Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  Porter swung his legs out and departed for the head.

  "And remember!" North shouted after him. "Your piss is real salty, and that plumbing's mostly metal. So aim for the center of the hole—not the sides."

  Click!

  Click!

  Click!

  ROAR!

  Aboard Tugboat Mighty Mouse, 11:09 UT

  "Hot shit! Sweet Jesus! Goddamn!" Michael Worsky swore out loud, his voice rising above the roar of the tugboat's single engine. And while he vented this anger, his hands moved frantically to kill the burn.

  Nothing worked.

  For ten minutes he had been trying to get the damned thing lit off. He had diddled the fuel-oxidant mixture. He had sequenced an ignition with the glow plug and without it. He had even spun the ship on her vernier squirt thrusters, placing the reaction chamber in full sunlight and hoping that would warm up the works and get her juices flowing. But still nothing.

  So, at last, after all these antics had drifted Mouse about five kilometers off station, and before Worsky had her lined up for the first insertion toward Luna, the damn thing fired off of its own accord.

  Everything that can go wrong, sooner or later, does.

  Worsky understood he needed to take her the long way around, through about one-eighty degrees of course correction. He worked the feathering vanes in the exhaust plume, trying to nose his ship over while maintaining the full thrust she had finally achieved.

  The vanes didn't work, either.

  Next he tried rotating her on the verniers. But by then the bottles were so low on propellant, and the ship had gathered sufficient inertia, that the angle of thrust wasn't changing by more than a degree or two. Not enough to do anybody any good.

  When he tried to kill the engine outright, resigned at last to taking his lumps with a long coast on Mouse's current heading, why the hot pot just kept right on firing.

  So now, with no controls and a full burn on, where did that leave him? Worsky queried the computer and got the really bad news. On this heading, and if she didn't slack off the thrust pretty damn quick, they were going to leave orbit. And the one thing Mouse was not designed to do was reenter Earth's atmosphere. She didn't even carry heat shielding for a skip-pass through the upper layers. So they were going to burn up, the cyber told him, and not God and all his little angels could pull them back if Michael Worsky didn't kill that engine in about the next ten seconds.

  Worsky knew everything he could do from under the bubble of his observation dome. All of it involved switches, circuitry, and solenoids—exactly the sort of linkages that NASA bulletin had said might go haywire, and exactly the kind of mechanism that didn't take kindly to a judicious knock with a twenty-centimeter wrench. If there were time enough, then he could climb into his suit and crawl through the airlock. Once outside, Worsky knew just which valves he could turn to choke off the fuel and end this joyride right quick. But he didn't have enough time.

  As the cyber warned him off for the point of no return, he thought about the thirteen hundred rubles riding in his hip pocket. They were convertible to about nine hundred neu, anytime he needed it. Oh, well. As they said in the Worsky family, "Easy come—gone!"

  That money… that Russian in the airlock!

  It was not just Michael Worsky's hide that was going to get scorched in about twenty-two minutes. He'd faced ultimate propositions like this in the past—although, to be truthful, never one with so few possible options. But now also, and for the first time, Michael Worsky had a passenger to think about. That entailed responsibilities he'd never before considered.

  What should he do? Try to wake the Russian up, so he could know he was going to die and make whatever prayers he needed to for the safety of his soul? Or let him dream on and go out by the easiest possible route?

  If it was Worsky's choice, he knew what he'd want. Go out swearing. Know what was happening to him. Hit the wall still accelerating.

  But this guy Urbanov looked like the soft type. Planet bound. A city dweller, for sure. Dying painlessly in his sleep was probably his greatest wish.

  So be it.

  And who knew? With all the steel around that airlock, maybe it would even survive reentry. That was possible, sure. Except for the heat, of course. And the bad case of deceleration trauma awaiting anyone who rode it down to the planet's surface. No parachutes in the old Mouse.

  But… but enough with thinking.

  Worsky put his switches in order, centered the control yoke, powered down the cyber out of kindness to its fragmentary intelligence, and sat with his hands folded in his lap. Only at the end, when the dome over his head was glowing a veined pink and slagging pieces of itself into the streaming upper atmosphere, did he open his mouth again.

  "God… DAMN!"

  Chapter 23

  Induced Current

  Pit River 3

  Oak Flat

  Kerckkoff 2

  Kings River

  Pacific Energy Company, San Francisco, March 22, 6:05 a.m. PST

  One of the things George Meers liked best about his job as a dispatcher in the Power Control Department was that he got to watch California get up in the morning.

  He could measure the wakefulness of his state—or that part of it belonging to Pacific Energy's customers, at least—by the number of hydro powerhouses the electric grid called up. The more of these small, dispatchable generating units that kicked in from high in the Sierra Nevada, the more electricity the system was drawing for coffee pumps and breadmakers, for video screens and electric shavers, for flow heaters attached to people's showerheads and flywheel cranks coupled to the family car. All of the domestic business having to do with sprucing yourself up for another day would draw more and more power into the grid.

  It was Meers' job to wear a helmet and scan a field showing how many and what kind of power plant assignments and sales deals SIDNEY, short for System Integrator and Dispatch Network Executive, was making to supply the grid's needs. Engraved in the artificial intelligence's silicon protocols were the costs—operating, overhead, and embedded capital—for each unit of generation Pacific

  Energy itself owned, including the fusion/MHD horns, randomized fuel cells, and those sixty-odd hydro turbines. Added to that, SIDNEY carried in hot RAM all the bid prices registered over the past twenty-four hours by third-party suppliers willing to produce electricity for the system. SIDNEY'S function, then, was to sort through the maze of generating costs and power values to bring on the least expensive units to meet the day's rising demand curve. That way the company could keep its rates low and do right by its customers, just like the brochures said.

  But simply arranging for the grid's energy was not the most important part of SIDNEY'S work in power control.

  A lot of people didn't understand this about a utility grid, that when electric energy flowed through it, the hot question was not where it came from but where it was going. Electron flow always implied direction, and the flow went to a load. That was a place where the energy could be expended in doing work of some kind—in heating an infrared element or turning a shaft or chasing around an electronic circuit. Either that or it went to a ground, which was a sinkhole of capacitance that could absorb and dissipate the energy.

  A generating unit only created the potential for a flow of electrons. The energized plates of a fuel cell or the magnets of a spinning rotor merely set up a condition under which electricity might come alive and go someplace—if, that is, a load or a ground were waiting somewhere down the line to take it.

  So, if people didn't turn on their lightstrips and wind up their cars and buses in the morning, if they didn't run their computers and air-condition their homes during the day, then all that power would have nowhere to go. The charge would build up in the fuel cells until the heat just blew the plates apart. The rotors attached to the turbines would spin faster and faster until angular momentum tore them to pieces.

  Some of the old-time line dispatchers used to say the company's 50,000 kilometers of hig
h-voltage conductor—all of those braided aluminum cables and the new frozen-ceramic channels knit together across California like the sinews in a frog's leg—made up their own ground state. That even if every customer turned off his appliances and just sat in the dark, then power would still flow down the lines. But George Meers didn't believe it. Well… maybe one or two small units might pull that kind of a load, but not the system as a whole.

  So that was the other part of SIDNEY'S responsibilities, then, to channel the electron flow through the maze of transmission substations and out onto the distribution lines, to where the load happened to be. SIDNEY rode herd on a massively interconnected network of moron switch-servers and semi-intelligent local computers which opened and closed relays, monitored breakers for system protection, and selected between the main 500-kilovolt circuits and the parallel runs of 230-kv, 120-kv, and lower-voltage lines. Find the fastest way to the load, then route the power over it—that was the ticket.

  With SIDNEY doing all this work, however, Meers sometimes felt like a fool just sitting here. In the old days, he knew, a century and more ago, people did the dispatching. They had computers to help them, of course, but they made all the decisions themselves. Whether to use the company's own generating plants or buy power from sources outside the system. Which lines to energize and how many kilowatts each one could take, depending on ambient temperature and wind conditions, before the aluminum conductor got overheated and sagged down between the towers into the underbrush. How to work around a fault in the circuit, so that the electricity could always get where it was going. How much excess capacity, in terms of both generating units and transmission line, the company had that it could profitably rent in the spot market to other utilities.

  People used to decide those things.

  Now people just watched the kaleidoscope of sampled and summarized decision data that SIDNEY displayed. Sometimes the numbers and station names flicked by so fast, George Meers couldn't even read the blur. Then who was kidding whom about being in control?

  But right now, a lazy Saturday at just past six in the morning, when most of California was still asleep and nothing very urgent was going on, even SIDNEY himself seemed bored. The names of the hydro powerhouses and the capacities each one brought on line blinked lethargically across George's retinas as the intelligence roHed them on, and he could easily follow what was happening. Maybe this was a good time to initiate a conversation. When the pace was slow, SIDNEY often had excess capacity and would accept verbal programming from his human watchers.

  "Hey, SID? Did you see that warning on the notepad this morning?" With a click of his jaw muscles, Meers scrolled up the four lines of reference text in the field of his right eye.

  "Of course I saw it, George," the AI answered. "It came directly from the Law Department's cyber, didn't it?"

  "Well, uh, not really. My copy came down from Electric Operations. Do you think we're talking about the same thing?"

  "Dated twenty-two-hundred hours last night, quote, on advice of the National Astronautics and Space Administration, we are informed that a substantial quantity of free ions will impact planet Earth from outer space sometime within the next thirty hours. NASA informs us that this cloud of charged particles has the potential for inducing excess field current in any infrastructure with a conductive capacity. However, as the resulting outage conditions would represent force majeure against the company, you are directed to comply with this warning only after fulfilling primary and secondary contract deliveries per the usual schedule, end quote."

  "That's it," Meers acknowledged. "All except that last part. My version from Electric Ops says you should take the warning pretty damn seriously and curtail operations at the first sign of trouble."

  "Then we have a conflict," SIDNEY said carefully.

  "Well, what do your internal protocols tell you about excess field current?"

  "That my routines for system protection will function within design constants. At the first indication of overload, from whatever cause, I shall break the circuit and redirect the current into underutilized systems."

  "That's all?" Meers asked, surprised.

  "That is all there can be."

  "I see. So you are not worried about these induced currents? I mean, I've read that massive ion bursts beyond the Van Allen belts could alter the Earth's geomagnetic field, which would affect the electric field around—"

  "Outer space phenomena are not included in my design subsets," SIDNEY said coolly. "But you should know, George, that my protocols also instruct me to follow directives of the Law Department in all matters having to do with contracts. Power deliveries on the grid are a contractual matter."

  "I see." Meers was fast losing interest in the conversation. "Thanks for telling me. I'll rest easier knowing that."

  "It was my pleasure, George."

  Clack!

  Clack!

  Clack!

  CRACK!

  Vaca-Dixon Substation, Solano County, California, 6:12 a.m.PST

  Maintenance Supervisor Peter Sorkin ran out into the yard at the first of those unusual clacks— which sounded like an automatic recloser that was cycling in and out with a terminal spasm.

  Sorkin had started worrying and listening for something like this when he first came on with the shift at midnight and saw that notice from the operating department He didn't always agree with the engineers down in San Francisco, and sometimes they could be real fussbudgets, but when their fears were backed up by an organization the likes of NASA, then Peter Sorkin was prepared to pay attention.

  When he reached the switchyard, the sounds were the least part of the show. As soon as he cleared the door of the maintenance office, Sorkin ran into a gaudy shower of sparks. They were as long as his thumb and just about as big around. He saw vicious curls of blue-white light that would hit the yard's gravel and actually bounce. That had to be raw metal getting scalped off the switch's contact points. There'd be a lot of work for his crew today, refacing that closer.

  Shielding his eyes with one gloved hand against the brim of his hardhat, Sorkin looked up into the overhead. Not one switch but all twenty-four of them were cycling there, tossing off blazes and making a racket.

  Well, not all of them. Some had already spot-welded closed, and that was worse news. The metal there had heated itself into a solid bar of conductor, defeating the overload protection that was built into the system. The arms of those switches were going now from dull gray to a purplish-blue on their way to cherry-red. Unfortunately for the whole transmission system, the armature of a switch closing was made out of thicker and heavier metal than any of the conductor down the line. These pieces would get hot and still hold together right up until the cable somewhere out in the field melted, or the superconducting ceramic destabilized and blew itself to bits.

  In that mass of sparking, cycling closers, Sorkin looked for some kind of order and found none. What had happened to the goddamned switch-server?

  He ran to the panel on the NAT, short for Network Administrative Terminal, which was a black box attached to the foot of the A-phase tower on the primary 500-kv circuit. He flipped it open and studied the manual readout of its diode array.

  Ultimate craziness! The server had just broken down with hysterics or something. Nonsense numbers and letters, and sometimes just parts of letters, flowed left to right on the panel like the droolings of the village idiot. Sorkin didn't have to think hard to figure out why. The black box sat at the foot of the tower because the server drew its power directly from the primary circuit. Sure, the feed was buffered through filters and transformers and backup cells, but still the cyber was drinking at the same well it was designed to guard.

  That was going to be a maximally bad design choice if one of those randomly induced currents that the Electric Ops people warned about had gone into the box. The jolt—or at least some of it—must have burned through the filters and scrambled the server's brains.

  Peter Sorkin was a maintenance man in the sense
that he could bolt together tower sections, weld bussbar, string insulators, and cold-mold ceramics. He wasn't a cybertech and never hoped to be one. So, when the electronics were in doubt, call headquarters. That was Pete Sorkin's motto. He ran back inside the office.

  It was a good thing Pacific Energy used a private glassline communications system. Although it was strung along the same right of way as the company's transmission lines, the fiberoptic would be immune to their induced currents. The system had been installed along with the first version of SIDNEY, because the intelligence hadn't liked fighting for priority in the transmission queues at public uplink stations. Now, given the high jinks everyone had experienced in the phone beams yesterday, Sorkin figured those glasslines were going to save their collective ass.

  "Power Control here," a human voice answered the call, coming through as clear as if he were speaking from next door.

  "This is Pete Sorkin out at Vaca-Dixon. Who are you?"

  "Um, George Meers, chief of dispatch. Look, Pete, we're kinda busy—"

  "Of course you are. Your SIDNEY is going a little crazy there, and you don't know how to fix him. Am I right?"

  "Well, I wouldn't say crazy…just not coping very well, is all."

  "Good for you. What we've got out here is stone crazy. My reclosers are cycling blindly, and about half of them have welded shut. What I need to know is, what do you want me to do?"

  "Um…"

  "Hurry it, George. Every second you wait, I'm burning up conductor."

  "Well, let me consult with SIDNEY…"

  The line went blank for a long minute. Sorkin ducked his head to the window and watched as a piece of burning bussbar fell out of the trestle and crashed to the gravel.

  "P-Pete?" Meers' voice was a brittle shadow of itself.

  "Right here, George."

  "SID says for you to kill the NAT."

  "Kill it?”

  "Bash its brains out. Preferably with a nonconducting blunt instrument."