Old-fashioned
Ben Estes knew he was going to die and it didn’t make him feel any better to know that that was the chance he had lived with all these years. The life of an astro-miner, drifting through the still largely uncharted vastness of the asteroid belt, was not particularly sweet, but it was quite likely to be short.
Of course, there was always the chance of a surprise find that would make you rich for life, and this had been a surprise find all right. The biggest surprise in the world, but it wasn’t going to make Estes rich. It would make him dead.
Harvey Funarelli groaned softly from his bunk, and Estes turned, with a wince of his own as his muscles creaked. They had been badly mishandled. That he wasn’t hit as viciously as Funarelli had been was surely because Funarelli was the larger man, and had been closer to the point of near-impact.
Estes looked somberly at his partner and said, “How do you feel, Harv?”
Funarelli groaned again. “I feel broken at every joint. What the hell happened? What did we hit?”
Estes walked over, limping slightly, and said, “Don’t try to stand up.”
“I can make it,” said Funarelli, “if you’ll just reach out a hand. Wow! I wonder if I’ve got a broken rib. Right here. What happened, Ben?”
Estes pointed at the main portview. It wasn’t a large one, but it was the best a two-man astro-mining vessel could be expected to have. Funarelli moved toward it very slowly, leaning on Estes’ shoulder. He looked out.
There were the stars, of course, but the experienced astronautic mind blanks those out. There are always the stars. Closer in, there was a gravel bank of boulders of varying size, all moving slowly relative to their neighbors like a swarm of very, very lazy bees.
Funarelli said, “I’ve never seen anything like that before. What are they doing here?”
“Those rocks,” said Estes, “are what’s left of a shattered asteroid, I suspect, and they’re still circling what shattered them, and what shattered us.”
“What?” Funarelli peered vainly into the darkness.
Estes pointed. “That!”
There was a faint little sparkle in the direction he was pointing.
“I don’t see anything.”
“You’re not supposed to. That’s a black hole.”
Funarelli’s close-cropped black hair stood on end as a matter of course, and his staring dark eyes added a touch of horror. He said, “You’re crazy.”
“No. Black holes can come in all sizes. That’s what the astronomers say. That one is about the mass of a large asteroid, I think, and we’re moving around it. How else could something we can’t see be holding us ill orbit?”
“There’s no report on any—”
“I know. How can there be? It can’t be seen. It’s mass—Ooops, there comes the Sun.” The slowly rotating ship had brought the Sun into view and the portview automatically polarized into opacity. “Anyway,” said Estes, “we discovered the first black hole actually to be encountered anywhere in the Universe. Only we won’t live to see ourselves get the credit.”
Funarelli said, “What happened?”
“We got close enough for the tidal effects to smash us up.”
“What tidal effects?”
Estes said, “I’m not an astronomer, but as I understand it, even when the total gravitational pull of a thing like that isn’t large, you can get so close to it that the pull becomes intense. That intensity falls off so rapidly with increasing distance that the near end of an object is pulled far more strongly than the far end. The object is therefore stretched. The closer and bigger an object is, the worse the effect. Your muscles were torn. You’re lucky your bones weren’t broken.”
Funarelli grimaced. “I’m not sure they aren’t. . . . What else happened?”
“The fuel tanks were destroyed. We’re stuck here in orbit. . . . It’s just lucky we happened to end in one far enough away and circular enough to keep the tidal effect down. If we were closer, or if we even zoomed in closely at one end of the orbit—”
“Can we get word out?”
“Not a word,” said Estes. “Communications are smashed.”
“You can’t fix it?”
“I’m not really a communications expert, but even if I were—It can’t be fixed.”
“Can’t something be jury-rigged?”
Estes shook his head. “We’ve just got to wait—and die. That’s not what bothers me so much.”
“It bothers me,” said Funarelli, sitting down on his bunk and placing his head in his hands.
“We’ve got the pills,” said Estes. “It would be an easy death. What’s really bad is that we can’t get word back about—that.” He pointed to the portview, which was clear again as the Sun moved out of range.
“About the black hole?”
“Yes, it’s dangerous. It seems to be in orbit about the Sun, but who knows whether that orbit is stable. And even if it is, it’s bound to get larger.”
“I guess it will swallow stuff.”
“Sure. Everything it encounters. There’s cosmic dust spiraling into it all the time, and giving off energy as it spirals and drops in. That’s what makes those dim sparkles of light. Every once in a while, the hole will swallow up a large piece that gets in the way and there’ll be a flash of radiation, right down to X rays. The larger it gets, the easier it is for it to drag in material from a greater and greater distance.”
For a moment, both men stared at the portview, then Estes went on. “Right now it can be handled maybe. If NASA can maneuver a fairly large asteroid here and send it past the hole in the proper way, the hole will be pulled out of its orbit by mutual gravitational attraction between itself and the asteroid. The hole can be made to curve itself into a path that could head it out of the Solar System, with some further help and acceleration.”
Funarelli said, “Do you suppose it started very small?”
“It could have been a micro-hole formed at the time of the big bang, when the Universe was created. It may have been growing for billions of years and if it continues to grow, it may become unmanageable. It will then eventually become the grave of the Solar System.”
“Why haven’t they found it?”
“No one’s been looking. Who would expect a black bole in the asteroid belt? And it doesn’t produce enough radiation to be noticeable, or enough mass to be noticeable. You have to run into it, as we did.”
“Are you sure we have no communications at all, Ben? . . . How far to Vesta? They could reach us from Vesta without much delay. It’s the largest base in the asteroid belt.”
Estes shook his head. “I don’t know where Vesta is right now. The computer’s knocked out, too.”
“God! What isn’t knocked out?”
“The air system is working. The water purifier is on. We’ve got plenty of power and food. We can last two weeks, maybe more.”
A silence fell. “Look,” said Funarelli after a while. “Even if we don’t know where Vesta is exactly, we know it can’t be more than a few million kilometers away. If we could reach them with some signal, they could get a drone ship out here within a week.”
“A drone ship, yes,” said Estes. That was easy. An unmanned ship could be accelerated to levels that human flesh and blood would not endure. It could make trips in a third the time a manned vessel could.
