not more than a few kilometers across. So small I can’t explain how they can generate the gravity waves in the first place. We need something the size of the Ring to do it.”

Larry hesitated, and then moved to the controls, adjusting them. “I’ve got a good image of the black hole as well. And there’s… there’s something inside the Moon.”

“Inside?”

“I printed out a data summary, sir,” Larry said, handing Raphael the stack of papers.

Raphael took the pages and skimmed them quickly, flipping through the pages. Larry switched the view to a close-up of the Lunar Wheel. He called up the output from the observation dome telescope and superimposed a transparent real-time image of the visible Moon over the Wheel hidden deep inside. The three-dee tank dimensionalized the Moon image, so that the Wheel hung perfectly inside it, spinning sedately through the solid mass of the Moon.

Raphael stared at the tank. “Something in the Moon,” he agreed. “So it would appear,” he said, in a faint, abstracted tone. “Something that bears a strong resemblance to our own little toy.”

“Yes sir. That spinning effect is the gravitic energy moving, and not the physical object itself. Obviously, the Wheel itself must be stationary.”

“Obviously,” Raphael said, in that same abstracted tone. He sat down at the control-panel operator’s seat and looked up at Larry. “You have made a whole series of rapid-fire, utterly remarkable discoveries here tonight. I ought to be astounded, or fearful—but I just feel… feel dead inside. I don’t have the capacity to react anymore. As God is my witness, I don’t know what that thing in the Moon is, or what we can do about it. You found it. What do you think?” There was an eerie steadiness in his voice, as if Raphael himself knew perfectly well that he was keeping up a false front of calm.

Larry stood there, looking first at the old man, and then at the strange, frightening images in the three-dee tank. He thought of the asteroids leaving their orbits, unaware and unconcerned of the terrified Belters watching them go. He stared again at the rippling wheel of energy spinning through the solid mass of the Moon.

“I think that all my work is meaningless. It won’t help us one tiny bit, not by itself,” he said at last, a strange intensity in his voice. He stood over the old man, feeling tired, angry, defiant. The feeling washed over him and then faded away. Damn it, how could Raphael suddenly be so reasonable, just when Larry was finally feeling strong enough to fight him?

He took the mound of meaningless paperwork from Raphael and riffled through it. Useless. Utterly useless. He threw the thick sheaf of papers up in the air and ignored them as they fluttered slowly toward the floor in Pluto’s flimsy gravity field. Raphael stared at him quite solemnly, unable or unwilling to respond. “All this data means nothing by itself,” Larry said. “In the last twenty-four hours I’ve learned more about the mechanics of gravity than any human has ever known—but it’s not enough! It’s all irrelevant.

“Gravity is barely the start of what’s going on. This is something way beyond a freak lab accident, a strange natural phenomenon. Let’s face it: somehow or another, we—no, I —have touched off an alien invasion of our Solar System.”

Larry stopped, backed off from the desk, and looked around the room. “There. I finally said it. God knows it sounds absurd and melodramatic, but you tell me: what else do we call it ? We’ve been skirting around that reality long enough. Somehow, I don’t know how, I summoned up that… that thing buried in the Moon, like the sorcerer’s apprentice accidentally summoning up the demons. I awakened it. I don’t know what it is, or how it works, or who put it there. But I do know it must be related to the asteroids and Oort Cloud objects that have suddenly started moving. And I think they are moving toward us , toward all the surviving planets.

“There are at least thirty thousand asteroid-sized objects moving in on the surviving planets of this Solar System. Do you honestly think they mean us no harm ? I don’t know. I think maybe they got the Earth out of the way before the rough stuff begins. Maybe it’s not Earth that’s in danger. Maybe it’s Earth that’s being taken out of harm’s way.”

He sat down and turned his palms upward, a gesture of resignation, an admission of failure. “Or maybe that’s just nuts.” He forced himself to be calm. “We’ve been picking up reports from all over the Solar System, from people working in every discipline, and we’ve sent our own messages. But talking at people from light-hours away isn’t going to help. I think that we all have to get together, in one place, and work together.”