Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

“Of course not. Oh, I forgot to tell you. The hot core—the troublemaking part—is only about one hundred feet in diameter right now. But it’s spreading. We ought to do something within the next six months.”

Potter sat back and rubbed his face. “All right. We know what the trouble is. We know where the trouble is. And we will soon know what to do about it. Fair enough?” He looked around the room. Most of those present nodded. Anna Brackney and two other mathemeteorologists shrugged. Potter glared at them for a moment and continued. “We can even get down there to quench it. But we can’t get back. Is that what’s left of our problem?” No one said anything, and there were no shrugs this time. Potter waited a moment, then continued. “Well, if that’s really all that’s left, then we may be all done. I’m certain we can find a volunteer to take the sessile boat down to the core. The question is, should we allow the volunteer to do it? Do we continue to try to find a way to get him back up?”

Eden started to speak, but before he could form the words Anna Brackney cut in. “Now, just you don’t say anything here at all. There’s going to be a lot more thought put in on this problem before we go setting up a hero situation.” She turned to Kowalski and said, “You have six months. Isn’t there a chance you can come up with a suitable boat design in that time?”

Kowalski said, “A chance, yes. But it isn’t very likely. We’ve reached the point where we know we need a major breakthrough. It could happen tomorrow—we’re trying. Or it might not happen in the next ten years of intensive work. We’ve defined the problem sufficiently so that we know what’s needed to solve it. I am not optimistic.”

Potter said, “Any ideas from any others? McCormick, Metzger?”

Metzger said, “I think you’ve summarized it, Jeff. Let’s try for another, say, four months to get a boat design and to check out what we think we know. If we finish up right where we are now, we won’t have hurt anything. We can then find someone to take a boat down, and we’ll give him a great big farewell party. Isn’t that about it?”

More shrugs from the mathemeteorologists, and Anna Brackney glared at Eden. Potter said, “I think I’ll go call President Wilburn and tell him our conclusion. Can I use your office, Bob?” Greenberg nodded, and Potter said, “Be back in a minute. Work out the details while I make the call.”

He left, and a desultory conversation went on in his absence as the group set up priorities and discussed the beginnings of the phase-out of the giant program. Ten minutes passed. Potter reappeared and stood in the doorway. Eden looked up, leaped to his feet and ran around the table toward him. Potter was pale and his face was drawn. He leaned against the door jamb and said, “President Wilburn is dying.”

“I’m going with you, Jonathan,” said Harriet Wilburn. She sat across from Wilburn, dry-eyed, in their breakfast corner.

He smiled at her, and the cosmetics on his face wrinkled, giving his face an odd, ragged appearance. He reached across and patted her hand. “You have to stay behind to protect my good name. There’s a bitterness in some people. As long as my wife is alive, they won’t go too far.”

“I don’t care about them.” The tears were in her eyes now, and she looked down at the table to hide them. She wiped her cheeks in annoyance and said in a steady voice, “When do you leave?”

“In three days. The doctors want to make one more attempt to find out what’s causing the central myelitis; there’s got to be some reason for spinal cord deterioration. They hope they can come up with a cure someday, but first they have to find out what causes it.”

Harriet Wilburn burst out, “I don’t care about all this knowledge, all this good, all this benefit-of-man nonsense. I want you.” She put her head down on the table and frankly sobbed. Wilburn reached over and patted the back of her head.

“I don’t really believe all this, Boatmaster,” said Technician O’Rourke. “When the first manlike creature put out the first fire something like a half million years ago, he almost certainly used water. Now here we are, quenching the core of a sun heading toward a nova, and what do we use? Water. I don’t believe it.”

Eden did not smile. His mind was on a sessile boat, now about thirty thousand miles deep within the Sun and heading deeper. He sat with Technician O’Rourke in front of the main viewer panel of the neutrino detector, monitoring the flux density at the various energy levels. Eden said, “The reaction we are trying to get back to is simply the high-energy reaction of two photons to produce an electron-positron pair. As it is now, in the core the temperature is so high that the electron-positron pair doesn’t go back to two high-energy photons. Instead they are producing a neutrino-antineutrino pair, and these pour right out through the Sun and are lost to space. If we don’t stop that energy loss, the core will collapse. Since all we have to do is reduce the temperature by absorbing photons, we have a choice of materials to use. Many substances will do it, but water is the safest to carry down there without decomposing or volatilizing and killing Wilburn. That’s why the water.”

“Well, thanks. I still say it’s a mighty funny situation. Somebody’s going to do a lot of philosophizing on it, I’ll bet you. How deep is he now?”

“About forty thousand miles.”

Wilburn thought, “You never know. You never know until you’re there. I thought I’d be reflecting on my life, the few things I did right, the many things I did wrong, wondering what it all meant.” He glanced at a depth gauge that read 46,000, and he continued thinking, “About ten percent of the way, ninety percent to go, many hours yet.” He felt hungry, but his ability to swallow had deteriorated to the extent that it was no longer possible for him to eat normally. He sighed, and went about the business of hooking up a bottle of a solution of sugar and protein to the needle in his arm. There were other ingredients in the solution, too, so after the solution was all in, he took a long, painless nap. When he awoke, there were only forty thousand miles to go, and Wilburn realized with a shock that he had had his last meal.

He checked out the few gauges he was familiar with; his briefing period had been limited. He remembered once as a boy his father had taken him through a power plant, and the array of dials and gauges had been fantastic. There had been a large room, divided by a series of panels, and every square inch of the panels and walls of the room had been covered with dials and gauges. When the time came to kick in additional units, one of the operators had called him over and said, “Okay, son. Push that button.” Wilburn did, and his father said to him, “Don’t forget this. All the sensing instruments and dials in the world don’t mean a thing without one human finger.”

Wilburn looked at the one gauge he didn’t like—the one that recorded outside temperature. It read 678,000°K, and Wilburn looked away quickly. He was not a scientific man, and he was incapable of really believing that any living creature could exist in an environment of six hundred and seventy-eight thousand degrees. He thought of Harriet.

He had found it necessary to take steps to prevent her from using her rather significant influence to stow away on this boat. He chuckled and felt the wave of warmth he always felt when he thought of her. For her sake it would have been better to allow her to come, but there were times when one could not take the easy and most desirable path. A soft chime sounded through the boat.