Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 2

Sondra stood in front of her mirror. There she was, for what it was worth. Pudgy figure, chubbyface, red hair a ma.s.s of tight curls. She was dressed in her usual style: a rumpled s.h.i.+rt of indeterminate color, shapeless sweatpants, and Velcro-bottom slippers. But she wasn't at the mirror to check her appearance. The point here was to try an age-old test. Most people meant it figuratively, but her family had made it literal. She tried to look herself in the eye.

And failed.

She remembered the first time that had happened, when she had fibbed about dipping into the cookie jar at age five. Her father had marched her into the bathroom, stood her on the sink, and forced her to look in the mirror as she repeated her childish lie. She hadn't been able to do it then, and she couldn't do it now. Of course this time she hadn't lied. But she failed to do right-and that came to the same thing.

She turned and left her cabin, determined to make it up.

Five minutes later, she tapped at the door to Larry's room, more than a little embarra.s.sed, and quite unsure what she was there for. She had a guilty conscience, and Sondra had been brought up to believe in doing something about feeling guilty.

Any action, any gesture to make amends, however pointless, was better than letting guilt feelings fester.

She should have spoken up at the meeting, and she hadn't. She had to do something to fix that, even if she didn't know what that something might be.

"Come in," a m.u.f.fled voice said through the thin door. She pushed the door open and stepped into the little compartment. Larry was sitting up on the bed, a portable notepack computer in his lap. He looked up in surprise. "Uh, h.e.l.lo, Dr. Berghoff.""h.e.l.lo, Larry."

He tossed the notepack to one side of the bed and stood up, not quite sure how to make his guest welcome.

"Um, let me pull a chair out for you." He reached behind her and yanked a fold-out seat from the wall. Larry sat back down on the narrow single bed, and Sondra sat down opposite him. She had always thought of him as young, a wide-eyed kid. Probably that was true, even if it wasn't fair. Sondra herself was twenty-six, and Larry couldn't be more than a year or two younger. Sondra had unconsciously pegged him at about seventeen or so. That was patently impossible, now that she thought about it.

The station was the province of highly specialized researchers. High-energy physics was full of whiz kids- but not even a whiz kid could make it here earlier than twenty-four. It would take a certifiable genius, the sort who skipped every other grade all through his schooling, even to get here that young.

Sondra herself had been the youngest-ever fellow at the station when she had arrived here two years ago. With a start, she realized Larry was just about the same age she had been at arrival.

Had she been this much of an innocent then?

She looked more closely at him. Certainly there was something about his face that made him look more youthful than he was. His wide, solemn eyes, his jet black hair trimmed in the station's standard amateur bowl-over-the-head style, his smooth, unlined skin, the oversized coveralls added to the appearance of extreme youth. Sondra was willing to bet he didn't need to shave more than once a week.

But there was more to it than that. Life had not yet put a line upon his face, or touched his expression, his eyes, his soul. There was no hint of incident, of tragedy, of pain's lessons or sorrow's teachings in his eyes.

She had no idea where he was from. He had astrong American accent to Sondra's ear, for whatever that was worth. Was he born there, or did he merely learn English from an American tutor? So much she didn't know.

And he was one of only 120 people within a billion kilometers of here! One of only twenty scientists who sat around that science staff table at the d.a.m.ned weekly meetings. How could she have lived in such a small community for so long and know so little about one of the people in it? Sondra thought for a moment about some of the other people at the station, and was stunned to realize she could not put names to several of the faces.

She had once been such a people person. Pluto had turned her into a sour recluse, even as it poisoned Raphael. But it didn't seem to have touched Larry Chao at all. She looked at him and wondered what to say.

"I'm just trying to work up my usage figures for the Ring," Larry said, trying to find something to fill up the silence. His voice sounded most unhappy. "It looks like I spent the planetary debt last night. I don't know what the h.e.l.l to do."

"I'll bet. Can I see your figures?" Sondra asked, grateful that Larry had given her something to talk about.

Larry shrugged. "Sure, I guess. I can't get in any deeper than I am now."

Sondra wrinkled her brow and looked at him oddly. "What do you mean by that?"

"Well, the director sent you, didn't he? To check on me?"

Sondra opened her mouth in surprise, shut it and had to start over again before she was able to speak.

"Send me! Raphael sending me! The only place he'd tell me to go is outside without a heater or a suit."

It was Larry's turn to look surprised. "I thought you were one of his favorites. You always sit so closeto him at the meetings."

Sondra grinned wickedly. "There are always plenty of seats at that end. Besides, if I sit close I can keep an eye on him. I've sort of made a hobby out of watching how he handles things."

"He sure as h.e.l.l handled me," Larry said mournfully. "Now I don't know what I'm going to do. I'll never be able to pay this back. It's more than I'll earn in my whole life. h.e.l.l, I still haven't paid back all my loans to MIT."

"Let me see how bad it is," Sondra said gently.

Larry handed the notepack over to Sondra. She took one look at the figures and gasped. "Five million BritPounds! How the h.e.l.l could you possibly run up that high a tab? That's more than the monthly budget for the whole station."

Larry nodded miserably. "I know. It's all down there."

Sondra paged through the cost estimate and started to feel a little better. This guy might be a genius at what he did, but he obviously didn't know from cost estimating. His price figures were astronomically high, even for an honest cost report-though Sondra did not intend Raphael to get an honest report. "This can't be right. You've got yourself down for six full hours of Ring time."

"That's how long I was at it last night. Ring time is most of the cost. I checked the accounting records in the main computer. Ring time is billed at seven hundred thousand pounds an hour."

"First off, that's the figure we use when we bill to an external experimenter. Let me check the rate for staff experimenters." Sondra worked the controls on the note-pack, powered up the radio link to query the main station computers, and pulled down the answer. "Thought so. Inside work is billed out at five hundred thousand. Besides, even that's an artificial rate set up for accounting purposes. It's got nothing to do with actual costs.""Great. That knocks one-point-two million off my tab," Larry said. He flopped back on the bed and sighed. "I should be able to sc.r.a.pe up the other four-point-eight million from somewhere. Ha ha.

Big laugh."

Sondra looked up from her figures with a smile.

The joke wasn't funny, but the attempt to make it was promising. "Secondly," she said, "you billed yourself for power and materials when those are supposed to be covered by the hourly rate. It's not a big chunk, but we can subtract that out too. Third, six hours isn't how long you were running the Ring, it's how long you were in the control room, according to the logging report on the instruments.

You couldn't possibly have been operating the Ring for that six hours straight. You'd have gone through a month's power allocation. I bet ninety-five percent of that time was in computer time and setting up the experiment, right?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Okay, how long was the Ring itself powered up, actually taken out of standby mode and cooking?"

Larry thought for a second. "Seven, maybe eight minutes. I'd have to check the experiment log file."

"We'll check it in a second, but let's a.s.sume we're talking eight minutes. At the internal experimenter's rate of five hundred thousand pounds an hour, that comes to sixty-six thousand, six hundred sixty-six BritPounds."

"That's still two years' pay for me!" Larry protested.

"So we fudge together a ten-year garnisheeing plan and submit that," Sondra said. "You pay the first month's installment like a good little boy-and by the second month the whole Inst.i.tute shuts down. If the station shuts down, how can it dock your pay-especially when it isn't paying you anymore? And while we're at it, we arrange to have it paid off in Israeli shekels. That's the convertiblecurrency with the highest inflation rate right now.

The debt will lose half its value in a year."

Larry thought about it for a moment and frowned. "It doesn't sound exactly honest to me."

Sondra muttered a curse under her breath. "It's bad enough that Raphael wants to penalize you for showing initiative and being inspired. Why the h.e.l.l do you have to cooperate with him when he does it?"

"But he's got a point. I wasn't authorized to run the test. I didn't get it scheduled."

People want authority to be just, Sondra thought. "Three-quarters of the experiments here aren't scheduled. That rule is on the books to prevent people from doing side jobs for commercial labs. We're supposed to be working in the public interest and our data is public domain. Without a rule to cover moonlighting, private companies could hit a researcher up for secret experiment runs. The rule wasn't meant to punish you for thinking, and Raphael is wrong to use it against you. We couldn't get anywhere complaining directly to him, so we have to find backdoor ways around the rule. Give me a chance and I bet I can whittle the charges down even further."

Larry thought for a minute. "h.e.l.l, there's no way I'm going to be able to pay anything more anyway.

All right; I'll do it your way."

"Great. Glad to hear it." Sondra set the notepack to one side. "The real reason I came in was to apologize for not sticking up for you today. Let me fudge the figures for you, just to make it up."

"Why should you have done anything today? You barely know me."

"Yeah, but by this time, I should know you. The old-timer is supposed to show the new kid around.

Besides, every one of us around that table should have spoken up, and none of us did. We're all too browbeaten by Raphael."Larry sat up again. "That much I can believe. He reminds of my Uncle Tal. Tal always managed to find a way to let me know I wasn't sufficiently grateful to my parents. Nothing I did was ever enough. I don't know how many times I wanted to face up to him, but I never worked up the nerve.

And Dr. Raphael is a hundred times worse."

Sondra felt a twinge of guilt, a legitimate one this time. Much as she hated to admit it, there was a part of her that admired Raphael's cussedness, that felt some sympathy for him. "Don't be too hard on him. He hasn't had it easy. He's spent practically his whole life being an old man in a young person's game. It took him a few extra years to get his doctorate for some reason. He fell behind the current theories and research, and never really got caught up. That was twenty-five years ago. He's lived all that time watching boy and girl wonders like us make all the big strides.

"Imagine what a whole life like that would be-always a little bit behind the curve, forever condemned to be a bright man in a field where the average worker is a genius. No wonder he gets frustrated." She paused, and shrugged. "Even so, he shouldn't take it out on the rest of us."

"And we shouldn't let him get away with it,"

Larry said with surprising firmness. "If we didn't cooperate, he couldn't push us around."

"I've been telling myself that for a long time,"

Sondra agreed. "But if we're going to close up shop in a month, it's a little late to stage a revolt."

A shy, tentative smile played over Larry's face.

"There's still my results. They might be worth something."

Sondra smiled indulgently. It would take miracle numbers to do any good. Mere refinement, another tweakup in performance wouldn't help. But she wasn't going to say that to Larry. What good could it do to dash all his hopes? "Yeah, you're right. Theymight be something."

"Wanna see them?" Larry asked eagerly. He bounded off the bed without waiting for an answer, shot over Sondra's head and caromed off the ceiling, much to her startlement. He made a perfect landing in front of his desk and wrapped his legs around the chair legs. Obviously he had practiced a lot moving in Pluto's weak gravity. He dug through the papers clipped to the desktop, and pulled a single sheet out of the thick sheaf. "This is the summary," he said. "I've got a preliminary detail report, but the computer is still doing some number crunching."

Sondra took the paper without looking at it.

"Why so long to run the calculations?" she asked.

Larry shrugged. "I didn't have a chance to start it running until after the meeting, and it's a complicated problem that'll suck up a lot of processing time. Too big for a remote terminal. I've got the Ring control computer slipstreaming pieces of my job in between legitimate work, in small enough hunks that it won't get flagged on the accounting system. I don't want Raphael nailing me for sucking up computer time too." He grinned shyly.

Sondra laughed. "You're learning," she said, and glanced casually at the summary sheet. Then she blinked, and looked at it again, more carefully. She had to read it twice more before she was certain she had read the numbers correctly. They couldn't be right. They couldn't be. "This has got to be wrong,"

she objected. "You can't have gotten that kind of gee field. Even if we knew how to do it, we don't have the power to generate even one percent that much force."

"The numbers are right," Larry said. "And I didn't generate that gravity force-I focused and amplified an existing gravity field. Charon's gravity field."Sondra looked at him. His voice was calm, steady. There was nothing defensive in his tone, and he looked her straight in the eye. He believed in the figures. She looked at the page again and checked the time stamp on the experiment. Hours before Raphael had dropped his bombsh.e.l.l. No, Larry could not have faked the numbers in some sort of mad attempt to cancel the closing with a spectacular success. Besides, these numbers were too spectacular. They were too good for anyone to try to fake them. No one would believe it. They had to be real.

She realized that she had been staring blankly at the summary sheet. She put it down and took a good hard look at Larry. He was not the sort to make a good liar. If he had been trying to put something over, he would have blushed and stammered, his eyes would have s.h.i.+fted away from hers. Either the data were right, or Larry had made a spectacular error.

He believed. But no one else would.

"Has Raphael seen this?" she asked, tapping a finger on the sum sheet.

"I haven't worked up the nerve to send the data to his terminal yet. I was going to present it at the meeting, but I didn't," Larry admitted unhappily.

"d.a.m.n it." If Larry had sent them in before the meeting, they would have had at least some credibility. "Send it right now. Not just to his terminal. Copy to every researcher on the station.

Now."

"But-"

"But me no buts, Larry. When they see those figures coming after the shutdown announcement, everyone will a.s.sume you cooked them up to cancel the shutdown. If we release them now, at least there'll be the argument that you wouldn't have had the time to fabricate the figures. The longer you wait the weaker that argument will get.""But those figures are right," Larry objected.

"They're not faked."

"I know that, and you know that-but who else will buy it? These figures are five hundred thousand times larger than they ought to be. Use Occam's razor. What's the simplest explanation-a perfectly timed breakthrough, or a fraud?"

Larry thought for a moment, then grabbed his note-pack and typed in a series of commands. For a long moment, there was no sound in the little room but the low chuckle of the keyboard. Sondra stared intently at Larry, and she realized that her heart was racing, that sweat had broken out on her forehead.

I'm scared, she told herself, wondering what in the world there was to be frightened of.

And then the answer came to her. She was scared of the power Larry had found. He had stabilized it across a microscopic volume, and only for a few seconds. But inside that tiny time and s.p.a.ce, he had produced a gravity field a thousand times more powerful than the Sun's. He had produced force great enough to crush whole worlds.

Surely that should be enough to frighten anyone.

I'm coming home, Jessie. Home. Simon Raphael set down his old-fas.h.i.+oned pen and felt his eyes mist over for a moment. The foolish tears of an old man. But that didn't matter. No need to be ashamed. That was the whole point of the journal, of course. To let his emotions out in private, where they could do no harm. To tell everything to the one woman he had ever loved.

There were times, many of them, when hequestioned the wisdom, indeed the sanity, of writing his journal down in the form of letters to his dead wife. But sanity was in short supply on Pluto.

Best not to spend his h.o.a.rded supply on private thoughts. Best to have it in reserve for his dealings with the others.

The final notice came by lasergram last night, he wrote. Soon, soon now, I will walk again under an open blue sky. Soon, once again, I shall visit you . Her grave was a lovely place, nestled into the side of a quiet hillside, looking down on the green fields of Shenandoah Valley, looking out over the cool uplands of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I will leave this place and come home to you.

He set down his pen, sighed, and closed his eyes.

He imagined that he could smell the cool forest air wafted over the valley. It was incredible to him that others would chose to stay here. Fantastic that they would struggle to find reasons to stay. Even make them up. Perhaps this boy Chao seriously thought he had discovered something worthwhile. Perhaps it was not deliberate fraud.

Too bad. The moment was past for wasting time on harebrained theories.

Raphael knew Chao was wrong. Chao could not have found anything, for there was nothing to find.

Gravity research was a dead end. That, when all was said and done, was Simon Raphael's reason for giving up.

He smiled, a wan and thin creasing of his lips, and took up his pen again. I feel no regret in leaving here, he wrote. I have done all I could, tried as hard as I might. Now there is nothing left but to remember what W. C. Fields said. Jessie had always loved the ancient comedy films, even if Raphael himself had not. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then give up. No sense being a d.a.m.n fool about it. "