Aftermath Read online

  Except for Wilmer, the group in front of Celine moved in concert, edging away from the chamber window.

  "Are we in danger?" Zoe asked. Wilmer shrugged. He had the long limbs and wide shoulders of an outdoorsman. That, combined with his Australian accent, had Celine in the first months of their acquaintance expecting him to talk about wombats and wallabies rather than quantum field theories. "I don't see why," he said at last. "We can handle solar radiation. We have the inner shielded area in Section One, in case of big solar flares." He looked thoughtful. "Course, when the gas shell of the supernova expands, a big slug of gamma rays will break out. We have no idea which direction they'll emerge. But we have enough shielding to handle that, too. The big problem is going to be the high-energy particle flux. That will carry a lot more energy than the visible light or the gamma rays. It'll be an absolute killer."

  Zoe came bolt upright. "And you say we're not in danger!"

  "We're not. The light and gammas travel at light speed, but the particles are much slower—five to ten percent of light speed. It will take them fifty years to get here."

  The group relaxed again.

  "Fifty years," Zoe said. "I don't care about fifty years. I was worried about fifty minutes or fifty hours."

  Wilmer shook his head. "No worries. We will be fine."

  "We will be fine." Alta McIntosh-Mohammad was the Schiaparelli's chief engineer, Scottish-Indian and taciturn. Whenever she spoke, the rest had learned to listen. "But what about them? Back on Earth. Will they be all right?"

  "Wilmer?" said Zoe.

  There was a much longer silence, during which Alpha Centauri visibly increased in brightness second by second. Celine thought of her mother and stepfather, now on a field trip in central Kalimantan. They were very resourceful, they would be fine. Wouldn't they? And her brother Hiroshi should certainly be safe enough, on the west coast of Canada. But Wilmer's lengthy pause was worrying, and the appearance of the rest of the crew suggested that they were having the same thoughts as Celine. She could see uneasiness on every face, tight-lipped control, and a reluctance to look at each other.

  "That's a much harder question," Wilmer said at last—not what Celine was hoping to hear. "You put another illumination source, maybe as bright as Sol, down at sixty degrees south. It will have a hell of an effect on temperatures and global weather. In the long run, you'll see some ice melt and sea-level rise. But for good quantitative answers you need the best models on atmospheric circulation patterns. We don't have anything like that on board—though you can bet they're hard at work down on Earth."

  "I hope bad weather won't screw up our landing plans," Zoe said. "The last thing we need is high winds and storms. I suppose if we have to, we can sit it out in orbit."

  With hindsight, Celine would realize that Zoe had still been seeing Supernova Alpha as a problem for Earth but at most a minor inconvenience to the expedition. And everyone had taken their cue from the leader of the party. So after another half hour of watching they one by one wandered away, leaving the observation chamber for their own quarters.

  Wilmer and Celine were the last to go. He was simply fascinated by the supernova and wanted to see as much of it as possible; Celine had her own reasons. She wanted a quiet place to think, and the observation chamber was as good as any.

  Competition for the Mars expedition had been incredibly fierce. Each of the winners had multiple capabilities and would have multiple duties, but everyone knew that competence was only part of the picture. Politics was the other variable, beyond a candidate's control. The selection committee somehow had to achieve a mixture of crew members both competent and internationally balanced. Every crew member also had to be both vitally important and totally expendable. If someone died on Mars, there could be no sending home for replacements.

  So in Celine's mind, Ludwig Holter satisfied continental European pride, handled all communications, and in a pinch took over the computers. Alta McIntosh-Mohammad pleased Britain and the Federation of Indian States and was chief engineer, while Reza Armani was American-Iranian and served as backup pilot in addition to his role as areologist. Zoe Nash herself knew all the communications systems and represented both Africa and Asia Minor. And Jenny Kopal, Hungarian with a strong dash of Russian, had spent enough time with Celine to be fully familiar with the Schiaparelli's major command and control instrumentation.

  Celine still wondered how she herself had been lucky enough to survive the final cut. Perhaps it was pressure from the Eastern lobby, with a little Hawaiian help. She knew she was hardworking and pretty bright, but the others of the crew were more than that. They were spectacular.

  And in that company, the stand-out oddity was Wilmer. Everyone admitted it; they were highly competent, but he was a real genius. No one on board approached him as a pure scientist—and not one of them wanted him anywhere near when they were doing their jobs. He was as clumsy as you could get, and equipment fell apart in his hands. He was also the odd one physically. The rest were below average height and weight, Wilmer was tall and deep-chested and rangy.

  Their special capabilities and redundancies had all made sense, even before they headed for Mars. Only when they had been traveling for a few months did Celine conclude that the faceless selection committee back on Earth had employed yet another set of criteria. The crew were matched not only in technical skills, but in personality types. They had been paired, she suspected, before they ever left Earth. The group was not particularly highly sexed, but unless people are actually neutered or drugged into an asexual stupor, couplings are bound to occur. Reza Armani and Jenny Kopal had paired off early, followed a month later by Ludwig Holter and Alta McIntosh-Mohammad. Celine thought them unlikely duos. Reza, for example, had a deep mystical streak and sometimes seemed both illogical and half-crazy. Jenny, in contrast, was a cool and objective atheist. But of course they hadn't consulted Celine before sleeping together. And she could imagine the reactions when she and Wilmer began to share quarters: Whatever does he/she see in her/him?

  Zoe Nash had no one, man or woman, and seemed content with that. She was five years older than the rest, who were all within a year of each other, and maybe she saw them as her children. And maybe they liked that. They had lots of respect for each other, but of all possible losses Zoe's would be the hardest for everyone to take.

  The personality types were varied in one other way that was hard to define, although Celine had pondered it often enough. Zoe was certainly the authority figure. Reza was the class clown and cut-up king, sometimes far-out enough to make Celine wonder how he had passed the psychological tests. But what were the rest? She could never decide, with one exception: Celine herself was the expedition's worrywart, a Cassandra who could always imagine a dozen ways that things might go wrong. Unlike Cassandra's, though, her own dire predictions had never come to pass.

  Yet.

  And that, she suspected, was why she remained in the observation chamber with Wilmer, and stared at Alpha Centauri. She was worried, and not sure why. He hardly seemed to know that she was there, until she said, "Wilmer, we talked about what the supernova might do to Earth. Could it do anything to the rest of the solar system?"

  "Nothing to worry us. It will melt the ice surfaces on the moons of the outer planets, but as Alpha Centauri dims they'll freeze over again."

  "What about the sun? There will be a lot of extra heat, all pouring into one side of it."

  "It's a lot by terrestrial standards. In solar terms, it's nothing."

  "It couldn't cause big solar flares, or anything like that?"

  "I doubt it. Even if it did, Section Two of the Schiaparelli is well shielded against that sort of thing. We'll have plenty of notice, we'll just retreat there for as long as necessary. We're safer here on the ship than we would be down on Earth."

  Celine could see why Wilmer was so good as a partner for her. No matter what happened, he stayed calm. And he could usually give her a sound, logical reason why her worries were groundless.

 
This time, though, she had the awful conviction that she would be right, and he would be wrong.

  * * *

  Supernova Alpha brightened and brightened. The crew of the Schiaparelli was in the best possible position to observe it. Four weeks after the first brightening—and one week before the change—the expanding gas shell around the star was big enough to show a visible disk to the on-board telescopes. From the second day, Celine had tuned their communications antennae to receive images from the DOS in Earth orbit. They all watched the fiery sphere pulsate and shiver under the force of explosions deep inside it. Wilmer did inverse calculations to determine the energy release from the observations. The numbers he quoted, in his dry, matter-of-fact way, were enough to make Celine shiver.

  "If there were planets orbiting Alpha Centauri . . ." Alta said gloomily, when she, Celine, and Wilmer were together in the main galley of the Schiaparelli. She was the expedition's number two pessimist, right after Celine.

  "Then you would be quite right to employ the past tense." Wilmer nodded to a display, where Alpha Centauri was now constantly displayed. "If they were ever there, they're cinders."

  Celine didn't say anything. But after they had finished eating she went again to Section Two. There she checked that the quarters they would retreat to in case of a big solar storm were fully furnished with supplies. Then she did what she had done every day since the first blossoming of Supernova Alpha; she examined sequences of visible-wavelength images of both Alpha Centauri and of Sol, looking for changes in either.

  Of course, she didn't see anything. The huge pulse of gamma rays from Supernova Alpha, when it finally came, was invisible to human eyes.

  The instruments, however, had sensitivity to everything from hard X rays to long radio waves. They caught the leap in the ambient gamma-ray level in the first fraction of a second, extrapolated the upward curve, and sent a warning bellow through the whole ship.

  The crew had been well trained. Better to overreact than underreact. They headed at maximum speed for Section Two. Celine, in a bizarre way, felt vindicated. She had expected trouble, and here it was—and thanks to Celine they were ready, food and water fully stocked, extra instruments installed so they would know exactly what was going on outside.

  Not much space, of course. They were in an emergency shelter, not a luxury hotel. But Celine sat bug-rug-snug and not unhappy between Wilmer and Ludwig, watching the gamma-level readout.

  It was calibrated so that a level of zero equaled the mean solar gamma flux with a quiet sun. The current level—sixty-three—only meant something if you knew that the readout scale was the base-e log of the gamma intensity. That was easy to deal with if you knew, as Celine did, that e3 is about equal to twenty. So an increase of three in readout value was equivalent to a factor of twenty multiplier in actual gamma-ray level. Readout level sixty-three then meant that the current gamma flux was 2063/3 of the usual value. 2021 was rather more than 1027. Space outside the shielded compartment of the Schiaparelli was hot, hell-hot, with the gamma-ray burst from Supernova Alpha.

  And still Celine, who would conclude in retrospect that she was an idiot, thought they were sitting pretty inside their shield. She hadn't even bothered to include a display showing anything of what was happening back on Earth. It was Ludwig, sitting with his miniature ear-link tuned to open communications channels, who after a few seconds grunted, sat upright, and said, "What the hell is going on?"

  Nothing special, according to Celine's displays. She turned to him. "What do you mean? What do you hear?"

  He had his control unit on his lap, scanning frequencies. He shook his head. "I don't like this. I was monitoring S-band, low data rate ground-to-space vocal. Then it went dead—and now so has everything else. I'm getting nothing at all, not even video or general communications uplinks from Earth."

  It was Wilmer, on Celine's other side, who stirred from an apparent trance and said, "Check space to ground."

  Ludwig said nothing, but his fingers stabbed at another section of his lap set. After a few seconds he glanced across at Wilmer. "Weird. Nothing going down from low Earth orbit, voice or image or computer bit stream. But for the geosynchronous metsats, higher up, it's business as usual. Do you want me to look at their image data stream?"

  "Yes. But not what's being sent out now. Do you receive and store past data?"

  "Some. It's a moving window. We store metsats for the past twenty-four hours, that's all."

  "That will be ample. Tap us in to fifteen minutes ago, and run a display."

  Zoe was finally taking an interest. She had not actually been listening, but she reacted to Wilmer's and Ludwig's tone of voice. She leaned forward toward them. "Hey, what's going on? How long before this gamma surge fades, and we can get out of here?"

  Celine glanced across at the readout: forty-two. "It's fading already," she said. "It's down by twenty-one from the last value I saw. That's a factor of more than a billion. If it keeps going like this, we can all leave here in a few minutes."

  "I'm going to borrow your display, Celine," Ludwig said. "Here's the metsat images."

  Alpha Centauri vanished. In its place came the familiar and comforting sight of Earth as seen from geosynchronous orbit, thirty-five thousand kilometers above the surface. They stared in silence at the great globe, half lit by sunlight, half in darkness. Without knowing how to give a name to it, Celine could see a strangeness to the cloud patterns. Instead of broad bands or hurricane swirls, the clouds had an unusual north-south streaky structure, as though the equator—that already imaginary entity—had disappeared.

  Peculiar, yes. But menacing? Not really. All seven of them sat watching in silence. At last, as Zoe was saying, "All right, I've enjoyed as much of this as I can stand," it came.

  A blue glow started at the South Pole and shimmered north. Like a gas discharge in a fluorescent tube, it moved until it enveloped the whole Earth. And then, while they stared and wondered if they were seeing what they thought they saw, it was gone.

  Wilmer leaned back against Celine. "We're screwed," he said. "Dead unlucky, the geometry must have been just wrong. I knew it was a possibility, but I never thought it would happen. Ludwig, check the time codes on the data streams. I bet data loss in and around Earth began coincident with that high-atmosphere free electron phenomenon we just witnessed."

  "What will it do?" Reza asked. He had the least electronic background of anyone on board.

  "If it was as strong as I think," Wilmer answered, "it will have knocked out a lot of electronic gear down on Earth. Anything with microchips in it is probably dead."

  "Well, doesn't that mean . . ." Reza said.

  He was asking more questions. Celine could hear him, but his words didn't even register with her. If everything containing microchips no longer worked, then the planet would be plunged back to a pre-electronic age; except that the world of 2026, unlike the world of 1926, depended on electronic devices for every phase of living.

  And there was more. Equipment in low Earth orbit would also be affected. That included the space stations—stations on which the Mars expedition had been depending for its safe return to Earth.

  Celine thought again of her parents and her brother. They were probably not in situations critically dependent on electronic technology. They were all right.

  But she was not. The chances of survival of the first Mars expedition had suddenly dropped by many orders of magnitude.

  Sure, they should be able to fire retro-rockets to match speed with Earth. Sure, they ought to be able to park the Schiaparelli in Earth orbit. But the most difficult part of the journey home, the final reentry, would still lie ahead. And for that reentry, they needed resources that no longer existed.

  5

  As Grace Mackay was leaving Saul's office, Auden Travis popped back in the doorway. "You have no other meetings on your calendar this evening, Mr. President—"

  "And plenty to do. I'll eat right here, if you could pass the word."

  "Yes, sir. But I
was about to add, you have two people still waiting to see you, Dr. Singer and Ms. Silvers. Also, we have more working lines. South Carolina is patched in—"

  "Good."

  "—and Mrs. Steinmetz is on the line. It's not one of her better days, sir. She is referring to you as Ben."

  "Bring Dr. Singer in, and tell him to take the other headset. Then put Mrs. Steinmetz on the line. I want Dr. Singer to hear her. I'll see Ms. Silvers last, and she can eat with me. Order for two."

  "Very good, sir."

  Was that a faint look of distaste on Auden Travis's handsome face as he left? Better that, Saul decided, than the knowing smirk that a heterosexual aide might offer.

  He sighed—Why me, God?—and picked up the old-fashioned headset as Dr. Forrest Singer entered, nodded, and moved to the other working telephone.

  "Hello, Mother." Saul waited. When there was no reply, he went on, "How are you feeling?"

  "They're not feeding me right." The voice on the other end of the line came through faint and scratchy, with odd breaks between the words. "And they have different people giving me my bath and cleaning my rooms."

  "I'll talk to them, Mother. I'll make sure it gets fixed. We have trouble lots of places, because of the supernova."

  "Oh? Well, you know that's nothing to do with me. I can't do anything about that. What are you doing, Ben? Are you meeting any nice girls?"

  "This is Saul, Mother. I'm very busy. Too busy to think much about meeting girls."

  "Why haven't you been calling me? I don't think you've called for a long time. I don't know when you last called me."

  "I'm sorry, Mother. They've had a lot of trouble with the telephones. I'll try to call more often."

  "You ought to take a break, you work too hard. Make them fix the food better here. They'll listen to you, they don't seem to listen to me at all."

  "I'll tell them, Mother."

  "And make sure you take a break from work sometimes. Go down to the temple, have a social life."

  "I'll try, Mother. It's hard to get out at the moment, there's so much going on here."