Earth

A face in the rear window made Teresa gasp, then she sighed. It was only their inadvertent hitchhiker, the space-suited crewman, his helmet still pressed against the perspex screen.

“Hmph,” she commented. “Our guest doesn’t look as pissed off as before.” In fact, the expression behind the steamed-up faceplate beamed unalloyed gratitude. “He must have seen Nearpoint come apart. By now it may already be in the atmos…”

She stopped suddenly. “Jason!”

“What?” Mark looked up from the computer.

“Where’s the upper tip? Where’s Farpoint!”

Teresa scrabbled at the radar display, readjusting to its highest scale on autofrequency scan — taking in the blackness far from Earth just in time to catch a large blip that streaked past the outer edge of the screen.

“Sweet Gaia… look at the doppler!” Randall stared. “It’s moving at… at…” He didn’t finish. Teresa could read the screen as well as he.

The glowing letters lingered, even after the fleeting blip departed. They burned in the display and in their hearts.

Jason, Teresa thought, unable to comprehend or cope with what she’d seen. Her voice caught, and when she finally spoke, it was simply to say, “Six… thousand kilometers… per second.”

It was impossible of course. Teresa shook her head in numb, unreasoning disbelief that Jason would have, could have, done this to her!

“Kakashkiya,” she sighed.

“He’s leaving me… at two percent of the goddamn speed of light…”

□ It was Atē, first-born daughter of Zeus, who used the golden apple to tempt three vain goddesses, setting the stage for tragedy. Moreover, it was Atē who made Paris fall for Helen, and Agamemnon for Breises. Atē filled the Trojans’ hearts with a love of horses, whose streaming manes laid grace upon the plains of Ilium. To Ulysses she gave a passion for new things.

For these and other i

Did she realize her invention would eventually lead to Hecuba’s anguish atop the broken walls of Troy? Some say she spread dissension only at her father’s bidding… that Zeus himself co

Still, when he saw the bloody outcome, Zeus mourned. Gods who had supported Troy joined those backing Hellas, and all agreed to lay the blame on Atē.

Banished to Earth, she brought along her invention, and its effects would prove as far-reaching as that earlier boon — the gift of Prometheus. Indeed, what could Reason ever accomplish for mankind by itself, without Passion to drive it on?

Infatuation spread, for well and ill. Life, once simple, became vivid, challenging, confusing. Hearts raced. Veins sang with recklessness. Wild gambles paid off fantastically, or tumbled into memorable fiascos.

There came to Earth a thing called “love.”

Infatuation forever changed the world. That is why some came to call it the “Meadow of Atē.”

• CORE

The last tremors had ended, but it still 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 still. 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 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 subroutines 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 become real only after you have spoken them aloud.

“Seems to be,” he said, with difficulty.

“I agree,” added Start.

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 that 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 taniwha 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.