Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  Claire looked up. Abe was staring at the artifact, his face impassive. She said, “You knew just what to do.”

  Abe smiled. “I figured you out two weeks ago. There was always something a bit odd about the way you handled this, you know. Usually, comes an artifact over from BU, it has a stack of paperwork. This one did not.”

  John said, “We only had the customs papers. No way to document it six ways from Sunday.”

  Abe shrugged. “So I have put my defenses in place. Mind you”—his eyes narrowed—“I only do so because of the unusual nature of this find. I do not approve of how you got it.”

  Claire nodded mutely. Somewhere in her a spurt of joy was struggling to burst forth. The worst had happened and, all told, it wasn’t bad. Claire Number One had been wrong.

  “You’re going to need to use up a lot of your time defending yourself against him,” Claire said. “He’ll make a lot of noise.”

  “Not before we get our work done,” Abe said happily. He gestured at the cube. “We must bore into it now. That is the only way to answer our questions.”

  He said it so simply and naturally that Claire did not immediately marshall counter-arguments. And she saw that he had been playing one move ahead of them, arranging this bargain: MIT’s protection traded for a chance to break into the artifact. She sighed. It was inevitable.

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  They opened the plug in late afternoon. There was a reasonably good drilling kit in the Materials Science equipment inventory, so Claire proposed using that. The better alternative would be to call LeBailly at Brown, who, despite having a big mouth, was the best in this part of the country. But LeBailly would take time to arrive and Claire firmly ruled him out anyway, because she now saw him as a conduit of news to Hampton.

  Abe had an appointment he could not break, and wanted to reach the MIT administration before Hampton could. He reluctantly left the drilling to John, who had by now mastered the basic skills. Abe left definite instructions that as soon as the light pipe showed anything, he wanted to be called.

  John began drilling with a four millimeter bit, extracting a fine rock dust for study later. The arrangement allowed easy adjustment of height and angle, and held the drill in a vibration-free mouth supported by a heavy steel frame. He worked with extreme care, avoiding any radiation hazard. Even a four millimeter hole would allow a light pipe to slide through. With that, and a good deal of computer enhancement of the optical feed through the pipe, they could probably get decent images of the interior. The technology was getting better every year, and MIT had the best.

  The plug in the rear face gave every superficial appearance of being volcanic basalt. This was curious in itself, since the Mycenaeans usually did not use such rock in their stonework. The plug was virtually seamless, fitting snugly into its hole as though it has been tapered skillfully. Yet there were no signs of chiseling on it.

  John ran the whirring drill minutely deeper into its hole, being sure the runoff in rock dust fell into the catcher which would keep it for chemical analysis. Every half centimeter in he stopped and filed the dust in a plastic bag. It was tedious watching him, and Claire found little beyond storing the bags to keep herself busy. The afternoon hours brought stretching blue shadows into the bay from the big dirty windows high overhead. The drill cut into the rock with a high, jarring rasp, grating on her nerves. The rock was hard, progress slow. John had penetrated nearly six centimeters into the rock and was withdrawing the bit, preparing to change it, when he stopped, cocked his head, and listened.

  “Do you hear something?”

  “No. Is the bit wearing out?”

  John withdrew the drill completely. “Hear that?”

  Claire leaned closer. A tiny, high note, almost like the sound a television makes with the volume knob turned down. “What is it?”

  John looked around. “Some equipment in the lab?”

  Claire drew her head back and then leaned toward the plug again. “No, it’s louder near the hole.”

  Gingerly, John put a piece of paper against the drill hole. “Lord God A’mighty.”

  “What?”

  “It’s sucking on the paper.”

  “What do you mean? How—”

  “It’s a vacuum in there.”

  She sat in silence. Then, “Here, let me.”

  He removed the paper and the faint high whine returned.

  “It…it must be some sort of pocket, opened in the limestone,” John said quietly. “Pretty damned unusual.”

  “I didn’t know limestone did that. I mean, hot rocks will leave trapped gas, and it condenses later, leaving a vacuum. Igneous formations, yes, but…”

  Claire felt a slight breeze brush at her hair and suddenly realized that it was blowing toward the artifact, into it.

  “Cover it!” she cried.

  John secured the drill lock and reached for a piece of flat aluminum nearby. He slid it across the face of the cube and covered the hole. The moaning subsided, but not completely. The aluminum did not fit precisely to the uneven surface of the cube.

  “What…what in the world…” John murmured.

  “That’s no cavity.”

  “There’d have to be a pump inside to do that.”

  They stared at each other, speechless. Irrelevantly—her mind darting away from this new impossible fact—Claire noticed the chugg-chugg-chugg of a diffusion pump from a far corner of the lab, mingling with the steady spattering of rain against the high windows. Yet another storm was rolling in, and brilliant flashes of lightning threw shadowy images of streaming rivulets down into the lab. Thunder rumbled like an old, caged lion.

  “This…can’t be,” she said.

  “But it is.”

  The low howling continued, unnerving her. “Can’t we get a better seal on it than—wait, I know. Slide in the light pipe, why don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  She helped him set the thin, silvery tube in its clamps and feeder. It was attached to an array of optical readout instruments that crowded the working zone around the cube face. When John pulled the aluminum sheet aside the moaning had a ragged, harsh edge to it and seemed to Claire to swell up, filling the lab with its irrational, impossible cry. John quickly inserted the light tube, properly coated with an inorganic lubricant. This made a firm seal and cut off the dreadful hollow howling.

  The light pipe delivered a fogged, blue-white image.

  “Is that a side of a square?” John pointed at a blur.

  “Control your imagination. All I see is clouds, maybe a little brighter toward the center.”

  “We should be looking at light that comes through the cone. Why is it blue-white?”

  Claire peered at the electronics. “Maybe the color setting is off. It’s the vacuum that bothers me. This thing could be dangerous. I wish Abe—oh yes, let’s call him.”

  He arrived a half hour later, visibly excited, but could find nothing wrong with the settings for hue and color. He refused to believe their story until John slid the light pipe back out and the eerie drone filled the lab again.

  They sat and stared blankly at the cloudy screen image, discussing the latest development in hushed voices. There was simply no way to make sense of a vacuum inside an ancient artifact, and Abe reluctantly raised the question of a deliberate hoax. Could someone have planted the piece, perhaps to embarrass the joint Greek-BU expedition? Who would gain? Why do so much work? How was it done?

  No one believed in the hoax theory. But no one had anything better to offer.

  The situation seemed stable; the seal was good. Abe wanted time to review his diagnostics carefully, and the other two were tired, worn down by Hampton and now this. They agreed to meet early the next morning.

  As Claire left the lab, she noticed John was unusually silent. They ran through gusty rain under Claire’s bulbous yellow umbrella—John had forgotten to bring his—to her Alfa Romeo. He spoke little throughout dinner at a lobster cafe, and gave her a
solemn, distracted kiss when she left his apartment later. He was clearly following a thread of thought, but he refused to discuss it.

  Abe was bedraggled and sour-faced the next morning. He had worked most of the night and found no errors. The diagnostics were giving valid results.

  There were some curious new slants, though. The gamma-ray flux had increased to the danger point.

  “It would seem that the plug was absorbing a good deal of the radiation from the core,” Abe murmured wanly. “Now we can see it more clearly. It is the same—a square, plus the bright center.”

  Claire tapped the video screen, where blue-white lines made a square. “This is the gamma-ray picture?”

  Abe shook his head. “That’s the light pipe image. It cleared up gradually through the night.”

  “Then it gives the same picture as the gamma-ray!”

  “True enough.”

  “Consistent results.”

  “Yes,” John said, “we’re lookin’ at an intense source.”

  Abe said, “For something two centimeters across to put out that much in the gamma—incredible.” He seemed to Claire to have lost his momentum, to be numbed by the inexplicable facts. Not that she felt very much differently, she reminded herself. She had simply had more sleep.

  Abe said, “For a bunch of radioactive isotopes to do that, they—”

  “Not isotopes,” John said. He stood up from a lab stool, stretching. She saw fatigue lines around his eyes and guessed he had stayed up late thinking. “It’s not a ‘radioactive anomaly’ at all. I think we’re looking at a structure of very hot, very dense matter.”

  “Hot?” Claire asked.

  “That explains all the x-ray and gamma-ray emission. There’s something inside hotter than the surface of the sun.”

  Abe blinked. “It cannot be. It would melt through.”

  “I don’t know,” John said reasonably, “but the radiation isn’t enough to heat up the cube much—I calculated that last night. And we don’t feel the high temperature because we’re insulated from the center.”

  Claire was puzzled. “How? It’s only a few feet away.”

  John spread his hands. “There’s a strong vacuum between us. That’s what drew the air in when we opened the plug.”

  They sat in silence for a long moment. Claire could think of no objection, except the by now familiar one—the idea was impossible, absurd.

  “But…” she began feebly, “something buried in a Mycenaean artifact, in a tomb…”

  “That’s the real point, I suppose. Nobody knows how to make anything like that, that whatever in there. Nobody.”

  Abe curled his lip. “You are suggesting that we resolve our difficulties by attributing this object to—what? Let me guess. Visitors from outer space, correct?”

  Claire said scornfully, “That Von Däniken nonsense? Come now, John, we—”

  John smiled. “Yeah, I thought of that, too. Not absolutely crazy, but I don’t believe it. Just because we can’t explain it doesn’t mean it’s some roadside trash thrown out by a passing superbeing.”

  Abe said sharply, “What then?”

  “We’ve got to give up the idea that we’re dealing with an artifact here at all. This isn’t archeology anymore, folks. We’re studying physics here.”

  Claire was mystified. “I never heard of any physics like this.”

  John grinned, tired but oddly joyous, his eyes gleaming, his hands curling and uncurling with compressed energy. “Me either. But I can make some guesses. I think what we’ve got here is a singularity.”

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER

  One

  The most important lesson of modern Einsteinian physics was the fact that space could be pathological.

  Before Einstein, the world was a place of billiard balls, remorselessly predictable paths and serene certainty. No physicist can now recall without a thrill the moment when he left that arid Newtonian landscape and entered a Lewis Carroll-like world where time was a fourth dimension, space curved giddily, and honest witnesses could blithely disagree about the simplest facts of what happened where and when. Einstein linked space with the matter it contained, returning to physics a depth and mystery it had lost.

  By making the universe a partner in the construction of its own geometry, Einstein admitted the possibility that it would contain pitfalls, traps, bizarre spots. As soon as he showed that matter could curve space-time, the possibility arose that curvature could be unbounded, infinite. A particle proceeding through such a region of space-time would find a point beyond which it could not go, a spot where its own existence ended—a singularity.

  Claire asked, “Okay, singularity is another word for black hole, right?”

  “Almost,” John replied. “There might be other forms of singularity, but the one everybody knows is the black hole.”

  “But black holes are stars. Or were.”

  “Right. I think we’ve got something here that’s like a black hole, not identical.”

  “It gives off radiation. Black holes don’t—that’s why they’re black.”

  “Not so. A hole attracts matter, which falls in on a kind of spiral path. Suppose there’s a cloud of dust or whatever, orbiting near a black hole. Here, I’ll sketch it. Some dust gets drawn closer. That makes a disk of stuff coming in, swirling around faster and faster. It gets flattened into a disk by simple friction. That makes it lose some energy and fall in farther. Close to the hole, the matter gets very dense, and starts rubbing against nearby infalling stuff even more. So it gets hotter from more friction. Just before the hole swallows it up, you can see that hot matter radiating heat and x-rays and so on.”

  “So black holes aren’t black,” Claire said doubtfully.

  “Not if there’s stuff to swallow in the neighborhood. The best evidence for that is the center of galaxies, where there are plenty of stars to chew up. This sketch might be what it’s like there. Black holes, really big ones, gobble up the stars and give off lots of radiation. They’re spectacularly bright. That’s prob’ly what makes quasars.”

  Claire frowned. He could see her wrestling with the introduction of a bizarre idea.

  “Okay, I don’t know anything about quasars. But this thing we’ve got, it’s small.”

  “Right. There’s no limit on the size of a black hole, though. They can be tiny. Small ones don’t last long, but it’s possible to form one and have it sit around, industriously trying to eat its surroundings.”

  “And that’s what’s in the cube?”

  “Could be. How else can you explain the radiation?”

  Claire grimaced, not liking the conclusion. “But it’s…crazy.”

  “Sho’ nuff,” John said, amused.

  Abe listened to their conversation with open disbelief. They all had obligations elsewhere and the day was winding down, so John left, pleased to have delivered his bombshell at last. What he hadn’t told the others was that he was rusty on the physics of black holes and needed time to do some reading.

  He worked through the next night, and appeared at the lab in the morning, ragged and red-eyed.

  “You are wanting to measure what?” Abe twisted his mouth and did not try to conceal his disdain.

  “Local gravity. Is there any equipment…?”

  They had to get the gravitometer from a geological group across campus. It was used to study faultings and mass displacements, in search of likely oil deposits. Petroleum engineering had developed the technique extensively, so John could do most of the work by himself. Abe was not interested in spending his time on such an unlikely venture, and busied himself with his own equipment. He had no explanation for whatever was in the cube, but he dismissed John’s suggestion of yesterday as a pipe dream. The radioactive anomaly notion still appealed to him, but the unrelenting vacuum was a fact he preferred to ignore for the moment. John recognized the pattern. Abe had confronted too many bizarre facts at once. He needed time to digest them.

  The device John maneuvered aro
und the lab was a spindly affair of rods and coils, capable of measuring deviations in both strength and direction of the local acceleration of gravity, accurate to one part in a million. John worked slowly with it, sluggish from lack of sleep, but dogged. Claire arrived later in the morning to help. They got their first major result after lunch.

  There was a tiny deflection toward the cube at a distance of five meters. Closer, the deflection increased rapidly. Claire could not press the stubby end of the detector closer than two centimeters to the cube, because of a long balancing bar on the frame. There the effect became enormous—nearly one percent of the pull of gravity.

  Claire said, “That explains why, when you run your hands over the surface, it feels, well, funny.”

  “Yes…I noticed something like that.” John was staring hard at the gravitometer dial. He had moved it to the opposite side of the cube.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This meter. It reads differently here.”

  “You mean the acceleration is different from the other side?”

  “Seems so. It’s about half as strong.”

  “I thought gravitational force was the same in all directions.”

  “Yes. Spherically symmetric, we call it.”

  “But this gravitation from the cube, it isn’t?”

  “Apparently not. And it’s so strong…

  “Only one percent of the Earth’s, that’s not so much.”

  “To change local gravity by even one percent, you’d need—let’s see.” He stood by the tubular array of the gravitometer, careful not to touch the balancing arms, and calculated in his head. “You’d need a cubic mile of rock, just about.”

  “Your idea…of a singularity…”

  “A whole damn mountain! That’s pretty close to the mass a black hole would need to survive from the beginning of the universe.”

  “You think this might be one?”

  He shook his head. “Where’s the mass? A whole mountain’s worth! It’d drop right through the floor with that weight.”