Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Never mind. Survival issues first. Get this ship dancing, then worry other people’s worries. She started running down her checklists.

But routine system checks could not stop her mind working. Someone had taken them here . Earth had been stolen. This was no accident. They had done it on purpose.

Whoever they were.

Owing to lack of interest, the end of the world has been canceled . Gerald did not know what irreverent part of his hindbrain the thought had come from, but it was true. He was still here, and so was the Universe. He came to himself, and told himself to stay where he was, lying on his back. Slowly, carefully, he lifted his arm and felt the lump on his head. His hand came away sticky with blood. What had happened? Perhaps a rock shaken loose by the quakes had beaned him, knocking him out.

But that did not matter. The world was still here. The ground was still beneath him, the night breezes still blew, the stars still shone down, peeking through a high, hazy band of thin clouds that had blown in from the Pacific. The sky had been clear before. Some time must have passed. He felt cold.

The stars . Gerald thought the stars looked a bit strange, even through the haze, although he had never been much for stargazing. Too many bright stars. And the Moon was either greatly changed or else replaced by something he could not see clearly through the late-night haze.

What had happened? The experiment . Marcia had mentioned something about an experiment, a beam being pointed at Earth just after ten a.m. her time.

Gerald checked his watch by the too-bright starlight and figured the time out in his head, allowing for the time zones and the speed-of-light delay.

That beam had been scheduled to hit at precisely the moment the world had gone mad.

A coincidence. A devil of a big coincidence.

He stood up and hurried back to the house. He went to the printer bin and dug out the document she had sent. He started to read inside—but being inside just after an earthquake didn’t sit right with him. He went to the kitchen, fished a flashlight out of the junk drawer, and took the papers outside to read.

Ring of Charon. Gravity waves. High power. Earth-side target lab: Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But how could a gravity beam do this ? Gerald asked.

But then he asked an even more fundamental question.

Do what? What, exactly, has happened ? Gerald required of himself that he face things squarely, examine the evidence and reach conclusions based on what was so, not on what he wanted to be so. His nonreligious friends were confused that a man of faith would operate that way. But his faith was, paradoxically, a result of facing the evidence. God, in some form, was the only possible explanation for Creation.

But that was beside the point.

New stars in the sky. Several of them incredibly bright. Bright enough that he almost did not need his light to read by. That great sphere he had seen earlier must now be hidden away on the other side of Earth. He looked up again at the thing where the Moon should have been. The skies had cleared, and he could see plainly that it was a ring-shaped form.

Face the evidence and accept the obvious answer to his question. The Earth, the entire planet, had been moved to a new place.

By a gravity beam? It seemed absurd. Maybe the gravity experiment happening when it did was sheer chance. If not—

He looked again the paper. JPL. If the experiment happening when it did was not just a mad coincidence, then JPL would be the place to be. To find out what had gone wrong.

And the place to get involved in fixing it.

What can be moved, can be moved back . Gerald smiled with a rare thrill of gallows humor. If faith can move mountains, then maybe faith plus determination can move planets .

Gerald knew where he was going.

He stood up and looked across the valley below him. All was quiet, and still. A few houses here and there had lights on, and faint voices whispered across the distance. Only a few had been awakened, perhaps only those who had once lived where earthquakes were frequent.

It struck him that there would be those who had slept through the whole thing, who wouldn’t check the news the next day, who might go for days without noticing that the Universe had been transmogrified. He looked up at the stranger’s sky above and shivered.

He could find it in himself to envy such people.

Across the wide expanse of the Earth, by greater and lesser degrees, people realized what had happened—or at least that something had happened. Governments, news services, private comm systems, rumor mills—all were overloaded with speculation, wild rumors, sober and reasoned discussions, panicky tirades.

Two or three of the more unstable governments collapsed. Rabblerousers appeared in village squares, on obscure vid channels and on what was left of the major networks with the satellites gone. The Final Clanners, the Naked Purples and the other culture rads took to the streets.

Generals mobilized their armies, navies put to sea, air forces and what space forces there were surviving in orbit went on alert. All of it was useless. What use was an army against a power that moved worlds?

Within a few hours, riots, demonstrations, debates, and emergency meetings of world bodies were in full swing across the globe. None of it was of any use at all. Nothing could be, unless and until people could understand what had happened.

The post-Knowledge Crash world needed information, and started turning toward the people who could provide it.

But those people were more than a bit busy themselves, at the moment.

Time had passed. That much Wolf knew. How much time he could not tell without a deep act of concentration. Dreamlike, the hours were passing like seconds. Wolf Bernhardt looked up, bleary-eyed, from his console and checked the wall chronometer. Two p.m., local time. Something like twelve hours, then.

The tomblike quiet of JPL at nighttime had given way to a day of chaos, as every scientist with the remotest connection to JPL descended on the place, chasing after answers, charging about in panic. The printer was spitting out another telegram from the International Astronomical Union every few seconds, the JPL computers logging in the new data as it arrived. The IAU’s Telegram Office in Massachusetts was the clearinghouse for all new astronomical discoveries.

The sheer volume of data was daunting. Earth may have suffered a Knowledge Crash, may have lost many of its communications satellites, may have lost much of its power grid when half the power satellites vanished, but even so the information flowed in a torrent from endless sources. Less than twelve hours after the Big Jump, Earthbound observatories and the surviving orbital stations were reporting discoveries faster than JPL could log them in.

Wolf prided himself on being flexible. That flexibility was being put to the test this morning. It fell to him to pull the facts together, for the very basic reason that no one else seemed able to believe the facts. Not even the people who were finding them.

The observatories were forced to confront the impossible situation first and most directly. Every astronomical observation ever made back in the Solar System was worthless—the objects that had once been observed were all missing. Even more seriously, all the astronomical frames of reference were gone. The background stars, likewise gone from their old points in the sky, could no longer be used as positional aids.

In a new star system, with no frame of reference set, it was difficult to get one’s bearings. The word came down from the IAU: they were arbitrarily assigning Earth’s orbital plane as the zero-reference plane for the system. They decreed that Earth’s orbital motion was from west to east, approximating the conditions of Earth’s old orbit.