A Wreath of Stars

Chapter One

Gilbert Snook sometimes thought of himself as being the exact social equivalent of a neutrino.

He was an aircraft engineer, and therefore not formally schooled in nuclear physics, but he knew the neutrino to be an elusive particle, one which interacted so faintly with the normal hadronic matter of the universe that it could flit straight through the Earth without hitting or disturbing one other particle. Snook was determined to do much the same thing on his linear course from birth towards death, and—at the age of forty—was well on the way to achieving his aim.

His parents were faded and friendless individuals, with insular tendencies, who had died when he was a child, leaving him little money and no family bonds of any kind. The only type of education made available to Snook by the local authority was of a technical nature, presumably because it was a quick and well-proven way of converting community liabilities into assets, but it had matched his aptitudes quite well. He had worked hard, easily holding his place in the classroom, always leading his group in benchwork. After collecting an adequate sheaf of certificates he had chosen to be an aircraft engineer, mainly because it was a trade which involved extensive foreign travel. He had inherited his parents’ liking for solitude and had made full use of his professional mobility to avoid concentrations of people. For almost two decades he had shuttled through the Near and Middle East, impartially selling his skills to anyone—oil company, airline or military organisation—who was straining aircraft to the limits and was prepared to pay well to keep them flying.

Those years had seen the painful splintering of Africa and Arabia into smaller and smaller statelets, and there had been times when he had found himself in danger of becoming associated or identified with one upflung political entity or another. The involvement might have resulted in anything from having to accept a permanent job to facing an executioner’s machine gun while it counted its lethal rosary of brass and lead. But in each case—neutrino-like—he had slipped away, unscathed, before the trap of circumstance could close on him. When necessary, he had changed his name for short periods or had accepted different types of work. He had kept moving, and nothing had touched him.

In the microcosms of nuclear physics, the only particle which could threaten the existence of a neutrino would be an antineutrino; and it was ironic, therefore, that it was a cloud of those very particles which—in the summer of 1993—interacted so violently with the life of the human neutrino, Gil Snook.

The cloud of antineutrinos was first observed crossing the orbit of Jupiter on the third day of January, 1993—and, because of the extreme difficulty of detecting its existence at all, the astronomers were quite content to use the term ‘cloud’ in their early reports. It was not until a month had passed that they dropped the word and inserted in its place the more accurate, though highly emotive, phrase ‘rogue planet’.

This closer definition of the phenomenon was made possible by improvements in the newly invented magniluct viewing equipment, which—as so often has happened in the history of scientific discovery—had come along at the precise moment it was required.

Magniluct was a material which looked like ordinary blue glass, but in fact it was a sophisticated form of quantum amplifier which acted like a low-light camera, without the latter’s complex electronics. Goggles or glasses with magniluct lenses made it possible to see clearly at night, giving the wearer the impression that his surroundings were illuminated by blue floodlights. Military applications, such as the use of magniluct spectacles in night-fighting, had come first—providing the inventor/manufacturers with handsome dividends—but an astute marketing team had promoted the new material in many other fields. Miners, photographic darkroom staff, speleologists, night watchmen and police, theatre ushers, taxi and train drivers—anybody who had to work in darkness was a prospective customer. Staff in astronomical observatones found magniluct spectacles particularly useful because, thus equipped, they could work efficiently without splashing unwanted light over colleagues and instruments.

Also in the classic tradition of scientific discovery was the circumstance that it was an amateur astronomer, working in a home-made dome in North Carolina, who became the first man to see the rogue planet as it drew nearer to the sun.

Clyde Thornton was a good astronomer, not in the modern usage of the word—which might have implied that he was a competent mathematician or stellar physicist—but good in the sense that he loved looking at the heavens and knew his way around them belter than he knew the district of Asheville in which he had grown up. He also could locate every item in his small observation dome in pitch darkness, and therefore had bought his pair of magniluct glasses a week previously as much out of curiosity as for any practical reason. Thornton liked and appreciated technical novelties, and the idea of an inert transparency which turned night into day intrigued him.

He had set up his telescope to record the nebula on a thirty-minute exposure and was contentedly pottering about, wearing his new glasses, while the photographic plate absorbed light which had begun its journey to Earth before man’s ancestors had discovered the use of the club. A stray impulse caused him to glance into the auxiliary sighting scope to check that the main instrument was exactly following its target, and momentarily forgetful—he did so without removing his low-light spectacles.

Thornton was a modest man in his early sixties, soft-spoken and free of commercial ambition, yet like all other quiet watchers of the skies he had a hankering for the discreet immortality which is granted to the discoverers of new stars and planets. He experienced a moment of heart-lurching giddiness as he saw the first-magnitude object perched on the horizontal cross-hair of his scope, like a diamond where no diamond had any right to be. Thornton stared at the bright speck for a long time, assuring himself it was not a man-made satellite, then became aware of an annoying blue fuzziness in his vision. He tried to rub his eye and his knuckles encountered the frame of the magniluct spectacles. Clucking with impatience, he threw the glasses aside and looked into the sighting scope again.

The bright object was gone.

An insupportable weight of disappointment bore down on Thornton as he checked the luminous settings of the telescope to make sure he had not accidentally jarred the mounting. It was just as he had positioned it except for the minute creeping of the clockwork slow-motion drive. Unable to relinquish hope, he detached the camera from the main telescope, slipped in a low-power eyepiece and looked through it. The nebula he had been photographing was centred in his field of view—further proof that the telescope had not been jolted—and there was no sign of Thornton’s Star, as the object might later have been listed in the catalogues.

Thornton’s shoulders drooped as he sat in the darkness and deliberated on his own foolishness. He had allowed himself to get worked up, as other astronomers had done before, over an errant reflection in his equipment. The night air whispering through the open sector of the dome suddenly seemed colder, and he recalled that it was past two in the morning. It was an hour at which a man of his age should have been warmly bedded down for the night. He looked around for his magniluct glasses, put them on and—in the blue radiance they seemed to create—began gathering up his notebooks and pens.

It was a whim, a brief refusal to accept the dictates of common sense, which caused him to turn back to the telescope. Still wearing the glasses, he put his eye to the sighting scope. The new star glittered on the cross-hair as before.

Thornton crouched at the sighting scope for a full minute, alternately viewing with the glasses and without them, before fully accepting the phenomenon of a star which could be seen only through a magniluct screen. He took the glasses off and held them in unsteady fingers, feeling the embossed lettering of the trade name—AMPLITE—on the plastic frame, then came the urge to have a fresh, and clearer, look at his discovery. He manoeuvred himself on to the low stool and looked through the eyepiece of the big refractor. There was the

unavoidable lack of definition associated with a magniluct transparency, but the object was plainly visible, looking exactly as it had done in the low-powered finder scope. Strangely, it was no brighter.

Thornton’s brow creased as he considered the implications of what he was seeing. He had expected the object to appear much more brilliant, due to the light-gathering power of the main telescope’s twenty-centimetre lens. The fact that the object looked just the same meant…Thornton’s mind wrestled with the unfamiliar data…that it was emitting no light, that he was seeing it by means of some other type of radiation detected by his Amplite spectacles.

Anxious to make a further check, he struggled to his feet, twisting past the telescope’s mounting, and stepped out of the dome on to the pliant turf of his back lawn. The winter night stabbed through his clothing with daggers of black glass. He looked up at the sky and—aided only by the spectacles—selected the region in which he was interested. Coma Berenices was an inconspicuous constellation, but it was one which Thornton had known well since his childhood, and he saw at once the brand-new jewel tangled in the maiden’s hair. When he took the glasses off the new star vanished.

At that point Thornton did something which, for him, was very uncharacteristic—he ran towards his house at top speed, careless of the possibility of a twisted ankle, determined to reach his telephone without wasting another second. Many thousands of people throughout the world owned and wore magniluct nightglasses. Any one of them could glance upwards at any time and notice the unfamiliar new object in the heavens—and Thornton had a fierce yearning for it to bear his name.

The past few minutes had been the most exciting in his forty years of practical astronomy, but the night held one more surprise for him. In the utter darkness of the house he put the glasses on again, rather than switch on a light, and made his way to the telephone in the hall. He picked up the handset and punched in the number of an old friend, Matt Collins, who was professor of astronomy at the University of

North Carolina. While waiting for the connection to be made, Thornton glanced upwards in a reflex action which aimed his gaze in roughly the same direction as he had been pointing his telescope.

And there, glittering like a blue diamond, was his special star, as clearly visible as if the upper part of his house, with its beams and rafters and tiles, consisted of nothing more substantial than shadows. As long as he wore the magniluct glasses, the new star could be clearly seen—shining through solid matter with undiminished brilliance.

Doctor Boyce Ambrose was doing his best to salvage a bad day.

He had awakened early in the morning with, as sometimes happened, a gloomy sense of failure. One annoying aspect of these moods was that he had no way of predicting their arrival, or even of knowing what caused them. On most days he felt reasonably pleased with his post as director of the Karlsen planetarium, with its superb new equipment and constant stream of visitors, some of them VIPs, some of them attractive young females anxious to hear everything he knew about the heavens, even to the extent of encouraging his discourses to continue through to breakfast the following morning. On most days he enjoyed the leisurely administrative routine, the opportunities constantly afforded by local newsmen to pontificate on every event which took place between the limits of the stratosphere and the boundaries of the observable universe, the round of social functions and cocktail parties at which it was rare for cameras not to record his presence as he went about his business of being tall, young, handsome, learned and rich.

Occasionally, however, there came the other days, the ones on which he saw himself as that most despicable of creatures—the trendy astronomer. These were the days when he recalled that his doctorate had been awarded by a university known to be susceptible to private financial grants, that his thesis had been prepared with the aid of two needy but scientifically qualified ‘personal secretaries’ engaged by his

father, that his job at the planetarium had been up for grabs by anyone whose family was prepared to sink the greatest amount of money into buying the projection equipment. In his extreme youth he had been taken with the idea of proving he could carve out a career with no assistance from the Ambrose fortune, then had come the discovery that he lacked the necessary application. Had he been poor it would have been much easier for him to put in the long hours of solitary study, he eventually reasoned, but he was handicapped by being able to afford every possible distraction. Under the circumstances, the only logical thing to do was to use the money to counteract its effect on his academic career, to buy the things it prevented him from winning.

Ambrose was able to live happily with this piece of rationalisation implanted beneath his skin—except on the bad days when, for example, an incautious glance at one of the scientific journals would confront him with equations he should have been able to comprehend. On those occasions he often resolved to bring his work at the planetarium up to a new level of efficiency and creativity, and that was why he had made an early three-hour drive to see Matt Collins in person instead of simply contacting him by televiewer.

“I’m not an expert on this thing,” Collins told him as they sipped coffee in the professor’s comfortable tan-coloured office. “It was a pure coincidence that Thornton and I were old friends and that he rang me first. In fact, I doubt if there is such an animal as an expert on Thornton’s Planet.”

“Thornton’s Planet.” Ambrose repeated the words as he felt a pang of jealousy towards the small-town amateur whose name was going into astronomical history merely because he had nothing better to do than spend most of his nights in a tin shed on his back lawn. “We know for sure that it is a planet?”

Collins shook his massive head. “Not really—the word doesn’t have much relevance in this case. Now that it has begun to exhibit a disk we’ve been able to estimate its diameter at about 12,000 kilometres, so it’s of planetary size, all right. But, for all we know, in its own frame of reference it might be a dwarf star or a comet or…anything.”

“What about surface features?”

“Don’t know if it has any.” Collins sounded perversely happy with his lack of knowledge. He was a giant of a man who seemed impervious to worries which might beset normal-sized individuals.

“My problem is that I have to find some way to represent it at the planetarium,” Ambrose said. “What about a magniluct telescope? Can’t they make lenses with that stuff?”

“There’s no problem with making lens shapes out of magniluct material. They would serve pretty well if they were used as nothing more than light amplifiers—but they won’t work if you try to obtain a magnified image of Thornton’s Planet.”

“I don’t get it,” Ambrose said despairingly, deciding to admit his ignorance. “I’m the director of a planetarium, and I’m supposed to be an instant expert on everything that happens up there, and I don’t know what the hell this is all about. Reporters have begun to call me every day and I don’t know what to say to them.”

“Don’t worry about it—there are a lot of so-called experts in the same boat.” Collins gave a smile which softened his rough-hewn features. He took two cigars from the pocket of his white shirt and flipped one across the desk to Ambrose. “If you’ve got time, I’ll give you a quick run-down on what little I know.”

Grateful for the other man’s diplomacy, Ambrose nodded his head as he unwrapped the cigar which he did not really want. “I’ve got lots of time.”

“Okay.” Collins ignited both cigars and leaned back, causing his chair to creak loudly. “First of all, I wasn’t giving you double-talk about magniluct lenses.”

“I didn’t think you…”

Collins raised a large pink hand, commanding silence. “I’ve got to get the physics over in one burst because it’s all new to me and I only know it up here and not down here.” He tapped his forehead and chest in succession, and began to recite.

“Magniluct is a transparent material with a high density of hydrogen atoms in it. There were reports some time ago that

it might be useful as a kind of super scintillator to detect neutrinos, but as far as I know nobody took much interest in that aspect until Thornton’s Planet came blundering into the Solar System. The planet isn’t radiating on any of the known energy spectra—that’s why you can’t see it in the ordinary way—but it’s pumping out neutrinos in four-pi space. When a neutrino enters a lens of your magniluct glasses, it interacts with protons and produces neutrons and beta-plus particles which excite other atoms in the material and in turn produce emissions in the visible region.

“That’s why you can’t focus the radiation and get a magnified image—the neutrinos go through in a straight line. In fact, it’s only because of forward scattering of particles that you’re able to see that slightly blurry image of the planet at all. How did I do?” Collins looked like a schoolboy seeking praise.

“Very well,” Ambrose said, “especially if particle physics isn’t your field.”

“It isn’t.”

Ambrose decided against mentioning that nucleonics had been his own field in case it became apparent that he knew less than might reasonably have been expected. He tapped the first striated section of ash from his cigar and thought hard about what he had just been told.

“This emission of nothing but neutrinos,” he said slowly. “I take it that was the basis for deciding that Thornton’s Planet is composed of antineutrino matter?”

“So I’m told.”

“Which means it’s a kind of a ghost world. As far as we’re concerned, it almost doesn’t exist.”

“Correct.”

“Just my luck,” Ambrose said with a wry smile. “How am I going to show it in the planetarium?”

“That, I’m pleased to say, is your problem and not mine.” Collins spoke in sympathetic tones which contrasted with the form of words he had chosen. “Would you like to see where the intruder is at present?”

“Please.”

Ambrose sucked gently on his cigar while Collins tapped an instruction into the computer terminal on his desk, calling up an astronomical diagram on the wall screen. As the picture appeared he became aware that the big man was watching him with covert interest, as though hoping for some kind of reaction on Ambrose’s part. Ambrose studied the screen which showed two dotted green lines, designated as the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, sliced across by a solid red line representing the path of Thornton’s Planet. The diagram was pretty well what he had expected to see, and yet there was a wrongness about it…something connected with the mass of data which had just been presented to him…

“This is a corrected plan view, normal to the plane of the ecliptic,” Collins said, his eyes intent on Ambrose’s face. “We’ve been getting positional fixes on the planet by triangula-tion and they’re fairly accurate because we’ve been using the Moon colony as the other end of our baseline. The effective length keeps changing, of course, but…”

“Hold on,” Ambrose snapped, abruptly realising what was wrong with the computer chart. “The red line is curved 1”

“So?”

“Well, an antineutrino world wouldn’t be affected by the sun’s gravity. It should sail right through the Solar System in a dead straight line.”

“You picked up on that one rather quickly,” Collins said. “Congratulations.”

Ambrose derived no pleasure from the compliment. “But what does it mean? The diagram suggests that Thornton’s Planet is being captured by the sun, but—from what we know about the planet—there’s no way that could happen. Are they sure it is an antineutrino world?”

Collins hesitated. “If there are any doubts on that score, they’ll be resolved in a few months’ time.”

“You sound pretty sure about that,” Ambrose said. “How can you be so certain?”

“It’s quite simple,” Collins said soberly. “As far as we can determine at this stage, there’s every chance that Thornton’s Planet is going to pass right through the Earth.”