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don't know if you know much about black holes, but oh, shit," she interrupted herself, suddenly
stricken. "You do know, don't you? I mean, after you were stuck in one for thirty or forty years...."
She looked as though she had inadvertently caused me great pain. She hadn't. I was used to that sort of
reaction. People rarely brought up the subject of black holes in my presence, on the general principle that
you don't talk about rope when there's been a hanging in the house. But the time when I had been
trapped in one of the things was far back in the past. It had gone like a flash for me in the black hole's
time dilution, however many years it was on the outside, and I wasn't sensitive about it.
On the other hand, I wasn't interested in discussing it one more damn time, either. I just said, "My black
hole didn't look like that. It was a creepy kind of pale blue."
Terple recovered quickly. She gave me a wise nod of the head. "That would have been Cérenkov
radiation. Yours must have been what they call a naked singularity. This one's different. It's wrapped up
in its own ergosphere and you can't see a thing. Most black holes produce a lot of radiation not from
themselves, from the gases and stuff they're swallowing but this one has already swallowed everything
around it. Anyway." She paused to recollect her train of thought. Then she nodded. "I was telling you
about the gravitational lensing. Hans?"
She didn't say what she wanted from Hans, but evidently he could figure it out for himself. The stars
disappeared and a sort of wall of misty white appeared in front of us. Terpel poked at it here and there
with a finger, drawing a little picture for me:
"That little dot on the left, that's the Crabber planet we want to study. The circle's the black hole. The
arc on the right is our mirror, which is right at the point of convergence where the gravitational lensing
from the black hole gives us the sharpest image. And the little dot next to it is us, at the Cassegrain focus
of the mirror. I didn't show the Crabber sun actually we have to avoid aiming the camera at it, because
it could burn out our optics. Am I making sense so far?"
"So far," I agreed.
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She gave me another of those assessing looks, then said, "We'll actually be doing our observing by
looking toward the mirror. There too we'll have to block out the star itself, or we won't see the Crab
planet at all, but that's just another of the things we'll be adjusting. We'll actually be looking diametrically
away from the planet in order to observe it."
I hadn't been able to resist the temptation with Hypatia, and I couldn't now with June Terple. "For four
or five days," I said in my friendliest voice.
I guess the tone wasn't friendly enough. She looked nettled. "Listen, we didn't put the damn black hole
where it is. It took us two years of searching to find one in the right position. There's a neutron star that
we could've used. Orbitwise it was a better deal because it would have given us nearly eighty years to
observe, but it's just a damn neutron star. It wouldn't have given us anywhere the same magnification,
because a neutron star just doesn't have anywhere near as much mass as a black hole, so the
gravitational lensing would've been a lot less powerful. We'll get a lot more detail with our black hole.
Anyway," she added, "once we've observed from here we'll move this whole lashup to the neutron star
for whatever additional data we can get I mean, uh, if that seems advisable we will."
What she meant by that was if I was willing to pay for it. Well, I probably was. The capital costs were
paid already. It would only mean meeting their payroll for another eighty years or so, and none of them
were getting big bucks. Hypatia had seen to that.
But I wasn't ready to make that commitment. To take her mind off it, I said, "I thought we were
supposed to have almost thirty days of observing right here."
She looked glum."Radio observing. That's why we built the mesh dish. But it turns out there's no
artifactual radio coming from the Crabber planet, so we had to get mirror plates so we could convert it to
optical. Took us over three weeks, which is why we lost so much observing time."
"I see," I said. "No radio signals. So there might not be any civilization there to observe, anyway."
She bit her lip. "We know definitely that there'slife there. Or was, anyway. It's one of the planets the
Heechee surveyed long ago, and there were advanced living organisms there at the time pretty
primitive, sure, but they certainly looked as though they had the potential to evolve."
"Thepotential to evolve, right. But whether they did or not we just don't know."
She didn't answer that. She just sighed. Then she said, "As long as you're here, would you like a look
around?"
"If I won't be in the way," I said.
Of course I was in the way. June Terple didn't let it show, but some of the others barely gave me the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]