Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 10

  The professors at the door were crowding into the room.

  “No, the chimeras’ creators needed something self-luminous, something that would last a long time, but something that would cost as little as possible because they had to make two thousand copies. A fifty-fifty deuterium-hydrogen mixture is the nuclear fuel that can be ignited in the lowest possible host mass. It’s the cheapest interstellar beacon you can make if you insist on a hundred-million year warranty. Nature can’t make these objects. But somebody can,” She took a sip of water as her words sank in.

  “The helium makes sense, too,” she continued. “It’s the ash, the by-product of pure deuterium-hydrogen fusion, brought up by convection from the core. The helium content of the chimeras is limited to one percent or less because they’re all younger than a million years. Each one will continue burning its core deuterium and will shine at its present luminosity for another hundred million years.”

  Tim was going to say something else but Greg broke in. He was beaming. “Kristi, two of the chimeras are not associated with black holes. What can you tell us of them?”

  “One of them,” she said, “is moving at nearly three percent of the speed of light through Taurus. A second is in orbit around a G-dwarf in Scorpius. It’s just under seven Jupiter masses, the lightweight of the entire sample, and the least luminous. I really don’t know for certain, but I’d speculate that the first object is being towed or pushed toward a newborn black hole. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the second one is on the assembly line.”

  The applause was tentative this time. Until the people at the doorway joined in.

  Greg had a final word: “My initial reaction, when Kristi ran all this by me, was the same as Tim’s. But there’s one more piece of evidence that convinced me. Kristi?”

  She was at her charming best, at a moment she would always remember. “A thirty-meter telescope at geosync orbit,” she said, “is an amazing instrument. But the chimeras are faint and I couldn’t find anything but deuterium, hydrogen, and helium in any of their spectra. When I realized that they had to be copies of each other, I removed the Doppler shift of each one and then co-added the two thousand spectra. The result is almost fifty times more sensitive to trace elements.”

  She touched the video controller and the summed spectrum appeared, undulating and smooth, with four sharp, narrow dips. “See those four absorption lines? Only one element makes those lines. Plutonium. The nastiest, most dangerous substance we know.

  “Each chimera is seeded with pure Plutonium-244, which will last as long as the chimera itself. It’s the closest thing to a universal skull and crossbones I can imagine.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the chimeras are beacons. Celestial lighthouses. Space-faring travelers are being warned away from the shoals. Away from the Milky Way’s two thousand solo black holes, which are otherwise nearly undetectable.”

  “Magnificent,” said one of the professors. “If true.”

  She smiled, as her audience collectively let out its breath. “The evidence is all there, Professor. And, if Greg doesn’t mind, I could use a glass of Cabernet. If we could quit now.”

  COOL NEIGHBOR

  (with Michael Shara)

  Greg Cooper had been sitting in the control center of the Weber gravity wave observatory, eating popcorn and calibrating Icewave, when he realized he had about a minute to live.

  He’d been writing a letter to Kristi Lang, hinting at the discovery he was about to make public, and suddenly it was over. The order-of-magnitude calculation took ten seconds, and told him he was a dead man. Bad karma. He choked off a wave of panic and self-pity. No time for regret. He knew exactly what was coming. The portholes would fluoresce ferociously, down-converting the X- and gamma rays to optical photons for a few spectacular seconds. The last thing he’d ever see.

  Warn the people on Clarke. Get the tourists back inside.

  He opened a channel. “Mayday, Ana, Mayday. Incoming hard radiation. Get everyone back onboard, into the shelter. Do it now!”

  Five kilometers away, Ana Vassileva, the observatory manager, gaped at the transmission. The real-time solar X-ray images and radiation monitor live feed were working perfectly. It was near solar minimum, so Ana wasn’t surprised to see nothing at all brewing on Sol. “What are you blathering about, Greg? I haven’t seen a sunspot, let alone a serious flare, in weeks. Sol’s asleep.”

  “Ana, the local spatial strain went totally offscale twenty seconds ago… A gravity tsunami just went by. Einstein never dreamed something this big could happen. There’s a gamma ray burst right behind it. Get everyone into the shelter!”

  “My God,” she said, “Marnie’s out there in the shuttle.”

  Ana wasted no time. She hit the alarm and klaxons sounded through the station and its cash-cow hotel. Tourists dropped everything, crowded in the passageways, and headed toward the water- and lead-lined chamber nestled in the heart of Clarke. A middle-aged woman with blonde hair askew grabbed Ana in the hallway “What’s going on?” she demanded. “This had better not be a drill, damnit, we had one yesterday.”

  “It’s okay,” And said. “Just hurry, please.” She needed another twenty seconds to reach the Shuttle Control Center.

  In the cockpit of the shuttle, Marnie Leeds had backed slowly away from Clarke, allowing her French Canadian guests to ooh and aah at the view. The hotel-spa was shaped like a clamshell, with ceiling-to-floor windows on the concave side facing Earth. Many tourists spent their entire time on the station savoring the sight, reluctantly leaving the picture windows only to sleep. The Neugebauer Infrared Array hung four hundred meters above the hotel. A thirty-meter telescope anywhere is a remarkable sight, but permanently perched thirty-five thousand kilometers above Africa, it was riveting. The segmented primary mirror glistened with a yellowish hue from its bacteria-thin gold coating.

  She looked down at the carbon nanowire space elevator cable, which snaked from the geosynchronous station to the summit of Kilimanjaro. Nearly cloud-free today, the continent was framed between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Marnie activated the shuttle’s electron beam pointer. She highlighted Cairo, Algiers, Casablanca, Gibraltar, Abidjan, Lagos, Kinshasa, Capetown, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, and Addis Ababa, circumscribing the cradle of mankind in less than two minutes. Her passengers responded with delight. She opened a channel to Ops. “Shuttle One to Weber. We’re on our way. ETA twenty minutes. Over.” Whichever astrophysicist was on duty in the gravitational wave telescope, he or she knew well in advance when tourists were coming. Marnie always hailed them anyway. Tourists were a minor time-sink for the scientists and techs, but their steady revenue stream was a godsend, so they were treated like visiting royalty.

  Of the whole crowd that rotated in and out of the Weber, she most liked turning the tourists over to Greg. He was one of the few scientists on the project who really enjoyed engaging the public, and he did it with wit and charm. Kids initially reacted cautiously to his sharply chiseled face and intense eyes. His captivating talk of voracious black holes, punctuated with energetic violin playing for illustration, had them pleading for more by the end of a tour. Marnie relished his enthusiastic explanations of collapsing stars and warped spacetime. “The life of every star is a war between gravity and pressure,” he inevitably began. “Hydrogen fuses into helium. Then the helium fuses into carbon and oxygen. That supplies the outward pressure to balance the crushing pull of gravity. Gravity is the stellar angel of death.” All the while accompanying himself on the fiddle, he usually made a scary face with that one and the kids whooped. “Gravity always wins when a star’s nuclear fuel is exhausted.”

  “Negative, Marnie.” Greg’s voice, unlike she’d ever heard it before. “Radiation surge coming. Didn’t Ana get to you yet? Go back to Clarke. Get everybody under cover.”

  “Greg, when?”

  “Now, goddamnit. Do it now.”

  She switched over to the passenger comm system. “Everybody belt down.”

  Moments later Ana wa
s on the circuit. Her voice stayed level, but Marnie knew frantic when she heard it.

  “Greg.” She was having trouble breathing. “Marnie’s got six aboard Shuttle One, two adults and four kids. She’s coming around. Headed back. Just a kilometer away. Three minutes out, tops. Shuttle Two’s still down. We’ll turn One around as soon as Marnie’s group is back onboard.” Her voice quavered. She desperately wanted to order Marnie and Shuttle One to pick up Greg. But even with her fiancé’s life at stake she knew the rules. Tourists come first, no exceptions. Ever. “Greg, what can we do?”

  A long silence. “Ana, I haven’t a clue, sweetheart. I wish I’d said it more often, but you’re beautiful and I love you.” A pause. Then: “I think we’re at the end here.”

  “There must be something—.”

  He went quiet again. “Give Kristi a hug. And listen, tell her to read her email. It’s important.”

  Marnie pitched the shuttle 180 degrees in the ten seconds after she’d spoken with Greg. Guidebooks ricocheted off the cabin walls. Frantic yells came from the passenger section. “It’s okay,” she told them, while she turned sharply toward Clarke’s airlock. One of the kids started to whimper. “Hold tight, everyone. Brace yourself!” She gave it a solid thirty seconds of thrust. The sudden acceleration pushed them all into their seats. The shuttle raced back toward the hatch at an illegal fifty knots. The approach was slightly off-center. She tapped the port thruster, and was horrified to see it remain ON after she released the button.

  The shuttle bounced hard off the emergency bumpers. Her head snapped sideways into a restraint. Metal tore. Thank God for the pressure suits. Marnie struggled to remain calm as the deploying airbags punched at her. Her youngest charge, Lissette, was screaming. The emergency lights glowed angry red, then failed as the passenger cabin split along its main seam. A hurricane of escaping air tried to suck out her passengers. They were all screaming now.

  Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm.

  Marnie remembered her training as the airbags deflated.

  Don’t panic.

  Her suit was intact. So was everyone else’s. She flipped on her helmet lights, unbuckling the six terrified tourists. Holding Lissette herself, she pushed and pulled the family toward safety. The airlock was meant for four. No time for that luxury. She jammed her six wards inside and pushed in after them. Ana’s face was on the monitor, giving her a thumbs-up. The inner door closed on her arm and rebounded open. She tried again and held her breath until the hatch closed. The green lamps came on and she slapped the emergency re-pressurize knob. Air flooded the chamber. “Keep your suits on,” she told everyone. When the pressure equalized, Ana yanked open the outer hatch. “Around the corner,” she said. “Don’t stop, keep going, turn right, thirty meters to the shelter.” When one of the kids tried to ask a question, she simply shook her head. “Go! Go!” she barked.

  Marnie watched her take a moment to look back at the wrecked shuttle. Ana bit her lip. Then she pulled herself into the shielded station core.

  Greg saw the seismograph needle twitch twice, then jerk back and forth with growing fury. The oscillations surged, and he watched the arm snap off in mid swing. Pulling himself to the digital console, he read a peak strain of ten to the minus seventeenth on Icewave, his cryogenic diamond gravity-wave detector. No way, he thought. Can’t be that high. It must be a major system glitch. But the hundred kilometer interferometer gave him the same impossible result. Savor this, he told himself. You just recorded a gravity wave a hundred million times more powerful than any on record. The neutrino guys are about to experience the biggest flash in history. Incredible. Probably fry half their equipment. The cold realization that other, far deadlier, radiation was also coming froze the thought and turned his face chalk-white.

  It had been over a minute since the seismograph needle had sent its warning. The radiation monitors hadn’t budged. I’m not dead yet. It can’t be a collapsing neutron star, I’d be toast by now. “Ana,” he radioed, “the strain is so big that it’s got to be something nearby.”

  “Wait, Greg? What could it possibly be?”

  “A supernova. Something massive. Maybe a Wolf-Rayet star. The core might have run out of nuclear fuel and imploded, but the star’s outer envelope runs behind the process. The gamma rays coming from the interior would have needed a few more minutes to break through the envelope. Call Kamiokande in Japan, okay?”

  “Kamiokande IV is reporting eight hours of right ascension, minus forty-seven degrees of declination,” said Ana tensely. “Somewhere in Vela.” It had taken her just a minute to reach the duty technician of the world’s largest neutrino telescope. Its cubic kilometer of ultra-pure water was two miles underground to prevent false signals from cosmic rays. Most neutrinos raced through the entire Earth without being stopped. But a tiny fraction crashed into protons in Kamiokande’s water, generating miniscule flashes of light. Many of the Japanese telescope’s trillion photo-detectors had saturated during the neutrino onslaught, but the neutrino flash’s position in the southern Milky Way was firmly in hand. “Plus minus two degrees is their guess, near Gamma Velorum. Roughly an hour before they can refine the position, but at 810 light-years, Gamma’s the closest Wolf-Rayet star in the sky. I wish that helped.”

  Maybe. At the moment, Greg had other priorities. “Okay, Ana. Thanks. It means I have a few minutes more. When Marnie gets back, if you could send the shuttle PDQ, I’d be grateful.”

  She was silent a long time.

  And he knew. “What’s wrong?”

  “Greg, Shuttle One is scrap,” She added a few details as she finished sealing the shelter doors. She was trying not to lose control in front of the bewildered tourists.

  “No chance at all?” Greg asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  They were on a visual hookup, so she could see him. He nodded and pressed his lips together. Sometimes things like this happen. Nobody’s fault. “It’s okay, Ana,” he said. “Thanks for trying.”

  He pushed back in his chair, as if it might be possible to draw it around him, to hide in it. Not exactly my day. I hope it isn’t too painful when it comes. There was nowhere to run. He’d put on his spacesuit for the shuttle trip, but it couldn’t protect him from a gamma ray burst. Vela was visible through the portside hatches. He moved as far starboard as possible, behind some computer racks. Tying up the loose strands of his life took just a few minutes online. He was finishing when the comm link suddenly roared with static and his visor blazed like the midday sun.

  As they suspected, it had been Gamma Velorum. The star had undergone core collapse, producing a supernova brighter than the full moon. Kristi Lang was shattered by the news from Clarke. Greg was the only casualty, thank God, but he had been her mentor and friend, and had provided encouragement and support three years earlier during her Ph.D. research. She now had an international reputation for outside-the-box thinking, and a bit of media renown to boot. She’d concluded, on strong evidence, that a class of brown dwarfs, failed stars, were being used to mark black holes. They were being pressed into service as interstellar lighthouses. It was a wild idea, of course. And, like all wild ideas, it was still not widely accepted. But it would be one day.

  Greg would not be there to see it.

  Ana called her within an hour, although the story was all over the media by then. The director had been fighting back hysteria, and Kristi had lent her strength. Hang on, Ana. He had a good life. Our lives are richer because he lived.

  Words. What the hell good were they at a time like that? And in the morning, when she was able to get herself together, the found the e-mail from Greg.

  It was routine stuff. How much he was enjoying himself on the Weber. How he was at that moment watching a shuttle filled with tourists headed his way. And there was a PS.: There’s big news in Sagittarius. A Clyde Tombaugh special. Gotta go. More later.

  Clyde Tombaugh was the guy who’d discovered Pluto. What the hell was Greg talking about?

  M
ore later.

  She gave it a few weeks, and then tried to reach Ana. But she was in transit on her way to Baltimore. Kristi located her on a glide train and arranged to meet her for dinner.

  Ana could not have been called beautiful, but she was an attractive woman, with blue-green eyes, lush chestnut hair, and the kind of presence you associate with leading ladies. Kristi was shocked by how much she’d changed over the few weeks since they’d last seen each other. Ana looked gaunt and her skin was sallow. She was bitterly unhappy and it showed. Kristi gave her a hug. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Ana shrugged. “Not really.” Her eyes avoided Kristi, and wandered instead around the interior of the Crab Pot. It was early, and there were only a few customers present. Piano music was being piped in. “I finally got all the reports,” Ana began. “Greg got an awful dose. Around 90 sieverts. Five is fatal.” Her voice caught, and tears began running down her cheeks. She managed a smile and wiped her eyes. “It took us over a day to get him out of Weber. He was horribly burned, comatose, and—. Well, the details don’t matter.”

  “Ana, there’s no need to talk about this.”

  “I need to, Kristi. I really need to.”

  A waiter appeared. His name was Richard, and could he get anything for the ladies?

  They ordered Maryland microbrews and crabcakes.

  Ana took a deep breath. “He’s in cryosusp and his daughter won’t let the doctors pull the plug.”

  “Pity. But I can understand it.”

  “Did you know we’re getting sued, too?”

  “No. By whom?”

  “The tourists. They’ve launched a class action claiming negligent design and inadequate radiation protection. A wonder they aren’t suing God for setting off Gamma Vel so close to us.”