Schwarzschild Radius

by Connie Willis

  “Müller!” I shout. “Where are you?”

  “I’m hit,” he says.

  I try to find him in the darkness, but I am crushed against Schwarzschild. I cannot move. “Where are you hit?”

  “In the arm,” he says, and I hear him try to move it. The movement dislodges more dirt, and it falls around us, shutting out all sound of the front. I can hear the creak of wood as the table legs give way.

  “Schwarzschild?” I say. He doesn’t answer, but I know he is not dead. His body is as hot as the Primus stove flame. My hand is underneath his body, and I try to shift it, but I cannot. The dirt falls like snow, piling up around us. The darkness is red for a while, and then I cannot see even that.

  “I have a theory,” Müller says in a voice so close and so devoid of curiosity it might be mine. “It is the end of the world.”

  “Was that when Schwarzschild was sent home on sick leave?” Travers said. “Or validated, or whatever you Germans call it? Well, yeah, it had to be, because he died in March. What happened to Müller?”

  I had hoped he would go away as soon as I had told him what had happened to Schwarzschild, but he made no move to get up. “Müller was invalided out with a broken arm. He became a scientist.”

  “The way you did.” He opened his notebook again. “Did you see Schwarzschild after that?”

  The question makes no sense.

  “After you got out? Before he died?”

  It seems to take a long time for his words to get to me. The message bends and curves, shifting into the red, and I can hardly make it out. “No,” I say, though that is a lie.

  Travers scribbles. “I really do appreciate this, Dr. Rottschieben. I’ve always been curious about Schwarzschild, and now that you’ve told me all this stuff, I’m even more interested,” Travers says, or seems to say. Messages coming in are warped by the gravitational blizzard into something that no longer resembles speech. “If you’d be willing to help me, I’d like to write my thesis on him.”

  Go. Get out. “It was a lie,” I say. “I never knew Schwarzschild. I saw him once, from a distance—your fixed observer.”

  Travers looks up expectantly from his notes as if he is still waiting for me to answer him.

  “Schwarzschild was never even in Russia,” I lie. “He spent the whole winter in hospital in Gottingen. I lied to you. It was nothing but a thought problem.”

  He waits, pencil ready.

  “You can’t stay here!” I shout. “You have to get away. There is no safe distance from which a fixed observer can watch without being drawn in, and once you are inside the Schwarzschild radius, you can’t get out. Don’t you understand? We are still there!”

  We are still there, trapped in the trenches of the Russian front, while the dying star burns itself out, spiraling down into that center where time ceases to exist, where everything ceases to exist except the naked singularity that is somehow Schwarzschild.

  Müller tries to dig the wireless out with his crushed arm so he can send a message that nobody can hear—

  “Help us! Help us!”—and I struggle to free the hands that in spite of Schwarzschild’s warmth are now so cold I cannot feel them, and in the very center Schwarzschild burns himself out, the black hole at his center imploding him cell by cell, carrying him down into darkness, and us with him.

  “It is a trap!” I shout at Travers from the center, and the message struggles to escape and then falls back.

  “I wonder how he figured it out,” Travers says, and now I can hear him clearly. “I mean, can you imagine trying to figure out something like the theory of black holes in the middle of a war and while you were suffering from a fatal disease? And just think, when he came up with the theory, he didn’t have any idea that black holes even existed.”

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