The Hole

by Brandon Q Morris

  “I have a great paper here, published by some colleagues,” Zetschewitz said, interrupting her thoughts. “They are Spaniards, you might be glad to hear. It was published,” he said, briefly looking at the article in front of him, “in 2019, and in Nature Astronomy, no less.”

  Why is he telling me about this? This is ancient stuff, isn’t it? Maribel grew nervous.

  “The two of them reported on their investigations of several trans-Neptunian objects. They were trying to find indications for a ninth planet in our solar system.”

  Maribel did not know the details, but she was aware that astronomers had been searching for an additional planet beyond Neptune for a long time. She recalled that until 1992, Pluto—a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, now designated 134340 Pluto—had been considered the 9th planet in the solar system. Then came the discoveries of several objects of similar size in the Kuiper belt...

  There had been tiny details in the orbits of small objects out beyond Neptune whose cause, according to each theory, was believed to be a planet the size of Mars or Neptune. In the end, all of this was proved to be errors of measurement, and so Neptune remained the last planet.

  “Well, that didn’t work out too well,” she said.

  “You are correct. In spite of it, this paper caused a big stir back then. A mysterious planet in the depths of space—something like that wasn’t just of interest to astronomers, but also to the news media.”

  “I don’t quite understand what you are getting at, Dieter.”

  “I noticed the two Spaniards employed a very interesting analytical method in their paper. For their observations they could only use one of the old telescopes, so the quality of the data was not particularly high. They tried to compensate for this disadvantage with a clever mathematical method during data analysis.”

  “They couldn’t help it back then. Luckily, we have better data these days.”

  “That’s exactly the problem. We astronomers—and I include myself—always jump at the newest, most precise data. We don’t even try anymore to get more out of our older data by using especially clever analytical methods. And if the instruments don’t improve for a few years, suddenly science is in a crisis.”

  “You mean NASA’s problems launching the new space telescope.”

  “Not just that. I would just like to return to the good old values at the beginning of the century.”

  “By sending me to the research museum?”

  “No, you misunderstand me, Maribel. Apart from the larger issues, I also hope to solve my own problems with your help. In studying the dynamics of galaxies, I seem to have come up against a precision limit for measurement data. Maybe the method used ‘way back when’ will help here. I do have some knowledge of math, but basically I am an astronomer, a watcher. But you have a master’s degree in astrophysics, with excellent grades...”

  “You want me to apply the old method to the dynamics of galaxies?”

  “Well, no... familiarizing yourself with galactic dynamics would take too long.”

  Maribel thought she understood what her boss was trying to say. The big topic, which might answer the question about the nature of dark matter and gain him a Nobel Prize, that was to belong to him, and him alone. He was like the top surgeon who operated on the living heart and saved the patient. She was only supposed to build him the tool he needed for the operation. Now it became clear to her why Zetschewitz wasn’t known as a ‘team player.’

  “What exactly do you need?” she asked.

  “I would like you to apply the method used by the two researchers on the newest orbital data available today for trans-Neptunian objects.”

  “And what is that supposed to do? We already know there is no ninth planet.”

  “You could get a nice little publication out of it, which confirms this insight with much higher precision.”

  Maribel bit her lower lip. Zetschewitz had something here. Even proving the nonexistence of a phenomenon with much higher precision than before was of some scientific value. Nature Astronomy, where the original article appeared, would certainly publish her paper. Perhaps this might get her the reputation she needed to apply for a job elsewhere. Zetschewitz, she now knew, would never let her do research on an important topic, since he considered himself too much of a genius. She noticed her boss gazing intently at her, as if trying to read her thoughts.

  “That’s a good idea,” she finally said. Zetschewitz’s expression brightened. The topic seemed to be of great importance to him. He must urgently need that new tool, she thought.

  “How long do you think you’ll need?” he asked.

  “Hard to say. I haven’t even read the article.”

  He tossed the journal he was holding toward her, and she caught it. It was an original issue of Nature Astronomy, May 2019. The old journal must be worth hundreds of euros. Hardly something to be thrown about so casually.

  “Then read it,” he said. “In May there is a convention in Mexico. I would like to be able to use the method by then.”

  Maribel nodded. It was a challenge. She would handle it.

  “I will personally make sure you get access to the newest data feeds. And I will set up a sub-account for you with the supercomputer of the IAC at La Laguna. That monster will provide results at lightning speed, no matter what you need to calculate.”

  Aha! It was still a task from the scientific Stone Age, but at least she would not have to work with hammer and chisel. Not too bad for a start. She was glad Zetschewitz was in such a hurry. That way he would exert his best efforts to help her finish her own little paper—and her ticket to a new job. She hoped so!

  “Don’t forget the tourist group at eleven, right, Maribel?”

  “Of course not, Dieter,” she replied. Up yours!

  January 2, 2072, 2003 EH1

  Doug sat alone at the living room table. He had a sheet of paper in front of him and was chewing at the end of a pencil he held in his hand. The sheet was still completely blank. This pretty much corresponded with his knowledge of the object approaching the asteroid. Doug stared intently at the white sheet. The eraser at the end of his graphite pencil tasted awful. Why have I never noticed that until now? Before launch he had bought an extra-large box of these pencils. It wasn’t easy to find them on Earth anymore. In space, pencils were irreplaceable, because they were sturdy and had no moving parts. Otherwise, people only tapped on screens, and read or talked or listened to them.

  The computer controlling Kiska—and now their little station—wasn’t much of a conversational partner. While it could be controlled by a microphone, it expected specific commands. Doug wasn’t ready for that yet. Although he had sent Maria outside twice to check on the ship’s engines, this did not mean they would actually use the spaceship. Apart from the hissing and gurgling of the life support system, at the moment it was quiet down here, which rarely happened. Sebastiano was in the greenhouses on the surface, looking after the vegetables. The champagne bottle had survived and floated—still unopened—near the wall at half height. Yesterday’s dinner, a risotto, had been one of Sebastiano’s masterpieces. Unfortunately, one could not say that about the bland porridge he had served them today.

  Well, what do we know? Doug drew a circle on the paper. This was the asteroid, but then he erased it again. He had to start differently. He placed the sheet of paper sideways and drew a small circle in the middle. This was the sun. Then he drew three flat ellipses—squished ovals—of different sizes. Those were the orbits of Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter he added the asteroid belt as a dotted line. All four ellipses, those of the planets and those of the asteroids, were located on one plane.

  Now he added a new ellipse. It also moved around the sun, but was almost vertical to the other ellipses. He erased something again. ‘Vertical,’ meaning 90 degrees, was too much. It had to be about 70 degrees, somewhat steeper than a clock dial pointing at eleven o’clock. This was the course of the asteroid 2003 EH1, on which they were
piggybacking through space.

  And then there was this unidentified object. They had no idea what it was. Kiska’s radar detected it, and the computer tracked its position. It approached with a speed of 10,000 kilometers per hour, but it would not hit the asteroid. They could simply wait and act as if nothing had happened. On the other hand, this object was about the only new thing they would see in the coming months. It surely would be good for the morale of the crew—and in particular, his own—if they paid it a visit.

  But what if it was dangerous? Doug looked at his drawing. He had the computer calculate this thing’s direction of movement. If he assumed that the foreign object moved on an elliptical course, like any body that was part of the solar system, and if he added that oval to his sketch, he would get a course that was almost as steep compared to the plane of the planets as that of 2003 EH1. Only it wasn’t the sun in its center, but Jupiter.

  But that was impossible, as he had learned during pilot training. While Jupiter was a gas giant, its force did not reach all the way out here. If the object moved as they measured it, it could not be orbiting Jupiter. Then it might be from outside the solar system. But its speed was too low for that, and the sun would have captured it long ago, so that it would be moving around the sun just like 2003 EH1. Or had it been sent on its way from a position near Jupiter? One could then say it had been launched like a rocket.

  Doug excluded the possibility that it was aimed at their location. Shostakovich was the only one who even knew they were here. In addition, it was practically impossible to hit something from such a distance. It had to be an enormous coincidence, meeting this object at this very moment in a small corner of space, allowing them to reach it via their spaceship. This was as probable as shooting an arrow from the Moon and hitting a specific apple in a specific orchard on Earth, but somehow that was what was happening. They simply could not pass up this chance for experiencing something new. And who knows? Maybe this thing is somehow valuable.

  Doug cautiously stood up. The computer was located in a corner of the living room on a small table. To be precise, the monitor and the keyboard were there, while the actual computer was located inside the wall. Doug just needed something he could swear at when it did not do what he wanted it to do. Therefore he considered the monitor and the keyboard to be the computer, which he vociferously criticized—at least when Maria, who often defended the computer against him, wasn’t there.

  He pulled himself down to the edge of the table so he could type comfortably. First Doug called up the orbital data for the foreign object, and found the orbit was unchanged. He accordingly had the computer calculate a course. It took the software only a few seconds, and it offered a list of several suggestions, sorted by flight duration. That was the most important aspect of spaceflight. They had enough fuel, but the longer they were away from the protection offered by their shelter, the greater the risk. Doug would have liked to start today, but the computer indicated one fact quite clearly—if they launched tomorrow at noon, they would have the shortest flight.

  Grrr. Doug grumbled because this meant one thing in particular. He would have to use what he referred to as ‘the mill.’ He knew, of course, this was for his own good, but he still disliked being whirled around. Nevertheless, the calendar was unrelenting. Today was his turn for experiencing a dose of gravity.

  He switched off the monitor. If he couldn’t avoid it, he might as well get the requirement over with right away. Doug floated through the living room to the central pole. Instead of going down, he first pulled himself upward. He had to use the restroom before his three hours in the mill. The door to the bathroom was open. The urinal on the wall consisted of an elongated plastic cup, and Doug inserted his penis into the opening. The urine would be siphoned off and then recycled by the system. When he was done he put everything back and washed his hands. He smiled to himself as he did this. Maria had trained him well. Before he met her he rarely considered it necessary to clean his hands after using the toilet. Besides, he almost never got sick.

  Doug sighed. He wasn’t looking forward to the next three hours. He pulled himself down using the pole. Behind the living room were the kitchen and the workshop, all on the same floor, then the level with the life support system, where air and liquids were recycled. At the bottom was the basement. This circular room had a height of only a meter and a half, and a diameter of twelve meters. The basement was dimly lit and smelled of sweat. Cold sweat, Doug thought, probably my own.

  He floated down and looked for the center of the room. There was a motor there that rotated a metal bar with a radial length of about five meters. At the end of the bar was a sort of cage which was well-padded. Doug moved to the wire cage, opened a door at the front, and pulled himself inside. This cage would become his prison for the next three hours. It contained a kind of low stool and a control panel.

  Well, let’s get this over with, he thought. Doug closed the door, seated himself, and pushed the big green button. The motor started humming loudly and the metal bar began to move. He immediately felt the force pushing him outward. His buttocks automatically sank into the cushion of the stool. The movement accelerated, while the automatic system dimmed the light. To avoid nausea, one was not supposed to see too much of his environment. For safety’s sake there were a few barf bags next to the stool.

  Doug felt around on the floor. His book must be here somewhere. He never read otherwise, so he just left it in the cage. He only needed it for the first ten or fifteen minutes, then he usually got sleepy and dozed off. The book was made of real paper, so Doug had to switch on the reading light. He tried to focus on the pages. If he did not notice the motion, his body would believe what the machine was trying to simulate—that he was under the influence of normal gravity. While he weighed about twenty percent less than on Earth, Shostakovich’s aviation doctor promised this would help him avoid the worst effects of living for years in zero gravity. Spending three hours every third day at 80 percent of terrestrial gravity—NASA physicians would have never been satisfied with that, but in his former employer’s company they were a bit more pragmatic. In addition, there was nobody keeping him from using the cage more often, as he was his own boss.

  So there, Doug thought to himself. If someone had told him this 15 years ago, he wouldn’t have believed it. Back then, the NASA psychologists decided he should be fired because they thought he drank too much. Shostakovich had been more interested in his skills as a pilot. When all was said and done, he still did better with a blood alcohol level of 0.15% than many a young hotshot pilot. Then, when the Russian billionaire asked him to help solve a tricky situation, he could not say no. Doug stared intently at the paper and tried to focus on the letters. They no longer formed meaningful words, but jumped around wildly, fighting with each other all over the page.

  His thoughts had strayed into a direction he did not like, but it was too late now. No one could have known two people were left on board the ship he destroyed with a controlled blast of the asteroid. It was only supposed to be a warning to a competing corporation, Shostakovich had assured him. Doug had tried to save the passengers, but it had been too late—he even got a medal for trying. He sold it and anonymously donated the money to the families of the victims. Three years from now, when he’d be a rich man, he would pay the college tuition for the two sons of the female pilot whose death he had caused. He had promised himself that. He scratched his temples, loosening a scab. He had received the wound back then, and it had never completely healed.

  Doug’s thoughts returned to the approaching object, wondering if this was to be cosmic payback for his past.

  January 3, 2072, Kiska

  “Three, two, one...” At the end of the countdown the ship started to vibrate, and Doug felt every hair on his body rise and stand on end.

  “Engines starting up,” Maria said. Kiska’s holding clamps made a loud, metallic clacking sound, as if someone had knocked against the ship’s hull from the outside.

  “Holding clam
ps released and retracted,” Maria announced. Since she was the pilot, she was in charge today. The computer was once again duly logging her flight activity. Once the crew returned to Earth she would have accrued enough flying hours to get her own license—at least in the Eurasian Bloc, where formal pilot training was not as important.

  Doug’s feet, which a moment ago had been floating slightly airborne, now rested on the metal of the flight deck. Sitting at an angle behind him was Sebastiano, who groaned. The acceleration was minimal, but sufficient enough to give an impression of up and down. Doug confirmed this by a glance at the monitor screen. From his perspective, Kiska loomed high above 2003 EH1. Right now, the asteroid still seemed huge, but soon it would be just a speck of dust in space.

  “Increasing to one quarter g,” Maria continued.

  She boosted the output of the engines. Doug observed that Maria was handling her duties as a pilot really well. The jets only stirred up a small cloud of dust. Compared to Earth’s moon, the asteroid they were leaving behind was a very fragile object. It consisted of a more or less loose conglomeration of large and small rocks. A significant part of the ‘cement’ which had held it together for a long time had been dissolved and blown away when the asteroid flew closely past the sun. The fact that the asteroid still kept its shape was mostly due to force of habit. If nothing pushed them—meaning no external forces were exerted—the individual components had no reason to separate from each other. In order to keep it that way, their ship had to lift off and land very carefully.

  “Warning, one half g.” The thrust of the engines now gave their bodies half of the weight they would be experiencing if they were back on Earth.

  Doug turned towards Sebastiano.

  The Italian waved at him, smiling. “Everything is fine, boss.”

  Doug gave him a thumbs-up. He had known Sebastiano for almost three years. One might never know the cook was unable to feel his legs—except for the moments when gravity briefly returned. After his long time on the asteroid, Sebastiano would have enough money for the best and most expensive exoskeleton, but did he really need one? Doug decided to talk to him about it after their return. Why not right now? Why did he feel hesitant concerning this issue, and wasn’t that unfair?