FEBRUARY
1

It began quietly.

Amy Major came into Benjamin's office and with studied care placed a sheet in front of his tired eyes. "Got a funny one for you."

Benjamin stared at the graph. In the middle of the page, a sharp peak poked up to a high level, then fell slowly to his right. He glanced at the bottom axis, showing time, and said, "So it died away in a few seconds. What's so odd?"

Amy gave him an angular grin that he knew she thought made her look tough-minded and skeptical. He had always read that expression as stubborn, but then, she so often disagreed with him. "Here's the second."

"Second?" Maybe her grin was deserved.

With a suppressed smile, she handed him another sheet. Same sort of peak, subsiding into the background noise in four seconds. "Ho hum." He raised his eyebrows in question, a look he had trained the staff to interpret as Why are you wasting my time?

"Could be any ordinary burster, right?"

"Yes." Amy liked to play the elephantine game out in full.

"Only it's a repeater."

"Ah. How close?"

"In space, dead on. The prelim position is right on top of the first one's." Dramatic pause. "In time, 13.45 hours."

"What?" Was this a joke? "Thirteen hours?"

"Yup."

Gamma-ray bursters were cosmological explosions, the biggest Creation had ever devised. They showed up in the highest energy spectrum of all, the fat, powerful light that emerged when atomic nuclei fell apart. The preferred model describing bursters invoked a big black hole swallowing something else quite substantial, like a massive star. Bursters were the dyspeptic belch of a spectacularly large astrophysical meal. Each one devastated a seared region of the host galaxy.

Eaten once, a star could not be ingested again, thirteen hours later.

On the off chance that this was still a joke, he said with measured deliberation, "Now, that is interesting." Always be positive at the beginning, or else staff would not come to you at all. He smiled wanly. "But the preliminary position is in a big box."

This was more than a judicious reservation. It was almost certainly the true explanation. The two would prove to come from different points in the sky.

They got from the discovering instrument a rough location of the burster—a box drawn on the sky map, with the source within it somewhere. Sharpening that took other instruments specially designed for the job. Same for the second burster. Once they knew accurately where this second burst was, he was sure it would turn out to be far from the earlier burst, and the excitement would be over. Best to let her down slowly, though. "Still, let's hope it's something new."

"Uh, I thought it was worth mentioning, Dr. Knowlton." Her rawboned face retreated into defensive mode, mouth pursing up as if she had drawn a string through both lips. She had been the origin of the staff's private name for him, Dr. Know-It-All-ton. That had hurt more than he had ever let on.

"And it is, it is. You asked Space Array for a quick location?"

"Sure, and sent out an alert to everybody on Gamma Net."

"Great."

She let her skeptic-hardnose mask slip a little. "It's a real repeater. I just know it."

"I hope you're right." He had been through dozens of cases of mistaken identity and Amy had not. She was a fine operations astronomer, skilled at sampling the steady stream of data that flowed through the High Energy Astrophysics Center, though a bit too earnest for his taste.

"I know, nobody's ever seen a repeater this delayed," she said.

"Minutes, yes. Hours, no."

"But the prelim spectra look similar."

"How many data points in the spectrum?"

Copyright © 2000 by Abbenford, Ltd.