Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

“The trouble is,” Senior Boatmaster James Eden said matter-of-factly, “the film of carbon vapor begins to collapse at these pressures. The rate of carbon consumption goes up, the sessile effect dissipates, and the boat itself is consumed.”

“Very interesting,” said Dr. John Plant. “Now don’t you think we ought to get the hell out of here before you demonstrate the point?”

Eden nodded and said into the intercom, “Up. Forty degrees. Now.” He fingered the keys and took the boat up to within five hundred yards of the surface before he leveled off. He said to Plant, “Don’t wash it out, though. Those limitations I just mentioned will allow these boats to be consumed, but there may be a way around them.”

“I don’t know what they could be. Those limitations seem pretty fundamental to me. I think we need a whole new approach to get down to the center. We’ll never do it with this kind of equipment.”

Eden shook his head and said, “I never thought I’d be sitting in a sessile boat on the Sun and hear someone say it was obsolete. Look here. The carbon toruses that surround the boat act as a mirror. They absorb all the radiation from infrared down to the hard stuff to a depth of a fraction of a millimeter and then reflect it with an efficiency of ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine eight. That’s the turnaround effect we’ve been telling you about. Carbon vaporization protects against the balance of the radiation, and the power difference is supplied by our internal reactors. So look. If we can increase the efficiency of the turnaround effect by a factor of a few thousand, we could cope with the increased temperatures and radiative effects at great depths. What’s wrong with that?”

“Well, just how do you—”

“We can still balance out the gravitational force by channeling additional power to the bottom toruses, to take advantage of the radiative pressure on the bottom of the boat. Right?”

“Well, just how do you—?”

“That’s your problem. I’ve told you how to do it. You’re the scientist. I’m just a boat captain. Now, stand by while we get this thing back to base. I’m going Earthside today.”

Plant sighed and settled back in his harness while Eden picked up the beacon and followed it back to base, through the lock and into the bay. While they were stripping off their lead suits, Plant said, “Maybe a carbon alloy.”

“What?” said Eden.

“Maybe a carbon alloy would improve the efficiency of the turnaround effect.”

“Sounds promising to me. Give it a whirl. Nice going.”

Plant looked at him wryly. “Thanks. Glad you like my ideas.” Eden was too busy to pay any attention to the slight emphasis on the word “my,” so Plant smiled at Eden’s back, shrugged and hung up his suit.

They found Base Commander Hechmer in the day room with some of the staff watching a teevee transmit Earthside. Wilburn was addressing the Weather Council, bringing the members up to date on the Sun program. He told them results were coming in. The Sun’s core was behaving anomalously. Neutrino formation at the core had accelerated and apparently was going to accelerate even more. The Sun appeared to be moving out of the main sequence a billion years ahead of schedule. Hechmer said, to no one in particular, “Gives you a nice comfortable feeling, doesn’t it?”

On the screen Wilburn said, “To finish my report to you, we should know in a few weeks exactly what is wrong with the Sun, and we should then be in a position to know what to do about it. In short, ladies and gentlemen of the Weather Council, this most massive of research efforts has borne fruit. It is isolating the problem, and it will arrive at a solution. Thank you.” The applause was long and genuine, and Wilburn made a slight bow and quickly put his hand on the podium.

The Advisors had the jitters, so Greenberg called together his mathemeteorologists and said, “Now look. Just because we have the heavy artillery in the scientific world showing up here in a few minutes is no reason to get all upset. It’s just a high-level meeting, and they’re holding it here. After all, we’ve made an important contribution to the total research effort on this program.”

“Yes, but why here? They going to change the Advisors?”

“I hear they’re going to fire us.”

“Yeah, clean shop and start again with a new group.”

Greenberg said, “Oh, cut it out. They probably want our advice on the next steps in the program. You’ll have to admit, we have a problem there. We may have accomplished everything we can in the program.”

People began to drift in, and soon the room was full. Potter took over as chairman. “What we’ve got to do is see where we go from here. We’ve accomplished almost all the major objectives of the program. What’s left?”

Kowalski said, “We’ve fallen down on boat design. We haven’t been able to come up with a boat that will get us down to the center of the Sun and back up again. We don’t know where to turn next. We’ve explored every alley we can think of, and we have some thirty thousand people working on the project, including some real bright ones, problem solvers. All we’ve done is improve the efficiency of the boats by a factor of a thousand. We don’t know where to turn next.”

Potter said, “You can get a boat down, but you can’t get it back. That right?”

“Yes, and don’t anybody here tell us about remote control or automation. Center-of-Sun conditions are such that we can’t communicate twenty feet away. As to automation, we can’t get into the boat a computer of the size we need to make a few critical decisions. The presence of the boat is going to change center-of-Sun conditions, so someone is going to have to make a quick evaluation. Well, let Frank Valko tell you what’s there.”

Dr. Frank Valko, senior scientist in charge of evaluation of the Sun’s deep interior, smiled and rubbed his chin in embarrassment. “I wish I could tell you precisely what’s there. Then perhaps we could automate. But here’s what we have. Our Bomnak group came up with a neutrino detector of reasonable size, one we could get in a spaceship. This is a device we’ve been trying for a hundred years. If the program produced nothing else, the neutrino detector alone has been worth it. Well, we put it in a ship and orbited it around the Sun and did some scanning. This detector is adjustable—most remarkable. We ran the scale from the fastest neutrinos with the weakest interaction to the slowest with some slight interaction, and we were able to peel the core of the Sun like an onion. Each interior layer is a bit hotter than the one outside it. And when we got to the core—I mean the real core now—we found the trouble. We found the very center at a temperature of over half a billion degrees Kelvin. The neutrino energy was greater than the light energy. The electron-positron pairs do not annihilate back to high-energy photons completely. We get significant neutrino-antineutrino formation. There are also some neutrino-photon reactions. But the point is that with such neutrino formation, energy can escape from the core, right through the walls of the Sun. And there you are.” He looked around at the others brightly.

The rest of them looked at him blankly, and Eden said it. “Where?”

“Why, the Sun is in the earliest stages of decay, unpredictably early. All we have to do is dampen the core, and we get our old Sun back.”

Potter said sarcastically, “How do we do that? Throw some water on it?”

“Well, water might not be the best substance. We’re working out the theory to improve on water. I think we’ll come up with something.”

Eden said, “From a practical point of view, wouldn’t it take quite a bit of water?”