Eater Page 5

  So astronomers avoided their home planet if they could. Placing large Big Eyes at Earth’s Lagrangian points helped—orbiting sixty degrees fore and aft of the moon’s position in its orbit, far from the blue-white glare of the planet’s ocean and sky.

  Without the sunlight reflected from the Earth’s disk, telescopes could cool to a few degrees above absolute zero. This helped enormously when looking in the infrared, for then the telescope body itself did not emit much radiation at the crucial frequencies. With a hundred times the area of the much earlier Hubble Space Telescope, the Big Eyes could see dim objects a hundred times fainter.

  But when pointed at the elusive quarry, the Big Eyes showed only a dim blur. They could not see in enough detail to tell what it was. As Kingsley remarked acerbically, two further days of effort on a global scale served merely to give it a name. One was suggested by Channing in an offhand moment: “X-1.” She had explained, “X because we don’t know what the hell it is, and one because there may be more.”

  But it sounded too much like a weapon or jet plane, so everyone just called it “the intruder.”

  Stymied, the worldwide network of observers went back to telescopes firmly fixed on Mother Earth.

  Earth-based instruments used adaptive optics—mirrors that adjusted second to second, offsetting the dancing refractions of the air above them. Several of these sat atop Mauna Kea, the best all-around observing spot in the world. The aim of the newest sixteen-meter reflector ’scope, using adaptive mirrors, was to fetch forth images of Jupiter-sized planets orbiting nearby stars. Pricey Earth-based ’scopes were still far cheaper than space eyes, which had to carry a guidance system to keep them pointed accurately while orbiting at 27,000 kilometers per hour.

  But the sixteen-meter ’scope could not resolve the blob of visible light that “X-1” gave off.

  To reliably see another star’s Jupiter-sized planets, humanity had to go to its own Jupiter—or rather, to send a robot. Able to see in the infrared with meticulous accuracy, the Deep Space Infrared Telescope hung as far from the sun as Jupiter itself, orbiting high above the ecliptic plane. This kept it cold and out of the plane of dust that clogged the inner solar system. The enemy of good, deep “seeing”—to use the astronomer’s jargon—was the glow of sunlight scattered by that orbiting debris. Its dim radiance had been discovered in 1661 and it was still termed the “zodiacal light.” In excellent seeing conditions, from Earth one could watch the plane of dim gray light stretch across a winter’s night. This dust-reflected sunlight perpetually brightened the sky of the inner solar system. The dust declined in density far from the sun, and sunlight dimmed, so that now astronomers were driven to the outer reaches.

  There a thin beam orbited, a hundred meters long and crafted to within a ten-thousandth of a millimeter: the Long Eye. To see a planet around another sun demanded that the Long Eye blot out the star’s infrared emission, which was a million times brighter than the world being sought. Then the telescopes spaced at regular intervals along the length compared the phases of the light they received from near the star. Matching and subtracting, an onboard computer sifted through a torrent of noise for the faint, steady signal of a tiny planet, sending out the message of its own existence.

  Standing beneath a clear sky, one’s unaided eye could see details on the moon about a tenth of the moon’s diameter. At the same distance, a Big Eye ’scope typical of those standing on Mauna Kea could make out an astronaut standing on the moon. With the Long Eye—and some luck—one could make out the astronaut holding up fingers—and count them.

  The Long Eye was painstakingly studying the zone around likely candidate stars, seeking evidence of life. By looking carefully at each color of the light from the target world, it could in principle see the fine details of absorption by water, oxygen, or carbon dioxide—telltale gases of life.

  This stretched array now searched for a dot at the very edge of the solar system, a target its designers had never conceived.

  “Got it!” Amy cried, jabbing at a large computer screen. The data had just come over the astro-Net connection.

  They crowded around. The de facto working group was only four: Amy, Kingsley, Benjamin, and Channing. Of course there were subgroups laboring over parts of the problem, but by unspoken agreement they had started meeting in each others’ offices whenever a fresh piece of data seemed in the offing. Martinez had approved this catch-as-catch-can method, suggesting to Benjamin, “Whatever works, go for it.”

  They all took in the new result at a glance. There were small gasps. But they left it to Channing to note her own triumph. “Looks pretty small.” A bright spot sat at one end of the radio finger: starship-like.

  “It’s fully resolved, though,” Amy said. “Looks like a circle. A moon? At its distance, let’s see…ten milliarc-seconds…Geez. No moon, not at all. It’s only a few kilometers across.”

  “What? That can’t be right.” Kingsley peered at the screen’s side panel of data and gazed off into space, making his own reckoning. He blinked. “Um. I’m afraid it is.”

  “Afraid?” Benjamin chided.

  “Because it means something is wrong with Channing’s rather nice piece of work from two days ago. This object cannot have the mass of a moon. It’s far too small.”

  Benjamin wanted to defend her, but Channing spoke up quickly, despite a fog of fatigue that had descended upon her in the last hour. Damned if I’ll leave early today, she thought adamantly, and let Kingsley call the tune.

  If only her head would stop spinning…“Let’s not rule out anything until we fit the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle together.”

  Kingsley said in a let’s-be-reasonable tone, “Your estimate included a characteristic size, which we now see was far too large. So you derived a larger mass—”

  “Not so fast,” Channing said. “What’s the rest of the Long Eye results?”

  Benjamin punched some keys and peered at a sidebar that popped up. “They’re logging in the spectrum…processing…Looks like an excess of blue shifts.”

  Channing beamed in a way that, from his expression, she could tell that Benjamin had not seen for a long time. “Which means it’s decelerating.”

  “Just as you said,” Kingsley allowed. “That I’ll grant. But your calculation still makes no sense—quantitatively.”

  “Look,” Channing pressed back, “I estimated in my first equation—”

  “We’re missing the big point, aren’t we?” Plainly Benjamin decided to intervene before talk descended into another technical wrangle, as it had so much these last few days. Often the devil was indeed in the details, but he had a way of pulling specialists, including most definitely herself, away from their narrow issues to face the larger picture.

  Kingsley smiled, seeing the point. “It is deliberately slowing to enter the solar system? The starship hypothesis.”

  “But to be so bright, it must have a huge mass,” Channing said. “No starship would be so heavy.”

  Benjamin nodded. “A big contradiction.”

  Long silence. She had often heard historians of science go on about how a great scientist had the courage of his convictions, stuck it out through opposition, and so on. Until this moment she had not felt the implied sense—that sometimes you had to take the big leap: buy two apparently conflicting ideas and fuse them.

  Should she? What the hell, you only die once.

  “Maybe we’re both right. It’s a lot of mass packed into a tiny package.” She had to put all her effort into getting the rest of the words out. Her mind was perking along just fine, but her body wanted to curl up and go to sleep. “After all, that few kilometers across is an upper scale. This thing must be lighting up a lot of gas around it. It could be smaller than we think. A lot smaller, even.”

  They all looked at each other. Another long silence.

  She thought giddily, He who laughs last just thinks slower, but nobody laughed at her implication. To her vast and abstractly distant surprise, they all, one by one, nod
ded.

  Within the hour, Channing was leaning back and breathing steadily, just holding on to watch the show. It took fewer muscles to smile than to frown, sure enough, and fewer still to ignore people completely. But she had shrugged off Benjamin’s efforts to take her home.

  She heard boss lady Martinez say tensely, “I’ve got to get up to NASA, NSF. Maybe even on to the White House.” She smiled slightly, relishing the moment. Even if she was feeling light-headed and Martinez’s words did come hollow-voiced, like a speech given down a long tin pipe.

  Not a moon, no. Something much more interesting.

  PART TWO

  FAST LANE SCIENCE

  MARCH

  1

  The pinnacle of Mauna Kea stands a full mile above a deck of marshmallow clouds that at sunset turn salmon pink. In late afternoon the sun seems to lower into a softly burning plain that stretches to the horizons. When the volcanoes that built the island belch, the underbellies of the clouds take on a devilish cast where they hover over the seethe of lava. Beneath these, black chunks of razor-sharp, cooled lava render the landscape stark, brooding, and ominous. Nature here seems blunt, brutal, and remorseless.

  Yet above all this churn, three hundred tons of gleaming steel and glass pirouette as gracefully as—and far more precisely than—any ballerina. No dancer has ever been required to set herself to within a tiny fraction of a millimeter.

  Once in position, the biggest optical telescope in the world then commands the two jaws of the covering hatches to yawn, their slow grind echoing as the ’scope drinks the first light of evening. Here is where the best and brightest come to find the farthest and dimmest. That Hawaii is the most isolated landmass on Earth with the highest pinnacle gives it an advantage in the steadiness of its air. The flat ocean keeps the air stably warm over the islands. Air’s usual small flutters cause stars to dance like shiny pennies seen at the bottom of a swimming pool. Over the peak of Mauna Kea air flows more smoothly than above any other high site in the world. The trade winds blow steady and level far beneath the realm of the telescopes.

  These conditions drew astronomers, the only major life-form at this height. Up a road left deliberately rough they brought their white observing pods, immaculate domes like enormous pale mushrooms. The venerable twin Keck telescopes had ruled over this realm since their construction in the 1990s, though they were no longer the largest of their breed. An even larger dome stood in the distance, but Benjamin thought the Kecks were the more beautiful. With two thirty-three-foot mirrors made from thirty-six segments, each such light-bucket was separately movable, swiveling in an echo to the dance of the heavens above. The two mirrors were in tubes eight stories tall, each floating so precisely on oil bearings that a single hand could move them.

  Not that such maneuvers were left to mere human means. Elaborate systems guided these tubes, for the human mind operating at 13,800 feet quickly lost its edge. That was why Benjamin seldom came to this height, yet today, on a whim, he had driven up. To clear his head, he had explained to others, whereas the altitude had the opposite effect. He gasped for air after even a modest climb. Pointless, really, to think that he could mull over an idea up here, where his brain was losing cells every moment to oxygen starvation.

  But today there was something about the perspective, in the slanted rays of late afternoon, that seemed to fit the scale of the idea he was carrying. Intelligence and technology ruled these barren heights. Against the cruel powers of vulcanism, which had shaped the islands, mere men had set up here a citadel of intricate artifice, dedicated to pure knowledge and the expansion of horizons. In the face of the world’s raw rub, and especially whenever he allowed himself to truly think about what was coming for Channing, the view from this majestic height was ennobling.

  Right now, he needed that. He drank it in.

  If life could work its wonder upon so hostile a place, what other forbidding sites in the universe could play host to mentality? The ’scopes around him were preparing for the coming night, to chip away at answers to such questions. Eternal questions—until now.

  Then his portable phone rang, dragging him back into the momentary world. It was a double ring, one of the codes they had introduced at the Center to get priority attention.

  Well, it was about time, anyway. His walk up here had left him panting and somehow had clarified his resolve.

  On his way down, he distracted himself by trying to find the FM station that played rock from the decade when you cared about it—the working definition of the Good Old Days.

  Channing had insisted on being there when he presented his idea. Brimming now with resolve, he called her on the way down. She sounded quite cheery, her tone lifting at the end of sentences, a good sign. He had become fairly good at detecting when she was covering up. So when she came into the seminar room, he was startled at the drawn gray pallor of her face. Plainly it had cost her considerably to come up to the Center for this, a drive of several miles in the usual clogged traffic on narrow two-lane blacktop.

  Above the gray cast her eyes sparkled with an energy that was intellectual, not physical—all that seemed capable of driving her now. He felt a pang of guilt; he should have driven home and picked her up. In fact, he had offered to, but she had shrugged it off, saying that she wanted to do some shopping later, anyway. This now looked completely implausible; he doubted that she would have the energy. But then, she had surprised him before with her desire to still visit dress shops, searching for just the right little item that would “cover the damage,” as she put it. He embraced her gingerly, felt an answering throb in her body. Or at least he hoped it meant that, and was not one of the tremors he sometimes felt pass through her while she was asleep in bed, like an impersonal ocean wave bearing all before it.

  He had decided to limit this to the usual four people, plus Victoria Martinez. If he proved utterly wrong, which he had to admit was quite probable, at least the number of witnesses to his embarrassment would be manageable.

  He got Channing a cup of tea and she took three of her pills along with it. By then the other three were gathered around the seminar table and he began, trying not to seem unsure, though he was.

  “How many bursts from the intruder, this ‘X-1’ object, have we recorded so far, Amy?” He knew, of course, but like a lawyer in a courtroom, a seminar speaker should never ask a question whose answer was not readily at hand.

  “Seven.” She held out the trace printouts and he waved them aside.

  “Far too many. That’s my argument in a nutshell.” Benjamin had wanted to create a dramatic effect, but saw instantly that this was too much of a jump. Victoria and Amy looked puzzled, Channing startled. He would have to be more orderly, he saw; one of his many speaking faults was a tendency to get ahead of himself. A closed mouth gathers no feet.

  Kingsley frowned, his lips drawn into a thin skeptical line. “Since we don’t know the mechanism…”

  “But we all have one in mind, don’t we?” Channing chimed in. “The energetic intruder smashing into iceteroids.”

  “Haven’t heard that term before. Ice asteroids, is it?” Kingsley said amiably as he turned toward her, his face quickly changing to solicitous concern, voice filling with warmth. “True enough, I had been making a few calculations assuming that—”

  “And they work out, don’t they?” Benjamin said. “Order of magnitude, anyway.”

  Kingsley said, “I can get the gamma rays, all right. It’s the radio tail I’m having trouble with. How does it form?”

  Amy said, “Can’t it be made pretty much the way galactic jets do?”

  Benjamin was bemused by this, for he had not known Amy to venture into that realm of astrophysics. Apparently, like the rest of them, she had been doing a lot of homework. He nodded. “It could. We can get to that. But let’s stick to my main point. How often should we see a burst, if the iceteroid idea is right?”

  “Depends on the thing’s speed,” Kingsley said.

  “Which we know from the Dop
pler shifts to be about a hundredth of the speed of light,” Amy said. “I just finished pulling that number out of the data. The spectral fields were sorta messed up, plenty of broad lines, a real jungle.”

  “Before we get to my reasoning, let’s hear Amy’s results.” She should have her chance to shine, he thought, and then I can get a fresh start myself. She got up with a few viewgraphs, blushing becomingly.

  If the entire solar system, including dim Pluto, were reduced to the size of a human fingertip, the bulk of the Oort cloud of iceballs would lie ten yards away from that finger. Space was indeed vast—and empty. But contrary to their first guesses, the intruder was not so far away. Amy had located it pretty decisively by timing the movements of bright parts of the radio tail and then making plausible arguments about how fast such radio-emitting plasma balls could move. She had showed that the intruder was only a bit beyond the distance of Pluto from the sun, or forty times the Earth-sun distance. A cometary nucleus would take years to fall inward 41 Astronomical Units, but this thing was moving much faster.

  “Good work, yes,” Kingsley said. He then offered his own reprise of her results—“to see if I’ve gotten it straight.”

  Benjamin noted how Kingsley often used the flattering conversational manner of beginning his next sentence by repeating another’s words, peppering his talk with references to others’ contributions and generally seeming modest. It paid off; scientists were stingy with praise and a few strokes worked wonders on their mood. After thrashing through the data a bit more, everyone present seemed settled.

  The intruder was about 50 Astronomical Units out, somewhat beyond the range of Pluto’s orbit. It was coming in at about a thirty-degree angle with respect to the plane the planets orbited in, the ecliptic. As Channing put it, “The thing’s pretty close—and closing fast.”

  They all looked at each other. Unspoken was their growing sense of strangeness.