With Lucifer’s acceleration toward this gravity known, it was dead-simple to measure the mass of the gravity source—or, at least, the total mass of the gravity source plus Lucifer, and subtract Lucifer’s listed mass. Probably it had lost some fragments after Dublin, but the result would be close enough.
Result of calculation: 1.053 Earth masses. It couldn’t be Earth. Not unless the planet had gained a few gigatons in the last few hours. Besides, this gee source was invisible.
Holy Christ. Invisible gravity source. Vespasian suddenly realized what was out there. But he couldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe it.
He checked the impact projection clock. He wouldn’t have to believe it for another eighteen minutes. He powered up the maximum-gain telescopic camera and trained it on the dot of light that was Lucifer. The camera zoomed in, the electronic amplifiers came on, and the typical rough potato-shape of an asteroid was tumbling in the center of the screen, tracking and velocity information appearing in a data window in the lower-right corner of the screen. Vespasian watched the fall of Lucifer, willing himself not to believe the evidence of his own eyes.
The ravaged asteroid started to die. The spin stresses were sheering off massive boulders and environment huts from the main body of the asteroid. The main mass of the asteroid was soon surrounded by a thin, rapidly dispersing cloud of fragments large and small, falling, diving into the piece of space where Earth should have been.
Down, down, closer and closer, moving not in a straight line toward Earth’s old position, but in a tight parabola that spiraled in, moving faster every moment.
At about the point where Earth’s surface should have been, tidal stresses began to make themselves felt, even over the relatively short distances involved. The gravity gradient started shredding larger chunks off the asteroid. Lucifer’s tumble got faster, adding to the stresses tearing it apart. Impacts between fragments came faster and faster, each smashing more fragments free. Lucifer disintegrated altogether, with no one piece of rock any longer distinguishable as the parent body.
The cloud of debris that had once been Lucifer spiraled down into the gravity well, falling deeper and deeper, whirling in a tighter and tighter spiral, faster and faster, approaching significant fractions of lightspeed. Bright flashes erupted in the depths of the gravity well as massive fragments smashed into each other at utterly incredible speeds.
The flashes and sparks rose to a crescendo, leapt up to a whole new level of violence. Bursts of radiation flared out across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma rays, X rays, ultraviolet, visible, infrared and radio blazed out from the gravity source. Then, just as suddenly as it had peaked, the violence ebbed away. A flash, a flicker, and then one last ember red flare that snuffed itself out with the suddenness of a candle flame caught by the wind.
And then there was nothing. Nothing at all.
“Radar, give me a scan of Earth-space,” Vespasian said.
“Running now,” Janie’s voice replied. “No return. I say again, no return signal of any kind.”
Lucian leaned in closer to the screen. “Jesus, Vespy, how could that be? What the hell happened to the asteroid? Shouldn’t there at least be debris?”
“It’s gone,” Vespasian said. “Think about it. Think about your college astronomy courses. What sort of gravity source can suck up an entire asteroid and leave nothing behind? No debris, no signal, no radiation, nothing. Lucifer just got sucked down into a black hole.” And now Vespasian knew how Earth could have gained five percent more mass. He had just seen a demonstration. Wherever Earth had gone for those few hours, it had been crushed down to nothing just as Lucifer had been crushed. Maybe Earth had got caught by a black hole with five percent of Earth’s mass. Either way, it didn’t matter. There was no more doubt, at least in his mind. He knew what had happened to Earth. Not how, or where, or why, but what. “A black hole with the mass of planet Earth,” he whispered. “A black hole that used to be Earth.”
Part Three
CHAPTER TEN
Naked Purple Logic
The meeting was not going well, Sondra decided. Larry was stubbornly refusing to believe that Earth was destroyed, Webling seemed incapable of anything but shooting down theories—having none of her own to offer—and Sondra found herself helplessly spouting out one damn-fool idea after another. If we three are the big gravity experts who are going to save humanity, we are in big trouble, Sondra thought.
Larry was still in a sulk, and Webling was just on the point of spinning out another objection when suddenly the door burst open. Dr. Raphael rushed into the room, carrying a datablock and a thick sheaf of printout. “The communications duty officer woke me,” he said without preamble. “This just arrived from the VISOR station at Venus,” he said, his voice breathless and weak. “The comm officer woke me to give it to me, and she was right to do so.”
Sondra was surprised. Raphael didn’t like anything disturbing his sleep. She looked at Raphael’s death-white face. Something had scared him, scared him bad. But what the hell could scare anyone more than Earth disappearing?
“Some man McGillicutty, down there at VISOR, has come up with some figures on… on Earth. Do you know him? Is he reliable?” Raphael asked, in a tone that suggested he wanted to be told no.
“I know him by reputation,” Webling replied carefully. “One of the sort that hasn’t been out of the lab in years. No understanding of people, and a tendency to get lost in the details. He often misses the point of what he finds—but his observations and measurements are always first-rate.”
“Well, he seems to have missed the point here all right,” Raphael said grimly. All the anger seemed to have drained out of the man, as if fear and distraction had left no room for anything else. Raphael dropped the papers on the visitor’s side of his desk. “Have a look at these while I call up the computer file. Can’t think as well looking at paper,” he said under his breath, muttering to himself. Sondra looked at Larry, and Larry looked at her. Muttering? For Raphael, this was utter loss of control. The man was frightened.
“I want to see what this report tells you,” Raphael went on. “I don’t want it to be what it told me.”
Larry and Sondra put their heads together over the hard copy of McGillicutty’s report, while Webling read the computer screen over Raphael’s shoulder.
Larry got it first. “The gravity waves are continuing, but with Earth gone there’s nothing there to produce them. And that twenty-one-centimeter radio source is radiating in a complex, regular and repeating pattern. McGillicutty doesn’t say anything about the pattern. He just talks about the signal strength and the distortions caused by the gravity waves. He missed the fact that the signal is complex and repetitive. But that can’t be. Natural signals can’t—”
He stared into space for a moment, until the truth dawned. “But that means these signals aren’t natural,” Larry said in a whisper. “That’s what the data say to me.”
Raphael nodded woodenly. “That was the conclusion I reached,” he said. “The one I hoped was wrong. The signals are not natural in origin. Could one of the radical groups on the Moon have—”
Sondra felt her skin go cold. “Not natural. Now wait a second here—”
But Larry wasn’t listening. He knew the technology required to generate gravity waves. The Ring of Charon was, if anything, a minimal hookup for gravity generation. It was inconceivable that any other group could have built anything remotely capable of such a job and kept it hidden.