Charles Sheffield - Starfire

Star was shaking her head. “Yer don’t get it, mam.” Her wide mouth turned down. “We can’t not talk ter nobody — because we already done it.”

“Damnation. Who?”

“John Hyslop, an’ Maddy Wheatstone.”

“What did they say?”

“They asked us not ter tell anybody. Same as you did. But we have.”

“That’s all right.” Politics was the art of the practical. “If they know, they know. It sounds as though they won’t talk about it. Anyone else?”

“No, mam.”

“Good. Then please keep it like that. Let’s survive today, then we’ll worry about tomorrow. Maybe by then you’ll have a new theory.” One that doesn’t sound so hopeless.

“Maybe we will.” Wilmer raised his cup and took a long, satisfied swallow. “I doubt if we’ll think much more about theories today. It’s going to be too interesting, just watching what happens. And if Mertok or anybody tells you they know what things will be like at three this afternoon, tell ’em they’re full of it.”

So much for breakfast reassurance. It’s not the end of the world today — we still have weeks to go. Whatever she did, she was not going to say that to the American people.

Don’t look up. Behave normally. Smile. Celine stood on the back lawn of the White House, very aware that in a couple of minutes she would be on national and international television. Three-oh-six in the afternoon, local time. A slightly overcast day of late summer, broken clouds a change after the year’s near-interminable rains. Temperature, eighty-six degrees. Low humidity. Light breeze from the northwest. Time to zero hour: nine minutes.

The urge to look up, even when you supposedly knew better, was close to irresistible.

Celine vowed she wouldn’t do that during the broadcast, but in the same moment she caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She cursed under her breath. A media skycar was cruising north, about three hundred feet above the Mall. So much for day-long warnings to be on the surface — or better still, beneath it — when zero hour arrived.

“Tell security to get those idiots down,” she snarled into her mike — and hoped that it was not yet connected to the network.

In spite of their assurances that nothing disastrous would happen in this part of the world, her staff had urged Celine to make her broadcast from one of the deep basement levels. She had refused. When all citizens could not hide away, she said, then she should not. She did not admit to a certain insatiable curiosity. Her decision meant the staff could not hide away, either. She could see Benedict Mertok eyeing her reproachfully, beyond the range of the cameras.

“Twenty seconds,” said a voice in her ear. “Counting down . . .”

Celine could follow the digital readout on the left-hand camera. Three-oh-eight. On cue, she smiled into the cameras. “My fellow Americans. You do not need me to tell you that these are difficult times. In just a few minutes, a rain of high-energy particles generated by the Alpha Centauri supernova will strike our world. Fortunately for this country, the main effects will be felt far from here, in a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean.”

She planned to talk right up to and through zero hour, her voice and image making it clear that this was a crisis survived, although at some possible cost.

“We are taking every possible precaution. Our scientific experts suggest that there could be another electrical surge, like the one that destroyed all Earth’s microcircuits twenty-seven years ago. This time we are prepared. All vital communications have a microwave and fiber-optic backup. Emergency personnel are in place at every population center in every state. We have ample supplies of food and water and reserve power. All ground transportation is halted until the storm is over. All aircraft flights have been suspended until we give an all-clear.”

But I allowed fourteen planes full of nutcases to fly to Tierra del Fuego. I couldn’t stop them and still tell people that things are fine and everything is under control.

Three-eleven.

The storm was well over fifty percent intensity, moving fast toward its maximum. Far to the south, bundles of high-energy charged particles were smashing into the upper atmosphere, stripping electrons from neutral atoms of nitrogen and oxygen. The bundles moved so fast that they were hardly slowed by each impact, but according to Star it was an open question when the collisions would fragment the bundles into individual nuclei. No one could do more than guess the strength of the bundle binding forces in the presence of numerous free electrons. In any event, most of the bundles and their daughter particles would make it all the way down to the surface, each one accompanied by a flood of secondary particles and shortwave radiation.

Three-twelve.

Celine glanced quickly south. The Sun was peeping through high, broken clouds. Was it her imagination, or did the day seem a little dimmer?

“Although the new space shield was unfortunately not ready to deal with this first event, I have good news concerning the bigger storm that will strike us three weeks from now. Progress on our space facilities has been faster than expected, and I am told that the new shield will reach operational test status within ten days. The shield will be fully tested well before the next particle storm, ready and waiting to divert the danger. Not all particle bundles can be handled like this, but our own preparations continue, on the surface and beneath it. I have every confidence that we will deal successfully with the effects of any bundles that evade the shield.”

The truth, but not the whole truth? How much truth was too much for the general population? You didn’t want widespread panic and talk of Armageddon. What was the truth? Mertok and the other science advisors this morning hadn’t agreed at all with Wilmer and Star. Yes, Mertok said, more particle bundles would indeed get through the shield than originally expected. But the bulk of them would be deflected, and Earth would easily survive whatever was not. And any talk of runaway changes to a new steady-state Earth unrecognizably different from today’s was nonsense.

Whom did you believe? She had heard from more than a dozen “experts.” The trouble was, Wilmer had a terrible habit of being right.

Celine could read the clock while still looking straight into the camera. Three-fifteen. Zero hour.

Keep talking. From now on it’s an easy roll.

“As for today’s events, even as I speak the particle storm hitting the Southern Hemisphere has passed its peak. I feel sure that most of you, like me, have been completely unaware of its presence, and in another hour this first storm will be over and done with. We can go on with our normal everyday affairs and begin to prepare for the next challenge.”

In the split second that it took to speak the word challenge the world suddenly became darker — much darker. Celine could no longer tell herself that the gloom was nothing more than the movement of the Sun behind a passing cloud.

In spite of herself, she looked away from the cameras and up into the afternoon sky. It was like no sky that she had ever seen. On the background of pale blue overcast ran hundreds of parallel dark streaks, so regular that they might have been drawn with a straight edge. They were everywhere, crossing the face of the Sun itself, dimming its brilliance and turning its warm circle into a ruled grating. As she watched, a new set of lines appeared, gridding the sky from north to south with another pattern of fine dark contrails. Afternoon had vanished. The White House lawn sat in the eerie half dark of a total solar eclipse.