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
ROME, ITALY
“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.