Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

To Charles Sheffield—friend, colleague, and the sanest man in this business.

I would like to offer my thanks to a number of people who have been tremendously helpful on this book.

Thanks first of all to Charles Sheffield, to whom this book is dedicated. He read and critiqued The Ring of Charon , but it goes far past that. He deserves a lot more than a book dedication for all his kindnesses to me over the years. He is a good man, and a good friend. Read his books.

To Debbie Notkin, my editor, who rode herd on me and did that tricky thing editors must do: she forced me to be faithful to my own vision of the book, without imposing her own. She got the book focused and moving.

To my father, Thomas B. Allen, who zeroed in on the cuts that needed to be made, substantially improving the book you hold in your hands. Read his books too.

To practically everyone at Tor Books—Ellie Lang, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Heather Wood, and Tom Doherty. They did more than publish this book. They got behind it.

And finally, thanks to the others who read over this book and kept me honest—my mother Scottie Allen, and my friend Rachel Russell.

One last thing. This book is subtitled The First Book of the Hunted Earth , and yes, there will be others. But this book, and the next, and all the books I have ever written or will ever write stand alone . You’ll never pick up a book of mine and not be able to understand it without reading 37 other titles. That’s a promise.

Roger MacBride Allen

April, 1990 Washington, D. C .

Note: a glossary of terms used in The Ring of Charon can be found at the end of the book.

Jansen Alter.A Martian geologist.

Sondra Berghoff.Young gravities scientist at the Gravities Research Station, Pluto.

Wolf Bernhardt.Night shift duty scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, later head of the U.N. Directorate of Spatial Investigation (DSI).

Larry O’Shawnessy Chao.Junior researcher at the Gravities Research Station, Pluto.

Chelated Noisemaker Extreme,also know as Frank Barlow . Naked Purple radio technician.

Lucian Dreyfuss.Technician at the Moon’s Orbital Traffic Control Center.

Gerald MacDougal,husband to Marcia MacDougal. Born-again Canadian exobiologist.

Marcia MacDougal,wife to Gerald MacDougal. Planetary engineer on Venus Initial Station for Operational Research (VISOR). Escaped from Naked Purple Movement in Tycho Purple Penal as a teenager.

Hiram McGillicutty.Dyspeptic staff physicist at VISOR.

Ohio Template Windbag. Maximum Windbag, or leader, of the Naked Purple Habitat (NaPurHab).

Dr. Simon Raphael.Elderly and embittered director of the Gravities Research Station, Pluto.

Mercer Sanchez.A Martian geologist.

Dianne Steiger.Pilot of the cargo tug Pack Rat . Later, captain of the Terra Nova .

Tyrone Vespasian.Director of the Moon’s Orbital Traffic Control Center.

Dr. Jane Webling.Science Director, Gravities Research Station, Pluto.

Coyote Westlake.Solo asteroid miner, owner of the mining ship Vegas Girl .

One million gravities , and climbing. Larry O’Shawnessy Chao grinned victoriously and leaned back in his seat to watch the show. They hadn’t shut the Ring down, not yet. Maybe this would change some minds. One million ten thousand gravities. One million twenty. One million twenty-five. One million thirty . Leveling off there. Larry frowned, reached forward and twitched the vernier gain up just a trifle, working more by feel and intuition than by calculation.

It was lonely, deathly quiet in the half darkness of Control Room One of the Gravities Research Station. But then all this world of Pluto was silence. Larry ignored the stillness, the gnawing hunger in his stomach, the bleariness in his eyes. Food and sleep could come later.

The numbers on the readout stuttered downward for a moment, then began their upward climb once again. One million fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety —

One million one hundred thousand gravities . Eleven hundred thousand times more powerful than Earth-normal gravity. Larry looked at the number gleaming on the control panel: 1,100,000 .

He glanced up, as if he could see through the ceiling of the control room, through the station’s pressure dome, through the cold of space to the massive Ring hanging in the sky. The Ring was where the action was, not here in this control room. He was merely poking at switches and dials. It was out there , on the Ring orbiting Pluto’s moon Charon, thousands of kilometers overhead, that the work was being done.

A feeling of triumph washed over him. He had used that Ring, and done this. Granted, he was working in a volume only a few microns across, and the thing wasn’t stable, but what the hell. Generating a field this powerful put the whole team back on track. Now even Dr. Raphael would have to admit they were well on the way to generating Virtual Black Holes, to spinning wormholes and stepping through them.

More immediately, a viable VBH would be impressive enough to solve a hell of a lot of budget problems. Maybe even enough to make Raphael happy. Larry, though, had a hard time even imagining the director as anything but distant, cold, stiffly angry. Larry’s father had been like that. There was no pleasing him, no effort that could be great enough to win his approval.

But all things were possible— if Larry could achieve a Virtual Black Hole. Even with this 1.1 million field, that was still a long way off. Field size and stability were still major headaches. Even as he watched, the numbers on the gravity meter flickered and then abruptly dropped to zero. The microscopic field had gone unstable and collapsed.

Larry shook his head and sighed. There went yet another massless gravity field, evaporating spontaneously. But damn it, this one had reached 1.1 million gees and had lasted all of thirty seconds. Those were breakthrough numbers, miracle numbers, no matter how much work was still left to do.

Too bad the rest of the staff was asleep. That was the trouble with getting an inspiration at 0100 hours: no witnesses, no one to celebrate with, no one to be inspired by this success and dream up the next screwball idea. But then he barely knew anyone on the staff. Even after five months here, and with such a glorious reason for doing it, he couldn’t think of anyone he would dare wake up at this hour. Lonely place to be, low man on the totem pole.

Never mind. Tomorrow would be time enough. And maybe this little run would earn him enough attention so he could get to know some people. Larry stood up, stretched and made sure all the logging instruments had recorded the figures and the procedures. He ordered the computer system to prep a hard-copy report for the next day’s science staff meeting, and then powered the system down.

The Observer felt something.

Brief, far-off, tantalizing. Weak, fleeting. But unquestionably, the feeling was there. For the first time in uncounted years, it felt the touch it had awaited.