Starfire (9 page)

"We probably sounded a bit mysterious to your lady in the outside office, insisting we had to see you in person and not telling her why. But you see, I didn't want to put her in a panic or have her spreading bad rumors."

"Given some of the things that Claudette has heard in the past few years, I don't think you need to worry. It would take news of the end of the world to shake her."

As a light remark, it fell flat. Astarte gasped and turned to Wilmer.

"She knows."

"No, she don't. Go on, Star, you tell it. It's your story. I mostly came to get you in to meet Celine."

Astarte nodded, but she didn't say a word. Celine had seen the same thing often enough in the past. People entered the office with their story carefully prepared, and promptly became tongue-tied in her presence. After the first few times she realized that it had nothing to do with her. It was the office of the presidency, carrying a weight unrelated to the personality and character of its current occupant. The surprise was that Astarte Vjansander felt it.

Celine said, "Let's all sit down and make ourselves comfortable. And Wilmer, why don't you start instead of Star? You've briefed me often enough, you know how to keep it down to my level."

She was making a trade-off. Wilmer must certainly know whatever it was that Astarte Vjansander wanted to say, otherwise he would never have brought her to meet Celine.

On the other hand, Wilmer's briefings had their own problems. Clarity, yes. Brevity, never. Celine sat back and prepared for a long evening.

"Is that all right with you, Star?" Wilmer said. And, at her nod, "You take over whenever you feel like it." He put his hand to the top of his bald head and rubbed at it for inspiration. "I think I'd better go a fair way back. Celine, you know how I told you there was something odd about the Alpha Centauri supernova, right from the beginning?"

"Told me once, told me twice, told me a hundred times. You may not remember this, but when we had our first look at the supernova, back on the
Schiaparelli,
you said that Alpha Centauri was a double star system, and double stars can become Type 1a supernovas only if one of the pair is a white dwarf. And Alpha Centauri didn't qualify."

"Still doesn't," Wilmer said placidly. "Bit of a nuisance, really, since the thing
did
go supernova. Zoe Nash told me then that if that's what the astrophysicists' theories said, we damn well better get new theories. She was right, of course. Poor old Zoe." He stared off at nothing for a few seconds, then shook his head. "Anyway, I worked and worked trying to explain the Alpha C supernova. And I got nowhere."

Celine could imagine what lay behind those simple words. When Wilmer latched on to a question he was a bulldog, worrying at the problem endlessly. He had picked up and solved many other problems during the past quarter of a century, but she suspected that there had never been a waking moment when the mystery of the supernova was fully out of his mind.

Wilmer wouldn't have had much help, either. Since the supernova, human survival and planetary rebuilding had been the sole priorities. There had been no spare money or resources for pure research, and you met few young physicists.

"You had no theory?" she asked, when neither Wilmer nor Astarte seemed ready to speak.

"Worse than that. I had a dozen." Wilmer blinked at Celine. He was almost sixty, yet his eyes still had the clear innocence of a young child. "A few of the ideas were beauts, too. You could go to bed with 'em at night, and still be in love when you woke up in the morning. But you know what they say, a beautiful theory gets destroyed by one ugly fact. I could make up all sorts of mechanisms that might let Alpha C go supernova. I could even make my models match bits and pieces of the data. Sometimes I fitted the recorded light curves, or maybe the neutrino arrival pattern, and a few times I got the gamma pulse profile. What I couldn't do was find a theory that would match all the data at once. Which means, when you get right down to it, that I didn't have a theory at all. That's where it stood for all those years. And that's where it stood four months ago, when Star came to see me."

He beamed at his young companion. She smiled back, a quick flash of crooked white teeth, but she ducked her head when she saw Celine was watching.

"Would you like something?" Celine asked. What she had in mind was a low-level fizz, something to calm Astarte and make her feel more at ease. All the while that Wilmer had been speaking, the young visitor had fidgeted on the edge of her chair.

"Yes, mam." Astarte gave another wriggle, but still she didn't look at Celine. "Mam, I'd like ter go ter the bathroom. In fact, I have ter, right this minute, or I'll pee on the chair."

"Last person to do that was probably Calvin Coolidge," Celine said. She wondered if Astarte heard her, because as soon as she added, "Private facility through that door, help yourself," Star was off, vanishing into the bathroom.

"Ta, mam," she said as the door closed.

"Nerves," Wilmer said. "She'll get over it. If it's all right with you, we'll wait 'til she comes back so she can hear everything and join in when she feels ready. Star's not normally like this. You'll see, she'll perk up."

"We'll wait for her. I've got nothing to do."

Wilmer nodded. Irony was wasted on him, or possibly he found it reasonable that the President of the United States had lots of free time. Celine looked for a tactful way to phrase her next remark—though tact, like irony, was alien to Wilmer.

"Astarte doesn't seem like one of your usual colleagues."

"She's not. She's a damn sight smarter. Smarter than them, smarter than me."

At Celine's skeptical glance, he added, "She is, you know. I'm sure of it, but most people can't recognize that because the way she does things is so off the wall. You'll see it when she's at ease and can relax a bit. It's her first time north of the line, too, so she's nervous. When she feels at home she can get a bit crude. Some of the people at the New Sydney institute say she needs to be housebroken."

"I can understand anyone's feeling strange the first time they're in this office. I know I was." It seemed to Celine that Astarte Vjansander was already quite as crude as she needed to be. As for her talents, Celine would reserve judgment—although Wilmer was not one to underrate his abilities. "How did you find her?"

"I didn't. She found me. Star thinks she's twenty-four, but she's not sure. She's had a hell of a life. She was born in what used to be the Northern Territory, a few years after Alpha C, when the whole of Australia was still a wreck. She doesn't know who her parents were, but she reckons they have to be dead. She was about seven years old, living in the middle of nowhere, when the Vjansander party found her during the first post-supernova survey. She ate bugs and little lizards and crocodile eggs and anything else she could find. She could speak some, which is pretty much a miracle, considering there was nobody else around. She didn't know her name."

"So where did she learn science?"

"Beats me. Breathed it in through her skin, I guess. Things in science that the average twelve-year-old would know, she's never heard of. But she finds other ways. I don't believe she works in words at all; it's pictures and equations. After she arrived at the institute, at the first seminar that I took her to—"

"Later," Celine said quietly. She hoped that the housebroken remark was not to be taken literally, because the bathroom door was opening. "Everything all right, Star?"

"Real good." Astarte gave Celine her first full smile, and she seemed like a different person. "There's nothing beats a pee, is there, when yer really have ter go? I feel loads better."

"Like to take over, then?" Wilmer asked. "It's your theory."

"That's all right." Star went to her chair, staring at it before she sat down. "Did that Coolidge fella yer talked about really sit here and unload?"

"I doubt it." Celine laughed. "But who knows? Silent Cal, they called him. He'd never have admitted it." The meeting was taking a downward turn. "Wilmer? Where were we when you stopped?"

"I said I was churning out supernova theories by the cartload, and all of them crashed when I compared them with experiment. I showed 'em to Star in the first month after she came to New Sydney. She agreed they were all junk.
Data rules.
Theories have to fit observations, not the other way round. So I thought that was the end of it."

Wilmer paused again, looking right past Celine and frowning at the wall of the office. "But it wasn't?" she prompted.

"For a long time I wasn't sure. Star came to me with something new, but it made me real uncomfortable. Right, Star?"

She nodded. "He told me that I knew bugger-all about how to prove things, an' all I was doing was making wild-arse guesses. And he told me if I kept dropping monkey-nut shells on the floor where he stepped on 'em in his bare feet, I'd get a boot up the wazoo and be out of there so quick I wouldn't know where I was 'til I landed."

Celine decided that she might as well relax. This meeting would go at its own pace, regardless of her preferences. "Still works barefoot, does he?" she said. "I used to tell him he only did it in case he ever needed to count to more than ten."

Astarte hooted, and Wilmer said mildly, "Star still doesn't know how to prove things, and she's a bugger to have around the house because she never cleans up. But she's infernal good at guessing. And there are great ideas that just can't be proved until long after they're discovered. Remember Max Planck."

"The physicist?" Celine did remember Max Planck, but Wilmer had lost her. "Planck, like in Planck's constant and the Planck length?"

"That's him. A hundred and fifty years ago, there was a problem in physics that had everybody baffled. When you worked out the formula for how much energy should radiate from a closed box, you found that at short wavelengths the calculated value went to infinity. In the real world that obviously wasn't the case. And data rules, theory only serves. But people who looked at the analysis all agreed with the results, and they were some of the best minds of the time—men like Rayleigh and Jeans and Boltzmann.

"So there was a big problem, and no solution. Then in 1900 Max Planck showed that if you used a
trick,
you could get a curve that fitted the experiments for all wavelengths. It was a really odd trick, because to get the right answer you had to use a formula that would apply only if the energy radiating out of the box came in little discrete packages. Planck gave the package a name, a
quantum,
and he could calculate how big each quantum had to be. He found that it involved a new constant. Planck's constant."

"Wilmer, I heard all this thirty-odd years ago, and then I forgot it. Do I really need to hear it again?"

His high forehead furrowed. "Yeah. Of course you do. Otherwise I wouldn't be saying it, would I?"

"Go on, then." Celine had forgotten how impervious Wilmer was to distractions. "Just keep in mind that we can go to dinner as soon as we feel ready to eat it."

"I'm ready now. I'll speed up a bit. Everybody thought that what Planck did in 1900 was a
mathematical
trick, that it didn't mean squat in the real world. Energy couldn't really come in little bundles. Even if the method worked for some reason when you were dealing with radiation from a closed box, that wasn't the way the rest of the world operated.

"But then Einstein took what Max Planck had done at face value. He explained the photoelectric effect by saying that light, and all radiation, interacted with matter as though the light was made up of quanta. If a quantum had enough energy, it would jar an electron loose from a surface that the light hit. If it didn't have enough energy—if the wavelength of the light was too long—then no matter how intense the beam of light, there would be no release of electrons."

"I've heard that before, too, and I'm getting hungry. Wilmer, what's your point?"

"It's this. Star made an assumption. We can go into details about what it is later; all I need to say at the moment is that it's the same order of assumption that Planck made in 1900. Radical, and simple, and enough to make you drop your back teeth. Star can't give you a justification for it, and neither can I, any more than Max Planck could. But with that assumption, and with nothing else that I didn't already have in my theories, Star matched the recorded light curves from Alpha C,
and
the neutrino arrival pattern,
and
the gamma pulse profile. The lot, all at once, which was something I had never been able to do. And it's something I would never have been able to do, nor would anyone else, if Star hadn't made that leap of intuition."

"That's great." Celine looked from Wilmer to Astarte, who was now basking in Wilmer's praise. "I believe you, and I think it's wonderful for both of you. And I'm glad to see you, Wilmer, anytime. But I don't see why you had to come running over here to tell me this when you could just as easily have called."

But did she know, or at least suspect? Celine recalled Astarte's gasp when she mentioned the imminent end of the world. The bad thing about being a world-class worrier was that being right was worse than being wrong.

"No," Wilmer said. "We absolutely had to come, as soon as we finished checking the calculations. Star's theory says that one component of the particle flux released at the time of the supernova ought to be traveling a lot faster than the old theories predicted. So we have less time than we expected."

Celine's mind ran ahead, wondering about the rest of it. "When?"

"We're not absolutely sure. We need the latest Sniffer data to determine accurate dates, and we don't have it. Can you get that for us?"

"Yes. When will all this happen?"

"A big slug of particles could be here soon."

"When?"

"Real soon. Months, maybe even weeks." Wilmer leaned back and told Celine something she already knew better than he did. "Trouble is, the space shield you're building can't possibly be ready."

* * *

Wilmer and Astarte added to Celine's problems during dinner.

Meals were not optional events for Celine, even if the sky was falling. She had learned something during the disastrous return of the Mars expedition to Earth: Even when you were worried sick, even when you had zero appetite, even when you were so depressed that food felt like it stuck in your gullet, you had to eat.