Part 16 (1/2)
”About forty minutes ago.”
Qhahenlo's lips puckered. ”Occasionally, you'll find I get too engrossed ill my work to be a proper host. My apologies.”
”That's all right,” Kosta a.s.sured her.Qhahenlo looked back at Gyasi. ”Anyway. Let's see; we were about here...”Their heads went back together, already lost in the data again. Kosta watched them, a wisp of worried contempt tugging at him. They were the archetypical crystal-tower scientists, all right, both of them. So completely wrapped up in their research that they didn't notice the rest of the universe.
So single-mindedly confident in what they were doing that not even the slightest doubt ever crossed either of their minds.
So infatuated by the angels that they'd lost all sense of perspective.
They'd put an angel on a baby. How long would it be before they were putting angels on all the babies?
”Yaezon?” he asked suddenly. ”What kind of numbers are we talking about to get the Empyrean
properly fitted out with angels?”
Gyasi looked up again. ”Well, we need angels for all politicians from regional level on up. Then there are the judges, corporate executives, EmDef officers, trade officials-”
”Yes, but what I want is the total number of angels we're talking about.”
Gyasi frowned. ”No idea. Doctor?”
”Not offhand,” Qhahenlo said. Without looking up she waved at another terminal. ”But all that
should be listed under the Empyreal Angel Experiment heading.”
The approaching-zero-gee alarm was beginning to sound as Kosta found the proper sublist; and the s.h.i.+p's rotation was nearly at a stop by the time he located the current status information.
It was worse than he'd expected. The original estimate had been that it would take forty years to
achieve the target level of one angel per hundred Empyreals. Now, barely eighteen years later, updated projections were guessing that goal to be only seven more years away. More hunters.h.i.+ps, better s.h.i.+elding and detection equipment, the breakthrough invention of the hypers.p.a.ce net-there
were pages and pages of graphs tracing how each new scientific and technological advance had brought the goal closer. Already over eighteen thousand angels had been collected, with that number growing at an ever increasing rate.
Kosta paused, staring at one of the graphs, a quiet alarm bell going off in the back of his mind. He'd studied great quant.i.ties of black hole theory during the astrophysics segment of his tridoctorum degree. But if that graph was correctly drawn...
Strapping himself into the chair, hardly noticing his weightlessness, he got to work.
He was still at it when the announcement came that the s.h.i.+p had landed.
”So. What did you think?”
Kosta looked up from his display, feeling a flicker of annoyance at the interruption. ”Of what, Angelma.s.s?”
”Of Dr. Qhahenlo,” Gyasi said. ”And our project.”
”Oh.” Kosta shrugged, turning his attention to the display again. ”I don't know. Okay, I guess.”
Peripherally, he saw Gyasi put down his stylus and scoot his chair over. ”Okay, I give up,” he said.
”What in the world is so interesting?”
Kosta hesitated. He was sure now. But whether he ought to tell any of the Empyreals about this...
No. Of course he ought to. He was here to save them, after all. ”This,” he told Gyasi, swiveling the
display around. ”It's a graph of number of angels captured per hunters.h.i.+p per unit time, shown in one-
year slices. You can see that it's gone up in the past couple of years.”
Gyasi glanced at it. ”No big surprise,” he said. ”There have been some major advances in technology and sensor equipment-”
”I've factored those out,” Kosta cut him off.
Gyasi stopped. ”Oh.” He looked at the graph again, more carefully this time. ”Well, maybe it's due to the fact that Angelma.s.s is getting smaller. You know-as a quantum black hole gets smaller, it gets
hotter and radiates its ma.s.s away faster.” He reached for the keyboard. ”Let's see; a hotter effective temperature would s.h.i.+ft the mean particle spectrum upwards, creating more angels-”
”I've factored that out, too,” Kosta told him.
Gyasi frowned. ”You sure?”
Kosta nodded. ”It's a simpler calculation even than the technological advancements. Check it
yourself if you want.”
”I'll take your word for it.” For a long minute Gyasi gazed at the display, lips moving soundlessly. ”Interesting and a half,” he admitted at last. ”What do you think is causing it?”
Kosta shook his head. ”I don't know. But it's for sure that something strange is going on out there. Something in the Hawking process that current theory doesn't cover.”