“He’s making me seem essential when I’m not,” Larry said, trying to keep his voice steady. “The Nenya’s repairs have been delayed, so I can’t leave for another seven days anyway. I’ve told the science teams here as much as I know, and they’re making progress on their own. And if I do know so much about gravity generators, doesn’t it make sense to send me down to get a look at this one?”
Chancellor Daltry said nothing, and looked at each of the young men in turn. The silence stretched for a long moment. “Do you each want to go around the circle one last time, or shall I speak now?” Neither Lucian nor Larry seemed ready to take the bait, and Daltry went on. “This is not about logic, or sensible reasons. This is ego, and anger, and guilt. And quite frankly, if I did not view you both as essential to our light against this enemy, I would not waste my time on your trivial bickering.
“There are, after all, one or two other claims on my time. It was a bit of miracle that the Martians agreed to sit at the same conference table with you. They were willing to talk with me only because I was not part of the government and thus not associated with this imaginary attack. They wanted you clapped in irons, Mr. Chao, and tried for crimes against humanity. It took a great deal of work to convince them otherwise.”
“Maybe they were right the first time,” Lucian muttered, half under his breath.
Daltry snapped his head around and glared at Lucian with a gimlet eye. “Were they indeed? For what it is worth, Mr. Dreyfuss, I thought so too, at first. I share all your anger and fear. But I have studied the matter, and concluded that Mr. Chao merely stumbled into a trip wire set long before humanity was born. It was chance, nothing more, that made him the one to do what he did. I choose to direct my anger and fear toward whoever set that trip wire, and the hideous trap it set off.”
“You live in Central City,” Lucian said. “Do you know how many dead there were in the quake? How many buildings were destroyed?”
“I do. And I mourn. But Mr. Chao is not guilty of their deaths. If he is, then so are all the people connected with the design and construction of the Ring of Charon, and its researches over the past fifteen years. His amplification technique would have been impossible without their work.”
Daltry turned his attention back to Larry. “And you, Mr. Chao. I know something of you. As I have said, I have examined all the data concerning you. Including your psychiatric profile. Having read that, and having met you, I believe I know what might be motivating you to volunteer for this duty. A sense of guilt. A need for atonement. And a desperate need to prove to persons such as Lucian Dreyfuss that you are not a monster. You seek to prove your innocence, your decent intentions, with a display of valor.”
Larry reddened, lifted his hand in protest. “Of course I feel guilty. Of course I want to help. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. That is precisely the trouble. I am faced by two admirable young men, far more like each other than they realize, each courageous, each willing to offer up his life in the cause, each armed with logical reasons for following his desired course of action.
“You are right, Mr. Dreyfuss. Although we need your skills, they are more easily replaced than Mr. Chao’s intuitive understanding of gravities. You are more expendable. Nor should we risk more than one person on this job.
“And you are right, Mr. Chao. It may well be wise to get a gravities man down there.” Daltry looked down at his notepack again. “I notice one other thing in your file. You are experienced with teleoperators?”
Larry hesitated a moment. “Well, yes. I am. We use them at the Gravities Station for doing maintenance on the Ring.”
“Wait a second,” Lucian said. “A teleoperator. A remote-control robot? Those things don’t give you the dexterity or the reflexes you need for this kind of job.”
“I agree,” Daltry said. “We can’t send a T.O. down by itself. But they do have advantages. They can do heavy lifting. They can carry telemetry. And they are expendable. Of course, we haven’t found the entrance to this so-called Rabbit Hole yet. Maybe we won’t find it in time for Mr. Chao to run the T.O. from the surface. Maybe we’ll never find it. But if we do, it seems to me, Mr. Dreyfuss, that we could send a T.O. down with you.”
Lucian glared at the chancellor. Trust a guy like Daltry to make sure no one got what he wanted.
How did it go? Coyote Westlake tried to remember the lessons from her old pilot’s physics course text on the differences between rockets and gravity.
No matter where in the system you measure, a rocket-propelled system shows acceleration in the same direction and at the same strength. Not so with gravity. Gravity pulls in from all directions, radially, toward a central point. The further you get from the source, the weaker it gets. So measurements at different points inside a gravity field should reveal different values for both direction and strength of acceleration.
That clear in her mind, Coyote set to work experimenting. She dropped weights from the ceiling and timed the fall to measure rate of acceleration. She hung other weights on lines to measure direction. Crude stuff, but the answers they gave were damn confusing. Things dropped from the side of the cylinder furthest from the asteroid fell at virtually the same speed as things dropped from closer in, but nothing dropped in a straight line. Everything curved in toward the asteroid as it fell, and curved more sharply when dropped on the rockward side of the shed. Weighted cords did not hang straight up and down the way plumb lines were meant to. Instead, they curved throughout their lengths in strange, disturbing patterns, as if they were drawing the gee-field lines of force in midair. It was as if she were in a cross-breed field, somewhere between linear acceleration and a gravity field.
Directionalized gravity. Suppose someone, somehow, had put a gravity source—a powerful one—just in front of the asteroid, and then set the gee source moving, accelerating? And suppose that someone focused the gee source’s gravity field, somehow, so its entire force was directed through the body of the asteroid, and with just a little of it slopping over to pass through her hab shelter, for example. Think of it as a tractor beam, she told herself. The asteroid would be set to falling, pulled toward the moving gee source, and her hab shelter, outside the path of the beam but physically attached to the asteroid, would experience forward linear acceleration as it was dragged along, with the result that things inside the shed would fall backwards. Plus a little leakage from the tractor beam, pulling in toward the rock. It fits the facts of her situation. Maybe it was even true. That ancient and mythical patron of engineers, Saint Ruben of Goldberg, would have loved it.
The whole theory depended, however, on there being something to provide a gravity field just ahead of the asteroid. And her exterior camera revealed that there was nothing there.
Okay then. Run through the facts. There was no rocket pushing the asteroid from behind. And nothing visible to produce the tractor beam that seemed to be pulling it from in front. What did that leave?
How about something inside the rock, some projector or gadget that produced and accelerated the focused gravity field that seemed to be pulling the asteroid along? A gizmo that in effect pulled the asteroid along by its own bootstraps.
Just as she came up with that idea, the seismo alarm bleeped again. Not as if she needed the alert. She could feel the whole asteroid shuddering. At first she had thought—or at least had hoped—that the microquakes were just the asteroid reaching a new equilibrium, a normal reaction to a most abnormal source of acceleration.