This story was my first attempt at a fiction story. Before that, I had written many science fact articles (many of which sounded like fiction), but this was my first attempt at telling the reader about some interesting science facts in the guise of a story rather than a lecture. It came about during the formative stages of the science-art magazine Omni. Ben Bova had been named editor of the new magazine and was looking for material. Since I had sold him speculative science fact articles before, when he was editor of Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction magazine, I wrote a draft of a science fact article on antigravity. That article contained many of the ideas for antigravity machines that are discussed in the previous chapter "Antigravity". Since Omni was also interested in science fiction, I took one of the ideas out of the antigravity article and used it as the science background for a science fiction story. I submitted both the technical article and the fiction story at the same time, asking Bova which one he would prefer. To my surprise, he bought both of them. The science speculation article, "Goodbye Gravity", appeared in the January 1979 issue of Omni, Volume 1, Number 5, on pages 88-91, while "The Singing Diamond" was published in the February 1979 issue, Volume 1, Number 6, on pages 70-73. Bova mentioned a number of years later that I was the only person who had published both science fact and science fiction in Omni magazine. I don't know whether that is still true.
The physical model for the heroine in the story is the science fiction writer, Joan Vinge. The first time I saw her, it was from a distance at a crowded science fiction convention. She was calmly and slowly making her way through a boisterous crowd of adoring fans, looking very much like an astronaut calmly and slowly making her way through the asteroid belt. I liked the "Red" Vengeance asteroid-belt prospector character well enough to use her again (in slightly different disguises) in the Rocheworld novels and Martian Rainbow.
I wrote this story in the first person, since most of the initial action takes place with only one character around. Having observed in action three independent-minded daughters and a contumacious wife, I didn't see anything unusual in having an asteroid belt prospector be a female, and so it didn't occur to me to make that point explicit early in the story. When I sent it to Jerry Pournelle for consideration in a reprint collection of short stories he was putting together, he started out assuming the narrator was male, since the author was male. I heard later he threw the manuscript across the room when he found out otherwise (he didn't buy it either).
My asteroid was singing.
Alone, but safe in my ship, I heard the multitude of voices coming through the rock. They were an angel chorus in a fluid tongue, strange but beautiful.
I followed the source of the sound, stereo headphones connected to a pair of sonarphones buried in the asteroid's crust. The voices were moving slowly through the solid stone. I knew my ears were not playing tricks on me, for I could also see a strange fuzzy ball on the three-dimensional display of the sonar mapper that tracked the singing sound. As the fuzzy ball reached the surface of the asteroid, the singing stopped, cut off in the middle of a tremulous crescendo. I took off the earphones, looked up from the sonar screen, and peered out the port at the black void around me. I could see nothing.
I stopped the pinger that was sending short bursts of sound down into the asteroid I had captured and waited while the last few pulses echoed back from within the body of almost pure metallic ore. This find would bring me a fortune once I surveyed it and got it back to the processing plant.
Most rock-hoppers are content to set up the sonar mapper on a potential claim and let the computer do the job of determining whether there is enough metal in the rock to justify dragging it in. But I always liked to work along with the computer, watching the reflections on the screen and listening to the quality of the echoes. By now, my ears were so well trained I could almost tell the nickel content of an inclusion by the "accent" it put on the returning sound. This time, my ears had heard something coming from the solid rock that had not been put there by the pinger.
I had the computer play back its memory, and again I heard the eerie voices, like a chorus of sirens calling me to leave my ship and penetrate into their dense home. I was sure now that the singing was real and not in my head, since the computer had heard it too. I replayed the data and found that the sound had started on one side of the asteroid, traveled right through the center in a straight line, and then had gone out the other side. I had a hunch, and ninety minutes later was waiting, earphones on, when the singing started again. This time the voices started at a different position on the surface of the asteroid, but as before, they slowly traveled in a straight line, right through the exact center of the rock and out the other side. A quick session with the computer verified my hunch. Whatever was doing the singing was orbiting the asteroid, but instead of circling about it like a moon, the orbit went back and forth right through the dense nickel-iron core! The computer did more work. It determined the orbital parameters, and predicted where the singers would next intersect the surface of my slowly revolving rock. I was outside, waiting at that point, when it came.
For a long time I could see nothing. Then, high above me, I saw a cloud of little sun specks—falling toward me. The glittering spots in the cloud moved in rapid swirls that were too fast to follow, and the cloud seemed to pulsate, changing in size and shape. Sometimes it collapsed into an intense concentration that was almost too small to see, only to expand later into a glittering ball as big as my helmet. Inexorably, the gravity of the asteroid pulled the swarm of star-midges down toward me. They were getting close. I tried to move back out of their path, but I had allowed myself to float upward in the weak gravity, and my magnetic boots were now useless. Twisting my body around, I tried to dodge, but the cloud of light spots expanded just as it passed me. I screamed and blanked out as my right leg burst into pain. I felt as if I had stepped into a swarm of army ants.
Dazed, I awoke, the emergency beeper shouting in my ear. My leg ached, and my air was low. With a detached glance, I looked down at the agony below my knee to see fine jets of vapor shooting out from hundreds of tiny holes in my boot. Fortunately, most of the holes seemed to be clogged with frozen balls of reddish stuff. My numbed brain refused to recognize the substance.
Using my hands, I dragged myself across the surface of the asteroid to my ship and carefully pulled my suit off. Insult was added to injury as the suit's Sani-Seal extracted a few red hairs as I peeled it off. I looked carefully at my leg. The tiny holes had stopped bleeding, so I was in no immediate danger. I just hurt a lot.
For the next few days I let my leg heal while I listened to the music. I knew that I was imagining it, but the beautiful voices now seemed to have a tinge of menace to them. The computer carefully monitored the motion of the swarm. It returned every 93 minutes, the normal period of a close orbit around an asteroid with such a high density. Once, I had to move the ship to keep it away from the singing swarm as it came up out of the rock underneath.
After I could move around again, I experimented. Tracking the swarm as it went upward away from the surface, I used the mass detector on it at the top of its trajectory. The collection of nearly invisible specks weighed eighty kilos—as much as I did in my space suit!
I put a thin sheet of foil underneath the swarm as it fell, and later examined the myriad tiny holes under a microscope. The aluminum had been penetrated many hundreds of times by each of the specks as they swirled about in the slowly falling cloud. Whatever they were, they were about the size of a speck of dust. I finally counted the midges by tracing the streaks on a print made with my instacamera. There were over ten thousand of them.
I was stumped. What was I going to do? No matter how valuable the asteroid was to me, I could not drag it back to the processing plant with its deadly hornet's nest swirling about it.
I thought about pushing the asteroid out from under the cloud, but my small ship was not going to move a twenty-million-ton chunk of rock at anything like the acceleration needed. I would have to get rid of the stinging swarm in some way, but how do you trap something that travels through solid iron like it isn't here? Besides, it could be that the tiny star specks themselves were worth more than the ball of ore that they orbited. I finally gave up and called for help.
"Belt Traffic Control, this is 'Red' Vengeance in The Billionaire. I have a problem. Would you please patch the following message to Belt Science Authority?" I then gave a detailed description of what I had been able to learn about my tiny pests. I signed off and started lunch—it was nearly twenty light-minutes to the Belt Traffic Control station.
In two weeks a few of the small cadre of scientists who lived out in the Belt were there, cluttering up my rock with their instruments. They couldn't learn much more with their gadgets than I had with my camera and aluminum foil. The specks were tiny and very dense. No one could think of any way to trap them.
I was ready to abandon my claim and leave a fortune and its buzzing poltergeist to the scientists when I remembered the Belt Facility for Dangerous Experiments. Their major activity was producing the antimatter that filled the "water torch" rocket engines used in deep space. At each refueling, I would watch apprehensively as electric fields and laser beams carefully shepherded a few grams of frozen antimatter into my engine room. There, each grain annihilated would heat many tons of water into a blazing exhaust.
Antimatter has other uses, however, and nearby a group made exotic materials by explosive-forming. I went to them with my problem. Soon I had a bemused entourage of high-powered brains trying to think of ways to stop my irresistible objects. We were relaxing with drink squeezers in the facetiously named BOOM! room, which overlooked the distant explosive-forming test site. I dressed for the occasion in an emerald-green bodysuit that I had chosen to match my eyes, and a diaphanous skirt that required dexterity to keep it looking properly arranged in free fall. I wore my one luxury, an uncirculated solid-gold Spanish doubloon.
While the discussions were going on, news arrived from the contingent still observing my find. The specks were still moving too fast to take close-up pictures with the cameras available, but at least the size and density of the specks had been determined. They were dense, but not of nuclear density, only about a million times greater than the density of water.
Our bodies are a thousand time more dense than air and we can move through that with ease," I said. "So, at a density ratio of a million to one, my leg was like a vacuum to them! No wonder they can go through solid iron like it isn't even there."
"Although the asteroid's iron can't stop the swarm, its gravity does hold them," said one scientist. He pulled out a card computer and started scratching with his fingernail on the pliable input-output surface. We clustered around, holding positions by whatever handhold was available, and watched as his crude scratchings were replaced by a computer-generated picture of a flat disc with curved arrows pointing smoothly in toward its two faces.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Flypaper," he said, looking up at me floating above him. "Or, for your problem, Red—gnat paper."
His thick fingers scratched some more calculations, this time in pure math. I followed them without too much trouble. There were no pictures to give me any clues, but it was obvious from the symbols that he was merely applying Newton's Law of Gravity to a disc instead of to the usual sphere.
"We can make the flypaper with the explosive-forming techniques we have developed," he said, "but to keep it from decomposing, we are going to have to contain it in a pressure capsule."
The process looks deceptively simple when one looks out through the eyes of an auto-robot. You merely take a large rotating asteroid as big as an office building and hit it from all sides with a spray of antimatter. When the shock wave passes, you have a small, rapidly spinning plate of glowing compressed matter that is trying desperately to regain its former bulk. Before it does, you hit it from twelve sides with a carefully arranged set of accurately cut chunks of nickel-iron lined with pure carbon. In the split-nanosecond that the configuration is compressed together into an elastically rebounding supersolid, you coat it heavily with another layer of antimatter and let it cool for a week.
The auto-robots brought it to us—still warm. It was a diamond—with a flaw. Right in the center of the barrel-sized crystal was a thick sheet of highly reflecting metal.
"What's that?" I asked the one who had arranged the fireworks display.
"The original asteroid, Miss Vengeance," he replied. "All four million tons of it. It's been compressed into a thin disc of ultradense matter and surrounded by diamond to keep it from expanding back into normal matter. There's your flypaper; let's go use it."
The disc was a foot across and only a centimeter thick, but it took a large space-tug to heave that ultraheavy pancake griddle with its thick diamond casing into an orbit that would reach my claim and its singing hangers-on. Once it was there, it was delicate work getting the sluggish plate placed in the path of the glittering cloud that still bounced back and forth through my property every 93 minutes. Finally the task was accomplished. Passing slowly through the diamond casing as if it were not there, the scintillating sparks floated upward toward the metal disc—and stuck.
"They've stopped!" I shouted in amazement.
"Of course," said a metallic voice over my suit speaker. "They ran into something that was denser than they are, and its gravitational field is strong enough to hold them on its surface.
"For something that dense, it must be a billion gravities," I said.
"I wish it were," said the voice. "I would have liked to have made the gravity stronger so I could be sure we could hold onto the specks once we had stopped them. With the limited facilities we have at the test site, the most matter we can compress at one time is four million tons. That disc has a gravitational field of only one gravity on each side."
After watching carefully for a while, I finally was reassured that the tiny specks were not going to be able to leave the surface of their flat-world prison. I conquered my fear and let my helmet rest against the outside of the diamond casing that encapsulated the shiny disc and its prisoners.
The diamond was singing.
The voices I remembered were there, but they were different from the wild, free-swirling chorus that still haunted me from our first meeting. The singing now seemed constrained and flat. I laughed at my subconscious double pun and pulled back to let the scientists have their prize. They hauled the crystalline cask away with the space tug, and I returned to the difficult months-long task of getting my asteroid back to the processing plant.
I made a fortune. Even my trained ear had underestimated the nickel content. When payoff time came, I knew that from that time on, every expedition I made out into the belt was for fun and gravy, for all the money I would ever need for a decent retirement nest egg was in solid credits in the Bank of the Outer Belt. With no more financial worries, I began to take an interest in my little beasties—for that is what they were.
The scientists had taken the diamond down to Earth and built a superfast robot to act as a translator. The specks, which used to be plastered to one side of the dense disc, were free once they were on Earth. The one-gravity upward pull of the underside of the disc was exactly canceled by the one-gravity downward pull of the Earth. The specks seemed to be perfectly happy. They could easily leave the gravity-free region under the disc, but they don't seem to want to. Their cloud stays a compact sphere just below their antigravity ceiling. They continue with their complex intermingling, swirling behavior, passing easily through the ultrahard diamond that holds up their four-million-ton roof.
The scientist's high-speed holocameras had been able to determine that their complex notion was not due to natural laws, but was caused by the deliberate motion of each of the spots with respect to the others. A few frames had even shown some of the tiny specks in the process of emitting a little jet of gamma-ray exhaust in order to change their course to meet with another speck for a fraction of a microsecond. Then, many revolutions and many milliseconds later, each of the two specks that had previously met would release another tiny speck, which joined the great swarm in its seemingly random motion.
The most significant frame from the high-speed holocameras, however, is the one that I have blown up into a holopicture over the head of my bunk. I didn't think that you could create a decent three-dimensional likeness of someone using only ten thousand points of light, but it's me, all right. Everyone recognizes it instantly—aristocratic nose, bobbed hair, helmet, mike, freckles, and all the rest.
But that is all the beasties have ever done in the way of communication. For years, the scientists have tried to get some other response from them, but the specks just ignore their efforts. I guess that when you live a trillion times faster than someone else, even a short dialogue seems to drag on forever and just isn't worth the effort. After years of examination and fruitless attempts to communicate, the scientists finally gave up and put the diamond on display at the San-San Zoo.
When I was a young girl at Space Polytech, I dreamed that when I got rich I would spend my later years reveling in the vacation spots around the world and throughout the solar system, but now I don't want to. Sometimes I can stand it for a whole year—but then I just have to go back and hear my diamond sing.