Timothy Zahn - Cascade Point

Pity we can't use the neutrinos, too, Carter thought wryly. Firefly's temperature, he noted, was still increasing, and he hoped the Secretary-General's speech wouldn't take much longer.

A yellow light flashed twice. They were ready in the auditorium. "Okay, Rossetti. Fire when ready."

"Aye, aye, Admiral." Rossetti's hands moved over the controls as Carter watched the indicators. Kilometers away, the three massive DeVega accelerators came to life, sending narrow beams of neutrons directly into the tiny black hole. Firefly's radiation levels jumped as the gravitational energy of the falling neutrons began to reach the collectors. Rossetti carefully adjusted the flux levels and Firefly's temperature began to stabilize.

"That's it, Doc," Rossetti said at last. "Total neutron flux about ten to the twenty-eighth per second; total Firefly luminosity one point six times ten to the eighteenth watts. Temperature holding near ten to the fifteenth degrees Kelvin. We've got steady state and she's running like a champ."

A loud cheer erupted in the control room, echoed, no doubt, in the auditorium. Someplace a cork popped loudly, accompanied by the steady hum of video cameras. Carter smiled for the reporters, his first real smile in weeks. After months of argument and backbreaking work, the closest thing to a total matter converter that mankind was ever likely to have was finally operational.

There were still things to be done, of course, but most of them were routine. He would first have to give a statement to the assembled dignitaries and cameras in the auditorium. Then came a check of the maser banks that would be beaming the energy to Earth and Luna, a quick trip to each of the DeVega accelerators to personally congratulate the operation crews there, and spot checks of other parts of the complex.

Five hours later he was finished, and he made a last stop back in the control room. "Any fluctuations in the plate potential?" he asked the dark-skinned man who had taken Rossetti's place at the main control board.

"No problems, Dr. Carter," Kapoor said, his gloomy face in marked contrast to the smiles worn by the rest of the Firefly Project staff today. "The black hole is holding position to a small fraction of a fermi, as nearly as we can tell."

Carter nodded satisfaction. The carefully shaped electric field of the main plates was all that held the positively charged black hole suspended in place at the focus of the three neutron beams. If it drifted even slightly the beams would miss the tiny object. "Anything else to report?"

"No, sir."

"Okay. Well, I'm off. See you in three weeks."

Kapoor glanced up. "You're going on vacation?"

"Theoretically, yes. Practically, it'll be one week of rest and two of speeches on Earth and Luna."

"It will be a nice change for you, anyway."

"Yes." Talking to Kapoor always depressed Carter a little. Something about the Indian's attitude seemed to indicate disapproval, although it was nothing you could put your finger on. As near as Carter could remember, Kapoor's geniality had evaporated during the Assembly's debates on a name for the project. It had come within a hair of being called Shiva, after the destroyer/regenerator of Hinduism, and Carter strongly suspected that Kapoor had considered even the suggestion to be sacrilegious. "Well, take care of the project, Kapoor," he said, a bit lamely, and left the room.

It could have been worse, Carter thought, walking down the hall. The Assembly had also considered the name Lucifer.

—

As things turned out, Carter was not away from Firefly for three weeks. He was gone for exactly fifty-eight hours, and the ship that returned him to the station was a big Patrol craft that made the trip in record time. No one aboard would tell him what was going on, but the message was painfully clear.

Something was terribly wrong at Firefly.

—

The entire senior staff was assembled in the conference room when Carter arrived and slid into his usual chair. Nodding to the group, he turned to the Deputy Director and asked, "What's happened, Paul?"

Dr. Paul Rurik looked like he was next in line for a oneway tumbril ride. "We may have a runaway on our hands, Ray."

Carter felt his hands tightening into fists under the table. "Fill me in."

Rurik touched a switch and a set of graphs appeared on one of the displays. "During last night's Owl shift Firefly's temperature started to rise. When we tried to restabilize this morning we discovered we couldn't do so. We tried everything we could think of and then sent the Patrol to get you." "Who was the operator last night?"

"I was, Doctor," a young man spoke up, a slight quaver in his voice.

"It wasn't Galton's fault," Rurik said. "The temperatures were within the allowable range we've calculated."

Carter nodded heavily. An operator couldn't be expected to notice that the rate of temperature increase was not following the theoretical curve. Only one of the scientists like Rurik or himself would have had the necessary knowledge.

Rurik went on, "I suspect Firefly drifted a little out of place, causing one or more of the neutron beams to miss it"

"No." Carter pointed to a display. "If that had happened you'd have gotten a big energy jump in the heat exchanger directly across from the beam that's missing. Instead, that extra neutron flux is spread out over several exchangers; furthermore, it's happening for all three beams. The beams aren't missing—they're being deflected."

"How?"

Carter looked toward the voice in surprise. "What are you doing here, Senator?"

"I was still here at Firefly when the crisis occurred," Chou said. "It is my right to be kept informed. How are the neutrons being deflected, Doctor?"

"Firefly emits particles in a thermal spectrum," Carter explained. "That means there are some at every speed from zero to near lightspeed. The ones that are moving slowly tend to stay near the black hole, forming a sort of cloud around it, and it's this cloud that's deflecting the beams."

"Surely they can't change the beam directions very much," Chou argued.

"They don't have to," Rurik put in. "Firefly is much smaller than the neutrons themselves. But, Ray, we took that effect into account when we set our temperature limits."

"I know. All I can think of is that our subatomic particle theory must be wrong somehow. If there are some particles coming out of Firefly that we haven't taken into account, all of our temperature curve calculations will be off."

"Hell cubed," Rurik muttered under his breath. "I'll get the theory people on this right away. Maybe with the extra particle emission data Firefly's giving them they can figure out where we're going wrong."

"For the moment, that won't help us," Carter said. "What we have to do is get more mass into Firefly, and that as soon as possible. The hotter it gets, the denser that particle cloud becomes. Not much, since most of the particles emitted have high kinetic energies, but even a slight increase in the number of low-energy particles just makes things worse. What have we got that we can throw at the black hole?"

"We have a spare DeVega accelerator," Rossetti volunteered, "but I don't think that'll help any."

"Why not?" Senator Chou asked. "That would give you an extra neutron beam."

For an instant Carter had an overpowering urge to tell the Senator to shut up. None of them had the time to explain things to a layman. "DeVega dipole accelerators require very tricky and sensitive electromagnetic fields to function. On a ring the diameter of the accelerator platform we can place only three DeVegas, spaced one hundred twenty degrees apart. Any closer and their fields would interfere with each other."

"What about putting the extra accelerator farther out from the center?" Chou persisted.