Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Lucian looked around the room. “Dr. Berghoff, Dr. Raphael, welcome to you as well. Follow me down through the access port. I have a runcart waiting on the city side of the lock. The conference will convene as soon as you arrive. The port crew will see to your luggage. They’re all in a bit of rush down at the conference center, to put it mildly. There’s been some wild rumors shooting around the stuff coming in from VISOR—” He abruptly stopped talking, as if discussing the rumors would only delay his finding out the truth. “Once you arrive, the meeting will start immediately.” He gestured the three of them down the hatch with what struck Larry as an oddly professional assuredness, as if he were used to playing guide.

“ Immediately ?” Dr. Raphael asked.

“Ah, yes sir.”

“I see,” Dr. Raphael said, with a rather concerned glance at Sondra and Larry.

They were all still in their traveling clothes, chosen for comfort on a cramped ship, and not for appearance. Larry was wearing one of his loudest shirts, and it was a safe bet that his purple shorts did not match it, as the shorts did not match anything. Great outfit for a historic meeting, Larry thought. Sondra was at least somewhat better off in a frowsy black coverall, but it definitely looked like it had been slept in, with a few crumbs from breakfast on the lapel. Raphael, in his sensible slacks and pullover shirt, seemed the height of formality.

“Ah, well, it’s our words and not our fashion sense they’re interested in, I suppose,” Raphael said.

“Yes, sir,” Lucian said with a glance at his watch, clearly not paying much attention to anything but the march of time. “Shall we go?”

The three visitors followed him, a bit uncertainly. He led them through the deck hatch, then the ship’s airlock, down a flexible accessway that was long and steep enough to lead them underground into an elaborate airlock complex. A squad of workers in pressure suits were checking each other’s equipment. “Repair crew,” Lucian announced. “Going to soup up your ship—we figure this isn’t going to be the last time she needs to make a fast run.” Larry glanced at the worried expression on Dr. Raphael’s face, and couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy. He was the director of the station, and the Nenya had always been the lifeline, the ticket home if it all went wrong, a talisman that made it all seem safer.

Things were moving too fast. Lucian led them from the airlock complex and out into a city tunnel, to a small open-body electric car. Lucian took the driver’s seat and the others got aboard.

Larry’s rear end had barely met the seat when Lucian hit the accelerator. The tires squealed, and the runcart took off at speed down the narrow, dimly lit tunnel. Ten minutes ago Larry had been scared to ride a landing spacecraft. It did not take him long to decide that a ballistic landing on the Nenya was downright safe compared to being Lucian’s passenger in this go-cart.

“You three are the last to arrive,” Lucian shouted above the roar of the air whipping past them down the tunnel. “Things are happening fast, even since my last comm signal to you. Marcia MacDougal from VISOR is supposed to have some sort of really hot numbers.”

“Do our numbers still hold up?” Larry shouted back, trying to forget that he was clinging to the seat frame just as hard as he had held onto his crash couch on the ship.

“The numbers are fine, very solid. It’s your conclusions I don’t like.”

“There’s no question at all about the conclusions.”

“There is in my mind,” Lucian shouted, trying to be heard over the air rushing past them. “But back to the numbers. I pulled together a last update just before you landed. The Earthpoint black hole mass is definitely 1.054 terrestrial, no appreciable accretion since appearance, though we’re starting to see a nice little debris field. We’ve used the optical scalar technique to nail down the spin rate. The north magnetic and spin poles are definitely pointed south . But are you that solid on what the figures mean ? I’m still a little hesitant about going public with them.”

“If the numbers are right, then we go,” Larry shouted back, a bit heatedly. “If they’ve called a crash meeting, we can’t waste time quadruple-checking just because you have a gut reaction against the answers. Give me an alternative explanation and I’ll hold back.”

“Okay, okay. I guess I’m convinced, but just barely. The other researchers will have to make up their own minds.”

In the backseat, Sondra couldn’t hear half the words, but she didn’t much care. The two of them had been going back and forth over this ground for weeks. The runcart burst out of the tunnel into what a sign said was the Amundsen SubBubble, and there was suddenly a lot more to look at than rock wall. She recorded a brief impression of a city that had been rattled about a bit, and people here and there working on the cleanup. There wasn’t time to note much before Lucian stood on the brakes nearly hard enough to throw them all over the front of the cart. Presumably, they had arrived at Armstrong University, though Sondra hadn’t seen a sign. “Here we are,” Lucian announced, and hopped out of the cart. He led them into a long, low, academic-looking building. They hurried down a long corridor. The door at the end of the hall was open, and Lucian ushered them right inside.

Larry was the last one into the room, and at first it seemed to him that the place was full of nothing but eyes sitting around an oblong table. Everyone in the room was staring straight at him, getting a good look at the man who destroyed Earth. Larry felt like he had been moving at breakneck speed and had just slammed into a brick wall. A brick wall made out of eyes.

He heard the door swing shut and latch behind him, and did not feel reassured.

Larry felt a gentle hand on his arm and turned to see a gnomish-looking little man in a rather severely cut lime green frock coat that lived up to the Lunar reputation for garish dress. “Welcome to you all,” he said. “I am Pierre Daltry, chancellor of the university and, it would appear, the de facto head of our group, at least for the time being. If you would take your seats, we can begin. Mr. Chao, Dr. Berghoff, Dr. Raphael?” They sat down in the chairs reserved for them at the head of the long table, Larry for one wishing for a less prominent place to sit.

Chancellor Daltry took his place at the middle of the table, but remained standing. “I will not waste too much time on introductions,” he said, “but let me note a few of the other principal speakers for the day. These are the people who have done the most to study our present situation. Lucian Dreyfuss you have all met. Tyrone Vespasian, also of the Orbital Traffic Control Center. Marcia MacDougal and Hiram McGillicutty from VISOR.” He pointed each of them out, and then gestured to include the entire table.

“Every major government in the Solar System is represented here—including Earth, I might add. Nancy Stanton, the U.N. ambassador to the Lunar Republic, is here. And we are here to make decisions. Simon Raphael and Larry Chao suggested this meeting some days ago, and things have happened quickly since then, enlarging the importance—and the responsibility—of this conference. As the time for deliberation is short, and the need for action urgent, the various governments have agreed to authorize this joint committee to speak and to act. What we decide around this table will not be mere recommendations, but the orders of the day. So let us consider well what we do.”

Daltry paused and looked around the table.

“A moment from the Moon’s history comes to my mind. About a century ago, the political situation between the Earth and Moon on one side, and the rest of the Solar System on the other, came dangerously close to interplanetary war. In the midst of that crisis, an asteroid that was to be placed in Earth orbit came horribly close to striking the Earth, a disaster that would have made a nuclear war seem trivial by comparison. The Moon bore the brunt of that crisis, and we have Morrow Crater in the center of Farside—and our independence from Earth—to remind us of those days.