Eyeball looked up again, ahead, toward their destination. An enormous blood-black shape, far too large to be seen as a whole, swallowed up half the horizon, its huge surface smashed and pitted and scored. And there, dead ahead, a wizened little ruin of a world seen in half phase hung over the huge black-red form beyond.
The Naked Purple Habitat moved forward, down into the wormhole, toward the strange worlds on the other side—
—And then they were gone.
Twenty-seven
Pandora and the Tiger
“It’s been said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve often wondered if there is a direct relation, or an inverse one, between the amount of knowledge and that of safety. There are times, I’m quite sure, when a little knowledge is dangerous—while a large amount is positively fatal.”
Larry Chao waited until everyone else had gone to bed before he went to see her, until there was no chance of being interrupted or overheard. He had thought it all out very carefully, and it seemed to him that he needed Marcia MacDougal. He could do the flight alone, yes. But that was not the point. Well, not all of it, anyway. He had personal reasons to get back to Plutopoint, no question—but it was also his duty to go there. If they were detecting radio signals, Plutopoint and the Ring of Charon were where the action was. That was where he was needed. Get back to Pluto, and then…
No. Don’t think past that, he told himself. Don’t get ahead of yourself.
And he had the ship to get him there, get him there fast, if they would let him use her. The Graviton, the gravity-beam ship. The test program was nearly complete. They would have started piloted tests in another week or so anyway. If he could get flight clearance, the door would be open. Sondra Berghoff would back him, and provide the gravity beams for the flight.
But no one would let Larry Chao do a solo flight. Not if he had learned anything about people these past few years, and come to understand that he was close to halfway around the bend as it was.
But with Marcia MacDougal—sensible, clear-headed Marcia MacDougal, expert in Charonian visual symbolism—as part of the deal, it would work. He could sell it.
But first he had to sell it to her. And he thought he had a way to do that, too. Maybe not the straightest, purest way—but a way. And if Larry had it figured right, it was even fairly honest.
He got to the door of her room and knocked. There was a brief pause, and then a bump and a thud or two. The door came open a crack, and Marcia peered around the corner. “Larry,” she said with a yawn. “What brings you around at this hour?”
“A proposition,” Larry said, and suddenly the words were spilling out of him. “A proposition I think you’re going to like. The odds on it are a little long, and a lot of things have to go right, but—”
“But what?” Marcia said, her expression halfway between puzzled and alarmed. “What?”
Larry paused, calmed himself. “Marcia, it’s long odds and a lot of guesses, but… but I think they’re going to be able to use the ring to punch open a wormhole link, and I think they’re going to do it soon, very soon. When they do, they’ll send a ship through and… and…”
“And what?” Marcia asked.
“And how would you like to see your husband again?” Larry asked.
Computers, Sondra thought, are good at what is known and stays the same. People are good at what changes and becomes different. Plodding through the pattern-recognition results files would have told her that much, if she hadn’t known it already. The Ring of Charon’s detectors had recorded dozens and dozens of wormhole passages by now. The computers had recorded reams of data about each and every event. The pattern-recognition software had massaged all the data, finding differences and similarities between the various events. The software had come to a rather unremarkable conclusion about the wormhole events: they were all pretty much the same.
But it was in the variance, the spread of values, the outliers, that Sondra hoped to find more useful data.
In theory, the team at the Ring now had enough tuning information to tune the Ring to the resonance patterns themselves, pump enough power into the Ring, and open up a wormhole link to the target location.
In practice, things were not so easy. There were hardware problems, for starters. Tech crews were working around the clock, finding ways to reconfigure the Ring so it could in fact form a wormhole link.
Sondra had confidence in her people. But hardware wasn’t the only problem. Sooner or later—probably sooner—the Ring would be capable of opening a wormhole link to whatever was on the other side of those tuning parameters.
But did they want to open such a wormhole? Large masses were being moved through a wormhole somewhere, but Sondra was nowhere as convinced as Larry Chao that Earth was involved. In her opinion, Larry was reading too much into the evidence. He wanted it to be Earth, and therefore it was.
All that being said, she’d be damned glad to get Larry the hell back here, if he could finagle the powers-that-be to let the Graviton make the run. She’d send all the gravity beams they wanted to get Larry back here. He might be one of the few people around who could actually give her some worthwhile advice.
But leaving Larry to one side for the moment, even if Earth were on one side or the other of the wormhole link, opening a link to the same target point might not be such a good idea. Did she, Sondra, really want to open a door that might let monsters like the Adversary loose into the Solar System?
If and when they got a hole open, what would they do? Merely look through it? Send a probe, or a ship? The Charonians knew how to make safe wormhole links—but did the Ring of Charon team? Might there not be, say, some unexpected source of radiation formed by the wormhole link? For that matter, could they be certain that the Ring of Charon itself would be safe? Might there not be some unexpected danger that could damage or destroy the ring? Granted, there were no such known dangers, but that really wasn’t much comfort. Mother Nature loved surprises.
They would, therefore, take it slowly. They would slog through all the data, looking for the tiny clues, the microscopic hints, that might add up to some sort of idea about what was on the other side. Then she would decide.
She would decide. That was a startling thought. No one else had authority over the Ring of Charon, and the Ring was the only game in town so far as gravities was concerned. The Autocrat could try and impose a decision, with the bully-boys in his crew there to serve as enforcers, but the Autocrat seemed serious about keeping the Ring out of his jurisdiction.
Good God. She would make the call on what might be the most important decision for humanity since the Abduction. Should she leave Pandora’s box closed, keep all the evils safely on the other side? Or was this the Lady or the Tiger? Was Larry right that Earth was in mortal danger even now? Suppose that danger was real, and there was something the Solar System could do to stop it? Leaving the worm-hole shut could doom the Earth. Or opening the wormhole could bring the same danger to the Solar System.