Starfire

14

Nick Lopez had a reputation of being a bad listener, someone who in the middle of a meeting would fiddle with papers, start reading an unrelated document, or even leave and not return. Celine found it hard to match that to Saul Steinmetz’s comment that Nick had possessed the most subtle and complex mind in Washington. Now, half an hour into the meeting, she thought she could reconcile the two.

Nick had received Wilmer Oldfield and Astarte Vjansander politely. He seemed secretly pleased by Celine’s irritation at Astarte’s presence. When the introductions were over he sat down at once, nodded to the newcomers, and said, “Your ball. Talk.”

Apparently Wilmer and Astarte had agreed in advance that Wilmer would be the spokesman. Being Wilmer, he of course favored completeness over brevity. Celine watched and listened as he carefully explained two different types of supernova, and how the Alpha Centauri binary system, according to long-established theories, could not possibly belong to either class. He pointed out, as though it were news to Nick Lopez, that Alpha Centauri had in fact become a supernova; then that no one had been able to explain how this might happen until recently; but now a new theory, based on original work by Astarte as modified by Wilmer, provided a full explanation.

Wilmer outlined the new ideas and defined the pattern of compressions that must have been applied to Alpha Centauri A, the larger star of the system, to induce a supernova explosion. He spoke clearly, but certainly not simply. Celine had to concentrate to follow, and she had heard it several times before. While he spoke Astarte sat cross-legged on the floor, grinned up at Nick Lopez, and unselfconsciously scratched her belly and bare thighs.

Nick did not seem upset at that. He listened closely to Wilmer’s every word, and when Wilmer talked of stellar resonance Nick nodded as though that idea was no more than common sense. He did not fidget, and he ignored the occasional beeping of the telcom unit. Twice he asked for additional details. Once he asked that a subtle point be repeated.

Celine decided that Saul was right. Nick Lopez was very smart. But in nine meetings out of ten he was bored, and that was when he wandered off to do other things.

Wilmer had reached the most controversial point in the presentation, the one that the Cabinet officers and government research heads had rejected out of hand. “So the compressive pulses couldn’t have occurred naturally,” he said. “They were induced by some other agent. That, and the fact that the directions of both the gamma-ray beam and the particle storm precisely intersect the solar system, indicate that the geometry for this event was arranged.”

“Arranged?” Lopez was frowning.

“Deliberately contrived. It didn’t just happen.”

This was the point where Wilmer was supposed to end the presentation, as he had ended it before. Celine was ready to defend his heretical suggestion of supernova intention when Wilmer nodded to Astarte and said, “That’s me done. Your turn up the gum tree.”

“Right.” Astarte came to her feet with a grace, fluidity, and energy that Celine envied. She glanced at Celine. “Hey, this’ll be new ter you as well. We just come up with it yes’day.”

Celine directed a lethal glare at Wilmer. Hadn’t he learned at his age that surprises in presentations were anathema?

But he remained oblivious, and Astarte went on, “We didn’t have the latest Sniffer results ’til two days ago. They agree with everything me and Wilmer calculated, and it’s the way we worried it might be. There’s one mode of the particle flux traveling a lot faster than the rest. It’s going to hit real early — mebbe as soon as a month. But there’s something else in the Sniffer data, and this one’s a real bugger.” Her chubby black face glowed with excitement, and she paused for effect before she exclaimed, “The particle charge-ter-mass mix is all fucked up!”

She stood up straight, as though waiting for applause.

“You’ll have to tell ’em more than that, Star,” Wilmer said. “Don’t assume they know the predicted energy spectra.”

“Or much else,” Lopez said. “What’s a particle charge-to-mass mix?”

“It’s like a— like a—” Astarte placed her fists together and rolled them around each other in a churning motion. “All right. Yer got yer supernova, right? The star blows up, and it’s hotter than hell.”

Lopez nodded. “Got that much.”

“Well, that’s when all the different element nuclei get made, everything from protons — hydrogen nuclei, they was there to start with — up to the nuclei of the transuranics, with hundreds of protons and neutrons in each of ’em. Most of the unstable ones and all the superheavy ones split down to something lighter real quick, so after that you’ve only got stable ones left. D’yer get that, too?”

She spoke to Nick Lopez slowly, as though to a rather backward child. He nodded gravely. “I get that, too.”

“All right. Now let’s take a few of them nuclei. Say helium, carbon, tin, and lead. Helium has two protons and two neutrons, carbon has six protons and six neutrons, tin has fifty protons and seventy neutrons, lead has eighty-two protons and a hundred and twenty-six neutrons. I’m simplifying because there’s isotopes, too, but that’s all right, in’t it?”

“Perfectly all right. The simpler, the better.”

“Now, there’s a different amount of each type of nucleus formed in the explosion, so naturally yer’d expect different proportions in what comes out of the supernova. But that’s only part of the story. The stuff don’t just fly out, bang, it’s gone. It gets accelerated, real hard, by electromagnetic fields. But the field can’t get a hold on the neutrons ’cause they got no charge. The field only pushes on protons. So the two protons in helium get grabbed by the field and slung away, and the two neutrons in the nucleus hang on tight and get a free ride. The helium nucleus shoots off just half as fast as a single proton would without a neutron. With carbon, it’s six protons get grabbed and flung, an’ they got six neutrons as freeloaders. So the carbon nucleus goes off same rate as the helium nucleus, neck and neck. But when you get to tin, there’s only fifty protons to boost and they have to carry seventy neutrons along. So they only finish up five-twelfths as fast as a proton, which means five-sixths as fast as helium or carbon. An’ when you get to poor old lead, eighty-two protons lumbered with a hundred and twenty-six neutrons, it can only go eighty-two two-hundred-and-eighths as fast as a proton. That’s slower yet, only seventy-nine percent as fast as helium or carbon. So you see, different nuclei come out from the supernova with different speeds. That means they fly different distances in the same time, which means they’ll arrive in the solar system at different times. And it all depends on the charge-ter-mass ratio of the particular nuclei. See?”

Astarte had uttered this in one great breathless spate of words. Celine understood, but she felt sure that Nick Lopez didn’t. He sat staring at Astarte with an unreadable expression on his face.

Finally he smiled, shook his head, and said, “I don’t see. But I don’t have to, do I? Because you started out telling me that this charge-to-mass-to-particle thing is wrong, which must mean it doesn’t come out the way you calculated it.”

“Too bloody true.” Astarte came close to Lopez and peered at him curiously. “Yer really listen, don’t yer?”

“Sometimes. I know what isn’t happening, but I still don’t know what is.”

“That’s because I haven’t told you yet. Hold your water, and we’ll explain.” Astarte looked to Wilmer. “You wanna do it, or you want me ter?”

“You keep going, girl. It’s your show.”

Astarte scowled at Wilmer and turned back to Lopez. “He’s a lazy bugger for everything bar physics, but I s’pose I oughta be used ter that by now. What we found in the Sniffer data wasn’t what we expected. We got something a lot more interesting. See, you can work out what the supernova chucked out, the proportions of different nuclei. And you can calculate how fast they should be going, and how they ought to have spread over time. What we found, the thing that’s real terrific, is that the Sniffer data shows groups of nucleus types, with some elements moving along together when according ter us they shouldn’t have been because they had different charge-to-mass ratios. And it turns out that the speed they’re moving is exactly as though they’re tied together physically. We found carbon linked with oxygen and iron and mercury.”

“They’ve formed molecules,” said Celine.

That earned the President of the United States, the most powerful woman in the world, a reproving look.

“We’re not dealing with atoms, you know,” Astarte said sternly. She turned to Lopez. “D’you see why that makes a difference?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, you oughta be ashamed of yerself. A man in your position, building the shield an’ all, yer ought ter know some science. So I’ll tell yer some. Atoms are electrically neutral, they have the same number of electrons as the number of protons in the nucleus. But the particle flux isn’t electrically neutral — if it was, the shield wouldn’t be a damn bit of good, would it? The particles would go right on through without the EM field of the shield touching ’em. The particles in the storm are bare nuclei, charged, no electrons attached. Molecules are atoms with shared electrons. So how can you have molecules if you don’t have atoms with electrons?” Astarte shook an admonishing finger in Nick Lopez’s face. “Stands to reason you can’t.”

Seated, he was taller than she was standing up. In his brown eyes was a curious expression. Celine felt that at any moment he might call for his imperial guards — or whatever their equivalent was in New Rio — to come and drag Astarte Vjansander away to the dungeons.

“Star,” she said. “Keep quiet for a minute. And you, Wilmer, I’m sick of hearing what the particle flux isn’t; that kind of talk could go on forever. In two sentences, what’s your new theory?”

Celine was aware of passing time — Lopez had promised an hour, and that was long past — but with Wilmer she should have known better. He didn’t speak often, but when he did it took him two minutes to tell you the time. Now he scowled and frowned and rubbed the top of his head, and finally muttered, “Do you know what Einstein said? An explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. I can’t describe a new theory in two sentences. Nobody could.”

“Two for the President, then, and two for me,” Nick Lopez said mildly. His telcom was beeping. Once again he ignored it. “Go ahead, Dr. Oldfield. I’m supposed to be somewhere else, but when we’re talking about the way the world ends I’ll find an extra ten minutes.”

Wilmer nodded. “That should be enough. Star already pointed out the important fact: The particles rushing toward the solar system are bare nuclei and they’re electrically charged. More than that, they’re all positively charged — nuclei are just protons and neutrons, no electrons. That means they repel each other, and certainly they have no tendency to travel in groups. But that is precisely what the Sniffer data says they do.

“Now, that gives us a few possibilities. The thing you think of first is that the groups of nuclei might contain equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Antimatter might be created in a supernova explosion. The antiproton has a negative charge equal to the charge of the electron, so a nucleus made up of antiprotons and anti-neutrons will be attracted to a nucleus of ordinary matter. We looked at that idea, me and Star, and chucked it out in two minutes. For one thing, it’s hard to make stable matter-antimatter constellations. Worse still, any antimatter would annihilate itself when it met the Sniffer — and it wouldn’t do the Sniffer much good, either. So forget that idea, and what’s left?

“Well, we looked at other possibilities — a fifth force, which has been speculated on lots of times. Associated toroidal EM fields, binding clusters together. Phase change condensations. You can do calculations for all of them, and nothing comes close to reasonable answers. But we finally found something that works. Suppose that the strong force — that’s the glue that holds nuclei together, in spite of the electrical repulsion of the protons inside them — has been modified. Sounds wild, because we’re used to thinking of the strong force as something in nature that can’t be touched. Like people thought about magnetism three hundred years ago. But Gottlieb, before he went off his head, had an alternative form of unification theory, and if he was right, there are ways of locally modifying the strong force so that it’s longer-range and nonmonotonic — it will permit regions of attraction and repulsion at different distances. Of course, we have no idea how to make that happen.”

Celine had listened long enough. She began to stand up, and for a change Wilmer noticed it. “I’m nearly there,” he said, “don’t get steamed. We did the calculations. A local modification of the strong force can allow stable assemblies of nuclei, just like the Sniffers are finding. Extremely stable, as a matter of fact, with trillions of nuclei in each group. Matter clumps. That’s what I’m getting at.”

“Wilmer, you blithering ditz, so what?” Celine was amazed at Nick Lopez’s patience. He was still listening, and still smiling. “A particle storm is going to reach the solar system years earlier than anyone planned. It will smash Earth back to the dark ages because the shield’s not finished. We’re in trouble, and you’re wasting our time telling us about some new half-assed theory?”

“Yer still don’t get it, do yer?” Astarte stepped in front of Wilmer. “We got good news, not bad news. It’s like Wilmer says, we don’t know how to modify the strong force. But we don’t need to. Thing is, if the particle flux is coming at us in big, stable particle groups, you want a different shield design. You’ve been buildin’ an umbrella net with a mesh close enough to keep off a fine rain of single nuclei, but that won’t do you a bit of good.

What’s going to hit isn’t a drizzle, it’s matter clumps. Bloody great hailstones, trillions of nuclei at a go. Sounds at first as though you’re a lot worse off, but you’re not. ’Cause with big clusters you can detect, catch, and divert ’em one at a time. Only you can’t do that with your present shield design. You hafta make big changes, and you hafta go at it arse-over-teakettle to finish in time. But we think it can be done.”

She turned to Nick Lopez. “Get it? We brought you good news.”

“I get it, Star. Dumb as I am, I really get it.” He stood, and the top of Astarte’s head reached only to the middle of his chest. “Now, you and Wilmer will have to excuse us.”

“Yer can’t leave. I don’t care what your other bleeding meeting is, this is more important than anything.”

“I agree. It is.” Nick met Celine’s eye.

She nodded. “As Senator Lopez said, you must excuse us. He and I have to discuss this in private.”

“Hmph.” Astarte reluctantly allowed Wilmer to usher her to the door. On the threshold she turned. “Yer all right, Senator. Not full of shit, like I expected.”

“Don’t mind her ways,” Celine said as soon as the door was firmly closed. “She was raised in the North Australian wilderness.”

“And I was raised in an eighties LA ghetto.” Lopez sat down. “Until I was fifteen I thought that fucking was a necessary adjective in every sentence. I don’t mind the way Star speaks. I think she’s terrific. She paid me the most sincere compliment I ever had.”

“I heard it. ’Yer all right, Senator.’ ” Celine imitated Astarte’s broad accent and delivery. “So what do you think?”

She was not referring to Astarte’s comment. Lopez sat motionless, his brown eyes staring far beyond the walls of the room. At last he spoke.

“It’s easy to be distracted by the wrong thing. In this case, the wrong thing is Wilmer’s insistence that the supernova was somehow arranged. Because if it was or if it wasn’t, that’s not our current problem. The supernova happened. A lethal particle flux is on the way, and it will get here a lot sooner than we expected. The shield we’re building won’t be ready in time. That’s what’s important. Do you believe it?”

“I’ve known Wilmer Oldfield for thirty years. I believe him without reservations.”

“So, oddly enough, do I. So we’re in deep trouble with the present shield. It won’t be ready in time, nor will I.”

Celine did not ask for an explanation of that last sentence. Nick Lopez had already indicated that he would be taking precautions to ensure his own survival.

She said, “The other important thing is that the particles arrive in big clumps, rather than solo and uncorrelated. We’re building the wrong shield. Do you believe they are right about that, too?”

“I don’t think it makes much difference. Look at where we stand.” Lopez began to tick off points on his long, carefully manicured fingers. “Fact: The particle flux will be arriving sooner than expected. Fact: The shield can’t be ready in time with its present design. Conclusion: Even if Wilmer and Star are wrong, we’re screwed with the shield the way it is. Therefore: Our best shot is to assume that they are right, and modify the shield so it can deal one at a time with large clusters of particles. That leaves only one question: Can we make the changes fast enough?”

“Wilmer says we can.”

“Right. Notice I’m not asking if we want to try.”

“You’re missing a couple of other questions, though. Can we persuade other people that we need to try?”

“I’ll work on that. So will you.”

“And what sort of staff changes will we need? Just yesterday I saw a paper from Bruno Colombo approving the transfer of the shield’s chief engineer to the asteroid capture problem. Now that looks like a terrible idea.”

“Ah.” Lopez turned away so that Celine could not see his face. “I agree with you, I see possible problems there. Let me look into it.”

She read worry in his tone. “Do you want me to get involved?”

“Thank you, but no.” He turned to Celine, and his face was impassive and unreadable. “I will speak with Bruno Colombo, and anyone else who seems appropriate. If I need help, I will call you. How long do we have?”

“Astarte said the wave could hit as soon as a month from now. Let’s hope she’s wrong.”

“If she’s right, that’s no time at all.” For the first time, Lopez’s amiable face bore signs of weariness and worry. “Excuse me, Madam President, but we must stop this meeting right now. I have calls to make.”

The private line rang and rang. Lopez was ready to give up calling the Virginia underground location and try The Flaunt when at last he heard a waspish voice at the other end.

“Yes, what the hell do you want?”

“Gordy, this is Nick Lopez.”

“I know it’s Nick Lopez, you stupid asshole. Didn’t we agree that we were the only people who would have access to this line? What do you want? I’m busy.”

“We have a problem. A big one. We need to get Hyslop assigned back to Sky City, and we need to do it as soon as possible.”

“No fucking way. Hold it, I’m switching to a general circuit visual.” There was a fifteen-second pause, during which Nick wondered where in his hideaway Gordy Rolfe kept his private line. It was certainly well hidden, because Gordy would not permit visuals when he was using it. There seemed little point to the line, however, if Gordy was willing to put discussions like this onto general circuits.

At last the miniature screen in front of Nick Lopez shimmered with color. Gordy Rolfe appeared, a tiny scowling gnome. The green of the habitat was visible in the background. Rolfe was holding a wire cage containing half a dozen guinea pigs and the same number of white mice.

“Now, what’s this crap you’re giving me?” he began. “You agreed just a few days ago that we had to get Hyslop out of Sky City before he put the shield back on schedule and picture-perfect.”

“I just sat through a presentation that changes everything. Listen to this.” Nick ran through what he had heard an hour earlier, while Rolfe sat with barely controlled impatience.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said when Lopez finished. “So you like the little black one. Fine, screw her if you get the chance. But even if you believe those two weirdos, so what? The blast gets here sooner than anybody thought. Earth gets crisped a few years early. Big deal.”

“The wave will hit before the shield is ready. We’re talking billions of deaths.”

“Don’t say that, Lopez, you’ll make me weep.” Rolfe put down the cage that he was holding and glared out of the screen. “Look, I don’t give a damn about who gets offed. The way they’ve treated me, I’ll be glad to get rid of most of the fuckers. I’ll be snug down here, let ’em go. And good riddance.”

His expression suddenly changed, and his eyes glittered behind the big lenses. “Oh, but I get it. I see what you’re really worried about. You don’t give a shit about people getting fried, any more than I do. You’re afraid that the place the Argos Group is building for you won’t be ready in time. Well, don’t sweat it. I’ll put in triple shifts and quadruple the workforce. You’ll be all set in your private pleasure palace before the first protons hit.”

Nick had learned to control his feelings before Gordy Rolfe was born. He grinned and said, “That easy to read, am I? But Gordy, finishing my place isn’t the real problem. We both know there’s no payoff for either of us if Earth gets clobbered too badly. You need customers, and I need an infrastructure. If these scientists are right, we’ll not have either after the storm. Hell, we may not even be alive to worry about it. We have to get Hyslop back up there and let him try to finish the shield, at least until we have a better take on this new thing.”

“And suppose he gets the shield back on schedule, and the storm’s not as bad as your pinhead scientists are saying?”

“Then we’ll find some other way of slowing down the project. Look, Gordy, there’s another factor here. I’m a public figure. I can’t say, ’Pull up the ladder, Jack, I’m on board.’ You see how it will go — everybody will cry out to finish the shield as soon as possible, and the first thing that Bruno Colombo will do is assign Hyslop back to his old job anyway.”

“You told me that you had Colombo in your pocket. You say ’shit’ and he squats.”

“True. But Gordy, I can’t make him into what he isn’t. Bruno comes across impressive, but inside he’s cream cheese. If people like Celine Tanaka start leaning on him, he’ll cave. And I daren’t try to stop it. Remember, I have to act like I’m on the same side as they are.”

“So you want Hyslop to have his old job back, and go charging all over Sky City poking into anything he likes? No fucking way, Jose. Lopez, you’ve lost your mind.”

“Don’t give me no shit about losing my mind. You listen to me for a minute.” Nick hadn’t been in a street fight for half a century, but it was amazing how easily you dropped back into it. He lowered his voice to a growl. “We’ve got no choice on this one. We’re talking a crash project, balls out, shield modification in a month or less. Hyslop, he’ll be too busy to worry about anything else going on. And just to make sure, we keep somebody close to him with one hand on his dick — your woman Wheatstone. You say she’s ambitious, does whatever it takes. Well, tell her to prove it. Control Hyslop. If the shield changes get made and there’s no particle storm, we can still switch him back to the Aten asteroid work. Okay?”

“Might be easier to off him and have done with it.”

“No. Suppose we need him again? Reason we’re worried is the same reason he’s useful. He’s smart, does things nobody else can.”

Rolfe nodded grudgingly. “All right, all right. Would have been easier to off him in the first place. Except everybody was telling me how useful he’d be on the Aten asteroid work. Okay. Do it.” He picked up the wire cage and peered in at the contents.

“More experiments?” Nick asked. If the fight was over, he was more than ready to change the subject.

“Continuation of one in progress. I pulled these from one section of the habitat a few weeks ago. Now the newborn dino count is way up. So I’m putting mice and guineas back in, along with more food for all of ’em. Want to bet that the dino count doesn’t start down within two weeks, food or no food? And the mammals thrive?”

“I’m not a betting man, Gordy. But I want to be sure we’re agreed. Hyslop can be reassigned to his old job on Sky City?”

“I guess. Go ahead and do it.” Rolfe seemed to have lost interest in the subject. He was crouched down on his haunches. His attention was on the guinea pigs and mice, nosing about their wire cage as he placed it into the hollow middle section of the transparent door leading through to the habitat.

Suddenly he stood up and walked forward to the camera, so that his image stared out of the display at close range. Nick could see each individual dark whisker on Rolfe’s upper lip, and the pore-filled skin around the gray eyes.

“Just one thing I don’t want you to forget, Lopez.” Rolfe was smiling. “I’m going along with you on reassigning Hyslop to the shield because it doesn’t make much difference to me. I plan ahead in ways you don’t even dream. But I want you to know that so far as I’m concerned, it’s your ass on the line, not Hyslop’s. Fuck this up some way, so word gets out that the Argos Group has been playing games with the shield deliverables and also skimming a little off the top, and I will become very upset. I don’t think you want me very upset.”

“Of course I don’t.” You ignorant birdbrained weeny-dick byblow of a syphilitic whore. Once you dropped back into the old way of thinking, it was remarkably easy to stay there. The danger was that you’d talk that way.

Nick blamed himself more than Gordy Rolfe. What had ever led him to become dependent on such a savage? He knew the answer to that. No one else had the Argos Group’s capability to manage and if necessary mismanage so large a project. No one else had Gordy Rolfe’s genius for electronics. And no one else was as willing to damage the Earth in order to control it.

Of course, Nick had also cultivated Gordy Rolfe to be assured of his own survival. But was that guaranteed? How long would Gordy feel that he needed Nick Lopez?

“Don’t worry, Gordy.” Nick’s smile was broad and easy. “I’ll stay on this twenty-four hours a day. How about Maddy Wheatstone, though? Can you make her available to keep close to Hyslop?”

“Lopez, you don’t give me enough credit.” Rolfe cut the video link to slow fade and went back to fussing over the wire cage. He sounded pleased for the first time in the conversation. “I’ve had Maddy riding Hyslop’s ass for days, and she’ll keep right on doing it. Talk to her anytime you feel like it, but just remember one thing. She can tell you how Hyslop is spending his time — but overall she reports only to me.”

“What about your man looking into the Sky City murders? Is he making progress?”

Nick’s question came too late. Gordy did not hear him, and the image on the display was slowly losing color. The final, graying scene showed a crouching Gordy Rolfe. Beyond him a group of small shadowy forms scuttled nervously away into the dark interior of the habitat.

Nick Lopez watched until the picture vanished completely. He felt sympathy for all but one of the mammals pictured in the display.