Charles Stross - Missile Gap

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Missile Gap by Charles Stross
It’s 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing — and the Earth is flat. It’s been flat
ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond the
Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like
newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but
nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped.
Gregor, in Washington DC, knows but isn’t talking. Colonel-General Gagarin, on a years-long mission to go
where New Soviet Man has not gone before, is going to find out. And on the edge of an ancient desert,
beneath the aged stars of another galaxy, Maddy is about to come face-to-face with humanity’s worst fear…
From Booklist:
“With the dazzling success of his last two novels, including the Hugo-nominated Accelerando (2005), Stross
is rapidly establishing himself as one of the preeminent masters of hard sf. Here he takes a breather from
weightier fare with a bizarre, nevertheless brilliant alternate-history novella featuring a protracted U.S.-Soviet
cold war…Once again, Stross sets the bar high for his colleagues, should they be feeling competitive, in this
mind-bending, intriguing yarn.”
From Publishers Weekly:
“The result is a blend of 1900s H.G. Wells and 1970s propaganda, updated for the 21st century in the clear,
chilly and fashionably cynical style that lets Stross get away with premises that would be absurdly cheesy in
anyone else’s hands.”
From Green Man Review:
”There are some pretty creepy moments here including one that remminded me of the Cthulhu mythos. Or
possibly the Pod People. Really. Truly. And the ending was a proper surprise, as I wasn’t sure how Stross
would wrap it up. Indeed that’s the gold standard for good storytelling for me — interesting characters in a
plausibe setting (no how farfetched it seems at first glance) with an ending that I wasn’t expecting. Bravo
Stross!”
Chapter One: Bomb scare
Gregor is feeding pigeons down in the park when the sirens go off.
A stoop-shouldered forty-something male in a dark suit, pale-skinned and thin, he pays no attention at first:
the birds hold his attention. He stands at the side of a tarmac path, surrounded by damp grass that appears
to have been sprayed with concrete dust, and digs into the outer pocket of his raincoat for a final handful of
stale bread-crumbs. Filthy, soot-blackened city pigeons with malformed feet jostle with plump white-collared
wood pigeons, pecking and lunging for morsels. Gregor doesn’t smile. What to him is a handful of stale
bread, is a deadly business for the birds: a matter of survival. The avian struggle for survival runs parallel to
the human condition, he ponders. It’s all a matter of limited resources and critical positioning. Of intervention
by agencies beyond their bird-brained understanding, dropping treats for them to fight over. Then the air raid
sirens start up.
The pigeons scatter for the treetops with a clatter of wings. Gregor straightens and looks round. It’s not just
one siren, and not just a test: a policeman is pedaling his bicycle along the path towards him, waving
one-handed. “You there! Take cover!”
Gregor turns and presents his identity card. “Where is the nearest shelter?”
The constable points towards a public convenience thirty yards away. “The basement there. If you can’t make
it inside, you’ll have to take cover behind the east wall–if you’re caught in the open, just duck and cover in the
nearest low spot. Now go!” The cop hops back on his black boneshaker and is off down the footpath before
Gregor can frame a reply. Shaking his head, he walks towards the public toilet and goes inside.
It’s early spring, a weekday morning, and the toilet attendant seems to be taking the emergency as a
personal comment on the cleanliness of his porcelain. He jumps up and down agitatedly as he shoves Gregor
down the spiral staircase into the shelter, like a short troll in a blue uniform stocking his larder. “Three
minutes!” shouts the troll. “Hold fast in three minutes!” So many people in London are wearing uniforms these
days, Gregor reflects; it’s almost as if they believe that if they play their wartime role properly the ineffable will
constrain itself to their expectations of a humanly comprehensible enemy.
A double-bang splits the air above the park and echoes down the stairwell. It’ll be RAF or USAF interceptors
outbound from the big fighter base near Hanworth. Gregor glances round: A couple of oafish gardeners sit on
the wooden benches inside the concrete tunnel of the shelter, and a louche City type in a suit leans against
the wall, irritably fiddling with an unlit cigarette and glaring at the NO SMOKING signs. “Bloody nuisance,
eh?” he snarls in Gregor’s direction.
Gregor composes his face in a thin smile. “I couldn’t possibly comment,” he says, his Hungarian accent
betraying his status as a refugee. (Another sonic boom rattles the urinals, signaling the passage of yet more
fighters.) The louche businessman will be his contact, Goldsmith. He glances at the shelter’s counter. Its dial
is twirling slowly, signaling the marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make small-talk, verbal primate
grooming: “Does it happen often?”
The corporate tough relaxes. He chuckles to himself. He’ll have pegged Gregor as a visitor from stranger
shores, the new NATO dominions overseas where they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by the
communists. Taking in the copy of The Telegraph and the pattern of stripes on Gregor’s tie he’ll have realized
what else Gregor is to him. “You should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often
to visit the front line, eh?”
“I am here in this bunker with you,” Gregor shrugs. “There is no front line on a circular surface.” He sits down
on the bench opposite the businessman gingerly. “Cigarette?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” The businessman borrows Gregor’s cigarette case with a flourish: the symbolic
peace-offering accepted, they sit in silence for a couple of minutes, waiting to find out if it’s the curtain call for
world war four, or just a trailer.
A different note drifts down the staircase, the warbling tone that indicates the all-clear these days. The Soviet
bombers have turned for home, the ragged lion’s stumpy tail tickled yet again. The toilet troll dashes down
the staircase and windmills his arms at them: “No smoking in the nuclear bunker!” he screams. “Get out! Out,
I say!”
Gregor walks back into Regent’s Park, to finish disposing of his stale bread-crumbs and ferry the contents of
his cigarette case back to the office. The businessman doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be arrested, and
his English nationalist/neutralist cabal interned: meanwhile, Gregor is being recalled to Washington DC. This
is his last visit, at least on this particular assignment. There are thin times ahead for the wood pigeons.
Chapter Two: Voyage
It’s a moonless night and the huge reddened whirlpool of the Milky Way lies below the horizon. With only the
reddish-white pinprick glare of Lucifer for illumination, it’s too dark to read a newspaper.
Maddy is old enough to remember a time when night was something else: when darkness stalked the
heavens, the Milky Way a faded tatter spun across half the sky. A time when ominous Soviet spheres
bleeped and hummed their way across a horizon that curved, when geometry was dominated by pi,
astronomy made sense, and serious men with horn-rimmed glasses and German accents were going to the
moon. October 2, 1962: that’s when it all changed. That’s when life stopped making sense. (Of course it first
stopped making sense a few days earlier, with the U-2 flights over the concrete emplacements in Cuba, but
there was a difference between the lunacy of brinksmanship–Khrushchev’s shoe banging on the table at the
UN as he shouted “we will bury you!”–and the flat earth daydream that followed, shattering history and
plunging them all into this nightmare of revisionist geography.)
But back to the here-and-now: she’s sitting on the deck of an elderly ocean liner on her way from somewhere
to nowhere, and she’s annoyed because Bob is getting drunk with the F-deck boys again and eating into their
precious grubstake. It’s too dark to read the ship’s daily news sheet (mimeographed blurry headlines from a
world already fading into the ship’s wake), it’ll be at least two weeks before their next landfall (a refueling
depot somewhere in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration surveyors–in a fit of
uncharacteristic wit–named the Nether Ocean), and she’s half out of her skull with boredom.
When they signed up for the Emigration Board tickets Bob had joked: “A six month cruise? After a vacation
like that we’ll be happy to get back to work!”–but somehow the sheer immensity of it all didn’t sink in until the
fourth week out of sight of land. In those four weeks they’d crawled an expanse of ocean wider than the
Pacific, pausing to refuel twice from huge rust-colored barges: and still they were only a sixth of the way to
Continent F-204, New Iowa, immersed like the ultimate non-sequitur in the ocean that replaced the world’s
horizons on October 2, 1962. Two weeks later they passed The Radiators. The Radiators thrust from the
oceanic depths to the stratosphere, Everest-high black fins finger-combing the watery currents. Beyond them
the tropical heat of the Pacific gave way to the sub-arctic chill of the Nether Ocean. Sailing between them,
the ship was reduced to the proportions of a cockroach crawling along a canyon between skyscrapers.
Maddy had taken one look at these guardians of the interplanetary ocean, shuddered, and retreated into their
cramped room for the two days it took to sail out from between the slabs.
Bob kept going on about how materials scientists from NOAA and the National Institutes were still trying to
understand what they were made of, until Maddy snapped at him. He didn’t seem to understand that they
were the bars on a prison cell. He seemed to see a waterway as wide as the English Channel, and a gateway
to the future: but Maddy saw them as a sign that her old life was over.
If only Bob and her father hadn’t argued; or if Mum hadn’t tried to pick a fight with her over Bob–Maddy leans
on the railing and sighs, and a moment later nearly jumps out of her skin as a strange man clears his throat
behind her.
“Excuse me, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“That’s alright,” Maddy replies, irritated and trying to conceal it. “I was just going in.”
“A shame: it’s a beautiful night,” says the stranger. He turns and puts down a large briefcase next to the
railing, fiddling with the latches. “Not a cloud in sight, just right for stargazing.” She focuses on him, seeing
short hair, small paunch, and a worried thirty-something face. He doesn’t look back, being preoccupied with
something that resembles a photographer’s tripod.
“Is that a telescope?” she asks, eyeing the stubby cylindrical gadget in his case.
“Yes.” An awkward pause. “Name’s John Martin. Yourself?”
“Maddy Holbright.” Something about his diffident manner puts her at ease. “Are you settling? I haven’t seen
you around.”
He straightens up and tightens joints on the tripod’s legs, screwing them into place. “I’m not a settler, I’m a
researcher. Five years, all expenses paid, to go and explore a new continent.” He carefully lifts the telescope
body up and lowers it onto the platform, then begins tightening screws. “And I’m supposed to point this thing
at the sky and make regular observations. I’m actually an entomologist, but there are so many things to do
that they want me to be a jack of all trades, I guess.”
“So they’ve got you to carry a telescope, huh? I don’t think I’ve ever met an entomologist before.”
“A bug-hunter with a telescope,” he agrees: “kind of unexpected.”
Intrigued, Maddy watches as he screws the viewfinder into place then pulls out a notebook and jots
something down. “What are you looking at?”
He shrugs. “There’s a good view of S-Doradus from here,” he says. “You know, Satan? And his two little
angels.”
Maddy glances up at the violent pinprick of light, then looks away before it can burn her eyes. It’s a star, but
bright enough to cast shadows from half a light year’s distance. “The disks?”
“Them.” There’s a camera body in his bag, a chunky old Bronica from back before the Soviets swallowed
Switzerland and Germany whole. He carefully screws it onto the telescope’s viewfinder. “The Institute wants
me to take a series of photographs of them–nothing fancy, just the best this eight-inch reflector can do–over
six months. Plot the ship’s position on a map. There’s a bigger telescope in the hold, for when I arrive, and
they’re talking about sending a real astronomer one of these days, but in the meantime they want
photographs from sixty thousand miles out across the disk. For parallax, so they can work out how fast the
disks are moving.”
“Disks.” They seem like distant abstractions to her, but John’s enthusiasm is hard to ignore. “Do you
suppose they’re like, uh, here?” She doesn’t say like Earth–everybody knows this isn’t Earth any more. Not
the way it used to be.
“Maybe.” He busies himself for a minute with a chunky film cartridge. “They’ve got oxygen in their
atmospheres, we know that. And they’re big enough. But they’re most of a light year away–far closer than the
stars, but still too far for telescopes.”
“Or moon rockets,” she says, slightly wistfully. “Or sputniks.”
“If those things worked any more.” The film is in: he leans over the scope and brings it round to bear on the
first of the disks, a couple of degrees off from Satan. (The disks are invisible to the naked eye; it takes a
telescope to see their reflected light.) He glances up at her. “Do you remember the moon?”
Maddy shrugs. “I was just a kid when it happened. But I saw the moon, some nights. During the day, too.”
He nods. “Not like some of the kids these days. Tell them we used to live on a big spinning sphere and they
look at you like you’re mad.”
“What do they think the speed of the disks will tell them?” She asks.
“Whether they’re all as massive as this one. What they could be made of. What that tells us about who it
was that made them.” He shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I’m just a bug-hunter. This stuff is big, bigger than bugs.” He
chuckles. “It’s a new world out here.”
She nods very seriously, then actually sees him for the first time: “I guess it is.”
Chapter Three: Boldly Go
“So tell me, comrade colonel, how did it really feel?”
The comrade colonel laughs uneasily. He’s forty-three and still slim and boyish-looking, but carries a quiet
melancholy around with him like his own personal storm cloud. “I was very busy all the time,” he says with a
self-deprecating little shrug. “I didn’t have time to pay attention to myself. One orbit, it only lasted ninety
minutes, what did you expect? If you really want to know, Gherman’s the man to ask. He had more time.”
“Time.” His interrogator sighs and leans his chair back on two legs. It’s a horribly old, rather precious Queen
Anne original, a gift to some Tsar or other many years before the October revolution. “What a joke. Ninety
minutes, two days, that’s all we got before they changed the rules on us.”
“’They,’ comrade chairman?” The colonel looked puzzled.
“Whoever.” The chairman’s vague wave takes in half the horizon of the richly paneled Kremlin office. “What a
joke. Whoever they were, at least they saved us from a pasting in Cuba because of that louse Nikita.” He
pauses for a moment, then toys with the wine glass that sits, half-empty, before him. The colonel has a glass
too, but his is full of grape juice, out of consideration for his past difficulties. “The ‘whoever’ I speak of are of
course the brother socialists from the stars who brought us here.” He grins humorlessly, face creasing like
the muzzle of a shark that smells blood in the water.
“Brother socialists.” The colonel smiles hesitantly, wondering if it’s a joke, and if so, whether he’s allowed to
share it. He’s still unsure why he’s being interviewed by the premier–in his private office, at that. “Do we know
anything of them, sir? That is, am I supposed to–”
“Never mind.” Aleksey sniffs, dismissing the colonel’s worries. “Yes, you’re cleared to know everything on this
topic. The trouble is there is nothing to know, and this troubles me, Yuri Alexeyevich. We infer purpose, the
engine of a greater history at work–but the dialectic is silent on this matter. I have consulted the experts,
asked them to read the chicken entrails, but none of them can do anything other than parrot pre-event
dogma: ‘any species advanced enough to do to us what happened that day must of course have evolved true
Communism, comrade premier! Look what they did for us! (That was Shchlovskii, by the way.) And yes, I
look and I see six cities that nobody can live in, spaceships that refuse to stick to the sky, and a landscape
that Sakharov and that bunch of double-domes are at a loss to explain. There are fucking miracles and
wonders and portents in the sky, like a galaxy we were supposed to be part of that is now a million years too
old and shows extensive signs of construction. There’s no room for miracles and wonders in our rational
world, and it’s giving the comrade general secretary, Yuri, the comrade general secretary, stomach ulcers;
did you know that?”
The colonel sits up straight, anticipating the punch line: it’s a well-known fact throughout the USSR that when
Brezhnev says ‘frog,’ the premier croaks. And here he is in the premier’s office, watching that very man,
Aleksey Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, third most powerful man in the Soviet Union, taking a
deep breath.
“Yuri Alexeyevich, I have brought you here today because I want you to help set Leonid Illich’s stomach at
rest. You’re an aviator and a hero of the Soviet Union, and more importantly you’re smart enough to do the job
and young enough to see it through, not like the old farts cluttering up Stavka. (It’s going to take most of a
lifetime to sort out, you mark my words.) You’re also, you will pardon the bluntness, about as much use as a
fifth wheel in your current posting right now: we have to face facts, and the sad reality is that none of
Korolev’s birds will ever fly again, not even with the atomic bomb pusher-thing they’ve been working on.”
Kosygin sighs and shuffles upright in his chair. “There is simply no point in maintaining the Cosmonaut
Training Centre. A decree has been drafted and will be approved next week: the manned rocket program is
going to be wound up and the cosmonaut corps reassigned to other duties.”
The colonel flinches. “Is that absolutely necessary, comrade chairman?”
Kosygin drains his wine glass, decides to ignore the implied criticism. “We don’t have the resources to
waste. But, Yuri Alexeyevich, all that training is not lost.” He grins wolfishly. “I have new worlds for you to
explore, and a new ship for you to do it in.”
“A new ship.” The colonel nods then does a double take, punch-drunk. “A ship?”
“Well, it isn’t a fucking horse,” says Kosygin. He slides a big glossy photograph across his blotter towards
the colonel. “Times have moved on.” The colonel blinks in confusion as he tries to make sense of the thing at
the centre of the photograph. The premier watches his face, secretly amused: confusion is everybody’s first
reaction to the thing in the photograph.
“I’m not sure I understand, sir–”
“It’s quite simple: you trained to explore new worlds. You can’t, not using the rockets. The rockets won’t ever
make orbit. I’ve had astronomers having nervous breakdowns trying to explain why, but the all agree on the
key point: rockets won’t do it for us here. Something wrong with the gravity, they say it even crushes falling
starlight.” The chairman taps a fat finger on the photograph. “But you can do it using this. We invented it and
the bloody Americans didn’t. It’s called an ekranoplan, and you rocket boys are going to stop being grounded
cosmonauts and learn how to fly it. What do you think, colonel Gagarin?”
The colonel whistles tunelessly through his teeth: he’s finally worked out the scale. It looks like a flying boat
with clipped wings, jet engines clustered by the sides of its cockpit–but no flying boat ever carried a runway
with a brace of MiG-21s on its back. “It’s bigger than a cruiser! Is it nuclear powered?”
“Of course.” The chairman’s grin slips. “It cost as much as those moon rockets of Sergei’s, colonel-general.
Try not to drop it.”
Gagarin glances up, surprise and awe visible on his face. “Sir, I’m honored, but–”
“Don’t be.” The chairman cuts him off. “The promotion was coming your way anyway. The posting that comes
with it will earn you as much honor as that first orbit. A second chance at space, if you like. But you can’t
fail: the cost is unthinkable. It’s not your skin that will pay the toll, it’s our entire rationalist civilization.”
Kosygin leans forward intently.
“Somewhere out there are beings so advanced that they skinned the earth like a grape and plated it onto this
disk–or worse, copied us all right down to the atomic level and duplicated us like one of those American
Xerox machines. It’s not just us, though. You are aware of the other continents in the oceans. We think some
of them may be inhabited, too–nothing else makes sense. Your task is to take the Sergei Korolev, the first
ship of its class, on an historic five-year cruise. You will boldly go where no Soviet man has gone before,
explore new worlds and look for new peoples, and to establish fraternal socialist relations with them. But your
primary objective is to discover who built this giant mousetrap of a world, and why they brought us to it, and
to report back to us–before the Americans find out.
Chapter Four: Committee Process
The cherry trees are in bloom in Washington DC, and Gregor perspires in the summer heat. He has grown
used to the relative cool of London and this unaccustomed change of climate has disoriented him. Jet lag is a
thing of the past–a small mercy–but there are still adjustments to make. Because the disk is flat, the daylight
source–polar flares from an accretion disk inside the axial hole, the scientists call it, which signifies nothing
to most people–grows and shrinks the same wherever you stand.
There’s a concrete sixties-vintage office block with a conference suite furnished in burnt umber and orange,
chromed chairs and Kandinsky prints on the walls: all very seventies. Gregor waits outside the suite until the
buzzer sounds and the receptionist looks up from behind her IBM typewriter and says, “You can go in now,
they’re expecting you.”
Gregor goes in. It’s an occupational hazard, but by no means the worst, in his line of work.
“Have a seat.” It’s Seth Brundle, Gregor’s divisional head–a grey-looking functionary, more adept at office
back-stabbing than field-expedient assassinations. His cover, like Gregor’s, is an innocuous-sounding post in
the Office of Technology Assessment. In fact, both he and Gregor work for a different government agency,
although the notional task is the same: identify technological threats and stamp on them before they emerge.
Brundle is not alone in the room. He proceeds with the introductions: “Greg Samsa is our London station
chief and specialist in scientific intelligence. Greg, this is Marcus.” The bald, thin-faced German in the smart
suit bobs his head and smiles behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “Civilian consultant.” Gregor mistrusts him on
sight. Marcus is a defector–a former Stasi spook, from back before the Brezhnev purges of the mid-sixties.
Which puts an interesting complexion on this meeting.
“Murray Fox, from Langley.”
“Hi,” says Gregor, wondering just what kind of insane political critical mass Stone is trying to assemble:
Langley and Brundle’s parent outfit aren’t even on speaking terms, to say the least.
“And another civilian specialist, Dr. Sagan.” Greg nods at the doctor, a thin guy with sparkling brown eyes
and hippyish long hair. “Greg’s got something to tell us in person,” says Brundle. “Something very interesting
he picked up in London. No sources please, Greg.”
“No sources,” Gregor echoes. He pulls out a chair and sits down. Now he’s here he supposes he’ll just have
to play the role Brundle assigned to him in the confidential briefing he read on the long flight home. “We have
word from an unimpeachable HUMINT resource that the Russians have–” he coughs into his fist. “Excuse
me.” He glances at Brundle. “Okay to talk about COLLECTION RUBY?”
“They’re all cleared,” Brundle says dryly. “That’s why it says ‘joint committee’ on the letterhead.”
“I see. My invitation was somewhat terse.” Gregor stifles a sigh that seems to say, all I get is a most urgent
recall; how am I meant to know what’s going on and who knows what? “So why are we here?”
“Think of it as another collective analysis board,” says Fox, the man from the CIA. He doesn’t look enthused.
“We’re here to find out what’s going on, with the benefit of some intelligence resources from the other side of
the curtain.”
Doctor Sagan, who has been listening silently with his head cocked to one side like a very intelligent
blackbird, raises an eyebrow.
“Yes?” asks Brundle.
“I, uh, would you mind explaining that to me? I haven’t been on one of these committees before.”
No indeed, thinks Gregor. It’s a miracle Sagan ever passed his political vetting: he’s too friendly by far with
some of those Russian astronomer guys who are clearly under the thumb of the KGB’s First Department.
And he’s expressed doubts–muted, of course–about the thrust of current foreign policy, which is a serious
no-no under the McNamara administration.
“A CAB is a joint committee feeding into the Central Office of Information’s external bureaux on behalf of a
blue-ribbon panel of experts assembled from the intelligence community,” Gregor recites in a bored tone of
voice. “Stripped of the bullshit, we’re a board of wise men who’re meant to rise above narrow bureaucratic
lines of engagement and prepare a report for the Office of Technology Assessment to pass on to the Director
of Central Intelligence. It’s not meant to reflect the agenda of any one department, but to be a Delphi board
synergizing our lateralities. Set up after the Cuban fiasco to make sure that we never again get backed into
that kind of corner by accidental group-think. One of the rules of the CAB process is that it has to include at
least one dissident: unlike the commies we know we’re not perfect.” Gregor glances pointedly at Fox, who
has the good sense to stay silent.
“Oh, I see,” Sagan says hesitantly. With more force: “so that’s why I’m here? Is that the only reason you’ve
dragged me away from Cornell?”
“Of course not, Doctor,” oozes Brundle, casting Gregor a dirty look. The East German defector, Wolff,
maintains a smug silence: I are above all this. “We’re here to come up with policy recommendations for
dealing with the bigger picture. The much bigger picture.”
“The Builders,” says Fox. “We’re here to determine what our options look like if and when they show up, and
to make recommendations about the appropriate course of action. Your background in, uh, SETI
recommended you.”
Sagan looks at him in disbelief. “I’d have thought that was obvious,” he says.
“Eh?”
“We won’t have any choice,” the young professor explains with a wry smile. “Does a termite mound negotiate
with a nuclear superpower?”
Brundle leans forward. “That’s rather a radical position, isn’t it? Surely there’ll be some room for maneuver?
We know this is an artificial construct, but presumably the builders are still living people. Even if they’ve got
green skin and six eyes.”
“Oh. My. God.” Sagan leans forward, his face in his hands. After a moment Gregor realizes that he’s
laughing.
“Excuse me.” Gregor glances round. It’s the German defector, Wolff, or whatever he’s called. “Herr Professor,
would you care to explain what you find so funny?”
After a moment Sagan leans back, looks at the ceiling, and sighs. “Imagine a single, a forty-five RPM record
with a centre hole punched out. The inner hole is half an astronomical unit–forty-six million miles–in radius.
The outer edge is of unknown radius, but probably about two and a half AUs–two hundred and forty five million
miles. The disk’s thickness is unknown–seismic waves are reflected off a mirror-like rigid layer eight hundred
miles down–but we can estimate it at eight thousand miles, if its density averages out at the same as
Earth’s. Surface gravity is the same as our original planet, and since we’ve been transplanted here and
survived we have learned that it’s a remarkably hospitable environment for our kind of life; only on the large
scale does it seem different.”
The astronomer sits up. “Do any of you gentlemen have any idea just how preposterously powerful whoever
built this structure is?”
“How do you mean, preposterously powerful?” asks Brundle, looking more interested than annoyed.
“A colleague of mine, Dan Alderson, did the first analysis. I think you might have done better to pull him in,
frankly. Anyway, let me itemise: item number one is escape velocity.” Sagan holds up a bony finger. “Gravity
on a disk does not diminish in accordance with the inverse square law, the way it does on a spherical object
like the planet we came from. We have roughly earthlike gravity, but to escape, or to reach orbit, takes
tremendously more speed. Roughly two hundred times more, in fact. Rockets that from Earth could reach the
moon just fall out of the sky after running out of fuel. Next item:” another finger. “The area and mass of the
disk. If it’s double-sided it has a surface area equal to billions and billions of Earths. We’re stuck in the
middle of an ocean full of alien continents, but we have no guarantee that this hospitable environment is
anything other than a tiny oasis in a world of strangeness.”
The astronomer pauses to pour himself a glass of water, then glances round the table. “To put it in
perspective, gentlemen, this world is so big that, if one in every hundred stars had an earth-like planet, this
single structure could support the population of our entire home galaxy. As for the mass–this structure is as
massive as fifty thousand suns. It is, quite bluntly, impossible: as-yet unknown physical forces must be at
work to keep it from rapidly collapsing in on itself and creating a black hole. The repulsive force, whatever it
is, is strong enough to hold the weight of fifty thousand suns: think about that for a moment, gentlemen.”
At that point Sagan looks around and notices the blank stares. He chuckles ruefully.
“What I mean to say is, this structure is not permitted by the laws of physics as we understand them.
Because it clearly does exist, we can draw some conclusions, starting with the fact that our understanding of
physics is incomplete. Well, that isn’t news: we know we don’t have a unified theory of everything. Einstein
spent thirty years looking for one, and didn’t come up with it.
But, secondly.” He looks tired for a moment, aged beyond his years. “We used to think that any
extraterrestrial beings we might communicate with would be fundamentally comprehensible: folks like us,
albeit with better technology. I think that’s the frame of mind you’re still working in. Back in sixty-one we had
a brainstorming session at a conference, trying to work out just how big an engineering project a spacefaring
civilization might come up with. Freeman Dyson, from Princeton, came up with about the biggest thing any of
us could imagine: something that required us to imagine dismantling Jupiter and turning it into habitable real
摘要：

MissileGapbyCharlesStrossIt’s1976again.Abbaareonthecharts,theColdWarisinfullswing—andtheEarthisflat.It’sbeenflateversincetheeveoftheCubanwarof1962;andtheconstellationsoverheadareallwrong.BeyondtheBorealocean,strangenewcontinentsloomabovetropicalseas,offeringanewstarttocolonistslikenewly-wedsMaddyand...

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