Starfire

17

John Hyslop stared around Bruno Colombo’s office and found himself speechless. He was losing count of the number of shocks he had received in the past couple of hours. The latest blow — the wave of the hand from Bruno Colombo, and a dismissive “Go ahead. It’s all yours” — lifted the afternoon away from Sky City and moved it to the realm of the Mad Hatter.

First there had been the horrifying discovery of Lucille DeNorville’s space-dried corpse. Next came the unexpected summons to Bruno Colombo’s office. Third, Goldy Jensen greeted John at the outer vestibule with the savage smile of a black widow spider about to eat her mate. What had he, a mere engineer transferred away from Sky City, done to deserve such a look? Offended Bruno Colombo? But if so, how, when they had not spoken to each other since John’s transfer to the Aten asteroid project? Goldy shook her head when John asked what was going on and ushered him without a word through to Bruno Colombo’s inner sanctum.

If Goldy had some unknown reason to smile, Bruno Colombo apparently did not. His private office was his shrine, an organized and well-ordered perfection. His telcom was discreetly hidden away in a drawer of the long wooden desk, and the desk itself never carried more than a single folder placed in the middle of its nine-foot length. A cut-glass bowl of red roses, fresh every morning from the Sky City hydroponic gardens, always graced its polished top.

Today the roses lay scattered on the floor. The folder was there with them, and the oriental rug on which they sat was soaked with water. The bowl had found a new use. A short black woman dressed in a lurid pink blouse and yellow shorts was crouched on the floor, bending over the ornament, which sat between her legs.

A tall, bald-headed man watched her gloomily. “I warned you,” he said. “But would you listen? Of course not. Are you ready for it now?”

The woman — she appeared to John hardly more than a girl — raised her head and glared up at the man. “Yer can stuff yer pills. I don’t want ’em.”

Bruno Colombo stood at the other side of the room, as far from the desk and the other people as possible. He gestured to John to come across to him.

“Hyslop,” he said as soon as John was close. “There are going to be major changes in the shield program. You will once again occupy the position of chief engineer for shield development. I have summoned other members of your old staff, and they are on the way here.” He waved a hand at the man and woman. She was now making dry-heaving sounds. “These people have come up from Earth and will be working with you. They have” — his voice turned to acid — “been given total authority to direct changes in shield construction.”

“But we’re already behind schedule!” John could hardly believe what he had just heard. Restoring him to his original position would have been good news, but not if he had to take orders from a pair of newcomers. No matter how talented they might be, they didn’t know the job. “Why are you letting them make changes?”

“I am not.” Colombo grimaced, as though swallowing something unpleasant. “That decision came from Earth. Needless to say, I do not approve of the situation. I, in fact, wash my hands of this. I’m leaving. It’s all yours.”

He was out of the room before John could ask what was all his. The bald man stared gloomily at the seated woman and said, “Listen to her. I never would have thought it. Star’s got a digestion like an emu, and I’ve never known her to be sick.”

“Her first time up from Earth?”

“That’s right.”

“Then it’s the gravity changes.” When the man stared at John blankly, he went on, “Some people take to low gravity easily, others have real problems. It doesn’t seem to depend on whether a person is in good or bad physical shape, or how old you are, or how strong your stomach is. You can still get sick. But being young and strong helps. With any luck she’ll feel better in a few minutes.”

“I told her that. She’s looking better already.”

“Better? I feel like shit.” The woman spoke with her head over the bowl.

John said to the man, “How about you? How do you feel?”

“Me?” He seemed surprised at the question. “Why, I’m fine.”

“You’ve been in space before?”

“Oh, yes. But as I say, this is Star’s first time. I told her to take a pill, and would she?” The man rubbed the top of his head. “Would she hell. She’s pretending she’s not feeling well enough to introduce herself, so I’ll do it for her. The pigheaded lump of obstinacy throwing up in the bowl there is my friend Star — Astarte Vjansander, the brains behind the shield changes.”

Again, references to shield changes. John couldn’t understand it. Didn’t people realize that the project was in deep trouble already? And you couldn’t drop new players into the middle of the job, no matter how good they were, without screwing things up.

“She’s an engineer, is she?” John asked. It seemed a harmless question, but the woman glared up at him, said, “Engineer! Bloody hell, no,” and bent forward to spit into the bowl. John began to feel a rare sympathy for Bruno Colombo.

The man said calmly, “Star’s not an engineer. Experimental equipment breaks when she walks into a room. She’s a physicist. She can tell you what needs to be done with the shield, but don’t for God’s sake let her try and do it herself. Me neither; I’m no good when it comes to the practical stuff.”

“And who are you?”

“Me?” The man reacted as though that was an odd question. “I’m Wilmer Oldfield.”

John had his hand extended when the man’s name and the Australian accent meshed. It had been many years, but everything fitted. He even had a vague memory of seeing pictures, a younger version of that heavy-browed face.

He froze with his hand still outstretched. “I’m sorry. You’re Wilmer Oldfield? Dr. Wilmer Oldfield?”

“Yeah, that’s me. But I don’t see what I’ve done to make you sorry.”

“I mean I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you when I first came in. You were on the Mars expedition, with Celine Tanaka. And I asked you if you had ever been in space!”

“Well, I have.” Oldfield took John’s hand and shook it. “That’s all right, it was ages ago. I’ve not been off Earth for years and years.”

“When I was growing up, you were one of my idols.” The words were absolutely honest, but as soon as John said them he wished he hadn’t.

There was an awkward silence, broken when the woman on the floor said, “And he’s still idle. Bone idle.”

She laughed.

“Told you she was feeling better. And look who’s talking.” Wilmer Oldfield reached down and took hold of her arm. “Come on, you lazy mass of convent reject. On your feet. We’ve got visitors, and it’s time for work.”

Four more people were entering the room. John knew each of them well: Will Davis, Amanda Corrigan, Rico Ruggiero, and Torrance Harbish — all his old senior team members, with the exception of Lauren Stansfield. From the expressions on their faces, they were as puzzled by recent events as he was. And Bruno Colombo, in spite of his words, had not left completely. He was peering around the edge of the door.

John made a decision. He didn’t know what was going on, but if he was ever to find out, he had to impose his own kind of order on things. He turned to the newcomers. “Do you know why you were asked to come here?”

They shook their heads. “Something about changes to the shield?” Will Davis said. “I’ve been hoping I misunderstood the message. We can’t afford to make changes.”

“I know. Where’s Lauren?”

“On the axis, with the power generation maintenance team.”

“Then we’ll start without her. She can catch up later.” John waved his hand at Wilmer. “This is Dr. Oldfield. He was on the original Mars expedition. And this young lady—”

“Young lady be buggered.” Astarte finally stood up. She rocked for a moment, then planted her feet. “I’m Star Vjansander, and I’m not a lady. An’ if yer don’t like me now, wait ’til yer hear what me and Wilmer have ter say. ’Cause yer going ter have ter work yer buns off.”

“That’s enough, Star.” Wilmer Oldfield turned to John. “I’d not have brought her at all, except that we absolutely can’t do without her.”

“Do what without her?”

“We’ll get to that, but it may take a while.” Wilmer sighed, subsided into a chair, and rubbed the red patch on the top of his head. “Let me start at the beginning. When we first had the Alpha C blowup . . .”

Later, John decided that Wilmer Oldfield had a gift for understatement. It may take a while translated into the longest technical briefing ever. Six and a half hours passed before the last question was asked and the last answer given.

Lauren Stansfield arrived at the end of the first hour, at the point where Wilmer paused for his first break and Star Vjansander began an explanation of the anomalous data from the Sniffers.

Lauren stared hard at Star but said not a word. She gave John one questioning glance and took her place quietly at Amanda Corrigan’s side. Bruno Colombo slipped into the room a few minutes later. He had been hovering uncertainly at the door while Wilmer was speaking. He took a seat next to Lauren. Amazingly, the director also said nothing.

Finally Wilmer shrugged and said, “That’s it, then. Unless you have more questions?”

John couldn’t speak for the others, but he personally felt stunned. Assuming that Wilmer Oldfield and Star Vjansander were right in their analyses, the whole shield project — twenty years of frantic labor — had to be turned on its head. And changes had to be made fast. Instead of years, they had at most months. The only good news was that the proposed changes would make the whole engineering problem easier.

“Let me make sure I have this right,” he said. “Almost all the charged particles won’t arrive independently of each other. They will be grouped in stable structures, the things you call bundles, each containing a few trillion nuclei. Instead of building a continuous shield structure, we have to detect each separate group and divert it away from Earth with an electromagnetic pulse generated for just that bundle.”

“Right,” Wilmer said, and Star nodded and added, “You got it. All very doable. And the obvious place to put your pulse generator is on Cusp Station, out at the end of the shield.”

“But if your interpretation of the Sniffer data or your supernova model is wrong — if all the particles actually arrive independently of each other—”

“Then we’re up shit creek,” Star said cheerfully. “Because the one thing that’s for certain is the particle storm is going to hit sooner than you thought six months ago. That means the shield you got now is no damn good no matter what.”

“Suppose you’re right,” Torrance Harbish said. He had the final word on shield balancing and stability. “All my work for the past eight years will go down the tubes, but that’s not what’s worrying me. You’re saying we have to find and deflect every particle bundle. I don’t understand how we’ll know where each one is. Remember, they’re flying at us at something like ten percent of light speed.”

“We’ve looked into that.” Wilmer did not sound worried. “We generate a wide-angle, low-intensity radiation beam from Cusp Station that extends out toward Alpha C. Easy, and probably best done at microwave frequencies. It won’t be anywhere near strong enough to divert a bundle, but each bundle will interact with the field enough to produce its own weak radiation. We can detect that signal when the bundle gets near enough. It will give us enough information to determine the speed and exact trajectory of each bundle. And that’s what we hit with a pulse strong enough to divert it safely away from Earth.”

“Do we have time to do all that?” Will Davis, like Torrance Harbish, could see his efforts of many years crumbling to nothing. “It sounds like an awful lot of work. I mean, we have to detect a signal, calculate a trajectory, and generate and fire a pulse. How much time do we have between bundle detection and bundle arrival?”

Wilmer nodded. “We’ve studied that, too. Star?”

“No worries. Yer can’t get a useful return beyond about fifteen thousand kilometers. From there the signal takes a twentieth of a second to reach Cusp Station, and the pulse needs that long ter go back. Knock that off the bundle travel time before it gets ter the shield — say half a second — and you’re left with point four seconds to generate a pulse and spit it back out ter the bundle. Bags of time. ’Course, it’s a monster computing problem to know just where ter fire. But I understand you’ve got computers up here coming out your wazoo.”

She saw their faces. “Uh-oh. Did I screw up?”

John spoke first. “I think so. Let me make sure I have this right. We receive a return signal at Cusp Station. From that we compute where the bundle is. On Cusp Station we generate a powerful EM pulse and aim it at the bundle.”

“That’s right. Look, we assume you don’t have equipment on Cusp Station to generate the signal field or the pulses. That’s all right, they can be shipped there easy.”

“Not the problem.” Amanda Corrigan was the computer specialist. Shy and gawky, she ducked her head and made her first contribution to the meeting. “You said we had a ’monster’ computing problem. How monster?”

“Yer might need to do simultaneous path computations for a few million bundles a second. I was told you could do that here, dead easy.”

“We can,” Amanda said. “Here on Sky City. But we don’t have anything near that much power at Cusp Station.”

“So yer beam the information from there—” Star paused.

“You’ve got it,” John said quietly. “We have all sorts of computing power on Sky City. But there’s not much on Cusp Station. The minimum distance between Sky City and Cusp Station is more than a hundred thousand kilometers. That’s more than a third of a second for a one-way signal, two-thirds of a second round trip. Far too long.”

There was a long silence, broken by Wilmer. “We’ve got some time, a few weeks. Ship computers out to Cusp Station, enough to do the job.”

“Amanda?” John Hyslop raised his eyebrows.

She shook her head. “Sorry. The computing system here is integrated and distributed through the whole of Sky City. We have plenty of spare capacity, but it’s impossible to pull part of it out without screwing up everything. Air, water, waste disposal — the systems all call on the same computing resources.”

Star flopped down on the floor and sat with her legs sprawled inelegantly wide. She leaned forward like a gymnast, touched the carpet three times with her forehead, sat up, and said, “Then we are buggered. Any chance we can get enough computer power shipped up from Earth?”

“Possibly.” Bruno Colombo had sat silent through the whole long meeting. Most of the time his eyes were closed. John had wondered if the director was even awake.

“Possibly,” Colombo repeated. “But it’s not an answer that I — or anyone — would be happy with. Either we’d have to ship people up from Earth who know their own systems well but are not used to working in space, or else our staff would be faced with the task of learning unfamiliar equipment and programming intricate life-or-death calculations in a very short time. Not just life-or-death for us. For everyone.”

“Even so,” Wilmer said, “it’s our best shot. I can promise you, even if the old shield were finished and working perfectly, the particle bundles we’re talking about will go through it like it’s not there. We need computer power on Cusp Station, lots of it. If the only place we can find it is on Earth, that’s where we take it from. I know Celine Tanaka, I’m sure she’ll cooperate.”

“Maybe she would.” Bruno Colombo stood up. Suddenly he had gone from being a bystander to the person in control of the meeting. “But I don’t think that’s the best answer. Hyslop? You know Sky City as well as I do, maybe better. Can it be done?”

“I have to check. It will involve accelerations and stresses beyond any that were ever dreamed of. But my gut guess is that yes, we can do it.”

“Do what?” Star was still on the floor, but now she was sitting bolt upright and scowling. “What are you two going on about?”

“If the mountain will not come to Mahomet . . .” Bruno Colombo turned to John. “Hyslop, you and the others here work out the engineering details. I’ll start on resource allocation. Even if it is possible, it’s not going to be easy.”

He hurried out of the room. John felt an odd mixture of irritation and admiration. Just when you were convinced that Bruno Colombo was nothing but a big bag of wind dressed in an expensive suit, he did something to prove that deep inside the pomaded head sat a highly creative brain. Sure, part of it was Colombo protecting his territory — but he also happened to be proposing the only possible solution. And then he left you to “work out the details.”

John found himself once more running the meeting. “It’s going to be an interesting few weeks,” he said. “We need loads of computers out near Cusp Station. We have all kinds of computational power here, but we can’t ship it anywhere else.”

“So Mahomet . . .” Will Davis said.

“That’s right.” In spite of the enormous size of the problem, John felt the thrill of a new technical challenge. “We’re heading for the front line — all of us. We’ll take this place and fly it all the way out to Cusp Station. And then, assuming that Sky City doesn’t disintegrate on the way, and certain people stay out of our hair” — he stared at Star Vjansander, who was grinning at him in delight — “well, then we’ll find out if certain harebrained ideas are anywhere close to reality.”