Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 4

But for it, disaster was yet far off.

Earth was not as lucky.

"Well, Dr. Berghoff, it's a pity we could only arrange such a late-night experiment time, but I think you have matters well in hand," Dr. Webling said. "It should be a fairly straightforward experiment run. Quite routine. I think I might as well head on off to bed. I'll be looking forward to seeing your results in the morning. I suppose wewon't have the last return signals from Earth until after lunchtime."

"Yes, ma'am," Sondra said distractedly. She had her mind on other things than pleasantries.

"Treat yourself to that extra cup of coffee tonight," Webling said playfully. "You'll need it.

Good night, then, Dr. Berghoff."

"Good night, Dr. Webling."

Dr. Webling cautiously eased her way out of the lab, as if she were afraid of a fall. A lot of the older scientists never did master the tricks of moving in low gravity.

Sondra watched the door close behind Webling and breathed a sigh of relief. She had thought the old girl would never get moving. She stood up and locked the door behind Webling. Sondra definitely did not want to be disturbed.

She glanced up at the main control display. Just four hours until the scheduled start of Webling's experiment. d.a.m.n! Barely time to sc.r.a.p the preliminary setup for Webling's run and reset the center's controls to replicate Larry Chao's results.

And there was no slack time in the system tonight, either. The other three control rooms were full and busy. Control Room One was running a test now, and Two and Three were waiting their turns to get command of the Ring. Sondra's, Control Room Four, got its shot at the ring only after Three was done-and there was an experimenter already signed up for the 0300 slot in Control Room One.

Once she got command of the Ring, she would have an hour to make her run. No time to correct mistakes if she got it wrong.

Of course Webling would discover the change and see to it that Raphael handed Sondra her head the next morning, but that couldn't be helped. Nor would it matter. After all, the station was shutting down. What could they do? Fire her?This experiment run might well be her only chance to replicate Larry's results. That was important.

Maybe others would try to duplicate his run, but this was her only shot at it. She couldn't trust the cowering sheep-scientists of this place to take the risk of pursuing this line of inquiry.

Even if she had known for certain of other runs, she still would have had to know for herself that it really worked, that the million gees were really out there waiting to be controlled. That could happen only if she set the run herself, trusting no one else to get it right.

She sat down and started to adjust the controls, reprogramming the system to Larry's specs. Larry's notes were thorough and complete, but it was a highly complex setup. She almost immediately found herself getting wrapped up in the job.

Working down there at the level of controls, of meters and dials, she began to understand Larry's thinking. She had never been strong on theory- but hardware was something she could deal with.

She was so focused on the job she jumped nearly into the ceiling when the door chime sounded.

Earth reflexes could be downright hazardous under such light gravity.

She punched the intercom switch. "Who... who is it?" she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. She glanced quickly at the control panel and allowed herself a rea.s.suring thought. It would take an expert to tell she was cross-setting the system.

Everything was fine. Nothing to worry about.

"It's me, Larry," a m.u.f.fled voice replied. He was talking through the door rather than using the intercom. Was he afraid of Raphael bugging the place?

Sondra let her breath out, not even realizing that she had been holding it. The feeling of genuine relief that swept over her told Sondra how much she hadbeen kidding herself a moment before. She stood up and unlocked the door.

Sondra knew she should not have been surprised that Larry had shown up. He had a brain, after all.

He could look at a schedule sheet and know she'd be here. And she had offered herself as an ally-even if he had not immediately accepted the offer.

Larry stepped into the room and looked around thoughtfully. Sondra stepped back from him, more than a bit taken aback by his manner. There was something more determined, harder edged, more self-a.s.sured about him than there had been a few hours ago.

Larry went to the front of the control panel and glanced over the settings. "You're halfway through dumping Webling's run settings," he announced. It was not a question.

"Ah, well, yes," Sondra said, awkwardly fidgeting her hands. Well, here was the expert.

"Well, we've got to put it back," Larry said.

"But I need to confirm your results," Sondra protested. "That's a h.e.l.l of a lot more important than the graser right now."

"Where are the gravity-wave detectors you'll be sending to?" Larry asked.

There was something in his tone of voice that told her she had better give a direct answer. "Ah, t.i.tan, Ganymede, VISOR-that's the big Venus...o...b..tal station-and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Earth. Ten minutes of pulse sending to each. A millisecond pulse every second."

"How powerful?" Larry asked.

"Well, power is one thing we're trying to measure. We start with a spherical one-gee field one kilometer across here, which we can hold stable for about a millisecond. By the time we concentrate it, collimate and pulse it, we've lost most of the power. The wave front spreads as well, weakeningthe field strength. We'd be happy to end up delivering maybe a ten-millionth of a gee at the other end, but we don't know what we'll get.

"In fact the job tonight is to find out what we can deliver at the other end. The beam isn't all that well collimated and there's a h.e.l.l of a lot of leakage. In theory we should be sending a perfect column of parallel gravity waves. In practice, we're sending a conical beam, narrow at this end but broadening rapidly as it moves out. And the gee waves aren't exactly parallel either. We're guessing that we can deliver a ten-millionth gee, but we'd settle for anything within a factor of ten of that."

"And they can detect gravity pulses that small?"

"We send to those stations because they have the best detectors, the same type we use. The t.i.tan and Ganymede stations are studying the interactions of the gravity fields of Saturn and Jupiter's satellite families. The Venus station is mapping the gravity field there, trying to use the Solar tidal effect to deduce the planet's internal structure. And JPL is where they designed the sensors they're all using.

Their detection gear is good, and they use a range of sensitivities. One at low end, a middle range, and a heavy-duty job," Sondra concluded.

"Could they measure, say, a millisecond one-tenth push-pull gee burst? Something like that, a million times more powerful that what they're used to getting from us?"

Suddenly Sondra understood. "You want to amplify the gee field with your process and then beam it to them!"

Larry grinned wickedly. "That'll make them sit up and take notice, won't it?"

Sondra thought for a moment, and the more she thought, the more she liked the idea. By its very nature, the experiment would attract attention to Larry's amplification effect. Attention, h.e.l.l! It would blow the doors off gravity detectors all over theSystem. Every gravity researcher between here and the Sun would be certain to hear about it within hours, and all of them would be clamoring for more information, more verification.

That was Larry's idea, obviously, to get the news of the Chao Effect off Pluto, spread out as far and wide as possible.

"It ought to work, Larry," she said. "No doubt about it, it ought to work. If we can set up the Ring to amplify the gravity field, modulate it, and collimate the gravity waves."

"That side of it I know we can do. I'm just worried about their seeing it at the other end and being able to measure it."

"Don't worry about it. All of those labs run their detectors twenty-four hours a day, recording their reading constantly. The detectors are built to operate and record automatically, to prevent a sloppy operator from missing something. If we can send it, they'll see it."

"Then let's give them something to see," Larry said, sitting down at the controls.

Long before the Ring of Charon was first powered up, astrophysics had ceased to be a strictly observational science. Active experiments, involving ma.s.sive energies, were common. Not only at the Ring, but at facilities large and small across the System, powerful forces were being explored.

Unfortunately, there were also many observatories, on Earth and in s.p.a.ce, designed to detect incredibly weak signals from millions of light-years away. Too much input could destroy them easily. The high-energy experimenters had itbeaten into their heads that they must give broad notification of their plans, offering plenty of time to shut down delicate gear. Failure to do so risked destroying some colleague's delicate detection gear halfway across the Solar System.

There was another, more complex reason for thorough warnings of experiments. Back in the old days, when all the observatories were on Earth, or within the orbit of the Moon, it was always possible to call on the phone with late-breaking news, so as to get a second observation of the phenomenon in question. Coordinating observations between two or more observatories was at least reasonably straightforward. Even in cases where the observation had to be synchronized to the nanosecond, there was no great problem when the two points were tiny fractions of a light-second apart. However, the speed of light had changed the forms of etiquette: phones and easy synchronization were out of the question once there were observatories...o...b..ting every planet from Mercury to Saturn. A wave of light energy that pa.s.sed Saturn might not cross Earth's path for four hours. A two-way contact, query and reply, would take eight hours.

Communications workers invented the event radius to handle this sort of problem, and the astronomers eagerly took it up.

Consider how electromagnetic signals move. All of them move at the speed of light, and unless manipulated by a focusing device, all types of electromagnetic radiation (for example, lightwaves or radio signals) radiate out from a given point on the surface of a sphere that is expanding at the speed of light. Think of a dot drawn on the surface of an inflating balloon. The dot, representing a signal, moves outward, riding the skin of the balloon as it expands.

The distance between that dot and the center of the balloon, between the surface of the radiativesphere and the center of radiation, is an event radius.

No data about a given event can be received until the dot, the information, pa.s.ses through the observer as the information sphere expands at the speed of light. Event radii can be measured in conventional linear measures, but it is generally more convenient to refer to them in light-time.

Thus, Earth's distance from the sun, one hundred fifty million kilometers, is an event radius of about eight light-minutes. If the Sun blew up, Earth would not know it for eight minutes.

But knowing the light-time distance was not the only problem. At times the situation grew even more frustrating as the movement and gravity wells of the planets themselves introduced slight reds.h.i.+fting problems and microscopic time-dilation effects. More than once, careers were saved or wrecked by the discovery of an error in compensating for those effects.

Webling had sent out a standard notice of her planned experiment hours before. Larry and Sondra knew they had to send out advance warning of their modifications of the experiment, but they were nervous about doing it. Yet without the warning, they would infuriate any number of other experimenters. Not a good idea for an experiment that was half public relations.

Sondra drafted the notice to JPL: ALERT TO JPL GRAVITY LAB: THIS WILL.

SERVE AS NOTICE OF A MODIFIED.

COLLIMATED GRAVITY-WAVE PROCEDURE.

TIMES OF TRANSMISSION TO YOU AND OTHER.

SENSOR LABS UNCHANGED, BUT NEW.

TECHNIQUE SHOULD PERMIT 10 TO SIXTH.

INCREASE IN POWER TRANSMISSION. PLEASE.

RIG FOR MORE POWERFUL INPUT AND ADVISE.

AFFECTED LABS.They sent similar messages to the other partic.i.p.ating labs, warning them of the high-power pulse on the way, requesting relay to other facilities that might be affected.

It seemed more than a bit foolhardy to be doing a secret experiment while providing a general warning that it was about to happen. The speed of light came to their rescue. Sondra was careful to send the alerts through the station's automated signal system, without any human intervention.

Many eyes on many worlds would read their messages, but no one on Pluto would know what was up until queries and replies came back from those labs. And by then, of course, it would be far too late to stop the experiment.

Figuring in speed-of-light delays, there would be nearly an eight-hour lag between the send-off of the warning to the closest lab on Saturn, and the earliest possible response back to Pluto.

That should serve as protection enough, so long as no one at the base noticed what they were up to in real time. To avoid that problem, Sondra and Larry agreed to stay as close as possible to Webling's original experiment design, in the hope of avoiding premature attention.

Given the difficulties of aiming the untested graser system, Webling had designed the original run to hit the closest, easiest target first and work out to longer range from there. The positions of the planets dictated that Saturn be the first target.

Sondra used the original aiming data as she set up the run.

It was a complicated job. She glanced again at the chronometer when she was halfway through it.

Three hours until this control room had its shot at the Ring. She sighed and went back to the complex job of resetting the controls.? ? ?

With a beep and a flas.h.i.+ng green light, the control panel announced that the Ring was ready for the graser run.

With ten minutes to spare, the myriad magnets, coolant pumps, ma.s.s drivers, particle accelerators and other components of the Ring system were configured to form a Chao Effect-amplified gravity well, to modulate and to collimate the gravity waves from it, and to fire tight pulses of collimated gravity power toward t.i.tan.

Or at least, Sondra thought they were ready. She took another look at the control system. This was definitely a wild setup. No wonder the station's old fogies hadn't been able to believe it.

The countdown clock came on and started marking the pa.s.sage of time. Eight minutes left.

Larry sighed and rubbed his weary eyes. Now it came down to one last set of checks to make, and one last b.u.t.ton to push.

One last b.u.t.ton.

They could have programmed those last checks on the automatic sequencer as well, even told the computer to start the actual firing of the system. If the experiment had been dependent on split-second timing, they would have.

But timing wasn't that vital here. Besides, letting the computer do the work would not have been right. This was a human moment, the triumph both of human ingenuity over a technical and scientific problem, and of human cussedness over d.a.m.n-fool rules. It was a way to proclaim a breakthrough to all humanity-and, equally important to Larry, it was a way to thumb his nose at Raphael. No computercould be programmed to do that properly.

Seven minutes left.

Still, there was something about the moment that surpa.s.sed even Larry's deep-seated need to defy the director. It was dawning on Larry that this wasn't just an experiment, not just an attention-getting device for saving their careers.

This was history. No one had ever attempted such a thing. This was gravity control on a grand scale.

Crude, limited-yes. But this one moment could change everyone's lives.

Six minutes.

Just how ready was he to change the course of history? Larry licked his dry lips and glanced nervously over at Sondra. She nodded once, without looking up from her readouts. Everything was ready. In nervous silence, the last few minutes slid away to seconds. And then it came to the time itself.

For a brief moment, a frightened voice in Larry's head told him no, told him not to do this thing. He ignored the voice of fear, of caution, and stabbed the b.u.t.ton down.

Thousands of kilometers over his head, the Ring activated the gravity containment, and then pulsed the first waves of gravity power toward Saturn.

Larry pulled his finger from the b.u.t.ton and looked around blankly, feeling the moment to be a bit anticlimactic. There should have been some dramatic effect there in the lab to make them know it had happened. Maybe I should have programmed the lights to dim or something, he told himself sarcastically.

Of course, nothing happened in the control room.

The action was far away overhead, at the axis, the focal point, of the Ring of Charon.

But by now, the action was rus.h.i.+ng its way down toward Saturn. The first pulse was already millions of kilometers along its way.From here on, the automatics did take over. The sequencer fired again. The second millisecond pulse leapt from the Ring. And the third, the fourth. It was too late to bring it back. Far too late. There was nothing they could do but press on. They would catch h.e.l.l no matter what they did now.

The Observer had no concept of free choice. All that it did, or thought, or decided, it was compelled to do, each stimulus producing the appropriate response. There would not be, could not be, any situation not provided for. In its memory and experience, going back far beyond its own creation, all was supposed to be categorized, understood, known. There should have been nothing new under this or any other star.

It could not fear the unknown, because such a concept was beyond it. To it, the unknown was inconceivable.

Thus, it struggled to force new phenomena into old categories-for example, choosing to see the alien ring as a mutation, a modification of its own form.