The Ring of Charon - Roger MacBride Allen, ebook
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THE HUNTED
EARTH
Book I
The Ring of
Charon
By Roger MacBride Allen
To Charles Sheffield-friend, colleague, and the
sanest man in this business
Acknowledgments
I would like to offer my thanks to a number of
people who have been tremendously helpful on this
book.
Thanks first of all to Charles Sheffield, to whom
this book is dedicated. He read and critiqued
The
Ring of Charon
, but it goes far past that. He
deserves a lot more than a book dedication for all
his kindnesses to me over the years. He is a good
man, and a good friend. Read his books.
To Debbie Notkin, my editor, who rode herd on
me and did that tricky thing editors must do: she
forced me to be faithful to my own vision of the
book, without imposing her own. She got the book
focused and moving.
To my father, Thomas B. Allen, who zeroed in on
the cuts that needed to be made, substantially
improving the book you hold in your hands. Read
his books too.
To practically everyone at Tor Books—Ellie Lang,
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Heather Wood, and Tom
Doherty. They did more than publish this book.
They got behind it.
And finally, thanks to the others who read over
this book and kept me honest—my mother Scottie
Allen, and my friend Rachel Russell.
One last thing. This book is subtitled
The First
Book of the Hunted Earth
, and yes, there will be
others. But this book, and the next, and all the
books I have ever written or will ever write
stand
alone
. You’ll never pick up a book of mine and not
be able to understand it without reading 37 other
titles. That’s a promise.
Roger MacBride Allen
April, 1990 Washington, D. C
.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six
impossible things before breakfast”
—White Queen in
Through the Looking-Glass
by Lewis Carroll
Dramatis Personae
Note: a glossary of terms used in
The Ring of
Charon
can be found at the end of the book.
Jansen Alter.
A Martian geologist.
Sondra Berghoff.
Young gravities scientist at
the Gravities Research Station, Pluto.
Wolf Bernhardt.
Night shift duty scientist at
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, later head of the
U.N. Directorate of Spatial Investigation (DSI).
Larry O’Shawnessy Chao.
Junior researcher
at the Gravities Research Station, Pluto.
Chelated Noisemaker Extreme,
also know
as
Frank Barlow
. Naked Purple radio technician.
Lucian Dreyfuss.
Technician at the Moon’s
Orbital Traffic Control Center.
Gerald MacDougal,
husband to Marcia
MacDougal. Born-again Canadian exobiologist.
Marcia MacDougal,
wife to Gerald MacDougal.
Planetary engineer on Venus Initial Station for
Operational Research (VISOR). Escaped from
Naked Purple Movement in Tycho Purple Penal as a
teenager.
Hiram McGillicutty.
Dyspeptic staff physicist
at VISOR.
Ohio Template Windbag
. Maximum
Windbag, or leader, of the Naked Purple Habitat
(NaPurHab).
Dr. Simon Raphael.
Elderly and embittered
director of the Gravities Research Station, Pluto.
Mercer Sanchez.
A Martian geologist.
Dianne Steiger.
Pilot of the cargo tug
Pack Rat
. Later, captain of the
Terra Nova
.
Tyrone Vespasian.
Director of the Moon’s
Orbital Traffic Control Center.
Dr. Jane Webling.
Science Director, Gravities
Research Station, Pluto.
Coyote Westlake.
Solo asteroid miner, owner
of the mining ship
Vegas Girl
.
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
The End
One million gravities
, and climbing. Larry
O’Shawnessy Chao grinned victoriously and leaned
back in his seat to watch the show. They hadn’t shut
the Ring down, not yet. Maybe
this
would change
some minds.
One million ten thousand gravities.
One million twenty. One million twenty-five. One
million thirty
. Leveling off there. Larry frowned,
reached forward and twitched the vernier gain up
just a trifle, working more by feel and intuition than
by calculation.
It was lonely, deathly quiet in the half darkness of
Control Room One of the Gravities Research
Station. But then all this world of Pluto was silence.
Larry ignored the stillness, the gnawing hunger in
his stomach, the bleariness in his eyes. Food and
sleep could come later.
The numbers on the readout stuttered downward
for a moment, then began their upward climb once
again.
One million fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty,
ninety
—
One million one hundred thousand gravities
.
Eleven hundred thousand times more powerful than
Earth-normal gravity. Larry looked at the number
gleaming on the control panel:
1,100,000
.
He glanced up, as if he could see through the
ceiling of the control room, through the station’s
pressure dome, through the cold of space to the
massive Ring hanging in the sky. The Ring was
where the action was, not here in this control room.
He was merely poking at switches and dials. It was
out
there
, on the Ring orbiting Pluto’s moon
Charon, thousands of kilometers overhead, that the
work was being done.
A feeling of triumph washed over him. He had
used that Ring, and done this. Granted, he was
working in a volume only a few microns across, and
the thing wasn’t stable, but what the hell.
Generating a field this powerful put the whole team
back on track. Now even Dr. Raphael would have to
admit they were well on the way to generating
Virtual Black Holes, to spinning wormholes and
stepping through them.
More immediately, a viable VBH would be
impressive enough to solve a hell of a lot of budget
problems. Maybe even enough to make Raphael
happy. Larry, though, had a hard time even
imagining the director as anything but distant,
cold, stiffly angry. Larry’s father had been like that.
There was no pleasing him, no effort that could be
great enough to win his approval.
But all things were possible—
if
Larry could
achieve a Virtual Black Hole. Even with this 1.1
million field, that was still a long way off. Field size
and stability were still major headaches. Even as he
watched, the numbers on the gravity meter
flickered and then abruptly dropped to zero. The
microscopic field had gone unstable and collapsed.
Larry shook his head and sighed. There went yet
another massless gravity field, evaporating
spontaneously. But damn it, this one had reached
1.1 million gees and had lasted all of thirty seconds.
Those were breakthrough numbers, miracle
numbers, no matter how much work was still left to
do.
Too bad the rest of the staff was asleep. That was
the trouble with getting an inspiration at 0100
hours: no witnesses, no one to celebrate with, no
one to be inspired by this success and dream up the
next screwball idea. But then he barely knew anyone
on the staff. Even after five months here, and with
such a glorious reason for doing it, he couldn’t think
of anyone he would dare wake up at this hour.
Lonely place to be, low man on the totem pole.
Never mind. Tomorrow would be time enough.
And maybe this little run would earn him enough
attention so he could get to know some people.
Larry stood up, stretched and made sure all the
logging instruments had recorded the figures and
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