The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  “Really?” Andy frowned. “So, uh, you think we should call it the Rifle?”

  “The Bullet,” Ralph said again. “It’s sure going fast, and we don’t really know it’s a neutron star.”

  “Hey, it’s a long way off, hard to diagnose.”

  “Maybe it’s distant, I kinda wonder—”

  “And it fits the other parameters.”

  “Except you couldn’t find a pulse, so maybe it’s not a pulsar.”

  “Gotta be,” Andy said casually, and someone interrupted with a point Ralph couldn’t hear and Andy’s gaze shifted to include the crowd again. That gave Ralph a chance to think while Andy worked the room.

  There were nearly a thousand pulsars now known, rotating neutron stars that flashed their lighthouse beams across the galaxy. Some spun a thousand times in a second, others were old and slow, all sweeping their beams out as they rotated. All such collapsed stars told their long tale of grinding decay; the slower were older. Some were ejected after their birth in bright, flashy supernovas—squashed by catastrophic compression in nuclear fire, all in a few minutes.

  Here in Briancon, Ralph reflected, their company of smart, chattering chimpanzees—all evolved long after good ol’ G369.23–0.82 had emerged from its stellar placenta—raptly studied the corpses of great calamities, the murder of stars by remorseless gravity.

  Not that their primate eyes would ever witness these objects directly. They actually saw, with their football-field sized dishes, the brilliant emissions of fevered electrons, swirling in celestial concert around magnetic fields. Clouds of electrons cruised near the speed of light itself, squeezing out their waves—braying to the whole universe that they were alive and powerful and wanted everyone to know it. Passing gaudy advertisements, they were, really, for the vast powers wreaking silent violences in the slumbering night skies.

  “We’re out of its beam, that’s got to be the answer,” Andy said, turning back to Ralph and taking up their conversation again, his smile getting a little more rigid. “Not pointed at us.”

  Ralph blinked, taken unaware; he had been vaguely musing. “Uh, I’m thinking maybe we should consider every possibility, is all.” Maybe he had taken one glass too many of the Vin Local.

  “What else could it be?” Andy pressed his case, voice tightening. “It’s compact, moving fast, bright at the leading edge, luminosity driven by its bow shock. A neutron star, charging on out of the galaxy.”

  “If it’s as far away as we think. What if it isn’t?”

  “We don’t know anything else that can put out emissions like that.”

  He could see nearby heads nodding. “We have to think…” grasping for something… “uh, outside the box.” Probably the Vin Local talking.

  Smiling, Andy leaned close and whispered through his tight, no-doubt-soon-to-be tenured lips, “Ol’ buddy, you need an idea, to beat an idea.”

  Definitely the Vin Local, yes.

  He awoke next morning with a traffic accident inside his skull. Only now did he remember that he had exchanged polite words with Harkin, the eminence gris of the Very Large Array, but there was no news about getting some observing time there. And he still had to give his paper.

  It was a botch.

  He had a gaudy Powerpoint presentation. And it even ran right on his laptop, a minor miracle. But the multi-colored radio maps and graphics failed to conceal a poverty of ideas. If they could see a pulsed emission from it, they could date the age and then look back along the track of the runaway to see if a supernova remnant was there—a shell of expanding hot gas, a celestial bull’s eye, confirming the whole theory.

  He presented his results on good ol’ G369.23–0.82. He had detailed microwave maps of it, plenty of calculations—but Andy had already given his talk, showing that it wasn’t a pulsar. And G369.23–0.82—Ralph insisted on calling it the Bullet, but puzzled looks told him that nobody much liked the coinage—was the pivot of the talk, alas.

  “There are enough puzzling aspects here,” he said gamely, “to suspend judgment, I think. We have a habit of classifying objects because they superficially resemble others.”

  The rest was radio maps of various blobby radio-emitting clouds he had thought could be other runaways…but weren’t. Using days of observing time at the VLA, and on other dish systems in the Netherlands and Bologna, Italy, he had racked up a lot of time.

  And found…nothing. Sure, plenty of supernova remnants, some shredded fragments of lesser catastrophes, mysterious leftovers fading fast in the radio frequencies—but no runaways with the distinctive tails first found in the famous Mouse. He tried to cover the failure by riffing through quick images of these disappointments, implying without saying that these were open possibilities. The audience seemed to like the swift, color-enhanced maps. It was a method his mother had taught him while playing bridge: finesse when you don’t have all the tricks.

  His talk came just before lunch and the audience looked hungry. He hoped he could get away with just a few questions. Andy rose at the back and asked innocently, “So why do you think the, uh, Bullet is not a neutron star?”

  “Where’s the supernova remnant it came from?” Ralph shot back. “There’s nothing at all within many light years behind it.”

  “It’s faded away, probably,” Andy said.

  A voice from the left, one of the Grand Old Men, said, “Remember, the, ah, Bullet is all the way across the galaxy. An old, faint remnant it might have escaped is hard to see at that distance. And—” a shrewd pursing of lips—“did you look at a sufficiently deep sensitivity?”

  “I used all the observing time I had,” Ralph answered, jumping his Powerpoint slides back to a mottled field view—random flecks, no structure obvious. “The region in the far wake of the Bullet is confusion limited.”

  Astronomers described a noisy background with that term, meaning that they could not tell signal from noise. But as he fielded a few more quick questions he thought that maybe the jargon was more right than they knew. Confusion limited what they could know, taking their mayfly snapshots.

  Then Andy stood again and poked away at details of the data, a bit of tit for tat, and finishing with a jibe: “I don’t understand your remark about not jumping to classify objects just because they superficially resemble other ones.”

  He really had no good reason, but he grinned and decided to joke his way through. “Well, the Bullet doesn’t have the skewed shape of the Duck…”—which was another oddly shaped pulsar wake, lopsided fuzz left behind by a young pulsar Andy had discovered two years ago. “Astronomers forget that the public likes descriptive terms. They’re easier to remember than, say, G369.23–0.82.” Some laughter. “So I think it’s important to keep our options open. And not succumb to the sweet temptation to go sensational, y’know—” He drew a deep breath and slipped into a falsetto trill he had practiced in his room. “Runaway star! High speeds! It will escape our galaxy entirely!”

  —and it got a real laugh.

  Andy’s mouth twisted sourly and, too late, Ralph remembered that Andy had been interviewed by some flak and then featured in the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer, with wide-eyed headlines not much different.

  Oops.

  Irene had been a hit at Briancon, though she was a bit too swift for some of his colleagues. She was kooky, or as some would say, annoying. But at her side he felt he had fully snapped to attention. Sometimes, she made it hard to concentrate; but he did. When he got back to UCI there was teaching to catch up on, students to coach, and many ideas to try out. He settled in.

  Some thought that there were only two kinds of science: stamp collecting and physics. Ernest Rutherford had said that, but then, he also thought the atomic nucleus had no practical uses.

  Most scientific work began with catalogs. Only later did the fine distinctions come to suggest greater, looming laws. Newton brought Galileo’s stirrings into differential laws, ushering forth the modern world.

  Astronomers were fated to mostly do astro-
botany, finding varieties of deep space objects, framing them into categories, hoping to see if they had a common cause. Stamp collecting.

  Once the theory boys decided, back in the 1970s, that pulsars were rotating neutron stars, they largely lost interest and moved onto quasars and jets and then to gamma-ray bursters, to dark energy—an onward marching through the botany, to find the more basic physics. Ralph didn’t mind their blithe inattention. He liked the detective story aspects, always alive to the chance that just because things looked similar didn’t mean they had to be the same.

  So he prowled through all the data he had, comparing with other maps he had gotten at Briancon. There were plenty of long trails in the sky, jets galore—but no new candidates for runaway neutron stars. So he had to go back to the Bullet to make progress. For that he needed more observing time.

  For him and Irene, a good date had large portions of honesty and alcohol. Their first night out after the French trip he came armed with attention span and appetite. He kept an open mind to chick flicks—rented and hauled back to her place, ideally—and even to restaurants that played soft romantic background music, which often did the same job as well as a chick flick.

  He had returned to news, both good and bad. The department wasn’t interested in delaying his tenure decision, as he had fleetingly asked (Irene’s suggestion) before leaving. But: Harkin had rustled up some observing time for him on the VLA. “Wedges, in between the big runs,” he told Irene.

  “Can you get much with just slices of time?”

  “In astronomy, looking hard and long is best. Choppy and short can do the same job, if you’re lucky.”

  It was over a weekend, too, so he would not have to get someone to cover his classes.

  So he was definitely up when they got to the restaurant. He always enjoyed squiring Irene around, seeing other guys’ eyeballs follow them to their table—and telling her about it. She always got a round-eyed, raised eyebrow flash out of that. Plus, they both got to look at each other and eat. And if things went right this night, toward the dessert it might be like that scene in the Tom Jones movie.

  They ordered: her, the caramelized duck breasts, and for him, tender Latin chicken with plantains. “A yummy start,” she said, eyeing the upscale patrons. The Golden Coast abounded with Masters of the Universe, with excellently cut hair and bodies that were slim, casually elegant, carefully muscled (don’t want to look like a laborer), the women running from platinum blonde through strawberry. “Ummm, quite soigné,” Irene judged, trying out her new French vocabulary.

  Ralph sensed some tension in her, so he took his time, glancing around at the noisy crowd. They carried themselves with that look not so much of energetic youth but rather of expert maintenance, like a Rolls with the oil religiously changed every 1500 miles. Walking in their wake made most working stiffs feel just a touch shabby.

  He said, “Livin’ extra-large in OC,” with a rueful smile, and wondered if she saw this, the American Dream Extreme, as he did. They lived among dun-colored hills covered by pseudo-Spanish stucco splendor, McMansions sprawled across tiny lots. “Affluenza,” someone had called it, a disease of always wanting more: the local refrain was ‘It’s all about you,’ where the homes around yacht-ringed harbors and coves shone like filigree around a gemstone. He respected people like her, in business, as the drivers who created the wealth that made his work possible. But just today he had dropped her at the Mercedes dealership to pick up her convertible, in for an oil change. Pausing, he saw that the place offered free drop-in car washes, and while you waited with your cinnamon-topped decaf cappuccino you could get a manicure, or else work on your putting at a green around the back. Being an academic scientist around here felt like being the poor country cousin.

  He watched her examine all the flatware and polish it with her napkin. This was not routine; she was not a control freak who obsessed over the organization of her entire life, or who kept color-coded files, though, yes, she was a business MBA.

  “That was a fun trip,” Irene said in the pensive tones that meant she was being diplomatic. “Ah…do you want to hang out with those people all your life?”

  “They’re pretty sophisticated, I think,” he said defensively, wondering where she was going with this.

  “They—how to put this pleasantly?—work too damn hard.”

  “Scientists do.”

  “Business types, too—but they don’t talk about nothing else.”

  “It was a specialist’s conference. That’s all they have in common.”

  “That, and being outrageously horny.”

  He grinned. “You never thought that was a flaw before.”

  “I keep remembering the M.I.T guy who believed he could wow me with—” she made the quote marks with her fingers—“a ‘meaningful conversation’ that included quoting The Simpsons, gangsta flicks, and some movie trilogy.”

  “That was Tolkien.”

  “Elves with swords. I thought you guys were scientists.”

  “We have…hobbies.”

  “Obsessions, seems like.”

  “Our work included?”

  She spread her hands. “I respect that you’re deeply involved in astronomy, sure.” She rolled her eyes. “But it pays so little! And you’re headed into a tough tenure decision. After all these years!”

  “Careers take time.”

  “Lives do, too. Recall what today is?”

  He kept his face impassive, the only sure way to not get the deer-in-headlights expression he was prone to. “Uh, no…”

  “Six months ago.”

  “Oh, yes. We were going to discuss marriage again.”

  Her eyes glinted. “And you’ve been hiding behind your work…again.”

  “Hey, that’s not fair—”

  “I’m not waiting forever.”

  “I’m in a crunch here. Relationships don’t have a ‘sell-by’ date stamped on them—”

  “Time waits for no man. I don’t either.”

  Bottom line time, then. He asked firmly, “So instead I should…?”

  She handed him a business card.

  “I should have known.”

  “Herb Linzfield. Give him a call.”

  “What inducement do I have?” He grinned to cover his concern.

  She answered obliquely by ordering dessert, with a sideways glance and flickering little smile on her big, rich lips. On to Tom Jones.

  To get to the VLA from UC Irvine means flying out of John Wayne airport—there’s a huge, looming bronze statue of him in cowboy duds that somehow captures the gait—and through Phoenix to Albuquerque. Ralph did this with legs jammed up so he couldn’t open his laptop, courtesy of Southwest Airlines—and then drove a Budget rental west through Socorro.

  The crisp heat faded as he rose up the grade to the dry plateau, where the Array sprawls on railroad lines in its long valley. Along the Y-shaped rail line the big dishes could crawl, ears cupped toward the sky, as they reconfigured to best capture in their “equivalent eye” distant radiating agonies. The trip through four-lane blacktop edged with sagebrush took most of a day. When Ralph arrived Harkin had been observing a radio galaxy for eight hours.

  “Plenty more useful than my last six hours,” he said, and Harkin grinned.

  Harkin wore jeans, a red wool shirt and boots and this was not an affectation. Locals described most of the astronomers as “all hat and no cattle,” a laconic indictment of fake westerners. Harkin’s face seemed to have been crumpled up and then partly smoothed out—the effect of twenty years out here.

  The radio galaxy had an odd, contorted look. A cloud of radio emitting electrons wrapped around Harkin’s target—a brilliant jet. Harkin was something of a bug about jets, maintaining that they had to be shaped by the magnetic fields they carried along. Fields and jets alike all were offhand products of the twirling disk far down in the galactic center. The black holes that caused all this energy release were hard to discover, tiny and cloaked in gas. But the jets carried out to th
e universe striking advertisements, so they were the smoking gun. Tiny graveyards where mass died had managed to scrawl their signatures across the sky.

  Ralph looked at the long, spindly jet in Harkin’s radio images. It was like a black-and-white of an arrow. There was a lot of work here. Hot-bright images from deep down in the churning glory of the galactic core, then the long slow flaring as the jet moved above the galactic disk and met the intergalactic winds.

  Still, it adamantly kept its direction, tightly arrowing out into the enveloping dark. It stretched out for many times the size of its host galaxy, announcing its presence with blaring radio emission. That came from the spiraling of high-energy electrons around magnetic field lines, Ralph knew, yet he always felt a thrill at the raw radio maps, the swirls and helical vortices bigger than swarms of stars, self-portraits etched by electrons alive with their mad energies.

  At the very end, where it met the intergalactic gas, the jet got brighter, saturating the images. “It’s turned toward us, I figure,” Harkin said. “Bouncing off some obstruction, maybe a molecular cloud.”

  “Big cloud,” Ralph said.

  “Yeah. Dunno what it could be.”

  Mysteries. Many of them would never be solved. In the murder of stars, only tattered clues survived.

  Harkin was lean and sharp-nosed, of sturdy New England stock. Ralph thought Harkin looked a lot like the jets he studied. His bald head narrowed to a crest, shining as it caught the overhead fluorescents. Harkin was always moving from the control boards of the ganged dishes to the computer screens where images sharpened. Jets moved with their restless energies, but all astronomers got were snapshots. Black holes spewed out their advertisements for around a hundred million years, so Harkin’s jet was as old as the dinosaurs. To be an astronomer was to realize one’s mayfly nature.

  “Hope I haven’t gotten you to come all this way for nothing.” Harkin brought up on a screen the total file on G369.23–0.82.

  He recognized one image from the first observations a year before, when Feretti from Bologna had picked it up in the background of some jet observations. Over the last three years came others, Andy’s and Ralph’s extensive maps, polarization data files, the works. All digital; nobody kept much on paper anymore.