The Ring of Charon

CHAPTER SIX The Amber of Time

Gerald MacDougal reached out and slapped the alarm buzzer. Two in the morning. Vancouver, British Columbia, was a lovely city, but it had a major flaw: it was in the wrong time zone. Like the Moon and the domed Settlements and virtually all the other space installations, VISOR worked on Universal Time. Greenwich Mean Time as they insisted on calling it here.

Two a.m. here. That was ten in the morning on VISOR, ignoring the speed-of-light delays. Ten a.m., Tuesdays and Saturdays, were Marcia’s assigned slots for sending view messages home. If she even got that much chance. She had sent a twenty-word-text message the night before warning about watching some gravity experiment from Pluto, just after 1000 UT. Right on top of her sending time slot.

Gerald stretched and yawned. Venus was about ninety degrees from conjunction at the moment, which worked out to a ten-minute speed-of-light delay, plus a split second or two while the Earth-orbiting comsat picked it up and relayed it around to his receiver. He had time to wake up a bit before Marcia’s weekly message came in. He could have let his comm system pick it up and could have played it back later, of course, but he preferred to see the view message immediately, the moment it came down. That way he would know what Marcia had been doing and saying ten short minutes before. It was the one time when that was possible. God, he missed her.

He stood up, walked to the window, and looked down at the splendid city laid out before him. His hometown. Aside from the time zone, there was no place on Earth he’d rather be. And, as far as his work was concerned, no place on Earth was where he ought to be. Gerald was a big man, tall, muscular and tough, with curly brown hair and a solid jaw. He got restless waiting, and was too often forced to convince himself that patience was a virtue.

Back to space soon, he promised himself, not quite believing it. There was still hope. To Venus, and VISOR, and his wife and his work.

Strictly speaking, the primary subject of Gerald MacDougal’s work did not exist. One of his career goals was to wipe out anything that resembled it.

Gerald was an exobiologist, a student of life off the planet Earth. The flaw, of course, was that there wasn’t any life beyond Earth. Except, of course, such Earth-evolved life that continued to evolve even off planet. Every human being, every plant, every animal brought along to the Settlements carried microscopic life-forms by the billions.

Anywhere humans went, viruses, bacteria, and other microbes, disease-causing and benign, traveled as well. Normal medical practice was enough to keep most of the nasties at bay inside the sealed colonies—but some microbes escaped the domes, tunnels, ships and habitats to the outside environments. Virtually all of them died the moment they left the controlled environment. But a few survived. And of those survivors, a very few managed to reproduce, and evolve, often at a ferocious rate.

Earth-derived microbes lurked in the soil around Martian cities, living off dome leakages of air, moisture and organics; lived inside the rock of mining asteroids, dining on a witches’ brew diet of complex hydrocarbons; lived as mildew-like patches in airlocks all over the Solar System, absorbing air, moisture and bits of organic matter whenever the locks were pressurized, encysting when they went into vacuum.

Even to Gerald, who should have been used to such things by now, the tenacity of life in such circumstances was incredible. It was proof to Gerald that there was a God. No random sequence of events could have produced living things capable of such feats. Evolution existed, yes; Gerald was no creationist. But there was a divine hand guiding evolution.

A divine hand that worked in mysterious and sometimes horrifying ways. For a few, a terrifying few, of the outsider organisms came back inside the domes and the spacecraft. Most such Returnees were wiped out by the drastically different environment, but some readapted to life back inside. That was when terror struck. Hardened by their generations outside air, light and pressure, some Returnee organisms bred hellaciously back inside, carrying in their genes the ability to digest unlikely things. Plastics, metal, resin compounds, semiorganic superconductors. And some of them, ancestors of disease organisms, retained the ability to infect the human body.

There were microorganisms that could cause disease in humans and also eat through pressure suits and air domes from the inside. Or dissolve the superconducting wires of power grids. Or jam valves in fusion systems.

From a human perspective, the Returnees were a nightmare. But God, Gerald had long since decided, did not have a human perspective. The Good Lord wanted all life, everywhere, to have a chance. Humans and microbes were equally His children, equally miraculous. He wanted all His children to have a chance at life, from the most high unto the least. If some individuals of one species had to die so another species might survive, was that not the way of all Nature? Why should humanity be exempt?

He did not see any contradiction between admiring the dogged survival skills of the Returnees and coldbloodedly seeking to destroy them. The wolf lives at the expense of the deer, and the buck may kill the wolf to defend his herd. Neither is right or wrong. Even the lamb lives at the expense of the foliage it crops—and many a thorn will stab at a lamb unwary enough to dine on the wrong plant. All that lives must draw life from others, and must defend itself against the assault of other species. So too with humanity.

Gerald’s goal was to wipe out all off-planet microscopic life outside the human-made environments. He knew he could never achieve his goal, and this knowledge gave him a certain strange comfort. But it was not enough. The destruction of life, however needful, did not fulfill Gerald.

He wanted to create life, be God’s tool in the work of making a whole new world full of life—but now that dream was fading. The circumstances were so frustrating.

The terraforming of Venus was technically possible. No one questioned that any longer.

Gerald’s work would have played a part in it, too. The Isolated Exobiology Facility would have been an ideal source of terraforming microbes. The simplest of gene engineering would have produced microbes to break down the noxious atmosphere, to fix nitrogen to soil, to remove carbon dioxide and produce water, to convert the acid-leached rocks to soil.

But the era of grand projects, of great visions, was fading before it had gotten properly under way. The Terra Nova starship project had been canceled, and now the word was that the Ring of Charon was being shut down. What hope could there be for a plan to rebuild a world? More than likely, the microbes stored at Gerald’s Isolated Exobiology Facility would never get their chance to seed Venus.

He looked up from the valley, into the late-night sky. Venus would not rise for hours yet, but he knew it was there. And Marcia was there, aboard VISOR as it circled that hell-hot world. He had spent much of the last year preparing to join her there—but now the two of them were forced to face the likelihood that it would be Marcia returning here, as humanity retreated from the challenge of Venus.

The comm center bleeped, and Gerald rushed over to it, sat down and powered up the screen. The countdown clock appeared, ticked down to zero, and then was replaced by Marcia’s dark exquisite face.

“Hello, Gerald,” she said, her voice warm and loving. “Thank heavens I got through—we just got word of a big experiment that we’ll need all our transmission bandwidth for. There was supposed to be a ten o’clock cutoff on personal messages, but Lonny knew I was scheduled and stretched the rules for me. He’ll keep me on as long as he can, but I might get cut off abruptly. Nothing to worry about—they just need this vision channel. Lonny’s sending a text message from me on a sideband right now. It tells what the experiment is so I don’t waste view time talking about it. Sorry, but the text message isn’t much—just a data dump on what we’ve been told about the experiment. I haven’t had time to write a real letter. I’m working on one. I should be able to send it tonight.”

The printer bin buzzed and a thin sheaf of papers dropped into it. Gerald ignored the document, reached out a hand and touched the screen. These few moments with her image were all he had, and now even this contact was being rationed. Never again, he decided. Once he got there, or she came here, never again would they be separated.

“There isn’t much excitement beyond this experiment run,” Marcia’s image said. “McGillicutty’s driving us all even madder than usual, but I suppose I should be used to that by now. The work is going well—though we’re all watching the news and hoping we’re not in it.” There was a muffled voice from off camera, and Marcia glanced away. “Oh damn!” she said, cursing with the sincerity of someone who didn’t do it often. “Lonny says I’ve got ten seconds. I love you, Gerald. I can’t wait for your next message to me. Finish up all your business and get here. I love you. Good-bye—”

The screen cut off, and Gerald felt a lump in his throat. There was only so much of this separation that he could take. Thank God it would be over soon, one way or the other.

Aboard VISOR, Marcia MacDougal forced a smile, thanked Lonny, and hurried out into the corridor. But where to go? she wondered. She felt lost, empty. Gerald gone, the project dying. What did it matter? To the wardroom, she decided, almost at random. Maybe there would be people there, someone to talk to, someone to take her mind away from loneliness.

She went into the corridor and walked the short distance. But the wardroom was empty. McGillicutty must have pulled everyone in to help observe the gravity experiment. No doubt she’d get drafted herself, sooner or later.

Finding herself alone, Marcia MacDougal made the best of it. She stepped over to the wardroom’s big observation port, and looked down at the planet’s glaring cloud tops.

She was a striking woman, seeming taller than she really was by virtue of her determined character. She had clear, flawless skin the color of dark mahogany, and her face was round and expressive. Her eyes were dark brown, bright and clear; eyes that seemed to see everything. But there was nothing at all to see out the observation window.

To the naked eye, dayside Venus was blindingly bright, a featureless wall of cloud. She could have fixed that: the observation windows could be controlled, the contrast, brightness, and spectrum manipulated. With the right settings, pattern and order appeared in the cloud tops.

But right now, to Marcia, a blank, staring, featureless globe seemed most appropriate. The light was so bright that nothing could be seen. So much information was coming in that nothing could be understood. The metaphors seemed apt to the era of the Knowledge Crash. And VISOR seemed likely to be the next Crash victim.

Venus Initial Station for Operational Research— VISOR—had been meant to be the stuff that dreams were made of. The headquarters for the creation of a brave new world—a new Venus, cooled, watered, made new with life.

No one knew exactly how it was to be done, how a world would be brought to life. That was what VISOR was for—to find the answers. There had been some wild ideas: VISOR dropping huge probes and seeder ships onto the planet, manhandling ice-bearing asteroids and monstrous atmosphere skimmers into place. Huge sunshades orbiting the planet, floating chemical factories built under enormous dirigibles and set loose in the upper atmosphere.

Some of the more wild-eyed miners in the Asteroid Belt had their own ideas. They had quite seriously offered to blow up the planet Mercury with a fearsome device named the Core Cracker. With a second asteroid belt close to Sun, they would really get some use out of solar power. Venus didn’t really have much to do with the idea, but the Belt Community crowd had tried to sell its plans to VISOR, pointing out the Mercury Belt would be an ideal place to build those massive sunshades or rotation-enhancement impact bodies.

There were other schemes, not quite so mad, and VISOR would have tried some or all of them. At the present time, of course, no one had the faintest idea how to do any of those things. And that was the whole point. VISOR was built to last for centuries, built to grow, change, evolve. The station designers expected that it would have to handle technologies whose inventors were not yet born.

VISOR. The last two words in the acronym were the key. Operational Research. Before Venus could be remade, the scientists and engineers had to learn how the task could be done. A lot could be resolved with computer models and small-scale simulations, but when dealing with a massive planetary environment, those techniques simply weren’t enough. The engineers and scientists needed a whole planet to play with, a whole planet to make mistakes on. Terraforming required on-the-job training.

Couldn’t the United Nations see that? Couldn’t they see how vital the station was? How disastrous a shutdown, or even a temporary mothballing, would be? Venus was a task for decades, generations. It could not be done in fits and starts.

Suddenly the intercom hooted at her. A high-pitched slightly peevish voice that Marcia had learned to dread spoke. “MacDougal! Get on up to Main Control!” McGillicutty’s voice said. “I need you to monitor some low-end radio for me.”

Marcia shut her eyes and counted to ten before turning away from the window and heading up to the lab. She was willing to bet that even her husband’s patience would be worn thin by Hiram McGillicutty. She’d have to try the experiment, once Gerald got here.

Hiram McGillicutty was the staff physicist of the Venus Initial Station for Operational Research. Most days, that job made Mcgillicutty as useful as a parachute on a fish.

No one disputed that VISOR needed a physicist, but only in the sense that a small town needed a fire department. You had to have one around, just in case something unexpected happened.

McGillicutty did not think much of his colleagues on the station. Mere engineers. Give them the numbers to plug into the equations, and they were perfectly happy. Never mind what the numbers meant, or how they were derived. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they not only would not need to know how the numbers came to be there, they would positively resent your wasting their time with such petty details.

Hiram McGillicutty imagined himself as accepting his lot philosophically—though no one else on the station would ever describe his attitude in such terms. Most of them would come up with arrogant, or self-absorbed.

But today was different. Today this was his station, thanks to those bad boys on Pluto. McGillicutty chuckled under his breath, shook his shaggy head, and bared his snaggled teeth in a rueful grin. He had seen the prelim data from Ganymede and Titan. What a stunt the gravity boys were pulling!

He checked the sequencer clock and worked out the speed-of-light delay. According to the experiment plan Pluto had transmitted, the gravity beam should have started targeting Venus just over five and a half hours ago. So if the experiment was indeed running on schedule, the gravity beam should be arriving any—

“Jesus jumping Christ willya lookit that!” he cried. Hiram McGillicutty was of an excitable sort, but for once he would seem to be entitled. The gravity-wave meter, a piece of incredibly delicate hardware that had rarely given off so much as a quiver, was now spiking high, slamming into the high end of the scale. McGillicutty adjusted the graphic display scale by a factor of a hundred.

Marcia MacDougal shook her head in wonderment. It was real. After hundreds of years as a minor curiosity— a sideshow in the world of high-energy physics—gravitic research was suddenly coming alive, right before her very eyes.

“It’s a gravity beam,” someone said. “Shouldn’t we feel heavier, or lighter, or something? I don’t feel a thing.”

“How powerful is that beam?” one of the biologists asked, a bit nervously. “It’s not going to start pulling us toward Pluto, is it?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” McGillicutty explained testily. “What they’ve managed to do—somehow, God only knows how—is use a phase relation to make half the wave repulse instead of attract. The effect cancels itself out overall. And the beam is damn weak before it gets here.”

McGillicutty licked his lips greedily. “God I’d love to know how they do it. But if they’ve figured out how to manipulate gravity fields that well, they can’t be more than a few steps from true gravity control—if they could fiddle the harmonics somehow and establish a standing wave front—they could create whatever gravity field they wanted.”

“That’s the sort of little ‘if’ that takes another hundred years to crack,” Marcia said. “I’d bet gravity waves are just a parlor trick for a long, long time.”

“Maybe,” McGillicutty said. “But as parlor tricks go, this is a pretty major one. Gravity waves ought to provide a whole new way of looking at the Universe. Matter should be practically transparent to gee waves! Tune the waves right, and we ought to be able to use them to see right through the Sun and the planets, look down into them as deep as we want. Put a gee-wave sender on one side of Venus, and a detector on the other, and we’d be able to examine its internal structure in real time. Like radar. There are big times ahead. Big times.”

“For the gravity crowd,” Chenlaw said mournfully. “The research pie is getting mighty small. So what do you think will happen to our funding if this Ring gets sexy and starts gobbling up all the money? What we have to do is come up with a way to get involved in gravity if we want to see a dime.”

Marcia glanced up at the sequence clock. “Eight more minutes here. Then they switch the beam to Earth.” She watched her displays, and wondered what the new world would be like.

McGillicutty was also glad when the beam shifted off Venus.

Oh, those ten minutes when the beam had been directed at them, at VISOR, those were blissful, fantastic. But they were almost too much. The signal was so powerful it threatened to overwhelm his instruments. But now he could direct his gear at a remote target, at Earth. No one had ever done this sort of sensing before. It was an entirely different challenge, an entirely different opportunity.

You needed some range before you gained any perspective. Besides, there were all the secondary effects you could only observe at range. How did the gee waves warp radio? Lightwaves? In theory, modulated gravity waves should alternately blueshift and redshift electromagnetic radiation. Would that really happen? And what effect would the beam have on existing and interacting gravity sources? Would there be induced resonance waves in the Earth-Moon system’s gravity patterns?

McGillicutty wanted to know it all. That in itself was nothing new—he spent his entire life, every waking minute, wanting to know all the answers. What was different about today was that he was getting the chance to find out.

Still, he would have to move fast to get it. The gravity-wave beam had shifted off Venus only a few minutes ago. He had only about five minutes to reorient the station’s sensors toward Earth and reconfigure them for distant sensing. Fortunately, the rest of the staff was there to assist him on the job.

He checked the main control board one more time. A few of the instruments still weren’t in position. “Marcia, swivel in that damn boom antenna. We’ll need the twenty-one-centimeter band on this job. I want to see if there’s any ripple in the neutral hydrogen band.”

“Yes sir, boss. Right away boss. You bet, boss,” Marcia growled as she activated the antenna system. Personally, she could not imagine a more useless task than watching the twenty-one-centimeter band. It seemed to her that twenty-one centimeters never showed anything.

McGillicutty wanted to see if the gravity wave would distort space-time enough to show a ripple in the carrier.

So what, either way? She watched as the indicator showed the antenna directing itself at Earth. She switched her monitor to oscilloscope mode. Yep, there it was. Twenty-one centimeters was showing a virtually flat carrier wave, as usual. She powered up the audio gain and was rewarded with a faint hiss. “Ready to go, boss,” she said, “and I’m real excited about it.”

“Good,” McGillicutty said, completely missing the sarcasm. “Chenlaw, what’s with the microwave receiver? I need it now, not next week!”

“For God’s sake, Hiram, give me more than thirty seconds.”

“Why?” McGillicutty asked. “It shouldn’t take anywhere near that long to swing it around twenty degrees.”

“I have to swing it around the other way, through three hundred forty degrees, or point it straight at the power generators as it slews around,” Chenlaw replied through clenched teeth. “Do you want it blown out when it gets into position?”

But McGillicutty wasn’t even listening anymore. He was on the intercom to one of the other labs, chattering on about neutrino backscatter. Chenlaw turned and shook her head at Marcia. Marcia shrugged back. What could you do? The man was utterly impossible.

“Okay, boys and girls,” McGillicutty said in a loud, cheerful voice, patently unaware how many of his co-workers wanted to strangle him. He checked his chronometers. “Earth should be under the beam already, and has been for seven minutes. The event radius is moving toward us. Stand by to receive results data in three minutes—mark! All instruments and recorders should be operating now to establish pre-event background levels.”

McGillicutty managed to shut up long enough to check his own control board. “Two minutes,” he announced at last.

Under the beam for seven minutes. Marcia suddenly found herself thinking of her husband, Gerald MacDougal, back on Earth, back home in the lab in Vancouver. Even at the speed of light, he was ten long minutes away. But it wasn’t numbers and seconds. It was that Gerald was in the past, his reality cut off from hers by the wall of time. No matter what he did, no matter what happened to him, she could not possibly know about it until the sluggish lightwaves crossed the void between the worlds.

He could die in the midst of sending her a live message and she would not know it for ten minutes.

If, for Marcia, Gerald was trapped in her past, then she was trapped in his past. Each in the other’s past. There was something deeply disturbing about that, as if both of them were frozen in place, like some insect trapped in Precambrian tree sap, imprisoned as the sap fossilized into crystal perfection, leaving its victim perfectly preserved, trapped in the amber of time.

“Twenty seconds,” McGillicutty announced. This weird pulsation and manipulation of gravity was not something she understood. She was more than a little afraid of it, to tell the truth. Somehow, it smacked of magic, of voodoo and mystery. How could there be a beam made of gravity waves? It even sounded like a nonsense phrase, a cheese made of xylophones, a cloud made of steel.

She blinked and forced herself to concentrate on the display screen. “Ten seconds.” Nine minutes and fifty seconds ago, the beam had struck her husband’s world, but that stroke of time would not pass through her frame of experience for another ten seconds, nine seconds, eight seconds—she fiddled with her tuning controls, sharpening the image—four, three, two, one, zero—

Her screen display went wild, and her terminal speaker was suddenly overwhelmed by a powerful screeching roar of noise. She cut off the audio and stared in astonishment at the oscilloscope trace on the screen. Something was producing a powerful and complex signal out there. There almost seemed to be a pattern to it, as if it were repeating over and over again.

It took her a moment to look up and realize that the rest of the people in the lab were more surprised than she was. Even McGillicutty seemed to be in shock. It took her significantly longer to realize that the squeal on the twenty-one-centimeter band was all that was left of Earth.

With a bump and a clunk, the Pack Rat undocked herself from the Moonside cargo port of the Naked Purple Habitat. Dianne Steiger glanced at the chronometer: 1001 GMT, just after ten in the morning, departure right on schedule, though it didn’t come soon enough for her. If there were weirder places than NaPurHab in the Solar System, she didn’t want to know about them. The Rat backed off with a cough from her control jets, engaged her gyros and came about to a new heading. The big bright ball of Earth swung into view through the starboard port.

With folded hands, Dianne Steiger sat at the control panel and watched the proceedings.

The massive, somehow scruffy bulk of NaPurHab loomed large in her forward port. NaPurHab flew a looping figure-eight orbit that shuttled back and forth around Earth and Moon. Right now the hab was headed down into the Earthside portion of its orbit. That was where the Rat got off, fired engines to circularize her orbit and get on course for her next port of call. Dianne keyed the comm panel and called NaPurHab comm and traffic. “NaPurHab, this is Foxtrot Tango thirty-four, call signal Pack Rat, departing for deadhead run to High New York Habitat. On auto departure, now sending departure vector data on side channel. Please acknowledge.”

“We copy you, Pack Rat. Departure plan received, recorded and approved. Slide on in to HNY easy. Milk the fatcats until they moo or meow. See you next time.” Chelated Noisemaker Extreme, also know as Frank Barlow, was a decent sort, even if he drifted into the stilted Naked Purple lingo now and again.

“Thanks, Frank,” Dianne replied. “I’m looking forward to it.” Not exactly true, of course, but what the hell. On her job description, Dianne Steiger was called a pilot-astronaut. But she knew better. Dianne was a backup system. The robots, the automatics, the artificial intelligence routines—they were the astronauts. They did all the work. She was here because this freight run flew close to inhabited areas in the crowded regions of Earth orbit, and because the astronaut union was still fairly strong, if in decline.

Union rules and safety regs required a pilot aboard in case the incredibly unlikely occurred and the automatics packed up while leaving the manual controls functional. Nice theory, except that virtually every mishap that could incapacitate the autos would wreck the Rat past all possibility of controlling her ever again, by any means. But regulations were regulations.

Even the few tasks left to Dianne could just as easily have been done by machines. But it was deemed wise to give the pilots at least something to do, even if the computer could have controlled that circuit, and a servo could have sealed that hatch. A pilot left completely inactive, her reflexes completely dulled by boredom, was not likely to be of much use in an emergency. Or so went the theory. Dianne felt pretty dulled down, even so.

Flying spaceships was supposed to be romantic, exciting, dangerous and challenging. Dianne had gone through eight years of training and ended up running a glorified delivery service.

She was thirty-three years old, but looked older. Her hair was long and brown, half-gone to gray. At the moment she had it bound up in a tight braid coiled on top of her head. When she let it down, it was as wiry as a bottle brush. Her face was lined and lean, and her eyes were wide and bright. People who didn’t know her assumed at first sight that she hadn’t eaten in a week, Her face took expressions to their extremes. Her slightest smile lit up a room, her least frown was frightening.

She sorely missed her cigarettes aboard ship. Someday they’d build a ship with an air system rated to handle tobacco smoke. She made up for it on the ground, though. She was a chain-smoker between flights, her fingers stained yellow with nicotine. She was small and slight of build, but surprisingly strong, with a bone-crushing handshake and a hard, muscular body built over her slender frame. Her appearance, her body, had helped her get a job. The shipping companies like their pilots small and quick.

She had, quite literally, set her sights a lot higher than flying an orbital shuttle. She had been a candidate for the starship project, before they scrapped it. She’d been one test away from acceptance as a cold-sleep reserve pilot aboard the Terra Nova. She was to have been the third-wave pilot, thawed out when the first-wave pilot retired and the second-wave pilot took command. When the second-wave pilot died or retired—then she would have been the commander of a starship.

Then the whole starship project had been canceled, victim of the Knowledge Crash recession that had hit Earth and the rest of the Solar System. It was an era of retreat, surrender, drawing back from the frontiers to safety. So now the nearly completed Terra Nova rode in low Earth orbit, mothballed.

The recession hadn’t offered much to ex-starship pilots. There weren’t any openings on the passenger lines, or even on the cargo ships moving between the major planets. And so Dianne was reduced to humping freight back and forth between NaPurHab, the low-Earth-orbit stations, and the dirtside spaceports. And she was lucky to get even this job. All the other Terra Nova pilots had out-emigrated long ago, looking for work in the Settlement worlds. But pilot jobs were lean out there, too.

She almost didn’t care about that. She was thinking of quitting astronautics altogether, picking one of the Settlement worlds or a habitat and getting the hell out. It wouldn’t be exploring new star systems, true, but at least it would be a frontier, of sorts.

She didn’t understand the people on the Earth or the Moon anymore. The crazies were taking over. The evidence was right in front of her. She looked intently at the huge habitat floating in the darkness. The Purps had come off Earth, taken over this place and the old Tycho Penal Colony—and the United Nations actually recognized the Purps as a legitimate government.

Dianne had her mind made up. If she could not have the stars, she wanted to get out to somewhere, to a place, a world, that would at least be new to her. But could she live in a habitat, a tin can in the middle of space? To one of the Settlement worlds, then. Mars, or Titan, maybe. Perhaps the Asteroid Belt. If she could even get that far in the middle of a recession.

Dianne Steiger checked the Pack Rat’s main panel again and sighed. All was well. Far too well. Nothing for her to do. Transorbital burn in ten minutes. The Rat knew that with far greater accuracy than she did.

The ship lit engines and made the transorbital burn with perfect precision, shut down, and left Dianne to continue stewing in her juices. Not much longer, she told herself. Not much longer at all.

Chelated Noisemaker Extreme glanced up at his external monitor. Good-bye to the Pack Rat. There she was, a small dot of light ten degrees across the sky from the gleaming bulk of a nearly full Moon, a skyful of familiar old stars glowing warm and bright between them. He glanced down and checked his Moonside comm board. All green. All comm channels to the Moon operational. He’d have to do something about that, or catch hell from his boss.

But not just yet. The view was too pretty. The Pack Rat’s acquisition strobes blinked on and off, giving Frank an easy visual sighting. Good for Dianne. A lot of the astros didn’t bother with ac-lights anymore, especially the ones who flew into Purple space. He sighed and shook his head. There was something wrong with a world where so many people worked so hard to do the absolute minimum. Not as if the Purps were much help.

Chelated did a lot of the traffic control duty, but he was mainly a radio tech, responsible for keeping the Naked Purple Habitat more or less in contact with the outside universe. That “more or less” was a key part of his job description. If things got too bad, he had to struggle to bring them up to spec. If, on the other hand, communications got too good, it was his job to degrade them. And he was, of course, expected to randomize the situation at times. Keeping things off an even keel was an important part of the Purple philosophy.

Even if the duties of the job were a bit strange, Chelated—known as Frank Barlow in his pre-Purple life—was skilled in his profession. That was what made him a Noisemaker Extreme—and earned him a bit of suspicion from the more purist Purples, who disapproved of any ability.

But that didn’t matter. Chelated (or Frank, as he still secretly thought of himself) loved radio, electronics, and communications gear for themselves. In the post-K-Crash world, there were few positions for a man of his skill. He had come to the Naked Purple Habitat simply because there was no other place he could get a chance to practice his craft. He saw it as a bonus that he was allowed—even required—to try all the crazy things the other comm centers never permitted.

Still, he found the place a bit disturbing. But then, he would have been worried about himself if he ever got used to these people.

He felt the need to talk to someone and keyed the radio link open again. “Hey Dianne, you still on the feed?”

“Still here, Frank,” her voice said from the overhead speaker. “What’s up?” Chelated was about to reply, but the view through the monitor caught his eye again.

Some sort of flash of light overwhelmed the camera for a moment before it recovered. A chance reflection of the Sun off some polished surface, no doubt. The image came back at once. But there was something wrong. Chelated frowned and looked harder.

No, it was okay. Dianne’s ship was still there, against the broad background of stars. Stars? That was nuts. The Moon should be behind the Pack Rat. An alarm began to bleat, and he checked the system. The Earthside links were okay, but all the Moonside commlinks were out. Every last one of them.

Frank looked to the external view again. A numbing horror began to take hold of his gut.

The sky was all wrong. The Moon wasn’t there anymore.

And those weren’t the right stars, either.

CHAPTER SEVEN Shock Waves

Lucian Dreyfuss was one of the few permanent Lunar residents who actually witnessed Earth’s disappearance.

Mostly, it was the tourists who saw it happen. At any given moment, there were thousands of tourists up on the surface, in suits or in the view-domes, seeing the Lunar sights, such as they were. The locals never went topside.

Lucian worked as a space traffic controller in his regular job, and shepherded tourists on the side when money was tight—as it usually was with Lucian. At least it was a view-dome tour today. Dealing with a gaggle of tourist in shirtsleeves, oohing and ahhing at the gray landscape from inside a bubble dome, was infinitely preferable to riding herd on a bunch of neophytes bounding about the surface, all of them merrily trying to kill themselves by finding the flaws in supposedly idiot-proofed pressure suits.

Not even the Sun could hurt them here. Outside the dome, a large occulting disk on a specially built tracking arm followed the Sun around the sky, putting itself between the dome and the Sun at all times, thus keeping the Sun’s disk safely hidden from the dome’s interior. Outside the dome, the Moonscape was brilliantly lit: the dome itself was in permanent shadow. Lights glowed around the edge of the dome floor, providing just enough illumination to keep the turistas from tripping over each other.

But dome or surface, morning tours were always a bit much for Lucian. He was a night owl, used to the night shift at Orbital Traffic Control—and the night life at the casinos. He glanced at his watch. Just before 1000, Universal Time. Of course, this crowd was fresh off the ship. Most of these grounders were probably still on their local times. God only knew what time of day it was for them.

Lucian was on the short side with a wiry, athletic build. He put in a lot of time in the gym, determined to fight off the typical Conner’s tendency toward pudginess. His face was narrow and pale, with a reddish brown crew cut. His eyes were slate gray, penetrating, serious, passionate.

He looked out over the landscape. At the moment, his eyes showed nothing more impassioned than boredom. Maybe the landscape was awesome, but the natives—the Conners, as they called themselves—had seen it all before. None of them bothered to go up to the surface without a good reason. After all, the Lunar surface didn’t change much. Or at all. The tourists never seemed to understand that attitude.

Lucian spotted a somewhat overfed matron looking around the dome, giving every person a once-over, no doubt cataloguing each by accent and clothing. She frowned, spotted Lucian, and came over to him. A Mrs. Chester, he remembered. He knew what she was going to ask even before she opened her mouth.

“Tell me, Mr. Dreyfuss,” she asked. “Why do so few natives came up to look at any of the sights? I’ve been on tour here for a week now, and the only locals I’ve seen aboveground have been the tour guides. The vistas are so lovely. Why don’t you all come to look at them?”

“ ‘You only have to see the rocks once,’ ” Lucian replied in a tired voice. He didn’t bother telling her that that bit of folk wisdom had the power of a proverb among the Conners. People said it to explain that something once new was getting stale, old, was something you didn’t need anymore.

Lucian currently felt all of those things. He certainly didn’t need to see the rocks again. His mind was on other things. On how long until he could bring the tour group back, on how much of the spiel he still had to give, on how many more herds of groundlings he would have to drag around to clear his casino debt.

He glanced at his watch. That was time enough to let them wander the dome, ogling on their own. Lucian clapped his hands together and stepped up onto a low dais built into the dome’s floor. “All right, folks, all right. Gather around, if you please. I’ll be pointing out several of the landmarks visible from here. First and foremost of these is of course the Earth, directly over my head.”

As if they were all attached to the same swivel control, the sea of heads surrounding Lucian all pivoted upward at once. A forest of arms sprouted up as the groundlings pointed out home to each other. Lucian had given up wondering why they did that. Did any of them seriously think their friends were incapable of finding Earth in the sky?

Lucian looked up himself to see what sort of real estate and weather were visible at the moment. Earth was in waning half-phase, the terminator just about to reach the coast of North America, with clear weather over most of the daylight quadrant. Good. That put Africa front and center. A nice, well-known, easy-to-recognize piece of geography plainly visible with no damn cloud cover hiding it. Much preferable to when the Pacific was socked in and he was reduced to showing where Hawaii would be if it were big enough to see and the clouds weren’t there. He tried to pump a little enthusiasm into his voice, just for the form’s sake.

“As you can see, the Sun is just rising over the coast of North and South America, and there’s clear weather over most of the Atlantic. Can anyone spot the coast of Africa?”

The murmur of voices swept toward a crescendo as the groundlings eagerly pointed out the perfectly obvious to each other. Next step. He could explain how the South American coast matched up with Africa. He looked up at the Earth and began.

“Very good. Now, if you look toward the dark side of the planet, you can just see—”

He saw it. He saw it happen. One moment the Earth was there, and then, suddenly, in a weird, twisted flash of blue light, it wasn’t. He blinked, unbelieving.

The Earth wasn’t there anymore.

Around him, the tourist voices rose again, a bit uncertainly. “Is it an eclipse?” one of them asked.

“Hey, sonny, is this some kind of joke?”

“Did the polarizers switch on in the wrong place?”

“No, dummy, this dome isn’t polarized. It’s got that Sun-blocking gizmo on the control arm outside.”

“It must be a power failure. All the lights on Earth went out.”

“Yeah, right, including the Sun?”

“Hey, mister, you ever seen anything like this before?”

“Young man, what in heaven’s name is going on?” Mrs. Chester demanded in an imperious voice, as if Lucian were responsible for preventing disasters.

Lucian ignored the welter of voices and stared at the impossible sky, his mind racing for an explanation. What in the name of God could create the illusion of a planet vanishing? He dreamed up a half dozen theories. A black dust cloud wandering through the Solar System, a bad prank by some grad students on one of the space habitats, flinging a king-size occulting disk in front of Earth, a sudden weird flaw in the dome’s glass that filtered out Earth-colored light. But none of his ideas made sense, or were even physically possible.

Then if there were no way to make it seem the Earth was gone, then it had to be that—

Lucian never had the chance to complete the terrifying thought. The first moonquake hit.

The Moon’s entire existence had been shaped by the tidal stresses imposed by Earth’s massive gravity well. Internal stresses in the Moon’s crust, stresses that had existed before the first trilobite ever swam Earth’s seas, were suddenly no longer there. With the strain patterns of a billion years suddenly relieved, the Moon’s crust snapped, like a rubber band let go after being stretched out. The first of the shock waves smashed into the surface, sending everyone in the dome sprawling.

Lucian, standing on the low tour-guide dais, was flung into the air, tumbling end over end in the Moon’s leisurely gravity.

It was the quake that convinced Lucian of the impossible truth. The sudden, appalling shock of the very ground beneath his feet, flinging him about, made the disaster real. He slammed into the floor of the dome and clung to it, digging his fingers into the rubber matting.

Suddenly his mind was clear. A legend spoke to him, and told him what to do.

“Accept the situation, think and act,” his father’s voice whispered to him. His father, Bernard Dreyfuss, hero of the SubBubble Three disaster. A thousand—ten thousand more would have died, if Bernard Dreyfuss had not kept his head. “Most people panic when they are in danger. Not our family.” That was family lore, the family law, Lucian told himself. “We think in a crisis, boy,” his father had told him. “That’s why we survive. When the terrible, the frightening, the incredible happens, accept it and act while the others are still in shock. It’s in your blood to do it. Trust that and act.”

He looked up in the sky. All his life, all the centuries humanity had lived on the Moon, all the endless millions of years before that, the Earth had hung in that one spot in the Lunar sky, the one unmoving object among the wheeling Sun and stars. It had hung there, always.

And it wasn’t there now. Damn it, accept that. No one was going to believe it, but accept it. It had happened. How? How had it been wrecked? Had it exploded?

Stop it. Accept the incredible. The how of it didn’t matter just now. The ground below his feet rattled again, and he heard a little girl whimper in fear. It refocused his mind. He could do nothing for the people of Earth, but the loss of the planet had consequences here, now.

And he had responsibilities. For starters, the people in this dome. He did not even notice that he had stopped thinking of them as tourists and groundlings.

They needed help. If the ground danced again, and the dome cracked this time… He had to get them safely down below, down into the panicked ant heap the city must be by now…

It struck him that down below they wouldn’t know about Earth yet.

Earth. Dear God, Earth. He looked again at the frightened people all around him. Earth people. They needed help. Help in getting below to safety, help in avoiding panic.

Keeping their minds off whatever had just happened to their world was vital. Focus them on the immediate danger. Don’t let them have time to think.

Lucian stood up carefully, adopting the cautious, wide-legged stance of a man expecting the ground to give way. “Everyone, please listen carefully.” He must have gotten some sort of tone of authority into his voice; they all quieted down and turned to him. Calm them. Downplay the situation. “You are in no immediate danger, but safety regulations require the evacuation of these domes after even a minor tremor.” There was nothing remotely “minor” about the temblor they had just experienced, but Lucian was perfectly willing to minimize the danger if it calmed these people and got them the hell out of here.

“Please form a single-file line and move in an orderly fashion back down the entrance ramp.” Warn them of the turmoil below. “Please bear in mind that everyone under us in the city felt that tremor too, so things might be a little chaotic down there.”

Fine, that will keep them from being shocked—but won’t they get completely freaked if they see the goddamn natives in an uproar? Panic is contagious. How to keep them from catching it—or causing it? Of course. Appeal to their pride. “The people below will be scared, and we’re scared—but let’s not let other people’s fear panic us. Show them tourists can handle a crisis just as well as Conners. Now let’s move, quickly.”

He jumped down and made his way through the crowd to the exit ramp. He started ushering the people down, and found himself pleasantly surprised at how cooperative they all were. He spotted a young woman who looked levelheaded toward the head of the line and took her by the arm. What was her name? Deborah, that was it. “Listen, Deborah,” he said. “We’ll need to keep the whole crowd together until we get back to the hotel. Hold them at the entrance to the main concourse while I take up the rear.”

If we get that far. Lucian knew full well what a quake could do to the underground tunnel-and-dome system that made up Central City. A collapse, a major pressure breach, a jammed lock, and they would be trapped. He thrust the thought from his mind. Just get them down below.

He never even noticed he had managed to make himself forget the main problem:

Earth was gone.

Dianne Steiger flinched back from the madness. The sky flared up in a field of unseeable whiteness that swept toward and over her and then vanished, taking the sky with it. Her ship lurched drunkenly and pinwheeled wildly—tumbling, pitching, yawing, tumbling end over end. Fighting the errant controls, she managed to stabilize the Rat on one, two, three axes. Stable again. She stared in shock at what was, and what was not. The stars and the slender crescent Moon beyond had been swallowed up in that whiteness that was there and then gone. Stars, but not the stars of Earth, sprawled across the sky once again. Only Earth and the ugly bulk of NaPurHab, now several kilometers distant, remained of the familiar Universe.

Until the blue-whiteness snapped into being and lunged toward her once more.

But no, it was not whiteness, but nothingness. For a split second, her eyes decided it was utter black, but that was wrong too. There was not even black to see. Unless it was a blinding white, or a fog leaping for her mind through the viewport. Whatever it was, it flashed over the ship once again. This time her ship held attitude. The Universe, or at least a universe, snapped into existence in front of her. Again, it was not a sky she had ever seen. No Moon, no High New York, none of the familiar constellations.

At least there were stars and a proper sky. She checked her stern cameras. Below and behind her, the fat crescent of dayside Earth was suddenly night, barely visible but for the gleaming of starlight. Was the Sun gone? Before she had time to wonder how such a thing could be, the new sky vanished into a new world of that black/white nothingness. An unseen fist slapped at her ship and the Pack Rat fell off its axes again, tumbling madly. Even as she brought the nose steady, yet another new sky appeared. And the whiteness, and the mad tumbling. Then a true sky. And then it happened again, the whole nightmare cycle.

Again.

And again.

And again.

The sky outside the ship thundered in silence, exploding, vanishing, destroying itself, renewing itself over and over. Dianne’s hindbrain told her such violence should have been deafening, should have made a noise that would rattle the ship apart—but the cold vacuum of space kept all sound at bay, and the nightmare outside her ship was reeling past in utter quiet.

But no, the quiet was not that absolute. With every pulse from nothingness to sky, with every pulse back again to the solidity of the tangible Universe, she thought she heard and felt a low rippling boom shudder through the ship, almost too low to hear.

That gave her hope that she had gone mad. For there could be no sound in space. Could there? But was she in any normal version of space?

She realized belatedly that every alarm on the Pack Rat’s control board was lit up and screaming. Dianne dared not move her hands from the control yoke long enough to shut them off. Outside the viewport was an insane pinwheel of white, red and blue-white stars. No, not stars: suns, close enough for their disks to be visible, close enough to be blindingly bright. She checked the rear monitor to see Earth in strange colors, lit by the light of stars it had never been meant to see.

Acting more by instinct than logic, Dianne fired the Pack Rat’s nose jets to back away from the churning madness of the sky, a few hundred meters back toward the imagined safety of Earth.

Damn it! There was something seriously wrong with the nose jets. They seemed to have been badly damaged in the first jolt, and tended to tumble her toward portside. Dianne held on and leaned into the port jets, and managed to back off in a more or less straight line. Her nose yawed over a bit, but this time she let the Rat have its head, let her tumble a bit. She might need her reaction gas later. The wall of white appeared again. With the Pack Rat’s nose looking to one side when it appeared, this time she saw the edge of the nothingness, a knife-sharp boundary between the nothing and normal space. It suddenly struck her that perhaps the nothingness was stationary, and it was she herself that was moving, falling into a series of holes in space that opened before her.

Herself, and NaPurHab, and the Earth, falling into the holes. HolyJesusChrist. The Earth.

A new hole yawned wide. New stars snapped back into being on the other side. And then another hole appeared before them. On the other side of this one, Earth, the hab and the Pack Rat hovered under an impossible hell-red plane, a throbbing scarlet landscape stretching overhead to infinity in all directions. Regular markings that resembled lines of latitude and longitude scored the surface. Dianne could feel the star heat burning on her face. But this could be no star. Its surface was not gaseous and moving, but distinct, solid, concrete.

But then a new hole opened and that vision vanished as well.

Dianne held the control yoke in a death grip and prayed that she was going insane. Her own personal madness was far preferable to a universe that could indulge in such lunacy.

The sky was falling. Gerald MacDougal lay faceup on the ground, his hands clawed into the earth, hanging on for dear life, watching it coming down.

The sky was blue, noonday bright, in the middle of the night. And not true daylight, but a deep blue skycolor he had never seen before. How could that possibly be?

A disk of white/not-white appeared in the sky and swelled outward over the clean blue Vancouver sky, stretching out in all directions until all the world was blotted out. Bigger and closer it came, sweeping all before it, coming closer, closer—and then it passed through him, leaving darkness where daylight had been. Stars that were strangers to Earth shone down in a night that should not have been, casting a cold light that sent a shiver through Gerald’s heart.

The ground trembled again. Earthquake. Gerald shut his eyes and prayed. He had spent some time in Mexico and had developed a good set of earthquake reflexes there. It had been the first ground tremor, rather than the strange shifts in light, that had awakened him and sent him outside in the first place.

Again the sky fell, the cloud of nothing swelling out, sweeping down. The hole in the sky swallowed Gerald, swallowed the land he was on, and left behind still another skyworld. From horizon to horizon, it turned to fire, a hell-red glow, brightest in the north. The lush and lovely greensward of Vancouver looked as if it had been dipped in blood.

In that moment Gerald knew that this was Judgment Day. God, in His Infinite Wisdom, had decreed the long-awaited End of Days foretold for thousands of years. Here was the Rapture, the Shout, the Trump of Doom. He closed his eyes again and prayed, prayed hard. For who could be sure of Salvation? He thought of his wife, Marcia, far away on that station orbiting Venus, and a small part of him smiled. In Heaven, families long divided would be reunited. He prayed for her, too, and found some comfort there. An unbeliever, but a good woman, a kind and loving woman who followed her heart and used her God-given talents. How could a just Lord deny her Paradise?

If any of them survived this Judgment. Fear rattled his faith.

By a sheer act of will, he forced his eyelids open. Still praying, still praising the Lord with all his heart, he watched. He was determined to witness the End of all things. Few indeed would be privileged to see such a sight. He was to be a Witness of Doom. He did not wish to annoy the Lord by refusing to see the sight set before him.

But, all things being equal, to witness such events was an honor he would gladly forgo.

Wolf Bernhardt, astronomer, sat inside on the floor in the dark, with no thought for the sky. He picked himself up off the floor, moving carefully in the sudden darkness. The lights had gone out right in the middle of the first quake. He knew, already, that the quake and the gravity wave could not be a coincidence. He had no proof, no evidence whatsoever—but he knew. Somehow, the gravity beam had disturbed the San Andreas Fault—and the San Andreas practically ran through the parking lot of JPL. No wonder the temblor had been so violent.

But how could the microscopic power of a gravity wave jolt something as massive as a planetary fault system? It didn’t make sense. But the seismologists hadn’t predicted a quake, either. The Californians at JPL were forever boasting to visiting scientists that the seismo-predictions hadn’t been wrong once in the last fifty years.

Until today.

But how could a gravity beam do this? There had to be more to it. The gravities people out on Pluto had discovered something far greater than they had imagined.

The lights came back on, and Wolf got back into his chair. The autocamera came back to life and swiveled back to focus in on him. “Hello again to you on Pluto,” he said. “You may have set something off down here. There was a quake here in California, though we can’t know what caused it.”

More of the reserve power system was coming back on-line. He looked up at the communications status board and noticed that the comm line from Pluto had dropped out. Damn it! All the comm lines had dropped, and all the backups. “Pluto, it looks as though we have lost incoming contact with you. I will keep transmitting in the hope that you can receive me.” He glanced at another set of meters, displaying the readouts from the gravity-wave sensors.

And then he stared at the readouts. Impossible. Flat-out impossible. The Ring of Charon was supposed to be sending a steady pulsing signal from a single direction. The meters were showing a chaos of gravity signals of all strengths coming from all directions. Then, even as he watched, all of the readouts went dead at once. A warning bar appeared across the screen:

A strange little thud quivered past his feet, shaking the whole building. An aftershock? It didn’t quite feel like one. Too sharp, too abrupt and focused. It seemed to come from the direction of the gravity sensor lab, in a building a few hundred meters away. A new warning bar appeared:

God in His Heaven, what else could go wrong? “Pluto, we are getting some definitely weird results down here. I think that quake might have damaged the gear. Stand by. I will keep this message beam active while I check the situation.”

Wolf stood up and shook his head. So much for dreams of glory. Duty required that he check the system. But the experiment had failed, somehow. No one was going to get famous off this one.

He headed for the gravity lab, while the message system valiantly tried to send a blank carrier beam to a planet that wasn’t there anymore.

Wolf found a fair-sized crater where the gravity lab should have been, and fires still burning in the rubble.

Lucian breathed a sigh of relief as the airlock swung open. He had wondered if it had been a bad idea to head down into the depths during a quake—but now the move was vindicated. He didn’t mention it to any of the tourists, but the blinking yellow panel on the lock indicator meant that there was an air leak somewhere in the observation-dome complex. Had they stayed behind, sooner or later they would have been out of air. If the quake had likewise jammed the airlock door mechanism, they’d all be dead. The door stopped its travel and locked into the open position.

He noticed more than a few of his charges were hanging back, unwilling to enter the confined space of the airlock chamber. In a quake, claustrophobia was entirely rational. “Come on, folks,” he said, trying to assume the air of a bored tour guide again, weary of squiring his flock. If he treated them like sheep, maybe they would act like sheep. “Inside. The sooner we get into the lock, the sooner we can get out the other side. Let’s get into the lock.”

Still they hung back, until Deborah, the sensible young woman, squared her shoulders and strode purposefully into the lock. That was enough to get most of the others moving.

Lucian crowded them all into the lock chamber. He had twenty-eight people on the tour. Normally he would cycle the tour through in two runs—but one more good jolt and the lock might jam. Get them all through while he still could. Lucian herded the last tourist in, wedged himself in, and shoved his way over to the lock controls. He broke the seal over the emergency switch and punched the crash-cycle button. A siren hooted, and the normal white lighting cut out, replaced by blood red emergency lights. The domeside hatch swung shut at double time and bolted itself shut. The tourists crowded back from it.

The pump mechanism clunked and clanked, making noises that were unnervingly unfamiliar to Lucian’s practiced ear. Could the quake have screwed up the innards of the lock? What if it jammed? How long could the air last in here? It was a bit warm already, with all these people crowded into this small space. Then came the welcome hissing sound of the pumps equalizing pressure with the city side.

The city side doors opened. With a collective sigh of relief, the whole herd tumbled out into the entryway.

Central City was built underground, a series of lens-shaped hollows, kilometers across, known as Sub-Bubbles. The tourist dome sat on the surface, fifty meters directly above one edge of a lens, connected to the interior’s ground level by a long ramp running between the surface level and the airlock. The city side of the airlock complex had been designed with tourists in mind. One whole wall was made up of huge view windows that canted in from the ceiling toward the floor, overlooking Amundsen SubBubble, affording a splendid vista of the bustling city below.

Except now the view windows were shattered heaps of glass on the ground and jagged knife-edges sprouting up from window frames. A sooty wind swept into the overlook chamber.

The city below looked like a war zone. Smoke billowed up from at least three separate fires, only to be caught in a violent wind that flattened it into the sky blue ceiling of the bubble. Wind.

Nothing scared a Conner more than a leak. Lucian forced the worry from his mind. Either the repair crews were handling it or they weren’t. Lucian’s gaze left the ceiling and he looked down at the city again. The lush greenery that the city took such pride in was still more or less there, but whole garden sections had slumped over. Landslides had carried off hillside trees.

Mobs swirled about here and there—whether in panic or in some attempt to deal with the fires and other crises, Lucian could not tell. The lighting in the city was dimmer than it should have been. The emergency lights were on in places. Swirling smoke darkened everything. Many of the tall, graceful towers for which the city was famous had been felled or badly damaged. From what Lucian could see, the high-rent districts of the dome slopes had taken a lot of punishment.

Perfect, Lucian thought, glancing back at his charges. Just what these people need to see. “Come on, folks. Turn left and out the down ramp to the main city level. Let’s get down and back to the hotel.” Don’t give them time to think, his father’s voice whispered. Not when thinking will lead to panic. Get them home. He counted noses. There were still twenty-eight. Good. At least he didn’t have to go back through the lock after stragglers.

Lucian led the group down the access ramp, a long spiral walkway leading down from the overlook chamber. As with the chamber itself, the wall facing the dome interior was made entirely of glass. That was both for the benefit of tourists and because there was nothing cheaper than glass on the silica-rich Moon. Whatever the reason, it left Lucian leading twenty-eight people, most of whom barely knew how to walk in low gee, down an incline littered with razor-sharp fragments of glass, trying to stay out of a howling wind that blew through where the glass wall should have been. Somehow he got them down without anyone slicing open an artery.

The route back to the Aldrin Inn was at least short and direct. There was no sign of the bus that was supposed to be waiting to take them back. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. The periphery of the main level was littered with boulders and parts of buildings shaken loose from upslope, clogging the roads with debris. He urged his charges into a brisk walk back toward their hotel.

Even in that short walk Lucian saw enough to scare him badly. Amundsen SubBubble, at least, was in pretty bad shape. Every house, every building, seemed to have soaked up some damage. There was an obstruction in the road every few hundred meters. Abandoned cars, debris fallen from buildings, felled trees and broken tree limbs were scattered everywhere.

Finally they reached the Aldrin Inn. The big building seemed utterly intact. A small knot of people standing outside the entrance was the only sign here of anything out of the ordinary. By the looks of things, the place had been evacuated, and the guests were just now being allowed back in.

Lucian, standing in the middle of the rubble-strewn road, looking at the hubbub around the hotel, felt something being shoved into his fingers. He looked into his hand. A British twenty-pound note. He realized Mrs. Chester was standing next to him.

“Thank you so much, young man,” she said. “I’m so glad we’re all down safely.”

Lucian looked at her blankly. A tip. The woman had tipped him for saving her life. Without him, they’d still be a panicky mob up in a leaking dome.

At least it served to tell him he had discharged this responsibility. They don’t tip you until the job is over. He dropped the twenty-pound note, let it flutter to the ground, and walked away without saying a word.

And he had actually been thinking of tourists as people.

To hell with being a guide, he thought, glad that he had the day job to fall back on. He upped his pace to a dogtrot. He had to get to Traffic Control.

From the Aldrin Inn, Orbital Traffic Control should have been an easy five-minute walk. But the quake had turned everything upside down: even at a brisk jog, it took Lucian nearly half an hour to thread his way through the jammed intersections, powered-down slideways, and accessways cut by sealed airlocks.

Jesus Christ, Earth. Lucian stopped in his tracks and stared at nothing. Earth. He had managed to forget about the planet for a moment in the panic of the quake. Down here, they won’t know. Even if they did happen to see it through a monitor, they won’t believe it. Nobody knows. No one at Traffic Control will understand what’s happening.

Orbital Traffic Control was a madhouse. He could see that much through the smoked-glass windows that divided the control center proper from the administrative area. Too many people were standing, waving their arms, arguing silently into their headsets behind the soundproof glass. Too many consoles were on, too many lights glowed flame red instead of green.

Lucian flashed his ID at the control center entrance. By the time the sentry system cleared him through to the interior, Vespasian had spotted him and was on the way over, waving for Lucian’s attention. Lucian ignored him, grabbed a headset out of the rack and looked for an empty console. There, in the corner. There were things he had to check.

But Vespasian cornered him before he got halfway across the room. “Goddammit to hell, Lucian,” he began without preamble. “We’re in a helluva spot. All our navigation systems crashed all at once, right after the quake. Primary, backup, tertiary. All of them. Every damn ship is off course out there—the ones that haven’t vanished off the radar altogether. None of our course corrections work. We can’t figure out what—”

“The system’s working, Vespy,” Lucian cut in. “It’s just trying to compute for a gravity well that isn’t there anymore. Earth’s gone.”

Tyrone Vespasian was a short, heavy man of uncertain Mitteleuropean origins and very certain opinions. “What the hell are you talking about?” he snapped. “That’s ridiculous!”

“I mean the damned planet’s not there anymore!” Lucian walked over to the console with Vespasian right behind him. He ignored the older man, sat down at the console and powered it up. He found himself staring straight ahead, concentrating hard on the job at hand, excluding everything from his thoughts except the need to get this console on line.

“Earth can’t just vanish,” Vespasian objected. “I mean, jeez, sometimes I wish the damn groundhogs would go away, but—”

Lucian jumped back up out of his chair, grabbed his boss around the shoulders, and stared straight into his face through eyes half-mad with fear. “Earth is gone, dammit. I saw it happen with my own two eyes. I was on the surface, in the ob-dome, looking at it when it vanished. That’s what set off the quake. The tidal stresses vanished and the whole surface spasmed. There’ll probably be major aftershocks.”

Vespasian looked at him and swallowed hard. His face was sweating, and Lucian could see the light of fear in his eyes as well. “Planets just don’t vanish, Lucian,” he said in some sort of attempt at normal tones.

“This one did!” Lucian shouted. He gripped the older man’s shoulders harder, and then relaxed his grip, slumped down into his seat. He shut his eyes and forced himself to calm down. A planet. Yes, a planet. And everything on it. Eight billion people. All the oceans, all the ice caps and forests and animals, all the volcanoes and weather and deserts and trees. The molten core, the bottom of the ocean, the prairies and mountains. All of it gone.

No. No. He forced the thoughts, the fear, the panic from his thoughts. Don’t think about the Earth. Think about what we must do to save ourselves.

He opened his eyes and punched up the exterior surface camera that was permanently aimed at Earth.

“Look,” he said, not expecting to be believed. “That’s the camera locked down and targeted at Earth. Nothing there but stars.”

“So the camera was jostled in the quake,” Vespasian said in calming tone. “Dreyfuss, listen, I can use everybody I can get hold of right now, and I know maybe you’ve just been through a quake on the surface, but I don’t have time for this kind of—”

“Look at the background stars!” Lucian snapped. “That’s Gemini. Earth’s supposed to be in Gemini right now. Check with Celestial if you don’t remember.” Vespasian frowned and looked again at the camera. Lucian ignored him and punched up the playback on the camera. “Here we go. This is a replay off that camera for the last hour, in fast forward.”

Earth, or at least the recorded image of Earth, popped back into existence on the monitor screen. Clouds chased themselves across the surface, the terminator advanced over the globe as the playback rushed forward at high speed—and then, in a flash of blue-white, the planet wasn’t there anymore.

“Holy mother of God,” Vespasian said. “That can’t have happened. It’s got to be a camera malfunction.”

“Dammit, Tyrone, I saw it with my own eyes, and so did twenty-eight other people with me.”

“It’s nuts. It’s nuts. Optical illusion then.”

“Prove it. I’d love to be wrong,” Lucian said.

“I’ll do that,” Vespasian said. “Key this console to main ranging-radar output.” He punched a button on the intercom panel clipped to his belt loop. “Ranging radar, this is Vespasian,” he said into his headset. “Janie, scram your other operations for a moment and fire a high-power ranging pulse at Earth. Yes, now. I don’t care what the fuck else you got on your hands, you do it now.” Lucian switched in the radar operator’s audio and display screen.

“—kay, for Christ sake, here’s your damn pulse, Vespasian,” the operator’s voice announced angrily. The screen, cluttered with displays of dozens of craft in orbit, cleared as the radar op wiped her screen. A message flashed on the screen: ranging pulse fired. The display grid itself was blank.

And it stayed that way. After ten seconds, a new message flashed on the screen, no return, recycling. “Jesus Christ, what the hell kind of malfunction have we got here?” the radar operator asked. “We should have gotten a return in two-point-six seconds.” Now the radar operator’s voice was fearful.

“We don’t know, Janie,” Vespasian said in a hoarse voice. “Lucian here says Earth ain’t there no more. Do me a favor, recheck your gear and prove he’s crazy.”

He shut off the link and punched up another channel. “Comm, this is Vespasian. What’s your status on Earth comm channels?”

“Dead, every single one of them,” another disembodied voice announced from the speaker. “Must have been the quake. We’re running diagnostics now.”

Vespasian shoved Lucian out of the console chair and punched up an exterior optical circuit. The camera’s image of the surface popped up on one side of the screen while Vespasian did a celestial almanac lookup on the other side. He queried Earth’s current sky position as per the computer’s memory and fed it to the camera. The camera tracked smoothly, the current and ordered coordinates showing in a data line across the bottom of the screen. When the two matched, the field of view stopped moving—and displayed the same empty starfield Lucian had punched up three minutes before, as seen from another surface camera.

Lucian leaned over Vespasian and spoke in a steel-edged voice. “I don’t believe it either. I just know I saw it happen. Why, how, who or what did it, I don’t know. What I do know is that without Earth’s gravity as an anchor, every orbit and trajectory within a million kilometers of here is seriously screwed up. We’ve got to recalculate the orbit of every goddamn ship, satellite and habitat before they all start piling into each other. You get back to your own console and convince yourself. I’ve got to work on what we do next once you are convinced.”

Vespasian swelled himself up, as if ready to explode— and then stopped. He knew he was a tyrant, and sometimes a bully with his people—but he prided himself on knowing the truth when he heard it, and on accepting a little bullying himself when it was necessary.

Earth was gone. Getting people to believe that news was going to be a full-time job for Vespasian. He was having trouble enough convincing himself.

CHAPTER EIGHT Tears for the Earth

Second by second, millisecond by millisecond, in slow motion, Earth disappeared again. The cloud of blue-white appeared, swelled up and engulfed Earth. Hiram ran the key frames back and forth again. Wait a second. It was tough to tell at this resolution and this angle, but it didn’t look like that cloud was a globe forming around Earth, but rather a disk-shaped body forming behind the planet, between the Earth and Moon. Hiram watched the monitor as the cloud moved forward, toward the camera and away from the Moon, sweeping over Earth, and then winked out of existence, leaving no trace of Earth behind.

What the devil was the cloud?

Hiram sat alone in the main control room, hunched over his computer panels, glad for the peace and quiet. He didn’t quite know or care what had happened to the rest of the staff. For a gifted scientist, there were a lot of things Hiram McGillicutty didn’t notice or understand. Like other people, for starters.

It was, in a way, a family trait. He had been born into one of the old pioneer families on Mars, and his greatgrandfather had been one of the earliest—and most obstreperous—of the Settlement World leaders way back when.

Hiram had not inherited his ancestor’s political skills, or even his marginal ability to understand people, but Hiram had certainly gotten the old boy’s single-mindedness. He had also gotten a full dose of another unfortunate family trait—an almost complete inability to see the other person’s point of view.

The rest of the station was in shock, struggling to come to terms with an incalculable loss. But Hiram was from Mars. He had never even visited Earth.

If the rest of humanity was stunned and terrified, Hiram McGillicutty was merely fascinated. No known mechanism could do this to a planet. Clearly there was a new principle at work here. And he would be the one to crack it. On that, he was determined.

If the silence in the station meant anything at all to him, it was that he had a leg up on the competition. Here was the greatest scientific puzzle in history—and he was well ahead of the pack. After all, if his station mates weren’t working, who else would be?

He sat alone in the main control room, pleased that every instrument and data record was, for the moment, his and his alone. He ran the visual record on the right screen again, throwing a new set of data overlays on the left-side screen.

He watched the infrared image track up against the visible-light image of Earth. In visible light, that blue-white cloud bloomed up out of nowhere, but in infrared, there was nothing. It wasn’t there at all. No IR activity at all—except of course the Earth’s infrared image, vanishing when Earth did.

Or maybe he just didn’t have good enough data to see the IR from here. He racked up the near-ultraviolet image and ran it against visible light again. Too bright. The event, whatever it was, positively glowed in UV. But then, VISOR had very sensitive UV detectors, far better than its IR stuff. Maybe the signal strengths he was seeing were artifacts of his own instruments’ relative sensitivity. He would have to compensate for that. But later. Later. Now he just had to look at the raw data. All of it.

He stared hard at the visible-light image. VISOR was not intended as an astronomical observatory, of course, and the long-range optics used to get the last images of Earth did not provide very high resolution. Unfortunate, but no matter. Some sort of camera would have been running on the Moon. Sooner or later, he could see that imagery.

He pulled up far UV and ran that. A bright, fuzzy image that told him nothing. Damn it, he would need better images of Earth! For now he would have to settle for the view from VISOR of a slightly smeary Earth about the size of a golf ball at arm’s length. He watched the playback again and again, tracking the vanishment against every data line he had recorded. This was the third time he had run through the complete dataset.

The amplitude lines and false-color images for UV, visual, infrared, magnetism, and radio marched across the right-side screen, one after the other, and then again in various combinations—while on the left-hand screen, the visible-light Earth vanished again and again. It was a crude technique, and no doubt the computer system could have found any and all corollaries between the various datasets within a few milliseconds. Later he would use the computer to do just that. But speed was not the only issue here. Hiram wanted to be immersed in the data, wanted to understand each bump and twist of it backwards and forwards. Then, when he ran it through the computer, perhaps he could understand what the computer’s findings were telling him.

Even without a computer, he had already learned two or three fascinating things not readily apparent.

One, Earth vanished not at the moment the gravity beam struck it, but 2.6 seconds afterwards—which, interestingly enough, was the period of time it took for light to travel between Earth and the Moon and back.

Two, simultaneous with the vanishment came the first of a massive series of gravity-wave pulses—far more powerful than the Pluto beam, and continuing long after Earth was gone. Indeed, VISOR’s gear was still detecting gee waves from the vicinity of Earth’s former orbit. Those waves had to be coming from somewhere—presumably someplace fairly large, as it would require a Ring of Charon-size generator to create them.

Three, that squeal on the twenty-one-centimeter band had started at the moment Earth vanished, and it likewise was continuing, long after the Earth was gone. As best his direction-finding gear could tell, it was coming from the Moon, though no known Lunar transmitter worked on that frequency.

All of which strongly suggested that the Moon had something to do with what had happened.

There was another point, a rather obvious prediction. The orbits of every planet in the Solar System were going to be very slightly shifted. Nothing very dramatic, of course. There would be minor changes to Venus’s orbit, and Mars’s. Enough to throw off navigation a bit, that was all. The big changes would be in the area of the Moon.

Which was probably more than anyone on the Moon had realized yet, McGillicutty told himself proudly.

McGillicutty cackled to himself. Nice to be ahead of the pack. But in science, it was important not just to be ahead, but to prove it, to the world at large.

He ordered the computer to summarize his finding and transmit the text and images to all the public-access channels on the Moon, Pluto, Mars and the major satellites.

That ought to give them something to think about. He read over the computer-generated summary, made one or two changes, adjusted a few of the graphs, and told the computer to send it. He grinned and started running the playbacks again. He was having a wonderful time.

Orbital Traffic Control had its own tunnel-and-airlock system leading to the Lunar surface. OTC had a lot of instruments topside, and it made sense to have direct access to them without having to deal with the municipal locks.

But Tyrone Vespasian was not going to check on his instruments, except, quite literally, in the most basic possible way. For all scientific instruments are merely extensions of the human senses. The instruments Vespasian needed to check were his eyes. He needed to see for himself.

There was always the faint chance, the faint hope that a camera, a lens, an electronic image system would have malfunctioned. He had to eliminate that possibility. He needed to know there was nothing but his own bare-assed eyeballs between himself and what he was looking at. He needed to go up to the surface, look in the sky, and see for himself.

He knew Earth was gone, but this was not about knowing. He needed to believe.

The outer airlock door opened and Vespasian, huge and squat in his pressure suit, stepped awkwardly out onto the Lunar surface.

Look to the skies, he told himself, but somehow his gaze stayed determinedly staring at the ground. Strange thoughts ran through his head. What, exactly, would happen to the Moon without the Earth? Vespasian found his eyes scanning the horizon, not the zenith. He could not bring himself to look up. Lucian’s computer models showed the Moon merely retaining its previous Solar orbit with a somewhat increased eccentricity that would gradually damp out, eventually leaving the Moon riding secure, square on the former barycenter, the old center of gravity for the Earth-Moon system.

Look to the skies. What would happen to the Moon’s rotation? Would it retain its old once-a-month spin? Still he could not force his eyes to look up, toward Gemini, to where Earth should have been. Would the Moon’s spin speed up? Slow down?

Look to the skies. At last he turned his gaze upward, and looked—at nothing. A blankness, an empty spot where Earth had always been. He felt his knees about to give way, and leaned backward in time to land on his ample rump, rather than flat on his face.

He sat there, legs splayed out in front of him, head thrown back, staring at the sky, for hours, or days, or seconds. The lifeless hills of the Moon, the gray, cratered landscape no longer graced by the blue-white marble in the sky. He felt a tear in his eye, and was glad for some reason that he could not reach through his helmet and brush it away. Another tear fell, and another. These were tears for Earth, tears that deserved to flow.

Dr. Simon Raphael paced back and forth, stalking up and down the carpet, completely ignoring the visitors in his office. No one in the room had spoken in the five minutes since Raphael brought them in.

Finally Raphael seemed to have run out of steam. He slowed, turned, walked back behind his desk, and sat down. “Very well then. It’s gone. Eight and a half hours ago in real time, and three hours ago to our awareness, the planet vanished. All our instruments confirm that, and all contacts with other stations confirm it as well.

“And it happened when Mr. Chao’s magic beam touched the planet. All correct so far?” he asked, his voice frighteningly calm.

Sondra, Larry, and Webling said nothing.

Raphael stood up again, came around his desk, stood over Larry, raised his arm as if to strike the young man and then backed away. He stood there, breathing hard, with his arm raised, for a long moment. Then he slowly lowered his arm to his side. “I am actively restraining myself at this point, you know, trying to keep from screaming bloody murder at all of you, trying to keep from blaming Mr. Chao especially for this catastrophe. That is my first impulse. I expect everyone on this station—including all of you here—are harboring similar feelings. If not of anger, then of fear and horror.

“But my rational side, my scientific side, is holding me back.” Raphael leaned over Larry, wrapped his hands on the armrests of Larry’s chair, put his face close enough to Larry’s so that Larry could feel the clean warmth of Raphael’s breath on his face. “I want to blame you, Chao. I want to blame you very much. I don’t like you. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I hate you right about now. My home is gone, Chao. My family, my grandchildren, my wife’s grave. Eight billion souls are gone, vanished, destroyed. Because of that damn-fool gravity beam you had to fire at Earth.” Larry forced himself to look the director in the eye. The ruined patrician’s face was pale, chalk white with fear and repressed rage.

Raphael stood up straight again and recommenced his pacing. He seemed incapable of keeping still, seemed to need to be in motion. All of them were in shock. None of them knew how to respond. At least Raphael was reacting, moving forward instead of staring into space. “I want to blame you,” he repeated, “except I understand gravity, and gravity waves.

“Nothing about this makes sense. But I do know enough to see one obvious fact: that your beam did not do this. I understand the power—or rather the absence of power—of that beam at that range. Passing asteroids and comets have more powerful gravity fields. Nor is this result the sort of thing that gravity could do. A powerful enough beam handled the right way might conceivably shift Earth in its orbit a bit, but no more. So why did your beam destroy a planet when so many other, stronger gravity sources have had no effect?”

Raphael turned and faced the three of them again. “We don’t know, and we have to find out. The ironic thing is that I must turn to the people who have done the damage. You three are the most likely to get at the answers, for the very good reason that you understand gravity waves better than anyone else. I want you to figure out what happened. Was Earth destroyed? Then why is there no rubble? Did that force move the planet? But how? Did it produce the illusion of Earth vanishing? Again, how?”

Raphael stopped pacing again and sat down at the edge of his desk with a deep sigh. “Find out. Forgive me for bending the rules, Dr. Berghoff, but I am ordering you to figure out those things.” He rubbed his face and slumped forward, a tired old man incapable of feeling any further shock, any further emotion of any kind. Suddenly the angry director was gone, to be replaced by a lonely, frightened, tired old man. “The entire station and all its facilities are at your disposal,” he said, in a voice that was suddenly weak and reedy.

The facade of strength and control was crumbling before their eyes. This man had suffered as deep a loss as any of them. He had held together long enough to do his job—but now, Sondra realized, he was at the end of his courage,: his endurance. “Now,” Simon Raphael said, “if you will excuse me, I am going to go lie down.”

Without another word, Raphael stood up, made at least a show of squaring his shoulders, and walked out of the room. Sondra watched him go, and thought how much she had underestimated the man. There were unknown depths of courage, of self-control, of cool intellect beneath all that pomposity. Her image of Raphael had been a mere caricature of the real man—but it struck her that Raphael had been acting like a caricature of himself. She had seen a strutting egotist because that was what Raphael chose to show the world. She closed her eyes and rubbed her brow. Not as if that mattered now.

She turned toward Larry. Another one she hardly knew. Here was another one deep in shock, and in mourning. Raphael managed his shock by calling forth the shield of rationality and reason to hide behind. How would Larry react? “Well, Larry,” she asked gently. “Earth is gone. What do we do?”

“It didn’t happen,” Larry announced, staring down into the carpet. “It didn’t happen.”

Denial, Sondra thought. “Larry, I wish that were true, but it isn’t. Earth isn’t there anymore.”

Larry looked up at her sharply, a blazing gleam in his eye. “I know that,” he snapped. “But Earth was not destroyed.”

Sondra looked up helplessly at Dr. Webling. But she seemed further gone than anyone. She wouldn’t be of any use for a long time. Only by the slightest of connections was she involved in this at all. They had hijacked her perfectly innocent experiment, and destroyed the home-world. Thanks to them, the name Webling would go down in history as one of the maniacs who destroyed Earth.

Sondra felt her mind wandering, bouncing from one question to another. History? Why worry about that now?

If indeed there was any more history after this. Were the surviving human settlements, on Mars and the Moon and elsewhere, really self-sufficient enough to survive without Earth? And suppose whatever happened to Earth happened to them, too?

Bingo. That was what her mind was trying to tell her. That was what gave this crisis urgency, why Raphael had set them to work now. It wasn’t over yet. They had to solve this problem fast, to protect whatever was left of human civilization. That was why Larry had to face the truth now. He was the best chance at finding the answer. They could not afford to wait for him to recover. “Larry, Earth is gone. Lost. Destroyed. We have to figure out why before it happens to the rest of the Solar System. Earth is gone. Accept it.”

“Without debris? Without any residual heat?” he demanded. “There isn’t any way to wreck a world without leaving something behind. You can’t destroy matter or energy. If the Earth was instantly converted into energy somehow, the flashover would at least have melted the Moon. From here it would be like a temporary second Sun, at least. The nuclear radiation would probably kill us. If Earth was simply smashed, there would be debris. Earth had—has—a mass greater than a hundred Asteroid Belts, and we can detect the Belt, certainly. Where is the rubble of Earth? There ought to be debris pieces from the size of the Moon down through asteroid size, right down to molecules. There isn’t any way to wreck a world without leaving behind something. Even if the planet had been reduced to a gas cloud, single molecules, we’d be able to detect it. It would block the Sun, dim the sky. None of that happened. Therefore Earth was not destroyed.”

Sondra stood up and walked to the far end of the room.

It sounded coldly logical, but she was in no condition to judge. Nor was Larry in any shape to make sense. Sondra knew she was in no state to tell if someone else was thinking clearly right now. But it almost sounded as if Larry were offering hope, and she could certainly use some.

“Then what happened?” she asked. “We didn’t see it move anywhere. It… it just went.”

“Wormhole,” Webling said.

Sondra drew back, startled. She had almost forgotten Webling was there.

The old woman looked up from whatever blue funk she was in and repeated the one word. “Wormhole.”

Larry nodded absently and Sondra frowned. “Huh? How the hell do you bring wormholes into this?” she demanded. “They’re just some bit of theoretical fluff. No one’s even proved they exist.”

Larry rubbed his eyes and dropped his hands into his lap. He sat there, knitting his fingers together, staring straight ahead. “I was working on gravity as a step toward something else,” he said in a quiet voice. “As a step on the way to creating a wormhole transit pair. I wanted to create a stable Virtual Black Hole, an artificial gravity field powerful enough to make space-time cave in on itself.

“According to theory, if you create a pair of VBHs tuned to each other, exactly matching each other in mass, charge, spin, velocity, you might be able to induce them to link up, in effect to become one black hole that exists in two places at once. Induce the black hole to enclose a plane of normal space at each end, and those two normal-space planes become contiguous—you’ve got a wormhole link. The two Virtual Black Holes can be ten meters apart, or a thousand light-years from each other. It doesn’t make any difference. The two planes of normal space are effectively next to each other. You can move from one to another without moving through any of the normal space in between. A wormhole transit pair. Maybe I stimulated a natural wormhole. God knows how.”

Webling stirred again, seeming to come out of herself. “But that’s impossible, isn’t it? I know I suggested it— but it doesn’t make sense. I remember reading a calculation showing that a natural wormhole was just barely theoretically possible, on about the same order of probability as every air molecule in a given room rushing out the window all at once and leaving the room in vacuum. Quantum theory says both are possible. The odds on each happening are about as realistic—and the two conditions would be about as stable. And how could a wormhole the size of a planet appear? I can’t accept Earth being snatched away by something that incredibly unlikely.”

Larry nodded, and a bit of his hardness seemed to fade away, as if he were letting some of the barriers down. “I know, you’re right. But something about all this says wormhole to me. After all, it was touched off by a gravity wave.”

Sondra blinked and looked at Larry. “Wait a second. Gravity wave. Gravity has been interacting with Earth for four billion years—but this is the first time a powerful modulated gravity wave has been aimed at the planet. Maybe the fact that it was a modulated tensor gravity wave is the important thing. Could a gravity wave stimulate that black-hole linkup somehow?”

Larry shrugged. “I think so. Ask me after I have some black holes of my own to play with. You need a pair of them. One here, and one there. Wherever ‘there’ is.”

Sondra turned her palms up in a gesture of confusion. “So maybe Earth’s core has been an imprisoned black hole right along, for four billion years, and our gravity wave just touched it off somehow.”

Larry frowned. “That might work insofar as supplying a black hole to induce a wormhole. Maybe. So long as you kept the main mass of Earth far enough away from the hole so that the hole couldn’t suck any mass down into itself. A black hole is mass like anything else. If the Earth were a hollow shell with a black hole at the center, there would still be one Earth-gravity at the surface. Though you’d give any geologist fits if you suggested any such thing. To allow for a black hole in the Earth’s core, you’d have to have a layer of vacuum somewhere in the planet’s interior.”

Sondra was a little hazy on geology, but that didn’t sound reasonable. “Could that be possible?”

“No!” Webling said vehemently. “Unless every theory of geology in the past four hundred years is wrong. Every time there’s an earthquake the geologists examine the shock waves, use them to map the Earth’s interior, like reading a radar signal. Don’t you think they’d have detected something as obvious as a hollow Earth and a black hole in all this time? Besides, all you’ve done is add another incredibly unlikely thing on top of your first one. A black hole inside the Earth, plus your natural wormhole. It doesn’t explain anything, it just creates more and more ridiculous questions. Where did the black hole come from? Why didn’t it suck Earth down into itself? How did our gravity beam induce it to form a wormhole? I can’t accept any of this.”

Sondra walked back across the room and sat down next to the older woman. “The problem, Dr. Webling, is that we’re stuck with a real-life question that’s even more ridiculous—how do you make a planet disappear? Answer me that and I won’t bother you anymore.”

CHAPTER NINE The Fall of Lucifer

The Observer felt good.

After all the endless years of waiting, it was doing what it had been created to do. Indeed, now it was entitled to a grander name than Observer. Now the work had begun, and it was a true Caller.

Caller.

The new name felt good, too.

A rush of pride swept through its massive form. But proud moment or not, the effort of Calling, and Linking, was not without danger, not without strain. Though the new-named Caller was drawing massive amounts of power through the Link, the mere act of establishing that Link had drawn down its own energy reserves. The power required to create the necessary massless gravity source had left it with just a few percent of its rated power remaining. Furthermore, the quakes were desperately uncomfortable, even painful. They could be stopped only if the old gravitational balance was restored. Massless gravity fields were inherently unstable. The Caller needed an anchor, a true gravity source to stabilize the Link at this end.

Help should come, must come through the Link. There ought to be a reasonable number of its relations surviving in the outskirts of this system, and they would assist as much as they could, but the Caller knew that the chances of success were far greater if help—and reinforcements— came through the Link.

First and foremost, it needed a true gravity source whose power it could tap. If that did not come, all was a failure. It would have surrendered its life planet for all time, and to no avail. Failure now would condemn the Caller to a slow, mournful death, trapped and powerless, watching its power reserves trickle away to nothing.

Help must come, the Caller told itself.

And then it did.

Vespasian nearly leapt out of his skin, then reached over and shut off the alarm. Jesus Christ, not another one.

Considering the crowded conditions of near-Earth space, there had not been all that many collisions so far. But each collision was a catastrophe.

Who the hell was going to hit now? The data snapped onto his screen. Oh, no. God no. Not again.

Lucifer. The formerly Earth-orbiting asteroid Lucifer was going to pile it in again. Lucifer had smashed into the High Dublin Habitat a few hours before. There had to be thousands dead there, and not a prayer of survivors. On any other day, it would have been the most horrifying of disasters. On the day when Earth died, it was merely a sideshow. The debris of station and asteroid were spiraling through space, causing dozens of secondary impacts.

Even after the Dublin crash, Lucifer remained the most serious threat to the Moon and the orbiting habitats. Tamed by its human masters and towed into a stable path around the Earth over a century before, now it was free again, careering through space in a random orbit, threatening other habitats. So what was Lucifer going to clobber now?

The computer drew the schematic for him, and the color drained from Vespasian’s face as if he had seen a ghost.

And in a way, he had. The computers were projecting Lucifer to impact with Earth. The blue-and-white graphic image of the lost planet gleamed in the flatscreen, Lucifer’s impact trajectory shown as spiraling in. No one had had time to reprogram this particular impact warning system to tell it that Earth was gone. The computer was warning that Lucifer would strike Earth—if Earth were still there.

If only it could be so, Vespasian thought. He’d settle for an asteroid strike on Earth if it meant getting the planet back again. He reached up a finger to dump the warning and then stopped.

Vespasian frowned. This particular impact-warning program was a trend-projection system for constant-boost systems. It assumed that all accelerations would continue, and projected forward in time under that assumption. This program did not assume Earth’s gravity, or any other gravity field, as a constant. It merely watched radar tracks, calculated the forces preventing the track from moving on a straight line, and assumed those forces would continue.

So why hadn’t it called this impact a long time ago? It should have been able to call it long before now, if Lucifer’s orbit had remained unchanged.

Vespasian had checked Lucifer’s track an hour ago. Granted, they didn’t have a precise path for the rock yet, but it hadn’t been moving anywhere near Earth’s old location at that time. Now what the hell was happening? He called up a backtrack on Lucifer, running its recent actual trajectory from the tracking system.

Sonnuvabitch. The thing had taken a hard left turn, toward Earth’s old coordinates. But that was impossible. He checked the trajectory more carefully, examining not only direction of travel, but velocity.

The frigging thing was accelerating rapidly toward where Earth should have been. No, accelerating wasn’t quite right. That was active, and this was passive. No rockets on that rock. It was being accelerated by an outside force. It was acting like a falling body, moving toward a gravity source that was pulling it in.

Vespasian punched up the Earth-track camera, and had his wild hopes dashed. Earth was not there.

Vespasian leaned back, tried to think.

And got slammed out of his chair as the Moon’s surface shuddered with new violence.

The second series of quakes was every bit as powerful as the first, and did every bit as much damage. It seemed as if every structure weakened in the first jolt collapsed altogether in the second. New explosions of shattered glass, new fires were everywhere. Somehow, all the SubBubbles rode out the second-wave shocks without breaching. Most people knew enough to expect aftershocks, and so the later temblors at least lost the element of surprise.

Besides, the Lunar population was preoccupied with the far more terrifying loss of Earth. By now, hours after the event, the truth was starting to filter through and be believed. With the homeworld gone, they had little capacity for being frightened by a mere tremor.

The second set of quakes could not have been timed more precisely to foul up Lucian’s work. He had just begun to get a handle on the orbital tracking problem when Orbital Traffic Control lost power. The emergency battery power system was supposed to be able to run the whole traffic control complex during an outage. But it had been strained by the first quakes’ outages already, and was showing signs of decay. The power-management program cut in immediately and went into conservation mode, cutting off all nonessential uses of electricity.

Unfortunately, hypothetical modeling of speculative orbital projections went under the heading of nonessential use as far as the automatic power-management software was concerned. Lucian’s panel went dead and stayed dead. He couldn’t even program an override of the power-management system until his board came on.

All across cis-Lunar space, spacecraft and stationary facilities alike were out of control, tumbling through space in unpredictable directions.

Through all the long years and centuries since the first manned stations were put up, whenever a new facility was placed in an orbit of the crowded Earth-Moon system, computers and engineers would labor long and hard to place it in a safe path, to keep it away from all the thousands of other orbiting craft and stations.

But all that fastidious timing and positioning had been overturned when Earth was suddenly not there to hold the reins. In the careful dance of the orbits, it had been Earth that had called the tune—and now the caller was gone, leaving the dancers themselves to wheel and pitch about at random.

Lucian was trying to find out just how bad the situation was—a tricky job with a dead computer. He sat there, staring at the blank screen, trying to think.

He had gotten far enough along in the problem to confirm his original fear. Earth’s disappearance was no illusion. Working by hand, he had recalculated projected orbital trajectories for several of the larger habitats, factoring Earth’s disappearance into the existing projection as stored in the navigational almanac system. He had fed his coordinates to the radar controllers, and radar had reported dead-on tracks for every habitat.

And the message was simple: without the Earth to anchor them, the Earth orbiters were careering across the sky. The Moon-orbiting satellites were not in much better shape—Earth’s massive gravity well was a major variable in their orbits as well. Several satellites and habitats had already spiraled down to impacts on the Moon, including all of the satellites stationed at the Lagrangian balance points. Held in stationary orbit over the Lunar Nearside and Farside by the balance of terrestrial and Lunar gravity, some of the Lagrangian stations had drifted off into deep space, and others had simply fallen down, once Earth’s gravity was no longer there to hold them up.

Other facilities hadn’t crashed yet—but they would, their impact points as inevitable and irrevocable as gravity itself. They were falling now, and nothing could stop them. The few stationary facilities with powerful station-keeping engines might be able to save themselves. But most of the stations had no stationkeeping engines, or only small ones. There was no way to correct their courses, even if Lucian had been able to calculate their present courses in time.

All of the objects Lucian tracked were still held in orbit about the Sun, of course, but the speed and vector each held at the moment Earth vanished threw a random element into the mix. Some were moving into higher-inclination orbits, others in a bit closer to or out a bit further from the Sun.

But what frightened Lucian most of all was that it should have been worse. Many of the predicted disasters never happened. Radar couldn’t spot many of the threatened ships in the first place. According to the computer plots, there should have been far more impacts, more collisions, more spacecraft radioing in to report themselves off course. Satellites, habitats and spacecraft, lots of them, were simply missing.

Suddenly, with a flare of lights and a renewed hum of ventilation fans, the primary power system came back on. Lucian’s console flashed into life. He leaned into the keyboard and ran some quick checks. Yes, his programs were still intact. That much was a relief. But what about the missing satellites? Lucian ordered up a three-dee projection of the coordinates for the missing ships and stations, as of the moment before Earth disappeared.

The pattern in the three-dee tank was clear, obvious, and clean. It was not merely the Earth that was gone, but everything that had been within a certain volume of space surrounding Earth. Somehow, that made it seem real. It was easier to conceive of a space station ceasing to exist than a whole planet. It was suddenly real enough to be frightening.

The intercom bleeped and Lucian punched the answer button. It was Janie in Radar, paging him on the intercom. “Lucian, you got a second?”

Lucian looked over and spotted Janie on the far side of the big room, saw her looking not at him, but at her display system. It was disconcerting to speak to disembodied voices all day, when you could see the bodies they belonged to, out of earshot. Lucian adjusted his earpiece and spoke into his throat mike. “I’ve got just about that long, Janie. What’s up?”

“I’ll relay it to your screen. It’s kind of hard to explain. You had me do a radar track on Mendar-4, right?”

“Right,” Lucian said.

“Okay,” Janie’s voice said. “Here’s what’s what. This is what Mendar’s orbit was.” A standard orbital schematic appeared on Lucian’s flatscreen. Earth stood in the center of the screen, and Mendar-4’s track showed as a perfect white circle tracing around it. “Now this is an orbit based on the radar tracks we’ve gotten since the first quake.” The symbol for Earth vanished from the screen, and Mendar moved straight out on a tangent from its previous orbit. “I’m running it forward in blue to give us a projected orbit.”

Lucian watched as the straight blue line stretched out into Solar space.“Okay, so what?” Lucian asked.

“So here’s what happened after the second quake, just a few minutes ago. This is Mendar’s actual course, based on radar tracking. I’ll run it in yellow.” A third course appeared on the screen, peeling away from the straight blue line of the projected course.

“Holy Jesus Christ,” Lucian said.

He knew what it meant, even without analyzing the orbit. Mendar’s path was being bent back toward some large mass, a large mass right where Earth had been. A planet-sized mass.

“Has this happened to the other orbital tracks?” Lucian asked, his fingers busy running his own board. He could feel the relief washing over him. It had to be. Earth was back from whatever impossible place it had been. It had to be.

“Yes it has,” Janie said. “Similar orbit shifts, all starting just at the onset of the last quake.”

“It’s got to mean that Earth is back,” he said, excitedly. “That’s what caused the second quake series. Earth’s gravity field coming back and grabbing at the Moon.” He brought up the image from the surface camera, still trained on Earth’s coordinates.

But there was nothing there. Nothing at all. Just some debris.

“I checked that too, first thing, Lucian.” Janie’s voice was soft, apologetic. “There’s nothing there.”

“Give me a real-time radar image of where Earth should be,” Lucian said. Maybe it was simply cloaked somehow, some weird optical phenomenon. Janie redirected her radar and Lucian split his screen, watching the same swatch of sky in visual and radar frequencies.

“Nothing, Lucian,” Janie said. “Not one damn thing—”

Suddenly there was a blue-white flash of light in the center of the visual screen, and a smaller, dimmer flicker on the radar. And then, on radar, a target appeared. A big one, Lucian judged. Perhaps two kilometers across, and moving fast. About the size of the other debris chunks in the radar image. And all the debris was moving away from the new gravity source. Almost as if they had been launched themselves…

“You got a recording on this?” Lucian asked.

“Sure thing,” Janie said.

“Let me access that. Last fifteen minutes of it.” Lucian cut away from the live picture and ran the recording forward from the moment the quakes hit.

Another flash, and another target. And again, and again, and again. Some of them drove straight on. Others seemed to snap around in tight parabolas before speeding away. They had to be moving at a helluva clip for the motion to be visible at this range, even in fast forward. Larry ran a check, and discovered that the targets were popping out of the bluish flashes at regular intervals, once every 128 seconds.

The image reminded him of something, and it took a moment for it to register. Like lifeboats launching from a crippled ship, Lucian thought. For one wild moment he wondered if that was exactly what he was seeing—the populace of Earth somehow escaping from their wrecked planet.

But in ships two klicks across? No one built them that large. The whole idea was absurd.

But then, so was the idea of asteroid-sized bodies materializing out of the empty spot in space where Earth had so recently been.

Lucian stared at his screens, praying for understanding. It didn’t come.

The Caller saw the intruder diving toward its Anchor. This was by no means a surprising development. Of course the Anchor’s massive gravity well would attract debris. The Caller immediately sent a message through the Link, requesting a temporary halt to operations. Nothing material could ever damage the Anchor itself, of course, but a disintegrating asteroid could certainly damage the new arrivals as they streaked through the worm-hole. It did not matter. Now the Caller had the Anchor as a power source. Now it had all the time and power it could ever need—and this asteroid would be out of the way in a few minutes.

Lucian, still staring at the mysterious blue flashes, was startled to see them stop coming, and startled again to see an asteroid-sized fragment moving in toward Earth’s previous position. The new radar track had an ID tag on. This one, the computer could identify. Lucifer. Sweet Lord, Lucifer.

Lucian jumped up, unplugged his headset, and hurried over to Vespasian‘ console. “Vespy, are you watching the Lucifer track?” he asked.

“I’m on it, Luce.”

Tyrone Vespasian glanced away from his console and rubbed his jaw nervously. Lucian stood behind him, watching in silence as the radar tracked the wreckage of Lucifer tumbling through space, pitching and wheeling wildly. The huge worldlet was tumbling, out of control. What was happening? Earth wasn’t there. But Lucifer was falling toward something. And falling fast. Vespasian checked the real-time track.

Hell’s bells. It was moving toward that gravity source at ten klicks a second, and accelerating. He asked the computer for an impact projection. Twenty minutes. That was too fast a fall. Tyrone Vespasian had been running orbital traffic systems for a long time. He knew the space around Earth and the Moon intimately, almost by feel. He knew, instinctively, what sort of forces Earth and the Moon would impose on a body in a given position. And Lucifer’s acceleration was wrong, just a shade high.

With Lucifer’s acceleration toward this gravity known, it was dead-simple to measure the mass of the gravity source—or, at least, the total mass of the gravity source plus Lucifer, and subtract Lucifer’s listed mass. Probably it had lost some fragments after Dublin, but the result would be close enough.

Result of calculation: 1.053 Earth masses. It couldn’t be Earth. Not unless the planet had gained a few gigatons in the last few hours. Besides, this gee source was invisible.

Holy Christ. Invisible gravity source. Vespasian suddenly realized what was out there. But he couldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe it.

He checked the impact projection clock. He wouldn’t have to believe it for another eighteen minutes. He powered up the maximum-gain telescopic camera and trained it on the dot of light that was Lucifer. The camera zoomed in, the electronic amplifiers came on, and the typical rough potato-shape of an asteroid was tumbling in the center of the screen, tracking and velocity information appearing in a data window in the lower-right corner of the screen. Vespasian watched the fall of Lucifer, willing himself not to believe the evidence of his own eyes.

The ravaged asteroid started to die. The spin stresses were sheering off massive boulders and environment huts from the main body of the asteroid. The main mass of the asteroid was soon surrounded by a thin, rapidly dispersing cloud of fragments large and small, falling, diving into the piece of space where Earth should have been.

Down, down, closer and closer, moving not in a straight line toward Earth’s old position, but in a tight parabola that spiraled in, moving faster every moment.

At about the point where Earth’s surface should have been, tidal stresses began to make themselves felt, even over the relatively short distances involved. The gravity gradient started shredding larger chunks off the asteroid. Lucifer’s tumble got faster, adding to the stresses tearing it apart. Impacts between fragments came faster and faster, each smashing more fragments free. Lucifer disintegrated altogether, with no one piece of rock any longer distinguishable as the parent body.

The cloud of debris that had once been Lucifer spiraled down into the gravity well, falling deeper and deeper, whirling in a tighter and tighter spiral, faster and faster, approaching significant fractions of lightspeed. Bright flashes erupted in the depths of the gravity well as massive fragments smashed into each other at utterly incredible speeds.

The flashes and sparks rose to a crescendo, leapt up to a whole new level of violence. Bursts of radiation flared out across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma rays, X rays, ultraviolet, visible, infrared and radio blazed out from the gravity source. Then, just as suddenly as it had peaked, the violence ebbed away. A flash, a flicker, and then one last ember red flare that snuffed itself out with the suddenness of a candle flame caught by the wind.

And then there was nothing. Nothing at all.

“Radar, give me a scan of Earth-space,” Vespasian said.

“Running now,” Janie’s voice replied. “No return. I say again, no return signal of any kind.”

Lucian leaned in closer to the screen. “Jesus, Vespy, how could that be? What the hell happened to the asteroid? Shouldn’t there at least be debris?”

“It’s gone,” Vespasian said. “Think about it. Think about your college astronomy courses. What sort of gravity source can suck up an entire asteroid and leave nothing behind? No debris, no signal, no radiation, nothing. Lucifer just got sucked down into a black hole.” And now Vespasian knew how Earth could have gained five percent more mass. He had just seen a demonstration. Wherever Earth had gone for those few hours, it had been crushed down to nothing just as Lucifer had been crushed. Maybe Earth had got caught by a black hole with five percent of Earth’s mass. Either way, it didn’t matter. There was no more doubt, at least in his mind. He knew what had happened to Earth. Not how, or where, or why, but what. “A black hole with the mass of planet Earth,” he whispered. “A black hole that used to be Earth.”