Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

He hauled himself through the last few meters to the rip. He started to deploy his repair kit, a gadget not much more sophisticated than a paint spray applicator that he cautiously poked out into the light. “How is Aristotle anyhow?”

“Not good,” Athena said grimly. “The worst of the EMP seems to be over, but the heat influx is causing more outages and disconnections. The fires, the storms—”

“Time for Plan B yet?”

“Aristotle doesn’t think so. I don’t think he quite trusts me, Bud.”

Bud forced a laugh as he worked. The spray was wonderful stuff, semi-smart itself; it just flowed up over the rent, disregarding the sunlight’s oven heat. Painting this stuff on was easier than customizing the hot rods he used to soup up as a kid. “You shouldn’t take any shit from that creaky old museum piece. You’re smarter than he is.”

“But not so experienced. That’s what he says, anyhow.”

It was done; the rogue beam of raw, unscattered sunlight dwindled and died.

Athena said, “The next breach is at—”

“Give me a minute.” Bud, breathing hard, drifted to the limit of his harness, with the repair gun floating from its own tether at his waist.

Athena said, with her occasional lumbering coquettishness, “Now who’s the museum piece?”

“I wasn’t expecting to be out here at all.” But he should have expected it, he berated himself; he should have kept up his fitness. In the last frantic months before the storm there had been no damn time for the treadmill, but that was no excuse.

He looked up at the shield. He imagined he could feel the weight of the sunlight pressing down on the great structure, feel the immense heat being dumped into it. It defied intuition that it was only the carefully calculated balance of gravitational and light pressure forces, here in this precise spot, that enabled the shield to hold its position at all; he felt as if the whole thing were going to fold down over his head like a broken umbrella.

As he watched, waves of sparkling fire washed across the shield’s surface. That was Athena firing her myriad tiny thrusters. The storm’s light pressure had been more uneven than Eugene’s models had predicted, and under that varying force Athena was having to labor to hold her position. She had been working harder than any of them for hours, Bud reflected, and all without a word of complaint.

But it was the deaths of his workers that was breaking his heart.

One by one Mario Ponzo’s maintenance crew had gone down. In the end it wasn’t heat that was killing them but radiation, the nasty little spike of gamma and X-radiation that had been unanticipated by Eugene Mangles and his endless mathematical projections. They had scrambled to cover the gaps. Even Mario had suited up and gone out. And when Mario himself had succumbed, Bud had hastily handed over his role as Flight Director to Bella Fingal—there was nobody left on the Aurora bridge more senior—and pulled on his own battered old suit.

Without warning his stomach spasmed, and vomit splashed out of his mouth. It had come from deep in his stomach—he hadn’t eaten since before the storm had broken—and was foul tasting and acidic. The sticky puke stuck to his visor, and bits floated around inside his helmet, some of them perfect, shimmering globes.

“Bud? Are you okay?”

“Give me an update on the dosages,” he said warily.

“Command crew have taken a hundred rem.” And that was with the full shielding of the Aurora 2 around them. “Maintenance crew who have been outside since the storm started are now up to three hundred rem. You are already up to one hundred seventy rem, Bud.”

A hundred and seventy. “Jesus.”

After his experiences in the ruins of the Dome of the Rock, long ago, Bud knew all about radiation. Preparing for today, he had boned up afresh on the dread science of radiation and its effect on humanity. He had memorized the meaningless regulatory limits, and the dreary terminology of “blood-forming organ doses” and “radiation type quality factors” and the rest. And he had learned the health effects of radiation dosages. At a hundred rem, if you were lucky, you were looking at queasiness for a few days, vomiting, diarrhea. At three hundred rem his people were already being incapacitated by nausea and other symptoms. Even if they shipped no more than that, twenty percent of them would die: two hundred people, of the thousand he personally had ordered out here, of the radiation alone.

And some had soaked up a lot more. Poor Mario Ponzo, beard and all, had let himself get caught. Bud knew the words for what had followed: erythema and desquamation, a reddening and blistering of the skin, and then a peeling away, a scaling, an exfoliation—along with less visible damage within. Mario had died horribly, alone in his suit, far from help, and yet he kept reporting on his situation to the end.

Bud glanced down, away from the shield, toward the open face of the full Earth. It was like looking down a well, a well with a brightly lit floor. The home world, the apparent size of the full Moon as seen from Iowa, was mercifully too remote for him to make out details. But it looked as if the air and oceans down there had been stirred up with a giant spoon, like creamy coffee. They had been battling the sun for twelve hours—the day was only half done—and everything was fraying, the shield itself, the people who struggled to maintain it, and the planet it was supposed to protect. But there was nothing to do but carry on.

He checked over his suit. The sluggish air-cycling system had removed most of the floating puke, but his visor was smeared. “Shit,” he groused. “There is nothing worse than throwing up inside a spacesuit. Okay. Where next?”

“Sector 2484, Radius 1002, panel number twelve.”

“Acknowledged.”

“We work well together, don’t we, Bud?”

“Yes, we do.”

“We make a good team.”

“None better, Athena,” he said wearily. He turned and, with an effort of will, hauled himself back along his guide rope.

1723 (London Time)

The Dome over London had cracked.

From the window of the ops room Siobhan could see it quite clearly. It was only a hairline yet, but it ran down the wall of the Dome from its zenith all the way to the ground, finishing up somewhere to the north, beyond Euston. It glowed a hellish pink-white, and burning stuff dripped from it, like pitch, falling down inside the Dome in a thin curtain.

The city itself was now in deep darkness. Power for the streetlights and Dome floods had finally been diverted to the big air circulation fans. But in places fires burned uncontrolled, and where that glowing stuff from the Dome splashed to the ground more blazes were starting.

St. Paul’s was surviving, though. In the somber light of the fires its profile was unmistakable. Wren’s great cathedral sat on the foundations of predecessors dating back to abandoned Roman London. Now the curves of the Tin Lid soared far above Wren’s masterpiece—but it was surviving, as it had endured previous national traumas. Siobhan wondered what small heroism was taking place to save the old cathedral tonight.

But it might not make any difference.

“If the Dome fails we’re done for,” she said.

“But it won’t fail,” Toby Pitt said firmly. He glanced at his watch. “Five thirty. Less than two hours to sundown. We’ll get through this yet.”

Since the death of Perdita, Toby had made it his mission, it seemed, to lift her spirits. He was a good man, she thought. But of course nothing he could say or do would make any difference to Siobhan, not anymore. She had outlived her own daughter: it was an astounding, unreasonable thought, and nothing else would ever be important. But she didn’t feel the pain of this terrible amputation from her life, not yet.