A look of anguish passed over Drefke’s face.
The sarcastic attack from his old friend pained him, and he knew
the President was not going to like the story he had to tell.
“Mr. President,” his voice quavered, but then
grew stronger, “the case I have to present is highly unorthodox. My
associate, Mr. Isaacs, has only just this moment returned with the
evidence to confirm that we are faced with a peril of unprecedented
proportions. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, the Earth
itself has become mortally endangered.”
“I’ve always considered nuclear holocaust
dangerous,” the President said, his irritation still plainly
evident.
“I don’t mean war, but something far more
insidious,” Drefke pressed. “If our understanding is correct, the
issues we currently regard as crises, including this exaggerated
light sabre rattling of the Soviets, become nearly irrelevant.”
Drefke could sense that his strong statement,
coupled with the ire of the President, had created a profound air
of discontent around the table. He rushed on.
“Our current understanding has been developed
by the Office of Scientific Intelligence under Mr. Isaacs with the
collaboration of the Jason group chaired by Professor Wayne
Phillips who is here to answer questions of a technical, scientific
nature that may arise.”
Phillips nodded at the array of severe faces
that surrounded the table.
“I will give you a brief overview,” Drefke
continued. “Mr. Isaacs will then provide details of the present
situation.” He paused and looked at some notes before him.
“In late April, analysis of seismic data from
the Large Seismic Array showed a peculiar signal. Closer
examination by members of the OSI staff revealed this signal to be
quite regular with a period of eighty and a half minutes. Attempts
to relate this signal to a man-made origin were unsuccessful. On
the contrary, the source of the seismic waves moved along a line
that always pointed to the same direction in space.”
“Hell’s fire!” The expletive came from the
representative of the Office of Naval Intelligence, a man of stern
military bearing. Several people in the room, including the
President, flinched at the outburst. Drefke, who had been
anticipating it, looked at him stonily.
“You’re talking about the same thing the Navy
has been monitoring on sonar,” the Navy man continued. “Fixed
orientation and all that. We lost a ship on that mission. What the
hell’s going on?”
Drefke looked coolly at the President,
confident of his special relationship.
“If I may continue?”
The President nodded and Drefke proceeded to
ignore the hot glare of the naval officer.
“It is true,” he said, “that the phenomenon
generates an acoustic signal in water that is the counterpart of
the seismic signal within the Earth.”
His voice took on a slight condescending
note. “My colleagues in the Navy are aware of the phenomenon I’m
discussing. They chose not to pursue the matter in a manner that
would give any useful insight.” Drefke knew that this simple
statement on his part would eventually cause heads to roll in the
hierarchy of naval intelligence, including, perhaps, that of his
obstreperous colleague at the table. He proceeded with the matter
at hand.
“The Navy lost a ship, the Stinson, with
tragic loss of life, while monitoring this phenomenon. That relates
to another important point. At the same time, also beginning last
April, another chain of events was set in motion, which are well-
known to all of you here.” Drefke hunched forward, leaning on the
table, and looked intently at his colleagues. “I am referring to
the Soviet carrier, the Novorossiisk.”
There was a rustle and exchange of glances
around the table. Drefke continued.
“You all know what transpired from that
seemingly minor incident. The Soviets unveiled their first laser
and demolished one of our surveillance satellites. We captured that
laser satellite, thanks to the brave action of our shuttle crew,
but that led to the launch of a new laser satellite and our nuclear
weapon in a standoff that was broken this morning, leaving us in
our current state of emergency. We now have reason to believe that
the object that damaged the Novorossiisk and, in sad fact, sank the
Stinson, was the very thing the Stinson was sent to monitor, the
source of the odd seismic and acoustic waves.
“Mr. President,” Drefke faced his
commander-in-chief, “we now believe that all these events and
several more peculiar happenstances are intimately related,
although it was difficult, until very recently, to see the common
thread. It is very much to the credit of Mr. Isaacs and his team
that the crucial connection was made. The seismic information was
used by the OSI to predict that the source of these waves would
appear in Nagasaki and Dallas on specific dates last summer, July 7
and July 26, respectively. In each instance, there was some
relatively minor, unexplained damage. In each case there was also a
death, but neither was directly attributable to the source of the
seismic waves. This much information was presented to Jason by Mr.
Isaacs in early August. A possible explanation was
forthcoming.”
Drefke leaned back in his chair, took a deep
breath, looked at Isaacs and Phillips, and then exhaled. He looked
keenly at the President.
“Mr. President, I know you have heard the
term ‘black hole.’”
“Yes,” the President answered with a note of
questioning in his voice, “some sort of gravitational trap, I
believe. Supposed to be formed by a collapsing star, if I have the
picture right.”
“That is the basic idea,” Drefke
assented.
“So what’s the point?” the President
demanded. “Are you going to tell me that in addition to the
Russians threatening to blow us to kingdom come, we are about to
fall into a black hole?”
“Apparently, Mr. President, we are doing so
at this very instant.”
This statement brought outbursts of protest
from around the table. Drefke looked pained again and raised his
voice.
“Mr. President! Mr. President! I beg your
pardon! If I could be allowed to explain.”
The President quieted the group. “Russians I
can deal with somehow, Howard, but what the hell are you feeding us
now?”
“Please consider my position,” Drefke pleaded
in the most dignified tone he could muster. “I sympathize with your
incredulity, but you have not heard all the arguments. Understand
that there is no way to introduce this idea without surprise and
shock.”
“All right, all right,” said the President
with protesting hands in the air. Then he dropped his elbows to the
table and supported his head in his hands muttering, “Jesus
Christ!”
“At the Jason meeting the suggestion was made
that, despite the seeming impossibility, the only explanation
consistent with the facts was a very small black hole. In addition,
a suggestion was made for a definitive test of this hypothesis.
Such a thing should have a precise and measurable gravitational
field. The meeting with Jason was on the second and third of
August, nine days ago. An expedition was mounted a week later, and
results were obtained only yesterday.
“Mr. President, the answer is unambiguous,”
Drefke continued. “An object with a mass of about a hundred million
tons and of very small size is oscillating through the solid matter
of the Earth as if it did not exist. The conclusion seems
inescapable that the object is a black hole and that it is slowly
consuming material from the inside of the Earth. Left unmolested,
that process will proceed to completion.”
A stillness had fallen on the room as Drefke
spoke. It continued for a few moments, then was broken by the
President.
“And now you are going to tell me the
Russians are onto this thing and think we have done it?” he said in
a forlorn voice. “Why wasn’t I apprised of this before I had World
War III dumped in my lap?”
“Sir,” Drefke pleaded, “as I said, the
results confirming the hypothesis only became available yesterday,
and even then there were important unanswered questions. You must
understand that the notion was so incredible that we had to be
absolutely sure before bringing it to your attention.”
Drefke paused to collect his thoughts. He had
always been comfortably frank with this man before and after he
became the President, but he did not care to confess in front of
this group his culpability in delaying Isaacs’ investigation. He
chose his words carefully.
“Besides drawing us into a confrontation in
space, the Soviets have been pursuing their own investigation of
the damage to the Novorossiisk.” He could not suppress a quick
glance at Isaacs. He also did not want to expose Isaacs’ role in
tipping the Russians to the nature of the black hole. “We are not
sure of the details, but with their extensive naval deployment in
the Mediterranean and the Pacific, they have evidently also
discovered the regular sonar pattern associated with this thing. We
have recently found that they have a series of vessels deployed
precisely on the path that the, uh, black hole follows as it
punches through the Earth’s surface.”
“May we deduce then,” an abrupt voice broke
in, “that the Soviets have the same information that was available
to our Navy?” The forceful baritone belonged to the Secretary of
State, a diminutive man whose tone belied his physical stature.
“But they have gone ahead to reach the conclusion that this thing
is a great danger?”
“I believe that is a fair statement,” Drefke
replied. In his peripheral vision he could see the jaw muscles of
the naval intelligence officer clinch and bunch.
“And they have concluded as you have,” the
Secretary of State continued, “that it is a black hole and have
further concluded that we are responsible?”
“That seems to be the best guess,” answered
Drefke. “They have individuals with the necessary insight and
imagination. Often their highly compartmentalized system keeps the
people with the data from the people with the insight. In this
case, however, one of their very best scientists has been in on it
from the beginning, starting with the analysis of the events on the
Novorossiisk. Academician Viktor Korolev.”
There were several nods of recognition around
the table. Korolev’s defense-related work was known to many of
them.
“We think,” Drefke continued, “that it is
very likely that, faced with the same data, Korolev would come to
the same conclusions that we have.”
“Where did this thing come from then?” the
chairman of the National Security Council demanded. “Outer space?”
He glanced at the Secretary of State. “Why do they think we had
anything to do with it?”
“Those questions are closely related,” Drefke
said. “I want you to follow the logic so that you can see that the
Russians, Korolev, have probably done the same thing. I would like
Bob Isaacs to lay that out for you and report what he found
today.”
“Very well,” said the President, “Mr. Isaacs,
why don’t you proceed?”
Isaacs stood, fighting the fatigue of his
hectic day, images flashing: the discovery of Krone’s lab, the race
to New Mexico, the machine, the encounter with Krone and the woman,
Latvin, the flight back. He had to admire Drefke’s presentation, a
politician who’d scarcely heard of the phrase black hole a day
earlier. He moved behind Drefke to the projector, switched it on,
and picked up a laser pointer, as the officials swiveled in their
chairs toward the screen.
“I’m going to leave out some of the
background details for now,” he said, pushing a button to advance
through a number of the slides Gantt and Phillips had prepared,
until he came to the one he wanted.
“This,” he said, “is an illustration of the
path the black hole takes when it comes out of the Earth, rises to
a peak, and falls back in. It will then go through the Earth and
come out the other side. For now, I want you to concentrate on the
fact that it rises to a fixed height each time. We can determine
the amount of time it is above the Earth’s surface, and that tells
us how far up it goes. The answer is fifty-seven hundred feet. The
simplest hypothesis is that it was formed somewhere at that
altitude and always returns to that height as it swings in orbit
through the Earth.”
He pushed the button and advanced the
projector to a map of the Earth centered on the western hemisphere.
He used the laser pointer to mark twin red horizontal lines.
“Here you see the path where the orbit
intersects the Earth’s surface, one line in the north through
Dallas and Nagasaki, another in the south. As you have heard, we
obtained hard evidence that we were dealing with a black hole only
yesterday. We immediately did an orbital survey of every point on
those two red lines that was at an altitude of fifty-seven hundred
feet. You can see there are not many, because of the broad expanses
of ocean and low terrain, but it still took some time. You can
appreciate that with the orbital path and timing data, the Russians
can follow the same procedure. All the locations of interest were
empty save one.”
Isaacs paused and looked at the floor as he
gently cleared his throat. He looked up and found, not to his
surprise, that he was the center of undivided attention. He pointed
to the map.
“That exception is here in New Mexico, east
of the White Sands proving grounds and just south of the Mescalero
Apache reservation in the Sacramento Mountain Range.”
“Wait a minute now,” the President said
excitedly. “New Mexico? You’re claiming this thing was made in New
Mexico?”
Isaacs flipped through several more slides to
reveal a blown-up photograph.
“This is a satellite photograph of the point
of interest taken late yesterday afternoon,” he explained.
All around the table the members of the
council peered intently at the complex of buildings perched on top
of a mountain range.