23: EXPLANATIONS AND PROBLEMS

Bony had met Elke Siry less than an hour ago, but already he had formed his impressions. The scientist was naturally shy to the point of appearing antisocial — he could relate to that — yet she could not bear to sit by and hear wrong deductions being made from hard data. As a result, she had become the leader of the meeting.

General Dag Korin, who was already a known name to Bony, didn’t seem to mind. He acted almost as the blond scientist’s protector, encouraging her to speak and give her opinions. As a result the whole group had clustered around her and paid close attention to her words. The Angel sat with its roots deep in a great pot of dark soil dragged in by Chan Dalton and Deb Bisson from the garden of the Hero’s Return. The Pipe-Rilla hovered high above it, with Tinkers clustered around her lower part. The humans, except for Chan Dalton somewhat uneasy with the recently arrived aliens, sat well away from them.

“Most of us seem to have ideas as to what’s happened to us,” Elke was saying.

Wrong, thought Bony, most of us have no idea at all.

But he did not speak, and Elke Siry went on, “Before we start to speculate, let’s look at what we know for sure. Four different ships set out for the Geyser Swirl. Each one expected to emerge in open space — more than that, we saw no way that they could emerge to anything other than open space, because of the safeguards built into a Link transition.

“Each of us arrived in water, on a planetary surface. It should have been impossible but it happened, not once but four times. Beyond the planet, according to the observations of the two unmanned orbiters that we sent out, is a region of space that looks nothing like the Geyser Swirl. Instead of dust clouds and normal stars, we see strange dimly glowing circles. We assume that they are spheres of some kind, but note that this is an assumption. So far as real knowledge is concerned, they could be circles painted on the sky.”

Dag Korin said, “But—” then paused and shook his head.

“No, General, I don’t think they are, either.” On anyone else’s face the slight relaxation of Elke’s tight mouth would have been a smile. “I merely point out the difference between knowledge and assumption. What else do we know ? Well, we know that the gravity field of this planet is abnormally small for its size. So small, the interior must be made of something less dense than ordinary water. But if that were the case, the heavy-water ocean should have sunk toward the planetary center. So let’s call that a paradox, with no explanation.

“Also, we know from observations made by orbiters and by some of our party, that the primary star around which this planet revolves is a blue giant. We also know, again from the experience of some here, that there is life in this ocean. The bubble people are not only alive, they appear to be intelligent.

“These two facts together, the short life span of a blue giant star and the long time needed for living things to develop on a planet around it, give some of us problems. But those problems arise from our trust in our own scientific ideas. According to standard astrophysical theories, blue giant stars must run through their stellar lives very fast, in millions of years rather than billions. So Limbo can’t be more than a few tens of millions of years old, at most. But according to our biological theories, the development of life requires a much longer time scale. It needs at least hundreds of millions of years to evolve from its primordial forms, and maybe billions of years to produce multicelled complex beings with intelligence. So we have two of our basic scientific theories, and they seem to be incompatible with each other.”

More than anyone else in the fire control room, Tully O’Toole seemed at ease with Elke Siry. He was sitting closest to her, and he rubbed at his stubbled chin and said, “I burned my brains with Paradox, and maybe that’s my problem. But I don’t get it. Two theories sound like one too many. Why should we believe in any?”

That produced an actual smile on Elke’s thin face. “I’m not saying we pick a theory at all at this point. I’m just listing the things we know, and the things we don’t know but tend to assume. Let me keep going, and see where it leads. We know, from direct chemical tests, that the liquid of the ocean into which we fell is water. But it’s not the form of water we’re most familiar with, H2O, which forms the bulk of the oceans of Earth and the water-ice of much of the rest of the solar system. This ocean is D2O, deuterium oxide or heavy water. Heavy water occurs naturally in the solar system, but it’s only one six-thousandth as common as ordinary water. Does anyone have a problem with that?”

She looked at the circle of faces. Dag Korin shrugged, and the others, taking their lead from Chan Dalton, shook their heads.

Elke said firmly, “Well, I do. And so should you. Deuterium is a stable alternate form of hydrogen, with a neutron in the nucleus as well as a proton. They don’t turn into each other. And the relative proportions of the amounts of each were defined in the first few minutes of the universe, soon after the Big Bang started the whole thing going. Now, I know what you’re going to say” — no one other than Elke showed signs of saying anything — “the Big Bang is a theory, too, and because it’s a theory we don’t know that the proportions of hydrogen to deuterium have to be fixed at six thousand to one. I can’t disagree with that, but I’ll say only this: if we’re going to throw the idea of the Big Bang overboard, we won’t have much left of current astrophysics and cosmology. I’m going to make the case for keeping the Big Bang, but before I do that I want to point out one other thing that we know.

“This one concerns times. The Angel pointed this out to me, so I can’t take credit for it. Let’s examine the dates when each of our four ships made the Link transition that was supposed to carry it to the Geyser Swirl. I don’t need to go into detail. It’s enough to say that it took time to decide to send another expedition when a previous one failed to come back. Months went by between the Link entry times of the Pipe-Rilla and Tinker expedition, the Angel expedition, and the first and second human expedition. These are known facts.”

Bony caught Liddy’s eye. No one was tactless enough to say that the efforts of the Mood Indigo had been undertaken without the approval or permission of the aliens of the Stellar Group, and also spectacularly unsuccessful. Friday’s failure to return strongly suggested that he and his ship had been destroyed in the storm.

“Now consider our arrival times, here on Limbo,” Elke said. “Again, we’re dealing with facts, and not theories. Our ships arrived in the correct sequence, corresponding to the order in which they made the Link transitions; but they arrived no more than a day or two after each other. Link transitions are supposed to be instantaneous. Again, that’s a theory, but it’s a theory supported by many thousands of cases, with no counterexamples to suggest anything different.”

Elke paused. “I think I’ve covered everything that’s relevant. Oh, no, one other thing, and again it’s a fact. The Link in the Geyser Swirl isn’t one that we knew was there before. In fact, until recently every member of the Stellar Group would have sworn that there was no Link transition point anywhere in the Swirl. We didn’t make it, and we know of no one else who might have done so. Add that fact in to everything else, and what have you got?”

She glanced from one member of the group to the next. Everyone remained silent, although the Angel was waving its upper fronds.

“I don’t think we have anything,” Tully said at last. “Unless you count a bunch of contradictions and impossibilities as something.”