Starfire

29

Alpha Centauri lies at sixty degrees south on the celestial sphere. The preliminary particle storm — call it a blip if you like, but no longer dismiss it as insignificant — would hit Earth from that direction, with the zero hour of peak maximum occurring at three-fifteen local time. Every prediction from Celine Tanaka’s science advisor, Benedict Mertok, said that Washington, at thirty-nine degrees north, should be affected only in minor ways.

And yet …

Mertok was confident and knowledgeable and polished, the very model of a modern senior advisor, but the person whose opinion Celine really trusted was Wilmer Oldfield. She placed a call to Wilmer on Sky City early in the morning. She had to radiate public optimism, but she needed to know the worst.

“Know for sure? Can’t tell you that. Might as well be betting on a horse race.” Wilmer was sitting at a Sky City communications unit and steadily consuming the huge breakfast of a man without a care in the world. At Celine’s question he touched his hand to the bald spot on top of his head. “Star and me have a theory, you’re right about that, but it’s not a tested theory. We need new Sniffer data. We’ll be able to give you a better answer in a few days.”

“Wilmer, a few days is no good.” Celine had drunk lots of coffee and barely nibbled at dry toast. How could anyone eat the way he did so early in the morning?

“We’ve got a psychic calling all the media, telling people that the world is going to end at three-fifteen this afternoon. The Fist of God will strike, and Earth will split open like a melon dropped from a tenth-floor window.”

“He’s an idiot. You can quote me on that.”

“It’s a woman. So this won’t be the end of the world. But what will happen? I have all emergency services on standby alert. I have a national broadcast this afternoon. I have fourteen planeloads of people asking permission, right now, to take off and fly south.”

“Fly south? What for?”

“God knows. I guess for the fun of it. They’re thrill seekers who see themselves as daredevils, on the way to Tierra del Fuego for a big whoop-de-doo storm party. I’m in a tricky position. On one hand, I’m supposed to make sure there’s no panic, and to do that I have to minimize talk of danger. On the other hand, I don’t want even lunatics to head south if they’re likely to kill themselves. I need to know what to tell them, and everybody else. That’s why I called you. I wasn’t just being sociable.”

“I can see that.” His face was serious, the heavy brow furrowed in thought. “Celine, me and Star can’t tell you what’s going to happen today, and we shouldn’t be telling you what to do. But let me say this for starters: Every single thing we’ve ever assumed about the Alpha Centauri supernova turned out later to be wrong.”

He paused, for so long that Celine in her caffeine high wriggled in impatience. She wanted instant answers. Except that thirty years of experience had taught her that Wilmer wouldn’t be hurried.

“We talk as though we know a lot about supernovas,” he continued at last. “We don’t. They are extremely rare events. You have only one or two a century in a typical galaxy, and most of them take place so far away that they give us little information. Did you know that there hasn’t been a naked-eye supernova since the invention of the telescope? That’s four and a half centuries. When scientists tell you we understand supernovas, they mean something very specific and very limited. What we should say is that we have been able, through computer models, to show how certain kinds of stars and stellar systems can produce the enormous energy release that characterizes a supernova. That doesn’t mean no other type of star can possibly explode, or that some other supernova-creating mechanism can’t exist. The limits we assign to Nature sometimes define our own lack of imagination.

“Alpha C is a great example. Before 2026, every astrophysicist — including me — would have told you it couldn’t happen. Wrong type of binary system, no dwarf component, no supermassive star. But it happened. After that, no one predicted the gamma pulse would come along and wipe out all our microcircuits. It did. After the gamma pulse, we still didn’t learn. The fact that the burst was aimed directly at the solar system was dismissed as an ’accident of geometry.’ ”

“But you predicted the particle storm,” Celine objected. “Twenty-seven years ago, you told me it would happen.”

“I did. That was in the pre-supernova theories. And based on those theories we started to build the space shield. Then we were surprised again by an observational result, that the particles come grouped in trillion-component lumps instead of singly. The old shield was useless at stopping bundles. So we had to come up quick with a new shield idea. This one still assumed what everyone ’knew,’ that the strength of the particle storm would weaken over distance as it traveled farther away from the supernova. Now we find that the beam is converging as it approaches Sol. That means greater particle densities, and the new shield will be inadequate. I don’t know what Ben Mertok and the others are telling you, but if everybody’s track record — including mine — is anything to go by, whatever you are being told is going to prove wrong.”

“Marvelous. Wilmer, you can sit back and say you have no idea what will happen. I’m not allowed that luxury. I have to say something to the media this afternoon, whether I turn out to be right, wrong, or ridiculous. You sound as though you haven’t even been thinking about that.”

“I have. I’ll bet good money that we’ll see surprises this afternoon — only I can’t say what. Otherwise they wouldn’t be surprises. But I doubt they’ll be too awful. And today’s not what I’ve been thinking about most. Today might be messy, in ways I can’t begin to suggest, but I’m sure we’ll pull through. Our concern has to be with three weeks from now.”

“Three weeks?” Celine wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “Three weeks, when the main storm hits. You’re worried about more surprises?”

“I don’t need more surprises to make me worry. The things we already think we know are enough for that. Did you see the figures for peak energy input when the big storm arrives? That’s going to be the Fist of God.”

“The only summary I’ve seen is based on your and Star’s calculations. You said that the energy hitting us will be thirty times as much as we thought before. But the maximum impact will last only a few days, and thirty doesn’t sound too bad. I figure we can live through that.”

“You don’t mean figure. You mean you hope.” Wilmer turned to Star, seated next to him and so far silent. “You tell her.”

Star nodded amiably at Celine. She was holding a shiny metal canister about the size of a beer can. “See what he does? Puts me on ter give you the bad news. No worries, you think. But I got new data, and things don’t look good. D’yer know what cooperative phenomena are?”

“Assume I don’t. Tell me.”

“It’s when a lot of little things hook up together, ter produce effects yer wouldn’t expect from one of them. This here” — she held up the metal cylinder — “has a few thousand particle bundles in it. We collected ’em over the past day or two during the first slow rise in particle flux. Caught ’em in flight, slowed ’em down in a synchrotron, held ’em in using an electromagnetic field once they were down to thermal velocities. They’re fascinating little buggers. For starters, they’re stable as hell. We put individual bundles in the middle of a fusion plasma with an effective temperature of fifteen million degrees, and they hold together… When you get a lot of bundles, they exhibit a group attractive force — opposite ter what you’d expect, ’cause they’re all positively charged. That makes ’em converge as they travel through open space, an’ they’re doing it now. The only thing they can’t stand is neutral atoms — which is what they’ll find when they hit Earth. They lose their charge and fall apart. Trouble is, they don’t go quiet. A disintegrating bundle gives off loads of energy.”

“How much is a load?”

“About twenty times their free-space kinetic energy. I used ter say that each bundle hits as hard as a small bullet. Now I’d say it’s like an explosive bullet.”

“Not thirty times as much energy as we thought, but six hundred?”

“Yerss. An’ there’s an outside chance of worse news. D’you know what homeostasis is?”

“I used to, before I rotted my brain with politics.” Celine thought for a moment. “It’s a feedback effect, one that gives a system the tendency to return to its original state when it’s perturbed away from it.”

“Yer got it. An’ Earth’s one big homeostatic system. Dump in more energy, and when you stop doing that the temperatures and pressures and all the biosphere tend ter go back ter the original states. That’s how come the Sun could increase its energy output thirty percent over the past couple of billion years, like it did, but surface temperatures hardly shifted in all that time.

“But there’s limits. Hit Earth hard enough and quick enough, an’ homeostasis could fail. Yer might go to a steady state all right, but mebbe it’s not the one you started from. An’ that’s the way it looks to me sometimes, when I run the numbers for the big particle storm.”

“You mean Earth will be different forever after the main storm. Can you tell me how different?”

“Nah. I can’t tell, and nobody else can neither. We’re probably all right, but yer got some scary possibil’ties. One run I looked at has end-point oxygen at three percent — all right for plants, mebbe, but a bugger for animals. Another has global end-point temperature at forty-two Celsius. Blood heat for humans is thirty-seven Celsius. We’d all be goners.”

Celine looked at Wilmer. “That sounds like the end of the world to me. But you said it wouldn’t happen.”

“I said it wouldn’t happen today. We’ll come through today just fine. I’m talking weeks from now, and it’s all still speculation and theory. We might be wrong again. In fact, based on recent past experience, we will be. Victims of our theories, we are, like everybody else. Me and Star have some even newer ideas based on the bundles she caught, but it’s too soon to talk about them.”

“So what will happen today? What do I tell people?”

“If it were me, I’d follow what Ben Mertok said to do. You tell everybody that we’ll be all right. I think we will be, and there’s no point saying different. But I’d make damn sure there’s no planes in the air or space launches scheduled between three and four o’clock. And I’d freeze ground transportation. People talk about zero hour coming at three-fifteen as though that’s a single moment of time, but the blip has width. We’ll be at fifty percent particle flux seven minutes before we hit peak maximum.”

Celine nodded. She heard Wilmer, but already her mind was running ahead to another problem. What should the public know, and when? “About this possible change away from planetary homeostasis. I know science is an open field, and scientists hate any suggestion of secrecy. But could you avoid telling anyone else about Earth’s becoming uninhabitable?”

Wilmer and Star looked at each other. “It’s only a possibility,” Wilmer said weakly.

Scientific scruples. “We don’t even want a possibility, Wilmer. Not until we can decide on policy.”

Star was shaking her head. “Yer don’t get it, mam.” Her wide mouth turned down. “We can’t not talk ter nobody — because we already done it.”

“Damnation. Who?”

“John Hyslop, an’ Maddy Wheatstone.”

“What did they say?”

“They asked us not ter tell anybody. Same as you did. But we have.”

“That’s all right.” Politics was the art of the practical. “If they know, they know. It sounds as though they won’t talk about it. Anyone else?”

“No, mam.”

“Good. Then please keep it like that. Let’s survive today, then we’ll worry about tomorrow. Maybe by then you’ll have a new theory.” One that doesn’t sound so hopeless.

“Maybe we will.” Wilmer raised his cup and took a long, satisfied swallow. “I doubt if we’ll think much more about theories today. It’s going to be too interesting, just watching what happens. And if Mertok or anybody tells you they know what things will be like at three this afternoon, tell ’em they’re full of it.”

So much for breakfast reassurance. It’s not the end of the world today — we still have weeks to go. Whatever she did, she was not going to say that to the American people.

Don’t look up. Behave normally. Smile. Celine stood on the back lawn of the White House, very aware that in a couple of minutes she would be on national and international television. Three-oh-six in the afternoon, local time. A slightly overcast day of late summer, broken clouds a change after the year’s near-interminable rains. Temperature, eighty-six degrees. Low humidity. Light breeze from the northwest. Time to zero hour: nine minutes.

The urge to look up, even when you supposedly knew better, was close to irresistible.

Celine vowed she wouldn’t do that during the broadcast, but in the same moment she caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She cursed under her breath. A media skycar was cruising north, about three hundred feet above the Mall. So much for day-long warnings to be on the surface — or better still, beneath it — when zero hour arrived.

“Tell security to get those idiots down,” she snarled into her mike — and hoped that it was not yet connected to the network.

In spite of their assurances that nothing disastrous would happen in this part of the world, her staff had urged Celine to make her broadcast from one of the deep basement levels. She had refused. When all citizens could not hide away, she said, then she should not. She did not admit to a certain insatiable curiosity. Her decision meant the staff could not hide away, either. She could see Benedict Mertok eyeing her reproachfully, beyond the range of the cameras.

“Twenty seconds,” said a voice in her ear. “Counting down . . .”

Celine could follow the digital readout on the left-hand camera. Three-oh-eight. On cue, she smiled into the cameras. “My fellow Americans. You do not need me to tell you that these are difficult times. In just a few minutes, a rain of high-energy particles generated by the Alpha Centauri supernova will strike our world. Fortunately for this country, the main effects will be felt far from here, in a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean.”

She planned to talk right up to and through zero hour, her voice and image making it clear that this was a crisis survived, although at some possible cost.

“We are taking every possible precaution. Our scientific experts suggest that there could be another electrical surge, like the one that destroyed all Earth’s microcircuits twenty-seven years ago. This time we are prepared. All vital communications have a microwave and fiber-optic backup. Emergency personnel are in place at every population center in every state. We have ample supplies of food and water and reserve power. All ground transportation is halted until the storm is over. All aircraft flights have been suspended until we give an all-clear.”

But I allowed fourteen planes full of nutcases to fly to Tierra del Fuego. I couldn’t stop them and still tell people that things are fine and everything is under control.

Three-eleven.

The storm was well over fifty percent intensity, moving fast toward its maximum. Far to the south, bundles of high-energy charged particles were smashing into the upper atmosphere, stripping electrons from neutral atoms of nitrogen and oxygen. The bundles moved so fast that they were hardly slowed by each impact, but according to Star it was an open question when the collisions would fragment the bundles into individual nuclei. No one could do more than guess the strength of the bundle binding forces in the presence of numerous free electrons. In any event, most of the bundles and their daughter particles would make it all the way down to the surface, each one accompanied by a flood of secondary particles and shortwave radiation.

Three-twelve.

Celine glanced quickly south. The Sun was peeping through high, broken clouds. Was it her imagination, or did the day seem a little dimmer?

“Although the new space shield was unfortunately not ready to deal with this first event, I have good news concerning the bigger storm that will strike us three weeks from now. Progress on our space facilities has been faster than expected, and I am told that the new shield will reach operational test status within ten days. The shield will be fully tested well before the next particle storm, ready and waiting to divert the danger. Not all particle bundles can be handled like this, but our own preparations continue, on the surface and beneath it. I have every confidence that we will deal successfully with the effects of any bundles that evade the shield.”

The truth, but not the whole truth? How much truth was too much for the general population? You didn’t want widespread panic and talk of Armageddon. What was the truth? Mertok and the other science advisors this morning hadn’t agreed at all with Wilmer and Star. Yes, Mertok said, more particle bundles would indeed get through the shield than originally expected. But the bulk of them would be deflected, and Earth would easily survive whatever was not. And any talk of runaway changes to a new steady-state Earth unrecognizably different from today’s was nonsense.

Whom did you believe? She had heard from more than a dozen “experts.” The trouble was, Wilmer had a terrible habit of being right.

Celine could read the clock while still looking straight into the camera. Three-fifteen. Zero hour.

Keep talking. From now on it’s an easy roll.

“As for today’s events, even as I speak the particle storm hitting the Southern Hemisphere has passed its peak. I feel sure that most of you, like me, have been completely unaware of its presence, and in another hour this first storm will be over and done with. We can go on with our normal everyday affairs and begin to prepare for the next challenge.”

In the split second that it took to speak the word challenge the world suddenly became darker — much darker. Celine could no longer tell herself that the gloom was nothing more than the movement of the Sun behind a passing cloud.

In spite of herself, she looked away from the cameras and up into the afternoon sky. It was like no sky that she had ever seen. On the background of pale blue overcast ran hundreds of parallel dark streaks, so regular that they might have been drawn with a straight edge. They were everywhere, crossing the face of the Sun itself, dimming its brilliance and turning its warm circle into a ruled grating. As she watched, a new set of lines appeared, gridding the sky from north to south with another pattern of fine dark contrails. Afternoon had vanished. The White House lawn sat in the eerie half dark of a total solar eclipse.

There were cuss words that you could think but not say on a national broadcast. Celine breathed deeply and said, “Here in Washington we are experiencing an unusual atmospheric effect. It is presumably due to the particle storm. It will probably not last more than a few minutes, but I recommend that we all move indoors until this is over.”

She forced a smile, turned, and walked steadily toward the stone path leading to the White House. When she was safely off camera she ripped away her cordless lapel mike, dropped it to the floor, and stamped it flat.

“Mertok! What the fuck is going on here?”

“It’s all right, Madam President.” He was hurrying to her side. “When the particle bundles hit the upper atmosphere they strip off free electrons. They follow Earth’s magnetic lines of force, and they move fast. We knew this would happen. But there’s some sort of group phenomenon that produces visible lines, and we didn’t expect that. It is undoubtedly related to the size of the charged particle bundles. But I think that people have nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry about? I’m supposed to tell people they have nothing to worry about — when the Sun is going out in the goddamned sky? Mertok, when should I tell people to worry?”

“Madam President.” He flapped a well-manicured hand toward the heavens. “See for yourself. It is already starting to fade.”

Celine looked up. He was right. The lines were less pronounced. But the sky behind the dark streaks was no longer blue. It shimmered pink and gold and pale mauve. The sun was brighter, and had a greenish tinge.

She glared at Mertok — his face was an unnatural greenish yellow. “And this?”

“Electrical discharge effects from free electrons. Like an aurora, but much more powerful — that’s why we can see it even in daylight, although of course the Sun is dimmed, too.” He was staring up, not looking at Celine at all. “How very interesting. I wonder how long it will last.”

Celine glared at him. He didn’t notice. Of course he didn’t notice. She had never realized it before, because Ben Mertok wore a veneer of political sophistication. But when you came right down to it, he and Wilmer and Star and the rest of the science advisors were the same under the skin.

They were all crazy. Show them a new scientific phenomenon, and the fact that the world might be ending became of minor importance.

Celine gestured to the crew to bring her a new microphone. She must continue her broadcast, reassuring anyone who had not run for cover that things were rapidly returning to normal.

Saying what?

Yes, sure, the world may be going to end. But we don’t want to talk about that, because it’s weeks away. And if Maddy Wheatstone is right, some people on Earth have been trying to make things worse, rather than better, by screwing up shield development. But for now things are just peachy. Why don’t we all go home and relax?