The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  It came in sharp and clear on the long-range screen – a vast, luminous island still moving outward from the sun at hundreds of miles a second. At this distance it was impossible to see its finer details, for my radar waves were taking minutes to make the round trip and to bring me back the information they were presenting on the screen. Even at its speed of not far short of a million miles an hour, it would be almost two days before the escaping prominence reached the orbit of Mercury and swept past us toward the outer planets. But neither Venus nor Earth would record its passing, for they were nowhere near its line of flight.

  The hours drifted by; the sun had settled down after the immense convulsion that had shot so many millions of tons of its substance into space, never to return. The aftermath of that eruption was now a slowly twisting and turning cloud a hundred times the size of Earth, and soon it would be close enough for the short-range radar to reveal its finer structure.

  Despite all the years I have been in the business, it still gives me a thrill to watch that line of light paint its picture on the screen as it spins in synchronism with the narrow beam of radio waves from the transmitter. I sometimes think of myself as a blind man exploring the space around him with a stick that may be a hundred million miles in length. For man is truly blind to the things I study; these great clouds of ionized gas moving far out from the sun are completely invisible to the eye and even to the most sensitive of photographic plates. They are ghosts that briefly haunt the solar system during the few hours of their existence; if they did not reflect our radar waves or disturb our magnetometers, we should never know that they were there.

  The picture on the screen looked not unlike a photograph of a spiral nebula, for as the cloud slowly rotated it trailed ragged arms of gas for ten thousand miles around it. Or it might have been a terrestrial hurricane that I was watching from above as it spun through the atmosphere of Earth. The internal structure was extremely complicated, and was changing minute by minute beneath the action of forces which we have never fully understood. Rivers of fire were flowing in curious paths under what could only be the influence of electric fields; but why were they appearing from nowhere and disappearing again as if matter was being created and destroyed? And what were those gleaming nodules, larger than the moon, that were being swept along like boulders before a flood?

  Now it was less than a million miles away; it would be upon us in little more than an hour. The automatic cameras were recording every complete sweep of the radar scan, storing up evidence which was to keep us arguing for years. The magnetic disturbance riding ahead of the cloud had already reached us; indeed, there was hardly an instrument in the Observatory that was not reacting in some way to the onrushing apparition.

  I switched to the short-range scanner, and the image of the cloud expanded so enormously that only its central portion was on the screen. At the same time I began to change frequency, tuning across the spectrum to differentiate among the various levels. The shorter the wave length, the farther you can penetrate into a layer of ionized gas; by this technique I hoped to get a kind of X-ray picture of the cloud’s interior.

  It seemed to change before my eyes as I sliced down through the tenuous outer envelope with its trailing arms, and approached the denser core. “Denser”, of course, was a purely relative word; by terrestrial standards even its most closely packed regions were still a fairly good vacuum. I had almost reached the limit of my frequency band, and could shorten the wave length no farther, when I noticed the curious, tight little echo not far from the center of the screen.

  It was oval, and much more sharp-edged than the knots of gas we had watched adrift in the cloud’s fiery streams. Even in that first glimpse, I knew that here was something very strange and outside all previous records of solar phenomena. I watched it for a dozen scans of the radar beam, then called my assistant away from the radiospectrograph, with which he was analyzing the velocities of the swirling gas as it spun toward us.

  “Look, Don,” I asked him, “have you ever seen anything like that?”

  “No,” he answered after a careful examination. What holds it together? It hasn’t changed its shape for the last two minutes.”

  “That’s what puzzles me. Whatever it is, it should have started to break up by now, with all that disturbance going on around it. But it seems as stable as ever.”

  “How big would you say it is?”

  I switched on the calibration grid and took a quick reading.

  “It’s about five hundred miles long, and half that in width.”

  “Is this the largest picture you can get?”

  “I’m afraid so. We’ll have to wait until it’s closer before we can see what makes it tick.”

  Don gave a nervous little laugh.

  “This is crazy,” he said, “but do you know something? I feel as if I’m looking at an amoeba under a microscope.”

  I did not answer; for, with what I can only describe as a sensation of intellectual vertigo, exactly the same thought had entered my mind.

  We forgot about the rest of the cloud, but luckily the automatic cameras kept up their work and no important observations were lost. From now on we had eyes only for that sharp-edged lens of gas that was growing minute by minute as it raced toward us. When it was no farther away than is the moon from Earth, it began to show the first signs of its internal structure, revealing a curious mottled appearance that was never quite the same on two successive sweeps of the scanner.

  By now, half the Observatory staff had joined us in the radar room, yet there was complete silence as the oncoming enigma grew swiftly across the screen. It was coming straight toward us; in a few minutes it would hit Mercury somewhere in the center of the daylight side, and that would be the end of it – whatever it was. From the moment we obtained our first really detailed view until the screen became blank again could not have been more than five minutes; for every one of us, that five minutes will haunt us all our lives.

  We were looking at what seemed to be a translucent oval, its interior laced with a network of almost invisible lines. Where the lines crossed there appeared to be tiny, pulsing nodes of light; we could never be quite sure of their existence because the radar took almost a minute to paint the complete picture on the screen – and between each sweep the object moved several thousand miles. There was no doubt, however, that the network itself existed; the cameras settled any arguments about that.

  So strong was the impression that we were looking at a solid object that I took a few moments off from the radar screen and hastily focused one of the optical telescopes on the sky. Of course, there was nothing to be seen – no sign of anything silhouetted against the sun’s pock-marked disk. This was a case where vision failed completely and only the electrical senses of the radar were of any use. The thing that was coming toward us out of the sun was as transparent as air – and far more tenuous.

  As those last moments ebbed away, I am quite sure that every one of us had reached the same conclusion – and was waiting for someone to say it first. What we were seeing was impossible, yet the evidence was there before our eyes. We were looking at life, where no life could exist . . .

  The eruption had hurled the thing out of its normal environment, deep down in the flaming atmosphere of the sun. It was a miracle that it had survived its journey through space; already it must be dying, as the forces that controlled its huge, invisible body lost their hold over the electrified gas which was the only substance it possessed.

  Today, now that I have run through those films a hundred times, the idea no longer seems so strange to me. For what is life but organized energy? Does it matter what form that energy takes – whether it is chemical, as we know it on Earth, or purely electrical, as it seemed to be here? Only the pattern is important; the substance itself is of no significance. But at the time I did not think of this; I was conscious only of a vast and overwhelming wonder as I watched this creature of the sun live out the final moments of its existence.

  Was it inte
lligent? Could it understand the strange doom that had befallen it? There are a thousand such questions that may never be answered. It is hard to see how a creature born in the fires of the sun itself could know anything of the external universe, or could even sense the existence of something as unutterably cold as rigid nongaseous matter. The living island that was falling upon us from space could never have conceived, however intelligent it might be, of the world it was so swiftly approaching

  Now it filled our sky – and perhaps, in those last few seconds, it knew that something strange was ahead of it. It may have sensed the far-flung magnetic field of Mercury, or felt the tug of our little world’s gravitational pull. For it had begun to change; the luminous lines that must have been what passed for its nervous system were clumping together in new patterns, and I would have given much to know their meaning. It may be that I was looking into the brain of a mindless beast in its last convulsion of fear – or of a godlike being making its peace with universe.

  Then the radar screen was empty, wiped clean during a single scan of the beam. The creature had fallen below our horizon and was hidden from us now by the curve of the planet. Far out in the burning dayside of Mercury, in the inferno where only a dozen men have ever ventured and fewer still come back alive, it smashed silently and invisibly against the seas of molten metal, the hills of slowly moving lava. The mere impact could have meant nothing to such an entity; what it could not endure was its first contact with the inconceivable cold of solid matter.

  Yes, cold. It had descended upon the hottest spot in the solar system, where the temperature never falls below seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit and sometimes approaches a thousand. And that was far, far colder to it than the antarctic winter would be to a naked man.

  We did not see it die, out there in the freezing fire; it was beyond the reach of our instruments now, and none of them recorded its end. Yet every one of us knew when that moment came, and that is why we are not interested when those who have seen only the films and tapes tell us that we were watching some purely natural phenomenon.

  How can one explain what we felt, in that last moment when half our little world was enmeshed in the dissolving tendrils of that huge but immaterial brain? I can only say that it was a soundless cry of anguish, a death pang that seeped into our minds without passing through the gateways of the senses. Not one of us doubted then, or has ever doubted since, that he had witnessed the passing of a giant.

  We may have been both the first and the last of all men to see so mighty a fall. Whatever they may be, in their unimaginable world within the sun, our paths and theirs may never cross again. It is hard to see how we can ever make contact with them, even if their intelligence matches ours.

  And does it? It may be well for us if we never know the answer. Perhaps they have been living there inside the sun since the universe was born, and have climbed to peaks of wisdom that we shall never scale. The future may be theirs, not ours; already they may be talking across the light-years to their cousins in other stars.

  One day they may discover us, by whatever strange senses they possess, as we circle around their mighty, ancient home, proud of our knowledge and thinking ourselves lords of creation. They may not like what they find, for to them we should be no more than maggots, crawling upon the skins of worlds too cold to cleanse themselves from the corruption of organic life.

  And then, if they have the power, they will do what they consider necessary. The sun will put forth its strength and lick the faces of its children; and thereafter the planets will go their way once more as they were in the beginning – clean and bright . . . and sterile.

  THE PEVATRON RATS

  Stephen Baxter

  Stephen Baxter (b. 1957) collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke on four novels, starting with The Light of Other Days (2000). In some ways, he might be seen as the natural successor to Clarke, as both share similar visions of the potential of technology. Baxter’s own work began in 1987 with “The Xeelee Flower”, a story that introduced Baxter’s future history series, which includes the novels Raft (1991), Flux (1993) and Ring (1994). He attracted a wider readership with The Time Ships (1995), his sequel to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and went on to establish himself as one of Britain’s most innovative and entertaining science fiction writers.

  “MR HATHAWAY, it’s Amanda Breslin. Ms Breslin from the high school?”

  A call from Penny’s teacher wasn’t particularly welcome in the middle of the working day. I kicked shut the office door. “Yes, Ms Breslin. Is something wrong?”

  “Not exactly . . .”

  That hesitation triggered memories of meeting her at the last parent-teacher night: a slim woman, intense, shy, eyes that drew you in. Penny, twelve years old, was on a school field trip to Harwell today, the nuclear lab. I had lurid imaginings of what might have gone wrong. “Go on.”

  “Penny found some rats.”

  “What?”

  “Two rats, to be precise. Babies. The problem is, the rats shouldn’t have been where they were. Couldn’t have been, in fact. The lab authorities suspect this is some kind of hoax played by the kids. And since it was Penny who found them – ”

  Ever since the cancer that had taken her mother three years before, I had fretted continually about Penny’s welfare. Now Ms Breslin’s prevaricating about what seemed a trivial matter irritated me. “What’s this all about? Where exactly did she find these damn rats?”

  I heard Ms Breslin take a breath. “In a particle accelerator.”

  “I’ll be there.” And I hung up, rudely. I made some excuses to old Harrison, the senior partner, and went to get my car.

  That was the start of it for me. Soon, of course, the whole county was going to be getting calls and emails about rats turning up where they shouldn’t be. I suppose it’s my peculiar distinction to have been the very first.

  Harwell is only a couple of miles west of Didcot, where we lived. It didn’t take me long to drive out.

  Penny was doing fine at school, as far as I could tell. That was the trouble – I was increasingly unsure that I could tell. The school itself was very alien to a 1990s relic like me, with more laptops than teachers, who all had job titles like “motivational counsellor”. Penny and I had muddled through the first couple of years after we lost her mother, when she was still essentially a child. Now, at twelve, I knew she was moving into a more complex phase of her life – still fascinated by horses, but increasingly distracted by bad-boy soccer players with dirty hair.

  I was an office manager for a firm of solicitors. I can handle people reasonably well, I think – crusty old lawyers and their clients anyhow. How well I could handle the moods and dilemmas of a teenage daughter I was much less sure. Maybe today was going to be a test.

  The facility that everybody calls Harwell Laboratory, in Oxfordshire, was founded after World War II as a nuclear fission laboratory, on an old RAF airfield close to Oxford University. Some good work was done there, in fission reactor designs and fusion experiments. But as the decades wore away the slowdown of government science and the reduced threat of nuclear war saw the place go through complicated sell-offs. RAL, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, still operates within what is now known as the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. This year, 2018, RAL had briefly made the headlines when the public were first allowed to see the revolutionary new Pevatron, a new breed of particle accelerator, which was due to come online in a couple more years. And that was why Penny’s school party had gone there that day.

  As I approached the gate I had to drive through a sullen picket line of protestors. They were calm and sane-looking, and their placards, leaning against the outer fence, were wordy warnings about the dangers of doing high-energy physics in the middle of the English countryside: black holes might be created, or wormholes, or “vacuum collapses” might be triggered, none of which meant very much to me.

  Ms Breslin met me at the security gate, as I signed bits of paper and submitted to retinal and DNA scans. I even had
to pass through a Geiger counter trap, as if I might try to smuggle radioactive materials into a nuclear laboratory. Then we walked across the laboratory campus, side by side, her pace rapid, edgy. “Harwell’s a major local employer, of course,” she said, talking too fast, “and for the kids to be able to see a world-class science facility in development right on their doorstep is a great opportunity – it helps that I know a couple of the scientists on staff here personally . . .”

  It was a bright spring day, late April, with a bit of wind that blew Ms Breslin’s hair around her face. She was a slim woman, tall, in her late thirties a bit younger than me, with hints of grey in her tied-back brown hair. She struck me as wistful, a woman at the end of her youth – and, I guessed, alone; she wore no rings.

  The lab buildings were blocky and old-fashioned, laid out in a rough grid pattern, like a military base. But every so often I glimpsed a fission-reactor dome, silent and sinister, rising beyond the tiled rooftops, or the glistening hulk of a cooling plant or oxygen store, and much of the site was sealed off by fences plastered with warning signs and radiation symbols. The facility we were approaching was a kilometre across, but unprepossessing, like a ring of garden sheds set out across the scarred runway of the old airfield.

  “The Pevatron,” I prompted her.

  “It is a fantastic development,” she said. “Called the Pevatron because it can reach energies of peta-electron volts – that’s ten to power fifteen, a million billion. Orders of magnitude more even than the big new International Linear Collider in Japan, and at a fraction of the cost and scale thanks to the new methods they’ve developed here. It’s all to do with room-temperature superconductors controlled at the femtosecond scale by a new quantum computer – I have a physics PhD myself and I barely understand it . . .” I wondered how she had ended up teaching high school kids.