The Two Worlds Read Online Free Page A

Shapieron of how it had looked twenty-five million years before established beyond doubt that most of what had been Minerva had ended up as Pluto. Earth had been formed originally without a satellite, and Luna had orbited as the single moon of Minerva. When Minerva broke up, its moon fell inward, toward the Sun, and by a freak chance was captured by Earth, about which it had orbited stably ever since. The problem was that so far no mathematical model of the dynamics involved had been able to explain how Pluto could have acquired enough energy to be lifted against solar gravitation to the position it now occupied. Astronomers and specialists in celestial mechanics from all over the world had tried all manner of approaches to the problem but without success, which was not all that surprising since the Ganymeans themselves had been unable to produce a satisfactory solution.

    "The only way you can get it to work is by postulating a three-body reaction," Duncan said, tossing up his hands in exasperation. "Maybe the war had nothing to do with it. Maybe what broke Minerva up was something else passing through the Solar System."

    Thirty minutes later and a few doors farther along the corridor, Hunt found Marie, Jeff, and two of the students on loan from Princeton, excitedly discussing the set of partial-differential tensor functions being displayed on a large mural graphics screen.

    "It's the latest from Mike Barrow's team at Livermore," Marie told him.

    "I've already seen it," Hunt said. "Haven't had a chance to go through it yet, though. Something about cold fusion, isn't it?"

    "What it seems to be saying is that the Ganymeans didn't have to generate high thermal energies to overcome proton-proton repulsion," Jeff chipped in.

    "How'd they do it then?" Hunt asked.

    "Sneakily. They started off with the particles being neutrons so there wasn't any repulsion. Then, when the particles were inside the range of the strong force, they increased the energy gradient at the particle surfaces sufficiently to initiate pair production. The neutrons absorbed the positrons to become protons, and the electrons were drawn off. So there you've got it—two protons strongly coupled. Pow! Fusion."

    Hunt was impressed, although he had seen too much of Ganymean physics by that time to be astounded. "And they could control events like that down at that level?" he asked.

    "That's what Mike's people reckon."

    Shortly afterward, an argument developed over one of the details, and Hunt left the group as they were in the process of placing a call to Livermore for clarification.

    It seemed as if the information left by the Ganymeans was all starting to bear fruit at once, causing something new to break out every day. Caldwell's idea of using Hunt's section as an international clearinghouse for the research into Ganymean sciences was starting to produce results. When the first clues concerning Minerva and the Ganymeans were coming to light, Caldwell had set up Hunt's original pilot group to do exactly this kind of thing. The organization had proved well suited to the task, and now it formed a ready-made group for tackling the latest studies.

    Hunt's last call was on Paul Shelling, whose people occupied a group of offices and a computer room on the floor below. One of the most challenging aspects of Ganymean technology was their "gravitics," which enabled them to deform space-time artificially without requiring large concentrations of mass. The Shapieron 's drive system had utilized this capability by creating a "hole" ahead of the ship into which it "fell" continuously to propel itself through space; the "gravity" inside the vessel was also manufactured, not simulated. Shelling, a gravitational physicist on a sabbatical from Rockwell International, headed up a mathematical group which had been delving into Ganymean field equations and energy-metric transforms for six months. Hunt found him staring at a display of isochrons and distorted space-time