“Everyone is aboard the Nenya?” he asked in surprise. How wrapped up in his work had he been, that he had missed the comings and goings of the shuttle craft? Good God, isn ‘t there anything in my life besides work? Isn’t there even anything else I can see?
“It’s time to begin this,” Dr. Raphael said.
“And end it,” Webling agreed, in a tense whisper.
Larry lifted his finger, held it over the button, and pressed it down.
A signal, a simple radio signal of only a few watts in power, leapt across the depths of space toward the Ring.
Simplicity, and smallness ended there.
The immensely powerful Ring that girdled Charon sprang to life, shifting and channelling gravitic energy in ways that its designers had never imagined. Perhaps in some nomenclatures it would be more accurate to say the Ring bent space, re-aligned the areas of potential, but this assault on a world was too violent to be described by a mere bending and folding. The Ring crushed the space around Charon, beating it into a new form like red-hot iron on an anvil. It grabbed at Charon’s gravity field and focused it, creating a gravitic lensing effect, concentrating the entire worldlet’s gravitic potential at one point.
But not a point in the interior. A point on the surface, directly in the center of the hemisphere facing Pluto. It was Larry’s old experiment in focusing and amplifying gravity. But this time the point of million-gee force was stable, and solid. Now Larry knew how to maintain such a point source for as long as he wanted, draining the gravitic potential out of the entire world and focusing it in one tiny point.
For a time, a brief time, the satellite held firm, retained its near-spherical shape. But then the new and violent tidal stresses on it began to take hold.
The core, for billions of years at the focus of Charon’s gravity field, was suddenly at the gravity field’s periphery. Like a ship that has lost its anchor, Charon was suddenly a world cut adrift from the ancient gravity well that had molded it, formed it over all the lonely aeons of its existence. With the loss of gravity’s anchoring effects, the worldlet began to crumble. First the surface matter, and then more and more core material began to fall upward, toward the new gravitic locus.
Ancient crater fields trembled, shuddered, smashed themselves to pieces as impossible landslides slumped sideways over the surface, pounding and tumbling toward the locus. Deep in the interior, layers of frozen gas and rock that had not moved in a billion years began to shift, bulge upward toward the locus on the surface. Heat, caused by compression and friction, warmed ice and rock that had slumbered near absolute zero since long before the first living thing had emerged from Earth’s primordial sea. The heated ice and rock expanded, hissed, boiled, exploded. Vast sheets of the tortured surface suddenly blasted forth, streamers of glowing gas and pulverised rock arcing out into space, then falling down onto the hungry locus of gravity.
The Charonian Landers that had landed on their namesake world began to die, beaten and pummelled by the ever-growing violence that ripped at the frozen landscape.
With each infall of matter, the locus grew stronger, grasping greedily for more and more mass. The Ring monitored the locus, refocusing and amplifying it down to an ever-tighter, smaller, more powerful point source.
Now the Ring began the second phase of the operation, slowly dragging the new locus back down into the center of the dying satellite, twisting the knife in the wound, tearing a deeper hole in the surface, forcing a second wave of compression and heating to start moving back down into the interior, so that the old and new compression waves slammed directly into each other.
The satellite’s surface shuddered and cracked wide open, the heated ices of the interior blasting forth as gases and liquids.
The Ring took hundreds, thousands of minor impacts from the shower of artificial volcanic activity. But it had been built to withstand massive stresses, and Larry’s control program managed to focus most of the convulsions well away from the Ring plane.
The locus of gravity bore down into the center of the little world. By now, a solid pinpoint of matter, already close to the density of a neutron star, had gathered around the locus, and was eagerly sucking more and more matter down into itself. Under Charon’s tortured surface, the volume of infalling matter began to make itself felt. The locus mass swallowed up material and compressed it down into a tiny fraction of its previous volume. With more and more matter compressing into a smaller and smaller space, Charon began to fall in on itself.
The heat of collapse began to increase, even as the mass and volume of matter available for heating started to shrink.
Temperatures began to rise. Chemical bonds that had been stable for billions of years split apart. Hotspots began to glow on the surface, horrid splotches of red and white spreading like some ghastly plague on the land. More and more surface volatiles sublimated away. Gas geysers blasted free, plumes of steam roiled up through vents and from the bubbling cauldrons of the hotspots. Clouds of pink and green, chemical compounds new-formed in the turmoil below, twisted and knotted through the tempestuous air. For the first time in all its long history, Charon’s skies bore an atmosphere.
But not for long.
◊ ◊ ◊
The chronometers said it took 47.5 hours, but none of those who witnessed it were ever able to believe that. It was far too long, or too short, a time, for a world to vanish utterly.
Larry never slept in all that time, but long passages of that time had the qualities of a nightmare, when the surging, seething storms, the weird sight of a world glowing white-hot with the heat of compression and collapse, the matter of the world relentlessly crushing itself, the world-serpent swallowing its own tail, consuming itself, driven on by the relentless urging of the Ring of Charon, named for a satellite that no longer was.
On and on it went, transfixing him, the moments taking forever, and then no time at all. Charon seemingly locked for all time into one state of its collapse, and then abruptly, seemingly without any transition, Larry would blink to find the satellite shrunk by half, glowing with a fiery light that had not been there before.
Larry watched, utterly unable to act or react, as the drama unfolded. It was something beyond him, outside him. It was utterly inconceivable that this titanic event could have anything to do with him, that anything he could do or say or think could have any effect on such a spectacle.
And yet he had caused it. He had imagined it, planned it, set the program, and pressed the button that caused it.
Explosions, massive electric storms, powerful magnetic eddy currents, auroral displays. Charon in its death throes found every way imaginable to shed the massive energy of position held by all the matter that fell in toward the rapacious center. The shrinking world glowed brighter and brighter, grew hotter and hotter as the spectacle continued.
At last there was nothing left but a sun-bright fleck of light in the sky, the glowing, ionised cloud of debris surrounding the dot of neutronium that late had been a world. The ion glow set the inner rim of the Ring gleaming jewel-bright by reflected light. But soon, all too soon, even that cloud of matter, even now forming into a miniature accretion disk, would vanish as well. Particle by particle, atom by atom, it would smash into the surface of collapsed matter and be absorbed by it. And the neutronium sphere, now spinning at incredible speed as it conserved the satellite’s momentum, kept growing, a particle at a time, letting off a flash of light and hard radiation with every impact.
Charon was no more. In its place, a point of star-hot brilliance, surrounded by a wispy nimbus of gas, thickening into a lumpen disk of dust, debris, and gas at the plane of Charon’s old equator. And the Ring, the Ring of Charon surrounding it all, at right angles to the accretion disk, face-on to the tiny ship hovering at the still-unmoving barycenter. The system’s center of gravity had not shifted appreciably. Charon’s gravity was still there, now captured in a tiny dot of neutronium, a pinpoint of degenerate matter that held all of what had made a world.
Matter so compressed that even the atoms themselves had collapsed in on themselves, the electron shells flattened down to nothing, forcing protons and electrons to bond, forming neutrons, gravity overcoming the weak nuclear force, in effect compressing the satellite down into one giant neutron.
“So now we’ve become what they are,” Webling said, looking through the monitors at the impossible sight. “Become Shiva, destroyer of worlds. We’ve taken a whole world, a satellite four billion years old, crushed it down to nothing, to serve our transient needs.”
“Self-defence, Jane,” Raphael said. It was not explanation enough, but it was all he had. He turned and looked at Larry. “There isn’t any chance that Charon by itself will be enough, is there? No hope that we can leave Pluto alone?”
Larry stared straight ahead, numbingly exhausted, refusing to see anything but the screens full of abstract numbers ahead of him. He could not afford to consider the reality of what they were—no, what he—was doing. “None. I’ve amplified and focused Charon’s gravity enough to form a neutronium sphere, but that’s it. I’ve pulled all the artificial focusing pressure off it. It’s stable, certainly for the present time, and maybe permanently. It shouldn’t be able to re-expand on its own. But I can’t achieve any further compression with so little matter, no matter what tricks I play.
“Even with Pluto added in, it’s marginal. Even with the planet added in, I might not have the mass to cause a tripover into a black—I mean, um, a singularity.” He had dreamed of creating a black hole for a long, long time. But now that it was within his grasp, he could not even bear to say the words, was forced into euphemisms.
Webling gasped. “Not enough? Well, what happens then? What if Pluto goes and we still don’t have tripover?”
“We go shopping for planets and moons,” Raphael said coldly. “I believe Uranus will provide us with more possibilities than Neptune. With the focused mass of Charon and Pluto to draw on, I expect we could develop a gravity beam that could draw one of its moons toward us. That’s correct, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Larry said woodenly, as if he were giving a test answer. “A tighter, more directed, more powerful beam than we ever would have dreamed possible a few weeks ago. The gravity beam would produce mutual attraction, of course. We’d be moving ourselves toward them at the same time, in effect falling toward them once the beam stripped the satellites from their orbits. It would require a transit time of several weeks at least. We’d meet at the halfway point between Pluto and Uranus, more or less. I expect we’d need Oberon and Titania, and possibly Umbriel. They’re all far smaller than Pluto, but their combined mass would be more than enough if Pluto by itself doesn’t do the job.”
Would it even work? No matter how many worlds they destroyed, no matter how much mass they swallowed up, it meant nothing if they could not break into the Charonian power and control loop. Larry sighed, and his voice cracked just a little. “Then we proceed?”
Raphael nodded. “There’s no turning back now.” He pressed an intercom key. “Mr. Vespasian, this is Raphael. You may move us out of the barycenter now.”
For purpose of observation and measurement, the barycenter had some distinct advantages as a control station site, but because it was on a direct line between the locus mass and Pluto, it had some far more distinct disadvantages when firing a gravity beam from one point to the other. Vespasian wasted no time gunning the Nenya’s engines, moving his ship a prudent five thousand kilometres straight out from the barycenter.
Larry checked his sequencer, confirmed that the Ring was ready for the next phase, and pressed that damnable start button again.
The Ring of Charon focused down on the locus mass, this time bending the shape of space around it to direct most of its gravitic potential down on a tiny point on the surface of Pluto, suddenly subjecting that point to a field a million times as powerful as the planet’s surface gravity. A gravity field pulling that one point up, away from the planet. Just like what the Charonians do, Larry thought.
Almost instantly, a brilliant beam of ruby red light linked the locus mass with Pluto’s surface as a pencil-thin stream of matter ripped itself out of the planet and accelerated toward the locus. Heated by friction and particle collisions, the matter stream lit the frozen world in a terrifying crimson light. But the heating progressed further, and the in-falling end of the matter stream, accelerating toward the neutronium sphere, glowed hotter and hotter, a blue-white sword of light, a firelance of light stabbing into space toward the Ring of Charon’s centre-point, knifing into the bull’s-eye with dreadful precision.
And then, from the viewpoint of the Nenya, the locus end of the firelance began guttering down back toward the red. Not because it was slowing, but because it was speeding up, reaching relativistic speeds, moving fast enough that its light was redshifted, its color dimmed down toward red by the velocity at which it was moving away from the Nenya.
The Ring began to shift its target point on Pluto, moving the contact point across the surface, expanding the focus point slightly, deliberately unfocusing the edges of the beam to reduce the gravitic potential toward the perimeter of the beam. Torn by the hideous violence of the gravity beam’s assault, its underpinnings pulled away as interior core material was pulled skyward, the Plutonian landscape was shredded apart. Pulverised by the massive tidal effects of the variable beam, the solid surface was reduced to shattered rock and superheated volatiles that blasted into space.
Larry watched, the tears running down his face, as Pluto collapsed in on itself. It hadn’t been a large planet, or an important one. The astrophysicists had never even quite decided whether it was a true planet in its own right, or merely an escaped Neptunian moon or a bit of oversized skyjunk. But it had been a world, a place, a unique part of God’s Universe, a border marker for the inner frontier of the Solar System.
And now it was going, going, gone.
And he had killed it.
“The station’s still holding together,” Raphael announced, a strange note of pride in his voice. “We’re getting some impressive readings on all the telemetry channels. The world crumbling beneath her feet, and the station still stands. We built that place well, didn’t we?” Simon Raphael asked, turning toward his colleague. His face was pained, sorrowful, and his expression was mirrored in Jane Webling’s face. He reached out, and took her hand. It had been a lonely place, cold in a way no heating system could warm, a place of drawn-out defeats. But the station had been a home to both of them as well.
Larry got up from the control console, leaving the Ring to run itself. It was all on automatic now, the sequence moving too fast for a human eye to follow.
He went to the side of the two older scientists, and joined them in watching the relays from the Gravities Research Station’s external cameras. He recognised the camera angle. It was the same view, the old, unchanging view from the observation dome. Before his eyes saw it as it now was, his mind remembered how it had been for so long, immutable—the craters, the empty plain, and, close to the horizon, the jagged, shattered remains of the first stations, ruins exposed to the stars. And the graveyard, a few frozen corpses from the first missions here, hastily covered over a generation ago, carefully hidden from the dome’s line of sight.
And the now-missing happy blue marble of Earth sometimes gleaming in the night.
Now, nothing was as it had been.
He opened his eyes to the present time. The ground was shuddering, boulders leaping up into the sky, pressure vents blasting open as they watched, sending geysers of superheated liquid streaking upward. The shattered remains of the first and second stations tumbled over, collapsed into the bubbling cauldron of the melted land. And for a brief, terrible moment, the graves gave up their dead. A steam vent blasted open the ground below the graves, and Jane Webling cried in horror as the bodies of old friends were thrown upward, hurtling over the horizon.
Now the ground under the station lurched downward, and the camera slumped over, fell on its side.
A boulder slammed into the dome, smashing it open. The interior of the dome frosted over in the blink of an eye, and the contents of the room were a sudden blizzard of whirling debris. The viewscreen went blank as the camera was yanked free from its cable.
Like so many candles snuffed out with the rippling speed of a gusting wind, all the other indicators and readouts from the station flickered out and went dead.
Larry turned back toward his control console and checked the sequencer display. The locus mass had grown appreciably, and the Ring was able to refocus the gravity beam to even greater power. He switched one of the monitors to an external view camera and looked for a long last time at Pluto.
The planet was collapsing, shrinking, fast enough that he could see it happening. A haze of dust and debris and gas was a funeral shroud for the doomed planet. A huge, roiling cone-cloud of debris was climbing up the gravity beam, matter spiralling down into the maelstrom from all over the planet, pulled in toward the beam.
The Ring adjusted the focus again, centring the beam on the point directly under the locus mass, widening the beam to draw in a wider and wider swath of matter. The faster the locus absorbed matter, the faster the strength of the beam grew, and the faster it tore matter from Pluto.
The planet’s matter howled up the gravity cyclone, the superheated glow of ionised matter blazing across the sky. The locus absorbed more and more matter, giving the Ring more gravity potential to work with. The Ring tightened down the vise, compressing the locus down upon itself ever more tightly.
Larry watched the gee meters, the amplification meters. They were rising even more rapidly than he had planned. Closer and closer to the point where nothing, not even light, could escape from the microscopic pinpoint that now held all the matter that had once been a moon, the pinpoint that was swallowing a world. “Coming up on it,” he announced, and no one had to ask what he meant. He closed his eyes, and exhaustion swept over him, tried to claim him one more time. But no, not yet.
Hunted Earth Omnibus Page 41
