Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  Not to sweat—or so Fredrix could reassure himself after running the internal diagnostics and determining that the random energy had not burned out Whirligig's comm circuits or done other damage.

  But in all the excitement, he never thought to check his log of recent transmissions against the estimated lightspeed lag until their receipt, to see if any of them were likely to have been interrupted and to resend them if necessary.

  Comm Spec Wilbar Fredrix wasn't that fanatical about his job.

  Chapter 15

  Picking Up the Trail

  Focus

  Focus

  Foots

  Focus

  1919 Via Villa, Altadena, California, March 21, 9:49 a.m. PST

  Piero Mosca had decided that, before he absolutely had to proceed to his 10:05 seminar at the JPL Institute—it was called "Nebulas and Novas" and explained all about shockwave-induced stellar formation—he would go up to the roof of his apartment block and take one more look at Dr. Freede's sunspot.

  As he cranked down on the focus knob, a morning breeze from the San Gabriel Mountains fluttered the aluminized screen that was stretched over the objective end of his Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. The movement caused slight ripple distortions in the image and made the focusing harder.

  Suddenly, the dark blurs in his ocular leapt into focus, showing a pair of deep, ragged, black holes. They were each perhaps as wide as three degrees of arc, separated by more than twenty degrees across the sun's face, and fantastically linked by a larger pool of gray shading. This array was larger than any spot pair Mosca had ever heard of, dwarfing the photographs from the last century. This pair resembled those commonplace spots about as much as the crater Tycho resembled a heelprint in the sand.

  Po knew that the sunspots weren't really holes, but simply cool areas in the photosphere that failed to radiate the same frequencies of visible light which smoothed and obscured the rest of the solar atmosphere. For a long moment, however, he imagined he was looking down into a void, a pair of craters double-struck in that apparently glossy surface, as if blasted out by the impact of two unimaginably large and incredibly fast tumbling bodies.

  Then, as might happen with any monochrome outline etched on a surface that was seen in one dimension and which was nearly flat itself, the image did a flip-flop within his visual cortex. It exchanged the illusion of depth for one of height. Now the surrounding gray area, the penumbra, seemed to become a highlands, a broken terrain, rising to a pair of dark plateaus. The spot group appeared to be twin lakes of ink, swirling without pattern in his brain.

  The image flip-flopped again, and the ink became the breakthrough into an infinite tunnel. As Po watched, the shaft bored straight down into the core of the sun, revealing its dense, black heart.

  All of this Mosca could see with just his tiny reflector telescope, protected by a screen that cut out 99.999999 percent of the incoming light, reducing the incidental heat and luminosity to manageable dimensions and thereby saving his eyesight.

  Mosca wondered if the magnetic field linking the spot pair had picked up a prominence yet. That would be the usual pattern, as reported by the early astronomers back when the sun had been active with sunspot cycles. It would be difficult if not impossible for him to see the prominence at this angle, looking straight down onto its back as it stretched across the solar disk. Most prominences were wispy bridges of gas that radiated at extremely narrow band frequencies; prominences observable in white light were extremely rare. So, in the visible spectrum, most prominences showed only up along the limb, where they were exposed in profile. Those were also best seen when the sun's face, and so most of its glare, was covered by an eclipse.

  Of course, if Po were observing in the spectrum of hydrogen-alpha, he would have been able to see almost any prominence. That emission band would highlight the arch's superheated gases, which were energized by the loop's magnetic flux. Then the prominence would stand starkly visible against the cooler background of the photosphere. But since H-alpha filters were no longer available for his childhood scope and Po didn't know how to make one, and since Dean Withers had nixed Po's observing schedule with the Institute's telescopes, such sophisticated techniques were denied to him. Mosca was left to his own pitiful resources.

  Still, he would bet good money on a spot pair of this size having a prominence, and a gargantuan one at that! Maybe it would even collapse and flare for him. If it did, his telescope might, just might, pick out the spark in the visible spectrum.

  Watching like this, with his eye pressed too long to the ocular and dazzled by the roiled granulation of the photosphere, Po soon found he could observe anything he wanted or could imagine. Bright flashes, stark as a photographer's strobe, began to course back and forth between the spots. The black umbra turned blood-red against his retina and began to wink at him. Mosca took his head away from the eyepiece and rested his vision by looking off toward the mountains, which were crisply outlined against the blue sky.

  He was about to duck down for another glance, when his eye happened to catch the face of his watch. "The time!" he cried aloud. Po had only five minutes to get into his seminar. And it would look really bad if he was late, because he was the teacher, and he still had some visual aids to prepare.

  The old school rule required the class to wait a full fifteen seconds for a tenured or visiting professor, ten seconds for a simple doctorate. But no time at all for a lowly teaching assistant, which was all Mosca could claim to be.

  Without bothering to pack up his telescope, Po ran over to the roof entrance, thundered down the stairs, and banged through the door into his apartment. The terminal was all warmed up, at least. He pulled on the helmet, settled the electrodes back on his neural contact patch, yanked the goggles out to a comfortable distance in front of his eyes, and adjusted the boom microphone. Then he pulled on the wired gloves.

  In a blink he was standing in Room 1808, a vast chamber with black walls and high ceiling. It resembled nothing so much as an empty sound stage—from the era when movies were shot onto celluloid film from live actors. Thank Central Net, at least, for setting up this channel exactly the way he had ordered. Po might once have opted for a pool of invisible blackness, with an infinitely extensible boundary and with the normal one-gee acceleration countered to create a sense of freefall. But that would have been too strange, too real, for his students. Or right now, at this stage in their visualization and perception skills, anyway. Instead, he wanted exactly this air of make-believe, of artificial showmanship.

  Next, he added the visual aids.

  Mosca dialed into his directory in the Institute's main on-line storage array and retrieved the files he had been preparing. He routed these to Central Net, care of Room 1808, tagged for presentation in order and on his voice command.

  The first three-dimensional image automatically came up all around him: a miasma of chill vapor, similar to a "pea soup" fog from nineteenth-century London, straight out of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Like those fogs, the nebula that Po had generated for himself swirled in neutral colors, browns and grays, with now and then a sulfurous yellow or ferrous red winding its way past his head. He had even recreated the smells: the sickly stench of brimstone, the blood-tang of rust, the smoky peat of soft coal consumed in less than perfect combustion. Po stood—light-footed if not weightless, with the computer contact strip fooling his nervous system into believing he did not feel pressure against the soles of his feet—at the center of a slowly swirling gas nebula.

  Two effects added the last degree of realism. First, he had managed to get the light just right, diffuse and directionless, as if it came from multiple points of starlight outside the cloud. Later, when the subsidiary files clicked in, the knot of students standing around him would be approached by drifting spheres of internal luminosity, like lampposts looming in the fog. Second, he had added a measure of free-floating grit to the cloud, something even old London at its worst could not offer. Periodically these microparticles stung his cheek,
his neck, the backs of his hands, reminding him—and soon his students, too—that the primordial soup expelled from late-generation stars was not homogenized, that it had bite.

  While Mosca was touching up these special effects for his lecture, the first of his class members showed up. They had no door to knock on, pull open a crack, hesitate in the gap, then let Po wave them through; instead, they simply popped into view beside him as they plugged into the network. Two students, three… four.

  Mosca—or the image of him that was projected into their helmets, along with the fog—nodded as they assembled and shuffled themselves into a rough semicircle separated from him by a tacit space. This was the intellectual arena: students on one side, teacher on the other. Old-style classrooms characterized this separation with the uncommitted territory of the teacher's desk or the laboratory bench.

  Po checked his watch, and the network supplemented the physical device on his wrist with a readout from its own infallible clock. The time was going on twenty seconds after 10:05, but only four out of a class of thirty-two had so far materialized.

  "What gives?" he asked conversationally.

  Shrugs. Glances. "Dunno, Professor."

  This was really unsettling, because Mosca's classes were usually popular. The students appreciated his efforts at invention, trying to make the physics and chemistry of stellar formation come alive to all the senses. The Institute always had to turn away applicants for his seminars. The class on Wednesday had been a full house, with five non-students paying for the privilege of plugging in and auditing without credit. And now this… this rudeness.

  "Is anyone else coming?" Po asked with a grin, checking that it was now a full minute into his lecture time. If this was a sudden strike—or a boycott called on account of some remark he'd made last time—then Mosca hoped somebody would have the decency to so inform him.

  Again, blank looks.

  He studied their faces, trying to keep his own neutral and smiling. Then it dawned on Po that these four, three women and one man, were all his locals. They were either physically enrolled with some faculty at Caltech or were picking up from one of the aerospace companies and laboratories that had developed in the area. The other missing twenty-eight were his out-of-towners, those who had telerolled with the university or were corresponding from institutions elsewhere in the country. Some of them were even plugging in from overseas, despite the time and language differences.

  "Well," Po said at a minute and thirty, "I had a really neat show laid on for you. It would be a shame if so many people had to miss it… Why don't we call class for today, and I'll reschedule for Monday? That suit everyone?"

  Three smiles and one worried frown.

  "Cheer up, Chalmers," he told the frown. "You don't have to go down to the lounge and talk to girls or anything. I'm sure you've got some heavy reading to catch up."

  While the three women chuckled at this, Mosca cut the circuit. He faded out of their view with his own grin still intact, like the Cheshire cat. But he could feel it slip while he sent his visual aids back to on-line storage and signed off on the channel representing Room 1808 as of two minutes from now—that would give his four students plenty of time to do a little gossip and then cut themselves out. Anyone plugging in after that time would be greeted with an insubstantial text notice saying that class had been canceled for the day.

  Before he took the helmet and gloves off, however, Mosca decided to make one more call, this time to the manager of Central Net.

  "Central, Peter Bell speaking," answered a bland young man, who was probably working the technical reception desk part-time while he studied for his degree.

  "Hello, Central," Po introduced himself, offering the man a nod but not affecting an electronic handshake or some other virtual greeting copied from the flesh-and-blood formalities. "I'm Po Mosca, from the Astrophysics Department at JPL. Look, I… ah… had something unusual happen just now. I normally teach a seminar at this time, in Room 1808, on nebulas and stellar formation —" Peter Bell scrunched up his mouth while Mosca rattled on, as if wondering why Po bothered to tell him all this. "And, anyway, I usually have more than thirty students plug in. But today there were only four, and I noticed they were all local people, so I was wondering if—"

  "Phones are out," Bell said. "All the long-distance beams. Only local calls are going through."

  "All of them?"

  "That's what I said, hey?"

  Mosca, who knew something about how stacked frequencies of voice and data communications were carried over distances of greater than a few dozen miles, did not understand how all of the meteor-trail pulses could be disrupted at one time. Not over the whole country. Not from halfway around the world.

  "That's just not possible," Po concluded.

  "Look, Professor. You asked, I answered. You don't like the answer, go tell it to your shrink. We're all busy here, even if you ain't." Bell cut him out of the circuit.

  Mosca stopped to think. He was still wearing the helmet and could feel the sweat gather across his forehead and begin dripping down past his temples. If it reached the contact strip back of his ear, he knew, the moisture was likely to cause a minor fault. But that didn't hurry his thoughts a bit.

  Something had blanketed the hemisphere—or at least a large part of it, according to the distribution of Po's students. And it affected transactions in the upper atmosphere —or at least that was the trouble Mosca knew about so far. So, what could that "something" be? And, by the way, the evidence indicated an effect originating outside the atmosphere. Offhand, he could think of a dozen natural causes, but only one that interested him directly.

  Po dialed the number of Sultana Carr, his colleague and another of Dr. Hannibal Freede's notorious disciples.

  "Carr here," the young doctorate in astronomy answered voice-only. Mosca tried to imagine why she would not be using visuals. Maybe she was in the bath?

  "Sulie, it's Po," Mosca replied, taking off the stuffy helmet. He held it so that the boom mike was in front of his face and the earpads, which he set to full gain, resonated inside the helmet's shell.

  "Ah, the faithful Po. Still watching the hole, are you?"

  "Have you had a look at it? It's getting bigger all the time."

  "Are you taking pictures?"

  "Well, not on any methodical basis. I thought the doctor—"

  "Yeah, he'll bring back twenty miles of tape. And we'll have to watch all of it, frame by frame, with him. I think I'll wait for the movie."

  "It's the hole I'm calling you about, Sulie." He took a breath. "I think it's flared."

  "What!" Carr's voice chirped at him an octave above her normal range. "Po—Po? Where are you? I can't see you!"

  "Ah, just a minute." He pulled the helmet down over his head again and readjusted the pickups.

  "Now, what's this about a flare?" she asked when he popped into her reality. Sulie was wearing a white terry-cloth robe and her feet were bare. Maybe she had been in the bathtub.

  "You know that the phone beams are out, don't you?"

  "I hadn't heard. How long ago?"

  Mosca bit his lip. "Well, I don't know… Not long, I guess, because we'd have heard an announcement or something. I only discovered it because just four people showed up for my 10:05, and when I called Central about that, they said the beams were out."

  "So you're thinking it's electromagnetic interference—a pulse, am I right?"

  "Yeah, a big one. Big enough to knock out my students from Boston College and Wailuku State University at the same time. Something that big's got to be E.T. And the obvious choice is a flare from that spot pair."

  "Of course, impeccable reasoning," Sulie replied, sitting down on the ottoman in front of her reading chair. She seemed unaware that her robe had parted, exposing a length of tanned leg above the knee. “Just one leetle problem, Herr Doktor. And that's that no one has seen or recorded any kind of flare phenomena in more than eighty years....How do you answer this charge, sir?"

  "No o
ne has seen a sunspot, either—until Dr. Freede reported one."

  "Unfounded. No one else has reported it."

  "No one else has been looking for it."

  "And Dr. Freede only called you—"

  "No one else was listening!"

  "And look how far you got when you tried to arrange with the dean's office for independent observations. No, Herr Doktor—" She shook her head. A damp strand of hair fell out of her bouffe and lay across her cheek. "I'm afraid your theory, impeccable as it may be, suffers from a lack of credibility. Which is usually fatal to any line of reasoning these days."

  "If you want to see a sunspot, Sulie, all you have to do is smoke a piece of glass, put it over your eyes, and tilt your head back. You can do it. Dean Withers can do it. Joe-in-the-Know from Alamo can do it. I'm not going to sit here and play Chicken Little when verification of the effect is so fucking easy!"

  "Hold on, Hoss!" Carr threw up her hands. "I'm on your side, remember? I've been three years without a grant and will never see tenure only because I referenced three of Freede's publications in my dissertation. I believe you."

  "So what do we do about it?"

  "Hmmm… that is a tough nut...."

  Mosca waited her out, content to watch how her eyebrows curved down in the center as she was thinking, and how her light gray eyes clouded to a slate color as the lashes shadowed them.

  "Well, then," she began again. "Let's take a triage approach. Is there any immediate danger that we should warn people about?"

  "Yes, of course. Dozens of cases. Anyone who needs to get out a critical phone call, just for starters, is going to be blanketed by the electromagnetic interference. At least on the planet's daylight side. And that will affect data as well as voice—so computer links and communications are going to be all over the floor on this hemisphere."