The satellite, square-rigged with solar panels, sailed a smooth, circular, polar orbit every hour and a half. The rotation of the Earth beneath it brought every square inch of the surface within viewing range in a twelve-hour period. Its eye was a large, finely-honed mirror, bigger than most Earth- bound telescopes. This eye, like many cousins, would never witness the stark glories of the Universe. It was dedicated to peering at the human scurryings below.
Normally, the twenty minutes spent passing from the North Pole down over Canada and the continental United States to the equator were downtime devoted to signal relaying and reprogramming. This orbit, the gyros hummed and locked the telescope on several spots in a dead east-west line running through the high mountains of southern New Mexico. If the computer knew slang, it would have called this operation a piece of cake. The signal carrying orders from the ground had not called for highest resolution, the capability to distinguish letters on a license plate, only enough detail to discern a car from a house.
Light from the Sun scattered in the Earth’s atmosphere, bounced off the New Mexico landscape and was reflected upward. The mirror in the satellite gathered a tiny portion of this light and focused it as an image on a photocathode. A sweeping electron beam converted the lights and darks of the image into electrical impulses and the on-board computer converted the impulses to immutable numbers. A beam of radiation, modulated and encoded with those numbers, shot to a receiving station on the ground at the speed of light. This signal was relayed to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland where it received routine preliminary computer processing to decode the signal and remove the worst of the spurious electronic noise. Without pause, the signal was then relayed by special laser-driven glass fiber cable, immune to interception, to receiving equipment and a computer in CIA headquarters. This computer produced an electronic signal that reproduced a picture of the mountainous terrain on a special TV screen. A hard-copy photograph was taken of the screen, suitable for humans to scan and bicker over. Scarcely half an hour had passed from the time the special order had been sent up to the satellite to the time the camera shutter clicked.
As the photograph moved through the automatic developing process, the satellite coasted over the equator above the eastern Pacific Ocean. It would rest over the Pacific and Antarctica except for occasional records of ships. Things would pick up as it tried to collect data on the movement of the Soviet fleet in the Indian Ocean. There would be several frantic minutes in the vain attempt to monitor troops and rebels in Afghanistan, then the well-established routine over mother Russia herself. As the Arctic ice cap slipped underneath, the cycle would begin again.
Wednesday evening Isaacs sat in his study, the smells of supper beginning to romance his nostrils.
“Dad!” Isabel’s young girl volume resounded down the corridor. “It’s for you!”
He reached for the extension.
Even before she came on the line, from the long-distance hollow echo, broken by occasional radiophone static, he knew.
“Bob?” her voice was tense, excited.
“Pat?” His flat reply.
“Bob, he was right! It’s got to be a black hole! It almost hit us, came up right outside the tent. You could feel it, Bob! The pull, from its gravity, it knocked me over. Ellison is starting to analyze the computer records, but I just don’t see how there can be any doubt.”
Silence.
“Bob?”
“Sorry. That’s good work.” He was suffused with a bone-weary fatigue. “It’s just so hard to accept. I was trying to think of what to do next.” How was he going to explain this to Drefke, to the President? Damn! Why had he brought the Russians, Korolev, into this? He certainly didn’t want to hassle with them now.
“Have you started the site survey?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “We got the satellite time on an emergency basis, shots of every site on the trajectory, north and south latitude, at the right altitude. The satellite should be working now, and we should have the first cut tomorrow morning. Then we can go back to anything that looks promising.”
“I wonder what we’ll find?” she asked the question slowly, rhetorically.
“Pat, right now I haven’t the faintest damn idea. Let me know if Gantt’s analysis turns up anything interesting. I’ll get hold of the Director tonight and see if I can explain all this to him.”
“Okay, good luck. You’ll let me know what the site survey turns up?”
“Right.”
“Bye.”
“G’bye.”
He hung up the phone and stared at it, unseeing. He knew he should eat before calling Drefke, but his appetite had vanished.
Pat Danielson slipped back into the tent and took a chair next to Runyan who leaned over Gantt’s shoulder, watching numbers do formation exercises on the terminal.
“Did you get him?” Runyan swiveled his neck to look at her.
“Yes. He didn’t sound too happy.”
“Not the kind of thing you get happy about.” Runyan paused a moment, contemplating. “I guess I feel relief. The peril is real and immense. I don’t think any of us really appreciate in our guts the danger we’re in. But I’m relieved that it’s out in the open now so we can deal with it head on.” He turned back to the terminal. “Ellison’s finding out what our friend is really like.”
Danielson maneuvered her chair so she could see. Gantt pointed to the luminescent figures. “You see the seismometers saturated when it got too close, so they stopped giving any useful information.” He played with the keys some more. “The gravimeter here in camp also went off scale. They’re meant to measure fluctuations of a part in a billion, and this one was at one percent before it pooped out. The outer stations were fine, though; here’s the mass they detected, a bit over ten million metric tons. That’s just about what you guessed, wasn’t it, Alex?”
“Pretty close,” admitted Runyan. He thought for a while and then asked, “How long were the seismometers inactive?”
Gantt consulted the computer and then replied, “Twenty- eight point— well, call it an even twenty-nine seconds, why?”
“Maybe we ought to go back to your tent where we can talk this over,” Runyan replied.
They left the equipment tent and walked toward Gantt’s.
Wary glances followed them. All over the camp men stood in groups of three and four, discussing the strange event in muted and not so muted tones. Runyan and Danielson occupied the chairs they had first sat in upon their arrival, only a few hours ago. Gantt disappeared inside the tent and returned with three styrofoam cups and a bottle of bourbon.
“A bit early in the day for normal circumstances,” he said, “but I could use a little bracer. Will you join me?”
The other two nodded their acceptance and received their cups in turn. Runyan took a fairly healthy slug and looked on with mild surprise as Danielson drained hers in one quick motion and held it out to Gantt for a refill.
Danielson caught Runyan’s look, grinned, and said in a voice hoarsened by the liquor, “All us Virginians are bourbon drinkers, suh!”
Gantt smiled at the quip and raised his cup to gesture a toast, “Well, here’s to the future; may it not be entirely black.” He continued with a shake of his head, “I must say that was the most god-awful feeling. I had the definite impression that you people had snuck up on either side of me and lifted my chair and then dropped it. All this instrumentation and electronics are well and good, but they’re no substitute for being grabbed and shaken to let you know you’re up against the real thing. The idea that that thing actually came up within, what, two or three yards of the tent? Jesus!” He drained his cup and poured another dollop.
“Did you feel a sideways pull?” inquired Danielson. “That’s what bowled me over. I had one foot in the air when someone raised the floor and then gave me a shove.”
“I guess maybe I did,” answered Gantt, “but I was sitting down, so that took some of the edge off.”
“You’re right. The thing must have come up just outside the tent,” Runyan joined in. “Must have been one of those times when it got jarred off course somehow. Actually, in spite of the low probability, it’s lucky no one was hit. I was thinking, Pat may have had a good idea; it might be of some interest to find the hole it made coming out and the other falling back in. Apparently that occurred just a bit further to the east, near the edge of camp. I think we may have learned something important here, in addition to having the wits scared out of us.”
“What’s that?” asked Gantt.
“Well, there are three things that come to mind. First, we’ve confirmed the fact that it comes down near where it went up. That’s significant.”
“I thought of that. It’s the same as Dallas,” said Danielson, her eyes shining. “It must be moving with the same tangential velocity as the surface of the Earth as it comes up.”
Gantt looked puzzled, and Danielson explained to him, “Remember that, because it rotates, the surface of the Earth is actually moving at about a thousand miles an hour. If this thing were literally moving on a line pointed at a fixed direction in space, then as it reached the surface we would move out from under it at just that speed. How long did you say it was up? About a half of a minute? Let’s see, the Earth’s surface rotates about twenty miles in a minute or about ten in the time the thing was up.”
“Closer to seven,” said Runyan with unconscious pedanticism, “but clearly the relative motion could have been much greater than it actually was.”
“I guess I still don’t quite see,” began Gantt.
“The point is,” explained Runyan, “that when it comes to the surface of the Earth it’s virtually at rest with respect to the local terrain. That can’t be an accident. It must have begun that way. We can rule out the idea that it’s a naturally occurring black hole. To have it moving at precisely the Earth’s orbital velocity so that it could be trapped was asking a lot. To insist that it also move in consonance with the rotation of the Earth is out of the question. I could never put any store in the idea anyway, but now I think we can really lay it to rest.
“Let me put it another way,” he continued, “if you were to imagine taking a black hole and holding it in your hand so that both you and it were moving along with the surface of the Earth, and then you were to drop it, and let it orbit freely, the result would be just what we have seen. It would drop down, pass to the far side of the Earth and return. It must return to precisely the same altitude as that from which it was dropped, and at its highest point, when it momentarily has no velocity toward or away from the Earth’s center, it must have precisely the same sideways motion as when it was released. To someone moving with the same motion, that is, with the velocity of the Earth’s surface, it would seem to come momentarily to an exact standstill.”
“But it didn’t stand still,” objected Gantt, “that is, it continued on up.”
“That’s my second point,” replied Runyan. “One we kicked around in La Jolla. We know how far up it went. It took about fifteen seconds to go up and an equal amount to return. At one gee, that’s a distance of about three thousand four hundred feet. What’s the altitude here?”
“About twenty-three hundred feet,” said Gantt.
“Then apogee is about five thousand seven hundred feet above sea level. A bit over a mile. That must be the altitude from which it was originally dropped.”
Before either Danielson or Gantt could comment, Runyan was on his feet. “Let me get something out of my luggage.” He tossed off the remaining bourbon in his cup, set the cup on the chair arm, and strode purposefully over to the mess tent where their luggage had been placed. The cup blew off, and Gantt rescued it from the ground. Runyan rummaged for a moment and then returned with a stack of computer output. He regained his seat and balanced the paper on his knees so he could easily riffle the accordian-folded sheets.
“Another little project of mine,” he explained. “Pat, you said that in Dallas your agents thought about forty seconds elapsed from the time you first heard the noise to when it returned. That gives an estimate of the altitude to which it rises. I figured they could be off by ten percent either way. The Seamount event gave a more accurate estimate. I narrowed down the maximum altitude to within three hundred feet. What I’ve got here is a list of every point on Earth that falls along the locus of the orbit and within three bins in altitude, each spanning a hundred feet. With this new precise data of yours, Ellison, we can throw out two-thirds of the possibilities. There are surprisingly few left. Few enough that they can all be checked in a finite time. There are a couple in California, a few in Arizona, a small batch in New Mexico and that’s it for the continental United States.” He looked on down the list, “There’s a couple of places in Morocco, one in Algeria, some in Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, none in Tibet, it’s all too high, and finally, in the northern hemisphere, several places in China.” He flipped to another sheet. “The southern hemisphere is even more sparse. A few places on either side of the Andes, in Chile and Argentina. That’s about it. Everything else is lower, mostly ocean.”
Gantt’s brows knitted in concentration.
“We’re ahead of you there, Alex,” Danielson smiled slightly, her voice touched with pride. “I made up a similar list of sites after we got back from La Jolla. Bob Isaacs had ordered up a photomontage along the trajectory several months ago. The problem was we didn’t know what to look for, and there was too much area to cover. He just told me that we are collecting new satellite photos of the spots on my list; they’ll be ready tomorrow morning.”
She craned her neck and looked down his list, flipping the pages back and forth.
“I think I’ve got everything you have here, and a few more. Here in Chile, for instance, north of Santiago. There’s a shallow valley there and actually two points, not just one, a few kilometers apart.”
She looked up at Runyan, and he locked her eyes with a long, cool stare. Then he gave her a broad, friendly wink, and her heart jumped.
“You said you had three points?” Gantt prompted him to continue.
“This may be a bit more subtle, but just as important.” Runyan leaned forward and put his stack of computer printout on the ground. He retrieved his cup from Gantt and poured himself a small bit of bourbon. Resting his upper forearms on both knees and rotating the cup between his palms, he looked up at Danielson from beneath his brows. “Let me ask you, why is there such a small motion with respect to the surface?”
“But you just answered that!” objected Danielson. “Its motion at its highest point is set by the initial conditions with which it’s released. If it moved with the surface at first, it always will.”
“Always?”
Danielson stopped and stared at the bewhiskered scientist, her eyes shifting back and forth between his. Finally she said, “You said earlier there must be perturbations, friction. The orbit can’t be perfect, it must shift slowly with time.”
“Now I’m with you,” broke in Gantt. “The orbit must shift slowly with time, but it hasn’t shifted much.” He looked at both of them. “So it hasn’t had time.”
“That’s just the sort of thing I’ve been trying to compute,” said Runyan. “My model isn’t perfect yet, but I have some feeling for the scale of things. I would have to say this thing couldn’t have been around for more than ten years, and probably less.”
“What you’re saying,” said Danielson, “is that we only picked up a record of it recently because it’s only been around recently.”
“Let me get this straight then,” Gantt said slowly. “You’re arguing that someone or something, somehow, made a black hole of about ten million tons not more than a few years ago, releasing it at rest from a point on the Earth’s surface about six thousand feet above sea level.” His forehead wrinkled in consternation.
“When we examine those places,” Danielson said, pointing at the computer paper at Runyan’s feet, “do you expect to see something definite?”
“Maybe not,” said Gantt, looking at Runyan. “Granted that we’re dealing with a small black hole, and that it was created artificially, which seems to follow.”
Runyan nodded assent.
“Then,” Gantt continued, “we’re also talking about something beyond our technological feasibility. Suppose the only thing remaining at the ‘launch site,’ if I may call it that, is a burned spot and the impression of three round pods—I believe that’s the classical imprint of a UFO.”
“If we know where to look, we can find that too,” said Danielson, “if not with satellites, then a direct fly-over.”
“I suppose we must keep an open mind,” said Runyan, “but I have a feeling that the clues will be more definite.”
They lapsed into silence. Gantt broke it with a shake of his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but despite the evidence, I find the whole thing too incredible to believe. An artificial black hole planted here in the Earth—I mean, my god!” He raised his hands and eyes in an imploring salute to the skies.
“Alex,” he continued, “you said a while ago you were relieved the issue was now out in the open. I must say I don’t feel that way at all. After all, proving that we are dealing with a black hole is only the tip of the iceberg. Until we know who and why, we’ve barely begun to plumb the mystery. The most stupendous, terrifying, and profound aspects of this situation would seem to be before us.”
He was silent for a moment and muttered, “Christ,” and poured himself another jigger of bourbon and drank it off.
Runyan had slumped in his chair, chin on his chest. “I suppose you could be right, Ellison,” he said. “I have a hazy idea of what’s going on that suggests to me that, conceptually anyway, we’re over the hump.”
“How could we be? What in the world are you thinking?” Gantt demanded.
Runyan waved him off with a hand. “It’s too vague. I’m probably being naive or stupid or both.”
Gantt glared at him, uncomfortable with this dismissal.
At last he said, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ll go nuts if I just sit here and think about it. I’ve got to do something.” He stood up and looked around impatiently.
“Should we have another look for a hole in the ground?” asked Danielson. “I really wasn’t very thorough.”
“We could do that,” agreed Gantt. “We don’t really want to attract too much attention to what went on here. On the other hand, if we don’t look now, any sign may get covered up by people shuffling around.”
The moment of tenseness forgotten, they discussed the problem of security for awhile and finally decided they would stage a reenactment. This would show who was knocked down by the passage of the hole, thus showing where to look without giving away their object. Gantt would then order some rearrangement of equipment that would occupy most of the members of the entourage. This would give Runyan and Danielson a chance to search the ground for signs of penetration without drawing notice.
They put this plan into action with Runyan noting the vicinity where the hole had come up and Danielson several hundred feet away locating where it had descended.
Then Gantt gave orders to set up a fourth instrumentation site outside of camp and prepare accommodations for Runyan and Danielson, a legitimate task postponed earlier. Danielson joined Runyan. For the next few minutes they assiduously searched the several square yards just outside the main tent, Runyan erect and Danielson in a low crouch.
“Let’s try something else,” Runyan finally said. He directed Danielson to stand against the tent wall.
“Now I’m going to jump and stamp—you look for some sign of settling dirt.”
He launched himself upward and came down with a satisfying thud. He looked at the ground as Danielson peered around. They looked up at one another and shrugged. Runyan repeated the faintly ludicrous operation, working systematically across the suspect area.
On the fifth try, Danielson pointed, “There, just by your left foot.”
Two small stones were wedged in a depression, but as they looked a trickle of loose dirt sifted beneath the stones and disappeared.
Runyan crouched and carefully plucked away one of the stones in each hand. Beneath them was a hole in the sunbaked clay soil the size of a finger. Danielson jogged over to Gantt’s tent and returned with a coat hanger under her arm and another she busily untwisted. When she straightened the hanger, she lowered it slowly into the hole. It met only minor resistance and sank to the hook, which remained on the edge, marking the spot.
They walked to the second location and after a brief search found another hole. Again, they straightened a coat hanger and embedded it to mark the spot. Runyan rummaged up a tape measure he had spotted in the main instrumentation tent, and they marked off the distance between the two holes, which Runyan recorded in a small notebook in his pocket.
“Alex,” Danielson asked as they headed back to Gantt’s tent, “is there a special significance to the fact that it came down a bit further to the east? Is that related to the Earth’s rotation from west to east?”
“That’s one of many effects,” he replied as they settled into their chairs, “but you have to be careful to treat all the irregularities, all the perturbations.”
“How does the rotation come in?” she asked.
“Well, here, I’ll show you.” Runyan retrieved his computer output from the ground where he had left it and turned it over on his lap to write on the blank side. He pulled out a pen and carefully blocked out a set of equations. Danielson scooted her chair around close to his so she could see.
Gantt returned an hour later and found them in an animated discussion of orbit perturbations. He did not follow the details, but it was clear to him that Danielson was holding her own with Runyan, giving him pause with penetrating questions and occasionally adding a twist of her own. Although the discussion was purely intellectual, Gantt could sense the electricity between the two. Alex is well into stage two, he thought, black hole or no. Then a question of the generation and propagation of seismic waves arose, and Gantt pitched into the discussion as well.
They were still at it when the dinner bell sounded. Runyan and Danielson lagged behind as they headed for the mess tent.
“Listen,” Runyan said quietly, leaning over toward her, “there’s not much to do here in the middle of god’s country, but how about an evening stroll after things cool off. The desert can be quite beautiful then.”
Danielson turned her head to look up into his eyes, light flashing within the dark aura of his hair and beard. She wanted to be alone with him.
“That sounds very nice,” she said, holding his gaze for a moment. Then, with a new energy, they moved to catch up to Gantt.
After supper Runyan and Danielson joined Gantt at his tent in the fading evening light. Despite the lingering heat, they went inside the tent where Gantt switched on a generator- fed bulb. They discussed their current position and laid plans for the immediate future. Although the major point they had sought to check seemed well settled, they agreed that Gantt’s station should remain in operation to compile a precise record of the behavior of the object. Danielson would return and report to Isaacs and redouble the effort to discover the hypothesized point of origin. Runyan would report to Phillips and resume his orbital calculations. Gantt again proferred his bottle of bourbon, and they drank a nightcap to seal their arrangement. Danielson excused herself. Runyan followed a few minutes later.
Runyan pushed aside the tent flap and stepped out. The acrid aroma of tarpaulin mingled with the wafted delicate fragrance of grease wood. The clean dry air was warm and enveloping, as if you could shuck your clothes and drink it in through every pore. Runyan waited for his eyes to adjust, then turned toward Danielson’s tent, a sense of anticipation beginning to tickle his loins. He peered through the darkness toward her tent, some forty paces away on the other side of the one erected for him, but could only make out the vaguest outlines. Then he saw her, waiting for him in the deepest shadow. The familiar feeling of sweet power flooded him, and his mind filled with images of her warm curves, putting flesh to the dim silhouette he could barely perceive as he approached.
Danielson watched the figure picking his sure way in the dark. She had the irrational feeling that the ground would open up and swallow him before he reached her. It didn’t. He stopped a pace from her, his strong presence palpable even at the distance. She felt an urge to reach out and touch him, but he made no motion and neither did she.
He lingered a moment savoring the invisible aura between them, then whispered, “Let’s head out this way.”
He pointed to the rudimentary road that led to one of the outlying sites. They walked carefully out of the campsite and onto the road. The Moon was nearly full, casting faint shadows. Danielson found that at their strolling pace she could walk easily, with only part of her attention on the rocky roadbed. She looked around and up. Away from the Moon the pure desert sky was almost a solid blanket of stars.
“It’s so lovely,” she whispered.
As she looked upward and outward the trauma of the afternoon receded and an overpowering expansiveness filled her. She reached for Runyan’s arm and hugged it in both her hands, pulling him close to her. After several paces he freed his arm and encircled her waist. She slipped her arm across his back and leaned her head on his shoulder.
They walked on, speaking little, each lost in thought, awash in awareness of the other. Runyan estimated they had walked a half hour when he said, “I think we better head back.”
“I suppose we should,” she replied, her voice hinting regret. She felt something slipping by, something she didn’t want to lose. As they turned around in the darkness she tugged at his sleeve to halt him. He turned toward her, and she gripped his other sleeve as well, facing him, arms open, body exposed.
He raised his arms to encircle her shoulders, drawing her into a gentle embrace. She cradled her head against his chest, arms around his waist, and stared down at the Earth beside them. She thought again of the shattering event of the earlier afternoon, of the miniscule horror hurtling beneath their feet. Somehow, she felt this man was her protector, the sole barrier between her and the ferocious void. She lifted her head to look into his eyes. The shadows on his face were portals to a vast emptiness that she had to keep at bay. She moved her face closer to his so his features were clear, the shadows muted. She opened herself to a feeling she knew had been growing. She wanted this man. The world seemed large and empty. She needed to be with him, to hold to his firmness and strength.
She stretched to kiss him, feeling the prickle of his mustache and beard as he responded. Their lips brushed. A cool current raced through their bodies at the touch of sensitive flesh on flesh. He cupped her jaw and neck, fingers lightly tangled in her hair, kissing her deeply, drawing a dormant passion up and out.
They walked as quickly as they could back to the camp, pausing for another prolonged kiss when the interval grew too long to bear. The camp was dark and quiet when they returned.
Outside her tent she embraced his neck and stood on tiptoe for one more lingering kiss before crossing the threshold.
An image of the ludicrously narrow cot flashed in her mind. They could throw the thin mattress on the tent floor. She broke their kiss, found his hand, and brushed her lips across his palm. Then she pushed aside the tent flap and, still holding his hand, led him in. Runyan stooped to follow her, a small smile playing on his lips.