The last tremors were over, but it took several minutes for the technicians to crawl out from under their desks. Through cascading hazes of limestone dust they peered about, making sure the quake was really over. Some cast awed glances toward the nexus console, where Alex Lustig had remained throughout the unexpected temblors.
One unspoken thought circulated among them -- that any bloke who could make the Earth rattle was surely one to reckon with.
Inside, Alex wasn't quite as calm as he seemed. In truth, exhaustion and sheer astonishment were what had kept him at his station while others dove for cover, far more than bravado or showy courage. This sudden power to cause earthquakes was a completely unexpected side-effect of their project, and of trivial importance next to the news he now saw before him.
Unfortunately, they had found exactly what they were looking for.
The cutaway hologram told the story. Where only one purple dot had been depicted before -- looping a deeply buried orbit about the planet's center -- now a second object could be seen circling even lower. What had been only dire suspicion was now reified and horrible.
"It's down there, all right," George Hutton's chief physicist reported, lifting his hard hat to smooth back his sparse white hair. Stan Goldman's hands trembled. "We'll need data from other listening posts to pin it down precisely."
"Can you estimate its mass?" Hutton asked. The Maori tycoon sat on the other side of the console, wearing a scowl that would have made the warriors of Te Heuheu proud. During the quakes he, too, had spurned shelter. But the techs only expected that of him.
Goldman pored over his screen. "Looks like just under a trillion tons. That's several orders heavier than Alex's... than the first one. Than Alpha."
"And its other dimensions?"
"Too small to measure on linear scales. It's another singularity, all right."
George turned to Alex. "Why didn't we detect this other thing before?"
"It seems there are more ways to modulate gravity waves than anyone imagined." Alex motioned with his hands. "To pick any one object out of the chaos below, we have to calculate and match narrow bandwidths and impedances. Our earlier searches were tuned to find Alpha, and picked up Beta only by inference."
"You mean..." George gestured at the tank, "there may be more of the things down there?"
Alex blinked. He hadn't thought that far ahead. "Give me a minute."
Speaking softly into a microphone, he pulled sub-routines from his utility library, creating charts and simulations near the hologram. "No," he said at last. "If there were more they'd affect the others' orbits. It's just those two. And my... and singularity Alpha is decaying rapidly."
George grunted. "What about the big one? I take it that damn thing is growing?"
Alex nodded, reluctant to speak. As a physicist he was supposed to accept the primacy of objective reality. Yet there remained a superstitious suspicion in his heart, that dark potentialities only become real after you have spoken them aloud.
"Seems to be," he said, with difficulty.
"I agree," added Stan.
Hutton paced through the still-drifting dust, in front of the gleaming gravity-wave generator. "If it's growing, we know several things." He held up one finger. "First, Beta can't be terribly old, or it would have consumed the Earth long ago, neh?"
"It could be a natural singularity left over from the Big Bang, which hit Earth only recently," Stan suggested.
"Weak, very weak. Wouldn't an interstellar object be moving at hyperbolic speeds?" Hutton shook his head. "It might pass through a planet on a fluke, but then it'd just fly off into space again, barely slowed at all."
Alex nodded, accepting the point.
"Also," Hutton went on. "It stretches credulity such an object would happen to arrive just now, when we have the technology to detect it. Besides, you yourself said small singularities are unstable -- be they holes or strings or whatever -- unless they're specially tuned to sustain themselves!"
"You're saying someone else has...?"
"Obviously! Come on, Lustig. Do you think you're the only bright guy on the planet? Face it, you've been scooped. Preceded! Someone beat you to it, by inventing a better cavitron perhaps, or using something different.
"Probably something different, more sophisticated, since this is worse than your pathetic thing, your Alpha!" George spread a grin absent of mirth. "Accept it, Alex-boy. Someone out there whipped you at your own game... somebody better at playing mad scientist."
Alex didn't know what to say. He watched the big man's expression turn thoughtful.
"Or maybe it's not just a lone madman this time. I wonder.... Governments and ruling cliques are good at coming up with ways to destroy the world. Maybe one was developing some sort of Doomsday Device? An ultimate deterrent? Maybe, like you, they released it by mistake."
"Then why keep it secret?"
"To prevent retribution, of course. Or to gain time while they plot an escape to Mars?"
Alex shook his head. "I can't speculate about any of that. All I can do is --"
"No." George stabbed a finger at him. "Let me tell you what you can do. First off, you can get busy confirming this data. And then, after that..."
The fire seemed to drain out of Hutton's eyes. His shoulders slumped. "After that you can tell me how much time I have left with my children, before that thing down there swallows up the ground beneath our feet."
The frightened techs shifted nervously. Stan Goldman watched his own hands. Alex, however, felt a different sense of loss. He wished he too could react in such a way -- with anger, defiance, despair.
Why do I feel so little? Why am I so numb?
Was it because he'd been living with this possibility so much longer than George?
Or is George right? Am I miffed that someone else obviously did a bigger, better job of monster making than I ever could?
Whoever it had been, they were certainly no more competent at keeping monsters caged. Small satisfaction there.
"Before we do more gravity probes," Stan Goldman said. "Hadn't we better find out why that last scan set off seismic tremors? I've never heard of anything like it before."
George laughed. "Tremors? You want quakes? Just wait till Beta's grown to critical size, and starts swallowing up the Earth's core. Chunks of mantle will collapse inward... then you'll see earthquakes!"
Swiveling in disgust, Hutton strode off toward the stairs to climb back to Ao-marama -- to the world of light. For some time after he departed, nobody did or said much. The staff desultorily cleaned up. Once, Stan Goldman seemed about to speak, then closed his mouth and shook his head.
A nervous engineer approached Alex, holding a message plaque. "Um, speaking of earthquakes, I thought you'd better see this." He slid the sheet onto the console between Stan and Alex. On its face rippled the bold letters of a standard World-Net tech-level press release:
TEMBLORS, LEVEL 3 THROUGH 5.2, HAVE HIT SPAIN, MOROCCO, BALAERICS. CASUALTIES LOW. SWARM FOLLOWED UNUSUAL PATTERN IN SPACE, TIME AND PHASE DOMAINS. INITIAL ONSET --
"Hm, what does this have to do with...?" Then Alex noticed -- the Spanish quakes had struck at exactly the same time as the jolts here in New Zealand! Turning to the whole-Earth cutaway, he made some comparisons, and whistled. As nearly as the eyeball had it, the two swarms had taken place one hundred and eighty degrees apart -- on exactly opposite sides of the globe.
In other words, a straight line, connecting New Zealand and Spain, passed almost exactly through the planet's core.
He watched the new singularity, the one called "Beta", follow a low, lazy trajectory, never climbing far from the inmost zone where density and pressure were highest, where its nourishment was richest.
It does more than grow, Alex realized, amazed the universe could awe him yet again. It does one hell of a lot more than grow.
"Stan --" he began.
"You've noticed too? Puzzling, isn't it?"
"Mm. Let's find out what it means."
So they were immersed in arcane mathematics, barely even aware of the world outside the realm of numbers, when someone turned a dial to amplify the breathless voices of news reporters, describing a disaster in space.
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The Real Culture War
