Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

“So what was it?”

“A Penrose accelerator. You get yourself a heavy-duty rotating mass, big enough to have stuff orbit round it, and you whirl ordnance round those orbits, contrary to the direction of the mass’s rotation. Half of your ordnance separates from the payload, and drops into the mass. The other half gets kicked out to mind-buggering velocities. The trouble is, none of this works unless the mass is dense enough to have an escape velocity greater than light.”

“A black hole.”

“Yes. You have yourself thirty-nine charged rotating black holes, formerly used as artillery accelerators, now with nowhere to go. Plus another hole lodged precariously on the back of a tractor on the public highway halfway between here and Djelo-Binza. And the only way for us to find enough energy to get rid of them, I imagine, would be to use another black hole to kick them into orbit. They also give off gamma, almost constantly, as they’re constantly absorbing matter. You point one of those UXB defuser tractors at them and throw the safety on the gun, and—”

“JESUS!” Grosjean stared at the ground-floor entrance where his men had been preparing to throw heavy artillery shells at the problem, jumped up, and began frantically waving his arms for them to stop. “OUI! OUI! ARRETE! ARRETE! And we thought getting rid of nuclear waste was difficult.”

“Looks easy to me,” said Mativi, nodding in the direction of the highway. Two trucks with UNSMATDEMRE-CONG livery, their suspensions hanging low, had stopped just short of the military cordon in the eastbound lane. Their drivers had already erected signs saying LIGHT HEAT HERE FOR DOLLARS, and were handing out clear resin bricks that glowed with a soft green light to housewives who were coming out of the darkened prefabs nearby, turning the bricks over in their hands, feeling the warmth, haggling over prices.

“Is that what I think it is?” said Grosjean. “I should stop that. It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”

“Don’t concern yourself with it right now. Those bricks can only kill one family at a time. Besides,” said Mativi gleefully, “the city needs power, and Jean-Baptiste’s men are only supplying a need, right?”

Ngoyi, still in the passenger seat of the Hyundai, stared sadly as his men handed out radionuclides, and could not meet Mativi’s eyes. He reached in his inside pocket for the gun he had attempted to kill Mativi with, and began, slowly and methodically, to clear the jam that had prevented him from doing so.

“Once you’ve cordoned the area off,” said Mativi, “we’ll be handling things from that point onwards. I’ve contacted the IAEA myself. There’s a continental response team on its way.”

In the car, Ngoyi had by now worked the jammed bullet free and replaced it with another. At the Boeing, Grosjean’s jaw dropped. “You have teams set up to deal with this already?”

“Of course. You don’t think this is the first time this has happened, do you? It’s the same story as with the A-bomb. As soon as physicists know it’s possible, every tinpot dictator in the world wants it, and will do a great deal to get it, and certainly isn’t going to tell us he’s trying. Somewhere in the world at a location I am not aware of and wouldn’t tell you even if I were, there is a stockpile of these beauties that would make your hair curl. I once spoke to a technician who’d just come back from there… I think it’s somewhere warm, he had a suntan. He said there were aisles of the damn things, literally thousands of them. The UN are working on methods of deactivating them, but right now our best theoretical methods for shutting down a black hole always lead to catastrophic Hawking evaporation, which would be like a i,ooo-tonne nuclear warhead going off. And if any one of those things broke out of containment, even one, it would sink through the Earth’s crust like a stone into water. It’d get to the Earth’s centre and beyond before it slowed down to a stop — and then, of course, it’d begin to fall to the centre again. It wouldn’t rise to quite the same height on the other side of the Earth, just like a pendulum, swinging slower and slower and slower.

Gathering bits of Earth into itself all the time, of course, until it eventually sank to the centre of the world and set to devouring the entire planet. The whole Earth would get sucked down the hole, over a period which varies from weeks to centuries, depending on which astrophysicist you ask. And you know what?” — and here Mativi smiled evilly. This was always the good part.

“What?” Grosjean’s Bantu face had turned whiter than a Boer’s. From the direction of the car, Mativi heard a single, slightly muffled gunshot.

“We have no way of knowing whether we already missed one or two. Whether one or two of these irresponsible nations carrying out unauthorized black hole research dropped the ball. How would we know, if someone kept their project secret enough? How would we know there wasn’t a black hole bouncing up and down like a big happy rubber ball inside the Earth right now? Gravitational anomalies would eventually begin to show themselves, I suppose — whether on seismometers or mass detectors. But our world might only have a few decades to live — and we wouldn’t be any the wiser.

“Make sure that cordon’s tight, Louis.”

Grosjean swallowed with difficulty, and nodded. Mativi wandered away from the containment site, flipping open his mobile phone. Miracle of miracles, even out here, it worked.

“Hello darling… No, I think it’ll perhaps take another couple of days… Oh, the regular sort of thing. Not too dangerous. Yes, we did catch this one… Well, I did get shot at a little, but the guy missed. He was aiming on a purely Euclidean basis… Euclidean. I’ll explain when I get home… Okay, well, if you have to go now then you have to go. I’ll be on the 9 a.m. flight from Kinshasa.”

He flicked the phone shut and walked, whistling, towards the Hyundai. There was a spider’s web of blood over the passenger side where Ngoyi had shot himself. Still, he thought, that’s someone else’s problem. This car goes back into the pool tomorrow. At least he kept the side window open when he did it. Made a lot less mess than that bastard Lamant did in Quebec City. And they made me clean that car.

He looked out at the world.

“Saved you again, you big round bugger, and I hope you’re grateful.”

For the first time in a week, he was smiling.

In recent years Kate Wilhelm has become better known for her crime fiction novels, but for years — since her first sale in 1956 — she was a notable, if only occasional, writer of science fiction and fantasy, or speculative fiction, to use her preferred term. With her husband, Damon Knight, who died in 2002, she was a key player in creating both the Milford and Clarion SF Writers’ workshops. Her SF novels include the Hugo-winning post-apocalyptic Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), in which a community of clones find a remote hideaway to weather the storm. Her best short fiction will be found in The Infinity Box (1975), Somerset Dreams (1978), Children of the Wind (1989) and And the Angels Sing (1992). The following story, which considers how a global pandemic may start, is one of her more recent, and as yet remains uncollected.

I AM SITTING in my car, and nothing is visible, just the black night out there, the black night inside; the only sound is of the sea, the waves crashing against the cliff with fierce regularity. I remember the one time my grandmother came out here; she did not like the constant sea noise. She complained, “Don’t it ever shut up?” She did not like the constant wind, either; worse than Kansas, she said on that trip. On my first visit to her farm in Kansas I marveled at the stars, and she took that to be a sign of a simple mind. But I knew then, and I think I still know, that they have more stars in Kansas than they do at the Oregon coast. Grandmother also said Warren was simple. But that was later, ten years ago.