Part 6 (1/2)
”Sure-first, that this thing has to be enormously compressed, and the only object we know in its cla.s.s of energy and power is...a black hole.” She sipped her iced tea and watched his veiled surprise.
”One of...”
He was pulling it out of her, all right, but it was an amusing game. ”About three times the ma.s.s of our moon.”
”You derived that from the Doppler s.h.i.+fts from very close in to the core, I suppose?”
”Exactly. Didn't want to say so until I had more data.”
”A black hole of that size is quite small, a meter or two across.” He looked at her askance, skeptical.
She had looked up the theory. Primordial black holes could have been left over from the Big Bang, but there was no evidence for them. After birth, these tiny singularities in s.p.a.ce-time could have survived their habit of radiating away sprays of particles-that is, black holes were not exactly black. This radiation had been worked out by Stephen Hawking, who showed that a small hole would have survived this evaporation, from the beginning of the universe until the present, if it had at least 1015 grams of ma.s.s. This was equivalent to an asteroid a hundred meters in radius. grams of ma.s.s. This was equivalent to an asteroid a hundred meters in radius.
The intruder, though, had a ma.s.s ten billion times greater. It had swallowed a lot, perhaps, in the last fifteen billion years as the universe ripened.
Where it came from was completely open. It could not have been born in a supernova collapse, which was the theorists' favorite recipe for making holes. Such a cataclysm would have produced a black hole of ma.s.s comparable to the sun. This intruder might have been built up by sucking in ma.s.s, all the way back to the Big Bang. Might. Maybe. Perhaps Might. Maybe. Perhaps...the familiar wiggle room terms that accompanied most advanced astrophysical theory, which was starved for hard data. Until now.
Kingsley was enjoying this a bit too much, so she cut to the chase. ”So how's it guide itself, right? Like a fat man on skates, it should just shoot through in a straight line.”
Kingsley allowed himself a smile. ”I apologize for seeming to lead the conversation, but I have had the impression for several days that you know a great deal more than you are admitting.”
”Being away from the scramble at the Center helps. The quiet gives me time to think.”
”Particularly, to think of how this impossibility can exist.”
”It's a black hole, almost certainly guiding itself with its magnetic fields. I've proved they're there, thousands of Gauss in strength, by looking in a small bit of the optical line data.” There, the whole truth and nothing but. She was tired of all this precious waltzing around, as though they were all trying to get an ace journal paper out of this, or competing for a prize. She had operated under the a.s.sumption that Kingsley was, since he had quite a few prizes on his mantel already. But she now saw that he was beyond that, engaged at some different level.
”I see.”
He had something to say now, she could tell, but wanted to be coaxed. ”This object is not the only problem?”
”Sure, it's d.a.m.ned strange and people higher up-a h.e.l.l of a lot higher up-are going to want to control the situation. But our position is equally odd.”
”I try not to think beyond the astronomy.”
”Alas, I must.” He got up and paced, hesitating at the vision of leafy paradise beyond the window. ”Quite predictably, we will be...enlisted.”
”Benjamin feels the same way, but he didn't want to say it.”
”Why didn't he mention it to me today at the Center?”
”You two have your own, uh, styles. They don't match up too well.”
”A very polite way to say it. Bad blood between us, going back to...”
”Yes, you and me. He suspects, but I've never told him.”
”Good.” Quick nods of the head, a brisk manner. ”No point.”
”He got some hints from 'friends' around the time of our marriage. I could tell, from the way he edged around the subject, bringing you up at odd times. Then, years later, noticing very obviously your steady rise up the ladder. A professors.h.i.+p at Manchester-'Not bad for his age,' he said. Then a chair at Cambridge, how he envied that! Always in the back of his mind I could feel the question...but he never asked.”
”It was over, done.”
”Between men like you nothing is ever really over.”
”Well, it is to me.” He smiled very slightly. ”With you, I mean.”
”I know. Me, too. But you two are always going to be compet.i.tors.”
”Inevitably.” She could see him draw himself up, taking a cleansing breath, shoving the personal into a pocket of his mind. ”And I fear my understanding of how power works in our tiny world implies that matters shall soon change radically.”
”For the worse.”
He looked soberly at her and she saw that he had enjoyed this bit of verbal jousting as much as she. But not as flirting, no-as nostalgia. He was shoring up memories of better times, against a grim future.
Not that she did not do the same, she reminded herself.
Kingsley gazed at the tropical wealth and sighed. ”We're all going to be kept here, close to the incoming data, and 'encouraged' to work together. Of that I am sure. It's what you expect, isn't it?”
”I hadn't given it a thought.”
He smiled. ”Of course. You have far more important matters to attend. Quite right. I do hope I am wrong.”
”Me, too...” She let the sentence trail off. His transition from the Kingsley of old to this astute observer of the corridors of power was unsettling.
”I can think of no better place to be incarcerated. Compared with my situation in Oxford, especially with the chilly winds blowing from Angelica, it is-”
”It's like paradise,” she finished for him.
3.
For centuries, physics and astronomy sought the big, glamorous governing equations for phenomena that were themselves ever-more grand: larger or smaller, hotter or colder, faster or slower than the narrow, comfortable human world. But shortly after the end of the TwenCen, science-particularly astronomy, with its pricey telescopes-approached the financial turnover, where ever-larger infusions of money yielded only incrementally more insight.
The universe kept upping the fare for further erudition. The particle physicists had hit that marginal realm with their ma.s.sive accelerators. Now science increasingly s.h.i.+fted from the fundamental equations to discovering what emerged from those equations in the real, complex world.
One faction among scientists decried this turning to more applied problems. In their vision, physics resembled Latin-an important canon, essential for advanced work and kept alive by small bands of devoted advocates. This view failed to carry the day among those who gave funding. Applied problems had become the mainstream of physics and even astronomy, making the twenty-first century a more practical place, especially when compared with the great cathedrals of knowledge erected in the TwenCen, soaring to grand heights from the base of great theories.
Astronomers, with so many new observing windows thrown open upon the universe, kept busy scrutinizing the zoo of objects available at ever-finer resolutions. Those who interpreted the observations evolved new approaches. Theorists now used pencil and paper in a blend with vast computer programs, asking questions with whatever tool seemed best.
Luckily, such intellectual armament proved to be the best for use against the problem of the intruder. Channing's discovery of high magnetic fields in the hottest, most luminous region of the object was the crucial fact that opened a rich realm of informed speculation.
Benjamin was particularly happy with the importance of magnetic fields. His doctoral thesis had focused on magnetic forces in galactic jets, and this thing definitely had a jet whose twists and filigrees the radio astronomers were enthusiastically mapping. They sent new charts daily.
Benjamin threw himself into the work, using a combination of imagination and rigorous computer programs. He was pleased to find that some of his h.o.a.ry old methods were quite germane to this problem. It helped him keep up with Kingsley's darting skills at a.n.a.lysis. They had offices near each other and their meetings were contests between the speed of Kingsley's elegant fountain pen and Benjamin's custom keyboard.