“Wilmer, a few days is no good.” Celine had drunk lots of coffee and barely nibbled at dry toast. How could anyone eat the way he did so early in the morning?
“We’ve got a psychic calling all the media, telling people that the world is going to end at three-fifteen this afternoon. The Fist of God will strike, and Earth will split open like a melon dropped from a tenth-floor window.”
“He’s an idiot. You can quote me on that.”
“It’s a woman. So this won’t be the end of the world. But what will happen? I have all emergency services on standby alert. I have a national broadcast this afternoon. I have fourteen planeloads of people asking permission, right now, to take off and fly south.”
“Fly south? What for?”
“God knows. I guess for the fun of it. They’re thrill seekers who see themselves as daredevils, on the way to Tierra del Fuego for a big whoop-de-doo storm party. I’m in a tricky position. On one hand, I’m supposed to make sure there’s no panic, and to do that I have to minimize talk of danger. On the other hand, I don’t want even lunatics to head south if they’re likely to kill themselves. I need to know what to tell them, and everybody else. That’s why I called you. I wasn’t just being sociable.”
“I can see that.” His face was serious, the heavy brow furrowed in thought. “Celine, me and Star can’t tell you what’s going to happen today, and we shouldn’t be telling you what to do. But let me say this for starters: Every single thing we’ve ever assumed about the Alpha Centauri supernova turned out later to be wrong.”
He paused, for so long that Celine in her caffeine high wriggled in impatience. She wanted instant answers. Except that thirty years of experience had taught her that Wilmer wouldn’t be hurried.
“We talk as though we know a lot about supernovas,” he continued at last. “We don’t. They are extremely rare events. You have only one or two a century in a typical galaxy, and most of them take place so far away that they give us little information. Did you know that there hasn’t been a naked-eye supernova since the invention of the telescope? That’s four and a half centuries. When scientists tell you we understand supernovas, they mean something very specific and very limited. What we should say is that we have been able, through computer models, to show how certain kinds of stars and stellar systems can produce the enormous energy release that characterizes a supernova. That doesn’t mean no other type of star can possibly explode, or that some other supernova-creating mechanism can’t exist. The limits we assign to Nature sometimes define our own lack of imagination.
“Alpha C is a great example. Before 2026, every astrophysicist — including me — would have told you it couldn’t happen. Wrong type of binary system, no dwarf component, no supermassive star. But it happened. After that, no one predicted the gamma pulse would come along and wipe out all our microcircuits. It did. After the gamma pulse, we still didn’t learn. The fact that the burst was aimed directly at the solar system was dismissed as an ’accident of geometry.’ ”
“But you predicted the particle storm,” Celine objected. “Twenty-seven years ago, you told me it would happen.”
“I did. That was in the pre-supernova theories. And based on those theories we started to build the space shield. Then we were surprised again by an observational result, that the particles come grouped in trillion-component lumps instead of singly. The old shield was useless at stopping bundles. So we had to come up quick with a new shield idea. This one still assumed what everyone ’knew,’ that the strength of the particle storm would weaken over distance as it traveled farther away from the supernova. Now we find that the beam is converging as it approaches Sol. That means greater particle densities, and the new shield will be inadequate. I don’t know what Ben Mertok and the others are telling you, but if everybody’s track record — including mine — is anything to go by, whatever you are being told is going to prove wrong.”
“Marvelous. Wilmer, you can sit back and say you have no idea what will happen. I’m not allowed that luxury. I have to say something to the media this afternoon, whether I turn out to be right, wrong, or ridiculous. You sound as though you haven’t even been thinking about that.”
“I have. I’ll bet good money that we’ll see surprises this afternoon — only I can’t say what. Otherwise they wouldn’t be surprises. But I doubt they’ll be too awful. And today’s not what I’ve been thinking about most. Today might be messy, in ways I can’t begin to suggest, but I’m sure we’ll pull through. Our concern has to be with three weeks from now.”
“Three weeks?” Celine wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “Three weeks, when the main storm hits. You’re worried about more surprises?”
“I don’t need more surprises to make me worry. The things we already think we know are enough for that. Did you see the figures for peak energy input when the big storm arrives? That’s going to be the Fist of God.”
“The only summary I’ve seen is based on your and Star’s calculations. You said that the energy hitting us will be thirty times as much as we thought before. But the maximum impact will last only a few days, and thirty doesn’t sound too bad. I figure we can live through that.”
“You don’t mean figure. You mean you hope.” Wilmer turned to Star, seated next to him and so far silent. “You tell her.”
Star nodded amiably at Celine. She was holding a shiny metal canister about the size of a beer can. “See what he does? Puts me on ter give you the bad news. No worries, you think. But I got new data, and things don’t look good. D’yer know what cooperative phenomena are?”
“Assume I don’t. Tell me.”
“It’s when a lot of little things hook up together, ter produce effects yer wouldn’t expect from one of them. This here” — she held up the metal cylinder — “has a few thousand particle bundles in it. We collected ’em over the past day or two during the first slow rise in particle flux. Caught ’em in flight, slowed ’em down in a synchrotron, held ’em in using an electromagnetic field once they were down to thermal velocities. They’re fascinating little buggers. For starters, they’re stable as hell. We put individual bundles in the middle of a fusion plasma with an effective temperature of fifteen million degrees, and they hold together… When you get a lot of bundles, they exhibit a group attractive force — opposite ter what you’d expect, ’cause they’re all positively charged. That makes ’em converge as they travel through open space, an’ they’re doing it now. The only thing they can’t stand is neutral atoms — which is what they’ll find when they hit Earth. They lose their charge and fall apart. Trouble is, they don’t go quiet. A disintegrating bundle gives off loads of energy.”
“How much is a load?”
“About twenty times their free-space kinetic energy. I used ter say that each bundle hits as hard as a small bullet. Now I’d say it’s like an explosive bullet.”
“Not thirty times as much energy as we thought, but six hundred?”
“Yerss. An’ there’s an outside chance of worse news. D’you know what homeostasis is?”
“I used to, before I rotted my brain with politics.” Celine thought for a moment. “It’s a feedback effect, one that gives a system the tendency to return to its original state when it’s perturbed away from it.”
“Yer got it. An’ Earth’s one big homeostatic system. Dump in more energy, and when you stop doing that the temperatures and pressures and all the biosphere tend ter go back ter the original states. That’s how come the Sun could increase its energy output thirty percent over the past couple of billion years, like it did, but surface temperatures hardly shifted in all that time.
“But there’s limits. Hit Earth hard enough and quick enough, an’ homeostasis could fail. Yer might go to a steady state all right, but mebbe it’s not the one you started from. An’ that’s the way it looks to me sometimes, when I run the numbers for the big particle storm.”