“Everyone’s always assumed the Sphere was ready and waiting for Earth. They figured that since the Sphere managed to get Earth into an orbit and get the Moonpoint Ring set up for Earth in just a few seconds—the few seconds it took for Earth to come through the hole. The trouble with that theory is that Earth’s new orbit isn’t very stable. It’s a major anomaly.”
“What do you mean?” Bernhardt asked.
“Well, most of the Captive Worlds around the other Captive Suns in the Multisystem move in orbits that should be good for at least several million years. But Earth was dropped too close to the orbits of a lot of other planets that orbit the Sunstar. Dr. Sakalov showed that the Sunstar system was stable before Earth was dropped into it.”
Dr. Sakalov nodded and spoke, looking at Bernhardt. “Those same simulations show that the Sunstar’s system of planets was rendered highly unstable by Earth’s arrival. The interaction of all the gravitational forces throws things off. Earth’s orbit, and the orbits of the neighboring planets, will start deteriorating within about three hundred years at the outside—maybe a lot less. The Sphere will have to do constant active maintenance on the orbits to keep them under control.
“At first we assumed that was the norm for the Multisystem. We’ve proved it’s the exception. All the other Captive Worlds are in far more stable orbits. But why? Why did the Sphere put us in an unstable, unsuitable orbit, without waiting until such time as it could arrange a more stable pattern?
“Miss Colette’s theory answers that problem,” Sakalov went on, answering his own question. “It allows the Sphere enough time to do some preparation—but not enough to do a perfect job. If she is right, then the Sphere put Earth in this stasis orbit while it rushed to prepare a place for it. Thirty-seven minutes is not much time, of course, but it is more than the forty or fifty seconds of elapsed time recorded on Earth between the moment of Abduction and arrival in our present orbit. I suspect that holding Earth in a stasis orbit put great demands on the Sphere, or else it would have maintained the stasis longer and prepared a more stable orbit.”
“But what the devil is a stasis orbit?” Bernhardt demanded.
“You catch the Earth in a wormhole, and then use the Mtabe modal transformation sequence model,” Wally said, in a tone of voice that made it clear how obvious it was. Sianna almost expected him to add of course. “The modal transformation causes the wormhole itself to move through space as a standing wave front.”
“Huh?” Sianna said, making her first contribution to the discussion.
“It’s simple,” Wally said, without a trace of irony in his voice. “Drop the Earth into the wormhole, pinch the endpoints of the wormhole, seal the ends to form a closed volume, and you’ve got the Earth inside a singularity that can be manipulated. Viewed from the outside, you have a supermassive charged particle that can be guided electromagnetically. If you then create magnetic lines of force between Ring-and-Hole sets co-orbiting with the Lone World, you have what amounts to a huge storage ring, one large and powerful enough to hold an Earth-mass pinched wormhole particle.” Wally shrugged. “Trouble is, the pinched wormhole particle will tend to evaporate spontaneously. It won’t last long. Of course, if you accelerate the hole to near light velocity, then relativistic time dilation kicks in and the hole lasts longer.”
“Of course,” Bernhardt said, with amused sarcasm.
But that sort of thing went right past Wally. He went on with his explanation, completely unaware that even Sakalov’s eyes were showing signs of glazing over. “The main thing is, the pinched hole won’t last long. You have to drop Earth out of the hole before it evaporates, get Earth back into normal space, and then drop the planet down into a new hole, pinch that one off, and send it back along the next leg of the storage ring. Keep repeating the procedure as long as you want.”
“But why didn’t it hold us longer, if this is what happened?” Bernhardt asked. “I can see that the Sphere might need to have the Earth complete an orbit for some mechanical reason we don’t know about, but surely the Sphere could have held us in stasis longer and prepared a more stable orbit somehow.”
Sakalov shrugged. “My guess is that the Sphere simply did not have the energy reserves to hold the planet in stasis more than one orbit. It would require tremendous power to do all the things Wally is describing so casually. And even the Sphere has a limit on its energy output.”
“Just out of curiosity, what would happen if the Sphere was unable to provide enough power?” Bernhardt asked. “Would the Earth have dropped out of the stasis orbit?”
“Well, yes, that would be the problem. You’d get an uncontrolled spontaneous evaporation of the pinched wormhole,” Wally said, as if evaporating wormholes were some sort of annoying household nuisance, like dustballs under the bed.
“And what would that mean?” Bernhardt asked.
Wally shifted awkwardly in his seat and grinned, a bit embarrassed. “E = MC2. Earth’s mass would be expressed as energy.”
“Which would of course be a great inconvenience to us all,” Sakalov observed, rather dryly. “The explosion would almost certainly be enough to destroy the Sphere, and probably vaporize most of the planets of the closer-in Captive Suns as well.”
Bernhard raised his eyebrows. “Just as well the Sphere knows what it is doing, then.” He bent his head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. “Leaving the destruction of the Earth to one side, if I’m following you, what you’re describing would jibe with what people saw at the time Earth was abducted: the sky quite abruptly turning from dark to light and back again, with repeated drops through the blue-white zones that seem to be what the throat of a wormhole looks like. Many witnesses in the Northern Hemisphere saw what must have been the Sphere, but so close up that it resembled a flat plane stretching across the sky.”
“So the idea fits?” Sianna asked, feeling rather tentative about speaking up, even if it was her idea they were discussing. They were going into an awful lot of detail, considering that the discussion of stasis orbits and co-orbiting R-H sets was wholly hypothetical.
“So it would seem,” Bernhardt said in a voice that was quite alarmingly cheerful. “And it is not the only thing that fits. That is the splendid thing about your theory, you know. It explains everything we know to date. But it’s a good theory for two other equally important reasons. Do you know what they are?”
“Because it makes testable predictions and is subject to disproof,” Sianna blurted out, her competitive classroom instincts kicking in. It was the right answer, of course, but she instantly regretted giving it.
Bernhardt had obviously wanted her to ask for the answer, not give it. Wally gave her a funny look, as if to say even he could tell that was a rhetorical question.
“Ah, yes, exactly,” Bernhardt said, thrown off his stride just a trifle. “You have given us a theory we can test. We can study this Lone World and see if it behaves as your theory requires. We must see if we can detect commands coming from it, for example. The study should be made far easier because we can focus our attention on this one small body, rather than searching the whole vast expanse of the Sphere for Charon Central.”
Sianna nodded, not quite knowing what to say—and having no desire to speak out of turn again.