Space Eater (31 page)

“If there is any apparatus,” Winkel said, speaking from a long way away.

“I don’t like that talk,” said Smith nervously. “If something goes wrong we’ll all be dead.”

Rossa looked sort of dreamy. “_I_ remember...” she said. “You mentioned the pyramids—well, it’s from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. ‘Behind Thoth stands the female monster Amam, the Devourer, or Am-mit, the Eater of the Dead ... She has the forepart of a crocodile, the hindquarters of a hippo and the middle part of a lion.’ Which is, of course, as utterly irrelevant as anything can be.”

She’s flipped, I thought.

“A myth,” said Fusco like someone saying “A heap of dog shit.”

“No personal reference was intended,” said Rossa. “The Devourer, Ken, waits to eat your soul if your heart should fail when weighed against the feather of truth. She waits for each and other, she waits for all men born ... I
am
sorry. I’m talking sheer nonsense. The atmosphere isn’t exactly soothing.”

The buzz of talk in the War Room was getting louder as figures flickered and changed on the big screen.

We were all on edge. If we’d known what the damn thing was, even eight hundred Great Pyramids coming down right on top of us ... it would have been easier. Everyone’s afraid of what they can’t understand, and the more you heard about this “UFO,” the weirder it seemed.

Ronder came back and passed Winkel a wad of UTS paper, without saying anything. He squinted up at the big screen and mopped his face with a handkerchief, whether because he understood the figures or because he didn’t, it was hard to tell.

“If only it made
sense
,” said Smith as though someone were slowly twisting at his balls.

Winkel turned over the pages. The dead machine voice narrowed down our life expectancies to a bit under 500 hours (plus or minus 10 percent). General Skene came wandering over to mention that the

“special warheads” would be up at the
Overlord
station in a shade under fifteen hours. Winkel stopped, went back a page. Did we all stand here for 500 hours plus or minus 10 percent, waiting, or was there any chance of something to eat? The anthill crowd was thinning out now; maybe the word had got around that StraProgCom had made its decision so everything had to be just fine...

Then Winkel let go of the UTS interrogation report and it went whirring to the ground like a lurid orange-barred duck. (Smith bent to pick it up, giving Winkel reproachful looks; in Smith’s world you didn’t do that sort of thing with UTS papers.) He got out a notepad and scribbled; he looked up every so often and seemed to be copying from an invisible reference book about halfway up to the ceiling. I could see the long S of the integral sign here and there on the notepaper. Then, at last, when he was presumably sure everyone nearby was watching, he nodded his head with vast emphasis, and looked around.

“Next,” said Rossa softly, “he will tear off his clothes and dance naked about the room, shouting

‘Eureka!’ at erratic intervals.” I grinned at her. This was Winkel’s big moment; let him enjoy it all he could.

“You’re on to something, Chris,” Fusco snapped. “Let’s hear it.”

He started to look not so pleased with himself as (I guessed) he made the connections between his lovely mathematical pictures and the mess in the real world. “Oh dear,” he said. “Those nullbombs.” He bent back to the notepad and scribbled more figures. The result didn’t seem to make him any happier.

“We might as well forget the nullbomb attack for a start. If I have it right, a million-megaton energy release at one-meter range won’t transfer enough energy to this thing to, to light a match. I make it about ten ergs. The nullbombs are futile.”

Fusco simply looked angry. Ronder said, “What is the UFO?”

“Jacklin was right. It’s a devourer. It’s going to eat us all and we can’t stop it. Major Fusco, you know your physics—what’s as near as dammit a point source and still weighs about 2 times 10^13 kilos?”

“Doctor Winkel, I am not here to play games ... Oh, I suppose a black hole would do it, approximately.

No such thing as a true point source in nature. Look, that thing out there isn’t black.”

“Excellent,” said Winkel. “A black hole. A body so massive and dense that even light cannot escape from it, unquote. You gave me the clue, Jacklin, and thank you very much. Remember? Your interrogation where you, er, revealed that the Earth project had discussed the affinity between minigates and black holes? I do wish I could talk with those people. No doubt one can home in on a black hole rather as you say your people homed in on our own MT work. Risky business, I should imagine!”

“Winkel, darling,” said Fusco gently, “you need a rest. The UFO is not black. The UFO is putting out hundreds of megawatts of radiation. Would you like to lie down a while?”

Winkel sniffed. “Some people are
centuries
behind the times. Hawking showed way back in the 1970s that small black holes are
not
black. 2 times 10^13 kilos is tiny—a black hole that size had radius around 3 times 10^-13 meters. That’s small enough that there’s a definite quantum uncertainty in the event-horizon radius—energy comes leaking out like crazy! (That’s not a rigorous treatment of the problem, mind you.) The effective surface temperature works out on the order of 10^9 degreesK, which checks very nicely with the observations. It simply has to be the answer.”

“It’s not the answer,” Fusco said. “It’s the problem. Will this—I can’t call it a black hole, it sounds ridiculous—will it all have leaked away before it gets here? It can’t have long to go with an emission rate like that.”

“I worked that out too,” said Winkel as if he were apologizing to her personally. “I make it around 10^13 years lifetime. Roughly.”

“Then what the hell’s going to happen?” I asked. “What was that about the nullbombs again?”

“The area of the target, so to speak, that’s the problem. This object is about 3 times 10^-27 meters in area—we can’t come near the energy densities you need to throw anything significant into an area that small. As I said, a teraton explosion at one meter’s range would transfer something like ten ergs. All the rest wasted on empty space. Piffling.”

Fusco looked shrewd. “There’d be a gravitational focusing effect, though.”

“Negligible, I think, in this context,” said Winkel sadly. He sketched out the rest of the picture for us and it kept on getting grimmer with every new line. The object would fall clear to Pallas and hit at something much less than escape velocity. Its pull was over 135 gravities at one-meter radius, so it would happily scoop out a tunnel for itself and carry straight on through Pallas without stopping. By the time it got through, on a curved path because of the world’s spin, it would be one hell of a lot heavier from all the mass it had sucked in. It would swing out and fall back again—and again and again. Every time it passed through it was going to be a happier and heavier black hole; every time it passed through it would be a good bit cooler because (I didn’t quite see why) bigger black holes don’t leak so much as little ones—sounds just like people and toilet training. After a few swings it wouldn’t even come above ground—just orbit inside Pallas gobbling away like a maggot in an apple. When it was bloated enough it would settle dead center and let the planet fall in on it. The happy ending was going to be when the hole had finished Pallas and got quite cold. Then, Winkel said, there’d just be the hole, a little moving blot in space not quite a centimeter in radius—a happy hole because now it would be big and nonleaky enough to last approximately forever.

So it was all planned—a happy ending for the hole but not much of one for Winkel and Fusco and Rossa and myself and all the other people and things on Pallas that were just more tasty mass as far as the DEVOURER was concerned.

“Technically, of course,” Winkel said, “technically it should be possible to feed a massive electric charge into the thing—from accelerators, you know—and
manipulate
it electrostatically.”

“Can we do it in—what’s the latest figure -- 495 hours?” Fusco said.

“Certainly not.”

“Then it’s by no means a final
warning
. It’s final, absolutely final.
Damn
every single one of your fucking people,” she shouted at me, Rossa or probably both of us.

What I had to say then was just too obvious for words—something Winkel wouldn’t have thought of but something Rossa and I had been forced to think about more than we wanted. I had to get myself braced against disappointment before I said it...

Rossa said, “How
big
did you say this object was?” She’d beaten me to it. I caught her eye and winked to let her know it had been a close thing.

“Radius approximately 3 times 10^-14 meters. Almost invisibly tiny; a point source or nearly so ... say, ten times the size of an electron.”

“Then,” (she grinned at me) “I think Ken has something to tell you.”

I wanted to laugh—gallows jokes again, or something. But I asked it.

Winkel thought for a little while. “Impossible,” he said finally, and shook his head.

Twenty-Eight

It certainly is a wonderful thing, that minigate. Ellan used to claim someone had once used it to commit murder in a locked and sealed room. Wui and Lowenstein had loved the idea of pouring bits of sun through the hole. And we knew all about what it could do in the way of second-class travel ... Now Winkel had worked out a new trick—only the Tunnel staff had thought of it first.

You take a version of the minigate apparatus, the large-size tunable one they used in Tunnel, and you point it (or you tune it—Winkel wasn’t 100 percent sure) at a black hole. There are a good many black holes lying around in space, thick as potholes on the old North Circular Road, only you don’t see them on account of their being black. Distance is no object with the minigate, and your hole can be dozens of light-years away ... but if you’ve any sense you don’t do this trick from your own lab. That was one MT

mistake no one on Earth had ever made—I knew that because Earth was still there when I last looked.

What you do to make sure your planet stays there is to build the apparatus way out in space. You might even do it at two removes—double-safe—by first building this silly great spacegoing factory (which will come in handy when you want to send out a couple of suckers) with an outsize airlock. The DEVOURER package sails off into the dark; even if Corvus Station gets smeared it’ll still be out there, ready to fail-dangerous.

It’s one hell of a neat way to sweep your problems under the carpet if people won’t stop MT research when you tell them.

The small details of the difference between homing in on a big black hole and conjuring up a tiny one ...

that was where Winkel was guessing, but it made sense. The minigate comes on: all right. Two zones of space are joined together by a 1.9-centimeter peephole, one next to the MT apparatus two million kilometers out from Pallas and the other inside a big black hole, an old collapsed star a few kilometers across. What happens then, Winkel guessed, is something called the law of cosmic censorship that says you can’t see into a black hole. An event horizon, the hole’s outer surface where light just fails to get away, starts to form across the minigate opening—so it tries to be a dead black disc. But long before
that
can happen, gravity goes crazy, black-hole gravity leaking through the gate. The generating apparatus breaks apart and gets shredded by gravity differences as it falls into the hole, like the famous oozelum bird that flies around in ever-decreasing circles until it vanishes up its own orifice. So the contact’s broken before the event horizon is quite formed and it’s “as you were”...

...except that even a partial event horizon can’t just vanish

“A
very
unscientific way of putting it,” Winkel said critically, “would be to say that part of the black hole is nipped away when the gate closes, as though the gate were a closing cigar cutter. Think of that, nipping a piece off a black hole! It collapses into spherical form and there you are. The proper laws of physics are back in charge, and a good thing too.”

And what’s left is a microscopic point in space that you can’t even get near, that’ll roast you with its energy leakage and rip you apart with its gravity slope before you ever come close. The DEVOURER.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Fusco, twining her fingers into knots.

“Try telling that to the thing up there—no rush,” I said. “We’ve got an appointment with it in 494 hours plus or minus a bit. How about something to eat?”

“Corrected estimate of direct collision probability 93 percent—“

“It’s impossible to
think
in here,” Fusco said while the dead voice was still telling its tale. That sounded a mite unfair to her good friend Winkel, who seemed to have been thinking rather effectively. “Suppose we can’t fight this thing on an empty stomach. Ronder—“

By now I had young Ronder pegged as StraProgCom’s errand boy. He was told to cancel the nullbombing run and have the nasties stored on arrival at the
Overlord
station, pending instructions. Come to think of it...

“I guess we haven’t time to send a few more people back to Earth, the second-class route?” I said to Rossa. “If this place is all washed up—“

“That would depend on Tunnel opening the door from their end ... if Tunnel still exists. And now we know what ultimate unpleasantness they had in store, I really cannot see them taking the chance. They never spoke of opening the gate again, remember, or of any return journey. Their game-theory experts will be advising Central never to risk what Pallas can do now for revenge...” Her dark eyes met mine, in a brief silence; then Fusco snapped her fingers as she left the War Room and we followed with Winkel tagging on behind.

“Mmm, yes,” I said. “If they warm up their MT rigs now, someone could home in, start the whole Corvus Station racket in
the
solar system, nullbomb the planet, the lot.”

“As things stand there’ll scarcely be time,” she said. “So that won’t make any difference. Ken, I’m still clinging to the hope that this isn’t
necessarily
the end of everything.”