Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 36

But not for long.

The chronometers said it took 47.5 hours, but none of those who witnessed it were ever able to believe that. It was far too long, or too short, a time, for a world to vanish utterly.

Larry never slept in all that time, but long pa.s.sages of that time had the qualities of a nightmare, when the surging, seething storms, the weird sight of a world glowing white-hot with the heat of compression and collapse, the matter of the world relentlessly crus.h.i.+ng itself, the world-serpent swallowing its own tail, consuming itself, driven on by the relentless urging of the Ring of Charon, named for a satellite that no longer was.

On and on it went, transfixing him, the moments taking forever, and then no time at all. Charon seemingly locked for all time into one state of its collapse, and then abruptly, seemingly without any transition, Larry would blink to find the satellite shrunk by half, glowing with a fiery light that had not been there before.

Larry watched, utterly unable to act or react, as the drama unfolded. It was something beyond him, outside him. It was utterly inconceivable that this t.i.tanic event could have anything to do with him, that anything he could do or say or think could have any effect on such a spectacle.

And yet he had caused it. He had imagined it, planned it, set the program, and pressed the b.u.t.ton that caused it.

Explosions, ma.s.sive electric storms, powerful magnetic eddy currents, auroral displays. Charon inits death throes found every way imaginable to shed the ma.s.sive energy of position held by all the matter that fell in toward the rapacious center. The shrinking world glowed brighter and brighter, grew hotter and hotter as the spectacle continued.

At last there was nothing left but a sun-bright fleck of light in the sky, the glowing, ionized cloud of debris surrounding the dot of neutronium that late had been a world. The ion glow set the inner rim of the Ring gleaming jewel-bright by reflected light.

But soon, all too soon, even that cloud of matter, even now forming into a miniature accretion disk, would vanish as well. Particle by particle, atom by atom, it would smash into the surface of collapsed matter and be absorbed by it. And the neutronium sphere, now spinning at incredible speed as it conserved the satellite's momentum, kept growing, a particle at a time, letting off a flash of light and hard radiation with every impact.

Charon was no more. In its place, a point of star-hot brilliance, surrounded by a wispy nimbus of gas, thickening into a lumpen disk of dust, debris, and gas at the plane of Charon's old equator.

And the Ring, the Ring of Charon surrounding it all, at right angles to the accretion disk, face-on to the tiny s.h.i.+p hovering at the still-unmoving barycenter.

The system's center of gravity had not s.h.i.+fted appreciably. Charon's gravity was still there, now captured in a tiny dot of neutronium, a pinpoint of degenerate matter that held all of what had made a world.

Matter so compressed that even the atoms themselves had collapsed in on themselves, the electron sh.e.l.ls flattened down to nothing, forcing protons and electrons to bond, forming neutrons, gravity overcoming the weak nuclear force, in effect compressing the satellite down into one giant neutron.

"So now we've become what they are," Webling said, looking through the monitors at theimpossible sight. "Become s.h.i.+va, destroyer of worlds. We've taken a whole world, a satellite four billion years old, crushed it down to nothing, to serve our transient needs."

"Self-defense, Jane," Raphael said. It was not explanation enough, but it was all he had. He turned and looked at Larry. "There isn't any chance that Charon by itself will be enough, is there? No hope that we can leave Pluto alone?"

Larry stared straight ahead, numbingly exhausted, refusing to see anything but the screens full of abstract numbers ahead of him. He could not afford to consider the reality of what they were-no, what he-was doing. "None. I've amplified and focused Charon's gravity enough to form a neutronium sphere, but that's it. I've pulled all the artificial focusing pressure off it. It's stable, certainly for the present time, and maybe permanently. It shouldn't be able to reexpand on its own. But I can't achieve any further compression with so little matter, no matter what tricks I play.

"Even with Pluto added in, it's marginal. Even with the planet added in, I might not have the ma.s.s to cause a tripover into a black-I mean, um, a singularity." He had dreamed of creating a black hole for a long, long time. But now that it was within his grasp, he could not even bear to say the words, was forced into euphemisms.

Webling gasped. "Not enough? Well, what happens then? What if Pluto goes and we still don't have tripover?"

"We go shopping for planets and moons,"

Raphael said coldly. "I believe Ura.n.u.s will provide us with more possibilities than Neptune. With the focused ma.s.s of Charon and Pluto to draw on, I expect we could develop a gravity beam that could draw one of its moons toward us. That's correct, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir," Larry said woodenly, as if he weregiving a test answer. "A tighter, more directed, more powerful beam than we ever would have dreamed possible a few weeks ago. The gravity beam would produce mutual attraction, of course.

We'd be moving ourselves toward them at the same time, in effect falling toward them once the beam stripped the satellites from their orbits. It would require a transit time of several weeks at least. We'd meet at the halfway point between Pluto and Ura.n.u.s, more or less. I expect we'd need Oberon and t.i.tania, and possibly Umbriel. They're all far smaller than Pluto, but their combined ma.s.s would be more than enough if Pluto by itself doesn't do the job."

Would it even work? No matter how many worlds they destroyed, no matter how much ma.s.s they swallowed up, it meant nothing if they could not break into the Char-onian power and control loop.

Larry sighed, and his voice cracked just a little.

"Then we proceed?"

Raphael nodded. "There's no turning back now."

He pressed an intercom key. "Mr. Vespasian, this is Raphael. You may move us out of the barycenter now."

For purpose of observation and measurement, the barycenter had some distinct advantages as a control station site, but because it was on a direct line between the locus ma.s.s and Pluto, it had some far more distinct disadvantages when firing a gravity beam from one point to the other.

Vespasian wasted no time gunning the Nenya's engines, moving his s.h.i.+p a prudent five thousand kilometers straight out from the barycenter.

Larry checked his sequencer, confirmed that the Ring was ready for the next phase, and pressed that d.a.m.nable start b.u.t.ton again.

The Ring of Charon focused down on the locus ma.s.s, this time bending the shape of s.p.a.ce around it to direct most of its gravitic potential down on a tiny point on the surface of Pluto, suddenlysubjecting that point to a field a million times as powerful as the planet's surface gravity. A gravity field pulling that one point up, away from the planet. Just like what the Charonians do, Larry thought.

Almost instantly, a brilliant beam of ruby red light linked the locus ma.s.s with Pluto's surface as a pencil-thin stream of matter ripped itself out of the planet and accelerated toward the locus. Heated by friction and particle collisions, the matter stream lit the frozen world in a terrifying crimson light. But the heating progressed further, and the in-falling end of the matter stream, accelerating toward the neutronium sphere, glowed hotter and hotter, a blue-white sword of light, a firelance of light stabbing into s.p.a.ce toward the Ring of Charon's center-point, knifing into the bull's-eye with dreadful precision.

And then, from the viewpoint of the Nenya, the locus end of the firelance began guttering down back toward the red. Not because it was slowing, but because it was speeding up, reaching relativistic speeds, moving fast enough that its light was reds.h.i.+fted, its color dimmed down toward red by the velocity at which it was moving away from the Nenya.

The Ring began to s.h.i.+ft its target point on Pluto, moving the contact point across the surface, expanding the focus point slightly, deliberately unfocusing the edges of the beam to reduce the gravitic potential toward the perimeter of the beam. Torn by the hideous violence of the gravity beam's a.s.sault, its underpinnings pulled away as interior core material was pulled skyward, the Plutonian landscape was shredded apart. Pulverized by the ma.s.sive tidal effects of the variable beam, the solid surface was reduced to shattered rock and superheated volatiles that blasted into s.p.a.ce.

Larry watched, the tears running down his face, as Pluto collapsed in on itself. It hadn't been a largeplanet, or an important one. The astrophysicists had never even quite decided whether it was a true planet in its own right, or merely an escaped Neptunian moon or a bit of oversized skyjunk. But it had been a world, a place, a unique part of G.o.d's Universe, a border marker for the inner frontier of the Solar System.

And now it was going, going, gone.

And he had killed it.

"The station's still holding together," Raphael announced, a strange note of pride in his voice.

"We're getting some impressive readings on all the telemetry channels. The world crumbling beneath her feet, and the station still stands. We built that place well, didn't we?" Simon Raphael asked, turning toward his colleague. His face was pained, sorrowful, and his expression was mirrored in Jane Webling's face. He reached out, and took her hand.

It had been a lonely place, cold in a way no heating system could warm, a place of drawn-out defeats.

But the station had been a home to both of them as well.

Larry got up from the control console, leaving the Ring to run itself. It was all on automatic now, the sequence moving too fast for a human eye to follow.

He went to the side of the two older scientists, and joined them in watching the relays from the Gravities Research Station's external cameras. He recognized the camera angle. It was the same view, the old, unchanging view from the observation dome. Before his eyes saw it as it now was, his mind remembered how it had been for so long, immutable-the craters, the empty plain, and, close to the horizon, the jagged, shattered remains of the first stations, ruins exposed to the stars. And the graveyard, a few frozen corpses from the first missions here, hastily covered over a generation ago, carefully hidden from the dome's line of sight.

And the now-missing happy blue marble of Earthsometimes gleaming in the night.

Now, nothing was as it had been.

He opened his eyes to the present time. The ground was shuddering, boulders leaping up into the sky, pressure vents blasting open as they watched, sending geysers of superheated liquid streaking upward. The shattered remains of the first and second stations tumbled over, collapsed into the bubbling cauldron of the melted land. And for a brief, terrible moment, the graves gave up their dead. A steam vent blasted open the ground below the graves, and Jane Webling cried in horror as the bodies of old friends were thrown upward, hurtling over the horizon.

Now the ground under the station lurched downward, and the camera slumped over, fell on its side. A boulder slammed into the dome, smas.h.i.+ng it open. The interior of the dome frosted over in the blink of an eye, and the contents of the room were a sudden blizzard of whirling debris. The viewscreen went blank as the camera was yanked free from its cable.

Like so many candles snuffed out with the rippling speed of a gusting wind, all the other indicators and readouts from the station flickered out and went dead.

Larry turned back toward his control console and checked the sequencer display. The locus ma.s.s had grown appreciably, and the Ring was able to refocus the gravity beam to even greater power. He switched one of the monitors to an external view camera and looked for a long last time at Pluto.

The planet was collapsing, shrinking, fast enough that he could see it happening. A haze of dust and debris and gas was a funeral shroud for the doomed planet. A huge, roiling cone-cloud of debris was climbing up the gravity beam, matter spiraling down into the maelstrom from all over the planet, pulled in toward the beam.The Ring adjusted the focus again, centering the beam on the point directly under the locus ma.s.s, widening the beam to draw in a wider and wider swath of matter. The faster the locus absorbed matter, the faster the strength of the beam grew, and the faster it tore matter from Pluto.

The planet's matter howled up the gravity cyclone, the superheated glow of ionized matter blazing across the sky. The locus absorbed more and more matter, giving the Ring more gravity potential to work with. The Ring tightened down the vise, compressing the locus down upon itself ever more tightly.

Larry watched the gee meters, the amplification meters. They were rising even more rapidly than he had planned. Closer and closer to the point where nothing, not even light, could escape from the microscopic pinpoint that now held all the matter that had once been a moon, the pinpoint that was swallowing a world. "Coming up on it," he announced, and no one had to ask what he meant.

He closed his eyes, and exhaustion swept over him, tried to claim him one more time. But no, not yet.

The end of the firelance resting on the ma.s.s locus reddened more and more, grew dark and sullen as the gravity well deepened, reds.h.i.+fting the light more and more. The last shreds and fragments of Pluto slammed into the accretion cone, ripped themselves down to powder and gas, then to ions, falling, whirling, spinning, glowing, collapsing toward the voracious maw.

Larry watched the meters and licked his fear-dry lips. Soon. Soon. When the escape velocity reached the speed of light...

Suddenly there was a strange flickering across the screen as the last of Pluto fell into the beam.

Just then, the light of the firelance guttered down to nothing, and not even the light of impact on the ma.s.s locus could escape. And the rest was darkness.Larry looked up from his numbers and his meters, ignored the view from the monitor screens, and stumbled toward one of the Nenya's few viewpoints. His own eyes. He had to see this with his own eyes.

In the wardroom. A port there. He stepped in, and saw a crowd there, people staring out the port.

But suddenly their faces turned toward him, and they backed away. Whether out of fear or respect Larry neither knew nor cared. See. He had to see, with his own eyes.

He shoved his face up against the port, leaned in close enough that his breath froze on the quartz, turning the port into a foggy mirror, putting eyes in the quartz reflection that looked back at him.

His breath had frosted the station's observation dome that first night of it all. That action, that tiny dusting of frozen moisture on a window, reminded him of the far-off victory when he had succeeded in focusing a pinp.r.i.c.k of gravitic potential, a nothing, and held it steady for the briefest of moments-and had thought that to be a triumph. Now he knew better.

And, oh how happily he would give up that moment in order to give up this one, trade away his dreams to lose the knowledge he had purchased at such terrible price. The knowledge of destruction.

He reached out a weary hand and wiped his reflection away to look out at his handiwork.

Charon was gone.

Pluto was gone.

Lost, vanished, as if they had never been.

Only the Ring, the mighty and terrible Ring, survived. At its centerpoint, at the axis of the Ring, at the place around which all their desperate hopes revolved, was an impossibly tiny dot, utterly and forever invisible. A dot that contained all that been Charon, all that had been Pluto, all that had beenthe station and the bodies of their dead comrades.

A black hole.

A piece of darkness, and he had made it so.

Larry closed his eyes, and trembled, and wept.

Then the exhaustion of collapse swept over him, and he knew no more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

Half a Loaf Larry awoke after far too short a time, longing for a better rest, for proper sleep, for a chance to dream away some of the nightmares. But things were getting worse back in the Inner System. People, families, whole cities could die while he caught a few winks. There was no time.

And so he was back in his control chair, trying to make it all work.

At last the main monitor screen lit up.

SYSTEM READY FOR TUNING HUNT.

Good. He cleared the board, ran one last check, and let the automatics take over. A display light flickered once, there was a faint beep, and the search program ran. The Ring's computers knew to within close tolerances Earthpoint's modulation, intensity, focus, pulse rate. Now it had to hunt within that range, searching for the precise combination of values that would cause a lock.

It was up to the machines now. Larry moved back from the board. This was it, the end of the quest.And yet only the beginning. There were endless battles left to fight.

The Ring sequencer worked relentlessly through all the myriad ways, testing, sensing as it made each adjustment. Larry watched it work, astonished by his own arrogance. His black hole was a scant few hours old, and here they were, using it in the most elaborate and complicated way imaginable.

They should have performed tests, years' worth of tests, acc.u.mulated an encyclopedia's worth of data, before they tried something this far out on the edge.

But there was no time. People were dying.

Webling, utterly exhausted, had gone off to try to sleep. Larry sat in the control room, alone with Dr.

Raphael, watching the display click through all the permutations.

But being alone was an illusion. Larry knew that outside that door the entire staff of the research station, the people he had just made refugees, were watching every monitor, every display. Watching to see if the Solar System would live. Oh, yes, he was far from alone.

Larry turned and looked at Dr. Raphael. No, at Simon. He had never called the man that. But maybe now was the time to speak the man's name.

Maybe that, too, would be a beginning, a start of saying many other things to his staunchest companion. "Simon," he said, quietly.

The older man looked up, startled. It was clear that he understood the significance of the moment.

"Yes, Larry?"

"Simon, where are we? I mean, even if this works, what does it gain us? If we stop them, where do we go next?"

Simon thought for a moment, and then offered up a sad smile. "I don't know," he said at last.

"Maybe nowhere. Maybe we win this battle and lose the war. We've just barely begun to have an idea of who and what we're fighting. But at least we'll havebought time. We'll be in a position to survive, to regroup. We'll have hope. And Earth will be safe, at least for the moment."

Larry was about to reply when the alert buzzer went off. He checked his board and suddenly felt the adrenaline surging through his body. "We have a lock," he announced. He powered up the external monitor and zoomed the camera in on the centerpoint of the Ring, where the invisible Plutopoint singularity hung lurking in the darkness.

Suddenly, impossibly, there was a flash of unwhite, unblue, a flicker of color in the black. And then it was gone. Larry watched, unmoving, scarcely daring to breathe, waiting.

One hundred twenty-eight seconds later it flared again, and Larry let out a shout of triumph that nearly scared Simon Raphael to death. They were in.

"Now," he said, "we start tapping into the Lunar Wheel's power feed."