Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 6

Webling. Perhaps you'd be interested in seeing them while we wait to see what t.i.tan has to say?"

The beam was moving again.

First directed at the sixth planet, then s.h.i.+fted toward the fifth, now sweeping over the second planet. Soon now, soon, it would sweep this way, toward the third world, and the Observer and its hiding place.

Close. The moment was close. After all the endless millennia, the wait was down to mere minutes, seconds.

The Observer all but quivered with antic.i.p.ation.

When Larry walked into the dome, he instantly noticed two things: one, a much larger number of people than usual "just happened" to be eating breakfast there, instead of in the cafeteria, and many were lingering over their coffee; and two, a murmur of conversation sprang up when he walked in-though no one had the nerve to go up and talk to him. When Sondra and Webling walked into the dome soon after, the murmur rose to a veritablebuzz of excitement. Obviously, news traveled fast through the station, and rumor even faster. True to form, the computer center had leaked like a sieve when the Webling experiment had come through.

Someone down there had seen and understood the significance of the readings-and that someone had a wagging tongue.

Sondra crossed the room and sat down at the table across from Larry, Webling beside her.

"Larry," she said with forced casualness, "tell Dr.

Webling about that experiment modification we worked up."

Webling stared hard at Larry and blinked once or twice. "You!" she said. "You're the one who faked the gravity-field results!"

Sondra winced. Ouch. Off on the wrong foot. "No, Dr. Webling," she said gently. "He's the one they've accused of faking the results. But that doesn't make the figures less true. Go ahead, Larry. Tell the doctor how you did it. Convince her that it really happened."

Larry swallowed hard and pulled out his notepack computer. "Well," he said doubtfully, "the main idea was to use the Ring's gravity power to focus and amplify an existing gravity field."

Webling's eyes widened. "Amplify an existing field. How on earth did you..." Her voice trailed off as she looked at the math that was already on Larry's notepack screen.

Within half a minute, the old woman and the young man were completely immersed in a complex mathematical argument, rattling off hideously convoluted formulas into the notepack's voiceport.

Sondra tried to follow their arguments on the pack's tiny screen, knowing that she was supposed to understand gravitic calculation and notation-but these two were just going too fast for her. Every time she thought she caught the sense of their discussion, they rocketed off onto a new topicbefore she had the chance to digest the last point.

Her attention wandered and she happened to glance up. Someone must have made a whole series of intercom calls. Virtually the entire station staff was there, and not just the scientists. The tech and admin and maintenance people were all there too.

By now no one was even pretending to have a good reason for being there. They were simply an audience waiting for the show to begin.

If they were waiting for Raphael to show, they didn't have long to wait. Not more than ten minutes after Sondra and Webling arrived, Raphael burst in.

He stalked up to Larry, leaned over him, and glared malevolently down at him. "I should like to know the meaning of this," he said, obviously struggling to keep his voice calm.

Larry and Webling both looked up in surprise.

"Meaning of what?" Larry asked, his voice nervous and subdued.

"Don't play me for the fool," the director snapped. He waved an experiment procedure form at Larry. "This is the standard report generated by the operations computer after every experiment run, showing how the equipment was configured and used. It describes the work done by these two"-he gestured in annoyance at Webling and Sondra-"last night. This absurd 'modification' to Webling's intended experiment stands out like a sore thumb. This was your work. You have acted in direct and deliberate contravention of my orders!"

he sputtered. "You have completely violated my every instruction. Every dollar, every cent expended by this ridiculous 'experiment' is coming out of your pay. Every cent."

Larry stole a sidelong glance at Sondra. Now was the time for their plan from the night. Last night, he hadn't much liked the idea of hiding behind Sondra's skirts, no matter how sensible it was. Now, Sondra's taking over was fine with him. Raphaelpractically had smoke coming out of his ears.

Anyone who wanted to deal with him was welcome to the job. Larry glanced at Webling, and saw the sweat starting to pop out on her forehead, too. She wasn't going to be much use as protective cover.

No, if anyone was going to handle the director, it would have to be Sondra.

"Violated orders? But that's just not so, Dr.

Raphael," Sondra cut in smoothly, dredging up a low, winsome, southern-belle accent from somewhere. Larry dimly recalled that she was from the American South, but he had certainly never heard that tone of voice from her. "I'm sure there must be some slight misunderstanding." Larry glanced around. Sondra was obviously playing to the crowd, using the public audience as a screen against Raphael's anger.

"Mr. Chao here was simply a.s.sisting Dr. Webling and myself in our graser system tests. I suppose he did help us augment our signal power, but I can't see how that const.i.tutes violating orders. For that matter, I don't see how you could issue him orders as to what to work on in the first place. You are the administrative director, but that doesn't give you any control over research operations. Mr. Chao is a full research fellow.

"Last time I checked the station's charter, research fellows have complete access to the Station's facilities. In fact, according to the station charter, the administrator is specifically excluded from authorizing experiments. That's supposed to be up to the chief scientist, Dr. Webling."

From the look on Webling's face, it was apparent that even she had forgotten she was chief scientist.

Raphael had gathered all the de facto power to himself so long ago that no one remembered the official de jure arrangements. Sondra saw Raphael's quick glance toward Webling. That brief, nervous look told her she had won. She had found a vulnerable spot in Raphael's armor. A bully whobreaks the rules cannot use the rules to bully.

"Unless, of course, I have it wrong. What, exactly, is your authority for controlling Mr. Chao's work? Has Dr. Webling ceded the power of her office to you?"

Raphael opened his mouth and shut it without speaking. Before he could come up with anything more cogent, Webling chimed in. "I most certainly did not cede my authority-not to Dr. Raphael or to anyone else. But that does not excuse your impertinence, Dr. Berghoff." Webling turned and addressed Raphael. "But that to one side, Simon, right protocol or wrong, young Mr. Chao seems to have his numbers right. It would be criminal to reject such a promising claim out of hand over some breach of scientific etiquette. The first response from t.i.tan should arrive at any moment.

It seems to me that we are about to receive either a confirmation or a refutation of these theories.

Shouldn't that be the basis for our reaction to Mr.

Chao's work?"

Sandbagged, Sondra thought gleefully. The old goat just got blown out of the water by his closest ally, in front of the entire staff. Larry seemed about to say something, but she kicked him under the table. This was no time to let Raphael off the hook.

Let him squirm.

But Sondra didn't get to see Raphael's reaction. A low beeping began, a sound that seemed to come from everywhere all at once. It took Sondra a moment to realize it was her notepack, alerting her that a message was incoming for her. Larry's pack was beeping too-and so were Webling's and Raphael's.

t.i.tan! She pulled her pack out of its belt pouch and punched in the Read Message command.

The screen cleared and displayed the text of the message. Even as she read to herself, Webling stood and read it aloud to the entire staff."from: tistat commcent personal and immediate.

"to: raphael, webling, berghoff, chao.

"message reads: t.i.tan station, sakharov physics inst.i.tute sending for pluto, gravitics research station. warmest congratulations to raphael and entire team. incredible! grav meters here recorded indisputable reception of pulsed, modulated gravity waves of remarkable power as per your preexperiment transmission. we are honored to be first to congratulate your lab for this great achievement. we are processing initial detailed a.n.a.lysis and will transmit same to you at earliest convenience. this is a breakthrough of the first importance. we toast you here with the true stoli vodka. well done, simon. proud regards, m. k.

popolov, director, message concludes."

A burst of applause followed, and a dozen people reached in to shake hands with Larry. Sondra could not keep a wry smile from her face. Well done, Simon, indeed. Director Popolov had a.s.sumed that Dr. Simon Raphael had been responsible for doing the experiment, rather than busy attempting to squelch it. Never mind. She could see the growing knot of people swarming over Larry. They could see where the real credit lay. And there would be no keeping the true word from spreading. Well done, Simon. Sondra looked up to where Raphael had been and discovered he wasn't there anymore. She looked toward the door just in time to see him ducking through it, escaping his humiliation while the attention was off him. For a moment, for a brief moment, she found it in herself to feel sorry for the man.

But then the crowd jostled her, and swept her into the swirl of people surrounding Larry.

Shy, blus.h.i.+ng, smiling, Larry accepted the congratulations of his colleagues, even those who had not believed him only hours before. There was ageneral clamor for information of all kinds.

Everyone seemed to have a notepack out, trying to link into Larry's files in the central computer. They all found the files in question had privacy blocks on them. The computer commlink system actually shut down for a minute, overwhelmed by too many people asking for a look at too many files and datasets. Larry used his own notepack to remove the blocks from every file he controlled.

The whole business was too much for him. Pride, excitement, his usual awkwardness in public situations, worry over what Raphael would do next-all of those feelings and a half dozen more besides were jumbled up inside him-and were forced to take a backseat to the endless questions from Webling and the other staff scientists. There wasn't time for anything but the moment itself, the event.

Someone-Larry thought it was Hernandez, the microgravity expert, but he wasn't sure-was shoving a notepack in his face, asking him to explain a flowchart display. Larry offered up a mental shrug, took the pack, and started trying to make sense of the graph. Maybe if he cooperated, they would all calm down sooner.

But his answer only prompted another question from someone else, started another argument.

There were too many possibilities, too many theories. There wasn't room in the dome for it all.

In part because the observation dome was getting too crowded, and in part because it was easier to explain things in front of the switches and dials and screens, the throng seemed to migrate from the observation dome to the primary Ring control room. Afterwards, Larry had no recollection of actually going there.

There was something about the b.u.t.tons and dials and instruments of the control room that made people remember their professionalism. Voices got lower, and people actually waited for each other tofinish talking.

The room was small, and there were too many people in it. The environmental system couldn't keep up, and the air grew hot and stuffy. n.o.body seemed to notice or care. If anything, the closeness of the room added to the intensity of the moment.

People got sharper, more focused, and started acting more like rational scientists. Larry found himself perched on the back of a chair, running an impromptu seminar.

But just when the situation seemed to be calmed down again, the next message came in, from Ganymede station. If anything, it was more effusive than t.i.tan's signal. Then t.i.tan checked in again, with a more complete report, and their enthusiasm seemed to have doubled, if such a thing were possible.

When Ganymede made its complete report, they had a real set of numbers to work with for the first time. They knew the power of the gravity beam when it had left Pluto-Charon, and now they had measurements, from two locations, of its power, intensity, wave shape and frequency at arrival-in effect giving them hard data on how the beam had been affected as it moved through s.p.a.ce.

The data not only confirmed that Larry's gravity beam was real, it also told volumes about the nature of gravity itself-and about how it interacted with the fabric of s.p.a.ce-time, about the matter and the gravity fields it pa.s.sed through and near, how it affected and was affected by the velocity of the objects it encountered. Hernandez was able to prove that gravity was subject to Doppler effects. That was no great surprise; theory had predicted it. But for the first time the matter was settled, confirmed, and not a mere a.s.sumption.

There was a lesson in there, and somewhere in the middle of the tumult that day, Larry spotted it: Before you can fully understand a force of nature, you must be able to manipulate it. Never before hadscientists been able to fiddle with gravity, in effect turn it on and off to see what would happen. Now they could, and the floodgates were open. In that first four hours they learned more about gravity than all of humanity had learned in all history.

And they had some power to play with, too. That helped. Science always needed more power than nature conveniently provided. How far would humans have gotten in the study of magnetism if all they had been allowed to work with was Earth's natural magnetic fields, and the occasional lodestone?

Size for size, nature's force generators were not very strong or efficient. It takes a whole thunderstorm to produce lightning, something as huge as Earth to create a natural one-gee field, a ma.s.s the size of the Sun to start fusion. Now humans could match all those power levels, or at least come close, using much smaller devices.

It was not a time for contemplation. Still the messages came, from Ganymede and t.i.tan, informing that VISOR and JPL had been advised.

Events were happening too rapidly, over too great a span of distance.

Larry imagined the radio and laser signals that must be crisscrossing the Inner System, chasing each other, sending new information that was old by the time it arrived. By now, as word was arriving at Pluto from t.i.tan, saying that t.i.tan had advised Earth-by now Earth had already received the gravity beam.

JPL would send a message as soon as someone there knew what was up. That was the signal to watch for. Larry watched the clocks and calculated the signal delay a dozen times over. Twenty minutes before a return signal from Earth could possibly arrive, he stood up and stretched. "Look," he said, "there's a lot more to cover, but we should be hearing from JPL soon, and I want to be in the dome when the message comes."With a renewed gabble of voices, the entire group migrated back to the dome. After all, everyone else wanted to see the message arrive as well. This discovery was going to save their jobs as well. Larry managed to duck away long enough to sneak back to his quarters, grab his toilet kit, go to the head and freshen up a bit. This was his second day more or less without sleep. If he couldn't have rest, he could at least have a two-minute shower and a shave.

By the time he arrived at the dome, a few minutes before Earth was due to check in, the show had already begun. The lights had been dimmed in the dome, and the stars gleamed forth overhead.

Charon and the mighty wheel of the Ring dominated the sky.

Larry could not look up at that sight without being inspired. That tool, that device, one of the mightiest generators ever made, and he had put it to use, commanded it toward a breakthrough.

Larry moved carefully into the darkened room, waited for his eyes to adjust, and looked around.

The comm staff had been at work, rigging a series of large view screens at one side of the dome and rearranging the chairs to face the screens. One screen showed a countdown clock, displaying the time remaining until the receipt-of-beam signal could arrive from Earth. The second display was clicking through screen after screen of results and reports already derived from the experiment, with data from t.i.tan, Ganymede and VISOR.

Larry realized that he must have missed the Venusian signal while he was in the shower. The third screen showed the dome telescope's view of the Earth-Moon system, the two planets glowing like fat stars in the firmament. But it was the fourth screen that surprised Larry. It showed a handsome young man, nattily dressed, talking into the camera.

An ID line across the bottom said he was Wolf Bernhardt, the spokesman for JPL, talking on a livefeed. Given the expense and difficulty of punching a television signal through to Pluto, that in itself told Larry that the folks back home were taking him seriously.

Larry ducked his way into the rows and found an empty seat next to Sondra. "You haven't missed much," she told him in a stage whisper that had to carry halfway across the room. "Right now this guy is talking about the results from Venus."

Larry nodded vaguely and glanced at the countdown clock. Three minutes to go. There was a slight stir from the other side of the dome. Larry glanced over and saw Dr. Simon Raphael coming in.

Raphael paused at the doorway and looked around.

Their eyes locked for a moment.

Larry's heart sank, just the way it had back in grade school when the princ.i.p.al's gimlet eyes bored into him. Justly or unjustly, fairly or not, Larry the child and Larry the adult both knew what that look meant. He was in trouble. Again. Still. Forever.

Raphael was going to find some way of punis.h.i.+ng him.

Larry thought again of Raphael's threat to take "every cent" of the experiment's cost out of his pay.

That look told Larry that the threat was still good.

Raphael would find some way of making it stick.

And making it hurt. If not for punishment, then for revenge.

Raphael broke eye contact and moved into the room, sidling along the far wall, to watch the action from as far away as possible.

Larry breathed a sigh of relief. Raphael was not going to cause a scene just now. This moment, here and now would belong to Larry. That was something.

? ? ?The beam s.h.i.+fted off the second planet, focusing on the third. Inevitably, the Observer was caught in the spill-over. The gravity beam pa.s.sed through the solid ma.s.s of the Moon like light through gla.s.s.

But if the Moon was transparent to gravity waves, the Observer was not. Lurking far beneath the Moon's surface, a huge torus girdling the satellite's core, the Observer shuddered as the beam played over it.

And that was the signal, the alert, the command it had been born and built to receive.

It responded as reflexively as a human jerking away from an electric shock, as instinctively as a lover at the moment of climax. There was no possibility of controlling the response. The beam set off an incredibly rapid chain of events far outside the control of what served as higher consciousness for the Observer.

Power long stored was drawn in, channeled, focused. But not enough power for the job at hand, merely enough to bring the Link up to full power.

The Observer felt a surge of irrepressible pleasure as half-forgotten power poured through the new-born hole in s.p.a.ce. The long-dormant Link bloomed back to life.

Power. Now it had the power. An overwhelming sense, a potency, of potential, of mission and purpose coursed through its being. Now. Now was the time for its destiny.

Now it could turn its attentions toward Earth.

The Observer drew ma.s.sive, surging power through the Link and grabbed.

? ? ?Larry turned his attention back to the countdown clock and realized with a start that there were only a few seconds left. He started listening to the announcer. "We have received further confirmation of a powerful signal from Venus. The beam moved off Venus ninety seconds ago in real time, and we are awaiting it here. We are standing by for scheduled reception of your beam at Earth." There was a rustle of antic.i.p.ation in the room. This was it, not only for Larry, not only for the experiment, but for the whole station.

If JPL was suitably impressed, the U.N.