Part 3 (1/2)

Would her own career at NASA have gone better, she mused, if she had been a man? n.o.body in pa.s.sing conversation would glance at your chest. You wouldn't have to pretend to be ”freshening up” to go to the G.o.dd.a.m.n john. n.o.body cared if you didn't remember their birthday. You could rationalize any behavior error with the all-purpose ”Screw it.” In late-night jokes in a bar, you could really see something hilarious in punting a small dog, preferably a poodle. You didn't give a rat's a.s.s whether anybody heeded your new haircut. Thank G.o.d, they never noticed if you'd lost or gained weight. Men had some things so easy! With the Other Side, flowers fixed anything. And as the years closed in, gray hair and wrinkles would add character. h.e.l.l, you could dine out on that alone. Lean over the bar, belch originally, and declaim about the old days when rocket boosters kicked you in the a.s.s so hard you thought you had a prostate problem. And what the h.e.l.l, you could always look forward to being a dirty old man.

5.

He had expected the next day to be hours of more muddling along, with data trickling in and more idea-bas.h.i.+ng with Kingsley and Amy. Instead, it proved decisive.

The Very Large Baseline Interferometer reported in promptly, to everyone's surprise. This network had grown from a few stations strewn around the world into an intricate system that now included radio telescopes...o...b..ting farther away than the moon. Its ”baseline” then made it effectively an instrument of enormous equivalent resolution, like having a dim eye of astronomical size. Getting a measurement quickly was pure luck. The distant s.p.a.ceWeb satellites had been looking in roughly the right portion of the sky, and Benjamin's request came in at the very end of a rather tedious job. Instrument tenders were human, too, and the mystery had caught their attention.

The radio plume was thin, bright-and moving. Comparison with the earlier map showed definite changes in the filaments making up the thin image. Now they had two maps at different times show changing luminosity and position.

”But these were taken only a day or so apart!” Kingsley jabbed at the differences between the maps with a bony finger.

”So?” Benjamin gave him a slight smile.

”Must be wrong.”

Benjamin said, ”No, it means this object is local-very local.”

”You took the rate of change of these features and worked it into a distance estimate?” Amy asked.

”Nothing moves faster than light-so I used that to set a bound. I came in early, had a chance to work through the numbers, and checked them by e-mail with the guys in Socorro.” The site of the now-outdated Very Large Array, Socorro, New Mexico, still had a practiced set of house theorists and observers, and Benjamin knew several of them well. ”Jean Ellik, an old hand there, agrees: this thing can't be much farther away than the Oort cloud.”

”But it's a radio radio object.” object.”

The Oort cloud was a huge spherical swarm of icy fragments...o...b..ting beyond the orbit of Pluto. Objects there were frigid and unenergetic, exceptionally difficult to detect.

”Something has found a way to light itself up, out there in the cold and dark,” Benjamin said happily. The look of consternation on Kingsley's face was all he had been hoping for. He could not resist rubbing it in. ”That added hypothesis you were asking for yesterday-here it is.”

They quickly went to the head of the Center, Victoria Martinez, and got permission for added resources. ”Get everybody on it,” she said intently. Martinez was a good astronomer who had been deflected into administration. Benjamin worried that he would drift along the same path, getting more disconnected from the science all the while. He was happy that she saw the implications immediately.

They wrote a carefully phrased alert for the IAU Notices, asking for any and all observations of the object, in all frequency bands, because in Kingsley's phrase, ”inasmuch as this is a wholly unantic.i.p.ated finding, no data is irrelevant.” ”Let's keep the media out of it for the moment,” Martinez said carefully, and they all agreed. Everyone remembered past embarra.s.sments: mistaken reports of asteroids that might hit Earth, misidentified ma.s.sive stars, spurious discovered planets around nearby stars.

Kingsley was atypically silent. Apparently he had decided to ”hang about” for a few days out of curiosity.

Coaxed, Kingsley said, ”Admittedly, all along I had thought that it would turn out to be a relativistic jet-yes, my favorite object. Indeed, one pointed very nearly straight at us. That would neatly explain its huge luminosity. Also, we would naturally see all the jet's variations as occurring quickly, as they would be time-squeezed by relativity. Alas”-a touch of the theatrical here, holding a pen aloft like a phony sword-”it was not to be.”

The gamma-ray signature had surfaced as crucial, and within hours Kingsley had a new idea.

”Let us face facts, uncomfortable as they may be to conventional views,” he began to a small band in the seminar room, including Amy and Benjamin at the front. ”It makes no sense if you suppose this is an object pa.s.sing through the interstellar medium, a very thin gas. It would emit radiation, then, because it was striking objects in its way. A quick calculation”-he proceeded to produce this in quick, jabbing strokes on a blackboard as he spoke-”shows that one needs to expend only a trivial amount of power to overcome the friction of the interstellar hydrogen.” He dropped the chalk dramatically. ”There is simply not enough matter nearby our solar system for it to run into.”

He turned to the audience, which agreed. Or at least nodded; Kingsley's reputation for incisive a.n.a.lysis was enough to silence the timid. Several were checking his numbers and did not look up.

Channing had heard the news and was sitting in on the impromptu seminar that had developed spontaneously down the hall from Benjamin's office. She saw her chance and stepped into the silence. ”Okay, then we have to look elsewhere. It's reasonably nearby, or else it couldn't possibly be so luminous. So as savvy Kingsley implies, why is it luminous? Because it's not gliding through, it's accelerating accelerating.”

Benjamin had not even known that Channing was in the room. He turned to look at her, a spark of uneasy pride at her speaking up so readily. Uneasy because Kingsley had a reputation for leaving questions hanging, only to knock them down when anyone ventured to take the next step without thinking it through. But this time the narrow, hatchet face showed only real puzzlement as it nodded. Kingsley put his hands behind his back, as if to disarm himself, and said slowly, ”Perhaps, but why? There are no unusual signatures near it, nothing to be propelling it forward.”

Benjamin got her drift. ”Exactly. But what if it's decelerating?”

Kingsley shot back, ”I just showed that the interstellar medium slows things very slowly. Nothing would naturally-”

Channing broke in. ”Suppose it's not natural? What if it's a stars.h.i.+p?”

Benjamin's jaw dropped, but out of loyalty he tried to fill the skeptical silence that greeted her question. ”P-pa.s.sing near us?”

To his amazement, she rose from her seat and stepped with fragile grace to the front, taking the chalk from Kingsley's hand. Everyone in the room knew of her illness, but he sensed that her command of them came from the quality that had made her a successful astronaut, a presence he could never name but that he sensed every day. He felt a burst of pride for her and a smile split his face, telltale of a joy he had not felt quite this way for a very long time. Since the illness, in fact.

This was a mere instant, for Channing did not pause to absorb the regard of the room. Quickly she did her own swift calculation. It all depended upon the source's intrinsic luminosity. A bright source ten light-years away looked the same as one a light year away and a hundred times dimmer, so-she turned to the audience, neatly jotting L = P/R L = P/R2, and said, ”With P the s.h.i.+p's power demand and R in light-years, we have-” More jotting. ”How much does one need to ram a s.h.i.+p through the interstellar medium?”

The crowd now filled the room to overflowing, Benjamin noticed, and from the packed faces came guesses: ”The power level of a city?” and ”No, nearer to all of North America.”

She shook her head. ”Try the whole planet.”

A gasp of surprise. Not even acknowledging this, she went on to cite the Mouse, a runaway neutron star discovered decades before. It lay somewhere within a thousand light-years and looked vaguely like a fleeing rodent with a long tail, because it left behind a trail of excited electrons, which were discovered by a radio telescope. All the energy in that tail came from the shock waves the Mouse excited ahead of itself. The interstellar gas and dust was slowing it, braking an entire compacted star, and the energy expended by this splashed across the sky in an extravagant signature.

Of course, she allowed, the Mouse was just an a.n.a.logy. There were details of how to estimate the braking, which demanded knowing the size of the ”working surface” and interactions across it, shock waves-a zoo of astrophysical effects. Benjamin recognized areas she had worked on in her career, so her approach was not really surprising; to the man who owns a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But this method came out of her life, giving her an a.s.surance others lacked.

She turned from her calculations to confront them. ”And this object is doing the same. But taking the luminosity, I can find the ma.s.s that's being slowed down by simple interstellar friction. Guess what it is.”

She had them on puppet strings now and a pleased smile rippled. She waited.

”A neutron star...again?” a voice called, dribbling away in self doubt; she would not be that that obvious. obvious.

”Jupiter-sized?”

”No, bigger!”

”An Earth ma.s.s, I would guess,” Kingsley put in, not to be utterly upstaged, but smiling at her audacity. Benjamin suddenly saw in the wryly appreciative cast to his face that Kingsley had a deep affection for Channing. Somehow this had eluded him through all their clashes.

She drew it out to just the right point and then wrote a number on the board. Silence.

”That's about the ma.s.s of the moon,” a voice called from the back.

”It's small.”

”Nothing at all like a neutron star,” a voice declared, sounding irked at being misled.

”True. With a moon's ma.s.s, but it makes gamma rays. Some kind of supermoon. Gentlemen, you have something really new on your hands.”

She sat down in a free chair in the front row, next to Benjamin. As she settled in, he caught her letting go, giving way to the sudden body language of near-exhaustion. The room broke into applause. Not, Benjamin saw, at the particular brilliance of the a.n.a.lysis-anyone in the room could do the arithmetic and make estimates, and many no doubt would rush back to their offices and do just that, checking her-but because she had seen just the right calculation to do and had done it before anyone else. That was the trick in high-flying science: to pick the right problem just as it becomes worth doing. And she had brought it off. He had noticed that she had gotten up in the night, and in his fuzzy sleep had attributed it to her familiar medical woes. But no, she had been honing herself for this grand game, the clash of scientific ideas. She still has it, my girl She still has it, my girl, he thought with relish.

He leaned over to her and whispered, ”I knew that I'd married Miss Right, okay-only I didn't know her first name was Always.”