“In other words, we averaged away part of the signal.” John leaned back. “Guess the name of the genius who said he couldn’t read the raw hash, and told you to smooth it out.”
“I wasn’t about to mention that if you didn’t.” Amanda was smiling.
“I’d rather you didn’t mention it at all. Colombo will have my scalp if he ever finds out.” John tried to sound worried, but he was smiling, too. This was his arena, his natural playing field. Here he was the best, with the self-confidence that eluded him when it came to personal affairs.
He went back to the first display with its innocent little side peak. “So this is the real thing — no smoothing.”
“You’ve got it. The new Sniffer detects and counts particle bundles over a cross-sectional area a hundred times as big as the old Sniffers could handle. We don’t need averaging to get rid of statistical variations. There’s something else peculiar in the counts from the new Sniffer, but I’d rather not talk about that until I know what I’m doing.”
“Keep me posted. There’s still one key piece of information missing in what we have so far.” John highlighted the companion peak. “About this. I need to know when. It’s going to hit sooner than the main pulse, but how long do we have? A day, a week?”
Amanda breathed out, explosively. “I’m sorry. The scale is shown along the abscissa, but it doesn’t include the origin. We don’t have much time. The particle bundles from the minor pulse will hit their maximum count forty-eight hours from now. Then the count will fall away and by sixty hours it will be back to normal.”
“But maybe we won’t be.”
When things went wrong you could curse; when things went really wrong you didn’t have time for that luxury. John, as a matter of habit, called a flow chart onto the display. It was more for Amanda’s sake than his own, because he already had a good idea of what it would reveal.
“Here’s the master schedule.” He moved the cursor. “And this vertical line at fifteen days shows what we hope will be happening when the big pulse hits. But we’re more interested in what happens here.” He introduced another vertical line on the display. “That’s forty-eight hours from now. As you see, we have no defense system in operation — old or new. We have to take that as a given, and see what everyone will be doing. I show you on Cusp Station, setting up the high-speed computer links with Sky City. Will Davis and his team are there, too, installing the pulse field generator. Cusp isn’t shielded well enough; you’ll all have to fly back and sit out the particle storm on Sky City. Torrance Harbish and Rico Ruggiero have a team outside, fine-tuning the balance of forces to hang Cusp Station and Sky City at the correct distance from Earth. They’ll have to come inside. The people we have to worry about most are Nordstrom’s group, out on the old shield. They’re modifying the superconducting circuits so they work with the low-intensity detection field. They can’t stay out there, even for a pulse this size. It’s at least a ten-hour flight to safety. I want you to pass the word to Nordstrom at once.”
“But what about Earth?” Amanda scanned the flow chart and saw only in-space activities. “What will people do there?”
“Dig. Hide below the surface, or stay under water. The new defense isn’t ready, and the old shield won’t stop the particle bundles. People down on Earth should be all right. Lots of fireworks for about twelve hours, but this pulse packs less than a hundredth of the energy of the main one. I’m a lot more worried about things out here.”
“I thought Sky City had ample shielding.”
“For individual particles, yes, but I’m not sure about particle bundles. Maybe they’ll be stopped, maybe some of them will pass through Sky City like it’s not there. I’m expecting a few to get through no matter what we do; statistically that’s inevitable. But too many of those and our field generators and computers will stop working. Problem is, I don’t know how many is too many. I’ll ask Lauren to try another calculation — she’s the least busy of the group.”
John glanced at the clock. “Two o’clock. She’s going to have a fit. Bruno Colombo, too. I’ll have to wake him up.”
“Hmph.” Amanda made a face. “Good luck with that one. I wouldn’t dare.”
“Bruno will have to make worse calls than any of mine. He’s got to wake Nick Lopez and Urbain Tosca, and tell them that the WPF and the UN have two days to organize the whole planet.”
“What about me? I’ll call Nordstrom, and I’ll work on the other anomaly I mentioned. What else can I do to help?”
John studied Amanda’s unlined face. “Not tired?”
“Fresh as a daisy.”
“Then go and wake up Star Vjansander. She’s been pestering me for weeks to let some bundles through the defense system so she can capture and study them. Tell her that her wish was just granted. By the time this peak has been and gone, we’ll have more than enough bundles.”
“Should I wake her right now?”
“Might as well. Everyone else is going to be up; why not Star? Oh, and Amanda.”
She was already standing up to leave the information center. She turned. “Yes?”
“Tell Star that no matter how pleased she is with all this, she’d better not show it.”
“Or else?”
“Or else she’s going to find that everyone in Sky City engineering is too busy to make a capture-and-contain device for particle bundles.”
“Isn’t it easy? The bundles are all charged. You just slow them and contain them with electromagnetic fields. Star must know how.”
“She undoubtedly does. But knowing how and making it happen are two different things. Star is no engineer.”
Amanda nodded. “Wilmer Oldfield says that Star can’t make coffee without breaking the jug.” She grinned at John. “You’ll probably kill me for saying so, but I’m sort of enjoying this. It’s interesting and it’s exciting”
“I’m glad you think so. But while this first pulse may be a small one compared with the main hit, people are going to die. Remember the old curse: May you live in interesting times.”
As she hurried out John stared again at the display of the particle counts, with its innocuous-looking little side peak. That blip looked like nothing, but it derived from the huge stellar energies of a whole exploding star. He had told the truth to Amanda: People were undoubtedly going to die, if not here then down on Earth.
And yet Amanda was right, too. John felt worry, he felt nervousness, he even felt fear. But underneath everything, deep down, the excitement of the challenge was growing.
They were weeks away from the peak. They had not yet reached the first of the foothills. The hardest times surely lay ahead. But there, visible in the distance, loomed the mountain.
Maddy’s dinner with John Hyslop had been a great success. A success, that is, if you didn’t mind being with a man apparently impervious to any form of romantic suggestion. They had talked, with the ease of old friends, about everything on Earth and off it. They had compared Gordy Rolfe and Bruno Colombo as bosses, they had laughed, and they had lingered. He had agreed, instantly, to meet with her and Seth Parsigian the next day, without even asking her the subject — score one for Seth. And then, at the end of the evening, he had escorted her to her rooms, kissed her on the cheek with a chasteness and formality you might expect from a legal guardian, and left. He told her he had to work.
Surprisingly, after that Maddy had slept comfortably and easily. Apparently that made her a Sky City oddity, since the next morning every other person at breakfast claimed to have been up most of the night, making preparations for the “blip storm,” an unexpected particle squall only a couple of days away. No one else had managed more than a couple of hours in bed. John Hyslop, according to Star Vjansander, had slept not at all.
Maddy and Seth were on John’s schedule for ten o’clock in the morning. Last night it had seemed an excellent choice, an hour when John should be fully awake but not yet weighed down with the problems of the day. Now you could hardly pick a worse time. If he had been up all night, John would be too exhausted or too overwhelmed with work even to listen. And Seth Parsigian — the louse who had talked Maddy into the meeting with John Hyslop in the first place — would not even be present.