[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

than in that office the Center gave you, even if it is nice and big."
"I fear that the Center is not secure. Or at least, as
I understand people like Victoria Martinez, I cannot be absolutely sure that
my office is not eavesdropped upon." He looked at her edgily, as if this were
being impolite. She liked his English delicate hesitation. "Already. But
within a few days, almost certainly."
"That's also why you're looking for an apartment."
"Precisely. This is going to be ever so much larger and it is going to last
quite a while."
"Once we've identified this new object  oh, I
see." He made a tent of his hands and peered through them at the languid
paradise out the window, like a prisoner contemplating an impossible escape.
"I was
102
shaken by Benjamin's calculation. His implication was clear."
"Martinez spoke of danger  "
"Only the obvious deduction."
Channing realized she had nowhere to go in this conversation without betraying
Benjamin's own ideas. She stalled with "But no one in the room mentioned& "
"That obviously there are only two ways to reconcile his numbers."
He looked at her searchingly and she had to suppress a smile at this coy game.
Might as well play, though; he still had the old sly charm, damn him. "Either
the thing's passing through a region of the outer solar system where the
number of iceteroids is very high for some reason, or& " He let it hang there
for a long moment and then gave up.
"Or the thing is somehow seeking out lumps of ice and rock and processing
them."
"Like a starship decelerating."
He slapped his knees, the sound scaring off a mynah bird from the windowsill,
its quick white flash of wings a blur. "But my own point, that the gamma rays
would kill anything  "
"A solid argument. So there's that pesky third choice."
"Third?"
103
She had to admit, he looked genuinely puzzled.
"None of the above."
"But when you say 'starship,' you mean  "
"Something that flies between stars, period."
"Something crewed, even by silicon chip minds, would quite clearly still be
vulnerable to  "
"Give it up, Kingsley. It's in a category we haven't thought of yet."
He fretted for a moment, his hatchet face with its large eyes drawing her gaze
downward to a mouth that stirred restlessly, yet would not shape words.
The default style in astronomy was to explain a new observation by assembling
a brew of known ingredients  types of stars, orbiting or colliding in various
ways, and emitting radiation in known channels, using familiar mechanisms.
Page 41
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
This worked nearly all the time. Kingsley had used it with speed and ingenuity
decades before, explaining gamma-ray bursters quite handily with a little
imagination and detailed calculations. Kingsley habitually worked in this
mode, his papers couched in a style whose unstated message was to show, not
just an in-
teresting application of impressive techniques to a known problem, but also
that he was a good deal better at doing this than his readers. Now his mouth
worked and twisted with his dislike of working outside this lifelong mode.
104
"Then you two are thinking along the same lines as I."
"Sure  first, that this thing has to be enormously compressed, and the only
object we know in its class of energy and power is& a black hole." She sipped
her iced tea and watched his veiled surprise.
"One of& "
He was pulling it out of her, all right, but it was an amusing game. "About
three times the mass of our moon."
"You derived that from the Doppler shifts from very close in to the core, I
suppose?"
"Exactly. Didn't want to say so until I had more data."
"A black hole of that size is quite small, a meter or two across." He looked
at her askance, skeptical.
She had looked up the theory. Primordial black holes could have been left over
from the Big Bang, but there was no evidence for them. After birth, these tiny
singularities in space-time could have survived their habit of radiating away
sprays of particles  that is, black holes were not exactly black. This
radiation had been worked out by
Stephen Hawking, who showed that a small hole would have survived this
evaporation, from the beginning of the universe until the present, if it had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]