“Who told you? I suppose that you have a network of your own—people who serve as your informants, pass on to you rumors and gossip.”
Sylvia looked uneasy at his comment, but Baker nodded again, her manner relaxed. “I do. Naturally, it is not something that we advertise.”
“Does it work both ways—to spread information and questions through the system as well as collecting answers?”
“Only too well.” Baker paused for a moment, looking around. “It may be happening now. I am not the only one who uses informers. Secret information leaks from my office so quickly that others often seem to know it before my own staff.”
“That’s fine. I want something spread as widely as possible, and I want it spread as a rumor.”
“It can be done. What is it, Mr. Wolf?”
“I want you to get out the word that I was killed in the accident on the Sagdeyev space farm.”
“Easy enough to do. But why do you want it?”
“Protective paranoia. Someone was after me when I was on Earth, trying to drive me crazy. I think they were still after me on the farm—it’s a self-indulgent idea that someone would arrange to destroy the whole farm just to get me. But I believe it, and I think you do. If they know I’m here and still working for you, they’ll keep trying. The safest person is a dead man.”
“Dead man,” Turpin repeated in a sepulchral whisper. “Dead man.” He walked along the back of the chair and peered at Wolf with bright, beady eyes.
“Very well.” Baker nodded, but Bey could see the doubt on her face. Was she continuing his own train of thought? If it was improbable that someone was seeking to end Bey’s life or destroy his sanity, that person’s continued failure was even more improbable. He had been too lucky. And it opened again the question as to why he was worth killing—or worth saving.
In his dog days at the Office of Form Control, Bey had sometimes thought of the detection of illegal forms as a vast game of chess. In that game he was the master player, one who controlled the movement of people and equipment on a giant board that spanned the space from Mercury to Pluto. It was a game that he had never lost.
Now another game was being played, on a much bigger board and with higher stakes. It was a battle over a territory that ranged from the Sun to the edge of the Cloud, one that stretched a quarter of the way to the stars, a new game that was spreading panic and anger and the threat of total war through the whole system. And this time Bey himself was nothing more than a pawn.
Chapter 15
A Kerr-Newman black hole, or kernel, charged and rotating, is a highly dynamic object. The rotational contribution to its mass-energy can be extracted (or added to) using the Penrose process, and the kernel’s own electric charge can be used to hold it in position, or to control its movement from place to place. Thus, such black holes are “live”; they can provide energy to or remove energy from their surroundings, in a controllable way, and they can be placed at any desired location. They are power kernels.
A Schwarzschild black hole is a kernel that is neither charged nor rotating. It is a kernel in a debased and limiting form, a spherically symmetrical object that has lost all electric charge and rotational energy. It is “dead,” in the sense that one cannot extract from it in a controllable way any of its mass-energy. Unless it is “spun up” (i.e., given rotational energy using the Penrose process) it is not useful for power production.
The Schwarzschild black hole is not, however, totally inert Like any other kernel, it gives off particles and radiation from its hidden interior according to the Hawking evaporative process, at a rate depending only on its mass (smaller black holes emit more strongly than larger ones). However, the pattern of this emission is predictable only in overall statistical terms. All events and processes occurring within a certain region about the center of any black hole, whether of Schwarzschild or Kerr-Newman type, are unknowable. The interior of the black hole within this “event horizon” constitutes, in some sense, a separate universe from ours.
Aybee was in trouble. He was smart enough to know it and smart enough to realize he was unlikely to get out in a hurry.
His decision to remain on the ruined farm had been perfectly reasonable. There was too little space for him on the transit ship. Leo and the others were in the competent hands of the ship’s emergency medic system, and Aybee himself was not urgently needed back on the harvesters. His offer to help the farmers had been politely—and predictably—refused. While they were maneuvering the habitation bubble back into contact with the collection layer, Aybee had switched to a long-duration suit and gone hunting.
He had two items he particularly wanted to find among the thousands of bits of debris created in the collision. One was the ship he arrived in. It would almost certainly need repairs, but it might be quickest way home when he was ready to leave.
With the help of the suit’s microwave sensors he found it in the first twelve hours. It was floating a couple of thousand kilometers from the collection layer, with a small relative velocity. Aybee tagged it with a tracking beacon and went on to the harder part of his search.
The central computer of the farm had been in the direct line of impact. Not even a trace of it was left. But there must have been backup storage for its records. It was in a region of the bubble that had smashed open by the impact but not totally destroyed. Somewhere the mess around the farm Aybee hoped to find the secondary storage cube. It would be small, no bigger than his fist, and he had no illusions about how hard it would be to find it.
With so much debris of all shapes and sizes, the only hope of identification was through the data cube’s reflectance spectrum. He selected the spectral signature for a data cube, set up a spatial survey for it, and settled down to wait. While the scan was being performed, he finaly had time to look around.
And to gasp.
If he had been less busy, he might have noticed it hours earlier. A dark oblong stretched across a quarter of the sky, hiding the bright starfield. He cut in his low-light sensors and saw it at once as a massive cargo craft, drifting closer with unlit ports and with its drive off. It was the type used to carry food shipments from the Cloud to the Inner System, a low-acceleration ellipsoidal hull over a kilometer long and six hundred meters across. It felt close enough to touch.
Aybee did not consider for one moment that it might be a rescue vessel. The approaching shape was too dark and lifeless. He floated himself across to a tangle of ruined cabin furniture and set himself in the middle of it.
The hulk approached within two hundred meters of the battered habitation bubble. A dark port opened, and a file of suited figures emerged. Their suits were bulky, ending in a characteristic flared and massive lower section. That solid base contained low- and high-thrust jets; power supply; food, air, and water recycling systems; medical facilities; exercise units; and communications equipment. At the wearer’s command, the flared bottom would open out to a thin-walled twenty-meter sphere, or couple with one or more other suits to form a common living volume.
Only one group used suits like that. Podders!
But these were Podders many billions of kilometers away from their usual haunts in the Halo. They were entering the dimly lit habitation bubble, passing to the interior through the gaping hole near the south pole. The bubble was on emergency power, but it was still far brighter than the dark cargo ship.