Larry turned back toward his control console and checked the sequencer display. The locus mass had grown appreciably, and the Ring was able to refocus the gravity beam to even greater power. He switched one of the monitors to an external view camera and looked for a long last time at Pluto.
The planet was collapsing, shrinking, fast enough that he could see it happening. A haze of dust and debris and gas was a funeral shroud for the doomed planet. A huge, roiling cone-cloud of debris was climbing up the gravity beam, matter spiraling down into the maelstrom from all over the planet, pulled in toward the beam.
The Ring adjusted the focus again, centering the beam on the point directly under the locus mass, widening the beam to draw in a wider and wider swath of matter. The faster the locus absorbed matter, the faster the strength of the beam grew, and the faster it tore matter from Pluto.
The planet’s matter howled up the gravity cyclone, the superheated glow of ionized matter blazing across the sky. The locus absorbed more and more matter, giving the Ring more gravity potential to work with. The Ring tightened down the vise, compressing the locus down upon itself ever more tightly.
Larry watched the gee meters, the amplification meters. They were rising even more rapidly than he had planned. Closer and closer to the point where nothing, not even light, could escape from the microscopic pinpoint that now held all the matter that had once been a moon, the pinpoint that was swallowing a world. “Coming up on it,” he announced, and no one had to ask what he meant. He closed his eyes, and exhaustion swept over him, tried to claim him one more time. But no, not yet.
The end of the firelance resting on the mass locus reddened more and more, grew dark and sullen as the gravity well deepened, redshifting the light more and more. The last shreds and fragments of Pluto slammed into the accretion cone, ripped themselves down to powder and gas, then to ions, falling, whirling, spinning, glowing, collapsing toward the voracious maw.
Larry watched the meters and licked his fear-dry lips. Soon. Soon. When the escape velocity reached the speed of light…
Suddenly there was a strange flickering across the screen as the last of Pluto fell into the beam. Just then, the light of the firelance guttered down to nothing, and not even the light of impact on the mass locus could escape. And the rest was darkness.
Larry looked up from his numbers and his meters, ignored the view from the monitor screens, and stumbled toward one of the Nenya’s few viewpoints. His own eyes. He had to see this with his own eyes.
In the wardroom. A port there. He stepped in, and saw a crowd there, people staring out the port. But suddenly their faces turned toward him, and they backed away. Whether out of fear or respect Larry neither knew nor cared. See. He had to see, with his own eyes.
He shoved his face up against the port, leaned in close enough that his breath froze on the quartz, turning the port into a foggy mirror, putting eyes in the quartz reflection that looked back at him.
His breath had frosted the station’s observation dome that first night of it all. That action, that tiny dusting of frozen moisture on a window, reminded him of the far-off victory when he had succeeded in focusing a pinprick of gravitic potential, a nothing, and held it steady for the briefest of moments—and had thought that to be a triumph. Now he knew better.
And, oh how happily he would give up that moment in order to give up this one, trade away his dreams to lose the knowledge he had purchased at such terrible price. The knowledge of destruction.
He reached out a weary hand and wiped his reflection away to look out at his handiwork.
Charon was gone.
Pluto was gone.
Lost, vanished, as if they had never been.
Only the Ring, the mighty and terrible Ring, survived. At its centerpoint, at the axis of the Ring, at the place around which all their desperate hopes revolved, was an impossibly tiny dot, utterly and forever invisible. A dot that contained all that been Charon, all that had been Pluto, all that had been the station and the bodies of their dead comrades.
A black hole.
A piece of darkness, and he had made it so.
Larry closed his eyes, and trembled, and wept. Then the exhaustion of collapse swept over him, and he knew no more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Half a Loaf
Larry awoke after far too short a time, longing for a better rest, for proper sleep, for a chance to dream away some of the nightmares. But things were getting worse back in the Inner System. People, families, whole cities could die while he caught a few winks. There was no time.
And so he was back in his control chair, trying to make it all work.
At last the main monitor screen lit up.
Good. He cleared the board, ran one last check, and let the automatics take over. A display light flickered once, there was a faint beep, and the search program ran. The Ring’s computers knew to within close tolerances Earthpoint’s modulation, intensity, focus, pulse rate. Now it had to hunt within that range, searching for the precise combination of values that would cause a lock.
It was up to the machines now. Larry moved back from the board. This was it, the end of the quest.
And yet only the beginning. There were endless battles left to fight.
The Ring sequencer worked relentlessly through all the myriad ways, testing, sensing as it made each adjustment. Larry watched it work, astonished by his own arrogance. His black hole was a scant few hours old, and here they were, using it in the most elaborate and complicated way imaginable. They should have performed tests, years’ worth of tests, accumulated an encyclopedia’s worth of data, before they tried something this far out on the edge.
But there was no time. People were dying.
Webling, utterly exhausted, had gone off to try to sleep. Larry sat in the control room, alone with Dr. Raphael, watching the display click through all the permutations.
But being alone was an illusion. Larry knew that outside that door the entire staff of the research station, the people he had just made refugees, were watching every monitor, every display. Watching to see if the Solar System would live. Oh, yes, he was far from alone.
Larry turned and looked at Dr. Raphael. No, at Simon. He had never called the man that. But maybe now was the time to speak the man’s name. Maybe that, too, would be a beginning, a start of saying many other things to his staunchest companion. “Simon,” he said, quietly.
The older man looked up, startled. It was clear that he understood the significance of the moment. “Yes, Larry?”
“Simon, where are we? I mean, even if this works, what does it gain us? If we stop them, where do we go next?”
Simon thought for a moment, and then offered up a sad smile. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Maybe nowhere. Maybe we win this battle and lose the war. We’ve just barely begun to have an idea of who and what we’re fighting. But at least we’ll have bought time. We’ll be in a position to survive, to regroup. We’ll have hope. And Earth will be safe, at least for the moment.”
Larry was about to reply when the alert buzzer went off. He checked his board and suddenly felt the adrenaline surging through his body. “We have a lock,” he announced. He powered up the external monitor and zoomed the camera in on the centerpoint of the Ring, where the invisible Plutopoint singularity hung lurking in the darkness. Suddenly, impossibly, there was a flash of unwhite, unblue, a flicker of color in the black. And then it was gone. Larry watched, unmoving, scarcely daring to breathe, waiting.