“Do you think it would work, Wall?” Eyeball asked Wally. The two of them were sitting at the beat-up conference table.
“It ought to.” He thought for a moment and then nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. It will work. The mass density is different, of course, but that shouldn’t matter. It’s risky, of course, but it sure beats getting pasted by a SCORE or being accreted onto the singularity.”
Sianna shut her eyes and took a deep breath. “Hold it,” she said. “Pretend I’m stupid. What exactly are you talking about, from the top?”
“What Gruber said,” he replied. “They play back the command sets that they’ve been capturing on Earth. They send commands to the Ghoul Modules, and order the Ghouls to open the wormhole for us. We go through the wormhole instead of piling into the singularity or getting smashed to pieces by the SCOREs.”
Sianna looked from Wally to Eyeball. The two of them were actually serious. “You can’t do that,” she protested. “There are over nine thousand people in the hab. You can’t drop it through a black hole just for the hell of it. There has to be another way.”
“Then lay it on down,” Eyeball said. “We got the ears, you got the words?”
“Yeah, Sia,” Wally said. “You got a better idea?”
Sianna hated being called Sia. And Wally was ganging up on her, siding with this Eyeball lunatic instead of her. Suddenly, she got mad, blind angry. It would have been a perfect moment to come up with the brilliant solution, to have the blinding flash of inspiration that would make everything okay.
The trouble was, she couldn’t think of a damn thing.
Ohio Template Windbag, the Maximum Windbag himself, sat in his comfortable, frowzy old armchair, his hands folded over his ample gut, watching Eyeballer Maximus Lock-On pacing back and forth, listening to what she had to say.
“I don’t like it, boss, but I think the straights have it nailed down right. Was gonna do a bigburn correction, get our orbit up. But can’t go high orbit—get clobbered bigtime. We can’t go low without de-stabbing like crazy, badnews tidal effects. And can’t stay where we is without orbit rotting out.”
“Who you been yapping at?” Windbag asked.
“These two, some,” she said, indicating Wally and Sianna with a negligent flick of her wrist. “Been running my own data. And on the horn to Gruber,” Eyeball said. “She’s trying to square it up with the head hun Earthside.”
“Who? Bernhardt? Gruber didn’t sign off with him first?”
“Not before she talked to me. Guess didn’t want to push me, just drop idea. Our call, not theirs. But the straights have been picking the brains of that Lone World, tapping all its signals. These two have shown me some sims and data, and I buy it all. We gotta suck up what they spitting out. Nothing else for it. Deal’s real. Go in and through, not up and out.”
“Want to get this solid. You and Gruber and these two all asking me to okay dropping NaPurHab through the wormhole?”
“That’s the deal,” Eyeball said.
“You nuts for good this time? All anyone’s said ’bout that hole for sure is they sure it ain’t home on other side.” He cocked his head toward Wally. “Ol’ Windbag Max got that straight?” he asked, clearly hoping to be told he was wrong. “Noway the Moon and the Sun and Mars and home on the hole flipside?”
“Ah, no sir,” Wally said. “The hole is locked on its default tuning, and we know they had to retune it to lock on to the Solar System. The Solar System is the one thing we know isn’t on the other side.”
“Hmmph. So gimme guesses?”
Wally shrugged. “We don’t even know if there is another side, for sure. We assume there must be, because they’re sending the SCOREs into the hole. My guess would be another Multisystem of some kind, but I don’t know.”
“Any one of you have any idea past that?”
No one replied.
“Thanks for the bigtime info,” the Windbag growled. “Could the Hab survive there? Would there be enough light to the solar collectors, or not too much? We can adjust some, but by enough? Stable orbit possible? Low enough radiation density?”
Wally turned his palms up helplessly. “No way to know.”
“Can we even get hab through hole? This is a pretty bigtime tin-can.”
Wally nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes. We should be able to do it. It will take some very tight work, and some very good piloting, but it’s doable.”
“Um, sir?” Sianna said, struggling to find her voice. “There is another factor I think you really need to consider.”
“Yeah? Like what?” the Windbag asked as he gave his beard a thoughtful scratch.
“The SCOREs are setting themselves up to keep something from getting out of that hole. What, we don’t know. But obviously whatever it is has to be on the other side of that hole.”
“You don’t think we should do this, do you?” the Max Windbag asked.
“No, no sir, I don’t. I think it’s close to suicidal.”
“Got any instead ideas? Something we could live through, maybe?”
“Not really.”
“Thanks for the bigtime help,” the Windbag said. He stood up and started pacing the compartment, not speaking for a while. “Time,” he said at last. “We on the clock?”
“Ticking loud,” Eyeball agreed. “Earthside numbers crunch to fifty hours, maybe sixty, sixty-five tops. I get near-same. Orbit won’t hold past that. Practically every perturb is goosing us in closer. Past six-five hours max, we’ll be too deep in the hole’s gee-well to climb back out. High-speed orbital decay after that. And we pile it in.”
“Can’t stabilize where we are for lit-bit longer?”
“That’s with us duking it out to hold orbit. Can’t raise orbit without SCOREs doing for us. Can’t hold orbit exactly, perfectly steady with all the grav action round here. Means we drift in, no mistake.”
“Gimme some odds,” Windbag said, with something close to a note of pleading in his voice. “What if we don’t go down the tube? Say I put it all down on staying here. Gimme a bet.”
Eyeball made a thumb-out fist and then turned thumbs down. “Near enough zip makes no nevermind. This crate can’t dodge SCOREs. We stay, we pile it in. SCORE-splat or hole-smash. Dumpster locked.”
“Fershure?”
“Nailed. No odds.”
“No odds. No odds at all,” the Windbag said. “Don’t cut me much, does it?”
“Zip or less,” Eyeball said.
The compartment went silent as the Windbag stood there, motionless, thinking.
“Odds not much better if we take the dive,” he said. “Hole run deathride, otherside hostile, the scarything the Charos are trying to keep out. But zillion-to-one beats zero.”
He sat back down in his chair, with his forearms on the arms of the chair, his hands gripping deep into the worn fabric. He stared straight ahead, at nothing at all, the distracted, far-off look of a chess player on his face. But a vein was throbbing at his temple, and his eyes were flat and hard.
“All right,” he said at last. “All right. Gotta call a Purple Deluxe Meet. Pull in all the honchos and honchettes, tell them about it, get ’em close enough to realworld that they sign off on it. But that’s my gig, not yours. You got work to do.”
“Tell me straight,” Eyeball said. “No mistakes, no saywhats later on this one. Go Code?”
“Go Code,” the Windbag agreed, his voice a whisper. “Go Code it is.” He looked up at Eyeball, at Wally, at Sianna, and the fear was plain in his eyes. “Do it,” he said. “Gear us up and get us down that hole.”