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 forty-seven 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!
And 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…star ship?”
“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 forty-seven 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.
&
nbsp; “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 ignorance, 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. 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.
“Afraid so.” He managed a rueful smile. “Maybe I’ll even get more space in National Enquirerthan Andy did.”
She laughed, a tinkling sound he liked so much.
But then the weight of it all descended on him. So much to do… “I’ll have to look at your idea, that they were headed here. At least we can maybe backtrack, find where they came from.”
“And look at the earlier maps, data?” she ventured, her lip trembling. “From before…“
“They cracked up. All that life, gone.” Then he understood her pale, tenuous look. Things living, then not. She nodded, said nothing.
He reached out and took her hand. A long moment passed and he had no way to end it but went on anyway. “The SETI people could jump on this. Backtrack this ship. They can listen to the home star’s emissions…”
Irene smiled without humor. “And we can send them a message. Condolences.”
“Yeah.” The room had stopped whirling and she reached out to take his hand.
“Come on.”
As he got up wearily, Ralph saw that he was going to have to fight for this version of events. There would always be Andys who would triangulate their way to advantage. And the chairman, Gossian…
Trying for tenure-supposedly a cool, analytic process- in the shouting match of a heated, public dispute, a howling media firestorm-that was almost a contradiction in terms. But this, too, was what science was about. His career might survive all that was to come, and it might not-but did that matter, standing here on the shores of the titanic ocean he had peered across?
Pimpf
Charles Stross
I hate days like this.
It's a rainy Monday morning and I'm late in to the Laundry because of a technical fault on the Tube. When I get to my desk, the first thing I find is a note from Human Resources to say one of their management team wants to talk to me, soonest, about playing computer games at work. And to put the cherry on top of the shit-pie, the office coffee percolator's empty because none of the other inmates in this goddamn loony bin can be arsed re-filling it. It's enough to make me long for a high place and a rifle… but in the end I head for Human Resources to take the bull by the horns, decaffeinated and mean as only a decaffeinated Bob can be.
Over in the dizzy heights of Human Resources, the furniture is fresh and the windows recently cleaned. It's a far cry from the dingy rats' nest of Ops Division, where I normally spend my working time: but ours not to wonder why (at least in public).
"Ms MacDougal will see you now," says the receptionist on the front desk, looking down her nose at me pityingly. "Do try not to shed on the carpet, we had it steam-cleaned this morning." Bastards.
I slouch across the thick cream wool towards the inner sanctum of Emma MacDougal, the Senior Vice Superintendent, Personnel Management (Operations), trying not to gawk like a resentful yokel at the luxuries on parade. It's not the first time I've been here, but I can never shake the sense that I'm entering another world, graced by visitors of ministerial import and elevated budget. The dizzy heights of the real civil service, as opposed to us poor Moorlocks in Ops Division who keep everything running.
"Mr. Howard, do come in." I straighten instinctively when Emma addresses me. She has that effect on most people-she was born to be a headmistress or a tax inspector, but unfortunately she ended up in Human Resources by mistake and she's been letting us know about it ever since. "Have a seat." The room reeks of quiet luxury by Laundry standards: my chair is big, comfortable, and hasn't been bumped, scraped and abraded into a pile of kindling by generations of visitors. The office is bright and airy, and the window is clean and has a row of attractively un-browned pot plants sitting before it. (The computer squatting on her desk is at least twice as expensive as anything I've been able to get my hands on via official channels, and it's not even switched on.) "How good of you to make time to see me." She smiles like a razor. I stifle a sigh: it's going to be one of those sessions.
"I'm a busy man." Let's see if dead-pan will work, hmm?
"I'm sure you are. Nevertheless." She taps a piece of paper sitting on her blotter and I tense. "I've been hearing disturbing reports about you, Bob."
Oh, bollocks. "What kind of reports?" I ask warily.
Her smile's sharp enough to frost glass. "Let me be blunt. I've had a report-I hesitate to say who from-about you playing computer games in the office."
Oh. That. "I see."
"According to this report you've been playing rather a lot of Neverwinter Nights recently." She runs her finger down the print-out with relish. "You've even sequestrated an old departmental server to run a persistent realm-a multi-user online dungeon." Sh
e looks up, staring at me intently. "What have you got to say for yourself?"
I shrug. What's to say? She's got me bang to rights. "Um."
"Um indeed." She taps a finger on the page. "Last Tuesday you played Neverwinter Nights for four hours. This Monday you played it for two hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, staying on for an hour after your official flexitime shift ended. That's six straight hours. What have you got to say for yourself?"
"Only six?" I lean forward.
"Yes. Six hours." She taps the memo again. "Bob. What are we paying you for?"
I shrug. "To put the hack into hack-and slay."
"Yes, Bob, we're paying you to search online role-playing games for threats to national security. But you only averaged four hours a day last week… isn't this rather a poor use of your time?"
****
Save me from ambitious bureaucrats. This is the Laundry, the last over-manned department of the civil service in London, and they're everywhere-trying to climb the greasy pole, playing snakes and ladders with the org chart, running esoteric counter-espionage operations in the staff toilets, and rationing the civil service tea bags. I guess it serves Mahogany Row's purposes to keep them running in circles and distracting one another, but sometimes it gets in the way. Emma MacDougal is by no means the worst of the lot: she's just a starchy Human Resources manager on her way up, stymied by the full promotion ladder above her. But she's trying to butt in and micromanage inside my department (that is, inside Angleton's department), and just to show how efficient she is, she's actually been reading my time sheets and trying to stick her oar in on what I should be doing.
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 9
