“Well, just how do you—?”
“That’s your problem. I’ve told you how to do it. You’re the scientist. I’m just a boat captain. Now, stand by while we get this thing back to base. I’m going Earthside today.”
Plant sighed and settled back in his harness while Eden picked up the beacon and followed it back to base, through the lock and into the bay. While they were stripping off their lead suits, Plant said, “Maybe a carbon alloy.”
“What?” said Eden.
“Maybe a carbon alloy would improve the efficiency of the turnaround effect.”
“Sounds promising to me. Give it a whirl. Nice going.”
Plant looked at him wryly. “Thanks. Glad you like my ideas.” Eden was too busy to pay any attention to the slight emphasis on the word “my,” so Plant smiled at Eden’s back, shrugged and hung up his suit.
They found Base Commander Hechmer in the day room with some of the staff watching a teevee transmit Earthside. Wilburn was addressing the Weather Council, bringing the members up to date on the Sun program. He told them results were coming in. The Sun’s core was behaving anomalously. Neutrino formation at the core had accelerated and apparently was going to accelerate even more. The Sun appeared to be moving out of the main sequence a billion years ahead of schedule. Hechmer said, to no one in particular, “Gives you a nice comfortable feeling, doesn’t it?”
On the screen Wilburn said, “To finish my report to you, we should know in a few weeks exactly what is wrong with the Sun, and we should then be in a position to know what to do about it. In short, ladies and gentlemen of the Weather Council, this most massive of research efforts has borne fruit. It is isolating the problem, and it will arrive at a solution. Thank you.” The applause was long and genuine, and Wilburn made a slight bow and quickly put his hand on the podium.
* * * *
The Advisors had the jitters, so Greenberg called together his mathemeteorologists and said, “Now look. Just because we have the heavy artillery in the scientific world showing up here in a few minutes is no reason to get all upset. It’s just a high-level meeting, and they’re holding it here. After all, we’ve made an important contribution to the total research effort on this program.”
“Yes, but why here? They going to change the Advisors?”
“I hear they’re going to fire us.”
“Yeah, clean shop and start again with a new group.”
Greenberg said, “Oh, cut it out. They probably want our advice on the next steps in the program. You’ll have to admit, we have a problem there. We may have accomplished everything we can in the program.”
People began to drift in, and soon the room was full. Potter took over as chairman. “What we’ve got to do is see where we go from here. We’ve accomplished almost all the major objectives of the program. What’s left?”
Kowalski said, “We’ve fallen down on boat design. We haven’t been able to come up with a boat that will get us down to the center of the Sun and back up again. We don’t know where to turn next. We’ve explored every alley we can think of, and we have some thirty thousand people working on the project, including some real bright ones, problem solvers. All we’ve done is improve the efficiency of the boats by a factor of a thousand. We don’t know where to turn next.”
Potter said, “You can get a boat down, but you can’t get it back. That right?”
“Yes, and don’t anybody here tell us about remote control or automation. Center-of-Sun conditions are such that we can’t communicate twenty feet away. As to automation, we can’t get into the boat a computer of the size we need to make a few critical decisions. The presence of the boat is going to change center-of-Sun conditions, so someone is going to have to make a quick evaluation. Well, let Frank Valko tell you what’s there.”
Dr. Frank Valko, senior scientist in charge of evaluation of the Sun’s deep interior, smiled and rubbed his chin in embarrassment. “I wish I could tell you precisely what’s there. Then perhaps we could automate. But here’s what we have. Our Bomnak group came up with a neutrino detector of reasonable size, one we could get in a spaceship. This is a device we’ve been trying for a hundred years. If the program produced nothing else, the neutrino detector alone has been worth it. Well, we put it in a ship and orbited it around the Sun and did some scanning. This detector is adjustable—most remarkable. We ran the scale from the fastest neutrinos with the weakest interaction to the slowest with some slight interaction, and we were able to peel the core of the Sun like an onion. Each interior layer is a bit hotter than the one outside it. And when we got to the core—I mean the real core now—we found the trouble. We found the very center at a temperature of over half a billion degrees Kelvin. The neutrino energy was greater than the light energy. The electron-positron pairs do not annihilate back to high-energy photons completely. We get significant neutrino-antineutrino formation. There are also some neutrino-photon reactions. But the point is that with such neutrino formation, energy can escape from the core, right through the walls of the Sun. And there you are.” He looked around at the others brightly.
The rest of them looked at him blankly, and Eden said it. “Where?”
“Why, the Sun is in the earliest stages of decay, unpredictably early. All we have to do is dampen the core, and we get our old Sun back.”
Potter said sarcastically, “How do we do that? Throw some water on it?”
“Well, water might not be the best substance. We’re working out the theory to improve on water. I think we’ll come up with something.”
Eden said, “From a practical point of view, wouldn’t it take quite a bit of water?”
“Of course not. Oh, I forgot to tell you. The hot core —the troublemaking part—is only about one hundred feet in diameter right now. But it’s spreading. We ought to do something within the next six months.”
Potter sat back and rubbed his face. “All right. We know what the trouble is. We know where the trouble is. And we will soon know what to do about it. Fair enough?” He looked around the room. Most of those present nodded. Anna Brackney and two other mathemeteorologists shrugged. Potter glared at them for a moment and continued. “We can even get down there to quench it. But we can’t get back. Is that what’s left of our problem?” No one said anything, and there were no shrugs this time. Potter waited a moment, then continued. “Well, if that’s really all that’s left, then we may be all done. I’m certain we can find a volunteer to take the sessile boat down to the core. The question is, should we allow the volunteer to do it? Do we continue to try to find a way to get him back up?”
Eden started to speak, but before he could form the words Anna Brackney cut in. “Now, just you don’t say anything here at all. There’s going to be a lot more thought put in on this problem before we go setting up a hero situation.” She turned to Kowalski and said, “You have six months. Isn’t there a chance you can come up with a suitable boat design in that time?”
Kowalski said, “A chance, yes. But it isn’t very likely. We’ve reached the point where we know we need a major breakthrough. It could happen tomorrow—we’re trying. Or it might not happen in the next ten years of intensive work. We’ve defined the problem sufficiently so that we know what’s needed to solve it. I am not optimistic.”
Potter said, “Any ideas from any others? McCormick, Metzger?”
Metzger said, “I think you’ve summarized it, Jeff. Let’s try for another, say, four months to get a boat design and to check out what we think we know. If we finish up right where we are now, we won’t have hurt anything. We can then find someone to take a boat down, and we’ll give him a great big farewell party. Isn’t that about it?”
More shrugs from the mathemeteorologists, and Anna Brackney glared at Eden. Potter said, “I think I’ll go call President Wilburn and tell him our conclusion. Can I use your office, Bob?” Greenberg nodded, and Potter said, “Be back in a minute. Work out the details while I make the call.”
He left, and a desultory conversation
went on in his absence as the group set up priorities and discussed the beginnings of the phase-out of the giant program. Ten minutes passed. Potter reappeared and stood in the doorway. Eden looked up, leaped to his feet and ran around the table toward him. Potter was pale and his face was drawn. He leaned against the door jamb and said, “President Wilburn is dying.”
* * * *
“I’m going with you, Jonathan,” said Harriet Wilburn. She sat across from Wilburn, dry-eyed, in their breakfast corner.
He smiled at her, and the cosmetics on his face wrinkled, giving his face an odd, ragged appearance. He reached across and patted her hand. “You have to stay behind to protect my good name. There’s a bitterness in some people. As long as my wife is alive, they won’t go too far.”
“I don’t care about them.” The tears were in her eyes now, and she looked down at the table to hide them. She wiped her cheeks in annoyance and said in a steady voice, “When do you leave?”
“In three days. The doctors want to make one more attempt to find out what’s causing the central myelitis; there’s got to be some reason for spinal cord deterioration. They hope they can come up with a cure someday, but first they have to find out what causes it.”
Harriet Wilburn burst out, “I don’t care about all this knowledge, all this good, all this benefit-of-man nonsense. I want you.” She put her head down on the table and frankly sobbed. Wilburn reached over and patted the back of her head.
* * * *
“I don’t really believe all this, Boatmaster,” said Technician O’Rourke. “When the first manlike creature put out the first fire something like a half million years ago, he almost certainly used water. Now here we are, quenching the core of a sun heading toward a nova, and what do we use? Water. I don’t believe it.”
Eden did not smile. His mind was on a sessile boat, now about thirty thousand miles deep within the Sun and heading deeper. He sat with Technician O’Rourke in front of the main viewer panel of the neutrino detector, monitoring the flux density at the various energy levels. Eden said, “The reaction we are trying to get back to is simply the high-energy reaction of two photons to produce an electron-positron pair. As it is now, in the core the temperature is so high that the electron-positron pair doesn’t go back to two high-energy photons. Instead they are producing a neutrino-antineutrino pair, and these pour right out through the Sun and are lost to space. If we don’t stop that energy loss, the core will collapse. Since all we have to do is reduce the temperature by absorbing photons, we have a choice of materials to use. Many substances will do it, but water is the safest to carry down there without decomposing or volatilizing and killing Wilburn. That’s why the water.”
“Well, thanks. I still say it’s a mighty funny situation. Somebody’s going to do a lot of philosophizing on it, I’ll bet you. How deep is he now?”
“About forty thousand miles.”
* * * *
Wilburn thought, “You never know. You never know until you’re there. I thought I’d be reflecting on my life, the few things I did right, the many things I did wrong, wondering what it all meant.” He glanced at a depth gauge that read 46,000, and he continued thinking, “About ten percent of the way, ninety percent to go, many hours yet.” He felt hungry, but his ability to swallow had deteriorated to the extent that it was no longer possible for him to eat normally. He sighed, and went about the business of hooking up a bottle of a solution of sugar and protein to the needle in his arm. There were other ingredients in the solution, too, so after the solution was all in, he took a long, painless nap. When he awoke, there were only forty thousand miles to go, and Wilburn realized with a shock that he had had his last meal.
He checked out the few gauges he was familiar with; his briefing period had been limited. He remembered once as a boy his father had taken him through a power plant, and the array of dials and gauges had been fantastic. There had been a large room, divided by a series of panels, and every square inch of the panels and walls of the room had been covered with dials and gauges. When the time came to kick in additional units, one of the operators had called him over and said, “Okay, son. Push that button.” Wilburn did, and his father said to him, “Don’t forget this. All the sensing instruments and dials in the world don’t mean a thing without one human finger.”
Wilburn looked at the one gauge he didn’t like—the one that recorded outside temperature. It read 678,000°K, and Wilburn looked away quickly. He was not a scientific man, and he was incapable of really believing that any living creature could exist in an environment of six hundred and seventy-eight thousand degrees. He thought of Harriet.
He had found it necessary to take steps to prevent her from using her rather significant influence to stow away on this boat. He chuckled and felt the wave of warmth he always felt when he thought of her. For her sake it would have been better to allow her to come, but there were times when one could not take the easy and most desirable path. A soft chime sounded through the boat.
He was approaching the core. He focused his attention on the two instruments directly in front of him. He could feel the deceleration of the boat as the toruses, top and bottom, became more nearly balanced. The temperature inside the cabin was one hundred and forty-six degrees Fahrenheit, but Wilburn was not uncomfortable. He had the feeling that everything was going very well, and he wished he could tell Harriet. The deceleration continued; several of the gauges on the periphery of his vision went off scale. He was very close to the core. Conditions seemed to be as predicted.
He continued to watch, and a chime softly began a beat that slowly increased in tempo. He did not know it, because there was no instrument to record it, but the temperature outside approached the one billion mark. He watched the neutrino flux direction indicator, knowing that the great quantity of water aboard was no longer in the form of a liquid, vapor or solid, and it crossed his mind to wander how that could be. And when the neutrino flux direction indicator wavered, and changed direction to show he had just passed through the very center of the core, he placed his finger on the black button. The last thing he remembered were the words, still clear in his ears, “don’t mean a thing without one human finger.” Then the walls of the boat collapsed and released the water. And the electron-positron pairs appeared instead of the neutrino-antineutrino pairs. On the neutrino detector in the orbiting ship, Eden saw the tiny, hot core fade and disappear. The technician made an adjustment to bring in the neutrinos with slightly greater interaction, and the normal core showed up again, with its normal neutrino flux. But Eden, though he stared at the screen with eyes wide open, could see nothing but a blur.
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* * * *
GRAHAM CHARNOCK
THE CHINESE BOXES
The room was white. Its walls were like unmarked fields of snow, gleaming in the light of four fluorescent strips set in the ceiling. In the center of the room stood the Box, a huge cube of stainless steel ten feet on a side. It resembled some exquisite, ultimately formal piece of modern sculpture, although Carpenter, whose last visit to an art gallery had been as a freshman many years ago, preferred to think of it as a shiny, oversized sugar lump.
The surfaces of the Box were, with one exception, featureless, and this exception showed the outline of a flush-fitting door. In place of a latch there was a metal plate possibly five inches square and secured with four crosscut, countersunk bolts. Elleston, who relieved Carpenter at the end of his afternoon watch, had told him that the plate concealed something called a time lock.
Carpenter sat on a chair with his back to one of the room’s white walls and facing the Box’s door. He was a large man and the chair was rather too small to be comfortable. He’d asked Horden, the man who’d hired him, for a new chair. Carpenter thought that Horden, who was a sedentary, oversized, florid man himself, would be sympathetic to his request, but three weeks had passed so far and the chair had not been replaced.
For four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon Carpenter
was supposed to watch the Box. There was a red disk inset on the wall beside him and he was supposed to press this if anything untoward occurred. Untoward was Horden’s word. Supposedly the red disk was some kind of alarm.
Anne had picked him up in her Volkswagen after his first day at Chemitect.
She was glad he had got the job. He was really very lucky. Had he seen the unemployment count, going up and up? This was really a job he should try to hold onto. How had it gone?
The Volkswagen purred into life. Carpenter was happy to let Anne drive. He didn’t like the Volkswagen—its seats were too small for one thing—but it was cheap and it was economical to run and it was all they really needed.
He told her about the job, about how all it was just sitting there, you see, and watching this ... Well, he didn’t know what it was. It was big and square and shiny. Like a big, square shiny box. Yes, he meant he just sat there, he really did. On a chair. Well, wasn’t sitting in a clean room better than grease-monkeying? Yes, that was it, only this big square, shiny box, nothing else. What was in the box? Well, he didn’t know. It had a door so ... so he forgot about the door, just a door, nothing else. Well, it had a door, so he supposed there was something inside. Sure he’d asked. He’d asked Elleston...Who Elleston? He didn’t know who Elleston. Elleston relieved him at the end of his afternoon watch, Cochran stood in for him for two hours at lunchtime and Levinson—yes he thought he was Jewish—was the one he relieved in the morning. Yes, he’d asked all three, but none of them knew. None of them knew what—if anything—was in the box.
Orbit 8 - [Anthology] Page 17
