Charles Sheffield - Aftermath

Wilmer shook his head. “No worries. We will be fine.”

“We will be fine.” Alta Mclntosh-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 Mclntosh-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 Mclntosh-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.