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.”