by Bill DeSmedt
A chime rang out. 10:47 A.M.! Vysshaia tochka! Turnover! The stuttering displays changed from green to red. Miles under the sea, Antipode Station’s computers stepped through the polarity reversal sequence one last time, preparing to impart one more small delta-vee to the visitor from outer space now lurking in the Earth’s interior.
The north-polar electromagnetic hemisphere shut down; its opposite-charged counterpart came on line. In a single instantaneous repulsor burst, it discharged all the energy stored over the past twelve hours, speeding Vurdalak on its way with one last push. And that should do it, as her instruments were even now confirming. One more halfday wait, and then for Galina it would be—what was the American expression?—“showtime.”
She yawned. No sleep last night. The party had continued till all hours. And why not? Why not welcome back the sun on this first morning of a world redeemed, reborn? She smiled remembering the festivities, remembering dear, sweet Dzhon, who could hardly have guessed what it was they were truly celebrating, strumming a borrowed guitar and leading them in ballads from the Great Fatherland War, from Stalingrad itself: “Dark night, only the bullets whistling over the steppe . . .” She hummed the old tune as she hit the powerdown button.
How long it had taken the dedicated crew and research staff of Rusalka to bring this dazzling success within reach. Four years just to find the location of the North Atlantic apogee. Studies of the throw-down pattern of trees at the Tunguska impact site could yield only an approximate angle of entry at best. In the end, it had taken Rusalka s meticulous seismographic survey of the undersea target area to finally detect those faint twice-daily tremors in the oceanbed that betrayed Vurdalak’s subterranean passage.
Then came the construction work itself—just another undersea mining operation, as far as the world at large knew. But what an operation! Forty months to excavate the main Antipode chamber, using Remote Operating and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles to carve ten billion metric tons of rock out of the heart of an undersea mountaintop, and to install the nuclear generators that powered the station’s enormous superconducting electromagnetic arrays. Ten more months for the ROVs and AUVs to drill shafts for the capture Mohole and the kilometers-long braking train. All that at crushing depths thousands of meters down. It never could have been done at all without Grishin Enterprises’ vast resources and expertise in artificial intelligence and telemediated systems. Even so, the automated workforce had required constant on-site supervision in the main bathyscaphe.
Galina shivered. If they succeeded here tonight—and they must, please God, they must!—such a trip to the sunless deeps of the Newfoundland Basin awaited her as well.
And then, the Antipode installation complete, three more years of electromagnetic pushing and pulling on Vurdalak. Three years of exertion to slowly change the orbit of an object massing five and a half billion metric tons! There was, of course, no electromagnet on earth powerful enough to raise the beast—its weight the equivalent of fifteen thousand Empire State Buildings—against the force of gravity.
Not directly, at least. Instead, they had tricked Vurdalak into doing most of the work itself, by means of resonance.
Resonance was a wonderful thing, enabling micro forces to yield macro results. Soldiers march in step across a bridge and, if the cadence of their footfalls happens to match the span’s natural resonance frequency, the whole structure begins to sway back and forth. Small pushes on a child’s swing, delivered one after another at just the right time, and soon the little passenger is sailing high into the air, squealing with glee.
Her eyesight blurred again momentarily. To enjoy such simple things with a child of one’s own! But fate had ruled that hers was to be a sterner joy: to secure a future for all the children of the world.
If only there was still time.
As it was, they had almost been too late—another few years of orbital decay and Vurdalak would have burrowed down to depths beyond the reach of their best technology.
She knew all too well the worst-case scenario that would then have ensued: Sasha’s multimedia mission briefings had been only too graphic. Orbital degradation would increase exponentially as Vurdalak spent more and more of its time in the denser layers of magma further down. As it slowed, it would absorb more material on each circuit through the Earth. That, in turn, would slow it still further and increase its capture cross-section still more, in a fiendish feedback loop. Until at last it came to rest at the core.
Then its ghoulish feast would begin in earnest.
Estimates varied as to when the end would come. Two years? Five? In a decade at most the Earth would have been utterly consumed by the beast at its heart.
And what then? No more autumn forests of pensive birch and stately pine, or little girls to wander through them in search of secret glades. No more rushing springtime brooks with small boys fishing alongside their papas on the banks. Gone, all gone in the final gravitational cataclysm, as the whole Earth together with all its inhabitants, all its children, collapsed down into a sphere three centimeters wide and disappeared forever behind its own Schwarzschild radius, wrapping its event horizon about itself.
From then until the end of time, the lonely moon, sole mourner and funerary candle for a once-living world, would circle a mathematical point with the mass of the Earth, a mere space-time distortion moving in its usurped orbit around the sun, sailing ever onward through the eternal night. Galina shivered again in the perfect climate conditioning of Rusalka’s secret lab.
But—glory to God!—they had been in time! By means of electromagnetic pulses timed to resonate precisely with its orbit, they had gradually increased Vurdalak’s velocity and, with that, its height at apogee. At first, the vampire had been too deep to be attracted or repulsed by the main electromagnetic arrays within Antipode proper. But this, too, had been foreseen: a kilometers-deep Mohole had been bored down through the base of the mountain housing Antipode Station. Smaller, but almost equally powerful electromagnets were then lowered into the shaft, coming at last within grappling distance of Vurdalak. Over the next thirty-three months, these satellite arrays had been gradually raised back up the Mohole, dragging the vampire along behind them, coaxing it ever closer to the containment chamber at the top of the shaft.
The operation would have gone much quicker, of course, if only they had been able to erect a twin to Antipode on the Tunguska impact site itself. She pictured two stations on opposite sides of the Earth, bouncing Vurdalak back and forth between them like some grotesque medicine ball. But, no—impossible! The Siberian apogee had been a good eight kilometers below the surface when they’d started, and trying to sink a Mohole down to reach it would have destabilized the permafrost. Any facility that tried such a trick would sink beneath a quicksand lake of its own creation.
Not to mention that the Tunguska site was hardly an ideal locale, given Arkady Grigoriyevich’s penchant for secrecy. Ever since the fall of Communism, hordes of astrophysical researchers had taken to descending on it every other summer. In fact, the latest joint Tomsk-Bologna expedition had been there until this past week, once again scouring the Great Southern Swamp for the remnants of a meteorite that had never existed. Her heart went out to her fellow scientists, laboring under a misconception now nearly a century old.
Well, and who could blame them? The truth was so fantastic she had scarcely credited it herself at first. She recalled the long-ago evening she had first learned of it, that wintry January evening in 1986 when Sasha had announced he was returning to Bratsk, to take up an old research interest. An interest recently rekindled by an interview he had been summoned to, somewhere in central Moscow. Of the mysterious interview itself he would say nothing, only that it had been “official.” But he could not stop talking about the ideas it had sparked in him.
“Galya,” he had said, barely able to contain his excitement, “it would be the greatest single find in the history of cosmology. Will be, better to say. If only I could find the support! Someone will, someone must
. Of that I am certain, for it has already happened. If only it will be me!”
And with this strange preamble he had gone on to tell her of stranger things yet: of a message from out of time, from the future. Of a tiny knot in the fabric of space, of a thing that was old before the stars were born, smaller than an atom, heavier than a mountain—the thing that had devastated Tunguska so long ago. She barely heard him, struggling as she was with her own feelings of devastation. For it had become clear as he spoke that nowhere in his plans was there a place for her.
“It will be difficult, Galya,” he had said. “Possibly dangerous as well. It is better that you remain here in Moscow, complete your doctorate. Have faith, I will return for you.”
And return he had, though only after she had long since despaired of ever seeing him again, after the trickle of correspondence had dried up altogether, after her increasingly frantic inquiries had been met with ever stonier official silence, after he had disappeared without trace into that still, white Siberian emptiness that had claimed so many others.
He had returned for her, but not as she’d hoped. In the spring of 1992, he had returned to recruit her for the Project. He had found the support for his research, he said. In a way, he had become the support: his key role in the new Grishin Enterprises kombinat permitted him to fund certain pet projects of his own. On a small scale at first, true, but that would soon change, once results were forthcoming.
None of it seemed to make him happy. If anything, beneath the businesslike exterior he seemed haggard, troubled. And distant somehow, as though the better part of him had receded behind some event horizon of his own. Only when he spoke of the Project itself did embers of the old enthusiasm, the old Sasha, glow briefly amid the ashes. More than anything it was a hope that, somewhere within the stranger he had become, there still lived the man she had loved that moved her to join him.
Long after that hope had died, love still kept her at her post. Love, not for a man, but for the children of the world. A world she was working to save.
A world that stood in desperate need of saving.
For it was true, all of it: having obliterated the heartlands of the Stony Tunguska, Sasha’s primordial black hole had not tunneled through the Earth and out the other side. It had taken up an elliptical orbit within the lithosphere. An eighty-minute orbit with its eighteen apogees advancing completely around the globe once every twenty-four hours, revisiting Tunguska and the waters off the Azores and even less accessible places again and again as it slowly consumed the Earth’s very substance.
It had become Vurdalak, gnawing in secret at the flesh of the world.
If only an expedition had been dispatched to the impact site immediately, they could at least have known. Even the rudimentary magnetometers of the time—no, even a child’s compass—would have fluctuated wildly once every twelve hours, betraying the presence of the fiercely charged Vurdalak as it returned nearly to the surface at its Tunguskan apogee. But czarist Russia had been preoccupied with imminent war and revolution; no expedition had been sent. By the time the new Soviet government sent Kulik and his party to the epicenter for a proper geomagnetic survey, twenty years had passed. Years in which Vurdalak had slowly receded deeper into the Earth as its orbit gradually decayed, descending almost beyond the range of the second expedition’s primitive instruments. All Kulik managed to capture in 1928 were a few feeble magnetic anomalies.
Elsewhere in the world, the chances of detection were even slimmer.
Most of the apogees occurred in trackless ocean or inaccessible wasteland. The North Atlantic site—the point where, had it been in the cards, Vurdalak would have left Earth forever on its original trajectory—was actually more propitious than most.
Even here, though, and even at the outset, the local maximum in Vurdalak’s orbit had only brought it within twenty meters of the surface. That was still too deep to have much effect on North Atlantic shipping, other than to play havoc with the bridge compass of the occasional passing vessel. As it submerged ever deeper over the years, Vurdalak may have been responsible for one or more unexplained World War I U-boat disasters, but otherwise it had spiraled slowly down beyond the ken of man, sinking unnoticed into the sunless abyss.
And leaving behind so little evidence of its passing that, when the Americans A. A. Jackson and M. P. Ryan proposed their primordial black hole explanation for Tunguska in 1973, they were made a laughingstock. Even the otherwise splendid American television series Cosmos had the astronomer Carl Sagan joining in the chorus of derision.
It was doubtless this air of the ridiculous, still clinging to the PBH-collision hypothesis three decades after its proposal, that drove Arkady Grigoriyevich to keep the Antipode Project under wraps, at least until the cat was safely in the sack.
Galina reddened then, remembering her vodka-induced gaffe at last night’s banquet. Arkady Grigoriyevich had been very angry with her; she had read it in his eyes. But while she could understand Chairman Grishin’s insistence on cloaking his great humanitarian effort in such secrecy, she could not agree. The fruits of this magnificent achievement must belong to the whole world.
Soon they would. Not only would cosmologists have an opportunity to study at close hand that dream of twentieth-century physics—a “universe in the laboratory”—but, in time, networks of undersea cables would carry a stream of clean, inexhaustible power to all the peoples of the globe.
Her workstation’s powerdown cycle had long since completed. Galina shook herself and rose to leave. As she climbed the rungs to Rusalka’s bridge deck, she was already looking ahead to what the next twelve hours would bring.
Just as no force on earth, not even Antipode Station’s gigantic superconducting electromagnets, could have raised the black hole’s Brobdingnagian bulk, so too none had the power to hold it in place against the pull of Earth’s gravity.
But Galina, sorceress of magnetohydrodynamic enchantments, had one more trick in store for Vurdalak. In just twelve hours, she would sap the vampire’s own diabolical strength to weave her incorporeal web.
22 | Departures
THREE METAL CHAIRS, a sofa that doubled as a cot, a console, a portrait of Andropov—Grishin’s private quarters were austere, not to say ascetic, in their appointments. And dark. The Residence was situated well inboard of the vessel’s hull. For reasons of security, of course, but it meant no portholes, no natural light to soften the glare of the overhead spots or lighten the gloom beyond their cones of illumination. Outside it was still broad daylight, late afternoon, the westering sun just beginning to gild Rusalka’s superstructure. Within this sanctum sanctorum at Rusalka’s heart it might as well be midnight.
Sasha felt rather than heard the heavy steel door slide shut behind him and lock into place. He experienced a brief surge of panic, as though he were trapped in that other room again, the twin to this one, in the Foreign Directorate’s headquarters on the outskirts of Moscow. As though he were facing, not the urbane Arkady Grigoriyevich Grishin, but Colonel Gromov once more. Confronting once again all the brutal power of the KGB, with nothing to pit against it, no means of reclaiming his life from it, but a theory bordering on madness.
A theory of how a black hole might have been, might yet be, used to warp time itself. A theory summed up in a single mantra: “It must be true, it will be true—for it has already happened.”
Sasha shook himself. The moment had passed. He was back on Rusalka, that other existence far away, fading into nightmare memory again.
He turned his attention to the figure hunched over the console. Grishin was staring at his datawall, at what looked like visuals of Rusalka’s chartroom.
“You sent for me, Arkasha?”
“Ah, Sasha, come in and sit down.” At a spoken command the datawall went dark, save for a countdown box in its upper left corner. Grishin swiveled his chair around to face the desk and picked up a gleaming object that had been resting on its matte-black surface.
“Here, have a look at this.” A cry
stalline note rang out as the lopsided metal cylinder skittered across the desk. Sasha caught it just in time to keep it from rolling over the edge.
“Is this the probe that I was—that you retrieved the other night?” Sasha rotated the object, squinting to make out the message cut into its distorted surface. “But, but this is the go-code for capture! Why was I not advised?”
“I informed Galina Mikhailovna. And her team. I judged that sufficient.”
Still angry about that business with Dzhon on the bridge, then. Best steer away from that. “For—when is it? I can barely make it out in this light.”
“Tonight.” Grishin glanced at the countdown on his datawall. “Some six hours from now.”
“But this is wonderful news, Arkasha! Simply marvelous!”
“Indeed, indeed it is. But there are complications. I fear the time has come to say goodbye to your friends, Sasha.”
For “goodbye,” Grishin had not said das vidania, literally “until we meet again.” Instead, he had used the archaic proshchai, a word meaning “farewell” or “adieu,” with overtones of “forgive me.” Such an expressive language, Russian, marvelous in its subtle indirectness. Entire populations condemned to the camps in passive-voice pronouncements discretely omitting mention of those responsible. Even a death sentence need merely be hinted at.
A thin film of sweat coated Sasha’s brow. “Arkady Grigoriyevich—”
“This was stupid of you, Sasha.” Grishin’s hand slammed the desktop. “Inexcusable. You knew we could not have outsiders aboard Rusalka once we entered the final phase.”
Sasha swallowed, and began again. “Had I known we were so close, Arkady Grigoriyevich! But who could have guessed before the probe arrived?”
Grishin appeared not to have heard. “Sasha, I am very disappointed. What could you have been thinking?”
