And as for herself—“Well,” as cousin Linda said cheerfully, “they can only section you once!”

The process was difficult to tolerate, though. Technically she outranked this corporal, but here in his study he was the psychologist, she the one with a screw loose; there was no question about who was in control. It didn’t help that he was so much younger than she was.

And it didn’t help that back on Mir she had known another Batson in the British Army, another corporal. She longed to ask Batson about his family background, and if he knew of a grandfather six or seven generations back who might have served on the North—West Frontier. But she knew she’d better not.

“Since our last session I looked up eclipses,” Batson said, referring to his notes. “The Moon’s distance from Earth varies a bit, it says here. So a ‘total’ eclipse may not be total. You can have the sun and Moon centered on the same spot of sky, but with a little bit of the sun’s disk peeking out because the Moon’s apparent size isn’t great enough. It’s called an annular eclipse.”

“I know about annular eclipses,” she said. “I checked it out too. The ring I saw was much fatter than in any annular eclipse.”

“So let’s think about the geometry,” Batson said. “What are the possibilities that could produce what you saw? Maybe the sun was bigger. Or the Moon smaller. Or the Earth was closer to the sun. Or the Moon farther away from Earth.”

She was surprised. “I hadn’t expected you to analyze my vision like this.”

He raised his eyebrows. “But you keep saying it wasn’t just a vision. I showed your sketches to an astronomer friend. She told me that actually the Moon is moving away from the Earth, over time. Did you know that? Something to do with the tides—can’t say I understand it. But there it is; you can prove it with laser beams. It’s a slow drift, though. We won’t get an eclipse like yours until at least 150 million years from now.” He eyed her. “Does that number mean anything to you?”

She tried to keep herself calm, through long habit, as she processed this new and startling bit of information. “What could it mean?”

“You’re supposed to be telling me, remember. You say you’ve been shown all this—indeed you’ve been brought home—for some purpose. A conscious purpose of those whom you believe have engineered all this. The ones you call—” He checked his notes.

“The Firstborn,” she said.

“Yes. Do you have any idea why you should be selected, manipulated in this way?”

“I challenged them,” she said. Then: “I’ve really no idea. I feel I’m being told something, but I can’t figure out the meaning.” She looked at him miserably. “Does that make me sound crazy?”

“Actually the contrary. My personal experience is that sane people accept that the world is bafflingly complex and arbitrarily unfair. Let’s face it, that’s certainly true in the Army! The crazies are the ones who think they understand it all.”

“So the fact that I can’t make any sense of all this inclines you to believe me,” she said dryly.

“I didn’t quite say that,” he cautioned. “But I knew from the moment you walked in that you are telling the truth, as you see it. I just haven’t yet been able to rule out the possibility all this actually happened …” A softscreen lit up on his desk. “Excuse me.” He tapped the surface, and she glimpsed tables and graphs scrolling.

After a moment he said, “Your report from the sawbones has come in. You’ll have to discuss the results with her, of course. But as far as I can see you’re certainly who you say you are: your DNA and dental records prove it. You’re healthy enough, though you appear to bear the relics of a number of rather exotic diseases. And your skin has soaked up rather more ultraviolet than is good for you.”

She smiled. “On Mir, the climate broke down. We all got sunburned.”

“And—ah.” He sat back, gazing at the screen.

“What is it?”

“According to this result—the quacks looked at your telomerase, whatever that is, something to do with the aging of your cells—you are more than five years older than you should be.” He eyed her and grinned. “Well, well. The plot thickens, Lieutenant.” He seemed rather pleased at the way things were turning out.

17: Brainstorm

Once more Siobhan sat with Toby Pitt in the Council Room of the Royal Society.

From a wall-mounted softscreen the crumpled, rather melancholy features of Mikhail Martynov peered out. Siobhan thought he always looked as if there ought to be a roll-up cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth, but even the latest noncarcinogenic, nonaddictive, nonpolluting comfort smokes would never be allowed in the enclosed environment of a Moon base. Mikhail said, “If only the problem were simpler—if only we faced nothing worse than an asteroid coming to knock us on the head! Where is Bruce Willis when you need him?”

Toby asked, “Who?”

“Never mind. I have an unhealthy fascination with bad movies of the last century …”

Siobhan let their nervous banter roll on. A week after her second return from the Moon she was overtired and stressed out, and a headache niggled behind her eyes. After interplanetary space she felt smothered in the fusty atmosphere of the Society, with its smell of furniture polish, the huge coffee dispenser gurgling away to itself in the corner, and the vast heap of digestive biscuits on a plate on the table. And she was close to despair. Since accepting Miriam’s mandate to find a way to deal with the solar event, after a month of research she had elicited nothing but waves of hopelessness and negative thinking from “experts” around the world.

Mikhail and Toby, this motley crew, was her last gamble. But she wasn’t about to tell them that. She said briskly, “Let’s get on with it.”

Mikhail glanced at notes off camera. “I have Eugene’s latest predictions.”

Graphics glowed in the smart top of the table before Siobhan and Toby, showing energy flux plotted against wavelength, particle mass, and other parameters. “Nothing substantial has changed, I’m afraid. We are looking at a major influx of solar energy on April 20, 2042. It will last most of twenty-four hours, so that almost every point on Earth’s surface will be turned directly into the fire. We won’t even have the shelter of night. As we will be close to the spring equinox, even the poles won’t be spared. At this stage do you need the details of what will become of the atmosphere, the oceans? No. Suffice to say the Earth will be sterilized to a depth of tens of meters beneath the ground.

“But,” Mikhail went on, “we now have a much more precise handle on how the energy will be delivered. We are looking at flaws in the radiative and convective zones, where a great deal of energy is in normal times stored …” He tapped the hidden surface before him, and one tabletop chart was highlighted.

“Ah,” Siobhan said. “The intensity will peak in the visible spectrum.”

“As the spectrum of sunlight does normally,” Mikhail said. “In green light, as it happens. Which is where our eyes are most sensitive, and where chlorophyll works best—which is why, no doubt, chlorophyll was selected by evolution to serve as the photosynthetic chemical that fuels all aerobic plant life.”

“Then that’s what we face: a storm of green light from the sun,” Siobhan said firmly. “Let’s talk about options to deal with it.”

Toby grinned. “The fun part!”

Mikhail offered, “Shall I begin?” He tapped at his softscreen, and on the displays before Siobhan a number of schematics, tables, and images came up.

“As it happens,” Mikhail said, “even before our present crisis a number of thinkers have considered ways to reduce the solar insolation—the proportion of the sun’s energy flux that reaches the planet. Of course this was mostly in the context of blocking sunlight to mitigate global warming.” He brought up images of clouds of dust injected into the high atmosphere. “One proposal is to use space launchers to fire sub-micrometer dust up into the stratosphere. That way you would mimic the effects of a volcanic eruption; after a big bang like Krakatoa you often get a global temperature drop of a degree or two for a few years. Or you could inject sulfur particles up there, which would burn in the atmosphere’s oxygen to give you a layer of sulfuric acid. That might be rather lighter and so easier to deliver.”