Starfire (40 page)

"You're not thinking—" Nick found he was speaking into a dead line. He replaced the telcom set, more upset than he wanted to admit.

And more perplexed. You went through life in public office, laying claim to high morality when you knew quite well that at heart you were totally immoral. You were well acquainted with the majority of the seven deadly sins. Certainly pride, anger, and greed had their place in your life. You could claim a lifelong familiarity with and affection for lust.

And then, at an age when a man ought to know himself, you discovered that your immorality had its limits.

Gordy Rolfe was right. Compared with the overlord of the Argos Group, Nick Lopez was a spineless stooge unwilling to follow through on the consequences of his own actions. If it came to a shoot-out with Gordy, Nick had the terrible conviction that he would lose.

Well, you did your best. A man was only as wicked as a man could stand to be. Nick turned his thoughts to the coming evening with Martin Oliveira, and felt comforted.

25

John Hyslop surveyed the assembled group. If only they were mountaineers as well as engineers!

When you were climbing the highest peaks of Earth you had to make a lot of technical decisions: from which side and along which path you would attempt to scale the mountain; where you would establish base camp; how much time you allot to the adjustment of the climber's body to extreme altitude; how much equipment you would carry; and when and where you would use oxygen. Would you even use oxygen at all?

Important decisions. Each could be the difference between life and death. But none of them was the toughest and the most controversial.

That problem came on the final day of the ascent. You were close to the summit, you were weary, your body was so starved of oxygen that your brain was on autopilot and your feet felt like lead. You had come to within a thousand—maybe five hundred—feet of planting a flag at the top. Now you had to make the hardest call of all: Did you keep climbing the final ridge to the mountain-top that you seemed so clearly able to reach? Or, with the goal so visible and so tempting, did you recognize that a descent must follow an ascent? You had to decide, very quickly, if you had enough time and daylight and strength to continue to the top, and after that return to base.

The team leader made the call. If you decided that the wise choice was to retreat, you gave the word to turn around and expected a monstrous amount of grumbling when you got back to base camp. But the team respected your decision during the climb. There could be only one boss.

John was about to make a similarly tough decision. He examined the group one by one. They had the worn-down pallor of people who worked too hard and slept too little, but in mountain-climbing terms they were not on the final leg of the ascent. They had hardly reached base camp. Sky City was flying steadily on toward Cusp Station, but the journey was barely past its halfway point.

How was the group likely to react to the news that their efforts were useless?

Wilmer Oldfield and Star Vjansander were not engineers. They would presumably go along with John's judgment. The same was true of Seth Parsigian and Maddy Wheatstone. He caught her eye, received a dazzling smile in return, and looked away.

Will Davis would be all right, too. He was the one who had brought the word to John, and he would be ready with his own supporting arguments. Amanda Corrigan would not argue; she was obsessed with her own problems of computer access and use. Jessie Kahn was probably too junior to question him.

That left Lauren Stansfield and Torrance Harbish. Both sometimes had strong opinions, and both were unpredictable. You never knew what thoughts ran behind Lauren's amber eyes or Torrance's dark countenance.

Everyone was staring at John. It was time to take the plunge.

"I have news, and it's not good. We can't go ahead with the new particle defense scheme." That certainly had their attention. "Not, at least, the way we planned it. The problem lies in particle bundle detection. We intended to generate a low-intensity wide-angle field, so that each incoming bundle would interact with the field and generate a traveling EM wave of its own. We would pick up that signal and use it to calculate the bundle trajectory. Then we could deflect the bundle away from Earth with a direct and stronger beam.

"It sounds practical, even easy. But the first part won't work. We have no way to generate a field complete enough to allow us to track every bundle." John nodded at Will Davis. "Will did the calculations, and he'll be happy to go over them with you. It looks like maybe ten percent of the bundles will escape detection."

"Ten percent get through?" Jessie Kahn reacted at once. "What does that mean for Earth?"

"The most you can say is that it's better than a hundred percent. But it will mean the immediate loss of the ionosphere, the later loss of the ozone layer, massive heat imbalance between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres—which means freak weather—and a radio communications blackout. It could be as bad as the original Alpha C effects in 2026, but of course we'll be a lot better prepared for it."

"How long do we have?" Lauren Stansfield was making notes in her usual tidy fashion. She was as gray-faced and weary as anyone, but somehow, even though John had called the meeting without warning, she was carefully dressed and wearing makeup.

"That's another bit of bad news. Another Sniffer was launched two weeks ago on a crash basis. It can't do detailed analysis, but it reports that the big slug of particle bundles will hit in twenty-six days."

"Then we must keep going." Torrance Harbish spoke with force and conviction. "Look at the alternative. The old shield won't work, we know that. Even if it's not going to be perfect, we must have the new defense system. We're wasting time. We should leave here and work harder than ever."

"I hear you, Torrance. But I'm going to demand some more of your time. I didn't call you together just to pass on bad news." John glanced at each person in turn. "There's another reason for this meeting. Every one of you has a first-rate intellect. I want the benefit of those. You're all tired, but I called us together because we need
ideas
."

"I don't know about the first-rate intellect bit." It was Will Davis. "You've already had my two cents' worth, boyo, but I'll say it again for the benefit of everyone. We charge ahead with the new defense, even though it won't be perfect. And we tell Earth to get ready for trouble."

Amanda Corrigan added, "More than trouble, Will—disaster. I've got my whole family down there. Look, this isn't my area of expertise, so maybe it's a dumb question. But why can't we beef up the strength of the low-intensity field?"

"Will?" John didn't want to talk; he wanted to listen.

Davis nodded and turned to Amanda Corrigan. "We could. But that's not the problem. The field isn't generated from a single point; it's done with a distributed array of tuned oscillators. Even when the oscillator phases are matched as well as possible, you get regions where the contributions from different sources reinforce each other, and others where they tend to cancel."

Amanda was frowning, more than ever like a puzzled teenager. John asked, "Do you get it?"

"I don't think so. I guess I'm dumb."

"No. You're just tired."

"That too. So what if the fields cancel in places?"

"Will?"

Davis nodded. "Think of it as a three-dimensional interference pattern. The particle bundles will be coming in at random, so some of them will slide through along paths where the field cancels. If they don't encounter enough field to generate a signal, we don't detect them. If we don't know they're there, we can't zap them with a stronger pulse and direct them away. So they make it all the way, and hit Earth."

"Increasing the strength of the low-intensity field won't solve the problem?"

"No. We'd still have dead spots."

"Can't you do something to
average
the field?" Jessie asked. "If you could make it more uniform, the low points would disappear."

Will Davis shrugged. "You can fiddle with the oscillator strengths. But it's like working with an air mattress. If you push it down in once place, it bulges up higher somewhere else."

"What about putting something out in space?" Jessie was young, but she could be dogged when she had an idea in her head. "Couldn't a superconducting mesh average the field?"

"It could." Davis raised his eyebrows. "Have to be twenty thousand kilometers across, mind you, and thirty thousand kilometers out beyond Cusp Station. We could make something like that—if we had a few years. How long did you say we have, John?"

"Twenty-six days before the main hit. But Amanda and Jessie have the right idea. Keep thinking."

Advice easier to give than to follow. In the long silence that followed, John glanced from one perplexed face to the next. He was asking his engineering team for a miracle.

The person who eventually spoke was not one of his team. Star Vjansander had been nudging Wilmer Oldfield, muttering to him, and blowing out her round cheeks. Now she frowned at Wilmer and said, "What was it that feller Colombo said in our first meeting out here, about Missus Hommit going ter see a mountain?"

It was blank stares all round, until Wilmer said mildly, "Not Ma Hommit, you softheaded git. Mahomet."

"Yeah, that one. I'm rotten with names. If the mountain wouldn't go to Mahomet, he'd have to go ter the mountain." She nodded to John, as though confirming something he had said. "So that's what yer have to do."

"Star, you're jumping so far ahead you're falling all over yourself. You always do." Wilmer turned to Will Davis. "How close to finished was the old shield?"

"Ninety percent plus. All the structure and stability was done, but we were still missing batches of sensors." Davis shook his head. "Seven years of my life in that bloody thing, and it's useless. Ah, well. Easy come, easy go."

"Don't give up on it." Wilmer went on, slowly and thoughtfully. "It's useless as a shield, but it's covered with a superconducting mesh. That's what was going to divert the particles when we thought they were coming in as single nuclei. The mesh isn't enough to deal with the bundles, they're too massive. But could it do what Jessie said, and average the detection field that we create?"

It was like the promise of reinforcements to a tired army. John saw the engineers straighten up in their seats. "Can it, Will?"

"It could, very easily. But the shield is in the wrong place. To average the detection field, the shield would have to move thirty thousand kilometers farther out. That's not impossible, but the structure is so fragile and so finely balanced that the operation would take a few months. We don't have months. We have just a few weeks."

"I know." Star was bobbing up and down in her chair. "I know. That's why I said what I did. Yer don't take the mountain ter what's-'is-name, you leave the mountain where it is."

"Shut up, Star. You'll give people headaches." Wilmer reached out and pushed her back into her seat. "Just keep quiet, and let me explain your idea."

"I've heard you explain things before. Yer'll bore 'em to death, you old fart."

Wilmer took no notice. He went on in his unhurried way, "She's bright, you see, but when she gets excited she gibbers like a monkey. Here is the position, as I understand it. The old space shield is no use as a shield anymore, because it's far too fragile to divert the high-mass particle bundles. However, it would serve perfectly to average the low-intensity field that detects those bundles. Unfortunately, it is in the wrong place relative to Cusp Station, where you have installed the generators for high-energy pulses that
can
divert particle bundles away from Earth. To serve that purpose, the shield would have to be moved thirty thousand kilometers away from Cusp Station, in the direction of Alpha Centauri, since that is where the particle storm is coming from. However, the shield is so delicate that such movement would have to be done very slowly, at minuscule acceleration. It therefore appears that we have reached a solution too late. The particle storm will be here before the shield can be relocated.

"We would appear to be faced with an insoluble problem. That, however, is an illusion. The fragile shield cannot be moved in time. But why not, as Star suggests, invert the problem? We do not care about absolute position, we care only about
relative
position. Rather than moving the shield thirty thousand kilometers toward Alpha Centauri, Cusp Station must move thirty thousand kilometers
away
from Alpha Centauri—
closer to Earth
." Wilmer turned to John. "One question remains, which I regard as an engineering detail: Is Cusp Station strong enough to withstand the necessary acceleration?"

"If a group of you physicists wanted to land on the surface of the Sun and do experiments, you'd say the design of the ship that takes you there and back was engineering details." John was cursing—at himself. He was sure that the rest of his team was feeling the same way. To miss an obvious possible solution, and have it pointed out by a pair of
physicists,
who sat with their heads in the clouds . . . He went on, "Cusp Station has to be strong enough. We fly it inward even if it falls apart on the way. And we must change the trajectory of this place, too, so Sky City finishes next to Cusp Station's new location and we can fast-link the computers. Amanda?"

"A few hours' calculation." She rolled her head from side to side, as though she was attempting the calculation mentally. "If thirty thousand is a good working number for the move toward Earth, I'll have you a flight profile for Cusp Station and a modified one for Sky City by this evening."

"Will?"

"Cusp Station was built rugged. I'll be out there anyway, installing the field loop generators. Say, one day to decide where the mirror-matter thrustors go, two days to attach. Three days from now we'll be ready to move."

"Torrance? How about Sky City?"

"We're running close to maximum stresses in some places already. What are you looking for?"

"Too soon to tell. Aim for a factor of two."