Greg Bear - The Forge of God

Sand grinned like a small boy, mischievous. “Something that weighs perhaps a hundred million tons.”

“Right,” Kemp said, mirroring his grin. “So let’s talk crazy. Anything that masses in at ten to the eighth metric tons, strikes the ocean like a mountain. But all you get is a minor squall. So it didn’t transfer much of its energy. Very small profile. Just shot right through, lost a tiny, tiny percentage of its velocity to the water, maybe some heat as well. Something less than a meter wide.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Samshow said.

“Not at all. A plug of superdense matter, probably a black hole. Hitting the ocean nearby, falling to the bottom of the Ramapo Deep, voila! Burrowing.”

“Incredible,” Sand said, shaking his head, still grinning.

“All right. We both have anomalies. My people have a nuclear event profile that isn’t, and you have a jag.” Kemp lifted his drink. “Here’s to shared mysteries.”

Sand had his electronic notebook out and was busy entering figures. “A black hole that size would be a strong source of gamma rays, right?”

“I don’t know,” Kemp said.

Sand shrugged his shoulders. “But it’s so dense and so small it falls directly to the center of the Earth. Actually, it bypasses the center because of Coriolis, and bounds up the other side. There’s very little effective drag. It’s just like passing through thin air.”

Kemp nodded.

“When it reaches the core, it’s traveling about ten kilometers per second. Can you imagine the shock wave coming off that thing? The whole Earth would ring like a bell — your microseisms. The heat released would be incredible. I don’t know how to calculate that…We need somebody conversant in fluid dynamics. Its period — the time it takes to ‘orbit’ in its closed loop around the center of the Earth — would be about eighty, ninety minutes.”

“Wouldn’t whatever sound it makes get lost in background noise?” Samshow asked, feeling years out of date.

“Oh, we’re hearing it, all right,” Kemp said. “Chattering like an imp. Can I borrow your notebook?”

Somewhat reluctantly, Sand handed it to him. Kemp figured for a moment. “If we assume no factional effects, it would come right up out of the antipodes of its entry point. But I don’t know whether there would be drag — it’s sucking in matter and releasing some of it as gamma rays, creating a plasma, or maybe it’s…Hell, I don’t know. Let’s assume the core has very little drag effect on it. Maybe it doesn’t break the surface…”

“But the shock wave does,” Sand said.

“Right. So we’d have tremendous effects in…” Kemp’s brow furrowed.

“South Atlantic Ocean,” Samshow said. “Thirty south and forty west. About eleven hundred nautical miles east. of Brazil, somewhere along the latitude of Porto Alegre.”

“Very good,” Kemp said, his smile fixed now. “Some seismic events there, and then, it swings back to Ramapo eighty or ninety minutes later. And again and again, until its motion is damped by whatever drag it feels and it rests right in the center of the Earth. Do you realize what a black hole could do at the center of the Earth?”

Samshow, suddenly troubled, stood and walked through an open sliding glass door to the veranda. He looked deep into the night jungle behind Mrs. Fusetti’s house, quiet except for the noise of the party and the whirring of insects. “How in hell would something like this get to the Earth? Wouldn’t our radar spot it, our satellites?”

“I don’t know,” Kemp said.

“There’s definitely some correlation, Walt,” Sand said. “Our gravimeters were working perfectly.” He joined Samshow on the veranda.

“The party’s full of talk about the President’s announcement,” Kemp said, standing in the open doorway. “What I’ve been thinking…”

Sand’s eyes widened. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “I hadn’t even…”

“So?” Samshow asked.

“Maybe it’s not just a fantasy,” Kemp said. “You have a jag we can’t trace, a meteor strike you can’t explain, and we have compression waves we can’t explain. And the President has aliens.”

“Now wait,” Samshow interrupted. “We haven’t got any information about the South Atlantic.”

“Could this black hole, or whatever it is, cause substantial damage to the Earth?” Sand asked.

“It would eventually eat it up, swallow it completely,” Kemp said.

“Then we’d better tell somebody,” Samshow said.

Kemp and Sand looked at him like children chastised for being caught in a dirty game.

“Shouldn’t we?” Samshow asked. “Who’s going to San Francisco, to the American Geophysical Society convention?”

“I am,” Kemp said.

“I’d like to,” Samshow said, running on instincts now. Sand regarded him with some confusion. Perhaps he felt like backing down now, having carried things too far and seeing the Old Man take them all seriously. “Can we swing it, David?”

“I…want to try some calculations.”

“We obviously don’t have the expertise,” Samshow said. “But somebody there will.”

“Right,” Kemp said. “I know just the fellow. Jonathan Post will be there.”

The Furnace was now surrounded by three concentric wire fences, the innermost electrified. Troops patrolled the perimeter in Jeeps and helicopters. Beyond the barricades, hundreds of the curious sat idle in their cars, Jeeps, and trucks, binoculars trained on the black mound five miles or more distant. Still more hikers circled the forbidden area, none finding a way to get any closer.

A makeshift pressroom — little more than an unheated shack — stood at the main gate to the Furnace. Here, nine preselected reporters waited in abject boredom for news releases.

Except for the ubiquitous helicopters, the site itself was quiet. In the steady late morning sun, the cinder cone loomed black and purple, lava boulders and flows still in place, nothing changed, all silent and eternal.

As the blades and turbines on Arthur’s helicopter ride from Las Vegas slowed, Arthur climbed down from a hatch and approached Lieutenant Colonel Rogers across the salty sand and gravel landing strip. Rogers greeted him with a handshake and Arthur handed him a folder.

“What’s this?” Rogers asked as they walked alone toward the electronics trailer.

“These are orders telling you and your men to stay out of the bogey and do nothing to disturb the site,” Arthur said. “I received them in Las Vegas. They’re from the office of the President.”

“I already have orders to that effect,” Rogers said. “Why send more?”

“The President wants to make sure you understand,” Arthur said.

“Yes, sir. Tell him—”

“We aren’t communicating regularly,” Arthur said. He glanced around the area and put his hand on Rogers’s shoulder. “We’re going to have senators and congressmen all over this place in a few days. Senate subcommittees are inevitable. Congressional oversight committees. Anything you can imagine.”

“I heard that senator from Louisiana, what’s his name — Mac something.”

“MacHenry.”

“Yeah,” the colonel said, shaking his head. “On the radio. Calling for impeachment.”

“That’s the President’s problem,” Arthur said coldly. “MacHenry’s not alone.” They stopped twenty yards from the trailer. A path had been cleared between the landing strip and the complex of Army equipment. Bored soldiers had bordered the path with uniformly sized, whitewashed lava boulders. “I have something important to ask you. In private. This seems to be as good a place as any.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is there any way to destroy the bogey?” Arthur asked.

Rogers stiffened. “That option hasn’t been mentioned, sir.”