Angle of reflection prime
Murray Hill Laboratories, Inc., March 23,2:18 p.m. EST
Like a pool player confronted by a tableful of potential bank shots that line up the same ball with three different pockets, Harvey Sommerstein's head was absolutely spinning with the possibilities. And it didn't help that his pool table was in three dimensions. Or that he'd been working right through, logging almost twenty straight hours of wakefulness and intense mental activity, ever since that NASA bulletin had hit his E-mail in-bin early on Saturday morning.
It was the combination of subtexts to that dispatch which had set off his imagination and led to this marathon weekend.
First, NASA had explained Friday's general collapse of the communications network all over the Western Hemisphere. Although Sommerstein hadn't experienced that catastrophe directly, he had watched the news services' inadequate reporting of it with a growing surge of frustration. Anything that disrupted the phone beams was sure to pique his professional curiosity and demand a fuller explanation.
Second, the space agency had warned about a wave of energetic ions expelled from the sun which was expected to arrive at Earth orbit sometime between twenty and forty hours after the initial flare effect. As NASA had calculated backward to establish the flare at just before one o'clock Eastern time on Friday, that placed the start of the alert period at nine o'clock Saturday morning—or just about the time Harvey Sommerstein was reading the bulletin and beginning to get his inspiration.
He'd been scrambling ever since.
To start with, Harvey had to pick his target. Then he had to contact the receiving stations through the normal repeater channels, during the clear period following the solar flare's electromagnetic interference, to arrange for someone there to be listening for Sommerstein's unorthodox communication. Then he had to requisition Murray Hill's largest experimental radio horn out at Red Bank, which meant tracking down the laboratory's deputy administrator and getting his verbal permission to mess up several long-standing test schedules. Finally, Sommerstein had to work out the bounce in a variety of dimensions using the lab's detailed orrery simulation to position the inner system planets and moons, with a scratch program that would locate the advancing ion wavefront among them.
That was the drill, to his way of thinking. First came the target, then came the mathematics of the bounce path to reach it.
For a test subject he eventually chose the night side of Mars. After a moment's thought, he had rejected the satellite colonies around Jupiter and Saturn, as too company-dominated and profit-motivated to be cooperative, and the free bases in the Asteroid Belt, as too independent-minded to sit still for a polite request from the Mother World.
Mars was fine, though; a settled world with a lot of semi-bored people willing to participate in a novel test procedure. The only hitch was Mars' rotation. The red planet was likely going to make at least one complete revolution during the alert period for the ion storm. So Harvey Sommerstein sent a general message to all of the Mars stations, requesting that they nominate someone who would listen from dusk to dawn on a frequency not already fielded by the wideband repeater on Phobos.
Together Harvey and the stations agreed on transmission at 10 Hertz, which was way down in the upper reaches of the million-meter band. The lab's horn could easily handle it. All of the Mars receivers could tune to it. Such an unwieldy long wavelength was likely to be clear of other traffic. And at the same time that wavelength would offer Sommerstein the best chance of a bounce off a dispersed and still exponentially thinning cloud of charged particles.
Working out all of these details had taken the rest of Saturday morning and the better part of the afternoon. But by noon New York time Harvey was hearing the first batch of reports saying that the front edge of the wave had already reached Earth. This early arrival time meant the ion cloud was moving exceptionally fast. So it was likely to be densely packed with high-energy particles—which was good in terms of reflectivity for the bounce. However, the speed with which it was passing through the solar system meant Sommerstein would have almost no opportunity to practice an inside-angle shot. The wavefront, at that speed, would reach the orbit of Mars no more than ten hours after it hit Earth—or no later than about seven o'clock Saturday night.
At that, Sommerstein had given serious thought to changing his venue. But by then most of his contacts had already agreed to and were locked into the experiment. Changing the target stations at this late date would have him chasing the wave right out to Pluto, where no one was sitting to receive his signals. So Harvey kept his current arrangements and gave up both the inside shots as well as the comfort of a time cushion for practicing and perfecting his technique.
Late on Saturday afternoon and into evening, then, he wrangled for the radio horn with Deputy Administrator Paul Pierce, who happened to be in the Green Mountains on a late-season skiing trip. The conversation proceeded, by triangulation with a cloud of voice-only cellular phones, up and down through Pierce's support staff, who were scattered all over Greater New York City, at their homes, in restaurants and bars, on dance floors, and at intermissions in two different Broadway theaters. To a man and woman, these people wanted to keep the Red Bank horn on its established schedule of intra-atmospheric experiments. Then, relenting only to a degree, they wanted to know how Sommerstein, with his existing grant money, proposed to pay for equipment time and the power to run his series of tests. Sommerstein in turn made promises, cut deals, accepted strictures, and crossed his fingers with every word he spoke.
Later in the evening, Harvey had to go through it all over again to get one of the lab's software programmers brought in on overtime and assigned to inserting the wavefront into the orrery. At least by this time Harvey had a pretty firm estimate of the magnetic storm's speed, density, and internal energy to give the technician, whose name was Cal Warner. But the man was so sleepy and grumpy about being called in that Sommerstein couldn't be sure he was actually using everything Harvey gave him.
By that time, early on Sunday morning, the ion cloud was proceeding outward into the Asteroid Belt. Sommerstein had to decide quickly whether dropping a few carbonaceous and siliceous raisins—pebbles of rock and glass with here and there a lump of ferrous alloy—into the ion loaf might affect its reflective qualities. He chose to think it couldn't hurt a bit, but neither would it help much. The main trouble was that the farther beyond Mars the wave swept, the wider and less accurate all of his bank-shot transmission paths were becoming.
But Harvey Sommerstein was still intent on trying.
And by now, early on Sunday afternoon, Mars was above Greater New York's horizon, the people out there were dutifully listening, and the planetary program was all worked up, debugged, and running like a seventeen-jewel watch in clear oil. Sommerstein had been stuffed into his virtual reality helmet for seven hours, playing with all the possible transmission angles and breathing his own stale carbon-dioxide buildup until he was feeling quite lightheaded. And so far he hadn't gotten off a single "Hello, Mars!" that had received any kind of reply.
Inside the helmet, black space revolved around Harvey's head. Faint gray lines represented the major constellations by connecting the bright points of their stars. These provided him with a background map that supplemented the gridded globe marking off the celestial coordinates from his point of view on Earth.
Mars was at a declination of seventeen degrees north and a right ascension of two hours, fifty-two minutes. It was a position which he could read off the inside of his helmet and then punch into the renovated software with a touch of one finger. The planet showed up as a small dot of ocher and burnt umber, about twenty degrees to the right of a blank, white solar disk. At extreme ZOOM, taking him almost to the resolvable limits of the simulation program, he could just make out the glint of an icecap. But he was still too far away to place the orbiting moons, Phobos and Deimos, which were much smaller and closer in to their primary than Earth's own moon.
The wavefront of th
e flare's ionization, seen as a shadow beyond the meager red dot at normal viewing distances, was bent around his head like a section of speckled, silver-iodide donut scratched into the star map.
Once more Sommerstein put out a finger to touch it, right there, for yet another bank shot. Where his fingertip probed, a column of numbers—celestial coordinates plus range in kilometers—scrolled themselves in gray typescript on black space beside the point.
Within a tenth of a second, the logic-seeking routines in the software gave him a pair of angles, Earth to point and point to Mars, defining the bounce path. A blue cone appeared to show the beam spread going out and the footprint coming down. The far end seemed to engulf the red planet with margin to spare.
"Okay, Donald," he spoke to the operator at Red Bank, sitting in the radio horn's control cab, "blast our message out that-a-way."
Sommerstein knew the man could see those numbers in his own helmet and only had to redirect them into the cyber that shoved the horn's working end around.
"Gotcha." The antenna swiveled and made the connection, sending back the variables for the beam, which Sommerstein's program interpreted as a yellow cone. Where the proposed path and the actual overlapped, his helmet showed truncated sections of green cone.
Not much here glowed green. And too little of what did match seemed to fall across the ocher dot.
The ongoing problem seemed to be the horn. Again and again the antenna, traversing on its gear-driven platform and swinging inside its counterweighted cradle, was proving just too slow in responding to commands from Harvey and the simulation program. If this was a pool table, then he was using a pine log for a cue stick.
"All right, Donald," he said encouragingly. "That was a partial. Let's see if we get a response this time."
He now had to wait thirty-three minutes—twenty for this transmission to go out and another thirteen for the reply from the night side of Mars to come back by way of the Phobos communications repeater—before he would know how much of that fractured green cone had carried his message. Or if the principle of reflecting signals off an ionization wave was even practical.
"Stand down for now," he told Red Bank. "But be ready to try another blast at ten till three."
"Gotcha, boss."
Why was Sommerstein even doing this? Why waste all his time and effort, his sleeping hours and his precious grant money, on this mad notion? Especially if, as the NASA bulletin had noted, this flare from the sun seemed to be an anomaly, something that no one had seen in almost a century.
Because, deep down, Harvey Sommerstein didn't believe that. What had happened once in space could happen again. Maybe flares and ion waves would always be a sometime thing. Coming as capriciously as typhoons and hurricanes. But, as the past three days had shown, they could still be incredibly disruptive to the patches of humanity scattered across the solar system. Most vulnerable were the lines of communication. If Sommerstein's bounce path worked just once to warn, to protect, or to save a life, then it was worth his effort now. And the more common these flares turned out to be, then the more important would be his contribution.
At this particular moment, however, after thirteen consecutive unsuccessful tries, his gift to the theory and practice of interplanetary communications did not seem to be worth a red-hot penny.
But Sommerstein was still going to try again—in another twenty-eight minutes. He would work on this all night if he had to.
Tharsis Ridge
Olympus Mons
Valles Marineris
Chryse Planitia
Murray Hill Laboratories, March 24, 11:23 a.m. EST
Harvey Sommerstein showed up at his workbench-cubicle in the laboratory just before lunchtime on Monday. He was stumbling and yawning, having gotten only four hours of sleep. Bright-edged dots and squirmy lines swam before his eyes; they might have been symptoms of extreme physical and mental exhaustion, or merely afterimages from fifteen straight hours contemplating planetary points and transmission vectors inside his computer helmet.
His own good sense told him that, in his present condition, he ought to stay home for the day. But Harvey's political instincts told him he'd better be on hand to report some results, any results, to the lab's administration people after he had wasted huge amounts of their radio time and funding in fruitless attempts to say "Hi there!" to the nightlife on Mars.
The first thing Sommerstein did on arriving was to empty out his E-mail. And, sure enough, there at the top of the queue was a priority message from Paul Pierce requesting a formal, face-to-face meeting in the administrator's office. It said "as soon as might be convenient," for which the politically savvy translation was: Right now, buster.
Sommerstein was about to log his reply when some wild intuition suggested he put it off for two minutes more and instead scan through the rest of his mail. There were twenty-three items, all with offworld prefixes. He looked at them more closely. All of them had Mars prefixes. Harvey began sampling and reading through them.
"Received your 13:45 UT transmission," from his nighttime listener at the Areopolitan Center on Tharsis Ridge.
"Transmission clear and without distortion," was the reply from the observatory on Olympus.
"Hello yourself, Harvey!… Congratulations!" said his fifteen-year-old correspondent among the water miners in Ius Chasma, which was part of the Valles Marineris runoff system.
"Have now logged three of your transmissions. All messages received without error," from the geophysical station at Planitia, near the impact crater Domore.
"Still receiving you," commented the Tharsis station later.
"Seven in a row!" from the lad at the chasms.
"Enough already!" from Maja Vallis.
"This is getting boring, Harvey!"
"Your point is elegantly proven…"
And finally, "Please release our operator for other duties," came through from a somewhat higher level of authority at Tharsis Center.
Every one of Sommerstein's twenty-nine recorded messages had been received somewhere on Mars. Some had even been fielded by stations on the terminator, and two were heard on the dayside—but with enough of a timelag to prove they had come down on the bounce.
Sommerstein's project was apparently a resounding success. But why then had he heard nothing from these recipients during the course of his tests?
The answer to that was in the final item in his bin. It was a notice from the cyber which monitored the laboratory's E-mail delivery system. This text had been delivered last and so chronologically, under the system's first-in-first-out protocols, had followed up the queue.
"Documents via Mars Interplanetary Postal Service were delayed twelve to twenty hours in transit through systematic transmission failures at Phobos Repeater Station. MIPS wishes you to have its formal, though non-indemnifying, regrets regarding the interruption of these items.”
That would certainly explain the utter silence from his target listeners while he had sent his signals again and again—as well as the curious flood of responses now.
In the time it took him to pull a paper printout of all these documents, Sommerstein began framing his own reply to the deputy administrator's request for an interview. Finishing up his business this morning was going to be easy.
Part 6
Plus Thirty Days… and Counting
How perfect are your designs,
lord of eternity!
There is a Nile in the shy
for the strangers, for the cattle of every land....
Dawning, shining, passing and returning,
you have made all things of yourself, by yourself:
cities and tribes, roads and rivers.
All eyes see you daily, Aton over the Earth.
—From Ikhnaton's "Hymn to the Sun"
Chapter 29
Watching and Waiting
Jack of Diamonds
Ace of Clubs
Two of Clubs
… Queen of Hearts
Cabin B9 aboard ISS W
hirligig III, April 24, 2081
Peter Spivak stared at the red queen as she settled in front of him on the deck panels. For a flashing instant as she sailed toward him, face up in a flat spin, Peter had thought the card was another jack, to go along with the diamond he had showing and the jack of spades that was his hole card. Three of a kind would surely take this pot.
But no, when the last card slowed in the fractional gravity, she was the treacherous queen of hearts. A bad card for Peter in any game; so seeing her was a double shock. He stared down at her face with its cool, simpering Mona Lisa smile.
"You going to play, Pete?" Mitch North asked him. "The bid's twenty to you."
"He's still worried about his girl," Eric Porter said, reading Spivak's mind with amazing accuracy.
"No… I, ah… well, maybe a little," Peter replied, hoping the stuttering admission would bluff out the truth—that he had secretly been expecting a third jack.
"Women are a pain," said North, the experienced space sailor. "Love 'em and leave 'em on the ground, where they belong."
"Pete wanted his to come meet him on Mars," Porter explained. In Cabin B9, with four men bunking in just fifteen cubic, any secret shared in the dead of night was eventually known to all. But damn Eric's big mouth anyway!
"She asked to come along," Spivak explained lamely.
"Before you left?" the older shipman wondered out loud.
"Well, no, after. It took her a bit of time to get used to the idea of leaving Earth. She didn't actually decide until I'd already gone."
"How did you find out, then?"
"She sent me a blip-tape about a week after we broke orbit for Mars… Someone had beaten her up in New York, and that kind of made up her mind to go off planet."
"What did you say to that?"
"Of course I told her to come."
"You talked to her in person? Two-way?"
"Well, uh, no. I wasn't sure of the time difference. So the communications officer suggested I just send a night letter."
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