Kathleen Huddleston was in the outer office.
“Here’s the last of it,” he said to her. “I sure appreciate your
staying late.”
She acknowledged his gratitude with a smile
and flipped expertly through the pages. “This will just take a few
minutes. It’ll be on Drefke’s desk when he comes in in the
morning.”
“Great,” Isaacs replied.
He locked his office for the night, waved
goodbye to Kathleen who was busy in front of the screen of her word
processor and headed for the stairs. As he walked, his mind whirled
with images of the fateful moment, the target of the gargantuan
effort outlined in the report.
At zero hour the lasers would be triggered
and the tiny hurtling particle would be immersed in a carefully
designed cocoon of photons. In lightning response, the hole would
emit a corresponding burst of particles and energy in rapid cascade
and shrink a fraction in size. From the distance of the monitoring
flotilla, this unprecedented set of events would look similar to
another man-made holocaust.
Information of the blast would be fed nearly
instantaneously to nerve centers around the world. Within hours it
would be known whether the experiment was a success, whether the
energy released and the shrinkage of the hole were as expected, or
not. Only then would they have some concrete basis for the hope
that the mass of the hole could be peeled away, little by little,
that the orbit could be shifted until the menace was free of the
Earth.
As Isaacs descended the stairs, he thought of
the arguments he had heard from Runyan, Humphreys, Phillips, and
Korolev. He trusted these men and believed them when they argued
that this was the only rational approach, but their descriptions of
the possible pitfalls were deeply troubling. The response of the
hole was predicated on deductions from Krone’s data concerning
previously unknown effects. Great effort would be put into
developing theories to interpret the Krone experiments, but these
theories could not be tested except by the ultimate event
itself.
If the current expectations were
overoptimistic, the experiment could be a dud, the black hole
continuing on its rapacious path. They could err in the opposite
sense. If too much mass were liberated from the hole, too much
energy released, the explosion could be catastrophically powerful,
threatening the Pacific basin with deadly tsunamis and perhaps the
whole Earth with climactic changes.
Even if the expectations were correct, the
required engineering feats were enormously complex. If the aim of
the laser were not perfect, the black hole might be kicked
inaccessibly beneath the Earth’s surface rather than boosted
further above it.
Uncontrollably, Isaacs brooded on the
implications if the experiment should fail. The warp and woof of
human affairs were woven on a tapestry of time, comfortably
stretched by geologists and astronomers to billions and billions of
years. How would humanity change if the future were known to be
abbreviated, longer than a single human life, but grimly truncated?
Isaacs began to think of the future in its possible shortened
version. Earthquakes beginning in several hundred years, growing
ever stronger, more devastating. Then in several tens of thousands
of years—nothing. A Sun, eight planets, and a small, dark
marble.
Isaacs found himself in the foyer, headed
outside. It was early on a spring evening as he pushed out through
the door. No one was around as he paused at the head of the steps.
The glass door swung shut behind him and the rubber, steel, and oil
smell of man was replaced by the sweetness of growing things. The
warm, heavily scented air engendered a feeling of being tugged
gently but firmly downward, as if by a languid lover, but his eyes
rose to the multitude of stars winking on in the deepening
dusk.
An oasis, he thought. There must be
another.
His eyes searched the bright points for a
sign of welcome.
*****
Alex Runyan responded groggily to the rap on
his cabin door. I’m getting too old for this, he thought to
himself. Then the significance of the day awoke in him like a
spreading spark. He sat up, fumbled for the light, switched it on
and fell back on the bunk, eyes in a tight squint, the light
filtered blood-red through his lids. He lay for a moment feeling
the gentle roll of the ship, to which he had never gotten quite
accustomed. The USS Bradford, a Navy frigate, single shaft,
displacing twelve hundred tons and rigged for research duty, had
been his home for six weeks. He estimated he had logged a total of
eight months of sea duty in bits and pieces since the project had
gotten into full swing. He still preferred a floor that stayed
where you aimed when you took a step. He swung his legs over the
side of the bunk, grabbed his pants off the floor where he had
discarded them only a scant few hours before and stood up. He
leaned over and picked up one foot, preparing to thrust it into the
trouser leg, but the slow tilt of the deck threw him off balance.
He braced himself with one arm on the bulkhead and struggled
awkwardly, failing to get a foot in the floppy denims while he held
them with just one hand. He grabbed the trousers with both hands,
lifted a foot, and was tilted off balance again. This time he was
slow to drop the pants and reach for support. He smacked his head
against the shelf over his bunk.
“Goddamnit!” he swore at the offending
protrusion. Chagrined, he sat down on the bunk to put the pants on
like any landlubber. ‘Everything’s tougher at sea,’ he laughed to
himself as he stood to hoist the pants, zip the fly, and fasten his
belt. Then he sat again to shove his feet into sneakers and lace
them up. That was one of the first things the Navy types told him
when he came aboard. More the miracle that they were ready a bit
ahead of schedule, if not on budget. He looked at his watch, 4:07,
shrugged a light jacket on over his T-shirt, scratched his beard
mightily with both hands, ran fingers quickly through his hair,
then opened the door and stepped into the passage.
He made his way toward the galley, his eyes
feeding him the jumpy images of sleep deprivation. He joined the
small queue at the urn, grabbed a cup, filled it with steaming
black coffee, scalded his tongue, and carried the cup out, swearing
to himself, alternately blowing on the coffee and trying to sip as
he walked. He negotiated the steep stairs with one hand on the
railing, then walked back on the main deck toward the stern. The
chopper was already warming up on the pad, lit by spotlights, harsh
grey and shadow, its rotors driving cold moist air down along the
deck. Runyan shivered and clasped the neck of his jacket with his
free hand. He spied Viktor Korolev in the small knot of scientific
advisors and lifted the cup in salute. Damn Russian, he muttered to
himself, doesn’t he know what it means to run out of steam?
Korolev met him with a smile, jacket open,
oblivious to the prop wash.
“Ho, Alex! So today is our big day, eh?”
“You look disgustingly chipper for someone
who’s about to seal the fate of the world,” Runyan grinned,
“particularly at this ungodly hour.”
“Ungodly?” Korolev’s smile faded a bit. “Not
at all, in fact the whole thing is now in God’s hands, don’t you
think, and those of all these superb engineers we’ve worked with.
Certainly not mine.”
“You don’t want your government to hear you
invoking deities at this stage, do you?”
“Maybe they won’t arrest me for a little
generic prayer, you think?” Korolev chuckled and slapped Runyan on
the shoulder, causing him to slosh coffee on his hand.
“Time to get on,” Korolev said, jerking his
chin toward the helicopter where people were starting to clamber
aboard.
Runyan transferred the cup to his other hand,
licked his fingers, dried them on his jeans, took a last, long
swallow of coffee and then handed the cup to a young ensign.
“Run this stolen property back to the galley
for me, won’t you?” he asked the young man and then jogged to the
hatch of the helicopter as the rotors began to pick up speed.
The last one in, Runyan sat near the small
port. They lifted quickly and the Bradford rapidly disappeared
beneath them, but as it did Runyan could see the faint lights of
other ships come into view, scattered sparsely over the ocean as
far as he could see in any direction. He did not bother to count
them; he knew it was pointless since there were over a thousand,
ranging from small craft like the Bradford to a handful of hulking
carriers. He settled in for the familiar, minimally comfortable
half-hour ride.
They did not approach it on a direct line,
probably because of other air traffic, Runyan mused, and he could
begin to make it out when it was still some ten miles away—a
floating behemoth extravagantly lit, a sparkling diamond, a cross
section of L.A. from Mulholland Drive. They hovered nearby while
another helicopter landed and took on a load of people.
Runyan marveled again at the structure below.
It was patterned after an oil drilling rig, but was specially
constructed in almost every detail. It spanned a hundred meters on
a side and was covered with a complex superstructure dominated by
the central dome, two and a half billion dollars of floating
technology. The helicopter spun and settled toward the pad, a white
circle surrounding a stark black letter K, the only hint of the
prime contractor: Krone Industries.
Runyan jumped out and walked off the pad,
thankful for the firmness beneath his feet. The platform was
anchored by a dozen telescoping floodable legs that extended deep
down to the stable layers beneath the ocean swells that rocked the
Bradford. It felt as solid as St. Paul. Here was a place where a
man could put on his pants in civilized fashion, thought Runyan,
rubbing the bruise on his forehead. Behind him the helicopter
filled with departing personnel and lifted off.
Korolev assembled the small group of men.
“Okay,” he said, “you know your tasks. You
are to oversee the last minute checks and then, most importantly,
make sure every member of your crew gets off the platform. You all
know your scheduled departure times?” He looked around the group,
satisfied at their affirmative nods. “Okay, I will see you back on
the Bradford.”
Runyan knew that he should go immediately to
the computer room, but he was confident that his people would have
everything under control, and he wanted a last look. As he made his
way through the corridors, he noticed how empty they felt. The
platform had bustled with a thousand souls for a year, but now was
down to a skeleton crew. He stepped into the central dome. The wave
of
deja vu
was stronger than ever, amplified by the tension
of this last morning. The device that loomed in the center of the
room was more polished, but resounded with echoes of the machine
Paul Krone had constructed that had brought them to this pass—a
hedgehog array of gigantic lasers all focused into a central
chamber where the hole would make its appearance in a little over
two hours.
Unlike Krone’s original, this one was
designed not to create and support, but to track and destroy. It
was mounted on powerful hydraulic gimbals that allowed it to lift
and settle, rotate and track. Each laser was individually aimed,
controlled through an elaborate computer-driven feedback process.
Although it weighed hundreds of tons and should have been
ponderous, it was quick as a gunfighter. Runyan watched in awe as
the device was put through its final paces, leaping and slurring
with blurring speed. In principle it could follow the hole even
though the platform were buffeted by gale force winds. This day was
carefully chosen, however, the weather monitored for weeks, and all
the device needed to do was follow a simple parabolic trajectory.
Runyan shook his head as one would at the imminent death of a
magnificent animal.
He left the dome and descended to the
computer complex. He paused inside the door of the operations room
and glanced through the window of the cubicle where the central
computer stood. It was not much bigger than two men back-to-back,
but was the state of the art parallel processing machine. In turn,
it communicated with twenty-odd smaller dedicated machines
scattered about the platform. Runyan made a silent tour of the
room, pausing behind each of the half dozen operators at their
terminals who made final cross checks before turning the whole
operation over to the central computer. Signals from special
seismic and sonar monitoring stations throughout the world were fed
by satellite relay, so the computer could register the location of
the hole instant by instant. Any perturbation in the orbit was
translated into a signal to the powerful turbines in the bowels of
the platform. These could drive the platform at a maximum speed of
ten knots and represented the coarse guidance adjustment. Peering
at one terminal, Runyan saw that the turbines were engaged to
combat a small drift due to ocean currents. Another operator was
checking the program that predicted the precise path of the hole as
it rocketed up a reinforced shaft into the dome so the device there
could anticipate how to move. Yet another tested the operation of
the gravity detectors that would enable the lasers to focus their
blast in the precise fashion to stimulate the hole to emit an even
greater rocketing burst of energy. That release would reduce the
mass of the hole and boost it, however minutely, further out of the
Earth, closer to the sanctuary of space.
Everything looked in order, but Runyan felt a
sickening knot in his stomach anyway. He and hundreds of others had
worked very hard to determine the orbit of the hole. This site in
the mid-Pacific had been selected with careful attention to the
sub-mantle rock distribution to minimize any final perturbations to
the hole’s orbit. He was too close to this aspect of the project,
though, and knew that despite all their care, this was the weak
link. A small last second nudge, a drift in the orbit, one that was
a bit too large for the huge turbines and the snake-fast device
overhead to accommodate, and the whole gigantic enterprise could
backfire, sending the hole deeper into the Earth, beyond reach.
Everything had seemed to function perfectly in half a dozen dry
runs in which they had ambushed the hole, but allowed it to pass
through their floating trap unmolested. This time they would pull
the trigger. Their aim had to be true.