If the rest of humanity was stunned and terrified, Hiram McGillicutty was merely fascinated. No known mechanism could do this to a planet. Clearly there was a new principle at work here. And he would be the one to crack it. On that, he was determined.
If the silence in the station meant anything at all to him, it was that he had a leg up on the competition. Here was the greatest scientific puzzle in history—and he was well ahead of the pack. After all, if his station mates weren’t working, who else would be?
He sat alone in the main control room, pleased that every instrument and data record was, for the moment, his and his alone. He ran the visual record on the right screen again, throwing a new set of data overlays on the left-side screen.
He watched the infrared image track up against the visible-light image of Earth. In visible light, that blue-white cloud bloomed up out of nowhere, but in infrared, there was nothing. It wasn’t there at all. No IR activity at all—except of course the Earth’s infrared image, vanishing when Earth did.
Or maybe he just didn’t have good enough data to see the IR from here. He racked up the near-ultraviolet image and ran it against visible light again. Too bright. The event, whatever it was, positively glowed in UV. But then, VISOR had very sensitive UV detectors, far better than its IR stuff. Maybe the signal strengths he was seeing were artifacts of his own instruments’ relative sensitivity. He would have to compensate for that. But later. Later. Now he just had to look at the raw data. All of it.
He stared hard at the visible-light image. VISOR was not intended as an astronomical observatory, of course, and the long-range optics used to get the last images of Earth did not provide very high resolution. Unfortunate, but no matter. Some sort of camera would have been running on the Moon. Sooner or later, he could see that imagery.
He pulled up far UV and ran that. A bright, fuzzy image that told him nothing. Damn it, he would need better images of Earth! For now he would have to settle for the view from VISOR of a slightly smeary Earth about the size of a golf ball at arm’s length. He watched the playback again and again, tracking the vanishment against every data line he had recorded. This was the third time he had run through the complete dataset.
The amplitude lines and false-color images for UV, visual, infrared, magnetism, and radio marched across the right-side screen, one after the other, and then again in various combinations—while on the left-hand screen, the visible-light Earth vanished again and again. It was a crude technique, and no doubt the computer system could have found any and all corollaries between the various datasets within a few milliseconds. Later he would use the computer to do just that. But speed was not the only issue here. Hiram wanted to be immersed in the data, wanted to understand each bump and twist of it backwards and forwards. Then, when he ran it through the computer, perhaps he could understand what the computer’s findings were telling him.
Even without a computer, he had already learned two or three fascinating things not readily apparent.
One, Earth vanished not at the moment the gravity beam struck it, but 2.6 seconds afterwards—which, interestingly enough, was the period of time it took for light to travel between Earth and the Moon and back.
Two, simultaneous with the vanishment came the first of a massive series of gravity-wave pulses—far more powerful than the Pluto beam, and continuing long after Earth was gone. Indeed, VISOR’s gear was still detecting gee waves from the vicinity of Earth’s former orbit. Those waves had to be coming from somewhere—presumably someplace fairly large, as it would require a Ring of Charon-size generator to create them.
Three, that squeal on the twenty-one-centimeter band had started at the moment Earth vanished, and it likewise was continuing, long after the Earth was gone. As best his direction-finding gear could tell, it was coming from the Moon, though no known Lunar transmitter worked on that frequency.
All of which strongly suggested that the Moon had something to do with what had happened.
There was another point, a rather obvious prediction. The orbits of every planet in the Solar System were going to be very slightly shifted. Nothing very dramatic, of course. There would be minor changes to Venus’s orbit, and Mars’s. Enough to throw off navigation a bit, that was all. The big changes would be in the area of the Moon.
Which was probably more than anyone on the Moon had realized yet, McGillicutty told himself proudly.
McGillicutty cackled to himself. Nice to be ahead of the pack. But in science, it was important not just to be ahead, but to prove it, to the world at large.
He ordered the computer to summarize his finding and transmit the text and images to all the public-access channels on the Moon, Pluto, Mars and the major satellites.
That ought to give them something to think about. He read over the computer-generated summary, made one or two changes, adjusted a few of the graphs, and told the computer to send it. He grinned and started running the playbacks again. He was having a wonderful time.
Orbital Traffic Control had its own tunnel-and-airlock system leading to the Lunar surface. OTC had a lot of instruments topside, and it made sense to have direct access to them without having to deal with the municipal locks.
But Tyrone Vespasian was not going to check on his instruments, except, quite literally, in the most basic possible way. For all scientific instruments are merely extensions of the human senses. The instruments Vespasian needed to check were his eyes. He needed to see for himself.
There was always the faint chance, the faint hope that a camera, a lens, an electronic image system would have malfunctioned. He had to eliminate that possibility. He needed to know there was nothing but his own bare-assed eyeballs between himself and what he was looking at. He needed to go up to the surface, look in the sky, and see for himself.
He knew Earth was gone, but this was not about knowing. He needed to believe.
The outer airlock door opened and Vespasian, huge and squat in his pressure suit, stepped awkwardly out onto the Lunar surface.
Look to the skies, he told himself, but somehow his gaze stayed determinedly staring at the ground. Strange thoughts ran through his head. What, exactly, would happen to the Moon without the Earth? Vespasian found his eyes scanning the horizon, not the zenith. He could not bring himself to look up. Lucian’s computer models showed the Moon merely retaining its previous Solar orbit with a somewhat increased eccentricity that would gradually damp out, eventually leaving the Moon riding secure, square on the former barycenter, the old center of gravity for the Earth-Moon system.
Look to the skies. What would happen to the Moon’s rotation? Would it retain its old once-a-month spin? Still he could not force his eyes to look up, toward Gemini, to where Earth should have been. Would the Moon’s spin speed up? Slow down?
Look to the skies. At last he turned his gaze upward, and looked—at nothing. A blankness, an empty spot where Earth had always been. He felt his knees about to give way, and leaned backward in time to land on his ample rump, rather than flat on his face.
He sat there, legs splayed out in front of him, head thrown back, staring at the sky, for hours, or days, or seconds. The lifeless hills of the Moon, the gray, cratered landscape no longer graced by the blue-white marble in the sky. He felt a tear in his eye, and was glad for some reason that he could not reach through his helmet and brush it away. Another tear fell, and another. These were tears for Earth, tears that deserved to flow.