The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  “Yes, could you? This has got to be wrong.”

  A head-bob. “We will look again, yes.”

  47 seconds…

  The chairman kept talking but Ralph was looking out his window at the eucalyptus weaving in the vagrant coastal winds. Gossian was listing hurdles to meet before Ralph would be “close to tenure”—two federal grants, placing his Ph.D. students in good jobs, more papers. All to get done in a few months. The words ran by, he could hear them, but he had gone into that place he knew and always welcomed, where his own faith dwelled. The excitement came up in him, first stirrings, the instinct burning, his own interior state of grace. The idea swarmed up thick in his nostrils, he blinked—

  “Ralph? You listening?”

  “Oh, uh, yeah.” But not to you, no.

  He came into the physics building, folding his umbrella from a passing rain storm, distracted. There were black umbrellas stacked around like a covey of drunken crows. His cell phone cawed.

  Harkin said, “Thought I’d let you know there’s not much time I can use coming up. There’s an older image, but I haven’t cleaned it up yet.”

  “I’d appreciate anything at all.”

  “I can maybe try for a new image tomorrow, but I’m pretty damn busy. There’s a little slot of time while the Array reconfigures.”

  “I sent you the Fantis’ map—”

  “Yeah, gotta be wrong. No source can change that much so fast.”

  Ralph agreed but added, “Uh, but we should still check. The Fantis are very good.”

  “If I have time,” Harkin said edgily.

  Between classes and committees and the long hours running the filter codes, he completely forgot about their dinner date. So at 9 p.m. his office video phone rang and it was Irene. He made his apologies, distracted, fretting. She looked tired, her forehead gray and lined, and he asked, “No…change?”

  “No.”

  They sat in silence and finally he told her about the Fanti map.

  She brightened visibly, glad to have some distraction. “These things can change, can’t they?”

  “Sure, but so fast! They’re big, the whole tail alone is maybe light years long.”

  “But you said the map is all different, blurred.”

  “The whole object, yes.”

  “So maybe it’s just a mistake?”

  “Could be, but the Fantis are really good…”

  “Could we get together later?”

  He sighed. “I want to look at this some more.” To her silence he added more apologies, ending with, “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “Then remember where you put me.”

  The night wore on.

  Wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.

  The error, he saw, might well lie in their assumptions. In his.

  It had to be a runaway neutron star. It had to be a long way off, halfway across the galaxy. They knew that because the fraying of the signal said there was a lot of plasma in the way.

  His assumptions, yes. It had to be.

  Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly wrong?

  He had used up a lot of his choppy VLA time studying the oblong shroud of a once-proud star, seen through the edge of the Bullet. It was fuzzy with the debris of gas it threw off, a dying sun. In turn, he could look at the obscuration—how much the emission lines were absorbed and scattered by intervening dust, gas and plasma. Such telltales were the only reliable way to tell if a radio image came from far away or nearby. It was tricky, using such wobbly images, glimpsed through an interstellar fog.

  What if there was a lot more than they thought, of the dense plasma in between their big-eyed dishes and the object?

  Then they would get the distance wrong. Just a like a thick cloud between you and the sun. Dispersing the image, blurring it beyond recognition—but the sun was, on the interstellar scale, still quite close.

  Maybe this thing was nearer, much nearer.

  Then it would have to be surrounded by an unusually dense plasma—the cloud of ionized particles that it made, pushing on hard through the interstellar night. Could it have ionized much more of the gas it moved through, than the usual calculations said? How? Why?

  But what was the goddamn thing?

  He blinked at the digital arrays he had summoned up, through a thicket of image and spectral processors. The blurred outlines of the old star were a few pixels, and nearby was an old, tattered curve of a supernova remnant—an ancient spherical tombstone of a dead sun.The lines had suffered a lot of loss on their way through the tail of the Bullet. From this he could estimate the total plasma density near the Bullet itself.

  Working through the calculation, he felt a cold sensation creep into him, banishing all background noise. He turned the idea over, feeling its shape, probing it. Excitement came, tingling but laced with caution.

  Andy had said, I wonder if it shows up in any earlier survey.

  So Ralph looked. On an Italian radio map of the region done eleven years before there was a slight scratch very near the Bullet location. But it was faint, an order of magnitude below the luminosity he was seeing now. Maybe some error in calibration? But a detection, yes.

  He had found it because it was bright now. Hitting a lot of interstellar plasma, maybe, lighting up?

  Ralph called Harkin to fill him in on this and the Fanti map, but got an answering machine. He summed up briefly and went off to teach a mechanics class.

  Harkin said on his voicemail, “Ralph, I just sent you that map I made two days ago, while I had some side time on a 4.8 GHz observation.”

  “Great, thanks!” he called out before he realized Harkin couldn’t hear him. So he called and when Harkin picked up, without even a hello, he said, “Is it like the Fanti map?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Their work was pretty recent.”

  “Yeah, and what I’m sending you is earlier than theirs. I figure they screwed up their processing.”

  “They’re pretty careful…”

  “This one I’m sending, it sure looks some different from what we got before. Kinda pregnant with possibility.”

  The word, pregnant, stopped him for a heartbeat. When his attention returned, Harkin’s voice was saying, “—I tried that 47 second period filter and it didn’t work. No signal this time. Ran it twice. Don’t know what’s going on here.”

  The email attachment map was still more odd.

  Low in detail, because Harkin had not much observing time, but clear enough. The Bullet was frayed, longer, with new features. Plunging on, the Bullet was meeting a fresh environment, perhaps.

  But this was from two days ago.

  The Bologna map was only 14 hours old.

  He looked back at the messy Bologna view and wondered how this older picture could possibly fit with the 4.8 GHz map. Had the Fantis made some mistake?

  “Can you get me a snapshot right now?” Ralph asked. “It’s important.”

  He listened to the silence for a long moment before Harkin said, “I’ve got a long run on right now. Can’t it wait?”

  “The Fantis at Bologna, they’re standing by that different looking map. Pretty strange.”

  “Ummm, well…”

  “Can you get me just a few minutes? Maybe in the download interval—”

  “Hey, buddy, I’ll try, but—”

  “I’ll understand,” but Ralph knew he wouldn’t.

  His home voicemail from Irene said, fast and with rising voice tone, “Do unto others, right? So, if you’re not that into me, I can stop returning your calls, emails—not that there are any—and anyway, blocking is so dodge ball in sixth grade, right? I’ll initiate the phase-out, you’ll get the lead-footed hint, and that way, you can assume the worst of me and still feel good about yourself. You can think, hey, she’s not over her past. Social climber. Shallow business mind. Workaholic, maybe. Oh, no, that’s you, right? And you’ll have a wonderful imitation life.”

  A long pause, time’s nearly up, and she gasped, paused
, then: “Okay, so maybe this isn’t the best idea.”

  He sat, deer in the headlights, and played it over.

  They were close, she was wonderful, yes.

  He loved her, sure, and he had always believed that was all it took.

  But he might not have a job here inside a year.

  And he couldn’t think of anything but the Bullet.

  While she was wondering if she was going to be a mother.

  Though, he realized, she had not really said what she thought about it all.

  He had no idea what to say. At a talk last year about Einstein, the speaker quoted Einstein’s wife’s laconic comment, that sometimes when the great man was working on a problem he would not speak to anyone for days. She had left him, of course. But now Ralph could feel a certain kinship with that legendary genius. Then he told himself he was being fatuous, equating this experience…

  Still, he let it all slide for now.

  His eighth cup of coffee tasted bitter. He bit into a donut for a sugar jolt. When had he eaten last?

  He took a deep breath and let it out to clear his head.

  He was sure of his work now, the process—but still confused.

  The earlier dispersion measure was wrong. That was clear from the broadening of the pulses he had just measured. Andy and everybody else had used the usual interstellar density numbers to get the Bullet’s distance. That had worked out to about five thousand light years away.

  From his pulse measurements he could show that the Bullet was much closer, about 30 light years away. They were seeing it through the ionized and compressed plasma ahead and around the…what? Was it a neutron star at all?

  And a further consequence—if the Bullet was so close, it was also much smaller, and less intrinsically luminous.

  While the plume was huge, the Bullet itself—the unresolved circle at the center of it all, in Andy’s high-resolution map—need only be a few hundred kilometers long. Or much less; that was just an upper limit.

  Suppose that was the answer, that it was much closer. Then its energy output—judging that it was about equal to the radiated power—was much less, too. He jotted down some numbers. The object was emitting power comparable to a nation’s on Earth. Ten gigaWatts or so.

  Far, far below the usual radiated energies for runaway neutron stars.

  He stared into space, mind whirling.

  And the 47 second period…

  He worked out that if the object was rotating and had an acceleration of half an Earth gravity at its edge, it was about 30 meters across.

  Reasonable.

  But why was the shape of its radio image changing so quickly? In days, not the years typical of big astronomical objects. Days.

  Apprehensively he opened the email from Irene.

  You’re off the hook!

  So am I.

  Got my period. False alarm.

  Taught us a lot, though. Me, anyway. I learned the thoroughly useful information (data, to you) that you’re an asshole. Bye.

  He sat back and let the relief flood through him.

  You’re off the hook. Great.

  False alarm. Whoosh!

  An asshole. Um.

  But…

  Was he about to do the same thing she had done? Get excited about nothing much?

  Ralph came into his office, tossed his lecture notes onto the messy desk, and slumped in his chair. The lecture had not gone well. He couldn’t seem to focus. Should he keep his distance from Irene for a while, let her cool off? What did he really want, there?

  Too much happening at once. The phone rang.

  Harkin said, without even a hello, “I squeezed in some extra observing time. The image is on the way by email.”

  “You sound kind of tired.”

  “More like…confused.” He hung up.

  It was there in the email.

  Ralph stared at the image a long time. It was much brighter than before, a huge outpouring of energy.

  His mind seethed. The Fanti result, and now this. Harkin’s 4.8 Ghz map was earlier than either of these, so it didn’t contradict either the Fantis or this. A time sequence of something changing fast—in days, in hours.

  This was no neutron star.

  It was smaller, nearer, and they had watched it go to hell.

  He leaned over his desk, letting the ideas flood over him. Whoosh.

  Irene looked dazed. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I know we’ve got a lot to talk through, but—”

  “You bet.”

  “—I didn’t send you that email just to get you to meet me.” Ralph bit his lip and felt the room whirl around.

  “What you wrote,” she said wonderingly. “It’s a…starship?”

  “Was. It got into trouble of some kind these last few days. That’s why the wake behind it—” he tapped the Fantis’ image—“got longer. Then, hours later, it got turbulent, and—it exploded.”

  She sipped her coffee. “This is…was…light years away?”

  “Yes, and headed somewhere else. It was sending out a regular beamed transmission, one that swept around as the ship rotated, every 47 seconds.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’re sure?”

  “Let’s say it’s a working hypothesis.”

  “Look, you’re tired, maybe put this aside before jumping to conclusions.”

  He gazed at her and saw the lines tightened around the mouth. “You’ve been through a lot yourself. I’m sorry.”

  She managed a brave, thin smile. “It tore me up. I do want a child.”

  He held his breath, then went ahead. “So…so do I.”

  “Really?” They had discussed this before but her eyelids fluttered in surprise.

  “Yes.” He paused, sucked in a long breath, and said, “With you.”

  “Really?” She closed her eyes a long time. “I…always imagined this.”

  He grinned. “Me too. Time to do it.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” Whoosh.

  They talked on for some moments, ordered drinks to celebrate. Smiles, goofy eyes, minds whirling.

  Then, without saying anything, they somehow knew that they had said enough for now. Some things should not be pestered, just let be.

  They sat smiling at each other and in a soft sigh she said, “You’re worried. About…”

  Ralph nodded. How to tell her that this seemed pretty clear to him and to Harkin, but it was big, gaudy trouble in the making. “It violates a basic assumption we always make, that everything in the night sky is natural.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “The astronomy community isn’t like Hollywood, y’know. It’s more like…a priesthood.”

  He sipped his coffee and stared out the window. An airplane’s wing lights winked as it coasted down in the distance toward the airport. Everybody had seen airplanes, so seeing them in the sky meant nothing. Not so for the ramscoop ship implied by his radio maps.

  There would be rampant skepticism. Science’s standards were austere, and who would have it differently? The angles of attack lived in his hands, and he now faced the long labor of calling forth data and calculations. To advance the idea would take strict logic, entertaining all other ideas fairly. Take two steps forward, one back, comparing and weighing and contrasting—the data always leading the skeptical mind. It was the grand dance, the gavotte of reason, ever-mindfull of the eternal possibility that one was wrong.

  Still… When serendipity strikes…let it. Then seize it.

  “You need some sleep.” Her eyes crinkled with concern. “Come home with me.”

  He felt a gush of warm happiness. She was here with him and together they could face the long battle to come.

  “Y’know, this is going to get nasty. Look what happened to Carl Sagan when he just argued there might be intelligent life elsewhere.”

  “You think it will be that hard to convince people?”

  “Look at it this way. Facing up to the limits of our knowledge, to the enormity of our igno
rance, is an acquired skill—to put it mildly. People want certainty.”

  He thought, If we don’t realize where the shoreline of reasonably well established scientific theory ends, and where the titanic sea of undiscovered truth begins, how can we possibly hope to measure our progress?

  Irene frowned. Somehow, after long knowledge of her, he saw that she was glad of this chance to talk about something larger than themselves. She said slowly, “But…why is it that your greatest geniuses—the ones you talk about, Hawking, Feynman, Newton—humbly concede how pitifully limited our reach is?”

  “That’s why they’re great,” he said wryly. And the smaller spirits noisily proclaim the certainty of their conclusions. Well, here comes a lot of dissent, doubt, and skepticism.

  “And now that ship is gone.” He went on, “We learned about them by watching them die.”

  She stared at him. “I wonder…how many?”

  “It was a big, powerful ship. It probably made the plasma ahead of it somehow. Then with magnetic fields it scooped up that plasma and cooked it for energy. Then shot it out the back for propulsion. Think of it as like a jet plane, a ramscoop. Maybe it was braking, using magnetic fields—I dunno.”

  “Carrying passengers?”

  “I…hadn’t thought of that.”

  “How big is it?…was it?”

  “Maybe like…the Titanic.”

  She blinked. “That many people.”

  “Something like people. Going to a new home.”

  “Maybe to…here?”

  He blinked, his mind cottony. “No, it was in the plane of the sky. Otherwise we’d have seen it as a blob, head on, no tail. Headed somewhere fairly near, though.”

  She sat back, gazing at him with an expression he had not seen before. “This will be in the papers, won’t it.” Not a question.