Eater

To

Mark Martin,

Jennifer Brehl,

Ralph Vicinanza

and

Vince Gerardis

…who all did their part.

Man is a small thing,
and the night is very large
and full of wonders

—LORD DUNSANY,
The Laughter of the Gods

a cognizant original v5 release november 12 2010

FEBRUARY

It began quietly.

Amy Major came into Benjamin’s office and with studied care placed a sheet in front of his tired eyes. “Got a funny one for you.”

Benjamin stared at the graph. In the middle of the page, a sharp peak poked up to a high level, then fell slowly to his right. He glanced at the bottom axis, showing time, and said, “So it died away in a few seconds. What’s so odd?”

Amy gave him an angular grin that he knew she thought made her look tough-minded and skeptical. He had always read that expression as stubborn, but then, she so often disagreed with him. “Here’s the second.”

“Second?” Maybe her grin was deserved.

With a suppressed smile, she handed him another sheet. Same sort of peak, subsiding into the background noise in four seconds. “Ho hum.” He raised his eyebrows in question, a look he had trained the staff to interpret as
Why are you wasting my time
?

“Could be any ordinary burster, right?”

“Yes.” Amy liked to play the elephantine game out in full.

“Only it’s a repeater.”

“Ah. How close?”

“In space, dead on. The prelim position is right on top of the first one’s.” Dramatic pause. “In time, 13.45 hours.”

“What?” Was this a joke? “Thirteen hours?”

“Yup.”

Gamma-ray bursters were cosmological explosions, the biggest Creation had ever devised. They showed up in the highest energy spectrum of all, the fat, powerful light that emerged when atomic nuclei fell apart. The preferred model describing bursters invoked a big black hole swallowing something else quite substantial, like a massive star. Bursters were the dyspeptic belch of a spectacularly large astrophysical meal. Each one devastated a seared region of the host galaxy.

Eaten once, a star could not be ingested again, thirteen hours later.

On the off chance that this was still a joke, he said with measured deliberation, “Now, that
is
interesting.” Always be positive at the beginning, or else staff would not come to you at all. He smiled wanly. “But the preliminary position is in a big box.”

This was more than a judicious reservation. It was almost certainly the true explanation. The two would prove to come from different points in the sky.

They got from the discovering instrument a rough location of the burster—a box drawn on the sky map, with the source within it somewhere. Sharpening that took other instruments specially designed for the job. Same for the second burster. Once they knew accurately where this second burst was, he was sure it would turn out to be far from the earlier burst, and the excitement would be over. Best to let her down slowly, though. “Still, let’s hope it’s something new.”

“Uh, I thought it was worth mentioning, Dr. Knowlton.” Her rawboned face retreated into defensive mode, mouth pursing up as if she had drawn a string through both lips. She had been the origin of the staff’s private name for him, Dr. Know-It-All-ton. That had hurt more than he had ever let on.

“And it is, it is. You asked Space Array for a quick location?”

“Sure, and sent out an alert to everybody on Gamma Net.”

“Great.”

She let her skeptic-hardnose mask slip a little. “It’s a real repeater. I just know it.”

“I hope you’re right.” He had been through dozens of cases of mistaken identity and Amy had not. She was a fine operations astronomer, skilled at sampling the steady stream of data that flowed through the High Energy Astrophysics Center, though a bit too earnest for his taste.

“I know, nobody’s ever seen a repeater this delayed,” she said.

“Minutes, yes. Hours, no.”

“But the prelim spectra look similar.”

“How many data points in the spectrum?”

“Uh, four.”

“Not nearly enough to tell anything for sure.”

“I’ve got a hunch.”

“And I have a crowded schedule.”

“I really think—”

“Hard for me to see what the rush is.”

“We might want to alert some other ’scopes right away, if this is important.”

Patience, patience. “I see.”

“I’m getting the first one’s full spectrum any minute,” she went on, beginning to pace. He realized that she had been holding herself in check until now. He reminded himself that enthusiasm was always good, though it needed guidance.

“I’ll give Attilio a ring, see if I can hurry things along,” he said, touching his desk and punching in a code.

“Oh,
great
, Dr. Knowlton.” A sudden smile.

He saw that this was the real point of her telling him so soon, before confirming evidence was in. He could help. Despite himself, he felt pleased. Not at this implied acknowledgment of his power, but at being included.

Every once in a while he got to analyze raw data. Perhaps even to invent an explanation, try it out, see his work as a whole thing. Every once in a while.

As he punched his finder-phone keypad, Amy started to leave. He waved her back. “No, stay.”

He got straight through and jollied Attilio with a moment of banter, speaking into the four-mike set in his desk. Attilio’s replies came through, clear and rich, though his lanky, always elegantly attired body was sitting in the shadow of the Alps. “You knew I would be in here this very morning,” Attilio said. “We are both working too hard.”

“We’re addicts.”

“Science addicts, yes, an obscure vice.”

Benjamin asked for a “little bit of a speedup” in processing and checking the two events. This took about fifteen minutes, most of it devoted to chat, but getting the job done all the same. An e-mail might have gotten the same results, but in his experience, not. All the talk of being systematic and highly organized left out the human need to gossip, even with people you seldom saw.

He finished the call with a promise from Attilio to get together next time Benjamin was in Europe and also, just incidentally, could he look into this second source right away?

“I was hoping you’d do that,” Amy said. She had been sitting on the edge of her seat the whole conversation, when she wasn’t up and pacing quickly, her long hair trailing in the air.

“I wanted you to hear the conversation, get a little experience with greasing the international gears.” Studying gamma-ray bursters was now not merely international but interplanetary, if one counted the many robot observers orbiting in the solar system. At least the spacecraft did not take so much massaging. Or grand meals at Center expense.

“Oh, I’ve learned pretty well how to work the system.”

“Sure, but you don’t know Attilio yet. He’s a great guy. I’ll take you to dinner with him, next AAS meeting. He’s giving an invited talk, I hear.”

“Meaning, you’re on the program committee.”

Benjamin grinned. “Caught me out.” As in every field, having friends on the right committees and boards and con
ferences was important, a game Benjamin had played quite often. “And I appreciate your bringing this to me so soon. I do like to look up from the paperwork every year or three and act like a real astronomer again.”

“Glad to.”

“You’ve been doing a good job here. Don’t think I don’t notice.”

She was nominally a postdoctoral researcher under his direction, but her appointment was about to convert over to full-time staff. Might as well build her up a bit for the disappointment to come, when Attilio called back.

Astronomy treated its students kindly, providing many tasks that were true, solid science and even might lead to an important result. The universe was still so poorly known that surprises lurked everywhere, especially when one had a new instrument with greater seeing power, or the ability to peer into a fresh region of the spectrum. The newer ’scopes were mostly distant hardware operated by a corps of technicians. Astronomers themselves ruled these by long distance, asking for spots in the night sky to be scrutinized, all over a Net connection. Nobody squinted through eyepieces anymore.

So it was with gamma-ray bursters. Long known, and still imperfectly understood, they now rewarded only the diligent with new phenomena. Amy was careful and energetic, perfect for mining the profusion of data. Bursters were still interesting but not really a hot topic any more. Benjamin ran the group that did most of the burster data organizing, plunked down here in Hawaii more for political reasons than scientific ones.

Since they dwelled at the very edge of the perceptible universe, bursters yielded their secrets only to careful study. As there was no telling where and when a burster would burst, one had to survey the entire sky. When a burster spat out its virulent, high-energy emissions, a network of telescopes went into operation, recording its brief life.

If a burster was truly different, a crowd of experienced ob
servers would rush in, analyzing data and offering interpretations at the speed of e-mail.

But Amy—and he—would have the honor of discovery.

“Hope it pans out,” he said kindly.

“Got to play your hunches, right? I’ll zap the VLA results to you at home if you want.”

“Yes, do.”

Had he been harder on her than he should have? He felt grumpy, a sure signal to withhold judgment. The situation with Channing had been getting so bleak lately, he had to defend against the black moods that could creep up on him whenever he got tired. He would have to watch that. It kept getting worse.

Amy went back to work and he noticed that it was well past 6 P.M. He had been due home half an hour ago. He felt a pang of guilt as he left, lugging his briefcase full of unread bureaucratic paper.

As he was getting into his convertible, a loud bang echoed from the rocky slope above. His head jerked up toward the radio array antennas perched along the upper plateau. Birds flapped away on the thin air. The array’s “shotgun” fired several times at sunset to scare away birds, who showed a fascination with building nests in the dishes of the radio telescopes. It was incredibly loud, not a gun at all, but fuel ignited in a tube. It also served to keep the birds from getting into the great domes of the optical telescopes farther up the mountain. Still, the blasts always unnerved him. The “shotgun” was just another aspect of working at the true focus of astronomy, the observing sites. It had been a pure stroke of luck, being offered his position here at the High Energy Astrophysics Center. A university appointment would have been more comfortable, but less exciting. Even if he did mostly push paper around these days.

Here was where astronomy still had some vestige of hands-on immediacy. All the high, dry sites around the globe were now thronged with telescopes that spied upward in every band of the electromagnetic spectrum: radio to gamma
ray, with many stops in between. Though data flew between observatories at the speed of light, there was still nothing quite like being able to walk over and talk to the people who had gathered it, see the new images as they formed on TV screens. Of course, the sharpest observations came from space, sent down by robot ’scopes. And he was quite sure that within a day those instruments would tell Amy that her second burster was no kin to the first.

He drove down the mountain, from the cool, thin air of the great slopes and into the moist clasp of Hawaii’s sprawling big island. Mauna Kea was a massive stack of restless stone, giving great spreading views of misty green, but he noticed none of it as he sped a little too much on the way down. He felt guilty about being late. Channing would be home from her doctor’s appointment and would probably have started making supper and he didn’t want her doing that. Either he would make it, or else take her out. Visits to Dr. Mendenham usually made her withdrawn and wore down her precarious confidence.

That was it—a good meal at the Reefman, maybe even some dancing if she was up to it. He had forgotten about Amy’s objects by the time he hit the easier part of the road, the lush tropical plain that ran down to the sea.