Analog SFF, July-August 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Hamilton locked his eyes on Joshua. “You're lying! There's no one here!"

  “See for yourself."

  “You!” Hamilton pointed to one of his men, then at the airlock. “Go inside, check! No more than one minute, then come out!"

  With a nervous glance at his companions, the man approached the airlock.

  He pressed the button. The door slid open. He stepped inside. The door slid closed.

  Hustling Joshua and Lucas to one side, Hamilton motioned his other men into firing positions directly in front of the airlock.

  Joshua waited, tensing his muscles. Lucas studied the bare deck. Ann gazed blankly and stroked Constance's mane. The airlock door slid open.

  Out lunged a screaming man—and a thousand angry rats.

  Whirling and staggering, Hamilton and his henchmen frantically grabbed and flung furry bodies from their space suit controls. During the wild dance, one man's rifle fell to the deck.

  Mindful of the clinging vermin, Joshua slowly edged toward the abandoned weapon.

  * * * *

  Approximately half an hour later, having doffed his space suit, Joshua sat in the control room of Raven and watched the pilot's main screen as the skiff bearing Hamilton's henchmen returned to its yacht.

  Then Daedalus spewed incandescent and radioactive vapor into surrounding space. The gasses first emanated from the hangar, then from the vents, and then from holes melted along the rim as chunks of the reactor fell through. Finally, the microworld vanished within clouds of superheated mist.

  “All the stuff we could have salvaged,” Lucas said. “It's not doing anyone any good now."

  “Be thankful we got out alive,” Ann said.

  “Maybe we can get a reward, too,” Joshua said. “It depends whether our guest has a price on his head."

  He turned to their prisoner. Hamilton struggled with his bonds, but Ann had secured the knots. While continuing to watch the screen, Lucas casually kept a pistol aimed at the small of Hamilton's back.

  Hamilton formed his face into a snarl. “Wang, listen! My ship has you outgunned. They're under orders not to accept hostage threats. You may as well surrender right now, because you're not going anywhere!"

  “Let me show you why we are,” Joshua said.

  Joshua clicked screen icons, opening an application window that displayed a graphic of the ships and asterie. Daedalus was interposed between the salvage ship and the space yacht. From the holes in its equator, the spinning worldlet gushed expanding spirals of vapor.

  “See this disk-shaped cloud?” Joshua asked. “It's what remains of the interior of Daedalus. Hundreds of thousands of tons of material, converted to plasma-hot gasses. And I've maneuvered so that the disk serves as an impenetrable barrier between our ships. By the time it disperses, we'll be long gone."

  Hamilton glared at the screen, then at Joshua. “You won't get far! My ship is faster than yours!"

  “You've never navigated through the Asteroid Belt, have you?"

  “What's that supposed to mean?"

  “Speed isn't everything. Besides, Raven is faster than you think.” Joshua smiled at Ann. “You have a place to put him?"

  “In the main hold with Constance,” Ann replied. “If she can take the smell."

  Lucas helped Ann escort Hamilton away. Joshua returned his eyes to his console and tapped keys.

  The screen displayed a real-time map of the Asteroid Belt, with their current position superimposed upon a shifting field of asteroids, asteries, and spaceships. Sipping his espresso, Joshua touched the stylus to the screen—marking possible courses, identifying potential intercepts.

  He was still working when Lucas returned.

  “So who gets him?” Lucas asked.

  Joshua sighed, resting a hand on the screen. “I'm still analyzing and tagging the scanner contacts—friends, foes, neutrals, pirates, and sovereignties that might take him. Then I have to figure how to weave around intercept ranges and spheres of influence."

  Lucas twitched a smile. “Looks like a dynamic maze."

  “It's a mess. Everything in different orbits, changing vectors on whim. Long-range transits in the Belt are always miserable for navigators, thanks to the political chaos."

  “You'd like the Belt united under one government."

  Joshua shook his head.

  “That would be like having a keeper run everything. And there'd be no escape."

  He set a course. The ship got under way, and they entered the maze.

  Copyright 2006 Joe Schembrie

  * * * *

  "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

  —Louis D. Brandeis

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  KREMER'S LIMIT

  by C. SANFORD LOWE & G. DAVID NORDLEY

  * * * *

  When a project is bigger than any ever undertaken, even the first step isn't easy.

  * * * *

  Chapter 1

  Black Hole Project Headquarters, Santa Cruz Mountains, 10 April 2257

  * * * *

  But what if you're wrong?” the reporter asked.

  Hilda Kremer tried to compose herself. The Black Hole Project auditorium became so silent that the gentle whoosh of maglev traffic on the grassway down the hill could be heard. Even the small gaggle of protesters outside the auditorium were quiet, leaving the air to the calls of birds about their business in the two-century-old redwoods that had grown up around the mountainside building. The four story Mediterranean style mansion had once served as a satellite campus for the University of California at Santa Cruz and before that, a Buddhist retreat. The speaker's platform faced the rose window that once stood over the Buddhist altar, and Hilda often drew a sense of inner peace looking in that direction.

  She needed it. They had spent twenty minutes explaining why trying to make a black hole would not destroy the known universe, and here was yet another hostile question.

  Project director Dr. Zhau Tse Wen, who had the floor, turned to her. Did he want her to reply to the question? On one hand, his turning to her was a form of recognition; on the other, she didn't want to venture into the minefield of loaded questions. She shook her head. She created intricate, massive computer simulations of subnuclear processes; others strove to make them happen. Desire to make things happen was the enemy of equanimity and clear-headedness.

  Tse Wen's mouth turned up just slightly at the corners and he winked. When Tse Wen smiled he reminded her of a contented, if undernourished, Buddhist monk He'd lost his hair before taking his initial telomerase treatments and preferred that look, as it simplified his life. His thinness was not from any asceticism; he simply forgot to eat for days on end. Not infrequently, Hilda and Sarah Levine kidnapped him from his office and drag him over to Sarah's room for a feast of chicken soup and bagel sandwiches filled with kosher sausage slices.

  He turned back to the reporter who'd asked the question. “Theory tells us the forces between the electron shells of atoms keep us from collapsing into a tiny ball of neutronium in the center of the Earth. What if we were wrong about that?"

  “We don't collapse...” the reporter said.

  Tse Wen smiled and bowed slightly. “And neither has any naturally formed black hole ever created a new universe on top of us. Please remember, we live here, too."

  A titter ran through the room. Hilda smiled. Tse Wen was a student of martial arts among many other things, but had the kind of mind that could apply those lessons to conflict with words and ideas. Here he had gotten the opponent going in one direction and effortlessly pulled him past his objective and onto the floor. But another reporter rose to take a shot.

  “Dr. Zhau, is or is not the Ten-Ten experiment an attempt to create a black hole right in our own asteroid belt before final review of the project?"

  “It is not. It is far too small, only ten milligrams, and not the right geometry, to create a black hole. Many year
s ago, it was thought that quantum black holes might form in such experiments, only to evaporate instantly. But according to the 2135 Wilson-Lu synthetic model of quantum gravity, the minimum area of an event horizon is approximately 1/720th that of a proton—far too big to be made with the amount of energy the Ten-Ten experiment provides. It should, however, help us calibrate Kremer's limit and understand what kind of phenomena to watch for in the main event. I should let Dr. Kremer describe the model."

  Tse Wen gave her a cautionary glance. “Less technical,” she thought he meant. No escape this time. Hilda took a deep breath, stared up at great dark wooden beams, and imagined herself up there, calm and removed.

  “Think of neutrons as tiny balloons filled with quarks,” she began. “Squeeze them and heat them enough, they dissolve into a ‘quagma,’ a kind of bubble of free quarks buzzing around like angry bees. Push more, and the quarks buzz around faster and push back, but they get heavier and change in the process. At a high enough pressure, there's a transition to an ultra dense state of what we call ‘strange matter’ that is normally unstable, but can exist under extreme pressure.

  “Increase the pressure and we think one gets a condensed Planck-scale Lu superposition of all the original mass. I say ‘think’ because by this time a stellar mass is so dense that it warps spacetime around it to the point where light cannot escape, becoming the unobservable inside of a black hole. The central pressure of a quark star of 3.18 solar masses is enough to cause that collapse.

  “To make a black hole without a star, we need to force enough mass-energy into a small enough volume to exceed the critical pressure for long enough for the mass to implode within an event horizon. The Ten-Ten experiment will confirm the model where we can see it and help us with the precise design of the final experiment."

  Hilda touched the net for Sarah. I'm getting into your territory now, and you like attention. “Dr. Levine?"

  Sarah beamed and brushed a wave of thick brunette hair aside. “When we try to make the black hole some thirty years from now, we'll be using most of the interstellar propulsion capacity of four stars for several months. To use more would needlessly take resources from other interstellar commerce and exploration. Also, the resulting black hole would be heavier and harder to handle than needed. But if we use too little, we'd have to try again and decades of work would be lost. So to get it just right we're going to calibrate the model first."

  The reporter frowned and looked as if he were searching for a follow-up that would make sense. Finally he just sighed, shook his head and sat down. Hilda almost sympathized with him; the poor man had been looking for something sensational or at least controversial and what he'd ended up with was “calibrate the model.” Granted, it sounded sexy when Sarah said it.

  “I think we should take one more question,” Tse Wen said.

  A well-groomed reporter stood up and stared almost accusingly at Hilda.

  Torsten Ried, from Popular Issues, Sarah sent. He's the brother of our nemesis, Senator Lars Ried. Watch out.

  Hilda bit her lip. Sen. Ried was the leader of the consolidationist coalition in the Interplanetary Association Senate and a frequent project critic. If his coalition got a majority, he could be the new IPA president. Hilda shivered. Consolidationists wanted to limit cultural change and typically opposed research that might cause it. If the demographic analysis of consolidationist gains was right, humanity might be in for as profound an inward turn as that of China a millennium ago. She might get only one chance to make a black hole.

  Tse Wen acknowledged the reporter. “Mr. Ried?"

  “Yes. Setting aside the uncertainties and the possibility of wiping this universe out with a new big bang, have any of you considered what you might unleash if you succeed? Are the leaders of humanity ready for the kind of power that having its own black hole would mean?"

  Hostile as it was, Hilda realized it was a fair question. To her relief, Tse Wen nodded to Bradford Adams. Brad was a gifted engineer and practical problem solver. He'd thought and written more about what to do with a black hole, if they made one, than any of them.

  “No problems, I think. Now our society lets people be people, so we still have gangs, power trips, and police actions here and there. But there has not been a war, or anything resembling one, among the advanced nations of the world, for over a century. Our cybernetic tools for monitoring and preventing misuse of resources are increasingly effective.

  “Anyway, the black hole will be created six light-years from any concentration of human population. No bloody politicians there, just scientists.” The audience chuckled. Brad's normally standard English lapsed into his native Australian dialect, or ‘strine as he called it, when he got excited or wanted to sound folksy. “And many people are excited about this,” Brad continued. “Even Bruce Macready, my old science history professor, wants in on it."

  “The author of Unification Quest?” the reporter asked.

  “Right you are. He's even offered to leave Broadfield College on the Isle of Skye to go along on the Epsilon Eridani mission as an historian. That's probably the most challenging star in the project, technically, because it's so young..."

  Dr. Zhau held up a hand. “I must thank you all for this fascinating discussion. So fascinating that indeed we have gone a bit overtime and our food is waiting. Please, everyone, join us for the reception in the atrium and perhaps these conversations can continue in a more relaxed setting."

  He bowed and motioned for the team to rise, signaling the end of the press conference.

  Hilda and Sarah were first on their feet and quickly off the podium and out the door at the rear of the stage before the applause faded. They'd programmed the food and wanted to check on it. Sarah handed her jacket to a robot, revealing a dark, low-cut, strapless dress.

  Hilda sighed. She hadn't considered looking any different at the reception than at the press conference, and her loose black tunic and pants, while simple and elegant, were about as unsexy as a nun's habit. Well, she thought, there was something to be said for truth in packaging.

  They sampled some sausage and cheese; Sarah grinned and nodded.

  Hilda touched the net to let Brad and Tse-Wen know they were ready.

  The team lined up and the guests entered. After all the handshaking was done, knots of people formed. Sarah was surrounded by four major infonet editors, all male. Dr. Zhau had quietly slipped into a corner with the editors of Scientific American and Nature while Brad was sitting at a table in deep political discussion with some of the Coriolis media corps.

  “Dr. Kremer?"

  She turned. It was the reporter with the political point of view. She would have watch what she said. Misquotes by a journalist with a political point of view could be a real problem. “Yes?"

  “Torsten Ried. Popular Issues."

  “Oh, yes.” They shook hands. Hilda forced a smile and focused in on him. He seemed normal enough, about 180 cm and trim. His slightly sun-bleached brown hair was short with a part on the left. He wore cologne, maybe a little too liberally for her taste.

  “It's a nice spread,” he said. “I detect a woman's touch in the programming."

  She laughed. “Found us out, I'm afraid. Sarah Levine and I spent all afternoon yesterday on it."

  “Dr. Levine, yes.” Ried followed Hilda's eyes and did a double take.

  “Well, I'd like to talk to her, but she seems occupied just now.” He turned back toward Hilda.

  “Off the record, there's some real risk, isn't there or you wouldn't be doing this experiment?"

  Hilda thought about Sarah tasting her sausage and laughed. “It's just a calibration, a little like what Sarah and I did before this reception. The food was programmed down to the atom, but we still had to slip in and taste it first, to see what it was like."

  He smiled disarmingly. “Isn't there any result that would cause you to give up the project?"

  Hilda shook her head. “Black holes exist. The only question is how much trouble one needs to take
to make one."

  A deep, resonant thud broke the quiet. She wasn't conscious of falling, rather, the floor seemed to rise to strike her, fall away, and then clobber her again. Antique glass exploded into the room from the high windows. Wine glasses toppled to the floor and food dishes followed.

  Smoke and dust filled the atrium instantly. People started to get up off the floor and head for the exits. Hilda sat where she was a moment, not realizing her mouth was open in shock until the dust began to tickle her throat. She tried to touch the net. What happened?

  No answer. The building's comm must be down, she thought. She shivered. One got used to the near-instant access bioradio provided, and being cut off felt, momentarily, like suddenly being deaf, or in a lightless room.

  “Dr. Kremer, are you okay?"

  Hilda looked up at Ried's dust-covered face and clothes. “Ried? Yes, I'm okay. The local net's down."

  He nodded and offered his hand, which she took and flowed up to her feet.

  “Do you see Dr. Zhau and Dr. Levine?"

  “He's okay—over by the buffet, I think. I'll see if I can find Dr. Levine."

  Hilda found Brad and Dr. Zhau under the same table where she'd left them. Brad looked angry, Tse Wen looked calm but very, very serious. She felt another slight jolt then, and some dust came down on her. One look at the cracked wall towering over them and she slipped under the table between them.

  “Aftershocks?” she asked.

  “That was no bloody earthquake,” Brad said. “I'd say it was a subterranean bomb and the cavity it created is collapsing—hard to believe that level of animosity. Fortunately, it was matched by their level of incompetence; the damage seems pretty superficial."

  Tse Wen shook his head. “We should not assume incompetence, but rather that it achieved exactly the physical result they wanted. Now, what purpose would that result serve? It would frighten people. It could also serve to make the political opposition seem more moderate by comparison."

  Brad nodded. “A good cop, bad cop ploy. Just another argument for them—see, we still have these fanatics and therefore we shouldn't have black holes. Machiavellian, it is."