“No,” Wilmer said. “We absolutely had to come, as soon as we finished checking the calculations. Star’s theory says that one component of the particle flux released at the time of the supernova ought to be traveling a lot faster than the old theories predicted. So we have less time than we expected.”
Celine’s mind ran ahead, wondering about the rest of it. “When?”
“We’re not absolutely sure. We need the latest Sniffer data to determine accurate dates, and we don’t have it. Can you get that for us?”
“Yes. When will all this happen?”
“A big slug of particles could be here soon.”
“When?”
“Real soon. Months, maybe even weeks.” Wilmer leaned back and told Celine something she already knew better than he did. “Trouble is, the space shield you’re building can’t possibly be ready.”
Wilmer and Astarte added to Celine’s problems during dinner.
Meals were not optional events for Celine, even if the sky was falling. She had learned something during the disastrous return of the Mars expedition to Earth: Even when you were worried sick, even when you had zero appetite, even when you were so depressed that food felt like it stuck in your gullet, you had to eat.
First, though, Nick Lopez needed to know that the World Protection Federation — and the world — was in for bad news. Celine tried a quick call while Star went out to collect her and Wilmer’s luggage. The call turned out to be a wasted effort. On a planet where everyone could supposedly be reached at any time, Lopez did not answer. His whereabouts were stated as “unknown” by the staff of the World Protection Federation.
Celine didn’t believe that for a moment. They knew, but they weren’t telling. She left a message saying that she and Nick needed to talk on an urgent matter. After a moment she added the words highly sensitive. That ought to tickle Nick’s political curiosity.
As soon as Astarte had their luggage she would be conducted by the White House staff to the private dining room, where their meal should be waiting. As Celine and Wilmer headed that way she asked him how he had first heard of Astarte Vjansander.
“Out of the blue,” he said. “One day, five months ago, I got this package from the convent at Weipa, way up north on Albatross Bay.”
“You mean Star is a nun}”
“Gawdelpus, no. If Star’s a nun, Madame Curie ran a whorehouse. Star lived in the wild; she just used the convent as a mailing address and a place to beg free meals. Anyway, the envelope I received was full of pages of equations and drawings, all hand-written. I recognized the name Vjansander, it’s common in the territory, but I drew a blank with the name Astarte. At first I thought it had to be a man, because if a woman was given a name that sounded like ass and tarty put together, she’d change it soon as she could. Then during the tea break I found that Maria Greene and old Herbert Westerly had received copies of the same thing I had — all hand-written, must have taken ages. They’d looked at a few pages and found no sign of a proof for anything, so they’d chucked out the whole mess. I went back to my room, ready to follow their example, because there’s more nuts in the world than you can believe. It’s always the same old story: Einstein was wrong, Dirac didn’t understand what he was doing, Feynman was too simpleminded, Gottlieb missed the point. See, they always go after the big game in physics, and their own alternative ideas are always gibberish. It’s like Pauli says, most of the theories are so bad they’re not even wrong.”
They had reached the dining room and Astarte was not yet there. Celine walked over to the window and stared out at the night sky, looking to where Sky City would be, as Wilmer went on: “So I was all set to dump the papers into the trash. But I riffled through as I was ready to drop ’em, and I saw equations that I recognized at the bottom of a couple of the pages. One was the Klein-Nishina scattering formula, and the other was an old equation for something called an Emden polytrope, in an odd notation. That said we were in Eddington country. But the thing that struck me about what I was looking at wasn’t that those were new results — they were old, both of ’em — but that they were detailed. People with half-assed ideas always go grandiose, and they start by throwing overboard things like relativity or the conservation of energy. No sign of that here.
“So I glanced at a couple more pages and I saw variations on more things I recognized, like nucleosynthesis and stellar structure and stability. That’s when I cleared my desk, put my head down, and took a real good look.”
Celine could imagine what that meant. Wilmer had more sitzfleisch than a tired camel, more stamina than anyone in the world to sit in one place and worry at a problem while the seasons changed around him. He would remain at his desk forever, his high forehead with its heavy brow ridges scowling at nothing while his mind bludgeoned Nature into revealing its secrets.
“And I decided that whoever sent me the stuff wasn’t a nutcase at all,” Wilmer concluded. “Some of the ideas still seemed crazy, some I felt sure were dead wrong, a few I could see ways maybe to improve. But I knew I’d have to talk to the feller first and make sure I was reading him right. So I headed up-country to look for him. And I found Star. And I brought her back to the institute. I got her a staff position.”
A staff position, when there was precious little money for anything and none for theoretical physicists. Of course. As simple as that — if you were Wilmer Oldfield and you paid no attention to obstacles.
“She didn’t really live in the wild, did she?”
“She said she didn’t. I think she did, though, and I bet you would, too.” Wilmer turned away from the window and went to help himself to the stuffed celery sticks. “They do you well here,” he said with his mouth full. “Maybe it’s not all that bad being President. Anyway, Star had a little one-roomer at the edge of a wet-weather creek. Outside fireplace. No plumbing. No crapper. You want to take a dump, you do it out in the bush like the animals, and hope there’s no saltwater croc around to take a bite out of your arse. No electronics, of course, so no reference service or webwalks. Star had a couple dozen physics and astronomy books, all pre-Alpha C. She wouldn’t tell me where she got ’em — pinched ’em, for a guess — and a big slate board for writing down results. Not much used. She does analysis mostly in her head, like me. Saves on chalk.”
“So what was the big new idea she had?” Celine asked. “Even if it’s hard to understand, you have to be able to explain it to me. If I don’t get it, I guarantee that not many others around here will.”
“Best you ask Star about that.” Wilmer paused in his steady munching. “You give her a drink or two, get her loosened up, and she’ll talk. Do I hear her clogs out there? What’s she doing?”
The footsteps on the hard polished floor of the corridor had an odd cadence. They clopped forward half a dozen paces, paused for five seconds, advanced, and paused again.
“I think she’s looking at the pictures,” Celine said. “It’s a portrait gallery of the Presidents.” She suspected from Wilmer’s expression that he had walked along the same corridor three minutes earlier and never noticed the walls at all. She moved across to the side table and said as Star came in, “Here you are. How about a drink, then?”
“Yer better believe it.” Astarte was carrying a single bag. Like Wilmer, she apparently believed in traveling light — the travel bag was for both of them. She walked forward to the table, picked up a bottle of vodka, and sniffed at it. As she poured two tumblersful she said, “Lot of ugly old buggers out there in the hall. Yer the only woman, and the only one of the whole lot who looks halfway human.”
If you tried really hard, you could take that as a compliment. Celine pointed to the ice bucket as Astarte handed one of the tumblers to Wilmer. Star shook her head. “Dilutes the goodness out.” She raised her glass, took a big gulp, and breathed in deeply through her nose. “Not bad. Better than at the convent. Tastes a bit turpid, though. D’yer make it yerself?”
“In the basement,” Celine said, and saw Star’s accepting nod. An
other joke fallen down dead. She made a decision and poured herself a glass of chilled white wine. In politics it often helped to be the only one sober, but tonight was not politics.
Though what it was, Celine was not sure. Not the end of the world, but perhaps the beginning of the end?
“Come and sit. down.” She nodded at the server, and it began to rotate the loaded tureens slowly to each place.
Astarte brought her tumbler and the bottle with her, set them down in front of her, and watched the action of the server. “Smart little bugger,” she said after a while. The server was pausing only at places where someone was sitting. “How’s it know where we are?”
“Thermal sensor. Help yourself.”
“Yeah. We do it that way at the convent in Weipa. Only they got people to serve food for yer at Wilmer’s institute, so yer feel yer can’t take too much. How come yer don’t get served by people? Yer the President.”
“People talk more freely if there’s no one else listening.” Which was a totally bogus explanation, since Celine knew that the whole meeting was being recorded. “Just take what you want from any dish.”
“And you use a knife and fork, Star,” Wilmer added. “Same as at the institute. Or you’ll be in trouble.”
Astarte glared at him, but she nodded. She piled her plate high with meat and shrimp, ignoring all forms of vegetable. Wilmer took his turn and helped himself to a ton of everything. As he was doing so Astarte drained her glass and refilled it to the brim from the bottle of vodka.
“No worries.” Wilmer noticed Celine’s dubious look. “Star’s got a hollow leg. She’ll drink you and me under the table and then go back to work on her physics. How about a bit of chat from you, Star? I bring you all this way, and we don’t get a peep out of you. What’s Celine here going to think?”
“All right.” In spite of Wilmer’s warning Astarte was holding three large shrimp in her left hand and a juicy veal chop in her right. “What yer want me ter say?”
“It’s your theory, girl. Talk about it.”
“What about my food?”
“It can wait. We’re not going to pinch it.”
Celine added, “If you like, we can warm it for you later.”
“Oh, all right.” Astarte reluctantly put down the veal chop and the shrimp and wiped her hands on the sides of her sleeveless top. “A supernova’s — mmm — just one form of stellar — mmm — instability.”
“Chew and swallow first.” Wilmer turned to Celine. “I can’t take her anywhere. She does that all the time. You’d think she was a pelican the way she packs food into her mouth.”
Star grinned at Celine, a round-cheeked chipmunk smile, chewed, swallowed, and finally said, “He’s always on at me, but he’s all right otherwise. Let’s start with a question: When is a star unstable? Wilmer proved that yer can’t make Alpha Centauri go supernova if you work with the usual theories and continuous variables. But it did. Once you accept that, then yer have ter ask, can yer do it with discontinuous variables? Things that act like an impulse. You know what an impulse is, do you?”
“Assume I do.” Once, in the distant past, Celine had possessed a first-rate technical training. The question was, how much of it remained?
“There’s a few different ways to drive a star toward instability,” Astarte went on. “One is, you load on mass from outside until all of a sudden you have a collapse and an explosion. Another is you run out of raw material for fusion, an’ again you get a collapse an’ explosion. But those don’t work for Alpha Centauri; Wilmer proved that. So I asked myself, is there another way to cause instability, using some kind of impulsive events?
“Well, there is. Yer take a star — an’ it don’t have ter be the usual sort of star for a supernova. I mean, it don’t have to be a binary with one dwarf component, or a star many times as massive as the Sun. It can be any old star, could even be Sol. There’s something for yer to think about. So you take this star, an’ you apply a compressive pulse. A bit of a squeeze, and it don’t have to be a big squeeze, either. Yer can do it asymmetric, like on opposite poles, or you can make it work with radial squeezes, too, toward the center. Either way, yer can calculate the modes of oscillation.”
“You mean you can.”
“Yeah. Me and Wilmer.” Astarte picked up a shrimp, stared at it longingly, then put it down. “A star is stable because there’s a balance everywhere inside it between gravitational force inward and radiation pressure outward. So the star reacts ter the squeeze by contracting a bit, then the radiation pressure takes hold and pushes it back out. It overshoots a little bit, comes out a bit farther than it was ter start with, and oscillates. For some stars, like Cepheid variables, the wobble occurs naturally. But for most stars the oscillation will damp out — unless, just at the right moment, yer hit it again with another compressive pulse. And then you hit it again, and again, doing it each time at just the right moment. Then the oscillations don’t damp out at all. Yer get resonance.”
“Like soldiers,” Celine said, “marching over a bridge. They’re supposed to break step and not march together, otherwise the regular rhythm of their marching could hit the resonant frequency of the bridge and make it collapse.”
“I didn’t hear about that!” Star’s eyes widened with pleasure. “I love it. Have yer seen it happen?”
“No. Actually, I’m not sure it ever has. But people talk about it all the time as if it’s true.”
“Yer could do it. You’re the President, you’re in charge of the Army. Yer could take a whole bunch of troops, and a bridge, and tell ’em ter march over and not break step and see what happens.”
“Not if I want to stay President I couldn’t,” Celine said, and Wilmer added, “Star, unless I hear more astrophysics I’ll take that bottle away.”
“First yer tell me ter talk, and then when I’m talking you complain.” Astarte turned to Celine. “Anyway, an oscillating star’s not quite like troops walking over a bridge. It’s more like a pendulum, where if yer give it a bit of a nudge on each swing, the size of the swing gets bigger and bigger each time. But all of a sudden, instead of swinging back, the pendulum changes the way it moves.” Star made a complete revolution with her arm. “It goes right over the top and comes down on the other side. That’s what it does if it’s a pendulum. If it’s a star, it goes supernova. Like Alpha Centauri went supernova. Got it?”
“I think so.” Celine had been expecting something far more complicated, and this seemed remarkably clear and simple. “The star experiences a small impulsive force, applied regularly.”
“No.” Star scowled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have used the pendulum idea. Yer can’t hit a star with a regular squeeze, you have ter do it at intervals that vary with time, or it won’t work — and calculating the times gave us no end of trouble.”
“But the principle’s the same, isn’t it?” Celine was reluctant to abandon her nice mental picture. “I mean, instead of coming regularly, the squeezes come at certain calculated times. And if that goes on long enough, the whole star becomes unstable.”
“It does indeed,” Wilmer said, and Star added, “Becomes unstable, and explodes like a son of a bitch.”
“That makes perfect sense.” But Celine suspected that she was still missing something. “Why did you think I would find it hard to accept?”
“Not that part,” said Wilmer. “I felt sure you’d accept everything so far.”
“So what else is there?” Celine looked from Wilmer to Astarte, who had bent low over her plate, grabbed her veal chop in both hands, and was tearing a big piece off it with those crooked white teeth. “What haven’t you told me?”
Astarte stared at her silently over the lump of bloody meat and went on chewing steadily.
“We haven’t told you the part that’s hard to accept,” Wilmer said. “The oscillatory squeeze process that Star describes works perfectly. It allows us to reproduce every measurement that we’ve made since the beginning of the Alpha C supernova. But there’s something
we’ve not discussed.”
He deliberately waited, until Celine said, “What?” She had a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, as if her worry button had just been pressed.
“The agent. What is it that can impose such a systematic, exactly timed compressive pulse on a whole star?”
“You mean, what physical process can produce that effect?”
“I wish I meant that, but I don’t.” Wilmer seemed upset, and to Celine that was a bad sign. Wilmer never became uncomfortable when physics was the subject. “We’ve racked our brains, Star and me, trying to come up with a natural explanation for what happened. And we can’t. The timing-sequence of the impulses needed to make Alpha C go pop is so peculiar and improbable, I don’t see how it could possibly arise naturally. Something or somebody produced that sequence by design. Something made that star system go supernova.”
While Celine stared in disbelief, Astarte said, “Tell her the rest. About the gamma pulse and the particle storm.”
“Oh, yes.” Wilmer rubbed the bald patch on the top of his head — already red and inflamed from his previous attentions. “It turns out that the right sequence of impulsive compressions needed to provide a supernova is not radially symmetrical. Certain modes of oscillation must be excited, and that in turn gives preferred directions of emission for gamma rays and for the charged particle beam. Everyone always assumed that the fact that the gamma-ray beam was aimed to hit Earth, twenty-seven years ago, was a piece of pure bad luck.”
“Wasn’t it?” Celine was wondering if she could ever explain to anyone else what Wilmer and Astarte had been saying. Not one of her colleagues had any previous experience with Wilmer, or understood his brilliance and intellectual honesty.
“It wasn’t bad luck,” Wilmer said, and Astarte nodded firmly.
“Calculations show that it can’t be an accident,” she added. “Yer see, the Sun moves at thirty-two kilometers a second relative ter Alpha Centauri. Ter have a narrow gamma-ray beam intersect the position of Sol, twenty-seven years ago, and then ter have the main front of the particle storm hit Sol again, in its new position tens of billions of kilometers away — that’s off the scale on the probability charts.
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