The COMPLEAT Collected Short SFF Stories, page 1
Robert L. Forward
About this collection
and similar COMPLEAT collections
This volume includes all 11 short Science Fiction short stories written and published by Dr. Robert L. Forward during his career. The primary source of the bibliography is the information provided from www.isfdb.org.
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Styles have been changed from the originals to provide a common style throughout the collection.
Obvious mistakes (duplicated words, variant spellings of the same name or phrase within a story, missing quotes, etc ...) have been corrected where found (I don't see any need to perpetuate the mistakes of the typesetters). The varying quality of the writing is not my fault!
Individual Stories
Publication Date Title
1979/02 The Singing Diamond
1979/09 Demand The Stars For My Children!
1981/00 The Cerebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras III
1983/08 Twin Paradox
1986/03 Acceleration Constant
1987/00 Turn Left at the Moon
1988/00 A Matter Most Strange
1988/00 IIIXXT—
1988/07 Fading into Blackness
1992/05 Self-Limiting
1993/00 Race to the Pole
The COMPLEAT
Collected Short
Science-Fiction
Works
of
Robert l. forward
The Singing Diamond
Omni – February 1979
MY ASTEROID was singing. Alone, but safe in my ship, I heard the multitude of voices coming through the rock. They were an angel chorus in a fluid tongue, strange but beautiful.
I followed the source of the sound, stereo headphones connected to a pair of sonar microphones buried in the crust. The voices were moving slowly through the solid stone. They suddenly stopped, cut off in the middle of a tremulous crescendo. I took off the earphones, looked up from the sonar screen, and peered out the port at the black void around me. I could see nothing. I would have thought my ears were playing tricks on me if I had not seen the unusual fuzzy ball on the three-dimensjonal display of the sonar mapper.
I stopped the pinger that was sending short bursts of sound down into the asteroid I had captured and waited while the last few pulses echoed back from within the body of almost pure metallic ore. This find would bring me a fortune once I surveyed it and got it back to the processing plant.
Most rock-hoppers are content to set up the sonar mapper on a potential claim and let the computer do the job of determining whether there is enough metal in the rock to justify dragging it in. But I always liked to work along with the computer, watching the reflections on the screen and listening to the quality of the echoes. By now my ears were so well trained I could almost tell the nickel content of an inclusion by the "accent" it put on the returning sound. But this time my ears had heard something coming from the solid rock that had not been put there by the pinger.
I HAD the computer play back its memory and again I heard the eerie voices, like a chorus of sirens calling me to leave my ship and penetrate into their dense home. I was sure now that the music was real, since the computer had heard it too. I replayed the data again and found that the sound had started on one side of the asteroid, traveled right through the center in a straight line, and then had gone out the other side. I had a hunch, and 90 minutes later was waiting, earphones on, when the singing started again. This time the voices started at a different position on the surface of the asteroid, but as before, they slowly traveled in a straight line, right through the exact center of the rock and out the other side. A quick session with the computer verified my hunch. Whatever was doing the singing was orbiting the asteroid, but instead of circling about it like a moon, the orbit went back and forth right through the dense nickel-iron core!
My first thought was that the weak gravity field of the asteroid had trapped a miniature black hole. The singing would be caused by stresses in the metal ore from the intense gravitational field of the moving point of warped space. But then I realized the asteroid was too tiny, only a few hundred meters across, to have captured a black hole.
The computer did more work. It determined the orbital parameters and predicted where the singers would next intersect the surface of my slowly revolving rock. I was outside, waiting at that point, when it came.
For a long time I could see nothing. Then, high above me, there was a cloud of little sun specks—falling toward me. The glittering spots in the cloud moved in rapid swirls that were too fast to follow, and the cloud seemed to pulsate, changing in size and shape. Sometimes it collapsed into an intense concentration that was almost too small to see, only to expand later into a glittering ball as big as my helmet. Inexorably, the gravity of the asteroid pulled the swarm of star-midges down toward me.
They were getting close. I tried to move back out of their path, but in my excitement I had floated upward in the weak gravity, and my magnetic boots were useless. Twisting my body around, I tried to dodge, but the cloud of light spots expanded just as it passed me. I screamed and blanked out as my right leg burst into pain. I felt as if I had stepped into a swarm of army, ants.
I WOKE, the emergency beeper shouting in my ear. My leg ached, and my air was low. Detached, I looked down at the agony below my knee to see fine jets of vapor shooting out from hundreds of tiny holes in my boot. Fortunately, most of the holes seemed to be clogged with frozen balls of reddish stuff. My numbed brain refused to recognize the substance.
Using my hands, I dragged myself across the surface to my ship and carefully pulled my suit off. Insult was added to injury as the suit's Sani-Seal extracted a few red hairs as I peeled it off. I looked carefully at my leg. The tiny holes had stopped bleeding, so I was in no immediate danger. I just hurt a lot.
For the next few days I let my leg heal while I listened to the music. I know that I was imagining it, but the beautiful voices now seemed to have a tinge of menace to them. The computer carefully monitored the motion of the swarm. It returned every 93 minutes, the normal time of close orbit around an asteroid with such a high density. Once, I had to move the ship to keep it away from the singing swarm as it came up out of the rock underneath.
After I could move around again, I experimented. Tracking the swarm as it went upward away from the surface, I used the mass detector on it at the top of its trajectory. The collection of nearly invisible specks weighed 80 kilos—as much as I did in my space suit!
I put a thin sheet of foil underneath the swarm as it fell and later examined the myriad tiny holes under a microscope. The aluminum had been penetrated many hundreds of times by each of the specks as they swirled about in the slowly falling cloud. Whatever they were, they were about the size of a speck of dust. I finally counted the midges by tracing the streaks on a print made with my instacamera. There were over one thousand of them.
I was stumped. What was I going to do? No matter how valuable the asteroid was to me, I could not drag it back to the processing plant with its deadly hornet's nest swirling about it.
I thought about pushing the asteroid out from under the cloud, but my small ship was not going to move a 20-million-ton chunk of rock at anything like the acceleration needed. I would have to get rid of the stinging swarm in some way, but how do you trap something that travels through solid iron like it isn't there? Besides, it could be that the tiny star specks themselves were worth more than the ball of ore that they orbited.
I finally gave up and called for help. "Belt Traffic Control, this is 'Red' Vengeance in The Billionaire. I have a problem. Would you please patch the following message to Belt Science Authority?" I then gave a detailed description of what I had been able to learn about my tiny pests. I signed off and started lunch. It was nearly 20 light-minutes to the Belt Traffic Control station.
IN TWO weeks a few of the small cadre of scientists who were allowed to live out in the Belt were there, cluttering up my rock with their instruments. They couldn't learn much more with their gadgets than I did with my camera and aluminum foil. The specks were tiny and very dense. No one could think of any way to trap them.
I was ready to abandon my claim and leave a fortune and its buzzing poltergeist to the scientists when I remembered the Belt Facility for Dangerous Experiments. The major activity was a high-current particle accelerator designed to produce the antihydrogen that filled the "water torch" engines used in deep space. At each refueling I would watch apprehensively as electric fields and laser beams carefully shepherded a few grams of frozen antimatter into my engine room. There, each grain annihilated would heat many tons of water into a blazing exhaust.
However, antimatter has other uses, and nearby a group made exotic materials by explosive-forming. I went to them with my problem. Soon I had a bemused entourage of high-powered brains trying to think of ways to stop my irresistible objects. We were relaxing with drink squeezers in the facetiously named BOOM! room, which overlooked the distant explosive-forming test site. I dressed for the occasion in an emerald-green bodysuit that I had chosen to match my eyes, and a diaphanous skirt that required dexterity to keep it looking properly arranged in free fall. I wore my one luxury, an uncirculated solid-gold Spanish doubloon.
While the discussions were going on, news arrived from the contingent still observing my find. The specks were still moving too fast to take close-up pictures with the cameras available, but at least the size and density of the specks h
"Our bodies are one thousand times more dense than air, and we can move through that with ease," I said. "So, at a density ratio of a million to one, my leg was like a vacuum to them! No wonder they can go through solid iron like it isn't even there!"
"Although the asteroid's iron can't stop the swarm, its gravity does hold them," said one scientist. He pulled out a card computer and started scratching with his fingernail on the pliable input-output surface. We clustered around, holding position by whatever handhold was available, and watched as his crude scratchings were replaced by a computer-generated picture of a flat disc with curved arrows pointing smoothly in toward its two faces.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Flypaper," he said, looking up at me floating above him. "Or, for your problem, Red—gnat paper"
His thick fingers scratched some more calculations, this time in pure math. I followed them without too much trouble. There were no pictures to give me any clues, but it was obvious from the symbols that he was merely applying Newton's Law of Gravity to a disc instead of to the usual sphere.
"We can make the flypaper with the explosive-forming techniques we have developed," he said, "but to keep it from decomposing, we are going to have to contain it in a pressure capsule."
The process looks deceptively simple when one looks out through the eyes of an auto-robot. You merely take a large rotating asteroid as big as an office building and hit it from all sides with a spray of antimatter. When the shock wave passes, you have a small, rapidly spinning plate of glowing decomposed matter that is trying desperately to regain its former bulk. Before it does, you hit it from 12 sides with a carefully arranged set of accurately cut chunks of nickel-iron lined with pure carbon. In the split-nanosecond that the configuration is compressed together into an elastically rebounding supersolid, you coat it heavily with another layer of antimatter and let it cool for a week.
THE AUTO-robots brought it to us—still warm. It was a diamond—with a flaw. Right in the center of the barrel-size crystal was a thick sheet of highly reflecting metal.
"What is that?" I asked the one who had arranged the fireworks display.
"The original asteroid, Miss Vengeance," he replied. "All four million tons of it. It has been compressed into a thin disc of ultradense matter and surrounded by diamond to keep it from expanding back into normal matter. There is your flypaper; let's go use it."
The disc was 360 centimeters across and only a centimeter thick, but it took a large space-tug to heave that ultraheavy pancake griddle into an orbit that would reach my claim and its singing hangers-on. Once it was there, it was delicate work getting the sluggish plate placed in the path of the glittering cloud that still bounced back and forth through my property every 93 minutes. Finally the task was accomplished. Passing slowly through the diamond casing as if it were not there, the scintillating sparks floated upward toward the metal disc—and stuck.
"They stopped!" I shouted in amazement.
"Of course," said a metallic voice over my suit speaker. "They ran into something that was denser than they are, and its gravitational field is strong enough to hold them on its surface."
"Something that dense must be a billion g's," I said.
"I wish it were," said the voice. "I would have liked to have made the gravity stronger so I could be sure we would hold on to the specks once we had stopped them. With the limited facilities we have at the test site, the most matter we can compress at one time is four million tons. That disc has a gravitational field of only one g on each side."
After watching for a while, I saw that the tiny specks were not going to be able to leave the surface of their flat-world prison. I conquered my fear and let my helmet rest against the outside of the diamond casing that encapsulated the shiny disc and its prisoners.
The diamond was singing.
The voices I remembered were there, but they were different from the wild, free-swirling chorus that still haunted me from our first meeting. The singing now seemed constrained and flat.
I laughed at my subconscious double pun and pulled back to let the scientists have their prize. They hauled the crystalline cask away with the space tug, and I returned to the difficult months-long task of getting my asteroid back to the processing station.
I MADE a fortune. Even my trained ear had underestimated the nickel content. When payoff time came, I knew that from then on every expedition I made out into the belt was for fun and gravy for all the money I would ever need for a decent retirement nest egg was in solid credits'in the Bank of Outer Belt.
With no more financial worries, I began to take an interest in my little beasties—for that is what they were. The high-speed cameras had been able to determine that their complex motion was not due to random natural laws but was caused by the deliberate motion of each of the spots with respect to the others. A few frames had even shown some of the tiny specks in the process of emitting a little jet of gamma-ray exhaust in order to change its course to meet with another speck for a fraction of a microsecond. Then, many revolutions and many milliseconds later, each of the two specks that had previously met would release another tiny speck, which joined the great swarm in its seemingly random motion.
The most significant frame from the high-speed cameras, however, is the one that I have blown up into a holopicture over the head of my bunk. I didn't think that you could create a decent three-dimensional likeness of someone using only 1000 points of light, but it is me, all right. Everyone recognizes it instantly—aristocratic nose, bobbed hair, helmet, mike, freckles, and all the rest.
But that is all the beasties have ever done in the way of communication. For years the scientists have tried to get some other response from them, but the specks just ignore their efforts. I guess that when you live a trillion times faster than someone else, even a short dialogue seems to drag on forever and just isn't worth the effort. The scientists even took the diamond down to Earth and tried to build a superfast robot as a translator. Now, after years of examination and fruitless attempts to communicate, we finally were able to place the diamond in the San-San Zoo.
The specks, which used to be plastered to one side of the dense disc, are free now that they are on Earth. The one-g upward pull of the underside of the disc is exactly canceled by the one-g downward pull of the Earth. The specks seem to be perfectly happy. They could easily leave the gravity-free region under the disc, but they don't seem to want to. Their cloud stays a compact sphere just below their antigravity ceiling. They continue with their complex intermingling, swirling behavior, passing easily through the ultrahard diamond that holds up their four-million-ton roof.
WHEN I was a young girl at Space Polytech, I dreamed that when I got rich I would spend my latter years reveling in the vacation spots around the world and throughout the solar system, but now I don't want to. Sometimes I can stand it for a whole month—but then I just have to go back and hear my diamond sing.
The End
I Demand the Stars for My Children!
Galileo – September 1979
(as by Susan Lull)
IT WAS 17 December 1903. The snow fell in great flakes on the frozen torrents of Niagara Falls. I didn't see it—I was too mad. I cried at the indignity I had just suffered ... cried and cried and cried ...
"Good," said the Doctor, "A nice healthy daughter, Mrs. Lull." Mother raised her exhausted body and rested on her elbow as she looked out at the snowdrifts glistening like white sand dunes in the shining moonlight. There was a soft glow in the eastern sky—day would soon be starting.
"Daybreak, Orville," said Wilbur. "Got to get going before the winds get too strong. Looks like a good day for flying." He raised the shade and looked out at the white dunes of Kitty Hawk. He glimpsed a distant flashing of wing, a tiny sharp-tipped point of feather that soared and turned in the morning light. It soon would be replaced by a quivering contraption made of wood, fabric, and courage that would take the human race into the heavens.
