Cyber Rogues (30 page)

“I’ve never really appreciated the perspective before,” Kim murmured. “I saw it on the screen inside the shuttle when we came up and I’ve seen enough models and pictures, but seeing it for real close-up . . .” She shook her head as her voice trailed away.

“That’s the Spin Decoupler,” Ron said, pointing.

“One of the most critical parts of Janus,” Solinsky added. “Can you imagine what would happen if that were to jam up suddenly?”

“What?” Kim asked him. “I’m a computer researcher, not an engineer.”

“Well, the whole of the Hub and the Rim are going around together,” Ron said. “With the mass of the Rim at a distance of three-quarters of a mile out from the axis, that’s one hell of a lot of angular momentum. That says you don’t stop it just like that. It’d be like a big clutch snatching all of a sudden.”

“So what would it do?” Kim asked. “Start taking Detroit and the rest around with it? That’d be a pretty big jolt.”

Solinsky grinned and shook his head.

“It’d be pretty big all right. There’s a helluva lot of inertia in Detroit and Pittsburgh out there. You don’t start them moving just like that either.” He made a snapping motion in the air with his hands. “No ma’am. If that Decoupler ever locked up, the Rim and Hub would wrench itself clean off. You’d bust Janus clear in half, just like a dried-up ol’ twig.”

Kim looked at him in amazement and was about to reply when one of the figures on the floor below launched himself vertically with an effortless push of his legs and sailed upward to the walkway where he caught the guardrail to turn his flight into a slow vault that brought him standing beside them.

“Are these the people who wanted to go outside?” he asked, looking at Solinsky.

“That’s right,” Solinsky answered. “I said two but it looks like it’s three. I don’t figure you’ll be doing much complaining about the extra one though.” He turned and grinned.

“Remember that trip outside that you asked about at Vokes? I’ve been keeping a little surprise for ya. I’ve fixed it. This is Mitch. He’ll take you along on a routine check of the dishes that’s scheduled for about now. You ready to go, Mitch?”

“All set,” Mitch replied. “We’re using Isabelle.” He gestured toward the nearer of the two bugs. “There’s still a fault registering in Maisie’s starboard retro. Dave and Bud are looking into it.”

“That’s okay.” Solinsky beamed at his three guests. “There you go then, folks. What d’you say? A free trip around the lighthouse?”

Ron and Chris were already nodding enthusiastically.

Kim looked despairingly from one to the other and sighed. “I don’t know. Whenever I get mixed up with you guys, I always let myself in for something crazy, Okay, let’s go. We can’t turn it down now that we’re here . . . not after Mat’s been through all the trouble to fix it up.”

“That’s the idea,” Solinsky said approvingly. Mitch turned back toward the rail.

“Okay,” he called over his shoulder. “This way.” With that he reversed his vaulting trick and sailed back to the floor below. The other three looked at one another.

“Ladies first, I was always brought up to say,” Chris insisted cheerfully. Kim flashed him a murderous look, stepped forward, hoisted herself over the rail with an easy flick of her wrist, let go, and proceeded to hang for a moment before starting to drift downward with agonizing slowness.

“You’ll take all day if you do it like that,” Solinsky laughed, leaning over the rail. “You have to give yourself a push down.” He held the rail with one hand and shoved gently but firmly against the top of Kim’s head with the other. Kim squealed and disappeared below the walkway to land beside Mitch a second later. Chris followed with a neat imitation of Mitch’s performance. Ron pushed off too hard and sailed out of reach of the handrail. He hung in the air shouting obscenities and then drifted slowly down like a punctured balloon to join the amused semicircle below.

Five minutes later they were securely strapped into the seats of the bug’s tiny cabin amid a confusion of instrument panels and controls that seemed to sprout like weeds from every available chink of space. Mitch ran smoothly through the cockpit drill, checked with Control via radio and announced that they were cleared to go. The inner doors of the airlock in front of them slid aside and the bug rolled forward.

“Manual control?” Chris asked in surprise as he watched Mitch in the seat next to him. “I thought everything on Janus was supposed to be tomorrow today.”

“Maintenance vehicles are manual,” Mitch told him. “It wouldn’t do if you had to rely on something that might turn out to be the thing that needs to be fixed. It’s like it’s handy to have an oil lamp around in case you ever have to fix the lights.”

The doors closed behind them and the lock emptied. Then the outer doors opened to reveal again the spectacle of Detroit swinging slowly by at the far end of the enormous expanse of the Spindle. The bug slid forward and the floor of the lock fell away behind.

They were climbing away from the immense sphere upon which the entrance to the lock was just a diminishing spot. It was like a speeded-up replay of a view picked up from a climbing moonship. Detroit and the Hub swung around in perspective and became the two ends of a huge dumbbell that was beginning to take shape against an infinite cosmic backdrop. And then, as they pulled clear of the obscuring edge of the Hub, the full majesty of the Rim opened up beyond, shining brilliantly with reflected sunlight along its full circle and six gigantic spokes. Between the concentric circles of the Rim and the secondary reflectors, they could see the ghostly outline of the mile-wide primary mirror hanging even farther away in the void beyond, visible only by virtue of the stray light from the solar corona that leaked past the focal boundary of the secondary ring. It was a phantom ellipse of ghostly radiance floating against the blackness of space.

Mitch brought the bug over so that the Spindle was below them. Detroit was now a smooth mountain rearing high above their heads in front. The bug moved toward it and followed its contour upward. As they came over the crest, the sweeping curve of Detroit fell away below to uncover the second mountain of Pittsburgh at the far end of the Spindle.

“I feel like a fly on an elephant’s arse,” Chris remarked absently.

As they came over the top of Detroit, Mitch held height and set a direct line to graze the summit of Pittsburgh. The south slope of Detroit fell away beneath and the Spindle became the distant bottom of a trough between two enormous frozen waves of metal. Now they had a true feeling of being alone in their fragile capsule with the vastness of space stretching away in every direction. Earth was visible on the far side of Janus, framed on three sides by the Spindle and the twin arcs of Detroit and Pittsburgh while on the side of them away from Janus, standing alone amid millions of miles of emptiness to hold the darkness and the cold at bay, blazed the brilliant white orb of the Sun.

They cleared Pittsburgh and descended, finally rounding the end of the Spindle to watch a catcher ship just in from Luna docking at Southport. Mitch completed the inspections that had been scheduled and then took them out to return to the Hub along a wide curving path that carried them two miles out. From there they could see the whole structure of Janus looking just as it had in the 3D image they had seen for the first time not very long before in a lecture room somewhere in Virginia. But this time Janus was real, and Virginia was a long, long way away.

As Mitch was making the approach run and the Hub was growing larger ahead of them once again, the passengers remained quiet and their minds slowly absorbed what their eyes had seen. The experience had revealed a whole new dimension to their experience on Janus. The thought-habits of a lifetime all had to be taken to pieces and put back together in strange and unfamiliar ways. One day, no doubt, generations would be born and grow up to form all their concepts of normality in places like Janus—places even vaster and more complex than Janus, where inside and outside became interchanged, up and down were just geometric conventions and gravity changed from place to place.

How would their ideas of normality have to be revised when at last they set foot on the surface of someplace like Earth?

A call on Kim’s viewpad sounded suddenly and broke the spell. It was Fred Hayes, calling from one of the consoles in the Crystal Ball Room.

“I know you’re off duty, Kim, but I thought you might want to come in,” he said. “Things are getting interesting.” The atmosphere in the cabin of the bug at once became tense.

“What’s happened?” Kim asked.

“There’s a big flap going on in the middle of the floor here,” Fred informed her. His voice was brittle with suppressed excitement. “We’ve shut down SP Three via the substation, but
Spartacus
is still running at one-hundred-percent capacity, just as if it wasn’t missing a super-primary node at all! It’s functioning normally even after it’s had a full lobotomy. Nobody here can figure out how.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“I know, I know, I know!” Dyer shouted in response to the remonstrations from the two CIM scientists standing next to Krantz in the center of the Command Floor. “I know it’s impossible but it happens to be fact. Look at the goddam screens for yourselves.”

“But the screens also confirm that SP Three is dead,” one of them insisted. “How can the system be running to full capacity if a tenth of the SP net is dead?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Dyer told him. He called across to where Jassic was scuttling backward and forward between groups of operators working frantically at several monitor consoles. “Eric, have you tracked any of those links through yet?”

“We’re working on it, Ray,” Jassic called back. “It’s manufactured itself a whole new set of channels and we’re having to trace at the circuit level. It’s a slow job.” Dyer ground his teeth in impatience but said nothing. He turned his head back to scan the data summaries once again.

What had happened some thirty minutes earlier was certainly a puzzle. While everybody else was preoccupied with the status indicators of SP Three, waiting to see what
Spartacus
would do to bring it up again, Frank Wescott had drifted away on his own and used one of the master consoles to carry out a systematic investigation into how the System as a whole was faring. After frowning at the displays for a long time and rechecking his results, he had walked over to Dyer and told him quietly: “Ray, I’m not sure if I believe this, but you could find yourselves waiting a long time for SP Three to do something.
Spartacus
doesn’t need it anymore.”

The whole of the Command Room had been bedlam ever since. The immediate series of tests that Dyer ordered had revealed that the loss of the SP wasn’t making any difference; the system was performing to full capacity, just as if it were one-hundred-percent intact.

When they tried shutting down two of the SPs at once and then three, the effects had begun to show. Whatever
Spartacus
was doing, the system was evidently unable to compensate for effects as drastic as that. But the anomaly remained in evidence even then; the measured reductions in system capacity were far less than should have been the case with several SPs out of action. Somehow
Spartacus
was managing partly to offset the loss, and it shouldn’t have been able to.

The time had come to abandon the carefully planned schedule of tests and resort to improvisation. After a protracted discussion with Krantz and the other members of the team who had remained in the Command Room, Dyer decided on the direct approach to finding out what was going on: shut down all the SPs and then track down whatever was left running that shouldn’t have been running. With the SPs all inactive, the vital functions necessary to keep Janus habitable would have to be taken over by the backup stations and some time went by while they were alerted and brought to a state of readiness. Just as these preliminaries were finishing, Kim, Chris and Ron appeared in the main doorway and walked over to Fred Hayes to find out what had been going on.

By the time Fred had brought them up to date, the operator in the last substation on the list was just in the process of advising that the shutdown procedure had been completed without complications. The full complement of super-primary nodes was now dead; the “cerebral cortex” that supervised and coordinated the millions of functions handled by machines all over Janus had been anesthetized and
Spartacus
had been reduced to something akin to a starfish—a comatose community of reflexes.

Or at least, it should have been. The incoming data reports over the next few minutes showed beyond doubt that a measure of higher-level coordination was still being performed somewhere. The power of whatever was doing it was far below that of ten SPs working in concert, to be sure, but the point was it was happening; functions that should have been handled only by the SPs were still active and there weren’t any SPs left to be handling them.

“So it’s played its first card that we didn’t bargain for,” Krantz said to Dyer. “Where do we go from here?”

“It’ll take some time to figure that out,” Dyer replied. “But at least this experiment is proving its worth already. Can you imagine the problems we’d be having right now if this had just happened somewhere inside a system that covered a whole planet?”

After a few minutes Dyer went down to talk to Eric Jassic, who was running tests on the communications traffic associated with the phantom SPs in an attempt to help pinpoint their locations. A little while later Laura came over to join them.

“Everybody’s looking at screens full of numbers again,” she said in a disappointed voice. “Is that all that’s going to happen? I thought we were going to see something exciting at last. How am I going to write interesting things about scientists if you won’t do anything exciting?”

“Sorry.” Dyer shrugged. “That’s the way it is—all donkeywork and double-checking. You’ve been with us long enough now to know that.”

“You mean you really don’t have guys without any clothes on running down the street screaming
Eureka!
?”

“Haven’t seen many lately.”