Dr. Simon Raphael paced back and forth, stalking up and down the carpet, completely ignoring the visitors in his office. No one in the room had spoken in the five minutes since Raphael brought them in.
Finally Raphael seemed to have run out of steam. He slowed, turned, walked back behind his desk, and sat down. “Very well then. It’s gone. Eight and a half hours ago in real time, and three hours ago to our awareness, the planet vanished. All our instruments confirm that, and all contacts with other stations confirm it as well.
“And it happened when Mr. Chao’s magic beam touched the planet. All correct so far?” he asked, his voice frighteningly calm.
Sondra, Larry, and Webling said nothing.
Raphael stood up again, came around his desk, stood over Larry, raised his arm as if to strike the young man and then backed away. He stood there, breathing hard, with his arm raised, for a long moment. Then he slowly lowered his arm to his side. “I am actively restraining myself at this point, you know, trying to keep from screaming bloody murder at all of you, trying to keep from blaming Mr. Chao especially for this catastrophe. That is my first impulse. I expect everyone on this station—including all of you here—are harboring similar feelings. If not of anger, then of fear and horror.
“But my rational side, my scientific side, is holding me back.” Raphael leaned over Larry, wrapped his hands on the armrests of Larry’s chair, put his face close enough to Larry’s so that Larry could feel the clean warmth of Raphael’s breath on his face. “I want to blame you, Chao. I want to blame you very much. I don’t like you. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I hate you right about now. My home is gone, Chao. My family, my grandchildren, my wife’s grave. Eight billion souls are gone, vanished, destroyed. Because of that damn-fool gravity beam you had to fire at Earth.” Larry forced himself to look the director in the eye. The ruined patrician’s face was pale, chalk white with fear and repressed rage.
Raphael stood up straight again and recommenced his pacing. He seemed incapable of keeping still, seemed to need to be in motion. All of them were in shock. None of them knew how to respond. At least Raphael was reacting, moving forward instead of staring into space. “I want to blame you,” he repeated, “except I understand gravity, and gravity waves.
“Nothing about this makes sense. But I do know enough to see one obvious fact: that your beam did not do this. I understand the power—or rather the absence of power—of that beam at that range. Passing asteroids and comets have more powerful gravity fields. Nor is this result the sort of thing that gravity could do. A powerful enough beam handled the right way might conceivably shift Earth in its orbit a bit, but no more. So why did your beam destroy a planet when so many other, stronger gravity sources have had no effect?”
Raphael turned and faced the three of them again. “We don’t know, and we have to find out. The ironic thing is that I must turn to the people who have done the damage. You three are the most likely to get at the answers, for the very good reason that you understand gravity waves better than anyone else. I want you to figure out what happened. Was Earth destroyed? Then why is there no rubble? Did that force move the planet? But how? Did it produce the illusion of Earth vanishing? Again, how?”
Raphael stopped pacing again and sat down at the edge of his desk with a deep sigh. “Find out. Forgive me for bending the rules, Dr. Berghoff, but I am ordering you to figure out those things.” He rubbed his face and slumped forward, a tired old man incapable of feeling any further shock, any further emotion of any kind. Suddenly the angry director was gone, to be replaced by a lonely, frightened, tired old man. “The entire station and all its facilities are at your disposal,” he said, in a voice that was suddenly weak and reedy.
The facade of strength and control was crumbling before their eyes. This man had suffered as deep a loss as any of them. He had held together long enough to do his job—but now, Sondra realized, he was at the end of his courage,: his endurance. “Now,” Simon Raphael said, “if you will excuse me, I am going to go lie down.”
Without another word, Raphael stood up, made at least a show of squaring his shoulders, and walked out of the room. Sondra watched him go, and thought how much she had underestimated the man. There were unknown depths of courage, of self-control, of cool intellect beneath all that pomposity. Her image of Raphael had been a mere caricature of the real man—but it struck her that Raphael had been acting like a caricature of himself. She had seen a strutting egotist because that was what Raphael chose to show the world. She closed her eyes and rubbed her brow. Not as if that mattered now.
She turned toward Larry. Another one she hardly knew. Here was another one deep in shock, and in mourning. Raphael managed his shock by calling forth the shield of rationality and reason to hide behind. How would Larry react? “Well, Larry,” she asked gently. “Earth is gone. What do we do?”
“It didn’t happen,” Larry announced, staring down into the carpet. “It didn’t happen.”
Denial, Sondra thought. “Larry, I wish that were true, but it isn’t. Earth isn’t there anymore.”
Larry looked up at her sharply, a blazing gleam in his eye. “I know that,” he snapped. “But Earth was not destroyed.”
Sondra looked up helplessly at Dr. Webling. But she seemed further gone than anyone. She wouldn’t be of any use for a long time. Only by the slightest of connections was she involved in this at all. They had hijacked her perfectly innocent experiment, and destroyed the home-world. Thanks to them, the name Webling would go down in history as one of the maniacs who destroyed Earth.
Sondra felt her mind wandering, bouncing from one question to another. History? Why worry about that now?
If indeed there was any more history after this. Were the surviving human settlements, on Mars and the Moon and elsewhere, really self-sufficient enough to survive without Earth? And suppose whatever happened to Earth happened to them, too?
Bingo. That was what her mind was trying to tell her. That was what gave this crisis urgency, why Raphael had set them to work now. It wasn’t over yet. They had to solve this problem fast, to protect whatever was left of human civilization. That was why Larry had to face the truth now. He was the best chance at finding the answer. They could not afford to wait for him to recover. “Larry, Earth is gone. Lost. Destroyed. We have to figure out why before it happens to the rest of the Solar System. Earth is gone. Accept it.”
“Without debris? Without any residual heat?” he demanded. “There isn’t any way to wreck a world without leaving something behind. You can’t destroy matter or energy. If the Earth was instantly converted into energy somehow, the flashover would at least have melted the Moon. From here it would be like a temporary second Sun, at least. The nuclear radiation would probably kill us. If Earth was simply smashed, there would be debris. Earth had—has—a mass greater than a hundred Asteroid Belts, and we can detect the Belt, certainly. Where is the rubble of Earth? There ought to be debris pieces from the size of the Moon down through asteroid size, right down to molecules. There isn’t any way to wreck a world without leaving behind something. Even if the planet had been reduced to a gas cloud, single molecules, we’d be able to detect it. It would block the Sun, dim the sky. None of that happened. Therefore Earth was not destroyed.”