Moonseed

Moonseed by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Moonseed by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen Baxter
volcanic cones and domes, and other features which don’t have any analogues on Earth. We didn’t see plate tectonics, like Earth; we think Venus was a one-plate planet dominated by hot-spot volcanism. My favorite hypothesis is that there was a catastrophic global resurfacing every half-billion years.”
    “A what?”
    “The crust melting, globally. There are problems with the heat flow from the interior otherwise…It would be like five hundred million years of geology crammed into a few centuries. Now,” he said. “ After. An image taken by the Hubble this morning.”
    There was no evidence of a spherical shape. She made out a crudely defined, blurred oval, with extensive tails, like a comet’s.
    Alfred said, “You’re looking at a cloud of atmospheric gas, mostly frozen, and ground-up rock.”
    “The rock’s from the surface?”
    “Mostly the mantle, as far as we can tell. Most of the mass is still concentrated near the point where the center of gravity of the planet used to be. We tried radar pulses from Arecibo, and…Well. Monica, we can’t find a solid object there any more. The substance of the planet is spreading out along the orbit. The ring probably won’t stay stable; the perturbation by Earth’s gravity will—”
    “Hold it. Alfred, I can’t follow you. You’re saying that Venus no longer exists.”
    “Not as a coherent solid, no.”
    “That’s impossible. How much energy would it take to destroy a planet ?”
    He considered. “Well, roughly speaking, you would have to lift every piece of rock to escape velocity, out of Venus’s own gravity well. There’s a quantity called the gravitational binding energy…For Venus, which had eighty percent of Earth’s mass, it works out as ten to power thirty-two joules—umm, something like a thousand billion times our nuclear arsenal.”
    “Just for the record, we aren’t talking about your global volcanic resurfacing here, are we?”
    He smiled. “Even that would be quite a spectacle, if it occurred in the lifetime of this astronomer. But no, it’s orders of magnitude beyond that.” He rubbed his nose, smearing the gaudy sun block there. “Those are big numbers. But there’s another way of looking at it. If you consider the energy density required, averaged over the planet’s volume, it isn’t so high. Something like a tanker of gas per cubic yard or so, I guess.”
    “What are you telling me?”
    “We think we are looking at some funny physics over there, Monica. Which is why you and the rest of the particle physicists are going to have to work on this with us.”
    “Funny physics?”
    “Look at this.” He pulled up results from a cosmic ray detector, tracks left in bubble chambers, accompanying analysis. “We’ve found some strange products from the Venus event. Some exotic beasties, escaping from that particular zoo. Have you seen this result?”
    A spiderweb of tracks, of splits and decay events and spirals and tiny explosions.
    She whistled. “No. I’d remember. ”
    “Well, the results haven’t made it onto the nets yet. The authors are still checking.”
    “I don’t blame them,” she said. “If this is right—”
    “You’re looking at a particle with a charge a fraction of an electron’s. Which is something we’ve never seen before.”
    “And this mass—” She looked at him. “Alfred, this is the signature of an elementary particle with a fractional charge, and the mass of a bacterium. Now, what processes do we know of which could produce such a thing?”
    “We don’t know of anything since the Big Bang.” He studied her. “We’re measuring the symptoms here. Guessing at a cause isn’t so easy.”
    “A cause?”
    “A purpose, then. Something has taken Venus apart. It seems to have transformed the planet’s own mass energy to use against it.” He grinned, uneasily. “We’re speculating. Maybe there is something out there that doesn’t like planets, deep gravity wells. Something that prefers thin

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