“Now, we’re trying to minimize the shield’s design mass. But the lighter the shield is, the more the sunlight can push it back. And the farther it drifts toward the sun, the bigger the shield has to be to shade the whole Earth. So its mass actually starts increasing again … These two effects counteract to provide a minimum solution. Am I right? For a given thickness of film there is a theoretical minimum mass for the shield, below which there is no feasible design solution.”
Siobhan said, “And without the Chinese—”
“We can’t meet that minimum,” Rose said with a kind of grim pleasure.
The problem was a shortfall of heavy-lift capacity. Although the Chinese government had initially declined to participate in the shield program, Miriam Grec had been sure that after enough emollient diplomacy, and a little horse trading, the Chinese would come on board. Miriam had actually instructed Siobhan to factor into her plans the availability of the Chinese fleet of Long March heavy-lift boosters.
Well, Miriam Grec had proven to be right about many things, but not about the Chinese. Their resistance to participation had not altered one jot, and their space launch capabilities were being dedicated, it seemed, to some secretive scheme of their own.
Whatever the Chinese were up to didn’t matter to Siobhan. All she did care about was that despite months of frantic redesign they had failed to come up with a feasible solution: without the Chinese and their Long March boosters—and maybe even with them, said the pessimists—there just wasn’t any way to get that minimum mass to L1 in time.
Siobhan knew that momentum was everything for this project. The shield was hugely, horribly, ruinously expensive: the project absorbed more than the net GDP of the United States, and therefore a respectable fraction of the whole world’s economic output. Indeed the shield was thought to be humankind’s single most expensive project in real terms since the “project” of winning the Second World War. The money didn’t come out of nowhere, and many other programs, notably climate-change mitigation efforts in the desiccated heart of Asia and drowning Polynesia, were being put on hold, to predictable protests.
As the project became more real, it was provoking sincere political anger. In a way Siobhan welcomed that; it meant that more than a year after Alvarez’s Christmas announcement, the “phony war” was coming to an end, and people were starting to believe enough in the sunstorm to care what was being done about it. Of course there were technical problems to solve; what they were attempting had never been done before. But Siobhan knew that if she allowed a hint of doubt to seep out of her management structure, it would soon erode the fragile political consensus behind the project—an infrastructure every bit as essential to the shield as the glass struts and booms being shipped up from the Moon.
Siobhan massaged her temples. “So we find another way to do it. What can we change?”
Rose ticked points off on her strong fingers. “You can’t change the basic forces involved. You can’t change the gravity fields of sun or Earth, or the pressure per square centimeter of sunlight. You can’t shrink the shield. If it was transparent, sunlight would pass straight through the shield without troubling it, of course.” She smiled. “But then there would be no point in building it in the first place, would there?”
“There must be something, damn it,” Siobhan snapped.
She looked around at the softscreens that lined the walls of the room. The faces that peered back at her, her senior project managers, were projected from various corners of the Earth, the Moon, and L1 itself. The expressions of Bud and Mikhail Martynov as always radiated sympathy and support. Rose was wearing her usual it-can’t-be-done scowl. Many of the others were more reserved. Some may actually have been grateful to Rose and her showstoppers, as she gave them something to hide their own issues behind.
They just didn’t get it, Siobhan thought. There was a failure of imagination, even among her people, some of the smartest engineers and technologists around, who were closer to the project than anybody else. They weren’t just building a bridge here, or just flying to Mars; this wasn’t just another project, another line on a curriculum vitae. This was the future of humanity they were dealing with. If they fouled up, whatever the cause, there would be no tomorrow in which to hand out blame: there would be no careers to wreck, no new directions to seek. Siobhan ought to welcome Rose’s bluntness, she thought; at least from her you got the straight skinny, whatever the consequences.
“I’m not going to give you a pep talk,” she said. “Let me just remind you what President Alvarez said. Failure is not an option. It still isn’t. We are going to work on this until our foreheads bleed, and we are going to find solutions to both these problems of ours today, come what may.”
Bud murmured, “We’re with you, Siobhan.”
“I hope that’s true.” She stood, pushing back her chair. She said to Toby, “I need a break.”
“I don’t blame you. Just a reminder—your ten o’clock is outside.”
Siobhan glanced at a softscreen diary page. “Lieutenant Dutt?” The soldier who had, it seemed, spent more than a year trying to get access to Siobhan, with grave news she wouldn’t divulge to anybody else, and had finally drifted to the top of the in-tray. More problems. But at least different problems.
She stretched, trying to dissipate the ache in her upper neck. “If anybody cares I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”
22: Turning Point
Lieutenant Bisesa Dutt, British Army, was waiting for Siobhan in the City of London Rooms. She was drinking coffee and studying her phone.
As Siobhan crossed the room she was distracted by a peculiar shadow. Looking out the window, she glimpsed a gaunt framework rising beyond the rooftops of London: it was the skeleton of what would become the London Dome, the city’s own effort to protect itself from the sunstorm. It was already the mightiest construction project in London’s long history, although predictably it was dwarfed by still mightier shelters being raised over New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
From the beginning they had always known, just as Alvarez had announced, that the shield was not going to save the Earth from one hundred percent of the sun’s rage, even assuming it got built at all. Some of it was going to get through—but the shield would give humanity a fighting chance, a chance that had to be taken. The trouble was that nobody knew how much pain the world below, and cities like London, would have to absorb.
The Dome was merely the most visible of the changes befalling the city. Across London the government had begun a program of laying up stores of nonperishable food, fuel, medical supplies, and the like, and the prices of such items were escalating. Even water rates were increasing as the authorities siphoned off supplies to fill immense underground tanks under the city’s parks. It was like preparing for war, Siobhan thought. But the necessity was very real.
Certainly the building of the Dome, a physical manifestation of the danger to come, had started at last to make people believe, deep in their guts, that the sunstorm was real. Across the city there was a sense of apprehension, and the medical services reported upsurges in anxiety and stress. But there was excitement too, in a way, even anticipation.
Siobhan had been traveling extensively, and she’d found that things were much the same everywhere.
In the United States especially she thought there was a sense of determination, of unity; America, as always, was having to bear a disproportionately heavy weight of the global effort. Across the nation, even where domes were impractical, there was a neighborhood-level drive to prepare, as the National Guard, the Scouts, and a hundred volunteer drives dug shelters into their own backyards and their neighbors’, filled underground tanks with rainwater, and collected aluminum cans to be filled up with emergency rations. Meanwhile there was a less obvious but equally dramatic effort to archive as much knowledge as possible, in digital and hardcopy forms, in great storage facilities in deep mine shafts, wells, Cold War—era bunkers, and even on the Moon. This was after all the true treasure of the nation, indeed of humankind—but this program gathered more controversy from those who argued that you should save “people first and last.” President Alvarez was proving expert once more in guiding her nation’s spirits; she was planning a program of celebrations of World War II centenary events, leading up to Pearl Harbor in 2041, to remind her fellow citizens of great trials they had faced before, and overcome.