Charles Sheffield: Resurgence

“Too dangerous. The Bose node is close to Marglot’s equatorial plane. We got to wait ’til the planet’s spin-up is over before we can head for the node.”

“I see. Very well. I rely on your judgment as captain. I will pass the word to the others. Everyone has held the station you assigned, but all are wondering as to our fate.”

“Tell ’em the worst is over. They can sit back and enjoy.”

Graves glared but said nothing. He went staggering away along the corridor, supporting himself against the metal walls and grabbing at the stems of missing light fixtures.

“That was a lie.” Hans Rebka was back on his feet and once more standing behind Louis Nenda.

“Not all of it. We are at orbital speed, and I am takin’ us toward the pole.”

“You know what I mean. It’s not dangerous to head for the Bose node. That’s half a million kilometers away and it’s nowhere near the equatorial plane. Chances of our being hit are negligible.”

“Could be. You proposin’ to go to Graves back there an’ tell on me?”

“No.”

“Thought not. You’re as nosy as I am. How often do you get to see a whole planet fly apart? But what’s causing it, that’s what I’d like to know.”

“Maybe we can answer that.” Hans Rebka turned to Darya. “Do you remember what we were told by Guardian of Travel about the middle of Marglot?—though of course, we didn’t know at the time that it was Marglot.”

It was a struggle for Darya to think back. Their hours on Iceworld seemed years ago. “Isn’t there some sort of vortex in the middle of Marglot? A big one, once used to change the rotation rate.”

“Used once, and used again. That’s what’s happening now. The question is, where will all this end? What will be left of Marglot if the spin rate keeps going up?”

“I don’t give a toss what happens to Marglot, though I admit I want to watch it go blooey.” Nenda swiveled his chair to face the other two. “I’ll give you another question. I don’t trust the universe when it starts arrangin’ things for my convenience. But just when we need it, Marglot speeds up its spin rate—in time to give us the added outward push we need to ascend to orbit. How come?”

Darya didn’t think that Nenda expected an answer, but Hans Rebka was nodding. “We’re not looking at the case of a benevolent universe, and this isn’t coincidence. We owe our good luck to Ben Blesh.”

“He froze to death on Marglot.”

“I don’t think so. He found his way back to Iceworld. Remember, Darya, we had the option of returning there? He did it. And now, from Iceworld, he is controlling events within Marglot.”

“So he saved our asses? Pity we’ll never get a chance to thank him. You believe that something Blesh did is responsible for all that ? Sooo-eee.”

All that . Nenda’s gesture included everything outside the Have-It-All , but one feature dominated everything else. The ship had spiraled out and out and up and up, until Darya found herself looking down at Marglot from above. She could span the whole sphere with one hand. Except that it was not a sphere.

Marglot had become a fat ellipsoid. While parts of the world still showed the pristine white of undisturbed snowfall, a broad central belt glowed red and was shot through with sulfurous yellow flames. Marglot was developing its own planetary ring, a disk of hot ejecta expelled by violent vulcanism.

The others on the ship were drifting back into the control cabin, where the only remaining large display screen was located. They were silent as the central girdle brightened and Marglot continued to change in shape. The polar flattening and central bulge were too obvious to miss.

Hans Rebka was talking to no one in particular when he said, “Less and less at the poles, and wider and wider at the equator. Does it go on until the whole planet flattens into a pancake?”

Of course, it was E.C. Tally who answered. “It does not. An ellipsoid of revolution is a possible shape for a solid gravitating body only up to a limiting spin rate. Beyond that rate, instabilities grow exponentially and dissociation is certain. A threshold for the disintegration of Marglot must be reached in the near future.”

“Not true, E.C.” Nenda turned up the gain on the display. “Take a peek. It’s already here.”

The planet was changing. The spheroid had widened to become a fat disk of matter. Now that disk was dividing into three distinct lobes. The inner regions glowed white-hot, proof of enormous energies generated and released.

Nenda went on, “See what you got down there? It’s Builders, one, Masters of Cold, zero. The whole damned place is doing a meltdown.”

It was far from over. Darya could see more rifts developing within the three lobes of the shattered disk. Waves of compression and rarefaction built new nodes of compacted matter and left dark striations between them. They formed and dissolved chaotically as she watched.

Julian Graves had moved to stand next to Darya. He had his hand on her shoulder for support, although he was probably unaware of it. He said quietly, “The death of a world. But we are not witnessing genocide. That occurred before our arrival.”

Marglot no longer existed. It had become streams of molten matter, flowing down from what had once been the poles to the equator, then spun off into space. The central region was no longer red-hot or white-hot. It flared blue. The middle of Marglot had turned from a liquid core to a plasma, ionized gas at a temperature of tens of thousands of degrees.

And still it was not over. Within the center of the blue-white maelstrom another shape was coming into view. A spinning darkness obscured the stars beyond. As the whirlpool of matter outside it was expelled, the vortex grew in size.

Finally it stood alone as a column of absolute black. And then, while Darya’s eyes were still trying to recognize its reality, it vanished.

The vortex was gone. Marglot was gone. In their place stood three great lobes of super-heated matter within a broad expanding ring.

Even Louis Nenda seemed overwhelmed—until he leaned back in his chair and said, “Well, there’s a first so far as I’m concerned. I guess we’d all rather be here than there. Nothing could live in the middle of that lot.”

“Maybe not.” Sinara Bellstock had moved to watch the big display along with all the others, clustering into the remains of what had once been a control cabin as fine as any in the Orion Arm. But she had hauled along the small piece of communications gear that Nenda had assigned to her. She still wore the earpiece, and she seemed to be listening to something.

She went on, “Maybe no one can live there for very long. But I’m picking up a distress signal, and it’s from one of our suits. It shows weak but definite vital signs. And unless the range and direction are wrong on my readout, it’s coming from the middle of that.” She pointed to the display of the glowing disk. “Ben Blesh is alive in there, in the place where nothing should be able to survive.”

It was still the ship’s “conference room,” even though in its gutted condition it could have passed as a bare cargo hold. And the room was still being used for a “conference,” if that word could include a bitter argument plus insubordination by junior staff that verged on mutiny.

“I was not placed in charge of this expedition for the purpose of making popular decisions.” Julian Graves had his back to the wall in both senses, leaning against a metal partition that had once held conference displays. “It was my responsibility to bring us safely to the Sag Arm; it is no less my responsibility to take us home again.”