David Brin - Earth

George Hutton touched a control, dimming the globe display and bringing up the room lights. Alex squeezed June Morgan’s hand and she returned to her seat. Teresa looked away, feeling at once voyeuristic and resentful. She’s a collector , Teresa thought. How can a woman who^once wanted Jason also be attracted to a man like Lustig ?

She suppressed an urge to turn around and look at him again, this time in frank curiosity.

“Besides,” George Hutton added. “There’s a limit to how long we can keep this secret anyway. Sooner or later someone’s going to track us down.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Pedro countered. “Our weakest link is the Net, but I have some very bright people working for me in Washington. By keeping traffic to a minimum and using tricks like your Maori mountain-iwi dialect, we could mask our short blips for as long as six months, even a year.”

“Hmph.” George sounded doubtful and Teresa agreed. Manella’s optimism seemed farfetched. There were too many bored hackers out there with free time and kilobit parallel correlators, looking for any excuse to stir up a sensation. Frankly, she wasn’t at all sure whether she’d be greeted by her tame NASA flunkies when she got back to Houston or by a pack of security boys, wearing total-record goggles and slapping her with inquiry warrants.

Even so, she looked forward to the trip, riding a stratoliner again under her own name. I’ve had it with zeps and aliases for a while .

“Don’t you think the secret will come out when Beta finally emerges through the surface?” George asked. “We won’t be hiding from just ferrets then. The whole pack of hounds will be baying for blood.”

“Conceded. But by then we’ll have our report ready to present to the World Court, won’t we, Alex?”

Lustig looked up, as if his thoughts had been far away. “Um. Sorry, Pedro?”

Manella leaned toward him. “We’ve been after you about this for months! Second only to getting rid of Beta is our need to find out who made the cursed thing. It’s not just revenge — though making an example of the bastards will be nice. I’m talking about saving our own skins!”

Teresa blinked. “What do you mean?”

Manella groaned as if he were the only one in the room able to see the obvious. “I mean that, after all the havoc we’ve set off, and are going to set off in the future, do you think people will simply take our word we just found the awful thing down there?

“Hell no! Here we are, led by the one man ever caught building an illegal black hole on Earth. Who do you think they’ll blame for Beta? Especially if the real villains are powerful men, eager to divert responsibility.”

Teresa swallowed. “Oh.”

All the illegal things they had done — including maintaining secrets and harming innocents — all those she was willing to stand to bar for. The salvation of Earth was powerful justification, after all. But it hadn’t occurred to her that that very defense might be denied them… that their group might actually be blamed for causing Beta in the first place!

“Shit,” she said, in a low voice. Now she understood how Alex Lustig must have felt when he seemed so bitter, last time. Which made it even harder to comprehend the man’s tranquil expression right now.

“I hadn’t thought of that either,” June Morgan said, looking at her as if she’d read her mind. Teresa found herself recalling their friendship, back before things started getting so damned messy. The flux of contrary emotions made her quickly turn away to avoid June’s eyes.

Manella concluded. “Beyond all thought of revenge, we need the real culprits to hand over to the mob in our stead. So I ask again, Lustig. Who are they ?”

On the tabletop Alex’s hands lay folded. “We’ve learned a lot lately,” he said in a low voice. “Though I do wish Stan Goldman were here to help. Yes, surely he’s needed in Greenland. But what I’m trying to say is, despite many handicaps, I think we’ve made progress.

“For instance, with June’s assistance, we’ve now got a much better idea how matters must have been when the singularity first fell through the most intense regions of magnetism, which must have trapped the thing for some time before chaotic interactions finally let its apo-axis decay.”

“Chaos? You mean you can’t ever tell… ?”

“Forgive me. I was imprecise. The word ‘chaos’ in this sense doesn’t mean randomness. The solution isn’t perfect, but it can be worked out.”

Manella leaned forward again. “So you’ve traced its orbit back? To the fools who let it go?”

Teresa sat up, feeling chilled. A strange light seemed to shine in Alex Lustig’s eyes.

“It’s not easy,” he began. “Even a tiny, weighty object like Beta must have suffered deflections. Besides magnetic fields, there were inhomogeneities in the crust and mantle—”

Manella would have none of it. “Lustig, I know that look on your face. You’ve got something. Tell us! Where and when did it fall? How close can you pinpoint it?”

The British physicist shrugged. “Within approximately two thousand kilometers in point of entry—”

Manella moaned, disappointed.

“ — and within nine years, plus or minus, for date of initial impact.”

“Years!” Pedro stood up. He slapped the tabletop. “Nine years ago, nobody on Earth was capable of building singularities! Cavitronics was still a harmless theory. Lustig, your results are worse than useless. You’re saying that while we’re still likely to be destroyed, there’s no way to track and punish the guilty ones!”

For the first time, Teresa saw Alex smile openly, a look both empathic and feral, as if he had actually been looking forward to this. “You’re right on one count, but wrong on two,” he told Manella. “Can’t blame you, really. I made the same faulty assumptions myself.

“You see I, too, figured Beta had to have entered the Earth sometime since cavitronics became a practical science. Only after tracing Beta’s rate of growth and correcting for some hairy internal topologies did I realize it just has to be a lot older than we’d thought. In fact, those error bars I mentioned are pretty damn good.

“The date of entry was probably 1908. The region, Siberia.”

Teresa brought a hand to her breast. “Tunguska!”

George Hutton looked at her. “Do you mean… ?” he prompted. But Teresa had to swallow before finding her voice again. “It was the greatest airburst explosion in recorded history — even including that electromagnetic pulse thing the Helvetians set off. Barometers picked up pressure waves all the way round the world.”

Everyone watched her. Teresa spread her hands. “Trees were flattened for hundreds of kilometers. But nobody ever found a crater, so it wasn’t a regular meteorite. Theorists have suggested a fluffy comet, exploding in the atmosphere, or a bit of intergalactic antimatter, or…”

“Or a micro black hole.” Alex nodded. “Only now we know it wasn’t simply a black hole, but a far more complex construct. A singularity so complex and elegant, it couldn’t be an accident of nature.” He turned to face the others. “You see our problem. Our models say the thing has to come from a time before mankind possessed the ability to build such things… if we could do so even now.”

This time both Teresa and Pedro were speechless, staring. George Hutton asked, “Are you absolutely certain no natural process could have made it?”

“Ninety-nine percent, George. But even if nature did stumble onto just the right topology, it’s absurd to imagine such an object just happening to arrive when it did.”

“What do you mean?”

Alex closed his eyes briefly. “Look. Why would something so rare and terrible just happen to strike the planet at the very time we’re around to notice? Earth has been here four and one half billion years, but humans only a quarter million or so. And for less than two centuries have we been capable of noticing anything at all but the bitter end. That coincidence stretches all credulity! As my grandmother might say — it’s ridiculous to claim an impartial universe is performing a drama solely for our benefit.”