Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  Or maybe it was nothing at all.

  Snap!

  Gurgle!

  Hiss!

  Pop!

  JPL Institute, Caltech, Pasadena, California, March 7, 2081

  "Say again, Doctor!" Piero Mosca shouted into the microphone. "You're breaking up!"

  He was consciously overriding the last few syllables of Dr. Freede's transmission—but no matter. A burst of static from the sun's south pole had already gulped them down. The man's mouth worked in the scrambled image on the monitor screen, but nothing was coming through. Then his whole face dissolved into horizontal black lines.

  Sixteen minutes later—delayed coming and going by the lightspeed lag—the doctor's image faded in again as he boosted the gain on his end. Dr. Freede nodded into the video pickup and immediately began repeating himself. He now used clipped, supposedly garble-proof sentences.

  It almost worked this time.

  "I said, Po, that I Crack! something. Just as we Pop! the pole, but it was already up near the e-Squelch!. That's the far side now, of course, from your Crack! of view. Big God-Fizzle thing! Gone into the mists for me now, of course. We'll see it when the rotation brings Hiss-sss . If anything's still there. I hope it will be.

  "As to what it was, I'm Squelch! some visual images. Nothing much to look at, really. Just some kind of shadow, but quite wide. Or so it seemed from Hiss-sss. Maybe a penumbra. And maybe just a glitch in the Pop! With all the heat, you know.

  "At any rate, look for it Crack! the eastern limb. Latitude Squelch! degrees Boom! and about twelve degrees east of my current Grumble-umble when sighted. Possibly you'll get a read on this thing before I do."

  And that—what with the garbling and the time delays, except for hurried regards sent to his colleagues back on Earth, most of whom wouldn't return them anyway—was all Dr. Freede had time to say. End of the weekly transmission. And once-a-week was all the Earthly stationkeeping that the doctor's expedition could afford to fund.

  Putting the microphone down, Po Mosca studied the lines on the back of his hand, thinking. So the doctor had found something, hey? A shadowlike something, after all. But something just out of his visual reach.

  Of course, Mosca was prepared to believe in Dr. Freede—even when the digital images which the doctor sent, after Mosca's computer had reconstructed them, showed nothing definite. Probably the whatever-it-was had been blanketed under dropouts caused by the transmission static. Upon close inspection, however, using a hand glass to take him down to the resolvable limits of the bitmap, Po still detected only normal limb darkening.

  Mosca would certainly be looking, himself, when the far side of the sun came around to meet the Earth in the next two weeks. Po would take out his eight-inch Schmidt-to-Cassegrain, a relic of his childhood. He would fashion a solar filter for it from a piece of aluminized plastic sheeting, so the latent heat wouldn't pop the tube and warp the optics and so the focused sunlight wouldn't burn out his retinas. And then Po would be ready on—when was it? the twenty-first of March or shortly thereafter—to observe the smudge coming around some garbled number of degrees north or south of the equator. It shouldn't be too hard to find, if it was there at all.

  But what would that prove? With his puny telescope, Piero Mosca would at most have a debatable stain on a piece of rough-grained 35-millimeter film. Or a 1,280 by 1,024-pixel image, if he used his camera's chipback in the viewing. At the very best, he would own a conversation piece. At worst, a souvenir.

  And it mattered that Po should be able to get a good image. Not just to help Dr. Freede in his observations. It mattered a lot.

  Bink!

  Bink!

  Bink!

  Bink!

  Office of the Dean of Pure Sciences, Caltech, March 8, 2081

  Dean Albert Withers tapped his electric pencil on the gray glass of his desktop screen while he simulated deep concentration.

  Piero Mosca held a straight face. For a man whose job was more academician than scientist, and usually more politician than academician, Withers was appallingly bad at keeping his emotions under control. Especially his annoyance, or his distaste for an unpleasant request, or possibly it was just simple boredom he was feeling. But then, a man who routinely worked with budget requests, alumni petitions, policy committees, and faculty councils would expect to have to put up with a certain amount of tedium.

  Likely Withers didn't think little Piero Mosca was worth the effort of concealing his true feelings. Not from a second-year doctoral student who hadn't even filed his dissertation topic yet—although, given Mosca's field of study and his chosen mentor, anyone could guess what it was going to be. In that case, Po was probably lucky to have gotten a Saturday morning appointment with the dean at all.

  "No," Withers said at last, as if the decision were drawn from him reluctantly. "No, Mr. Mosca, I'm afraid the science faculty cannot approve your request."

  "If it's a matter of rescheduling other observations, sir," Po ventured, having used the time before this meeting to study the situation and lay his groundwork, "I'm sure I can arrange personally with the students whose work would be involved. There are only two. First, Iverson has her nebula survey—"

  "No, it's not the schedule that concerns me. If we thought your proposal had merit, then we could make the accommodation against less timely work. But, in this case, we cannot say that your suggested program of observations would have any scientific value."

  "But I have a preliminary sighting from Dr. Freede that indicates a—"

  "I should point out to you, young sir, that Dr. Hannibal Freede, with his half-baked opinions and volatile accusations, has not endeared himself to the scientific community, either at this or any other institution of higher learning."

  "I thought the scientific method guaranteed that the validity of an observer's findings had nothing to do with his personality or reputation," Po said quietly.

  "Now listen here…" Then Dean Withers did bother to control himself. "It saddens me, Piero, to see a young man of your obvious talents throw his career away on a fantasy. Forget the sun, my boy! It's a drearily predictable place. All it does is burn hydrogen, boil plasma, and expel photons. There's nothing new in that story. Nothing worth your study. Forget that fool Freede, too. He's just a crackbrain, wasting a fortune on that expedition of his. It wouldn't surprise me if his tenure were to come up for peer review next year."

  "He's found a sunspot."

  "He has? Or does he merely claim to have seen one?"

  "He sent me a digitized image," Po said, then added truthfully enough, "but magnetically induced radio noise—because his ship was over the south pole at the time of transmission—garbled his signal. It was impossible to reconstruct."

  "Humph!" Withers sniffed. "There you are. It's a garble, all right, and not just in the signal."

  Privately, Piero Mosca might admit that the dean was voicing some of his own strongest doubts. Dr. Freede's marginal sighting was a long way from conclusive. And the image he'd sent was next to useless. As for Withers' and the scientific establishment's scorn for Po's choice of solar astronomy as a field of study—well, that song had played in some of Mosca's worst night fears.

  Eighty years ago the sun's most active feature, the eleven-year cycle of sunspots, just seemed to wander away and die. When the last spot pair had faded from the solar disk in 1998, the then-flourishing community of solar astronomers totted up their sighting logs, drew their frequency curves, and eagerly awaited the start of the next cycle. It never came. For year after year, the sun shone with its same white face, granulated by convection turbulence and feathered with spicules. All trace of the star's renowned variability had disappeared. Gone were the cyclic fluctuations in energy output, the bare patches in the corona, the barking gaps in the solar wind, the blazing displays of solar flares—all features that the astronomers had long associated with sunspots. The sun had apparently settled down to behaving ljke a well-managed nuclear reactor. No surprises.

  There was consider
able evidence for previous lapses in the cycles. The first examination of the sun through a telescope, Galileo's crude observations in the early seventeenth century, did describe some spots. But there immediately followed a seventy-year period, from 1645 to 1715, in which almost none of them were detected.

  At the time, much of Europe was enduring a period of extreme cold that historians have called the Little Ice Age. During those years the Thames River froze in London, a phenomenon that was simply unknown from earlier centuries. It was an enigma—unless one considered the effects of a lowered output of solar energy, reflected in the lack of sunspots.

  Other periods of spotlessness have since been conjectured from their effects on climate, even when actual solar observations were not available. Scientists in the twentieth century computed many earlier and prolonged spot-free intervals statistically, by carbon-dating narrowly banded tree rings; the pinched rings indicated shortened growing seasons, changed weather patterns, cold spells. These tree records showed that decades and sometimes centuries of cooler than normal temperatures often passed on Earth. The prolonged absence of sunspots had its own technical name, Maunder Minimum, after the nineteenth-century British astronomer Walter Maunder.

  Clearly, the sun was now going through such a minimum period. At just over eighty years, it was comparable in length to the span recorded during the seventeenth century. But did that mean the current dip in the cycle was therefore about to end?

  That was the big question, wasn't it? In the previous decade or so, it had received halting debate in the scientific establishment. A few men and women in university faculties and research establishments, like Po's own JPL Institute, who had ignored the bland and friendly sun for several academic generations were beginning to speculate politely on its condition.

  Everyone could agree that the sunspot cycle was likely to end in the next five or ten or twenty years. Thirty at the outside was the general consensus. At that point, then, the sun might again become an object of respectable study. And, at that point, the scientists and engineers would probably begin evaluating what the renewed sunspot activity could mean for a spacefaring humanity that was now spreading itself across the solar system. It was good for an electronic journal article every couple of years.

  Then Dr. Freede had weighed into all this languid, genteel talk with a rude piece of news. His reinterpretation of magnetometer readings from the Telemachus probe, launched twelve years earlier under a cloud of funding recriminations, had convinced the doctor of a growing instability at the sun's magnetic poles. This reading, of course, was ambiguous to almost everyone else. In fact, to the few prominent astronomers who shared Dr. Freede's sense of intrigue, the twitches in the force lines became conclusive proof that sunspots were now incapable of developing, although no one presented a solid theoretical mechanism to support this bizarre conclusion.

  Rather than debate the point, Freede had chosen to gather new evidence by launching his own expedition. That would settle the matter, he thought, once and for all. From up close—just inside the orbit of Mercury—the doctor and his equipment would be in a position to detect even the tiniest fluctuations in the sun's energy output, radio voice, x-ray face, magnetic envelope, or in any other measurement that a tightly transiting platform might take. Such minutiae, Freede had reasoned, could reveal harbingers of the old solar variability.

  But that was a notion the quasi-governmental agencies and the major interworld corporations, for reasons of their own liability, preferred not to open up for consideration. So, when Freede first proposed his expedition, he was met with a stony vagueness. "What's the point of that, really?" the chairmen of the grant committees said with a shrug. "I mean, what will a solar-orbiting platform achieve that current monitoring from the Earth-Luna system doesn't already cover?"

  Freede had cited the fact that these current monitoring efforts totaled less than twenty physicists. None of them was working more than part-time, and most were involved with experiments to wring ever more kilowatts from photon flux in the visible-light band.

  The chairmen's response to that was just another shrug. Watching was watching, they said. If there was anything to see, the present crop of observers would see it. Request denied.

  When Freede went to his own colleagues in the astronomy faculties of the great universities, he had found another kind of ennui. "The sun," the scientists told him, "is not a popular subject. It's too healthy, too normal, too dull. Surely, the sunspot cycles had once been something worth studying. But those phenomena were adequately explained more than a century ago. There's nothing new to build your reputation on there."

  Freede then cried out that, by their own line of reasoning, the sun should necessarily be an object of immense theoretical interest. It was the only nearby example of a healthy star in its mature years, sitting squarely on the Main Sequence. Those objects that astronomers of the night-time sky chose to study were either freaks like the red giants and white dwarves, or burned-out cases like neutron stars, pulsars, novae, nebulae, and other energetic oddities. That outburst, however, rather quickly closed the door on further useful discussion.

  Still, it would all be a tempest in the technical journals if sunspots were not given to breeding solar flares the way blowflies bred maggots.

  During those eighty years of the Maunder Minimum humankind had settled, or at least staked out and claimed, most of the marginally habitable sites in the solar system. In the process, Earth's children had to launch and hand-build everything from Earth-orbiting platforms to cylinder communities; from ground bases on the Moon and Mars to torus colonies in the Outer Satellites of jupiter and Saturn; and all their supporting infrastructure for energy supply, atmospherics, transport, and communications. By now, everyone in the planetary economy had a financial interest in the health of those pioneering ventures, because the effort of shooting them into space had gobbled down vast sums of capital. The offworld entrepreneurs, working on the cusp and using other people's money, had entered into a huge balancing act—weighing rewards against risks—that made the art of aerial trapeze look steady and cautious by comparison.

  The initial cash had come from a complicated network of national trusts and corporate credits. The earliest translunar colonies had survived their inevitable catastrophes through a frail lacework of paid-up indemnities, acknowledged liabilities, and extended reparations. No one, in those early days, had taken the time or trouble to build exactly to code or to maintain the levels of redundancy in radiation shielding, life support and hibernation, or emergency communication channels that were recommended under the ESA/NASA/ JSA/Baikonur Combined Intrasystem Safety Regulations. Putting payload weight into orbit cost real money, and no one wanted to waste it on frills.

  Early on, the accountants and actuaries had ruled that insulating circuits and sensors, work stations and living quarters against unforeseen bursts of electromagnetic radiation from solar flares, when no one had seen a sunspot or a flare in thirty or forty years, was a species of frill. It was probably a safe bet, too—so long as the sun agreed to remain passive and smiling, the solar wind blew regularly, the energy output remained predictable, and the violent discharges of radiant and particle energy remained just a vague memory from the olden days of ham radio and copper telephone wires.

  By the year 2081, the offworld economy was now inhaling cashflows equal to the gross domestic product of South America on a daily basis. In return, it exhaled cargoes of rare earths and metals, extragravitational compounds, compressed pure gases, static energy products, deepspace observations, and hydroponically nurtured microfauna and macroflora exotica. This balanced economic arrangement would be threatened by collapse if solar flares were suddenly returned to the equation.

  Po was not naive. He understood that accountants always tried to delay the cost and limit the extent of any retrofits to an ongoing operation. That attitude went double for shielding and grounding that could be classified as "prevention against a possibility" and wouldn't provide a cent in immediately ca
lculable return.

  If Po Mosca or Dr. Hannibal Freede or even the prestigious JPL Institute were to present the evidence of a potential sunspot and argue, quite accurately, that every capital facility currently in use in the solar system was now suddenly vulnerable, that the structure exposed too much unshielded circuitry, too many uninsulated corridors and windows and observation bubbles, too many unshrouded sensors, and far too much soft human tissue to survive a solar flare's potential effects—then those same accountants would bury them all under a ton of legal paper.

  It was no wonder, then, that Dean Withers and the scientific community wanted to hang back and hope that the end of the current Maunder Minimum would somehow delay itself. All these people were like Italian farmers on the slopes of Vesuvius: while the mountain grumbled and smoked, they wanted to get in one or two more crops from their fields. Then they would think about moving on.

  "You'll have to admit, sir," Po said now, admittedly with great audacity, "that a huge number of human lives and practically our entire economic system hinge on the question of renewed sunspot activity."

  "I suppose you're talking about the greenhouse effect?" the dean replied, not at all impressed with the notion. "All that embarrassment about industrial waste gases and global warming. About how the sea level was one day going to rise and flood out the lowlands....That didn't come off, did it?"

  The obliqueness of his response startled Po. "Well, no, sir. But then, no one has correlated those theories with the fall-off in solar energy output. However, that wasn't my point. I was thinking of all the corners that were cut to make the space-pioneering effort possible. None of the infrastructure out there is shielded against the fluctuations of even a minimal solar flare."

  "And why do you want to rock that boat, Mr. Mosca? Do you think that you can become some sort of modern-day Jonah or Nader? Do you think that, by stirring people up and making them afraid again, you can gain some kind of academic notoriety for yourself? Do you think your Institute, or this university, is eager to set off a major panic through the idle speculations of Dr. Freede and his cult of graduate students?"