Starfire

27

John Hyslop scanned the table of values. If an anomaly was present, he couldn’t see it. “Are you sure?”

Amanda Corrigan nodded. Shy in a group, she was perfectly self-confident one-on-one. “It’s there. Hard to tell from the table of numbers, but when it’s graphed it jumps right out at you. See for yourself.”

She flashed up a different display, this one a curve of particle number against time. It showed a lopsided Gaussian distribution, the smooth mountain of the bell curve rising rapidly and then falling back to zero. On the left side of the mountain a secondary peak jutted up as a steep little hill.

John studied it. “Not much to look at.”

“It’s not, in terms of the maximum particle flux. Less than one percent.”

“But more than enough to cause trouble. Where did this curve come from?”

“Data from the Sniffer that we launched two weeks ago.”

“As a crash priority. What are the chances that something on board isn’t working right?”

“Poor. The Sniffer passed every test we threw at it.”

“Then we’d better start worrying about the earlier Sniffers. They were designed to catch this sort of thing, and they missed it.”

“Not really.” Amanda did more fast work at the pad.

“Here’s what the other Sniffers gave us, the way it was presented for visual analysis.”

John rubbed his eyes. The new curve he was looking at showed a single mountain with no bordering foothills. Maybe he was getting old. He had drunk wine with dinner, but that wasn’t it. After midnight he couldn’t keep up with Amanda’s speed and adolescent energy. She might be twenty-six, but she was like a fourteen-year-old in more than outward appearance.

“No peaks that I can see.”

“Right. No peaks.”

“Amanda, a peak in particle numbers can’t pop up from nowhere. It represents a physical entity.”

“It didn’t come from nowhere. The Sniffers are working correctly — all of them. What you are seeing is a combination of the physical limitations of the earlier instruments and the way we handle their data. I’ll show you.”

More dancing fingerwork from Amanda, and another display flashed into view.

“These are raw counts from one of the old Sniffers. The older models measure only what they find right in front of them, and they make readings every two seconds. That sounds like frequent sampling, but the relative speed of the particles and the Sniffers means we have only one sample every fifty thousand kilometers. I think of the data as a count of the number of particles at each cross section of a long, thin tube stretching from Earth toward Alpha Centauri. The particles come in bunches and clusters, so the counts have high statistical variation. Lots of hash in the data, hard to analyze. The peak I just showed you is present in the counts, but it’s really hard to see because of the noise in the signal. Now I apply a low-pass filter to the input, and there’s the resulting profile. Nice and smooth, but no peak. We see the major increases and decreases. The minor blip disappears.”

“In other words, we averaged away part of the signal.” John leaned back. “Guess the name of the genius who said he couldn’t read the raw hash, and told you to smooth it out.”

“I wasn’t about to mention that if you didn’t.” Amanda was smiling.

“I’d rather you didn’t mention it at all. Colombo will have my scalp if he ever finds out.” John tried to sound worried, but he was smiling, too. This was his arena, his natural playing field. Here he was the best, with the self-confidence that eluded him when it came to personal affairs.

He went back to the first display with its innocent little side peak. “So this is the real thing — no smoothing.”

“You’ve got it. The new Sniffer detects and counts particle bundles over a cross-sectional area a hundred times as big as the old Sniffers could handle. We don’t need averaging to get rid of statistical variations. There’s something else peculiar in the counts from the new Sniffer, but I’d rather not talk about that until I know what I’m doing.”

“Keep me posted. There’s still one key piece of information missing in what we have so far.” John highlighted the companion peak. “About this. I need to know when. It’s going to hit sooner than the main pulse, but how long do we have? A day, a week?”

Amanda breathed out, explosively. “I’m sorry. The scale is shown along the abscissa, but it doesn’t include the origin. We don’t have much time. The particle bundles from the minor pulse will hit their maximum count forty-eight hours from now. Then the count will fall away and by sixty hours it will be back to normal.”

“But maybe we won’t be.”

When things went wrong you could curse; when things went really wrong you didn’t have time for that luxury. John, as a matter of habit, called a flow chart onto the display. It was more for Amanda’s sake than his own, because he already had a good idea of what it would reveal.

“Here’s the master schedule.” He moved the cursor. “And this vertical line at fifteen days shows what we hope will be happening when the big pulse hits. But we’re more interested in what happens here.” He introduced another vertical line on the display. “That’s forty-eight hours from now. As you see, we have no defense system in operation — old or new. We have to take that as a given, and see what everyone will be doing. I show you on Cusp Station, setting up the high-speed computer links with Sky City. Will Davis and his team are there, too, installing the pulse field generator. Cusp isn’t shielded well enough; you’ll all have to fly back and sit out the particle storm on Sky City. Torrance Harbish and Rico Ruggiero have a team outside, fine-tuning the balance of forces to hang Cusp Station and Sky City at the correct distance from Earth. They’ll have to come inside. The people we have to worry about most are Nordstrom’s group, out on the old shield. They’re modifying the superconducting circuits so they work with the low-intensity detection field. They can’t stay out there, even for a pulse this size. It’s at least a ten-hour flight to safety. I want you to pass the word to Nordstrom at once.”

“But what about Earth?” Amanda scanned the flow chart and saw only in-space activities. “What will people do there?”

“Dig. Hide below the surface, or stay under water. The new defense isn’t ready, and the old shield won’t stop the particle bundles. People down on Earth should be all right. Lots of fireworks for about twelve hours, but this pulse packs less than a hundredth of the energy of the main one. I’m a lot more worried about things out here.”

“I thought Sky City had ample shielding.”

“For individual particles, yes, but I’m not sure about particle bundles. Maybe they’ll be stopped, maybe some of them will pass through Sky City like it’s not there. I’m expecting a few to get through no matter what we do; statistically that’s inevitable. But too many of those and our field generators and computers will stop working. Problem is, I don’t know how many is too many. I’ll ask Lauren to try another calculation — she’s the least busy of the group.”

John glanced at the clock. “Two o’clock. She’s going to have a fit. Bruno Colombo, too. I’ll have to wake him up.”

“Hmph.” Amanda made a face. “Good luck with that one. I wouldn’t dare.”

“Bruno will have to make worse calls than any of mine. He’s got to wake Nick Lopez and Urbain Tosca, and tell them that the WPF and the UN have two days to organize the whole planet.”

“What about me? I’ll call Nordstrom, and I’ll work on the other anomaly I mentioned. What else can I do to help?”

John studied Amanda’s unlined face. “Not tired?”

“Fresh as a daisy.”

“Then go and wake up Star Vjansander. She’s been pestering me for weeks to let some bundles through the defense system so she can capture and study them. Tell her that her wish was just granted. By the time this peak has been and gone, we’ll have more than enough bundles.”

“Should I wake her right now?”

“Might as well. Everyone else is going to be up; why not Star? Oh, and Amanda.”

She was already standing up to leave the information center. She turned. “Yes?”

“Tell Star that no matter how pleased she is with all this, she’d better not show it.”

“Or else?”

“Or else she’s going to find that everyone in Sky City engineering is too busy to make a capture-and-contain device for particle bundles.”

“Isn’t it easy? The bundles are all charged. You just slow them and contain them with electromagnetic fields. Star must know how.”

“She undoubtedly does. But knowing how and making it happen are two different things. Star is no engineer.”

Amanda nodded. “Wilmer Oldfield says that Star can’t make coffee without breaking the jug.” She grinned at John. “You’ll probably kill me for saying so, but I’m sort of enjoying this. It’s interesting and it’s exciting”

“I’m glad you think so. But while this first pulse may be a small one compared with the main hit, people are going to die. Remember the old curse: May you live in interesting times.”

As she hurried out John stared again at the display of the particle counts, with its innocuous-looking little side peak. That blip looked like nothing, but it derived from the huge stellar energies of a whole exploding star. He had told the truth to Amanda: People were undoubtedly going to die, if not here then down on Earth.

And yet Amanda was right, too. John felt worry, he felt nervousness, he even felt fear. But underneath everything, deep down, the excitement of the challenge was growing.

They were weeks away from the peak. They had not yet reached the first of the foothills. The hardest times surely lay ahead. But there, visible in the distance, loomed the mountain.

Maddy’s dinner with John Hyslop had been a great success. A success, that is, if you didn’t mind being with a man apparently impervious to any form of romantic suggestion. They had talked, with the ease of old friends, about everything on Earth and off it. They had compared Gordy Rolfe and Bruno Colombo as bosses, they had laughed, and they had lingered. He had agreed, instantly, to meet with her and Seth Parsigian the next day, without even asking her the subject — score one for Seth. And then, at the end of the evening, he had escorted her to her rooms, kissed her on the cheek with a chasteness and formality you might expect from a legal guardian, and left. He told her he had to work.

Surprisingly, after that Maddy had slept comfortably and easily. Apparently that made her a Sky City oddity, since the next morning every other person at breakfast claimed to have been up most of the night, making preparations for the “blip storm,” an unexpected particle squall only a couple of days away. No one else had managed more than a couple of hours in bed. John Hyslop, according to Star Vjansander, had slept not at all.

Maddy and Seth were on John’s schedule for ten o’clock in the morning. Last night it had seemed an excellent choice, an hour when John should be fully awake but not yet weighed down with the problems of the day. Now you could hardly pick a worse time. If he had been up all night, John would be too exhausted or too overwhelmed with work even to listen. And Seth Parsigian — the louse who had talked Maddy into the meeting with John Hyslop in the first place — would not even be present.

The voice message had been waiting for her after breakfast. “Hey. I gotta little problem to take care of down on Earth. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone, ’cause flights to an’ from Sky City are gonna be tight as hell ’til the blip storm excitement dies down. You go ahead and handle John Hyslop. Tell him anythin’, but make him say yes.”

Didn’t Seth realize that the same particle storm that could maroon him down on Earth would probably ruin all their chances of a meeting with John? The whole inside of the space city thrummed with energy and activity. For the first time in many months, worries about the Sky City murders had been pushed into the background.

Maddy went first to the plant engineering test facility, the meeting place that John had suggested. It was no surprise to find that he was not there. She sent a message over the Sky City general telcom channel. Ten minutes later she still had no reply.

Where was he? In one corner of plant engineering Maddy found Jessie Kahn and a slew of new attendant rolfes. A distracted Jessie, dictating rolfe assignments that yesterday would have been far above her level of seniority, waved a vague hand at Maddy. “Try the generating plant — they’re going loony there because the bundles interfere with the control circuits, and that might shut everything down. Or the engineering information center; John was there most of the night. Or Bruno Colombo’s office — I know a major flap was going on there. Maybe even Cusp Station. That has to be battened down before the storm hits. He could be there.”

Jessie’s tone said more than her words. Go anywhere, Maddy Wheatstone, but get the hell out of my hair.

Maddy went to the power-generation facility, on the axis beyond the main body of Sky City. Panic, yes, but no sign of John Hyslop. No one seemed to be expecting him. The engineering information center was deserted except for Torrance Harbish, who provided even less than Jessie Kahn: a gloomy shake of the head and a “Could be anywhere.” At Bruno Colombo’s outer office, guardian-of-the-inner-sanctum Goldy Jensen greeted Maddy with a snarl like a rabid wolf and a curt “Of course he’s not here. And he’s not on Cusp Station.”

“Then where is he?”

“How should I know? Am I John Hyslop’s keeper?”

Not John Hyslop’s, lady; Bruno Colombo’s. Maddy politely thanked Goldy and retreated.

Where? Maddy felt increasingly useless. Her wanderings through Sky City had made one thing evident: The space facility was in total turmoil. People were trying to cram weeks of labor into days, and it wasn’t working. They didn’t have a moment to spare.

It was already ten-forty. The time for the meeting with John had come and gone; still he had not answered her telcom message. Was there a place where he would be sure to go at some time in the next twenty-four hours?

Well, even if John were on a Neirling boost, he would crash by late tonight. And no matter where he passed out, he would be trundled back to his own quarters to sleep it off.

Maddy knew where John lived — a good thing Seth wasn’t here, or she’d have received his knowing wink. She ascended twenty levels, moved halfway around the cylinder of the city, and arrived at John’s apartment. She tried the door, and it was not locked.

Her glance both ways along the curved corridor seemed ridiculous — maybe she had no right to enter, but after all she was not planning to steal anything. She only wanted to leave a message.

She slipped inside and gently closed the door. Once in, she stared around with curiosity. This was the place, in her imagination, they had returned to last night. The living room was small, decorated much the way she would have imagined it: simple but comfortable furniture; a dozen nonprofessional color photographs on the walls, with John against a background of vast suspension bridges; a 3-D hologram of Sky City’s interior structure; and, a little more surprising, half a dozen of Escher’s gravity-defying lithographs and wood engravings. She recognized “Relativity,” “Waterfall,” “Ascending and Descending,” and “Other World,” but the strange lithograph “Print Gallery,” with its bizarre curved cityscape whose geometry somehow suggested the interior of Sky City itself, was new to her.

The bedroom was on the right. Maddy went into it, telling herself that John’s bed was the one place he was sure to find a message when he came home. The room was much too functional for her taste, and noticeably short on furniture. Bed, dresser, closet, a door that presumably led through to the bathroom — there was not even a comfortable chair. Maddy perched on the small bedside table. She was all set to write a note when her eye caught another detail. The dresser was bare except for a single picture.

It was a portrait of Maddy, as she appeared in one of the Argos Group’s rare promotional materials. She was smiling out of the frame in well-groomed and confident splendor, assuring the world that no job was too difficult or complex for the management skills of Maddy Wheat-stone. The spoken blurb, as Maddy remembered it, said much the same thing.

The brochure was almost a year old. John must have found it somewhere in the records of Sky City, and cut out and framed the picture. That knowledge, much more than anything she was doing, made Maddy feel like an absolute intruder.

She stood up. Forget the note; she would find some other way to reach John. She headed for the bedroom door, and at that moment heard a sound behind her.

She gasped and the skin of her forearms prickled into goose bumps. Someone else was in the apartment. She could hear them, just a few feet away.

She swung around and saw nothing. Imagination? No. The bathroom. The door was open a few inches.

Maddy tiptoed that way and peered through the crack. She saw John, sitting on a radiator cover and slumped back in the angle of the walls. He was naked, his eyes were closed, and his hair was tousled and damp. A towel lay on the floor in front of him. It looked as if he had taken a shower and fallen asleep in the middle of drying himself. No surprise, if he had been up all night.

The right thing to do was tiptoe away. John would never know that she had been here. But he was sitting in an unstable position. If he fell forward in his sleep, a sharp corner of the sink was waiting for his head.

Make a noise to wake him up, then run?

Stupid. That was even more likely to make him fall over.

Maddy opened the door all the way. In the quarter-gee field it was easy to place one arm under his legs and the other behind his back and lift him clear of the radiator cover. Harder was the move through the narrow door, but she managed it without banging on either side. She carried him over to the bed and gently laid him down. He was on top of the covers, but it was not cold.

Time to leave.

Maddy moved to the foot of the bed and stood there, staring down at him. He had spoken of mountain climbing in his youth, and now that he was unclothed she could see the corded tendons of his legs and arms. His skin was fair and unnaturally pale — or maybe, for someone who lived on Sky City, it was naturally pale. Direct sunlight out here was a killer, rich in the hard ultraviolet radiation that never made it through the Earth’s atmosphere to the surface.

But John was overworked, too. It was not ultraviolet, or its absence, that had placed the dark smudges below his eyes. Maddy moved her glance back along his body. She was startled to see that those eyes were no longer closed. John was staring — not at her, but straight up at the ceiling.

Was he still asleep, with his eyes open? Maddy backed away, through into the living room.

Time to leave. This time, definitely. She could hear sounds from the bedroom.

Again she hesitated. She was here; John was here. When would there be another chance of a meeting? Not until the present crisis was over, and maybe not for a long time afterward.

She went quietly across to the outer door and opened it. She knocked and called, “Anyone here? May I come in?”

How bogus could you get? But he was answering, “I’m through here. Just a minute.”

It was more like twenty seconds before he appeared in slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. His hair still fell damp over his forehead, and he was barefoot.

“We were supposed to have a meeting this morning.” Maddy tried to look him in the eye, and failed. “You weren’t where I thought you would be. So I tried here. I guess you forgot we had a meeting.”

“No.” He smiled at her. “I’d never forget a meeting with you.”

Something about him had changed. Maddy had an idea what. As long as the crisis lasted he would be the focus for all the engineering work on Sky City, and he drew power from that. Just as she felt more and more useless, he was increasingly in control.

He went on, “I came here because I’d been up all night. I wanted to look my best when I met you, and I thought a shower and a change of clothes would do the trick. It did the trick, all right. The last thing I remember is sitting down in the bathroom to dry myself off. Then I was on my bed, staring at the ceiling. You know all about the particle burst?”

“The blip storm? That’s what they’re calling it. Yes, nobody’s talking of anything else.”

“Then you know I don’t have much time to talk. What’s on your mind?”

Did he realize who had moved him from the bathroom? Had he seen her standing at the foot of the bed, inspecting him?

No time to worry about that. John had his shoes on, and he was already leading them out of his quarters.

Maddy said, “It’s about the Sky City murders. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

That stopped him. The corners of his mouth turned down, and he looked ten years older. “What about them?”

“Seth Parsigian and I know who did it. But we don’t have hard evidence, so we need to set up a trap. It would work like this.”

Maddy kept the story short and simple. At the end John seemed older than ever.

“You don’t believe me?” she asked.

“The hell of it is, I do. But I hardly have a spare moment, and it’s going to get worse. I can’t see any way to help.”

“We don’t need help. We just want you to make an announcement.”

“What about Doris Wu’s family? They’ll want details.”

“They’ll not hear of it. Only a few people will. Before word spreads, we’ll have the murderer.”

He hesitated. For the first time, Maddy thought she had a chance.

“When do you want me to announce it?”

“Not now. And not during the blip storm — we’re not ready. The best time will be when the main wave hits.”

“Maddy, that’s the worst possible time. Everything and everyone will be stressed to their limit. This place will be in chaos.”

“Chaos is what the murderer will rely on.” They were approaching the open doors of the information center, and Maddy’s last opportunity for a private discussion. She took John’s arm, so that he had to turn and face her. “We’ll probably only have one chance — ever. The evidence just isn’t there. Will you do it?”

He nodded. “When I first heard about the murders I was upset because I could do nothing. Now maybe I can. Just tell me when. All right?”

Maddy wanted to shout, Yes! She also wanted to hug him. She had no time for either, because the entrance to the information center was suddenly full of people. At the front were Amanda Corrigan and Wilmer Oldfield. Behind them, crowding forward, were Star Vjansander and Lauren Stansfield and two data analysts whose names Maddy didn’t remember.

Star and both data analysts all began to speak at once. But it was Wilmer’s voice, calm and slow and serious, that continued and cut through the rest.

“Amanda found another anomaly in the Sniffer data. If Star’s right in her interpretation, everything just got a lot more interesting. You need to hear about this.”