Connie Willis - Schwarzschild Radius

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SCHWARZSCHILD RADIUS

Connie Willis

Nebula 1987 Nominee Novelette

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When a star collapses, it sort of falls in on itself." Travers curved his hand into a semicircle and then

brought the fingers in. "And sometimes it reaches a kind of point of no return where the gravity pulling in

on it is stronger than the nuclear and electric forces, and when it reaches that point, nothing can stop it

from collapsing and it becomes a black hole." He closed his hand into a fist. "And that critical diameter,

that point where there's no turning back, is called the Schwarzschild radius." Travers paused, waiting for

me to say something.

He had come to see me every day for a week, sitting stiffly on one of my chairs in an unaccustomed shirt

and tie, and talked to me about black holes and relativity, even though I taught biology at the university

before my retirement, not physics. Someone had told him I knew Schwarzschild, of course.

"The Schwarzschild radius?" I said in my quavery, old man's voice, as if I could not remember ever

hearing the phrase before, and Travers looked disgusted. He wanted me to say, "The Schwarzschild

radius! Ah, yes, I served with Karl Schwarzschild on the Russian front in World War I!" and tell him all

about how he had formulated his theory of black "holes while serving with the artillery, but I had not

decided yet what to tell him. "The event horizon," I said.

"Yeah. It was named after Schwarzschild because he was the one who worked out the theory," Travers

said. He reminded me of Muller with his talk of theories. He was the same age as Muller, with the same

shock of stiff yellow hair and the same insatiable curiosity, and perhaps that was why I let him come

every day to talk to me, though it was dangerous to let him get so close.

"I have drawn up a theory of the stars," Muller says while we warm our hands over the Primus stove so

that they will get enough feeling in them to be able to hold the liquid barretter without dropping it. "They

are not balls of fire, as the scientists say. They are frozen."

"How can we see them if they are frozen?" I say. Muller is insulted if I do not argue with him. The arguing

is part of the theory.

"Look at the wireless!" he says, pointing to it sitting disemboweled on the table. We have the back off the

wireless again, and in the barretter's glass tube is a red reflection of the stove's flame. "The light is a

reflection off the ice of the star."

"A reflection of what?"

"Of the shells, of course."

I do not say that there were stars before there was this war, because Muller will not have an answer to

this, and I have no desire to destroy his theory, and besides, I do not really believe there was a time

when this war did not exist. The star shells have always exploded over the snow-covered craters of No

Man's Land, shattering in a spray of white and red, and perhaps Muller's theory is true.

"At that point," Travers said, "at the event horizon, no more information can be transmitted out of the

black hole because gravity has become so strong, and so the collapse appears frozen at the

Schwarzschild radius."

"Frozen," I said, thinking of Mullen

"Yeah. As a matter of fact, the Russians call black holes 'frozen stars.' You were at the Russian front,

weren't you?"

"What?"

"In World War I."

"But the star doesn't really freeze," I said. "It goes on collapsing."

"Yeah, sure," Travers said. "It keeps collapsing in on itself until even the atoms are stripped of their

electrons and there's nothing left except what they call a naked singularity, but we can't see past the

Schwarzschild radius, and nobody inside a black hole can tell us what it's like in there because they can't

get messages out, so nobody can ever know what it's like inside a black hole."

"I know," I said, but he didn't hear me.

He leaned forward. "What was it like at the front?"

It is so cold we can only work on the wireless a few minutes at a time before our hands stiffen and grow

clumsy, and we are afraid of dropping the liquid barretter. Muller holds his gloves over the Primus stove

and then puts them on. I jam my hands into my ice-stiff pockets.

We are fixing the wireless set. Eisner, who had been delivering messages between the sectors, got sent

up to the front when he could not fix his motorcycle. If we cannot fix the wireless, we will cease to be

telegraphists and become soldiers, and we will be sent to the front lines.

We are already nearly there. If it were not snowing, we could see the barbed wire and pitted snow of No

Man's Land, and the big Russian coal boxes sometimes land in the communication trenches. A shell hit

our wireless hut two weeks ago. We are ahead of our own artillery lines, and some of the shells from our

guns fall on us, too,because the muzzles are worn out. But it is not the front, and we guard the liquid

barretter with our lives.

"Eisner's unit was sent up on wiring fatigue last night," Muller says, "and they have not come back. I have

a theory about what happened to them."

"Has the mail come?" I say, rubbing my sore eyes and then putting my cold hands immediately back in

my pockets. I must get some new gloves, but the quartermaster has none to issue. T have written my

mother three times to knit me a pair, but she has not sent them yet.

"I have a theory about Eisner's unit," he says doggedly. "The Russians have a magnet that has pulled them

into the front."

"Magnets pull iron, not people," I say.

I have a theory about Muller's theories. Littering the communications trenches are things that the soldiers

going up to the front have discarded: water bottles and haversacks and bayonets. Hans and I sometimes

tried to puzzle out why they would discard such important things.

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Connie Willis - Schwarzschild Radius

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