Aftermath (9 page)

"And you have advanced degrees in physics and engineering. Think how he sounds to
me,
Grace—I know the media say I was a child prodigy who graduated college when I was fifteen, but what they don't tell you is that after that I went into real estate investment and didn't even go back for my diploma. I listen to Vronsky, and I don't understand. So I ask him questions, but his answers make me more confused."

"Yes, sir. If there's any way that I can help. . . ."

"That's what I'm getting to, in my not-so-subtle way. I want you to explain some things about Supernova Alpha."

"I'll do my best. What kind of things?"

"Why didn't people warn me about the pulse? Hell, I had briefings on everything from clouds over the Sahara to supermonsoons to calving of the Antarctic ice cap. It sounded more like a case for humanitarian relief than the collapse of this country. No one said a word about an electrical pulse that would knock everything sideways. I still don't know why the damn thing happened—or why it didn't happen at the same time as the supernova."

"Right." Grace Mackay sat perfectly still for a few moments. "According to Dr. Vronsky, he did mention the remote possibility of the electrical pulse to you, weeks ago. He says its delay was inevitable. But it was an accident of geometry that it happened at all."

"That's exactly what I'm getting at. Accident of geometry? What the hell is that supposed to mean? I don't get any of this."

"May I start with basics, sir? You know what a supernova is?"

"If I didn't know that by now, we might as well give up. It's the explosion of a star."

"A very violent explosion. When a star system goes supernova, it can shine a hundred billion times as bright for a month or two."

"But Vronsky said that according to theory, Alpha Centauri was the wrong type of star. It couldn't go supernova."

"Mr. President,
can
and
can't
make sense when you're talking about the future. We're talking about the past. It did. Time for a new theory. But here's what the astronomers tell us happens in a supernova. First, you get a runaway fusion reaction inside the star, and the outer surface blows off into space. That's what we see. People in New Zealand and Australia noticed it first—it was early evening—and they watched it get brighter and brighter until it was like a second sun. That's when the climate people started modeling the effects on the weather, and warned us to expect extreme conditions up here in the north as well as down south."

"You can speed it up, Grace. I've heard this much."

"I'm sorry, sir. I'll keep it short. When the star's outer layers blow off, they form a spherical shell. The shell is opaque to short wavelength radiation, so for a few weeks the X rays and gamma rays created in the fusion explosion stay bottled up. You've got billions of hydrogen bombs going off in there, but what you see at this point is just the bright outside of the shell."

"That's what we had until the middle of March."

"Yes, sir. But as the shell expanded it became thinner. And it wasn't of uniform thickness. Finally part of the shell was weak enough for high-energy radiation to get through. There was a huge squirt of X rays and gamma rays, all coming out at the same time. The 'accident of geometry' that Dr. Vronsky mentioned was that the beam of radiation came in our direction. It hit Earth on March 14."

"Why didn't it kill everything in the Southern Hemisphere? X rays and gamma rays are deadly."

"They are. But our atmosphere is opaque to most of those wavelengths and the radiation that got through hit the open Pacific Ocean and Antarctica. It did no direct damage to heavily populated areas."

"Keep going. I know this is going to end up bad, but I don't see how."

"The radiation absorbed by the upper atmosphere had enough energy to strip electrons from gas atoms. Enormous numbers of them. Electrons are charged particles, so they moved along magnetic field lines and kept building up their energy until finally—all at once—they produced a huge pulse of electromagnetic field. And
that's
what wiped out the microchips."

"All the chips?"

"Every one on the surface of the Earth, or close by in space. The pulse travels as well through vacuum as through air. But there's an inverse square law effect, so the farther away you are from Earth's atmosphere, where the pulse originated, the less power the pulse will have. That's why the manned platforms and the polar metsats are dead, in low Earth orbit, but the geosynchronous metsats and comsats in high orbit are working fine—if only we could receive from them."

"All the microchips. And it's hard to find equipment
without
a microchip somewhere inside it. I assume there's no way the chips can be repaired?"

"No, sir. They'll have to be replaced. And it's going to be a long job, because the production plants that make the microchips depend on their own microcircuits to do it. We face a difficult bootstrapping operation. Until the factories are up and running, we'll be relying on technology from the last century."

She paused. Saul Steinmetz had closed his eyes, and sat slowly nodding his head. "Do you have any more questions, Mr. President?"

"Yes. Why me, God? Why did it happen when I was President?" He opened his eyes and smiled at Grace Mackay. "I don't expect you to answer that. I'll be seeking answers from a higher authority. Thanks for the explanation."

"My privilege." She stood up, turned smartly, and marched toward the door.

"One other thing," Saul called after her. "You say that distance helps. What do you think the chances are for the Mars expedition?"

She turned in the doorway. "I've been afraid you would ask me that. I think they could be alive, and their ship in good working condition."

"In another few days they'll be back in Earth orbit. The plans for their visit to the White House were on my calendar before any of this started."

"Yes, sir. They are scheduled to retrofire and return to an orbit around Earth on March 26. The trouble is, I see no way to bring them down. The members of the Mars expedition are probably still breathing, Mr. President. But they are dead."

4

Regardless of opinions back on Earth, Celine Tanaka did not feel dead. She felt very much alive.

Stupid was another matter. How could all the Mars crew have missed something so obvious? Logically, they ought to have known about Supernova Alpha before anyone else. After all, space was all around them, their only scenery. They should have noticed anything happening in it.

After the fact, Celine tried to justify their oversight. First, they had been on the way home for seven months, and scenery that never changes—or changes too slowly to notice—loses its charm. Second, although no one on board would mention it, they were all thinking ahead to the return to Earth. Their place in history had been secured by the Mars landing, but at the time the aerobraking problems on the way down and the loss of one unmanned lander had occupied everyone's attention. The return from the Martian surface had been uneventful but equally tense. Only on the way home, with nothing to do but wait, could you give way to the sense of anticipation and excitement.

So Supernova Alpha had begun its change when everyone aboard the
Schiaparelli
was off guard. Celine, as head of instrumentation, did notice the apparent malfunction of one of her star trackers. It was reporting a photon variation above threshold. Since the trackers' target stars were chosen as stable stellar references, the tracker obediently noted the anomaly and turned itself off to prevent damage. But Celine saw no reason to investigate the problem immediately. There were four other working star trackers, and in any case spacecraft attitude control was not important during this phase of the mission. A fix could be made anytime in the next few weeks. She thought she would do it at the end of the work period.

In retrospect, that was less than totally conscientious. But no one else on board—except maybe Zoe— would have acted any differently.

Ten minutes after the star tracker went off-line, Ludwig Holier wandered into the instrumentation center. He had the face of a wicked elf and the slight build to match, and Celine noticed that he moved with a free-fall grace and economy of effort that three years ago would have seemed impossible to all of them.

"Celine, I'm picking up a report from Canberra of anomalous short-period variation in the brightness of Alpha Centauri. Do we have anything looking that way?"

Although he was German, his English was better than her Philippine/Hawaii mixture. Celine glanced at the big board. "Only one of our navigation star trackers, and it's off-line for checking. None of our scopes is observing in that direction. Want me to switch into the DOS, see if it's taking a look?"

The Distributed Observation System was a complex of forty-eight telescopes in Earth orbit, all tightly controlled to observe a common target. The
Schiaparelli
had been designed to receive the DOS output data stream, though the crew rarely did so.

Ludwig scowled from beneath blond bangs. "Nah. I'm sure DOS is booked up weeks ahead, and it takes hours to switch targets. Can you put our big scope on it?"

"Sure. Wilmer is using it right now for super-cluster observation, but as soon as he's done we'll take a peek."

"When?"

Celine pulled a face. "You know Wilmer."

"Not as well as you do, lady."

"I should hope not. He scheduled three hours, but he often runs over. Want me to ask him if we can jump in?"

"Not worth it. Wait 'til he's done, and let me know if you find anything interesting. I'm going to rest for a while." Ludwig drifted away, heading for the second of the three interlocking modules that made up the ship.

Celine was not surprised by Ludwig's comment. It was perfectly in order to take a midday nap. The ship would awaken him if any emergency occurred. Since an emergency was defined as a situation on board the
Schiaparelli,
there was by definition no emergency.

Wilmer Oldfield took advantage of Celine's indulgence and made use of the ship's biggest telescope for even longer than she had expected. It was another six hours before he handed instrument control back to her. She fed in the celestial coordinates for Alpha Centauri, and as a matter of routine took a look to make sure that target acquisition had been correctly performed.

By that time, Alpha Centauri had brightened by seventeen magnitudes. Celine gave the blazing point of light on the display one glance, noted its still-increasing intensity, and immediately buzzed Zoe.

"Zo? You there? We've got something I think you'll want to take a look at."

"What?" Zoe Nash was the head of the Mars expedition, and she sounded half-asleep. It was a rare condition for her, but in this phase of the flight home lethargy seemed more virtue than vice.

"It's Alpha Centauri," Celine said. "It's superbrilliant. I think it's becoming a nova, even a supernova. More than a thousand times as bright as usual."

"Really?" Zoe became more lively. "I do want to take a look at that. Everyone else will, too. Make a general announcement, will you?"

"Sure."

Celine alerted the ship's general intercom, made sure that the scope would remain locked on Alpha Centauri, and headed aft. The ship had been designed with high redundancy, so that any one of its three sections could at a pinch become a stand-alone unit able to make the journey home. A much overcrowded journey, to be sure, and one with little margin for error if all seven expedition members were present; but the crew would reach Earth orbit alive. The price paid for that triple security was the difficulty of transition from one section to the next. Celine grumbled to herself as she squeezed through a narrow passage with an airlock at each end. Small-boned and thin as she was, it was still hard going. When she reached the observation chamber at the far end of the ship's third section, every other expedition member was already there.

She surveyed the group, wondering where to place herself. In the front row, pushing each other for extra space, were Zoe Nash, Wilmer Oldfield, and the chief geologist—and areologist—Reza Armani. Behind them were the other three crew members, Alta McIntosh-Mohammad, Ludwig Hotter, and computer specialist Jenny Kopal. Celine had hardly seen them all in one place since the return ship left the surface of Mars.

Reza in particular had almost disappeared, gloating over his collection of Mars samples like a demented miser. Celine worried sometimes about his attitude, he seemed close to irrational on the subject. True, five of the samples did contain dormant bacterial life-forms of enormous interest. Wilmer Oldfield and Celine herself had performed the genome scans. The forms were DNA-based, but their sequences were nothing remotely like any Earth organism. Reza had stood by all through the work, glowering at Celine and Wilmer as though they might attempt theft of his treasure.

The observation chamber had not been designed to accommodate all the team at once. Celine was not going to get the best viewing position, no matter what she did. She squeezed in, peered over Alta McIntosh-Mohammad's shoulder, and gasped. Direct observation was quite different from looking at something on a screen. There was no question which star was Alpha Centauri. Although still showing only as a white point of light, it was brilliant enough to cast shadows inside the chamber.

"It looks brighter than it did just a few minutes ago," she said.

"It is." Wilmer recognized her voice and spoke without looking around. "Celine, did you get a reading for a number of magnitudes increase?"

His accent was the strongest in the whole international group. He was Australian, and he had bemused Celine at their first meeting by insisting that what he spoke was standard English.

"Yes, I did," she said. "It was seventeen, when I last looked."

"Then if it's a supernova—which I think it may be, even though it shouldn't—it's just getting going."

"What do you mean,
shouldn't
?" Zoe Nash was a short and stocky woman of mixed Ugandan and Turkish descent. She was right where an expedition leader ought to be, up at the front of the group. She was also, because of the shortage of space, squashed by the others against the observation window.