Starfire (5 page)

At that rate, the display of the period from the present to the time of maximum flux energy would take a hundred minutes; long before that John would be at Sky City. He called for a tripling of simulation display rate and settled back to watch. Already he was having premonitions. Will Davis would never suggest such a viewing unless the implications were severe.

In any case, John would have caught the problem even without prior warning. He remembered the results of the simulation from four months ago. Superimposed on the blue web you would always see a scattering of pink patches, within which the flecks of green and orange came and went apparently at random.

Today was different. Eight minutes into the display— less than two years ahead in real time—the pattern began to change. Pink patches spread. Within them he saw few flecks of green. The orange glow of worsening problems dominated.

Something had changed, rapidly and for the worse. It surely had to be something more than the number of uncharged particles, which John still judged acceptably low. He kept watching until the simulation reached the time of maximum flux. By then the space shield had become a sieve. In such a future, Earth would suffer far more than during the initial wave of twenty-seven years ago.

His imagination, heightened by the boost, flashed to scenes of disaster made vivid by early childhood. The first effects of the Alpha Centauri supernova had been calving of the Antarctic ice shelf, blizzards at the equator, tidal waves, and nested sets of tornadoes. When the gamma pulse hit, planes dropped from the sky, telephones and television and radio became useless, and mayhem, starvation, and disease took over.

That surprise would not happen again—the gamma pulse would not be repeated. But there was scope for new and worse disasters. His boosted consciousness threw images at him with awful clarity.

The upper atmosphere had shielded Earth from the direct effects of the gamma-ray pulse. It would not do the same for the particle storm now on its way. The charged nuclei, predicted to be mostly bare protons, would come like a hail of tiny bullets, smashing into the air at relativistic speed. Most would be absorbed on the way down, producing a cascade of forward-scattered mesons, electrons, and gamma rays. Some of those would in turn be absorbed and scattered, some would continue. The atmosphere would turn into a cloud of charged nitrogen and oxygen ions, opaque at every wavelength from hard ultraviolet to short-wave infrared. In the darkness below, a deadly blend of radiation and particles would hit the surface. That final mixture would depend on the type and energy spectrum of the incident particles.

Marine organisms would be lucky, at least at first. Water was a fine absorber, and within a few feet of the surface it would quench the main radiation storm. Troubles would begin at the bottom of the food chain, when plankton and algae lacked solar radiation for photosynthesis. Starvation would work its way steadily up, to the krill, to the vertebrate fishes and crustaceans, finally to the seals and dolphins and whales.

Long before that, all land forms would be in trouble. Water was a good absorber for the torrent of high-energy radiation and particles, but unfortunately most plants and animals were at least seventy percent water. Microscopic explosions would happen in a billion cells at once, disrupting protein synthesis and demolishing the delicate nucleotide sequences in the germ plasm. Old organisms would sicken and die, embryos would form with mutation levels high enough to kill, and all under a smoking sky of reactive ions and toxic rains.

Things would improve—slowly. In perhaps a year, when the main storm was over, sunlight would bleed back in and the air would turn clear and clean. Before that, the species die-off might be worse than anything seen during the Permian or Cretaceous/Triassic mass extinctions. Humans ought to survive, but there could be another halving in population, matching that of twenty-seven years ago. Said that way, it didn't sound too bad. Say it as two billion people dying in awful ways, and it became unthinkable.

John's head and stomach were churning. The shield team's job was to make sure that the worst you could imagine
didn't
happen. But was the team up to the task, even without the new problems?

He turned off the visual feed from Cusp Station. Into the foreground sprang the sunlit upper face of the "space pill," the thin disk of Sky City, a kilometer across and a hundred and ninety meters deep. He was closing on the nerve center for space operations, and he must prepare himself for arrival.

The trouble was, his brain refused to cooperate. The images of Earth's once and future woes distracted him, boiling and bubbling through his mind. John glanced at the condition monitor and understood what was happening. These were Neirling boost side effects, annoying but not unusual. He squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated. After a few minutes the disturbing mind pictures began to fade.

A law of diminishing returns applied to the Neirling boosts. Boost once, and you gained a clean twelve hours of wakefulness and heightened attention. Boost again, before you crashed, and you had maybe eight more hours, with some loss of judgment at the end of it and a danger of making decisions you would later regret. If you tried to stay awake too long in second boost, your consciousness turned off without warning like a failed light bulb.

And third boosts?

They were done only in life-or-death circumstances. The user had at most five good hours, followed by an unavoidable twelve-hour crash. You woke feeling fine. However, observers insisted that the person who came out of a three-in-a-row Neirling boost was not the person who went in. Psychological tests were inconclusive.

John did not intend to add to the body of available evidence. He would go to Bruno Colombo's office and listen to what the Sky City director had to say about the "new problem"—presumably the simulations. After that he would find a place where he could hide away.

Then he would sleep, as soundly as Henry Neirling himself, dead for the past six years.

4

Bruno Colombo's office sat in the half-gee environment of the outer perimeter of Sky City. It was the choicest real estate on the space arcology, a place where Coriolis effects of rotation were at a minimum and you were far away from the noisy zero-gee workshops of the central axis.

Maddy Wheatstone didn't begrudge the director his palatial surroundings. So far as she was concerned, Bruno Colombo had the worst job in the universe. Judging from all that she had heard of the man, he loved it. He was
Homo bureaucratiensis,
the pure product, happy juggling the mishmash of everyday affairs needed to run an eighty-thousand-person flying city. His worries were budget and construction priorities, plus international politics both Earthside and spaceside.

Different strokes for different folks.

The shuttle craft had docked smoothly on the zero-gee central axis of the rotating cylinder of Sky City. Maddy was late, she was exhausted, and she was hungry. She kept her suit on and hurried toward the perimeter. When she reached a quarter-gee chamber she operated the airlock, and at her command the suit removed itself from her body. Receiving her approval to leave, it headed back toward the axis. It would seek out the service facilities to take on new supplies and exhaust waste products. In half an hour it would be ready for reuse, by Maddy or anyone else.

Maddy didn't intend to be that next user. She appreciated the suit's devotion, but she had spent the past fifteen hours inside it, nine of them trying to catch up on lost sleep while the acceleration of her space environment ranged between the two and a half gees of takeoff and the easy float of free fall. The shuttle, for the fourth consecutive time that she had taken it, had been delayed at both ends. Enough was enough.

And in some ways it was too much. Her travel case would not be unloaded and taken to her room on Sky City for another two hours, but her appointment with Colombo was
now.
Maddy checked her appearance as she drifted down the incline of a spiraling outward corridor. The personal suit did a good job of removing waste products, and it tried to keep body and clothing free of perspiration; but it didn't quite succeed. Late or not, she had to do something.

Just before she came to Bruno Colombo's office she slipped into a washroom and did what she could in the way of repairs. Water and a quick brush and comb took care of her hair and skin. Makeup hid the signs of weariness around her eyes and mouth. Clothing was a more difficult problem. Her outfit was reasonably clean, but rumpled. It looked as though she had slept in it—exactly what she had been unable to do.

A woman occupied Bruno Colombo's outer office. She was, according to Maddy's information, the notorious Goldy Jensen. She was barely forty, but she had been Dr. Bruno Colombo's personal assistant for twenty years. She was also, according to the Argos Group information services, his longtime mistress. But beyond all that, she was his guardian. No one made it in to see Colombo without being subjected to Goldy's scrutiny. Maddy had heard that even Bruno's wife had to be cleared for access.

Goldy let her off easily. She gave Maddy's clothes a disdainful stare, but she said, "Go on in. You are late. Your meeting was scheduled to begin seven minutes ago. The others are already here."

Others? Maddy had assumed that Gordy Rolfe had arranged for a one-on-one. "Who is in the meeting?"

Goldy Jensen stared at her stonily. "I feel sure that Dr. Colombo will introduce you as he thinks fit."

And screw you, too.
But Maddy didn't say it. The briefing documents also noted that Goldy held grudges and forgot nothing.

Maddy slid the door open and walked through into Bruno Colombo's office.

The view, if you felt comfortable in space, was spectacular. On the perimeter of Sky City "down" meant "outward." The whole floor of the room was transparent. As Sky City turned on its axis you looked past your feet and watched the panorama of the heavens sweeping by. Once a minute the same view returned, except that Sky City was itself in synchronous orbit about Earth. Sometimes the benign face of the planet intervened, blocking out a full fifteen degrees of the sky.

Maddy knew that the transparent floor could turn opaque with the flip of a switch, but Bruno Colombo apparently had a habit of showing the wheeling starscape whenever he had visitors from Earth—particularly first-time visitors with weak nerves and little space experience.

If he hoped that was true in Maddy's case, he had missed his target. She walked forward, stared down and out, and said, "Magnificent. I'd pawn my soul for an office view like this." She held out her hand to the tall man standing with feet planted in the middle of the floor/window, and said, "Dr. Colombo, I'm delighted to meet you. And . . ." She stared pointedly at the other man in the room.

He was lounging at the low table. He had been speaking, but broke off in midsentence as she entered. Then he scrambled to his feet and held out his hand. "John Hyslop."

Something was wrong already. According to her plans, John Hyslop should not be here. Her meeting was with Bruno Colombo alone, and her main task was to persuade the director that Hyslop should be made available to assist the Argos Group in the asteroid capture program.

She needed time to think. Colombo already looked grumpy and ill at ease. Was Gordy Rolfe the cause, playing power games behind her back?

John Hyslop was still holding out his hand. She took it, held on for a fraction longer than custom demanded, and used the time to study him. He was short and stocky, only a few inches taller than her own five-four. Steady gray eyes, dark-smudged with fatigue or illness, stared into hers. He wore a dark two-day stubble of beard. The beginnings of male pattern baldness, easily treated with follicle protozoans, sent a different message: He didn't much care what he looked like.

Her peripheral vision made a lightning scan of his clothes. She concluded that she had worried too much about her own appearance. Compared to him she was well groomed and elegant. Her clothes looked as if she had slept in them. His looked like he had died in them.

Bruno Colombo moved between the two, forcing her to take a step backward. "Hyslop, this is Madeline Wheatstone. She lives in the United States. However, as I told you, she is not visiting us in any official government capacity."

Hyslop's gray eyes had been gazing at her with a curiosity that matched Maddy's own. She felt a sudden conviction that he did not know why he was here. And he did not know why Maddy was here, either. Her background data said that he was all engineer, as much the pure product as Bruno Colombo was the pure bureaucrat. His expression asked,
Why have I been dragged here from my work?
The director, Maddy knew, was the last person on Earth—or off it—to waste time with casual visitors.

Colombo had somehow glided forward again so that her view was mainly of the director's back. Bruno was enormously tall and broad-shouldered. He must seldom be in a setting where that groomed halo of silvery hair did not tower above the crowd.

Maddy took a quick step sideways, so that she and John Hyslop faced each other again. She said, "Actually, I prefer Maddy to Madeline. Why don't we all sit down? I don't think we've ever met, Mr. Hyslop, but I've heard a lot of good things about you."

Judging by the look on Bruno Colombo's face, none of those had come from the director. They all sat down, and now she and Hyslop were eye to eye. She was long-waisted, so a lot of her height was in her torso. John Hyslop was probably self-conscious about his own short stature. He would have been just the wrong age, all set to be given a series of growth hormone shots, when the supernova hit.

He leaned forward. "Ms. Wheatstone—"

"Maddy."

"—I feel sure that you and I have never met. Actually, I don't even know why I'm meeting with you now."

It was a cue, and not a very subtle one. But Bruno Colombo picked up on it before Maddy could. "I did send you a message, Hyslop, when you were out on the shield."

"If this concerns the new simulations of shield performance and shield failure, then I agree that the problem—"