Eater Read online

  With lacerating sarcasm, Channing made fun of the U types, reminding them that she had some dealings with the Agency in her “spacesuit days.” Her eyes danced with memories. “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity, and they’ve got plenty of both.”

  Benjamin felt their home around them like a warm cocoon and hoped that it could be a quiet refuge from the growing tumult outside as word inevitably spread. Something big was coming, and he was not ready. Above he saw the spray of glimmering that was the plane of the galaxy, the Milky Way, and wondered from which, of all those stars, this thing had come. It had been gobbling up iceteroids for some time, no doubt, so its initial incoming direction was no clue. It could be from anywhere. Given the vast spaces between the suns, it could have been traveling for centuries, millennia. And what unimaginable technology lay behind the downright weird signatures of the intruder?

  Starship? The word seemed inadequate for the energies the thing poured forth. They needed a better term, a name that carried the mystery of it.

  4

  Channing gave it a name that stuck, within a week. One much better than “X-1” or “intruder.”

  To concentrate and save her energy, she worked in the quiet of her home study. A doctor had told her that fighting this disease would be like the late career of a fading boxer: pacing yourself, resting when you could, so you could go a few hard rounds when you had to. She had a countdown to heed, and now the Center had one, too, with the intruder.

  A few days after the entrance of the U Agency, she noticed a small detail in the high-resolution pictures of the intruder’s spectacular collisions.

  The hottest region had an extended magnetosphere, a glowing dot that kept expanding with each collision. She compared images from all available kinds of telescopes—starting with the radio’s spindly jet, up through an infrared blur of hot gas, on into the visible spectra that revealed sharp streamers of agitated atoms arcing like geysers from the core, and finally on into the X rays that showed a white-hot center of intense heat, a seething central furnace that grew larger with every collision.

  The entire range of deep space telescopes now sent images to the Center, a gusher of data each time the intruder devoured another hapless chunk of matter in its path. One collision had decidedly different spectral signatures. Careful analysis showed emission lines from silicon, carbon, iron. It had struck an asteroid. With the same outcome—a jet of microwave-emitting electrons, hot gas, and plasma, trailing the intruder, a neon sign seen all the way across the solar system.

  Overlaying all these results with some sophisticated graphics, she got a consistent picture.

  The strong magnetic field was building in a huge active region, lighting up brilliantly, growing. She suggested some adroit observations, brought them to Kingsley’s attention, and soon enough the big-dish “ears” of Earth’s radio telescope net were mapping the moving magnetic region in intricate detail. They were the first to see a bull’s-eye disk, with circular lanes of varying luminosity centered on an unresolved blur.

  So she took it into the Center and the Gang of Four. “Looks like a target,” Benjamin said. “A bull’s-eye.”

  “An accretion disk,” Kingsley observed dryly, his expression showing his lifelong dislike of homey analogies for astrophysical objects. “The mass it has acquired is spiraling in. It collides, rubs, and gets warm. Hot enough and the matter emits radiation.” He nodded to Channing, who sat at the controls of one of their big-screen displays—a fresh compensation for their enforced collaboration with the U Agency, who had just installed higher-power computers and flat-screen displays of eye-opening quality. “Your working hypothesis is proved.”

  “I’m that obvious?” Channing was slightly miffed at having her thunder stolen.

  Benjamin called up from the massive Center computers his compilation of the radio telescope data. Using Channing’s discovery of the high magnetic fields, they had been able to take quick snapshot-like radio maps of the inner region.

  “Here, I’ve made it into a film,” Benjamin said. “It even has a plot, sort of.”

  The view opened far out in deep space, our sun a mere glimmering spark. In an overlay, Channing saw vast swarms of rock and iceteroids orbiting. Suddenly a strange glowing disk like an uncoiling silvery snake plunged across the field of view. It struck an iceteroid with a brilliant flash. Gaudy luminous streamers clasped the doomed mile-wide chunk of ice.

  “They were lucky enough to get a series of maps and optical images when it hit its latest victim,” Benjamin said to the darkened room. “I’ve blended them here.”

  The snake coiled up and deformed, becoming all mouth. Blue-hot, it gnawed its way through the ice. Channing knew that at its speeds, these had to be images made in slices finer than a millisecond. The eerie beauty of it was captivating, the lapping strands of magnetic fields flickering among the flying fragments.

  Then something luminous emerged like a wasp from a cocoon at the other side of an expanding ball of hot gas. The intruder moved on, now bearing a halo like an immense multicolored rainbow around a central bright hoop. But within the inner ring lay an utterly black core. The rainbow was a momentarily expanded disk of matter, she guessed, a hundred-kilometer-wide firework accelerating inward.

  “So we have seen the beast at last,” she murmured into the shocked silence of the room as the images faded to black.

  Benjamin stood next to the big screen, his suntan giving him an odd bronzed look in the small lamp of the speaker’s podium. A casual audience of astronomers who had come in for the show peppered him with questions and he fielded them well, the distances and times and resolutions at his fingertips.

  She let the moment wash over her. To her surprise, she had not been surprised. It looked just the way she had seen it in her dreams. Fevered, troubled dreams.

  Finally Kingsley got her attention by addressing a public question to her. “You hinted by e-mail that you had a name for the object,” Kingsley said with amusement.

  “I suggest we call it the Eater of All Things.”

  “Because it is a black hole,” Kingsley finished for her.

  “Exactly,” Benjamin put in. “I kept the secret pretty well while she massaged her data, but I’ll bet half the people here have been thinking the same thing—without saying so.”

  This was the first truly public announcement. They looked at each other silently, so it was left to Amy Major to say, “You don’t want to alarm the U people, correct?”

  “Right,” Benjamin said. “The spectral shifts—those reds and blues we found early on, remember? They fit the black hole idea. Now we can see it trapping mass. Case closed.”

  Channing leaned back and regarded their Gang of Four in the Big Screen Room, as the U types had labeled it. They had slapped labels on rooms all over the Center. “I hope we’re under no illusions that all this data isn’t being copied by the U computers they just installed. They’ll have this processed shot of Benjamin’s by now.”

  “And they are far from dumb,” Kingsley agreed. “Particularly the newest fellow, Randall. Knew him on a visiting appointment at Harvard, before he went ‘underground,’ as the U people say.”

  “Into classified work,” Benjamin supplied for Amy.

  “Oh.” Amy seemed startled that an astronomer would go into any other line. Her expression plainly said, Once you understand how big and wonderful the universe is, how could you do anything else?

  Channing permitted herself a nostalgic smile, remembering when she had worn just such an earnest expression—and had meant it.

  5

  Benjamin had a pad mounted on a tree in the garden, ostensibly for a dartboard. He and Kingsley had a game or two in the next few days, Kingsley casually tossing with his unerring accuracy born of a thousand pub crawls, winning easily. Afterward Benjamin took the board back inside to keep it out of the dependable tropical rain showers and then had considerable use for the cushion’s other, secret purpose. Often when he got home he
would take a stroll in the garden while Channing finished making dinner, her favorite daily task. When he reached the portion out of view of the house, he would approach the cushion and give it half a dozen good, solid punches. He had discovered this outlet years before and realized quite well that his need of it told him something about his feelings.

  He made good use of the cushion every evening now. As the flood of data deepened, he staked out a clear position that learning more is the best short-term goal. In this the Center staff backed him solidly.

  “Ummm,” Channing said over a dinner of baked ono in papaya-ginger sauce, “and good ol’ savvy Kingsley sees this as a power clash from which he can profit.”

  “Uh, yes. I was going to put it a little more delicately—”

  “To that Arno guy you can be diplomatic, but it’s wasted on me, dear. Kingsley is just staying in character. The U Agency isn’t using a hobnailed boots approach; they’re smarter than that. It’s more what we used to call at NASA a ‘soft presence’ style—you know they’re there and can take over the operation in a millisecond, and they convey that without saying anything.”

  Benjamin admired how she could sum up what had taken him days to realize. “Yup, subtle they are.”

  “So far.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They don’t have to stay that way.”

  He was having trouble river-rafting in the fast administrative U Agency waters. They operated as if they knew what mattered before they asked questions, so the answers had better fit their expectations. And pronto. He heard “cut to the chase” several times a day. “I keep getting signals like that,” he admitted.

  “I’m not there all the time, so maybe I can see it in a clearer perspective. Everybody’s getting more tense and the whole thing is going to crack open pretty soon.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Kingsley handled the public announcement very well, but it’s a stopgap.”

  “He can keep on handling it, for all I care.” Benjamin had found the whole press conference an anxiety squeeze from start to finish. He had not mastered the art of saying only enough to cover the subject, avoiding any speculation even when badgered.

  So it had been no surprise when Martinez gave Kingsley the spokesman job. He had downplayed any danger, though of course the mainstream reporters leaped on that immediately, implying with sneers and eyebrows yet another “cover-up.” Yet somehow, with a few quiet prebriefings and some postbriefing hospitality to various opinion-setters, Kingsley had managed to get just the right media angle: huge global interest, but so far, just curiosity.

  “It helps that there’s this new water war between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Plenty of juicy footage,” Channing said.

  “Oh, I hadn’t noticed.”

  “That’s why he’s Astronomer Royal. He timed the press conference in late afternoon, when the global news coverage was already locked up, plenty of shooting scenes ready to go.”

  “I hope that explains why some of the U Agency’s hired-gun astronomers have been arranging to get their own private channels of information.”

  “How?” She had been serenely distant so far, picking at her fish, but now frowned.

  “Getting their own simultaneous feeds on the Long Arm data, among others.”

  “A precaution?”

  “Against who? Me? I can’t see them worried about that.”

  “How can we be sure the data stays in-house?”

  “We can’t, not now.”

  “They want to have somebody on the outside checking us?”

  He felt pleased that she had arrived at his conclusion. Her instincts were good for this kind of infighting, a legacy of her NASA days, whereas his had been dulled by years of routine administration.

  “So what can I do?”

  “Nothing. It’s probably a Kingsley maneuver we don’t understand yet.”

  “I hope so.”

  There had been several such. As Kingsley had warned, there were “side effects” of working with the U Agency umbrella over them. Their home and his apartment had been carefully invaded, searched, analyzed—purely pro forma, of course—and then just as carefully put back as they were. Their electronic records had yielded e-mail addresses, and most valuably, the system still carried the signatures of recent use. This gave the e-mail paths of Kingsley’s recent messages, though even to the best of agents the system could not divulge their content; that was erased. The Agency and those over it did not realize that his leaving the e-mail tags in place was a neat way of ensuring that his correspondents would be rounded up and brought to him, to keep the lid on word of the intruder.

  In this manner, he gained a few people he had not asked for, explaining that some nuance was a good idea in these matters. Kingsley also hoped that they did not catch on when, earlier, he had deliberately been rude to several bureaucratic figures, precisely to provoke this measure. Of this last touch he was openly proud; “actually Machiavellian,” he termed it.

  But the next day, when the two of them caught Kingsley alone for a moment and pressed him on the issue of the U Agency having separate access to incoming data, he denied any involvement. “Arno is the best of that lot, believe me,” Kingsley explained, spreading his palms, face up in a gesture of openness—a little defensively, Benjamin thought.

  Channing looked worried. “Then we go to Theory B.”

  “Which is?” Kingsley asked, sitting on the edge of his new polished teak desk. The U Agency had offered it when he decided to stay indefinitely. Not that he had any real choice, he had noted to Benjamin, and one might as well take the good with the bad in such matters.

  “That they want a backup team to check us.”

  Kingsley nodded and Benjamin felt compelled to say, “And in case we can’t do the job anymore.”

  Both Channing and Kingsley shot questioning looks at him. “In case we’re put out of action.”

  “How?” Kingsley asked.

  “Politically, suppose the United Nations decides to make this their party?”

  “We’re on American soil.”

  “But the United States is pretty unpopular in the Security Council over this war business,” Benjamin said.

  “It couldn’t go that far,” Channing said.

  “Just a thought,” Benjamin said lightly. Then, jibing, “I’m sure Kingsley has a better Theory B.”

  But he did not, and their conversation broke off. There were more concrete issues to think about. It was by now clear that magnetic nozzles, like those of rockets but immensely larger, had begun to flare behind the intruder. A plume jet many thousands of kilometers long now twisted and flared. Each step of their understanding was being revealed by incremental observations, science as detective work, and the entire Center staff was fitting together more parts to the puzzle daily. The Long Arm got better close-ups of the Eater as it sped inward, still slamming into more iceteroids daily. It had been barely six weeks since the first detection.

  They met with Martinez and Arno later that same day to discuss moving several existing deep space probes to rendezvous with the Eater for close-up study. They had at their command advanced light, unmanned spacecraft—descendants of NASA’s faster-cheaper-smaller doctrine of the 1990s, developed for computer-enhanced exploration of the solar system. Assisted by ion rockets, these were the Searcher Class spacecraft, and to Benjamin’s astonishment, Kingsley casually called up the right people at NASA and began moving them into position to intercept and study the Eater. The smell of unalloyed power was heavy in the room, though unremarked.

  The afternoon waxed on. Benjamin keenly sensed the rising tension in the Center, a kind of electrical energy that he felt as he walked the corridors, listening to detailed technical conversations. A compressed tautness laced through the conversations about Janskys of measurement and arc-seconds of resolution, technical terms freighted with a gathering sense of storm.

  Arno casually waved away worries that they could muster resources quickly. Channing obliquely brought up t
he U.N. possibility and Arno looked grim for only a fraction of a second before returning to his patented ceramic smile. “No chance,” he said. Benjamin had noticed that at points of tension Arno seemed to revert to a Clint Eastwood-Gary Cooper imitation.

  Still, Arno’s certainty was reassuring, for so little else was. Within an hour they received a gusher of data from the Arecibo radio dish, still the largest in the world. This huge array of metal held its cupped ear to the cosmos in Puerto Rico, in a high mountain bowl that swept across the sky, listening intently. Only at certain hours did its sweep include the Eater’s trajectory, and so far they had heard little more than the electromagnetic hiss of the intruder’s flailing jet tail. Now, though, the radio telescope picked up an intense, high-definition pulse of emission. An hour later the Eater fell below Arecibo’s horizon and the Very Large Array spread across New Mexico’s high plateau took up the task.

  They had tracked the Eater now in great detail, adding images to the Long Arm’s pictures of the Eater’s inner core. Now the point was not mapping, but rather signal reception. Something highly detailed was coming from the very core of the intruder, and it made no sense.

  Benjamin watched all this with a growing sense of urgency. He could scarcely ignore the obvious fact that Channing was fading as the afternoon waxed on, her eyes hollowing out and mouth seeming to grow thinner, hands trembling under the strain of work. But she refused to go home. Upon her sallow skin there came an expression of adamant energy, and she said, “I’ll stay. I’ll stay.”

  This carried a hard existential weight and he was cowed by the hard certainty in her voice. He loved this woman and sometimes he understood her in a way he could not express—to her or to himself—and he did as she wanted. He helped her settle into one of the rather luxurious new leather form-fitting chairs before the big-screen display and they watched the sliding columns of compressed data. The entire processing capability of the Center bore down on what Arecibo and the VLA had found.