“STILL NOTHING?” ROGER asked. He sat on the gray couch of their improvised office, bouncing a plastic model of the Philae comet-lander spacecraft off the wall.
A whole collection of European Space Agency spacecraft models were arranged on the shelf next to his workstation. He kept one eye on his plastic model, the other on images of star fields from the Gaia observatory flipping through on his laptop screen.
But Roger wasn’t asking about the Nomad image search.
Ben held his phone to his ear. Four rings, then five…“You know what to do,” came Jess’s singsong voice on her answering message. “Dammit.” He hung up.
The driver sent to pick up Jess and Celeste at the apartment had called and said that nobody was there. The driver buzzed all the other apartments in the building, but nobody knew anything. He’d waited downstairs, in the alleyway with his Humvee, but no sign of them. The police complained about the truck blocking the alley, so the driver had been forced to move and park on a wider street five minutes away to wait.
Ben checked his email again. Relief washed through him.
There, in his inbox, was an email from Jess. “Thank God,” he muttered.
Roger sat up on the couch, putting down his Philae lander. “What?”
Ben read Jess’s message. “The girls got locked out last night.” He typed a quick response, telling them to get back to the apartment. “They’re just around the corner from the apartment I sent the driver to.” It was just in time—Dr. Müller was about to cancel the private jet he’d commandeered to get Jess and Celeste, after Ben twisted his arm. Literally.
“Good.” Roger got up and returned to his laptop. “So they’ll be here, in what, two hours?”
Ben nodded. “Something like that.” In time for the 4 p.m. flight from Frankfurt to JFK. Ben had tickets for the four of them, Roger included. He turned his attention to Roger’s screen, letting his mind return to Nomad. “Nothing unusual in the images yet?”
“Nope.” Roger clicked some options on the visualization tools, clicking through different spectra. “If it was a black hole, shouldn’t we be picking up microlensing by now? Or Hawking radiation?”
“When Steve”—Ben was on a first name familiar basis with the famous physicist—“proposed black holes as the invisible 90% ‘dark matter’ of the universe in 1974, I bet he never suspected the Earth would be the experimental guinea pig to test the idea. But a ten-solar-mass black hole would emit his Hawking radiation too weak to pick up at billions of kilometers.”
“Nomad had to pass through the Oort cloud of comets and debris on its way into the solar system,” Roger said, furrowing his brow. “Wouldn’t any material it encountered be spun around it in a super-heated accretion disk? That should light up right across the spectra from x-ray to visible, right?”
Ben shrugged, maybe.
“If Nomad has been passing through the Oort cloud for hundreds of years,” Roger continued, “there had to be something out there it would’ve hit. Somebody would have had to see something.” He paused and raised his eyebrows. “Right?”
Ben sensed the leading question. “Maybe.” If a black hole traveled through the Oort cloud, eventually it might suck in a comet or other object. Depending on the geometry of the event, it could create a brief accretion disk—a flash of light in the sky.
Roger narrowed his eyes. “What’s in the bags, Ben? What did you get Mrs. Brown to courier to the hotel?” He flicked his chin at the backpack by the door, the white courier package delivered at the hotel just poking out through the open zipper.
“Old data.”
Roger stared at Ben. “I read that paper.” He raised his eyebrows. “That one you wrote in grad school.”
Ben didn’t need to ask which one. The way Roger looked at him, he knew. But it was never published. “How did you get it?”
“I’m trying to get my PhD. You don’t think I did a little digging on the guy who’s supposed to give it to me?”
“Mrs. Brown gave it to you.”
Roger grinned and nodded. “I told her I wanted to know everything about your research. You proposed evidence of a black hole hiding in our solar system’s Oort cloud using data from the Red Shift Survey.”
“More idle speculation than anything else.” Ben leaned back in his chair. “Just a grad student with too much time and imagination on his hands.”
Ben hadn’t told anyone else about the old data he had Mrs. Brown send him, but Roger was like family. Ben suspected Müller dragging him out to Darmstadt wasn’t only based on Ben’s media credentials. Müller was covering his ass.
“Müller was the one that convinced me not to publish, did you know that?” Ben asked.
Roger shook his head. “How could he have known?” He stared at Ben. “Wait a minute. Do you suspect…what? What are you thinking?”