This rhetorical question went unanswered.
There was silence for a moment, broken by Runyan. “As I understand
from Isaacs, you had a marginal detection of an abnormal
acceleration?”
“Yes,” replied Gantt, “there was some
indication in the first event. It could be real, or just an
accidental accumulation of noise.”
“From the distances you got yesterday,”
Runyan continued, “what do you estimate for the location of this
event coming up today?”
“My best guess is that the epicenter, if you
can call it that, will be about a quarter of a mile to the
northeast of here, but there’s an uncertainty of a few hundred
meters.”
“Hmmm, too bad we don’t have that Navy sonar
data,” Runyan muttered. “I’d hate to have this thing fly up my
ass.” He caught himself and turned to Danielson, patting her on the
arm. “Pardon me, hon, excuse my language.” She suppressed a smile.
He turned back to Gantt.
“And you expect it at about 2:03 this
afternoon?”
“Give or take a few seconds.”
“So it surfaced almost half an hour ago in
northwest Louisiana,” mused Runyan. “It’s passed through the core
and is now headed up to a point in the East Crozet Basin in the
southern Indian Ocean. And, after another quick pass through the
core, it will soon be here.” He stared down at the brown dirt and
scrubby grass beneath his feet, as if by concentrating he could
peer into the depths of the Earth in reality as he could by
imagination and thereby witness this rogue particle at work.
“You think you’re right, don’t you?” Gantt
inquired.
“I’m afraid I am,” Runyan answered.
Gantt stared at Runyan and then removed his
glasses and wiped sweat from his eyes. “Let me give you a tour,” he
said and led his guests to the main tent where he explained the
function of the arrayed instrumentation.
At fifteen minutes before two, Gantt had
Runyan and Danielson stand aside while he made final preparations.
Danielson glanced at her watch at two minutes after the hour just
as Gantt turned to announce:
“Come and look—I’m getting a signal on the
seismometers.” Runyan and Danielson approached and peered over his
shoulder. All three seismometers were showing a definite increase
in activity. Gantt turned to the computer, fingered the keyboard,
and examined the screen.
“I’m getting a good reading on the distance,
but I’m having some trouble determining exactly where it’s heading
since, as predicted, it seems to be right beneath us.”
They turned their attention back to the
seismometers, which were by now showing great activity.
“Look at this!” exclaimed Gantt. He pointed
to the readings on the gravimeters. All were showing a definite and
growing anomalous acceleration. Once more, Gantt swiveled in his
seat toward the computer, but before he could key in his
instructions, confusion erupted.
Runyan first saw the needle of the
seismometer in the camp go off scale, slamming against its
restraining pin. Before his mind could quite absorb the implication
of that occurrence, his body recorded a rapid, bizarre set of
feelings.
First, he had the definite sensation that the
floor of the tent had accelerated upward suddenly like an express
elevator. This feeling was terminated by a sideways impulse as if
he had been hit with a sudden, strong gust of wind. Just as
quickly, that sensation was replaced by a familiar fearsome tickle
in stomach and gonads. Runyan was reminded of a roller coaster as
it begins its first terrifying descent, leaving tender organs in
the grasp of inertia. His ears registered a sucking whistle,
rapidly diminishing in amplitude as if someone had turned on a
vacuum cleaner just outside the tent and then whisked it rapidly
away.
As these sensations passed, Runyan became
aware of chaotic shouts beginning to echo around the camp and of
Danielson half sprawled, grasping the back of Gantt’s chair.
Danielson had taken a step toward Gantt and had been caught with
one foot in the air when she was bumped sideways and knocked off
balance. Runyan helped Danielson regain her feet. She collapsed
against him, weak-kneed and pale with shock. Runyan held her
shoulders gently.
The whistling noise returned, this time not
quite so loud and at a higher pitch. Danielson stepped back from
Runyan, her hands on his chest, her eyes searching his for
explanation, confirmation. After a moment, Runyan looked toward the
instrumentation. Danielson’s gaze followed his and they
simultaneously swiveled to look at the seismometers. All the
needles had fallen to rest, tracking a straight line down the
center of the strip charts. In the same instant as the faint
whistling stopped, the needles twitched and once more the one on
the camp instrument slammed against its restraining pin. As they
watched, the needles began to swing, first entirely across the
chart and then with gradually diminishing amplitude.
The hoarse voices outside the tent died with
the swing of the needles, and Runyan spoke first.
“Goddamn!” he said with measured stress. And
then again, “Goddamn!”
As the reaction began to sink in, he felt his
legs begin to shake. He moved uncertainly to the nearest chair and
collapsed in it. He looked at Gantt, whose face was ashen, and at
Danielson who, by contrast, was beginning to regain some color. Her
eyes now showed the intensity of contained excitement. She suddenly
had an idea, turned and rushed out of the tent. The two men sat in
silence until one of Gantt’s assistants burst in.
“Dr. Gantt,” he shouted, “what’n hell was
that?”
Gantt turned and looked at him for a long
moment before replying, “I don’t know, an earthquake, I
suppose.”
“Hell, that wasn’t like any earthquake I’ve
ever been in,” replied the other, his voice barely quieter. “Two
fellows just outside the tent got knocked on their butts. I was a
hundred yards away and didn’t feel a thing. And that noise, I’ve
never heard a quake make a noise like that!”
“It was somewhat irregular,” Gantt conceded.
“Why don’t you check out the camp and the other sites to see if
everything is all right. I’ll see what I can figure out from the
data we collected.”
The man knew he was being put off, but could
see nothing to do about it. He paused a moment until it was clear
that Gantt had nothing further to say, then departed with an
aggressive stride, nearly colliding with Danielson, who rushed in
as he left.
She hurried across the tent floor and pulled
up a chair to sit at right angles to Runyan. His arm was draped on
the chair. Danielson grasped his hand in both of hers and gave it a
strong, almost painful, squeeze.
Barely aware of Danielson beside him,
squeezing his arm, Runyan was caught up in a maelstrom of
fragmentary thoughts. He couldn’t grasp the details; they moved too
fast, too lightly, wafted away like floating cottonwood seeds if he
tried to grab at them. Somehow, though, he caught enough glimpses
through the swirl. Us? Them? He couldn’t see who, but he knew the
answer.
“You were right, Alex,” Danielson said in a
tense hissing whisper. “I don’t see any sign of a tunnel outside
the tent, but I know you were right. That force! It could only have
been the gravity! It is a black hole!” As she said the last words
she raised his hand in hers and banged it back down on the arm of
the chair. Runyan winced slightly.
Danielson had been looking at his face
without seeing. As the grimace passed briefly over Runyan’s
features, she suddenly became cognizant of the black desolation
reflected there. She stared at his impassive face as her own
tenseness and excitement abated. She turned her head to look
briefly at Gantt and read the same feeling of devastation on his
face. Her mind spun with conflicting emotions as she released her
grip on Runyan’s slack hand and slumped back in her chair.
My god, she thought, it’s like being torn
apart, elation and terror at the same time. She recognized that she
had been completely committed to this project, that she craved for
her passion to be justified. The frightening encounter had been so
real, so visceral, she felt—vindicated! But something in her mind
cowered like a timid creature, beset by a raging beast. Her mind
froze, resisting the full implications of what had transpired here.
Where had it come from? What were they going to do? They had done
what they had come to do. But were they better off, or worse?
She grabbed at a straw. Take a step, a small
step. We’ve got to move on.
“Professor Gantt?” she inquired. “I’ve got to
call Bob Isaacs.”
*****
The satellite, square-rigged with solar
panels, sailed a smooth, circular, polar orbit every hour and a
half. The rotation of the Earth beneath it brought every square
inch of the surface within viewing range in a twelve-hour period.
Its eye was a large, finely-honed mirror, bigger than most Earth-
bound telescopes. This eye, like many cousins, would never witness
the stark glories of the Universe. It was dedicated to peering at
the human scurryings below.
Normally, the twenty minutes spent passing
from the North Pole down over Canada and the continental United
States to the equator were downtime devoted to signal relaying and
reprogramming. This orbit, the gyros hummed and locked the
telescope on several spots in a dead east-west line running through
the high mountains of southern New Mexico. If the computer knew
slang, it would have called this operation a piece of cake. The
signal carrying orders from the ground had not called for highest
resolution, the capability to distinguish letters on a license
plate, only enough detail to discern a car from a house.
Light from the Sun scattered in the Earth’s
atmosphere, bounced off the New Mexico landscape and was reflected
upward. The mirror in the satellite gathered a tiny portion of this
light and focused it as an image on a photocathode. A sweeping
electron beam converted the lights and darks of the image into
electrical impulses and the on-board computer converted the
impulses to immutable numbers. A beam of radiation, modulated and
encoded with those numbers, shot to a receiving station on the
ground at the speed of light. This signal was relayed to the
National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland where it received
routine preliminary computer processing to decode the signal and
remove the worst of the spurious electronic noise. Without pause,
the signal was then relayed by special laser-driven glass fiber
cable, immune to interception, to receiving equipment and a
computer in CIA headquarters. This computer produced an electronic
signal that reproduced a picture of the mountainous terrain on a
special TV screen. A hard-copy photograph was taken of the screen,
suitable for humans to scan and bicker over. Scarcely half an hour
had passed from the time the special order had been sent up to the
satellite to the time the camera shutter clicked.
As the photograph moved through the automatic
developing process, the satellite coasted over the equator above
the eastern Pacific Ocean. It would rest over the Pacific and
Antarctica except for occasional records of ships. Things would
pick up as it tried to collect data on the movement of the Soviet
fleet in the Indian Ocean. There would be several frantic minutes
in the vain attempt to monitor troops and rebels in Afghanistan,
then the well-established routine over mother Russia herself. As
the Arctic ice cap slipped underneath, the cycle would begin
again.
Wednesday evening Isaacs sat in his study,
the smells of supper beginning to romance his nostrils.
“Dad!” Isabel’s young girl volume resounded
down the corridor. “It’s for you!”
He reached for the extension.
Even before she came on the line, from the
long-distance hollow echo, broken by occasional radiophone static,
he knew.
“Bob?” her voice was tense, excited.
“Pat?” His flat reply.
“Bob, he was right! It’s got to be a black
hole! It almost hit us, came up right outside the tent. You could
feel it, Bob! The pull, from its gravity, it knocked me over.
Ellison is starting to analyze the computer records, but I just
don’t see how there can be any doubt.”
Silence.
“Bob?”
“Sorry. That’s good work.” He was suffused
with a bone-weary fatigue. “It’s just so hard to accept. I was
trying to think of what to do next.” How was he going to explain
this to Drefke, to the President? Damn! Why had he brought the
Russians, Korolev, into this? He certainly didn’t want to hassle
with them now.
“Have you started the site survey?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “We got the satellite
time on an emergency basis, shots of every site on the trajectory,
north and south latitude, at the right altitude. The satellite
should be working now, and we should have the first cut tomorrow
morning. Then we can go back to anything that looks promising.”
“I wonder what we’ll find?” she asked the
question slowly, rhetorically.
“Pat, right now I haven’t the faintest damn
idea. Let me know if Gantt’s analysis turns up anything
interesting. I’ll get hold of the Director tonight and see if I can
explain all this to him.”
“Okay, good luck. You’ll let me know what the
site survey turns up?”
“Right.”
“Bye.”
“G’bye.”
He hung up the phone and stared at it,
unseeing. He knew he should eat before calling Drefke, but his
appetite had vanished.
Pat Danielson slipped back into the tent and
took a chair next to Runyan who leaned over Gantt’s shoulder,
watching numbers do formation exercises on the terminal.
“Did you get him?” Runyan swiveled his neck
to look at her.
“Yes. He didn’t sound too happy.”
“Not the kind of thing you get happy about.”
Runyan paused a moment, contemplating. “I guess I feel relief. The
peril is real and immense. I don’t think any of us really
appreciate in our guts the danger we’re in. But I’m relieved that
it’s out in the open now so we can deal with it head on.” He turned
back to the terminal. “Ellison’s finding out what our friend is
really like.”