Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  "But he doesn't—or at least he hasn't said anything yet." Sulie frowned. "You did try to contact him, didn't you?"

  “Just static. No response to his call sign on the frequencies he's supposed to be monitoring."

  "That worries me."

  "Yeah, me too… But that's not what I'm saying. I propose we fake a transmission from him."

  "One that only you are supposed to have received, Po? With no backup from, say, the repeater stations or the university dispatchers?"

  "Something like that," Mosca said stiffly.

  "And would this be a text-only message, tapped out in Morse code?" she persisted. "Or do you have full sound and video from the doctor? Do you perhaps have observation samples from his equipment, staring down the throat of a sunspot and showing the peak of flare activity? That's the only evidence that would convince people. That's the evidence I'd send, if I were in Freede's position. So that's the evidence you have to produce, if you want your bogus transmission to do any good. Do you know how to achieve that level of fakery?"

  "Not… not by myself. Not right now. But I know some wizards over in the video graphics department. They could whip up something that even an intelligence wouldn't be able to detect. By manipulating individual electrons in the signal—"

  "And that widens the conspiracy, doesn't it? From us two—to how many people?" Carr shook her head. "Sooner or later it all comes crashing down, Po. And then nobody believes you or me ever again. And we're both supposed to have long careers ahead of us."

  "But it would be worth it, if the tape got people moving in time for that magnetic storm!"

  "And then again it might not. No, this way we've played it straight. We told our story to the highest level of authority we could reach. Now it's up to the big boys to act."

  "Or not," he said bitterly.

  "That's their choice, too."

  More silence, filled with rain and wiper blades.

  "So we just go home and do nothing," he summed up flatly.

  "Wrong! We go home and gather our friends around us. We watch and take notes and document fully what's going on here. We lay out the history of this flare—your telescope observations, Freede's guesses, and all the physical evidence we can find. Then we publish a report for the scientific community."

  "And why do we bother?"

  Sultana Carr looked soberly ahead through the windshield. "Because, Po, have you ever heard of sunspots appearing in singles and lone pairs? I haven't. They always come in waves and cycles."

  Part5

  Plus Seventeen Hours... and Counting

  How great are your works!

  Hidden are your ways from our regard,

  only god, of powers no other possesses.

  You created the Earth, of light and your love,

  while you were alone:

  humanity, and creatures of all sizes,

  to go forth upon it;

  and all that are on high,

  soaring on outspread wings;

  and the foreign countries, Syria and Kush;

  Egypt, where you set everyone in his place,

  provide for his needs....

  —From Ikhnaton's "Hymn to the Sun”

  Chapter 22

  "We Will Resume Service…"

  Flock

  Flock

  Flock

  Perch

  Connor Transfer Station, March 22, 9:31 UT

  The pileup at Connor Station's multimodal transit lounge started to look like a huge and not very cultured game of musical chairs. Or like a lone oak standing out on the steppe when two hundred starlings all tried to alight on the hundred and ninety-nine available twigs and branches. People milled across the lounge's curved floor, leaned uneasily against the hanging walls, and drifted in and out of the restrooms in small, aimless flocks.

  If Dmitri Urbanov hadn't known the reason for it, he would have suspected the cock-up in schedules was due to some major disaster: a collision in near space, perhaps, or the coordinated—for that read "cybernetic"—failure of the docking cradles in the hub above this crowd's collective head.

  As it was, a twenty-ruble note passed meaningfully to a ticketing agent revealed the true cause.

  "The whole thing is just some piece of bureaucratic officiousness," the young man told Urbanov in a low voice. "NASA, which is a government department in the United States of North America, has sent up a warning about some kind of radiation scare—evidently cooked up by one of their own public laboratories. Anyway, then ESA, JSA, and the Baikonur Center quickly followed suit and ordered an emergency docking of all ships currently in transit above the atmosphere. That's Moon flights, El shuttles, transorbitals, the works. Rumors I've heard put the duration of the emergency at anywhere between thirty and seventy-two hours. No one will say for sure."

  Another tenner in Urbanov's hand lubricated a bit of further speculation.

  "You want to know the truth, the only reason all these space agencies and the passenger lines are taking the matter seriously is their legal liability. There's nothing wrong, of course. But if someone were to get hurt in any way during the course of this so-called crisis, then a smart lawyer might be able to pin it on the carrier's negligence, for disobeying the official warnings. So everyone is going to shut down and wait out the specified time period."

  "You don't agree with all this?" Urbanov purred.

  The agent shrugged. "Connor Station is curtailing all higher functions—except for baseline environmental control, gravity-actuated plumbing, and area lighting. But all the cybers, all the electrostatic lifts, and most of the commercial and communications systems are shortly going to shut down. Again, the only reason I can see is a corporate fear of accidents which might be misrepresented by a cunning legal mind."

  A cunning legal mind like Dmitri Osipovich Urbanov's…

  "So," the young man went on, "in about an hour you won't be able to get a hot meal or a cup of coffee anywhere in the station. Don't even ask about a bed, because there aren't any. But for a generous gentleman such as yourself, things can be arranged."

  "How so?" Urbanov asked casually.

  "I happen to know where the emergency lockers are all located. And, as one of the station's fire wardens, I happen to have a key to them. Inside there's food, stimulants, blankets. All things that can make your stay nicer."

  "Suppose I don't want to stay at all?"

  "Excuse me, sir?"

  Another twenty appeared between Dmitri's fingers.

  "If, as you say, the groundings are just a formality," Urbanov murmured, "enforced solely to satisfy the management's insurance requirements, then you must know of someone who is free to come and go as he pleases. A private yacht, perhaps? Or some ancillary craft, possibly attached to the station's docking functions? Anything capable of making in-system jumps, say, as far as Luna?"

  This time the young man just stared at the offered bill.

  Dmitri Osipovich produced yet another, sliding up beside it. "I have urgent business on Farside. At Tsiolkovskii Station."

  "Well… it might still be dangerous," the ticket agent said slowly. "You understand?"

  "And if the deal I have in hand doesn't close by the day after tomorrow, it will be more than a danger for me and for those I represent… Look, this is a gesture of friendship." His fingers rustled the bills against each other. "If you can find me the right ship and pilot, I am prepared to pay a finder's fee of ten percent—no, make that twenty-five percent—of his fare."

  The young man absorbed the bills into his palm.

  "I'll see what I can do, sir."

  "That's all I'm asking." Urbanov smiled at him.

  Ratchet

  Ratchet

  Ratchet

  Latch!

  Aboard ISS Whirligig III, March 22, 9:54 UT

  The one thing they would not stop was the spin on the ships. The first mate had made that clear to the team of articled passengers gathered in D Hull as they prepared, under his orders, to make Whirligig ready for the coming
storm.

  "Why not?" Peter Spivak had asked, studiously seeking information.

  "Because," First Mate James B. Wyvern had replied, his face going brick-red, "we have propellant enough to initiate ring rotation once and to brake it once, see? No more. After that we drift free, and we're still a long ways from Mars. Now shut your mouth and try to learn."

  The question had seemed important, because Peter supposed that a lot of the work they were doing might be performed easier and better in freefall, without a spin gravity. This work, for example.

  He and another articled passenger, name of Finlay, were winching the ship's solar panels up into the holds of A Hull, which anchored Whirligig's rosette. The triangular panels were widths of photovoltaic film battened with converter circuits and strung on conductive cabling. The job of hauling them up reminded Spivak of taking in the sails on a Chinese junk.

  The A Hull had electric motors to power the winches, but he and Finlay were working big handcranks with a minimum of gearing reduction against the point-three gee of spin. The why of that occurred to Peter the first time he tried to use his suit radio.

  "This is too much like work," he said to Finlay by way of making conversation on the open channel. "I only wish I could open this helmet for a minute and wipe the sweat out of my eyes. It's driving me nuts."

  "I… you… clear!" was all Spivak heard of his partner's reply. Obviously, from the way the man's mouth was working behind the clear face shield, he had a lot more to say. So the radio's circuits were already blanking out with the first wisps of the storm's magnetic interference.

  Peter was suddenly grateful that the regulator on his air tanks was the old-fashioned kind that worked on demand, not by some kind of electronic logic. He wondered, however, about the temperature sensors in the suit's climate circuits. Well, a man couldn't die of a thermal glitch… or not right away.

  Working in the half-light of the A Hull's cargo bay, cranking away on a chain-drive pulley, Spivak had a lot of time to think and a lot of questions to think about.

  For instance, why were the square kilometers of photovoltaic film in danger of becoming damaged by magnetically induced currents when they were spread in space among the five rotating hulls, but not when they were folded away inside the A Hull? The ship's ceramic and carbon-fiber skin wouldn't shield them against a magnetic field, would it? And the insulated cabling would still tie the panels into great parallel circuits, even when they were furled in on themselves, wouldn't it?

  These, too, were questions about which AP Peter Spivak was supposed to "shut up and learn." All he was supposed to know was how to spin the crank Wyvern handed him.

  Another thing that bothered Peter, though, was what the crew was going to do after the cloud of fast-moving ions had passed by Whirligig. Right now, the captain and first mate were powering down every system on the ship. What if they tried to restart them, after the danger had passed, and discovered everything had gotten fried anyway? Was it easier for a piece of circuitry to weather something like this magnetic storm in an off condition? Did it make a difference if the only current fluctuating through the silicon pathways came from those random external fields, and the circuit was not burdened by its own accustomed load? Or did functioning systems have a better chance of survival? Did it help when they had a ground state they could return to, a kind of base pattern to teach the electrons how to respond?

  Peter Spivak was a geoscientist and a tectonics expert, not an electrician. He couldn't even answer his own questions. So maybe the only thing he was fitted for on this trip was turning this damned crank. And maybe the physical labor was supposed to keep his mind occupied and lay his fears to rest If so, that was pretty smart thinking on the first mate's part.

  If only it had worked.

  Two hundred…

  Four hundred…

  Six hundred…

  Eight hundred…

  Connor Transfer Station, 10:19 UT

  Urbanov counted the bills, from the supplies of unfashionable but untraceable cash which he carried for just such occasions, into the hand of Michael Worsky. That hand was none too clean, showing rims of black grease under its bitten fingernails and a thick, red stain which might be some exotic sealant—or perhaps just dried blood—smeared across its knuckles. The man's face was square and jowly, with a heavy growth of black stubble around his mouth. A face out of old Poland, or those parts of it, at least, that the Russian Empire had never grandfathered into the Commonwealth.

  At Urbanov's side William Blair, the helpful ticket agent, oversaw the transaction. With little nods of his head he counted the money as it changed hands.

  The darkish skin around Worsky's pale blue eyes, whose shadowing betrayed the man's deep fatigue, began to wrinkle hungrily when the count went up to twelve hundred.

  So, at the thirteenth bill, Urbanov stopped with a flourish that gave the appearance of laying down his last cash. "That should more than cover my fare," the lawyer said.

  Worsky shrugged. "Going to Farside anyway. Nice to make a profit."

  "It's a fair price," Blair seconded.

  "Where is the ship?"

  The pilot hooked his head back toward a porthole set in the wall next to a hatch labeled for a docking manway. Urbanov walked over and looked out. What he saw on the end of the station's umbilicus looked like a crippled spider, with only four legs instead of eight. The bulbous body ended in a flaring nostril, the exhaust nozzle of a single large reaction chamber. At the waist, attached to a thick metal ring, were the holding grapples, stubby legs which ended in outsized pincers. Up near the spider's head was a tiny blister, under whose reflected glare Urbanov could make out just one padded chair.

  "Will that take us to Luna?"

  "Sure. There and back, with no load to haul," Worsky said.

  "It's a station tug, Mr. Urbanov," the agent explained. "That engine's got enough delta-vee to practically move all of Connor in its orbit."

  "And your accommodations…?"

  "I steer. You sleep in the airlock."

  "Sleep?"

  "Gotta hibernate you. Otherwise you breathe too much."

  "That's on account of the oh-two system," Blair expanded. "The cyclers are only sized for one man. But don't you worry. We'll give you a shot of 'Sweet Dreams,' and you'll sleep like a dead man."

  "This is an illicit drug?"

  "I said not to worry. You'll wake up at your destination feeling like you're ready to tackle the New York Jets. It's either that… or you wait here with the other passengers another two, three days."

  "When do we leave?" Urbanov asked the Pole.

  "Soon as tower gives clearance."

  "But I thought…" The lawyer turned to Blair.

  "We'll invent a small emergency. One of the El shuttles, the Maid of Dakar, is shortly going to report a slipping clamp. Then Worsky here has to go over and nudge her back into position. Storm or no, the management's not prepared to leave their capital equipment whipping around to get broken up. But once Worsky's clear of the dock, he lights up for Luna and then nobody can stop him."

  "But if he is derelict in his duty, and at my instigation—"

  Blair rolled his eyes. "Don't you get it? I know someone in the Maid's flight crew. It's all arranged. No one is going to come back at you, I guarantee it. And if they do, then you were slugged and drugged and that's all you know. Now, do you want this flight or not?"

  "Oh, I want it.... Sure." But still, Urbanov felt some lingering doubts about his legal situation. He was, after all, an officer of the Russian Popular Judiciary, and he would be honor-bound to answer truthfully any questions put to him at an inquiry. They were small qualms, in light of his greater need to get to Luna, but qualms nonetheless.

  Blair put out his hand. "My commission?"

  "Of course." Urbanov paid the agreed-on amount. As he did so, he felt a pricking in the back of his arm. "Sweet dreams," said Worsky's thick voice.

  Spark

  Crackle

  Spark

 
; Spit

  Aboard ISS Whirligig III, 10:35 UT

  "Here, you men! Get into your cocoons," First Mate James B. Wyvern shouted, standing in the doorway to Cabin B9. "Lash 'em up with these and then don't touch anything." He flung into the sleeping space a handful of russet-colored rings that looked like old-fashioned cake donuts.

  Spivak counted them in midflight, absorbed what felt like an even number, then recounted when they fell on the deck. There were ten of the things.

  "What are those for?" he asked, but Wyvern had already gone down the corridor.

  Porter, one of his four cabinmates, picked up the nearest ring and flexed it in his hands. "Seems like some kind of rubber."

  "It's an insulator," said North, who was a regular member of the crew. "You loop your bag ribbons through it, then put it over the wall hook." He showed them how.

  "Why do I want to do that?" Peter Spivak asked.

  "Okay, fella." North grinned. "You just touch that hook."

  Peter put out his finger toward it.

  Bra-ZAPP! A four-centimeter-long spark leapt from the metal, knocking him back on his heels. His finger, wrist, arm, and shoulder felt hot and tingly, like someone had jabbed his funny bone.

  North pointed to the deck, where the glazed plastic floor panels were slotted into a steel supporting lattice. "Don't stand on the strips next time you try that."

  "Oh." Spivak blushed.

  "We've got a hell of a charge building up in the ribs and keel. Anything metal that's tied into them, like the sub-frame for the decking and the anchor point for that hook, will conduct the current like an open circuit. You gotta be careful now."

  "Right."

  The rest of them lashed up their bedding, stepping gingerly around the floor strips as they did so, and climbed into the cocoons.

  "How long should we plan on staying here?" Porter asked.

  "Why? You got a date?" North laughed.

  "I was thinking about my bladder."

  "Well… better take care of it now," the crewman advised.