The difficulty came when the four of them asked, no, demanded, that the colony instruct the orbiting crews to put aside other work in order to make the observations only they could make, with the ship’s sensors that were the only eyes the colony had for investigating what was going on in space.
It took a full-scale colony meeting to decide—more than three thousand people crowding around the open-air platform where the speakers urged their cases.
When Pal Sorricaine heard that the decision would go to a meeting he swore and poured himself a drink. That meant it would go by majority vote, and Pal Sorricaine, like a lot of Mayflower people, thought the majority was unfair. The second shipload had begun by outumbering the first, 1,115 to 854—but then the first colonists had had six Earth years to make more babies, so the combination of the colonists from New Ark and their Home-born offspring now totaled 1,918, while Mayflower’s total had only reached a little over 1,300. Of course the newborns weren’t old enough to vote, but who was, exactly? At what age did the franchise begin? And by what sort of calculation?
Sorricaine went to the meeting grimly determined to battle out the voting age question. But this time the line wasn’t drawn between the two ships’ people. The question split both factions almost down the middle. There was one side—headed by Pal Sorricaine and his little group, along with Captain Rodericks from the first ship and Marie-Claude Stockbridge—who insisted that the star had to be studied with all the resources possible. There was another side that included Reesa McGann’s parents, but also Sam and Sally Broad from Mayflower and a lot of others from both ships, who were even more emphatic that the orbiting crews had all they could handle to finish converting the drive engines to MHD microwave generation, and didn’t the others understand the colony needed that power?
They all settled in for a long town-meeting argument. Even allowing only three minutes to each speaker meant long hours of debate. Worse, they were unproductive hours. Men and women debating policy were not planting crops or putting up houses or exploring the planet.
It took them an hour just to decide, by raucous voice vote, how many could be allowed to speak. The decision was a hundred—three hundred minutes—five hours of talk; and, even though some of the lottery winners immediately turned their times over to allies more articulate and convincing than themselves, a lot of those three-minute talks amounted only to saying, over and over, “The safety of the colony is threatened!”
What they couldn’t agree on was which threat—whether the threat from the sky was more dangerous than the threat of postponing the arrival of beamed power from the ship.
It ended badly for Pal Sorricaine. He and his colleagues got their observing time, but with a bad condition. The allotment of ship time was to become effective only after the ten Newmanhome days of additional work it would take for the microwave installation to be completed.
By then the flare was still bright, but not as bright; the vital first spectra had been missed. Sorricaine, Mtiga, and the others did what they could with the data that began to flood down on them, but they learned nothing they hadn’t known before. The star had somehow pulled itself apart, and no one could guess why.
The star continued to dominate the night sky for more than a hundred Newmanhome days. Then Pal Sorricaine filed his last report to the distant Earthly astronomers, gave up his privileges, and went resentfully back to laboring, mourning the lost chance.
At least he wasn’t reclaiming lost pods any more. The last of them had been found and brought in; someone else had done that for him. He found other jobs. He drove a tractor on the farms; he sailed to an island a hundred miles south of the colony, to seed it with earthworms and Earthly clover to prepare it, one day, for crops; he shifted goods in the storehouses with a forklift . . . and that was the job that did him in, for one day he stacked the sacks of seed potatoes too high, and the lift overturned.
There was not enough of Pal Sorricaine’s right leg left to save when they got him to the hospital.
It was a torment to him that, in the next year, there were two new flare stars, two months apart. “I think we didn’t pick a good part of the galaxy to colonize,” he told his son, wincing as he tried to find a comfortable position for the stump of his right leg. “Pieces of it keep blowing up.” And then he asked his teenage son, please, to save his liquor allotment for him—to help, he said, with the unremitting pain.
CHAPTER 5
Wan-To’s interest in the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects (which, of course, he never called by that name) was becoming pretty nearly frantic. He saw a lot more of them than Pal Sorricaine did, because he saw them a lot faster. He didn’t have to wait for creeping visible light to bring him the information. His Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs relayed the images instantly. The things were popping up all over.
However, he was beginning to have hope. The results from his blue-light studies were beginning to come in.
Blue light was particularly good for looking for starspots. Although the spots seemed relatively dark, they were quite bright enough to be seen by Wan-To’s great and sensitive “eyes”—particularly if you looked in the blue. Because the spots were cooler than the areas around them, their gases were ionized in a somewhat different way; and it was the spectral lines of the singly ionized calcium atoms—the ones that had lost just one electron—that stood out in blue.
When Wan-To found blue-light images that were not natural he knew just what to do. He summoned up the necessary graviphotons and graviscalars and hurled them in a carefully designed pattern at that star.
That would have been quite a wonder to human physicists, if they could have known what Wan-To was doing. It would have been a marvel for them if they could even have detected any of those particles, though they had sought them as long, and as unsuccessfully, as any medieval knight had sought the Holy Grail.
It was in the early twentieth century that Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein formulated the human race’s first decent model of how gravity worked. It wasn’t a wholly successful model. There was still a lot to learn. But it managed to relate electromagnetism and gravity as manifestations of a higher-dimension space-time in ways that seemed to fit together pretty well—in ways, in fact, that Wan-To had understood for many billion years. His own understanding of gravitation was more or less a Kaluza-Klein model, though with considerable important amendments. He understood that the three basic mediating particles of the gravitational interaction between masses were what human scientists of the Kaluza-Klein faith would call the vector bosons—the graviton, the graviphoton, and the graviscalar. His command of them was perfect. With the resources of his star to draw on, he could generate any or all of those particles at will. He often did—in copious amounts. He found them all very useful.
He didn’t bother much with the simple graviton. That was the uncomplicated spin-2 particle that seemed to pull masses together at even infinite distances—the only one that Isaac Newton, for instance, would have understood. Of course, the graviton was highly important in holding stars together and keeping galaxies rotating around their common center, but you couldn’t do much with it. The others were rarer, and more fun, especially when you wanted to attack a colleague’s star. A dose of graviphotons, the spin-l repellers, would churn up the star’s insides in a hurry; no organized system of Wan-To’s kind could survive inside a star that was tearing itself apart that way. Alternatively, or better still, in addition, he could pull at the star from outside with one of the other particles. The more useful of those was the spin-0 graviscalar, which pulled matter and energy toward it just as the humble graviton did, but only over finite distances. The graviscalar was a very local kind of particle.
The great virtue of the graviscalar, in other words, was that it couldn’t be detected by Wan-To’s enemies unless they were right on the spot—and then they wouldn’t be in any position to do anything about it.
When Wan-To saw his target star erupt—very satisfyingly—he began to relax.
Nothing could have survived in that utter holocaust, of course. Wan-To was pleased. He wondered which of his competitors he had killed.
It would, he thought, surely have been one of the dumber ones. The others—the ones he had first made, the ones who were almost as smart as Wan-To himself—would, like Wan-To, have figured out that they shouldn’t give their locations away by playing in the convection zones. But at least one was gone—one possible threat, but also, of course, one possible promise of companionship.