A principle easy to state, but oh so difficult to observe. As the particle storm continued its steady march toward the solar system and the Sky City defense system prepared for the final onslaught, I found myself in an agony-a chafing, a ferment, a convulsion-of enforced inactivity.
I had nothing to do. My preparation of the deep shelters had long since been completed. My darlings had been thoroughly briefed and knew exactly what each would do on the day of the particle storm. Seth was employed in his own inscrutable pursuits, on Earth and off it. And I? I suspect that I became intolerable, since my darlings tiptoed around Otranto Castle and minimized their interactions with me.
The days crept by. At last they turned into weeks. And finally, after an interval so apparently protracted that within it mountain ranges rose and continents were subducted, the weeks also passed and I rose one autumnal morning to discover that today was the day. The day. The day when the particle storm would strike. The day when Seth and I would also strike and, with a modicum of luck, bring to justice the Sky City murderer. The day, after endless eons of subjective time, for a final confluence of significant events.
Seth is a man able to handle major hardship with considerable fortitude. He is, however, less tolerant of small irritations.
Witness today.
The next few hours would bring danger and possible death. Beyond that, scant days hence, stood the prospect of universal destruction. So what were, in this time of final crisis, Seth’s concerns? His complaint — his only complaint — revolved around the RV jacket. “Makes me feel stupid,” he grumbled. “Lookatit. Them colors.”
I could have pointed out that the previous occupant of the apartment he occupied on Sky City had favored walls in shades of mauve and pale orange. Instead I said, “As you well know, looking at your jacket is for me impossible, unless you choose to stand in front of a mirror. However, if today’s outcome is satisfactory, you will never need to wear it again.”
“Yeah. ’Bout time. But I’m not goin’ near no mirror so you can sit there laughin’ at me.”
His ranking of concerns might be, as that final comment suggested, in some part posturing. But perhaps not all, since I felt a curious sympathy of outlook. My own worry lay not with the fate of the world and its varied billions. It centered on the personal safety and long-term future of my darlings. As the particle storm moved to its crescendo, they would retreat to the deep sanctuary below Otranto Castle.
And they would return, a day or a week later, to — what?
That was my question. Talk to me not of global escape from devastation and planetary blight. Rather, guarantee the survival of a small part of western Ireland, where my darlings and a few others could comfortably survive, and I would ask for nothing more.
It occurs to me that such an attitude may be prerequisite to the continuation of our species. Nature admits no welfare programs, and although we may die in multitudes we must struggle for survival one by one.
And so, as word spread of a curious and possibly fatal convergence of the particle storm on the solar system, the news media eschewed discussion of universal death in favor of personal survival schemes.
Many plans featured that old standby, prayer. Its historical record of effectiveness apparently discouraged few people, although I, regrettably, am among the skeptics. All the churches were full. It is not clear to me exactly what prayers were being offered by their occupants. A temporary suspension, perhaps, of the laws of physics? The art galleries and theaters also reported record crowds. If religion is an opiate, art is an anodyne.
Some other notions seemed equally unlikely to succeed. An American group, the Trust In Government coalition, displayed matching ignorance of biology and geology by intensifying their frenzied efforts on Project Way Down, the continuation of a wide-bore mine deep in the Anadarko Basin. The natural geothermal temperature gradient would make human life impossible at their projected twenty-mile end depth, without help from Alpha C, but — sublimely indifferent to both logic and cost — the TIG coalition dug and dug. They would have done well to remember the tragical history of Dr. Faustus: “Then will I headlong run into the Earth. Earth gape. Oh, no, it will not harbor me.”
More radical was the scheme, conceived in haste and executed at panic speed, of a European group, Earth Will Provide (La Terre Suffira). Its three hundred members, all among the world’s richest individuals, had rightly concluded that if Earth’s surface provided some protection, then the whole of Earth should offer more.
They had ascended to high orbit three days ago. There they would hover on their mirror-matter engines at Alpha Centauri’s antipodean point, two thousand kilometers above the surface, while Earth turned below them and the particle storm attained its maximum. The vast bulk of the planet would shield them until the storm blew past. When all was over they would return.
It was tempting to ask, return to what?
A logical mind might offer two alternatives. Either they would find a world that had survived the particle storm, in which case their flight was unnecessary; or they would return to a dying planet, where the old definition of wealth had lost its meaning and their own quietus, unhindered by privilege, could not be long delayed.
But who am I to mock the dreams and prayers of others? Their hope, like mine, is that the prevailing scientific view lacks validity. God knows, humans have been wrong often enough. We may be wrong again.
Meanwhile, business continues, though it is difficult to justify the customary added phrase “as usual.” Seth and I prepare ourselves, mentally and physically, for a meeting with a murderer. That encounter, unlike Earth’s rendezvous with the particle storm, will be decided by human actions alone.
32
The geometry had been set in place six days ago and fine-tuned every hour. The hollow tip of the conical shield pointed its arrow toward Alpha Centauri and maintained a fixed distance of half a light-second from Earth. Cusp Station hovered thirty thousand kilometers behind, precisely on the axis of the cone. Sky City in turn was locked in position one kilometer behind Cusp Station, whose newly installed field generators bathed the shield in a low-intensity glow mediated and diffused by the shield’s fine network of superconducting fibers.
Each particle bundle impinging on the shield would generate a burst of radiation, whose direction and signal frequency shift contained enough information for a precise trajectory to be computed. But to be useful, the calculation — like every other action — had to be made fast. Within seconds of hitting the shield, a free-flying particle bundle would reach Earth. Before then the detection data must be received on Sky City, necessary calculations completed, a loop field generated and sent on an interception trajectory, and the particle bundle caught and diverted safely away.
It was all possible — just. Maddy had watched the first tests, when the flux of particle bundles was still limited to a few thousand arrivals per second. Before the human eye could detect anything at all, each bundle was intercepted, netted, and curved away to miss Earth by thousands of kilometers. After a few hundred successful encounters, the conversation in the engineering control center became casual and upbeat. What no one mentioned — what Maddy wondered if most people knew — was the projected change in the situation as the storm approached its height. If the convergence of the beam was as strong as expected and the maximum arrival rate of particle bundles came even close to the projected value, the field generators would be unable to produce enough loop fields to handle the entire flood. At that point some of the bundles would begin to get through. Cusp Station and Sky City would have to be preferentially protected, since if their systems failed all defenses would be lost. But the consequence of that would be weaker protection at the edges of the shield, and thus of the parts of Earth, that lay behind them.