Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

And then it was over, and the Saint Anthony was through.

Chelated Noisemaker Extreme/Frank Barlow was responsible for keeping the Naked Purple Habitat in contact with the outside Universe. But now, Earth was the only comm target, and it was dead easy to track from here. But on the other hand, without its comsat network, Earth’s own communications were sorely degraded.

Chelated’s boss, Overshoe Maximum Noisemaker, was much troubled by the situation. After all, the Noise-makers were charged with keeping comm from getting too good or too bad. And therein lay the problem. Did the ease with which they could signal Earth mean comm was good and needed screwing up? Or did the damage to the space communications net represent bad comm that needed tender loving care? And how many pinheads can dance on an angel ? Chelated/Frank asked himself sarcastically. He was tired of all the almost theological worrying over minor points.

He was tired of it all. Tired of his Purple name, tired of thinking in circles, tired of not being allowed to do his job properly. It was his name that was bugging him most of all. Noisemaker just meant communications worker. Extreme was a bit less neutral, a derisive comment on how seriously he took his job. But Chelated . He had known that in Purpspeak it meant overdetermined and overeager. But it was not until last night that he found out the hard way from a cruelly informative young woman that it had a sneering sexual connotation. And they had been calling him that for months!

The hell with it. The hell with all the rules. While the powers-that-be dithered, Frank felt himself free to do his job properly, free to use his gear to observe the strange things NaPurHab now shared a universe with. He spent much of his time with all sensors locked on the wormhole, watching the massive vehicles drop into it, bound for who knew where. Frank was fascinated by it. He sat, for hours at a time, transfixed, staring at the hole in space.

So he sat when the Saint Anthony came through from the other side.

Frank Barlow/Chelated Noisemaker Extreme stared in astonishment as powerful video and radio signals lit up comm screens that had been dark for weeks. It took a long moment to understand what he was seeing. And then his fingers were flying over the control panels, setting up to record everything.

The news from home poured in, and Frank watched in awe. He looked down and realized that his hand was on the intercom phone. His first and understandable reflex was to call his supervisor, Overshoe Maximum Noisemaker.

But what the hell would Overshoe do? Sit there and contemplate the proper response under the Naked Purple philosophy? Calculate how this development could best be turned to the benefit of the Pointless Cause? Hold a meeting of all the brothersandsisters?

No, he told himself. Frank felt a higher duty than to Overshoe. And besides, this was a message for Earth, not for the Purples.

He powered up his best antenna and focused it on Earth, tuned it to the main comm signal for JPL. The folks at JPL were the ones who should take this call.

The Saint Anthony was a robust piece of hardware. The trip through the hole had been rough—it probably would have killed a human being—and it did scramble a few systems. But the probe’s builders had expected such problems, and built the Anthony to be able to bounce back.

The Anthony took a few seconds to sort itself out and restart its major systems. And then its video sensors began searching for the one sight that could answer the most questions.

It found what it was looking for, and recorded as many images as it could before the first signal-back period. It gathered the data it had collected and fired it all off down the hole on the tightest beam it could manage.

Larry opened his eyes, and found himself safe in bed, feeling far too heavy. “What’s… what’s going on?” he asked.

“You’re on board the Nenya ,” a gentle voice told him. “We’re flying you home to Pluto.”

He looked to his side. Dr. Raphael was sitting next to him. Larry blinked once, twice, and looked around. He noticed a video screen in the corner of the room. It was showing a status display of some kind.

Raphael noticed what he was looking at. “It’s the Saint Anthony ,” he said. “The probe just dropped through the hole a few seconds ago.”

Larry sat up a bit more and looked again at the screen. All the display values were at zero. The largest frame on the screen was supposed to show the video from the probe—but it too was black. A knot formed in his stomach. The probe had already met whatever fate was reserved for it.

Another clock display showed the time since entering the black hole. Larry leaned forward, watching it, scarcely daring to breathe. One hundred twenty-eight seconds passed.

“Any second now,” Raphael said.

And the screen scrambled and cleared.

To show a fuzzy, low-quality, long-range video frame.

Of Earth. Unmistakably of Earth. The planet lived.

Tears sprang into Larry’s eyes. Raphael turned to him, and the two men flung their arms about each other.

Earth. Earth was still there, surviving in a strange and frightful Universe. The homeworld lived, surrounded by peril.

But then, that had always been true.

Earth’s radio astronomers should have been happy people: Earth’s new sky was full of very bright radio sources.

The trouble was, none of the radio sources meant anything. As far as anyone could tell, every one of the worlds in the Multisystem was ringed by a set of close-orbiting radio emitters, immediately and confusingly tagged as “COREs.” The COREs seemed to serve no other purpose than to jam any investigations of other radio sources in the system.

They had another problem—there weren’t that many dishes left to work with, or radio astronomers left to work on them. As with most of astronomy, research in the radio frequencies had long ago moved off Earth.

A few ground-based dishes were still in operation on Earth, and there were a few ground-based scientists to work them. Those dishes were in use every moment, struggling to understand this brave and fearful new world of which Earth was suddenly a part. Most of them were targeted on the Dyson Sphere—and none on the Moon-point black hole.

They all missed the Saint Anthony’s signals, until NaPurHab clued them in.

When Chelated/Frank’s call came in, Wolf Bernhardt was, for what seemed the first time in weeks, sound asleep. His assistant ignored strict orders not to wake him for any reason, and yanked him from his cot the moment the first message came in. By the time Wolf arrived at JPL’s main control room and sat down in front of his console, JPL’s comm dishes had locked in on the Saint Anthony and queried it directly. The computers were pulling down the main body of data—everything the Solar System had learned about its invaders. Starting with the name, strange and cold. The Charonians . Wolf spoke the word to himself, as if it were a mantra against further danger. As if giving the enemy a name explained them, made them understandable and controllable.

The video monitors and text screens were scrolling off the most incredible data—asteroids attacking planets, a black hole taking Earth’s place. Fantastic knowledge.

But Wolf Bernhardt—tired, disheveled, still not quite awake, was in no mood for wonderment. He focused on the question of answering back, and fast, before those coldly named Charonians could interfere. One data channel gave the instructions for responding—among other things, the data capacity and format for the laser transponder that would attempt a relay to the Solar System. Screens full of information came in. The Solar System was giving Earth all it knew—Earth had to return the compliment. But would they have the chance? The Saint Anthony could broadcast to Earth constantly on all sorts of frequencies—but could only send back toward the Solar System on one laser beam through the wormhole, for three seconds every 128 seconds.