Earth

The big man sat across from Lustig, hands folded on a table of dark wood, his notepad completely forgotten. Pedro’s eyes kept flicking to a large holographic cutaway of the Earth, more vivid and detailed than anything their group had been able to construct back in Houston. Delicately traced minutiae cast orange, yellow, and reddish shades across one side of Manella’s face, lending false gay overtones to his bleak expression.

There were only the three of them here in a sparsely furnished underground chamber. After providing his guests with refreshments, Lustig had launched into his briefing without assistance, though twice he had lifted a headset to consult someone outside. Naturally, the man had help. Despite his “solitary wizard” reputation, there was no way he could have figured all this out by himself.

The possibility of a hoax occurred to Teresa several times, but she recognized that as wishful thinking. Lustig’s calm thoroughness bespoke credibility, however insane or horrible his conclusions.

“… so it was only this week, by combining gravity scans with neutrino observations, that we were able to pin down at last where the energy is coming from… the elevated state powering the gazer effect. It’s at the base of the mantle, where the geomagnetic field draws on currents in the outer core…”

Technically, the story wasn’t hard to follow. While searching for his Iquitos black hole, Lustig and his associates had stumbled across a much more dangerous singularity al-ready present at the center of the Earth. They tried using tuned gravity waves to trace that one’s trajectory and history, but that touched off internal reflections, amplifying gravitons much as photons are between the mirrors of a laser. In this case the “gazer mirrors” consisted of the mysterious Beta itself plus the experimental black hole onboard station Erehwon. What blasted forth was a great wave of warped space-time, spearing in the general direction of Spica.

Lustig was a good teacher. He kept his math to low-level matrices and used figures to graphically lay out this tale of catastrophe. It sounded all too plausible — and she wouldn’t have believed a single word if she hadn’t witnessed so much firsthand. The sudden, horrible stretching and contraction of Erehwon’s tether, for instance. Or the relativistic departure of the Farpoint lab. Or those colors.

What had Teresa becalmed in an emotional dead zone was the realization that all her concerns were over. What point was there in worrying about internal politics at NASA, or her next flight itinerary, or her failed marriage, if the whole world was coming to an end soon?

The mystery singularity — Lustig’s “cosmic knot” — must have started small. But Beta had grown till now it teetered near a critical threshold. She read the accretion rate off a side screen. Clearly the thing was poised for a voracious binge that could have only one conclusion.

One conclusion … So far he had spared them an explicit simulation of what would happen when matter began flowing into Beta’s maw in megatons per second. Teresa figured it would start with shock waves disrupting the planet’s deep, ancient convection patterns. Earthquakes would roll and volcanoes spume as great seams opened in the crust. Then, undermined from within, the outer layers would collapse.

Ironically, little would happen to things in orbit, like the moon or satellites. Earth’s total mass below would stay the same, only converted into a far more compact form. If she happened to be on a mission at the time, she’d get to watch the whole show… until the singularity revealed its bare glory and seared her spacecraft out of existence in a blast of gamma radiation.

Teresa shook herself. This was no time for a funk. Later, at home, she could climb under the covers, curl in a ball, and hope to die.

“… that one of our problems was finding the inverted energy distribution that’s being tapped by the gazer beam. Where does all the power come from?” The Englishman ran a hand through his hair. “Then it all made sense! The Earth’s magnetic dynamo is the source. Specifically, discrete superconducting domains where—”

Teresa started, sitting upright. “What did you say?”

Alex Lustig regarded her with pale blue eyes. “Captain Tikhana? I was referring to current loops, where the lower mantle meets the liquid core—”

She interrupted again. “You spoke of superconductivity. Down there? We still have trouble cooling rapid transit lines on a summer day, but you say there are superconducting areas thousands of miles below, where temperatures reach thousands of degrees?”

The British physicist nodded. “Don’t forget, pressures at the base of the mantle exceed ten thousand newtons per square centimeter. And then there’s a delightful coincidence one of my colleagues noticed only recently. The bottommost mineral state, before mantle gives way to metallic core, seems to consist of various oxides pressed into a perovskite structure—”

“Per… ovskite?”

“A particularly dense oxide arrangement that forms readily under pressure.”

“I still don’t get it,” she said, frowning.

He spread his hands. “Relatives of these same perovskites happen to be among the best industrial superconductors! This coincidence led us to consider a weird notion… that there are places, thousands of kilometers below us, where electric current flows completely free of resistance.”

The very idea made Teresa close her eyes. Once upon a time, superconductivity had been associated only with utter cold, near absolute zero. Only in recent decades had “room temperature” superconductors joined a few other breakthroughs to help salvage the hard-pressed world economy. Now she envisioned loops and titanic circuits, flowing in perfect, resistance-free fire. It was a startling notion. “These superconducting domains… they’re the excited zones you tap with the gravity resonator?”

“We think so. Energy levels drop each time, but are quickly pumped up again by convection.”

Silence held. When Manella spoke again, he shook his head. “So many wonderful discoveries… all made under the shadow of an angel of death. Okay, Lustig, you’ve had your fun. Now tell us what we need to know.”

“Know for what?”

Pedro pounded the tabletop. “For revenge! Who released this thing? And when? Where do we find them?”

From the other man’s countenance, Teresa guessed this wasn’t the first time he had heard that request. “I don’t know the answer yet,” he replied. “It’s hard to trace its trajectory back, taking into account friction and accretion and inhomogeneities in the core…”

“You can’t even begin to guess?”

The physicist shrugged. “By my calculations the thing shouldn’t even exist.”

“Of course it shouldn’t exist! But somebody made it, obviously. You said you understood the basic principles.”

“Oh, I do… or thought I did. But I’m having trouble seeing how anyone could make such a large knot with any energy source available on Earth today.”

“Wasn’t it smaller when it fell?”

“Surely. But remember, practical cavitronics is only about eight years old. When I extrapolate that far back from Beta’s present size and growth rate, it’s still too bloody heavy. No structure on Earth could have supported it.”

Manella glowered. “Obviously you’ve made some mistake.”

Teresa saw something flash briefly in Alex Lustig’s eyes — an anger that quenched as quickly as it came. With surprising mildness, he nodded. “Obviously. Perhaps it is eating faster than my theory predicts. This isn’t an area anyone has much experience in.”

At that moment Teresa felt the weight of the cave around her, as if all the tons overhead were pressing on her chest. Partly to overcome faintness, she spoke the critical question.

“How…” She swallowed. “How much time do we have?”

He blew a sigh. “Actually, that part’s fairly easy. However rapidly it grew in the past, the asymptotic threshold remains the same. If it continues sucking in matter, faster and faster… I’d say we have about two years until major earthquakes begin. Another year before volcanic activity chokes the atmosphere.