Nomad (4 page)

Even with Jess’s limited Italian, she understood:
Police. At the entrance.
The other part she didn’t understand—something about a controversy? That part didn’t seem to have anything to do with her, but from the old man’s body language, it was clear these police were here for her. How did they find her so fast?

Swearing under her breath, Jess remembered leaving an itinerary for this trip pinned to Ricardo’s fridge. “Mom, can we go?”

The third floor of the museum was one large hall, sixty feet long, separated into three twenty-foot square rooms connected by a wide hallway down one side with large windows facing the courtyard. Jess and Celeste stood by the door to the main entrance, next to the windows, with the tour guide and the other couple standing on the other side of the room. Down the hallway from Jess and Celeste, at the opposite end, was another exit that led onto a balcony.

Jess glanced over her left shoulder, through one of the large lead-glass windows. Two police officers, in short-sleeve blue shirts with red-striped pants and peaked hats emblazoned with a gold feather, stood at the closed iron gates of the castle. “I need to get out of here,” she whispered, flicking her chin at the back entrance down the hallway.

Celeste saw the panic in her daughter’s eyes and gripped her hand tighter.

“Excuse me.” The Baron stood in front of them again.

Jess thought he was going to grab hold of her, drag her outside for the police—that somehow the old man had communicated something to him—but he eased himself between Jess and Celeste and opened the door behind them. He stopped and turned. “Could you watch Hector for a moment?” he asked Jess and Celeste. “Please? Nico is here, in all cases.”

Panic rising, Jess looked down. The boy stared up at her. Why was the Baron asking them to look after his son? Why was a
Baron
even talking to them at
all
?

“Of course,” Celeste replied. She took Hector’s hand. The Baron disappeared out the door.

Celeste and Jess both craned their necks to look out the window across the gravel courtyard. The Baron had already made his way down the two flights of exterior stairs. The old man stood by the gate, staring at the police. They gesticulated, seemingly to convince the old man to open the gates, but he stared at them coolly and puffed his pipe.

Jess looked from the window at her mother, now holding little Hector’s hand. Hector tried to reach up to Jess as well, but she shrugged him off. “I’m going out the back,” Jess said over the top of Hector to her mother, “I’ll call you later.”

Celeste grimaced. “Jessica, we can talk to them, you don’t always need to run away.”

But Jess had already turned to stride off, glancing left through the windows as she passed them, leaving her mother's admonishing words behind. The Baron was talking to the police now. He glanced up at the museum. Jess looked back at her mother, still holding Hector’s hand, watching in disbelief as Jess fled.

Jess reached the back door, and without hesitation she grabbed and tried to turn the handle. It was jammed. With both hands she gripped the door handle, and after two tugs it turned. She stepped outside onto a small deck leading down a rocky slope into a grove of fir trees lining that side of the castle.

Stepping onto the slope, her left leg wobbled, alcohol and adrenaline competing to confuse her senses. Shouting erupted behind her. Jess glanced back at the entrance to see the Baron flicking his hands at the police. Stumbling forward, she lost her balance on the loose soil. Jess gasped as she pitched sideways, sending her tumbling down the rocky embankment. She automatically tucked into a forward roll, spotting a rock on the edge of the steepening incline she could swing her foot onto to stop her momentum. 

Spinning, she perfectly timed jamming her right foot against the rock to bring herself upright, but halfway through the maneuver the rock skidded away, sending her tumbling out of control. Putting her hand out, she tried to stop her fall, but her arm twisted backward and her head slammed into the ground. Her world exploded in a flash of pain.

5

R
OME,
I
TALY

“QUIET!” DR. MÜLLER yelled from the front of the room, trying to regain some control of his presentation. “Please, let me finish.”

“Are you drawing this conclusion
only
from the Voyager data?” asked a voice from the back of the room.

It was a good question. Several incredible discoveries had turned out to be of less-than-spectacular origin. One that came to Ben’s mind was faster-than-light neutrinos that ended up being nothing more than measurement error.

“No, it is not,” replied Dr. Müller. “You just haven’t been able to see the forest for the trees, so to speak. Please, let me finish.”

The noise in the room died down.

“For hundreds of years, our entire solar system has been falling toward this massive dark object. A part of the observed effect in the Pioneer Anomaly is due to thermal radiation, but a part is not due to the spacecraft itself, but tidal effects.”

“Tidal effects?” someone asked.

“Yes, tidal effects,” Dr. Müller said. “But tidal effects across the entire solar system.” Nodding, he crossed and uncrossed his arms before pointing at the graphic detailing the paths of the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft into interstellar space. “Because the planets are bound closely to the sun, as a whole we experience more or less the same gravity of the object approaching us. Everything in the solar system is falling toward it at the same rate.”

He pointed outward, away from the cluster of planetary orbits at Voyager 1. “But here, at almost five times the distance to Neptune, the Voyager spacecraft are experiencing a slightly different gravity from this object. To begin with, the difference was small, within the limits of what we attributed to the Pioneer Anomaly, but with this object drawing closer, the effect is growing.”

Dr. Müller nodded, and a new graphic appeared on the screen behind him. This one was an image of the paths of Voyager and Pioneer, but instead of a view from the north polar axis of the solar system—looking down—it viewed the orbits of the planets side-on. “As you can see, the Pioneer spacecraft both exited in the plane of the solar system, but Voyager 1 and 2 both left at fairly high angles.” He illuminated a laser pointer that traced their paths, at angles of about thirty degrees upward, for Voyager 1, and downward, for Voyager 2, from the plane of the planetary orbits.

“Several months ago, the slight acceleration experienced by Voyager 1 changed from being an acceptable error to being some kind of system malfunction. Voyager 1 is over a billion kilometers farther out than Voyager 2, but within weeks the same thing began happening to it as well.” He moved his laser pointer to the image of Voyager 2. “At that point, both of the probes accelerated toward each other, and now they’ve reversed course and begun slowing down. We have one other probe out there, the New Horizons spacecraft that flew by Pluto, and we are getting measurements from it that are consistent with our Nomad hypothesis.”

“What trajectory?” someone asked from the front. “Is it going to enter the solar system?”

“As I went over last night with Dr. Rollins…” Müller pointed at Ben, by inference making him complicit in knowing about this beforehand. “…that is exactly what we need your help with. By going through all of your collected radial velocity data, with the assumption that the solar system is falling toward some nearby massive object, we should be able to determine its path. Or better still, whether this is somehow an error.”

Or a hoax, Ben thought grimly. It still seemed impossible.

“We are also in the process of conducting a new round of measurements of planets against background star fields,” Dr. Müller added. “An object this massive, this close, should be perturbing their orbits.”

And should have been perturbing them for a very long time already, Ben thought. Dr. Müller had a solid reputation as a careful researcher and was a respected member of the community, but this had too many loose ends.

“You said Voyager 1 was affected, and then Voyager 2 a few weeks later,” said another voice in the crowd. “They’re more than a billion kilometers apart. How fast do you think this thing is moving?”

Looking up from the podium he hung onto like a life raft, Dr. Müller grimaced. “At hundreds of kilometers a second. Perhaps thousands.”

“That’s not possible,” someone said from the front row.

Even the fastest hyper-velocity stars inside our own galaxy moved at only twelve hundred kilometers a second. Ben had made the same objection the night before.

Dr. Müller held his hands out. “We don’t have the answers right now; that’s why we need your help.”

“What is it?” Ufuk Erdogmus asked. “Have you been able to image it?”

The list of options was slim. Up to five solar masses, it might be a non-rotating neutron or quark star, but this would be no more than fifteen kilometers across. At twenty billion kilometers distant, it was probably impossible to see. Could it be a black hole? Or perhaps something more exotic, perhaps an encounter with dark matter? They should have detected something—if not in visible light, then in x-ray or infrared or some other spectra.

Then again, thought Ben, astronomers were usually only staring at very specific parts of the sky. Very few projects ever tried to look at wide swaths of the sky. Some that did, like the Sloan and Catalina sky surveys, detected thousands of unknown objects that nobody had had a chance to look at yet. It was a subject he dabbled in, ever since he had participated in the Red Shift survey in the 80s. He had his own collection of anomalous objects he researched as a hobby.

Dr. Müller shook his head. “No, we haven’t been able to detect anything except the gravitational signature. Whatever Nomad is, right now it is almost directly behind the sun.” Which made Earth-based telescopes and orbiting platforms almost useless for trying to look at it, he didn’t have to explain.

“Until we get some confirmation,” Dr. Müller added, “secrecy is of the utmost importance. We don’t want to create panic.”

Ben’s stomach fluttered. “Wait, you said it was coming from the direction of the sun. What
exact
direction?”

“We’ve sent information packets to all of your emails, including our best guess at the right ascension and declination—but in general terms, from the direction of Gliese 445.” Müller locked eyes with Ben.

Ben returned his gaze, the fluttering in his stomach rising into his throat.

Gliese 445.

T
HIRTY YEARS EARLIER…

December 5th, 1989

Harvard Campus, Boston, Massachusetts

“WHAT THE HELL is that?” Bernie jabbed a finger at his computer screen.

Paul, his research partner, had his attention focused on a small TV jammed into a corner of a shared office at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He stared at a grainy image of people on top of a wall, hacking off chunks of concrete with crowbars and pick-axes. “That’s the Berlin Wall coming down!” Paul replied. “The end of the Cold War. Amazing, huh?”

“Not that. This!” Bernie pointed at his glowing green display again. “A bright flash at Gliese 445.”

After combing through twelve-years’ worth of data collection from the first all-sky optical survey, the Red Shift project, Bernie had never seen anything like it. “Gliese 445 is a red dwarf in the Camelopardalis constellation, usually not visible to the naked eye.” He grabbed a sheaf of papers and shuffled through them. “But it just had a massive wide-spectrum flash. Too fast for a nova, but not regular like a pulsar, either.” He squinted and checked other data. “And it doesn’t have the signature of an M-dwarf.”

Paul sighed, his eyes still glued to the TV. “There are a million things we can’t identify. Just make a note and move on.” Outside it was darkening, the lights coming on between the red brick buildings of the Harvard campus.

“Sure, you’re right.” Just the same, Bernie pushed a floppy disk into the drive of the IBM/400 minicomputer and saved the data. He could look at it later. Maybe he’d get Dr. Müller to take a look at it sometime.

6

C
HIANTI,
I
TALY

AN IMAGE DANCED in front of Jess’s eyes, a black hole ringed in brilliant white, framing a small boy’s face. Two children played in a white field of snow, laughing. The image faded, but the boy’s face remained. Jess blinked, fully opening her eyes, and the boy smiled.

“
Zio
,” the boy said, turning away, “
zio, sveglia
.”