Now she felt sheepish for even momentarily mistaking the lights overhead for stars. Their slow passage let her estimate parallax… ranging from one and a half to three meters above them. She’ could, in fact, follow the rough contours of the ceiling now. Anyway, there was no twinkle from atmospheric distortion. Some of the “stars” were, in fact, large oblong shapes.
Still… She blinked, and suddenly rationalization departed once more. For another thrilling moment Teresa purposely enjoyed the illusion again, looking out on an alien sky, on the fringes of some strange spiral arm with fields of verdant suns — the mysterious night glitter of a faraway frontier.
Their guide’s shadow was the black outline of a nebula. The nebula moved. So, she suddenly noticed, did a regular, straight boundary. A rectangular blackness, free of green, passed over them as if demarking a gate. Soon Teresa heard a low rumble of motors and sensed a barrier roll behind them. The emerald starscape vanished.
“Now, if you’ll please cover your eyes,” the shadow said. She felt Manella move to comply, but only shaded hers. To close them completely would demand too much trust.
A sharp glow suddenly grew ahead of them. Perhaps it was only a dim lamp, but the glare felt intense enough to hurt her dark-adapted retinas. It quickly drove out all remaining trace of the worm phosphors. Teresa bade them farewell regretfully.
The boat bumped once more and stopped. “Come this way please,” the voice told them. She felt a touch on her arm and Teresa let herself be led, blinking, out of the swaying craft. Her eyes tearing somewhat from the brightness, she had to squint past rays of diffraction to see who had replaced their original guide. It was a brown-haired man, lightly freckled, who clearly owned no Polynesian ancestry at all. Right now he regarded Pedro with an expression she couldn’t read, but obviously carrying strong emotion.
“Hello, Manella,” he said, apparently making an effort to be polite.
It was Teresa’s first chance to scrutinize Alex Lustig in person. In photographs he had appeared distant, distracted, and some of that quality was present. But now she thought she perceived something else as well, possibly the expression of one who has sought strangeness, and found much more than he had ever bargained for.
Pedro used a kerchief to wipe his eyes. “Hello yourself, Lustig. Thanks for seeing us. Now, I hope you have a good explanation for what you’ve been up to?”
Here they were deep underground, out of contact with any of their own people or, in fact, any legal authority — and sure enough, old Pedro was slipping right back into the role of paternal authority figure.
“As you wish.” Alex Lustig nodded, apparently un-fazed. “If you two will follow me, I’ll tell you everything. But I warn you, it will be hard to believe.”
Of course Pedro wouldn’t let someone else get the last word in, even with a line like that.
“From you, my boy, I expect no less than the completely preposterous and utterly calamitous.”
An hour later Teresa wondered why she only felt anesthetized, when she really ought to loathe the man. Even if he hadn’t made the monster eating away at the Earth’s heart, he was still the one who had brought this thing to her attention.
Then there was his role in triggering the burst of coherent gravity waves that drove Jason and nine others on their one-way journey to the stars. That, too, should be reason enough to despise Alex Lustig. And yet the only emotions she felt capable of right now were more immediate ones… such as the wry pleasure of seeing Pedro Manella for the first time at a loss for words.
The big man sat across from Lustig, hands folded on a table of dark wood, his notepad completely forgotten. Pedro’s eyes kept flicking to a large holographic cutaway of the Earth, more vivid and detailed than anything their group had been able to construct back in Houston. Delicately traced minutiae cast orange, yellow, and reddish shades across one side of Manella’s face, lending false gay overtones to his bleak expression.
There were only the three of them here in a sparsely furnished underground chamber. After providing his guests with refreshments, Lustig had launched into his briefing without assistance, though twice he had lifted a headset to consult someone outside. Naturally, the man had help. Despite his “solitary wizard” reputation, there was no way he could have figured all this out by himself.
The possibility of a hoax occurred to Teresa several times, but she recognized that as wishful thinking. Lustig’s calm thoroughness bespoke credibility, however insane or horrible his conclusions.
“… so it was only this week, by combining gravity scans with neutrino observations, that we were able to pin down at last where the energy is coming from… the elevated state powering the gazer effect. It’s at the base of the mantle, where the geomagnetic field draws on currents in the outer core…”
Technically, the story wasn’t hard to follow. While searching for his Iquitos black hole, Lustig and his associates had stumbled across a much more dangerous singularity al-ready present at the center of the Earth. They tried using tuned gravity waves to trace that one’s trajectory and history, but that touched off internal reflections, amplifying gravitons much as photons are between the mirrors of a laser. In this case the “gazer mirrors” consisted of the mysterious Beta itself plus the experimental black hole onboard station Erehwon. What blasted forth was a great wave of warped space-time, spearing in the general direction of Spica.
Lustig was a good teacher. He kept his math to low-level matrices and used figures to graphically lay out this tale of catastrophe. It sounded all too plausible — and she wouldn’t have believed a single word if she hadn’t witnessed so much firsthand. The sudden, horrible stretching and contraction of Erehwon’s tether, for instance. Or the relativistic departure of the Farpoint lab. Or those colors.
What had Teresa becalmed in an emotional dead zone was the realization that all her concerns were over. What point was there in worrying about internal politics at NASA, or her next flight itinerary, or her failed marriage, if the whole world was coming to an end soon?
The mystery singularity — Lustig’s “cosmic knot” — must have started small. But Beta had grown till now it teetered near a critical threshold. She read the accretion rate off a side screen. Clearly the thing was poised for a voracious binge that could have only one conclusion.
One conclusion … So far he had spared them an explicit simulation of what would happen when matter began flowing into Beta’s maw in megatons per second. Teresa figured it would start with shock waves disrupting the planet’s deep, ancient convection patterns. Earthquakes would roll and volcanoes spume as great seams opened in the crust. Then, undermined from within, the outer layers would collapse.
Ironically, little would happen to things in orbit, like the moon or satellites. Earth’s total mass below would stay the same, only converted into a far more compact form. If she happened to be on a mission at the time, she’d get to watch the whole show… until the singularity revealed its bare glory and seared her spacecraft out of existence in a blast of gamma radiation.
Teresa shook herself. This was no time for a funk. Later, at home, she could climb under the covers, curl in a ball, and hope to die.
“… that one of our problems was finding the inverted energy distribution that’s being tapped by the gazer beam. Where does all the power come from?” The Englishman ran a hand through his hair. “Then it all made sense! The Earth’s magnetic dynamo is the source. Specifically, discrete superconducting domains where—”
Teresa started, sitting upright. “What did you say?”
Alex Lustig regarded her with pale blue eyes. “Captain Tikhana? I was referring to current loops, where the lower mantle meets the liquid core—”
She interrupted again. “You spoke of superconductivity. Down there? We still have trouble cooling rapid transit lines on a summer day, but you say there are superconducting areas thousands of miles below, where temperatures reach thousands of degrees?”