Flare
Page 21
He is heading for home.
Glitch
Gamble
Twitch
Drop
Aboard Hyperion, March 22, 2:04 UT
Strapped into his observation and control bubble—and heedless of the possible exposure now—Dr. Hannibal Freede watched the counters on his board twitch and tumble with the surges of random current expelled from the swarm of highly energized ions that had engulfed his ship. The particles' transient magnetic fields sent crazy voltages buzzing through Hyperion's metal skin, crashing into any of her extended electronic circuits, and surging in the atom-wide pathways of her nanochips.
One by one, the pattern of resets and burnouts closed down her higher level systems. The disruption left running only those which operated by mechanical feedbacks, such as the flow of air across precipitator screens and oxygenation biofilters, the polarization of his bubble, or the trickle of coolant through the ship's hull and into the heat exchangers.
Freede could only hope that the ram engine, which itself established a massive magnetic field, would dominate in the interplay of electrical forces at the ship's core and hold stable the configuration he had built and nursed over the past seven hours. Then he could hope Hyperion would continue thrusting on his chosen course and ignore the gnat-bites of the invisible magnetic cloud through which she was now traveling.
Lacking any more sophisticated controls in this magnetic storm, Freede was reduced to visually comparing the position of the sun's face in his observation dome with its place a moment before the ion cloud struck. If the disk continued hanging in that lower right quadrant and didn't move past the gland-seam bisecting his bubble, then he figured Hyperion was holding steady on her course.
This was literally navigating by the seat of his pants—but it was the best he could do until the storm passed and some measure of control and coordination returned to his board.
"Han! Something ver-Pop! strange is happe-Zing! here. All the electrics, the emergency medical Yowl!—"
He thumbed the intercom. “Just hang on, Gyeli. Try to find an insulated place and don't touch anything that's sparking. We'll be in this disturbance for about half an hour."
"Are you Crackle! up there?"
"I'm fine! You just stay where you are!"
The sun's disk remained constant in that lower quadrant, and Freede began to think they were safe.
Then slowly at first, seeming inexorably, and finally with increasing speed, the white circle shifted. Freede's fingers leapt to his keyboard, trying to instruct the ramjet's computer. The keys sputtered as he touched them, and a sizzling blue glare winked beneath the tiles.
Nothing worked.
The face of the sun moved higher, centering itself in the dome over his head, aligning itself directly with the ship's thrust.
Dr. Hannibal Freede watched the object of his years of study rush down on top of him. He knew it would be many hours, probably even days, before the increasing heat overcame the cooling gel in Hyperion's skin, before her framework of duralumin, steel, and titanium structure passed their design tolerances and crumpled like a wad of paper in a furnace flame. But those things would surely happen now.
He had failed in getting his beautiful wife and his record of observations safely home. And he did not quite know how to tell her.
Freede thumbed the button on his intercom. It neither sparked nor squawked at him, indicating that the worst of the ion storm had already passed. Yet the ram's magnetic fields still did not correct themselves.
He brought the microphone to his lips. "Gyeli… I want you to know that I do love you…"
Grind
Splinter
Shiver
Grit
The constricting channel around the plasmote vibrates and pulses with the howling stream of gas that his dive is force-feeding into it. He strengthens the magnetic field again and again, trying to hold it together. The temperature and pressure rise to heady levels, invigorating him with life and hope, as this curious curve in the time-space continuum rides its wave of compressed ions through the corona.
In many ways, this pinched space reminds him of the screaming flux inside the gas prominence, where his whole adventure began on the quick edge of the typhoon.
After a short span of time—as the plasmote measures it—the howling in the channel peaks and then begins to recede for reasons he cannot fathom. As it fades, the gas flow pelts him with strange objects, much bigger than protons, far more massive than whole atoms. These chunks of raw matter pass through his plasma envelope as dark blots, all but invisible in the glow of life and energy surrounding him. He has no name for these strange manifestations. Because they do not seem to cause him damage or pain, he does not pause to create a name for them.
In time the pelting stops, and then so does the constriction. The curved space he is binding with his magnetic field vanishes like a dream in daylight. The compressed bulge of solar wind expands around him like a bubble and soundlessly pops.
The plasmote drifts forward, still carrying the inertia of his recent passage. For an instant he fears that he might die out here in the corona, then he senses the natural warmth, the cherishing pressure. He is passing down through the inner layers of the chromosphere. Ahead of him blazes the visible spectrum of the photosphere. He can discern the rising hump of a convection cell, surrounded by the cooler interstices of a downdraft.
He slips sideways into the luminous granule and pushes out his veiled membranes to slow the inertial rush. With a little experimentation, he finds his own level, adjusts his voice to the booming sea around him, and begins calling for others of his kind. He is eager to converse with them and tell them of his remarkable experiences.
Despite the most improbable of odds, the plasmote has finally come home.
Chapter 19
Ionizing Radiation
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
Tranquility Shores, Luna Colony, March 22, 1:47 UT
The door panel to Gina Tochman's sleeping cubicle sounded like a percussion board set on full whang, rich with subsonics but overlaid by the tweeting screech of glass fibers grinding together in brittle polymer resins.
"All right!" she said groggily. "I'm up already!"
Tochman slid her legs out from beneath the bedcovers and poked around for her robe. Not finding it, she tugged the sheet loose at the bottom corners and wrapped it around herself.
Boom-boom!
"Enough, will you? I'll be there in a second."
Gina stumbled barefoot across the clothes-littered floor, just one and a half paces to the door. She unworked the latch and pulled it back.
Out in the corridor were her supervisor, Harry Rajee, and a white-uniformed nurse from the dispensary whose badge shaped a name something like "Toliver." Rajee was poised against the far wall, head down, left wrist clenched in his right fist, his left elbow forward—about to hurl himself against her door.
"Hold it, Harry!" She smiled. "You'll hurt yourself that way."
"Gina! We couldn't wake you, and I was sure—"
"I wake up real fast when people come pounding on my door like this. What's the problem? Why didn't you just signal me?"
"But we did!" Rajee leaned into her darkened cubicle and gestured toward the phone. Its screen was showing a red-and-white bull's-eye that strobed in and out. Even competing with the corridor lights now, it was bright enough to cast shadows inside the room. For the first five minutes of contact, she knew, this pattern would have been joined by an angry buzzing—which she obviously had slept right through.
"Sorry, Harry. It must have been all the excitement today—um, yesterday."
"Well, there is more. They want you in the dispensary."
"I'll check in first thing in the morning. On my shift," Gina added with a twinkle.
"They want you right now." His face was dead serious, and so was the nurse's.
"Why?"
"It seems there has been—"
"All right," Rajee said reluctantly. "Gina, just go. It's very important."
"Can I stop even to get dressed?"
"I'll wait for her," the nurse volunteered.
"No need," Gina said. "I know my way."
"You don't understand," the man said. "Doctor's orders."
When Tochman had pulled on an indoor jumper and slippers, the man was still outside in the corridor, leaning against the wall. "Let's go then," she said, passing by him and keeping up the pace.
"You don't want to give me a little hint?" Gina asked after a bit, looking back over her shoulder.
"No, really—it's worth my job, ma'am."
"All right."
Down one hallway and up the next, around a corner, and the noise of many voices came to her like the babble of a river sounding through the trees.
"What's this—too late—I don't—never heard—some resort—damned silly—proper way—this hour."
Halfway down the corridor, about where Tochman knew the dispensary to be, a knot of people jammed into a doorway and hung out into the hall. As she and the nurse approached, Gina recognized several of Tranquility Shores' guests. Coming closer, she realized that they were all guests, no staff. And as she mingled with the fringes at the door, she sensed they were all from her Moon Walk tour the day before.
"What's going on here?" She turned to Oliva.
"Dr. Harper will explain," he replied, pointing her through the blocked door then walking away.
"Hey! Where are you going?"
"Three more to round up," he said, over his shoulder.
Gina turned back to her guests, who had stopped babbling and stared at her with a mixture of anger and fear.
"Excuse me, folks." She gently inserted herself through the crowd.
"What's going on here, Miss Tochman?" asked Mr. Carlin, the man who had gotten lost when the radios broke down. "They pulled me out of bed like some kind of Gestapo squad."
"Yeah, me too!" said Miss Gladvale, the woman with the dysfunctional camera.
"I'm going to find out," Gina assured them. "Dr. Harper is a good man, and he never does things without a solid reason. Let me talk to him, and we'll all know soon enough."
Tochman worked her way through the small, packed waiting room. Sure enough, everyone here was both a guest and a Moon Walker. At the receptionist's window, she found Jo Hamoud, the day-shift regular.
"Everybody's out in force," Gina said. "What gives, Jo?"
The woman glanced around behind her, tipped her head sideways at Tochman, and made a decision. "Harper got something from Admin about twenty minutes ago. Then he launched a max scramble."
"A medical emergency? But none of these people look like they're burned or bleeding. I don't—"
Hamoud turned back into the office again. "I'm not supposed to talk about it. But, look, Harper did say he wants to see you first. You'd better go right in."
The woman released the doorlock, and the panel slid back. Gina walked through into the sharp, old-fashioned hospital scents of rubbing alcohol and Betadine swabs.
Harper, an ugly gnome of a man in a white cotton coat over a frayed plaid shirt, looked up from his desk. His rumpled look was accented by heavy, gray stubble on his chin and jowls. Without rising, he waved her to a seat.
"Evening, Gina. Or morning, rather. How's that arm of yours?"
She had broken her forearm six weeks ago in an argument with gravity. Her buggy had bogged down in a little pothole west of the complex, and she had to pull the wheel out herself. One of the troubles of working under one-sixth gee was that people, even old Moonhands like Gina Tochman, tended to forget the difference between weight and mass. Up here she could actually lift the flex-steel wheel, the axle it was attached to, and the levered dead weight of the buggy, which given the axle's mechanical advantage was about 440 kilograms under Earth gravity. The apparent 73 kilos of weight was still a hard budge for her, but all she had to do was swing the mass clear of the craterlet's lip and put it down. That was where the confusion bit her—because in lateral motion the buggy retained the full inertia of its nearly 900 kilos. In heaving it sideways, she had pressure-cracked her ulna. Tochman flexed the arm now, remembering the tingling current from the electric pads as Harper had stim-healed it.
“Just fine, Doctor. But you didn't call me in the middle of the night—nor all those guests out there, either—to chat about my arm, did you?"
Harper looked her straight in the eye. That was something she liked about the older man, his directness. "No, I didn't… I want to run a short physical on you. And on those other people, too. We'll take some blood, maybe grab a pinch of bone marrow, do some cell counts...."
"'Cell counts?' Sounds like you suspect an infection. Do we have some kind of plague in the complex? Something respiratory? From the Moon Walkers' air canisters, perhaps? Or—"
"Slow up, Gina—Damn it, I was afraid of this! It's nothing contagious, so we don't have to worry about that, at least. No, Admin had been wrapping up details on that radio interference this afternoon, yesterday afternoon, which took out most of our external systems, by the way. Everything that wasn't below ground or heavily shielded got fried. Anyway, somebody upstairs came across a report from the observatory staff at Copernicus. Seems their big radio dish had also lost its receiver head—burned out—and somebody over there was speculating it might have been a blast of high-energy gamma or x-rays. That's compatible with the damage we suffered here, by the way. They also reported some cosmic ray bombardments, high-energy particles following the radiation burst.
"To make a long story short, it's taken our deep-thinkers in Admin this many hours to remember that high doses of extreme ultraviolet aren't particularly good for the human body. Just the same, they stuck it in my E-mail for morning delivery. Jerks! A good thing I was up and prowling about and happened to empty the bin. Anyway, I think you and your tour group may have picked up a dose of ionizing radiation."
Gina felt a rubbery wave pass under her diaphragm. "How bad?"
"Can't say until we run these tests. The first symptoms are usually changes in blood chemistry and in the lymphatic system. We'll check your white cells, like I said. If they don't start falling off inside of seventy-two hours, you're probably all right."
"Radiation sickness." The words caught in her throat.
"That's right. The cell count's the most reliable detector, but I want you to tell me, also, if you feel persistent nausea, get the trots, or develop an unexplained rash or burn mark."
"I've read something about this. We can also look for hair loss, lesions of the mucous mem—"
"Not right away. White cells come first....But I do want you to come to me with anything unusual."
"How much are you going to tell them?" Tochman nodded her head toward the waiting room.
"Not nearly as much as I'm telling you. Admin wants me to jolly those folks along. I am absolutely forbidden to mention the word 'radiation.' The brass wants I should make this seem like a routine precaution."
"Something you'd wake them at two in the morning for?" she smiled.
"Time is of the essence, Gina, and I have to get a baseline cell count on all of them."
"I understand."
"But what can I tell these people for a cover story? Some precautionary measure that won't cause alarm or invoke a lawsuit. You mentioned the air canisters—can we say we found some contaminant in the air supply? Some mutating mold perhaps? Or maybe a form of Legionnaires' disease?"
"And you think that won't bring on a suit for criminal negligence, Doctor?"
"Well… you may be right."
"Why not tell them the truth?" she asked.
"Because I don't want to cause a panic. And Admin is worried about perceptions of the resort in the popular media. You know how these things can get out of hand. If the paying public st
arts thinking space travel and off-planet assignments—let alone vacations on the Moon—are too dangerous, it could cut revenues in half around here. We don't want that."
"But this energy blast wasn't an everyday thing," Tochman protested. "It was some astronomical glitch. An act of God. The lawyers upstairs have to see that. The Moon Walkers had to sign enough indemnities, didn't they? The legal department can easily defend the corporation against any suit brought on that basis. And isn't that what those guys're trained to do?"
"Of course they can fight it. But there's still that word—'radiation.' It's a scary thing, radiation poisoning, from whatever source."
"Yeah, tell me about it!"
"Now, now, my dear. You do have a chance, you know. The possibility exists that your pressure suit and thermal jumper provided enough layers to shield you against the radiation."
"Doctor, do you know what those suits are made of?" Gina wrinkled her brow at him. "Synthetic fibers, mostly. Some silicon wool. And a layer of aluminized film about one atom thick. I could probably wear it while taking one of your tomograph scans and still show off every bone and tissue in my body. We all might as well have been dancing around naked out there."
"That's really too bad."
"No shit, Harper," she said bitterly.
He pulled at his jaw. "Well, we'll know inside of seventy-two hours. Then, depending on just how sick you may be—"
"Isn't there something you can do before then?"
"Such as?"
"Well, I've read about ionizing radiation. It damages sensitive cells, like bone marrow and skin tissue and the E. coli bacteria in the intestines. What it doesn't destroy outright, it poisons by chemically breaking down organic molecules into new and usually toxic substances. It also damages the DNA in some tissues, and that's where you get tumors."