Triton (Trouble on Triton) (6 page)

The dusty splatter of the Milky Way misted across the black. (On the shield, it was a band of green-shot silver.)

The sky looks smaller, Bron thought. It looks safe and close—like the roofed-over section of the u-1—yes, punctured by a star here and the sun there. But, though he knew those lights were millions of kilometers—millions of light-years away, they seemed no more than a kilometer distant. The shield’s interpenetrating pastel mists, though they were less than a kilometer up, gave a
true
feel of infinity. Another light-line shot overhead: It pulsed and diffused color across the dark like a molten rainbow.

“They’re flying so low—” That was Sam, calling from near the roof’s edge—“that their ion output is exciting a portion of the shield into random discharge: that’s not really their trail you’re seeing, just an image, below it, on the—”

Someone screamed.

And Bron felt suddenly light-headed; his next heartbeat reverberated in his skull, painful as a hammer. Then, at a sudden blow to the soles of his feet, his stomach turned over—no, he didn’t vomit. But he stag-geied. And his knee hit someone who had fallen. Somewhere something crashed. Then there was a growing light. His ears ceased pounding. The wash of red dissolved from his eyes. And he was on his feet (Had he slipped to one knee? He wasn’t even sure), gasping for breath.

He looked up. The shield’s evening pastels, circled with a brilliant blue Neptune, were on again. People on his roof (and the roofs around) had fallen. People were helping each other up. His own hand, as he turned, was grasped; he pulled someone erect.

“... back inside! Everybody get back inside!” (Still Sam; but the surety had left his voice. Its authority tingled with a slight, electric fear.) “Everything’s under control now. But just get back
mside
—”

They herded into the slant corridor, spiraling down into the building; anxious converse broiled:

“... cut the gravity ...”

“No, they
can’t
do ...”

“... if the power failed! Even for a few seconds. The whole atmosphere would bulge up like a balloon and we’d lose all our pressure for ...”

“That’s impossible. They
can’t
cut the gravity ...”

Back in the commons, the strain (if, indeed, the city’s gravity had faltered for a second or so) had shattered one of the skylight’s panes. No pieces had fallen (it was, apparently, “shatter-proof”) but the glass, smithereened, sagged in its tesselations.

Chairs were overturned.

A reader had fallen, file drawers spilled; fiche cards scattered the orange carpet. The astral cube had come loose from its holder and leaned askew, its god-faced markers fallen out onto the gaming board among scuttled ships and toppled soldiers.

Sam was saying to those who stood around them: “—no, this
doesn’t
mean that Triton will have to enter the war between the Outer Satellites and the Inner Worlds. But the possibility’s been a clear one for over a year. I doubt if the odds on it have changed one way or the other—at least I assume they haven’t. Maybe this incident has just made the possibility a little more clear in
your
minds. Look, pull up some chairs—”

“Now you explain the gravity thing again,” Freddie said, a little nervously. He sat cross-legged on the floor, one bright-ringed hand on his father’s knee (Flossie sat in the chair behind him, both hands a-glitter in his naked lap): “You explain it
very
slowly, see? And very clearly. And very simply.” Freddie glanced up, then around at the others. “You understand now how you have to do it?”

Someone else said: “Sam, that’s terrifying. I mean, if it
had
been cut for even fifteen or twenty seconds, everyone in the city might be dead!”

Sam sighed, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and patted two sides of an imaginary question. “All right. I’ll go over it once more for those of you who still don’t understand. Think back to your old relativity model. As a particle’s speed in a straight line approaches the speed of light, its volume decreases in the direction of the motion, its time processes relative to the observer slow down, its mass increases and so does its gravity. Now suppose the acceleration is in a curve. This all still holds true, only not at the rate governed by Fitzgerald’s contraction; suppose it’s in a very tight curve—say a curve as tight as an electron shell. Does it still hold true? It does. And suppose the curve is tighter still, say, so tight its diameter is smaller than that of the particle itself—essentially this is what we mean when we say the particle is ‘spinning.’ The relativity model still holds: it’s just that the surface of the particle has a higher density, mass, and gravity than the center—a sort of relativistically-produced surface tension that keeps the particle from flying apart in a cloud of neutrinos. Now by some very fancy technological maneuvering, involving ultrahigh frequency depolarized magnetism, superimposed magnetic waves, and alternate polarity/parity acceleration, we can cause al\ the charged nucleons—which is theoretically only protons but in actuality turns out to include a few neutrons as well—in certain, high-density, crystalline solids, starting with just their spin, to increase the diameter of their interpenetrating orbits to about the same size across as the nucleus of an atom of rhodium one-oh-three—which, for a variety of reasons, is taken to be, in this work, the standard unit of measurement—while still moving at speeds approaching that of light—”

“You said before, Sam, that they didn’t really circle,” someone else said, “but that they wobbled, like off-center tops.”

“Yes,” Sam said. “The wobble is what accounts for the unidirectionality of the resultant gravitic field. But I’m trying to explain it now for those who couldn’t understand the
last
explanation. Actually, it isn’t even a wobble; its a complex vertical gradient wave-shift—the thing to remember is that
all
of these terms, particle, spin, orbit, wobble
and
wave, are just highly physical-ized metaphors for processes still best understood and most easily applied as a set of purely mathematical abstractions. Anyway, all the particles in a bunch of tri-layer iridium/osmium crystalline sheets, spaced about under the city, are madly orbiting in tiny circles of one point seven two seven the diameter of a rhodium one-oh-three nucleus. The magnetic resonance keeps the crystals from collapsing in on themselves. The resultant mass, and the gravity set up, is increased several hundred million-fold—”

“—in one direction, because of the wobble,” Flossie said, slowly.

“That’s right, Floss.” (Freddie, visibly relaxed, dropped his hand from his father’s knee—and slid two glittering fingers into his mouth.) “The result is that anything above them is held neatly down. This, coupled with the natural gravity of Triton, gives street-level Tethys point nine six two Earth-normal, at-sea-level-on-the-magnetic-South-Pole, gravity.”

“You
mean
Earth has one point oh three nine five the normal bolstered gravity of Tethys,” someone said from the back of the room.

Sam’s black brow wrinkled above a smile. “One point oh three nine five oh
one
... more or less.” He glanced around the group. “The cold-plasma atmo—

sphere-trap works by similar magnetic maneuvering, though it has nothing to do with the gravity. The thing to bear in mind, with all of those twelve hundred thousand trilayer crystal sheets, is that each group of ten has its own emergency power supply.”

“Then they
couldn’t
all go off at once,” Lawrence said. “Even for a few seconds. Is that what you mean?”

“That’s what I said.” Sam put his chin on his dark knuckles, looking up at the men from under lowered brows. “What I suspect is far more likely: some synchronous overtone in the magnetic resonance was induced—”

“Induced by
whom?”
someone asked.

Sam raised his chin about an inch from his knuckles. “—was induced in the magnetic resonance, that caused the gravity field—remember, the magnetic field that controls the particle’s spin is alternating at literally billions of times a second—to list: all the wobbles wobbled to one side at once. Not even for a second; perhaps as much as a hundred-thousandth of a second, if that long. Yes, we got a sudden bulge in our atmosphere. But I doubt if we lost more than a pound or three’s pressure; and it settled back in seconds. Sure, it was a big shock, but I don’t think anything really serious—”

“What
was
it—!”

They turned to the balcony.

“What
happened}.
I didn’t ...” Alfred (who was seventeen, had the room directly across from Bron, and was the third person in the co-op Bron, from time to time, thought of as a friend) stood naked at the rail. A blood bubble burst in one nostril. Blood ran down his neck, across his bony chest. He reached up with a hand, already smeared, and wiped more blood across a bloody cheek. “I was in my room, and then ... I was scared to come out! I didn’t hear anything. Except some screaming first. What ... ?” A trickle crawled his belly, reached his genital hair, built there for three, silent breaths, then rolled on down his thigh. “Is everybody ... ?” With terrified, green eyes, he blinked about the common room’s assemblage.

Somehow, twenty minutes after that, the pieces had been rearranged on the vlet board; some dozen people were back at the various readers around the room, and several others (among them Sam) had taken Alfred to the console room where the co-op’s outlet for the city information computer would give him a medical diagnosis and any necessary referrals. Then someone came back to report, with astonishment, that there would be a seven-to-ten-minute wait for processing of all medical programs due to a city overflow! “I guess a lot of people sprained a lot of ankles ...” was someone’s dubious comment. Bron decided to go down and see for himself. Downstairs, he crowded into a room with several others. Between two shoulders, he could see the screen flashing: “There will be a three-minute delay before we can ...” Now that
was
unsettling. But other than a bloody nose and scared, Alfred seemed all right. While Bron was there, the delay sign was replaced with the usual: “Your diagnosis will begin in one minute. Please prepare to answer a few simple questions.” So while Alfred, one knuckle pressed against his upper lip, was sitting down to the console, Bron and several others had come back to the commons. He lost the astral battle seven to one.

“What,” Lawrence said, sitting back in his chair, “were you ever thinking of?”

Bron reached out and removed his own, overturned, scarlet Assassin and slid Lawrence’s green Duchess into the square by the waterfall’s bank, to threaten the caravan preparing to cross the river less than three squares to the East. With the piece still in his fist (he could feel its nubs and corners), he picked up his cards and surveyed his depleted points. “That woman.” Only one
meld
was possible and he was three away from his most recent bid.

Lawrence laughed, sat back, and turned his own cards down on his bony knee. “You mean to tell me, in the middle of all this excitement, you’re thinking about some woman? If you’re
that
kind, what are you doing in
this
co-op? There’re plenty of places set up for you oversexed, libidinous creatures. Most of them, in fact. Why do you want to come here and let your nasty id mess up our ascetic lives?”

“The first time I ever saw you,” Bron said, “you lumbered into me in the upstairs corridor, drunk out of your mind, and demanded I screw you on the spot.”

“I remember it well.” Lawrence nodded deeply. “The next time I get drunk, I may do the same: There’s life in the old pirate yet—the point, however, is that when you refused, saying that you just weren’t (as you put it so diplomatically) all that turned on by men, I did
not
immediately drop you from my acquaintanceship; I did
not
snub you in the dining area next time we passed. I even, if I recall, said hello to you the next morning and volunteered to let the repairmen in to fix your channel circuit while you were out at work.”

“What
is
the point, Lawrence?” Bron looked back at his cards. Several times in his life, people had pointed out to him that what friends he had tended to be people who had approached him for friendship, rather than people he’d approached. It meant that a goodly percentage of his male friends over the years had been homosexual, which, at this stage, was simply a familiar occurrence.
“You’re
the libidinous one. I admit it, my relationships with women have never been the best—though, by the gods of any sect you name, sex itself never seemed to be the problem. But that’s why I moved in here: to get away from women
and
sex.”

“Oh, really! Alfred rushing his little girl friends in here after midnight and hustling them out again before dawn—it may be screwing, but it
isn’t
sex. And anyway, it doesn’t bother anyone, though I’m sure it would just destroy him if he found that out.”

“Certainly doesn’t bother me,” Bron said. “Or you hustling your little boyfriends in and out—”

“Wishful thinking! Wishful thinking!” Lawrence closed his eyes lightly and raised his chin. “Ah, such
wishful thinking.”

“If I remember correctly,” Bron said, “that evening in the corridor, when I said ‘no,’ you called me a faggot-hater and demanded to know what I was doing in an all-male co-op if I didn’t like to go to bed with men—”

Lawrence’s eyes opened; his chin came down. “—whereupon you politely informed me that there was a gay—you know, politically that has, from time to time, been a very nasty word, till that silly public-channel series denatured it once and for all back in the Seventies, the same one which reestablished ‘into’ into the language—men’s co-op two streets away that might take me in for the night. Bastard!”

“You kept on insisting I screw you.”

“And you kept on insisting that you didn’t want to go to bed with
anybody,
in between explaining to me, in the most sophomoric manner, that I couldn’t expect
this
kind of commune to be more than twenty percent gay—where you got
that
dreadfully quaint statistic from, I’m sure / shall never know;
then
you went on to explain that, nevertheless, due to your current disinterest in women you felt yourself to be
politically
homosexual—”