Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Sondra leaned in. “The wormhole, dammit! That’s what the black hole is. A wormhole gateway to where Earth is.”

“Wormhole, that’s damned ridiculous!” McGillicutty snorted. “They don’t exist. They can’t exist. And for my money, neither can black holes. Certainly not black holes this small.”

Sondra felt her temper beginning to fray. “For God’s sake—you’ve seen asteroid-sized bodies popping out of those blue flashes—and you provided the images of that blue flash sweeping up from behind Earth, engulfing it.”

“I recorded that image,” McGillicutty snapped, “but I do not support that interpretation of it. There is clearly a compact mass in Earth’s old position, but you are merely assuming this compact mass is a black hole. I haven’t seen any evidence that supports that idea. Suppose it is merely very dense, with no event horizon, and a surface gravity low enough for physical matter to escape? I haven’t run the figures yet, but it seems to me that an Earth mass could be a thousandth the density of a black hole and still only be a few meters across, far too small to see from this distance. It could be that the beam shifted Earth from normal matter into strange-quark matter. A strange-quark body of Earth mass might only be a few kilometers across, and extremely dark in color. I suggest that is the situation, and the asteroid-sized bodies are being blown off the strange-matter compact body’s surface somehow. By violent transitions back into normal matter.”

“And the blue flashes?” Sondra asked.

“Energy discharges related to whatever is blasting the gee points off the strange-matter surface.”

“But how are they being blown off?” Larry asked. “What’s the mechanism?”

“I don’t know yet, sonny,” McGillicutty snapped. “But that’s the only unexplained feature of my theory. Your black hole idea is nothing but unexplained features. My idea makes sense. Yours doesn’t.”

With that, a dozen voices joined in, offering their own opinions.

Larry listened to the shouting with a sinking heart. They had been willing—even eager—to believe in evidence that the Earth had not been destroyed. But suddenly, he sensed something different around the table. McGillicutty’s theory had a dozen major flaws in it, was contradicted by the available evidence. But perhaps it was more palatable than something with the terrifying power to drop the Earth into a wormhole.

Larry watched the argument storm around him. They had been with him up until McGillicutty interrupted. But he had lost them when they’d been given something more like what they wanted to hear.

Larry shrank back in his chair, feeling very much like a little child lost in a sea of doubting grown-ups. He thought back to the last full science staff meeting of the Gravities Research Station. How long ago had it been? Just seventeen days ago? Eighteen? He had made a very long, strange trip indeed just to come and feel lost again. He sat there, feeling young and alone.

But then a new voice, strong and determined, cut through the welter of voices. “All this is a side issue,” Simon Raphael said in a stern voice. “Black hole, worm-hole, compact mass—just before we left Pluto, Mr. Chao reminded me that none of that truly matters. What matters is that our homeworld has been stolen, and our Solar System invaded by an alien force.” Raphael stood up, leaned his hands on the table, and looked about the room. There was silence.

“How that has happened does not matter. In a strange way, it is almost comforting to get lost in technical arguments over how it happened—because then we could get so lost in the details of the situation that we never have to look at these larger, and more terrifying issues. Our Solar System has been invaded . In some unknown way, our gravity-wave experiment appears to have been the signal for that invasion.

“I know as well as all of you how absurd that sounds—attack from beyond the stars—but what other explanation fits the facts? Do you have an idea, Dr. McGillicutty? Some other interpretation that does not contradict any of the very few facts we do have?” Raphael looked around the table. “The quiet in this room tells me there is no other explanation. But we cannot reject the only answer we have simply because it is difficult to accept. I know of what I speak when I say that. Refusing to accept a challenge is an old man’s failing, and one of which I have been much guilty in recent days.

“We have been attacked, that is obvious. And yet no one asks, ‘By whom?’ We are so reluctant to accept this incredible disaster that we cannot go even one step further and ask who did this, or why they did it. It seems to me that those questions are far more important than how they did it, or whether their technology seems to violate this or that pet theory. I don’t know what their motives are, but I cannot imagine that a fleet of thirty thousand asteroid-sized spacecraft are headed toward all our worlds with the intention of doing good deeds.

“And yet how they do what they do is important, because we must fight them, whoever they are. Before we can do that , we must learn more about them. If Earth has been removed, where was it taken? What do the aliens intend here in the Solar System? How, precisely, are the other planets threatened? And why?

“The latest reports estimate thirty-two thousand large objects, which we’ve been calling gee points, all of them on constant-boost courses headed straight for every one of the major planets—but not for the Moon. So let’s talk about why, if we can.”

“Ah, maybe this is the place for me to jump in,” said a bald, heavyset man sitting next to Lucian. “I’m Tyrone Vespasian, and I’ve been concentrating on the gee points.”

Raphael nodded and sat down. “By all means.”

“Okay, I guess the big questions about the gee points are one, what are they, and two, why is the Moon exempt? Let me talk about the first. Some of the fastest-moving gee points have reached Venus and Mercury. Unfortunately we don’t know what happened to them on arrival. Quicksilver Station on Mercury just saw large radar blips go below the horizon, and VISOR also lost the gee points as they went in. There weren’t any big seismic events on either world, which suggests that the gee points managed to make soft landings somehow.

“I don’t know if it’s good news or bad, but we ought to have landings on Mars in a few days. We should be able to get better information from there when that happens. The Venus and Mercury arrivals are from gee points moving out from the Earthpoint black hole.” Vespasian looked up and glared at McGillicutty. “Or compact mass, if you need to call it that. Anyway, there are a few gee points moving from Earth-space toward the outer planets, but they have farther to go. The gee points moving from the Asteroid Belt and Oort Cloud are moving slower and have the longest distances to travel.

“Some of the gee points are moving toward the gas giants. What they plan to do when they get there, we don’t know. We don’t know if they’re interested in the planets, the satellites, or both.

“If you take a look at the Asteroid Belt gee points through a long-range camera, they look just like ordinary asteroids. In fact, a few of them were mined as asteroids for some time. Except asteroids aren’t supposed to contain point-source gravity-wave systems.

“The objects coming out of the Earthpoint black hole look totally different, as far as we can tell. It’s hard to get good imagery on them. They’re a little smaller, and look more like artificial objects. Their surfaces are more reflective, and they seem to be very regular in shape. The Earthpoint gee points are moving too fast for any of our ships to match velocity with them real easy, though there are four or five missions already on the way. On the other hand, they seem to behave just like the asteroidal gee points. I think they’re all really the same thing.”