Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  Something happening on Earth, then, had caused the disaster…

  "Dr. Jamison?" the voice of his secretary intruded inside his helmet

  "What is it, Linda?"

  "There are some people here to see you," she sounded uncertain about it. "They say they're from Caltech, the JPL Institute."

  "Well, patch them through."

  "You don't understand, sir. They're here, in my office."

  "Do you mean physically present?"

  "Standing in front of me, sir."

  "Did they say why they've come?"

  "Only that the long-distance beams were still down when they started out. It's something of a drive, getting here. The woman—a Dr. Carr, who's come with her assistant—says it's urgent they see you now."

  "Then, I guess, you'd—um—better send them in....But—um—give me a minute first, all right?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Jord Jamison took off the helmet and smoothed back his rumpled hair. He looked around the office and decided there was nothing he could do about the sloping piles of disks and periodicals on his desk, the books holding each other open and marking their places on the window sills, the plates and cups from a late lunch—from several lunches, in fact. Well, at least he could pick up the sheaves of printout that were stacked in the two straight-back chairs in front of his desk. He went around in front, gathered the papers awkwardly in his arms, then could find no place to put them. Finally he located a bare patch of floor, just behind the office door. Jord settled them there, pausing with his hands spread in case the fanfolds decided to avalanche. They didn't.

  Jamison straightened up.

  "Okay, Linda," he called. "Show these people in."

  Slap

  Slap

  Slap

  Bump!

  Office of Orbital Mechanics, 4:59 p.m.

  The toe of Sultana Carr's elegantly slender pump tapped against the thin, industrial-grade carpeting in Jord Jamison's outer office. On the final stroke, she shifted her foot and thumped it against the front of the secretary's desk. Kicked the desk, actually—or so Piero Mosca thought.

  "He's probably left for the day," Carr whispered angrily to Po. "And this woman is just stalling us."

  "Why would she do that?" he asked quietly.

  "Politics. Professional jealousy. Bureaucratic ineptitude."

  "You're in a bad way, Sulie."

  "You're right."

  Carr went back to tapping her foot.

  The woman across the desk blandly affected to have heard none of this exchange. She was perfectly cool, perfectly organized. Po himself was awed by the implications, that the man they were trying to see was so highly placed that NASA would actually assign him a human secretary instead of a personal intelligence. But, after all, in the scheme of things, orbital mechanics was a pretty important part of the space agency's business. And this man Jamison was responsible for the development and maintenance of all U.S.-licensed slots from six hundred kilometers right out to geosynchronous. No wonder he rated human-level assistance.

  "Dr. Jamison will see you now," the woman said pleasantly. "But please—keep your visit brief. We have some very important work going on here today."

  "I'm sure you do," Sulie said with a frosty smile as she rose, smoothed her skirt, and marched toward the inner door with Mosca in tow.

  The door opened on them, held by a plump man with thinning hair. By its color and the wattles under his chin, Po judged Jord Jamison to be in his early fifties. An important and elderly man.

  "Yes? Dr. Carr, is it?" he said, extending a hand. "I don't believe we've had the pleasure."

  "We haven't," she replied, giving him a perfunctory, up-and-down shake. "I'm Sultana Carr, from the JPL Institute, and this is my colleague, Mr. Mosca. You're secretary told us to be brief, and as it's near the end of your office hours, I'll get right to the point—"

  "Won't you come in?" The man extended his arm into a cramped and cluttered office, pointing the way to two conspicuously empty chairs. Still, he held the door at an awkward forty-five-degree angle, and Po wondered if something was blocking it from behind.

  For all his graciousness, this man Jamison was clearly flustered. Whether it was the overpowering presence of a beauty like Sultana, or the surprise of entertaining physical guests in his workplace, Mosca could not guess. Mostly the latter, he suspected. When Jamison presented himself to callers on the virtual reality network, his office was probably a meter or two larger in every dimension, the desk and shelves would be cleared off, their surfaces composed of some luscious oiled wood, the lighting brighter, and Jamison himself shown with more hair and fewer wrinkles. The imaging systems could do all that, Po knew.

  For himself, Mosca was just surprised to see that the man had walls and shelves. Po did all of his own work out of an intelligent nook in the library or off his home system, with all his references cataloged and shared in the databanks.

  Sulie and Po crowded through the stuck door while Jamison held it open. They walked two short paces forward and seated themselves in the chairs. Jamison edged himself around the desk and sat facing them.

  "It's such an unexpected pleasure to see guests here," he began.

  "We've come on very urgent business, Dr. Jamison," Sulie said, less frosty now. "It's important that you hear what we have to say and consider it well. You are the most highly placed Space Administration official we could locate within physical driving distance from Pasadena. So we've decided to start with you. And, if you are at all persuaded by our evidence, then you must contact your superiors in Washington and get them to act."

  "But you didn't call ahead?" he prompted.

  "Communications were still in a mess when we settled on this approach. Not just in California, Dr. Jamison, but phone beams all over the Western Hemisphere—and that's our first piece of evidence."

  "Evidence of what?" the man wrinkled his brows. "Look, I hardly have time for a game of twenty questions. It has not been widely broadcast, but we in Orbital Mechanics have a real crisis on our hands today. I thought for a moment that, being from the JPL, you had come to help with our analysis."

  "What's happened?" Mosca pushed in before Sulie could continue her painstaking revelations.

  "More than forty of our, or rather, this country's and other nations' platforms have undergone unscheduled reentries. They were pulled down from orbit as if something—and we are trying to determine just what exactly—had reached up and snagged them. If you bothered to look at the sky this morning, you probably saw at least some of them auger in. Now, whatever you've got for me, it had better be more important than that."

  Sulie looked sideways at Po.

  "Have you established any pattern for the reentries?" Mosca asked.

  "Only that the effect seems to have been limited to the platforms in lower orbits, what we privately call the 'Low Rent District.' These encompass the satellites of minimal-priority commercial enterprises and Second World industrial nations. That, of course, leaves us in some doubt as to whether what we're seeing is not a natural phenomenon at all, but rather a persistent design defect. Some kind of systems failure. Maybe even coordinated sabotage."

  "Did they all go down at once?" Sulie asked.

  "Nearly so. Over a two-hour period, anyway."

  "When?" from Mosca.

  "It started just after ten o'clock this morning."

  Po looked sideways at Sulie. He wondered if she was sharing his suspicions.

  "But…" She groped for her words. "Did the reentries happen randomly? Or did they go down in any kind of order? Say, west to east? Or top to bottom?"

  "Bottom up," Jamison said quickly. "That is, our simulations, collated from what reports and sightings have reached us so far, suggest that the lowest platforms went down first, followed by those at higher altitudes. Right now, we're trying to establish whether this thing has arrived at its natural cutoff point, or are others going to reenter over a longer time-frame."

  "Skylab," Carr muttered in Po's ear
.

  "What's that?" Jamison asked.

  "About a hundred years ago—1973, to be exact—your predecessor agency, the National Aeronautics et cetera, launched an orbiting observation platform named Skylab. It hosted a human crew at various times and made a number of valuable discoveries, including work on the solar corona. Everyone knew that eventually it was going to reenter and burn up, but no one expected it to come down as early as it did—just six years after launch, plowing pieces of itself into Western Australia."

  "I'm familiar with my agency's history, Dr. Carr."

  "Then you should remember that the literature of the time associated Skylab's premature reentry with heating of the upper atmosphere by bursts of extreme ultraviolet radiation, resulting from a solar flare. Then about eleven years later—and note the rtime lag, Dr. Jamison!—your agency lost track of over half of the 19,000-odd satellites and pieces of space junk it was monitoring in orbit. Again, at the time this phenomenon was attributed to atmospheric heating and induced drag on this low-orbiting debris. And the cause was solar flare activity."

  "Really?" Jamison seemed more amused than alarmed. "Solar flares? But the sunspot cycles died out sometime in the nineteen-nineties."

  "Well, that's true," Sulie admitted. "But Mr. Mosca and I have been observing a large and irregular spot on the sun for the past two days. The accounts from the last century are clear on the subject matter—that sunspots cause flares and electromagnetic interference. Consider, for example, the archives of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; it ran the Space Environment Services Center at the time and kept track of both spot and flare activity."

  "A pair of long-defunct organizations, I'm afraid," Jamison observed dryly. "Yet it's an interesting contention, Dr. Carr, that this disaster was caused by a burst of extreme ultraviolet That is your point, right?"

  "Radiation at all frequencies," Po interjected. "But the greatest flux was in the high-energy part of the spectrum: gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet. The physics and timing suggest that the interference we experienced on the communications net this morning was also due to this radiation."

  "I'm almost inclined to believe in your solar flare," Jamison said. "It would greatly relieve my mind to think that we've been through the worst of this. A one-time bang of energy, a brief heating of the atmosphere, and then everything goes back to normal. This interpretation would indicate that the platforms I still have in orbit will stay there. No more instabilities, no more trouble. The burst has now passed us by, and all we have to do is clean up the casualties."

  "Not quite," Sulie said, leaning forward. "And that's what we've come to tell NASA. You should think of this as the lull, the eye of the storm, between the first wave of radiation traveling at lightspeed and what comes after. The next wave will be a mass of charged particles, ripped from the chromosphere. It will be like gusts in the solar wind, but traveling much faster."

  "How fast?"

  "That depends," said Po.

  "On what?"

  "On the latent strength of the flare, sir," Mosca replied. "The magnitude of the effect determines the ejection speed of the ionized gases. Our colleagues at Caltech are working on that now, trying to establish a correlation between the energy expressed in gamma and x-ray traces, and the potential speed of the magnetic storm that's coming. With the interference in the network over this hemisphere, there is little enough hard evidence to go on. But our people are at full scramble—" Po was exaggerating slightly here. Actually, only his friends and Sulie's who were believers in Dr. Freede's work had agreed to help. The university and the Institute were not officially involved. "—and they are now recording, detecting, tracking, and monitoring the various effects of the flare."

  "So? How soon will this ion storm arrive at Earth?"

  "Sometime between twenty and forty hours after the initial energy release," Po said. "Maybe twelve to thirty hours from now."

  "Can't you be more exact?" Jamison asked querulously. "After all, you're asking people to brace themselves for what, to them, will be a problematic effect. Maybe no effect at all. The least we scientists can do is try to be precise with our predictions. It helps with the public relations aspect."

  "We're on the verge of being able to correlate the timing with the strength of the radiation effects," Sulie lied smoothly. "Eventually, we'll be able to predict a magnetic storm as accurately as the Weather Office places a cold front Then we'll function as a solar weather bureau."

  "Very useful," Jamison commented—and Po couldn't tell if he was serious. "Especially if we ever experience another such vanishingly rarephenomenon as one ofthese solar flares."

  "Oh, we will, sir," Sulie Carr said with a straight face. "In the meantime, we've already experienced an electromagnetic pulse equivalent to about twenty billion H-bombs. With the coming ion storm, you're going to have magnetically induced voltages and currents all over the daylight face of this planet. Operators of transport and electrical facilities will have to shut down for the target period. What's coming will disrupt their circuits and probably destroy any delicate but unshielded equipment. You have to help us get the word out, Dr. Jamison."

  "Well, before I leap to your conclusions, Dr. Carr," the NASA official proposed, "perhaps I should ask for your credentials. Just exactly what standing do you have at Cal-tech?"

  Uh-oh, Po told himself. Truth time. And Sulie did not dare tell this man anything that wouldn't stand up to instant verification.

  "I received my doctorate there, in astronomy with the solar option," she said.

  "You're very young. Just how long have you held this degree?"

  "It was awarded last December."

  "I see. And you, Mr. Mosca?"

  "I'm working on my dissertation right now. It's on various cases of stellar formation."

  "Good luck with it, sir." Jamison nodded to him. "But do you two, by any chance, hold positions in the university's administration? Chair committees of the faculty senate? Work on government research? Anything like that?"

  "Not at present," Carr smiled thinly.

  "Then you're just two bright students? Two young people who happen to hold the secret of the ages in your hip pockets, is that it?"

  "We happen to be right on this," Po said evenly.

  "Of course… Tell me, Mr. Mosca, who is your faculty advisor?"

  "Why, he's—" Po hesitated. Officially, his advisor was Dr. Hannibal Freede. But with the doctor off campus, by a factor of 150 million kilometers, the responsibility for Mosca's academic career currently rested with the dean's office—that is, with Albert Withers. Now, which of those two was the more attractive choice for Po to confess to? Well, at least one of them was instantly and disagreeably confirmable; the other was a little harder to get hold of. "Dr. Freede, the eminent solar researcher. I have been in regular contact with the doctor. He's in the field, you know, examining just such phenomena as we've witnessed."

  "And what does he have to say about this sudden burst of solar energy?"

  "Well, ah, as you may know, he's doing solar research from near orbit. I haven't been able to contact him—not since the flare hit us. With all the interference, as you can imagine—"

  "The interference has largely passed," Jamison said blandly.

  "But there's still that wavefront of ion particles. It would now lie between Earth and his ship. It could—"

  Sulie leaned forward, putting a hand on Po's arm. "If Dr. Freede was caught in this energy wave, then we should fear the worst. I doubt that even he was expecting to come face to face with a sunspot or solar flare of this size. Certainly he never designed his ship to withstand such stresses."

  Jamison tucked his head briefly. "You may be right, Dr. Carr… As I said, it would be tempting for me to believe your story. It would certainly solve a lot of my problems. But I doubt that the rest of the world—especially working facilities that have schedules to meet and customers to satisfy—would take the same view. You're asking people to suspend their lives for up to a day and a
half on the say-so of a freshly minted doctorate and a graduate assistant. I just don't think it will fly, folks."

  "But," Po interposed, "if there's even a chance we're right, think of the damage you can help avoid."

  "I hear you, young man."Jord Jamison sketched a grimace. "Look, I will call your institution, talk to the administration. And if they will stand behind your claims—"

  "Well, they—" Po started to say disgustedly, expecting to end with won't.

  "Of course they will," Sulie said confidently.

  "—then I'll put forward my own recommendation along those lines. Not that the Office of Orbital Mechanics has much sway with the industrial and transportation sectors, unless they want to license a platform slot. But if I attribute the recent reentries to this flare of yours, people will probably listen."

  "Thank you, Dr. Jamison!" Sulie Carr beamed at the man.

  "My pleasure," he replied, giving her an ashen smile.

  Wick!

  Whack!

  Wick!

  Whack!

  U.S. 101, South of Solvang, 6:23 p.m. PST

  The windshield wiper blades kept time with Po Mosca's pulse as he and Sultana drove back to Pasadena through a late-season rainstorm.

  "What do you think he'll do?" he asked.

  "Talk to Dean Withers, of course."

  "And then?"

  "Then, Po, I think we'd better go look for real jobs. You know that Withers is going to dump a load of biased shit and innuendo on Jamison about Dr. Freede's standing with the Institute, his scholarly contributions, and his current project with Hyperion. After that, everything we've told the man will go right out of his head."

  Po left a silence in which the wiper blades worked.

  "You know, I think we made a tactical mistake back there," he said finally.

  "Such as?"

  "Well, we went into that NASA guy's office and told him the sky was falling. Wrong approach. We should have told him we just got off the horn with Dr. Freede and he says the sky is falling."