Part 6 (1/2)

”No, sir.”

”Okay. Well, I'm off. See you in three weeks.”

Kapoor glanced up. ”You're going on vacation?”

”Theoretically, yes. Practically, it'll be one week of rest and two of speeches on Earth and Luna.”

”It will be a nice change for you, anyway.”

”Yes.” Talking to Kapoor always depressed Carter a little. Something about the Indian's att.i.tude seemed to indicate disapproval, although it was nothing you could put your finger on. As near as Carter could remember, Kapoor's geniality had evaporated during the a.s.sembly's debates on a name for the project. It had come within a hair of being called s.h.i.+va, after the destroyer/regenerator of Hinduism, and Carter strongly suspected that Kapoor had considered even the suggestion to be sacrilegious. ”Well, take care of the project, Kapoor,” he said, a bit lamely, and left the room.

It could have been worse, Carter thought, walking down the hall. The a.s.sembly had also considered the name Lucifer.

As things turned out, Carter was not away from Firefly for three weeks. He was gone for exactly fifty-eight hours, and the s.h.i.+p that returned him to the station was a big Patrol craft that made the trip in record time. No one aboard would tell him what was going on, but the message was painfully clear.

Something was terribly wrong at Firefly.

The entire senior staff was a.s.sembled in the conference room when Carter arrived and slid into his usual chair. Nodding to the group, he turned to the Deputy Director and asked, ”What's happened, Paul?”

Dr. Paul Rurik looked like he was next in line for a oneway tumbril ride. ”We may have a runaway on our hands, Ray.”

Carter felt his hands tightening into fists under the table. ”Fill me in.”

Rurik touched a switch and a set of graphs appeared on one of the displays.

”During last night's Owl s.h.i.+ft Firefly's temperature started to rise. When we tried to restabilize this morning we discovered we couldn't do so. We tried everything we could think of and then sent the Patrol to get you.””Who was the operator last night?”

”I was, Doctor,” a young man spoke up, a slight quaver in his voice.

”It wasn't Galton's fault,” Rurik said. ”The temperatures were within the allowable range we've calculated.”

Carter nodded heavily. An operator couldn't be expected to notice that the rate of temperature increase was not following the theoretical curve. Only one of the scientists like Rurik or himself would have had the necessary knowledge.

Rurik went on, ”I suspect Firefly drifted a little out of place, causing one or more of the neutron beams to miss it”

”No.” Carter pointed to a display. ”If that had happened you'd have gotten a big energy jump in the heat exchanger directly across from the beam that's missing. Instead, that extra neutron flux is spread out over several exchangers; furthermore, it's happening for all three beams. The beams aren't missing-they're being deflected.”

”How?”

Carter looked toward the voice in surprise. ”What are you doing here, Senator?”

”I was still here at Firefly when the crisis occurred,” Chou said. ”It is my right to be kept informed. How are the neutrons being deflected, Doctor?”

”Firefly emits particles in a thermal spectrum,” Carter explained. ”That means there are some at every speed from zero to near lightspeed. The ones that are moving slowly tend to stay near the black hole, forming a sort of cloud around it, and it's this cloud that's deflecting the beams.”

”Surely they can't change the beam directions very much,” Chou argued.

”They don't have to,” Rurik put in. ”Firefly is much smaller than the neutrons themselves. But, Ray, we took that effect into account when we set our temperature limits.”

”I know. All I can think of is that our subatomic particle theory must be wrong somehow. If there are some particles coming out of Firefly that we haven't taken into account, all of our temperature curve calculations will be off.”

”h.e.l.l cubed,” Rurik muttered under his breath. ”I'll get the theory people on this right away. Maybe with the extra particle emission data Firefly's giving them they can figure out where we're going wrong.”

”For the moment, that won't help us,” Carter said. ”What we have to do is get more ma.s.s into Firefly, and that as soon as possible. The hotter it gets, the denser that particle cloud becomes. Not much, since most of the particles emitted have high kinetic energies, but even a slight increase in the number of low-energy particles just makes things worse. What have we got that we can throw at the black hole?”

”We have a spare DeVega accelerator,” Rossetti volunteered, ”but I don't think that'll help any.”

”Why not?” Senator Chou asked. ”That would give you an extra neutron beam.”

For an instant Carter had an overpowering urge to tell the Senator to shut up.

None of them had the time to explain things to a layman. ”DeVega dipole accelerators require very tricky and sensitive electromagnetic fields to function.

On a ring the diameter of the accelerator platform we can place only three DeVegas, s.p.a.ced one hundred twenty degrees apart. Any closer and their fields would interfere with each other.”

”What about putting the extra accelerator farther out from the center?” Chou persisted.

”At the distance we'd need the beam would spread out too much to be useful.

And before you ask, directly above and below Firefly are the charged plates that hold it in place, so we can't run a neutron beam through there. Paul, can we increase present flux any?”

”No way. We're already running them ten percent above spec maximum, though I don't know how long they can hold that. We may in fact have stopped the runaway-the temperature is changing so slowly now we can't tell if it's going up or down.”

”Let's a.s.sume it's still going up,” Carter said. ”Anything else we can use?”

”We've got a few X-ray lasers,” someone said. ”They could be set up to fire at Firefly.”

”I've already checked that,” Rossetti said. ”It won't give a significant ma.s.s increment, and might add an extra scattering component to the neutron beams.”

”Sir?” Galton spoke up hesitantly. ”I may have an idea.”

”Spit it out, son,” Rurik said brusquely. ”This is no time to be shy.”

Carter winced at the tone as Galton blushed slightly. The young man's reticence was clearly not shyness, but instead the result of guilt feelings over his part in this mess. Rurik had never been good at understanding human emotion, though. He had declared that the fault was not Galton's and, for him, that ended the subject. It would never occur to him that Galton might still be upset.

”Sir, the DeVegas will accelerate any neutral particle that has a reasonable dipole moment. If we used, say, iron atoms instead of neutrons, we might be able to reverse the runaway.”

Rurik nodded slowly. ”That might just work, Galton. You'll probably get fewer hits on Firefly because of heightened beam self-interference diffusion, but the ones that go in are fifty-six times more ma.s.sive. And they'll be deflected less by that particle cloud around Firefly.” He looked at Carter inquiringly.

”It's worth a try,” Carter agreed. ”Anyone know how long it would take to switch beam materials?”

”I checked, sir,” Galton said. ”The beam would only have to be off for ten minutes. And there's enough spare iron around for about ten hours of operation.”

”If we can't reverse the runaway in that time we'll have to try something else, anyway.” But to have the beams off for even ten minutes might prove disastrous.

Carter weighed the options briefly, painfully aware of the need for speed. ”All right. Galton, get the DeVega crews together and brief them. We'll switch just one accelerator for now-make it Beta. If it helps, we'll do the other two a little later.

Paul, I suggest you get the control room people ready for the switchover. The rest of you go to your Emergency posts-I want to be ready if any problems crop up.

Get to it.”