Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  "Are you what?"

  "Dead?"

  "Oh, dear me, no! You're fine, old man! Just physically weak, is all. And still sorting things out in your head, I imagine. Tell me now, what is the last thing you remember?"

  "Money. I was…" The cold mists swirled inside Winston's skull now, without any holes to escape through. "I was in the middle of a deal, trading in gas properties, with money on the table—my money!" A surge of panic blew the fog out of his brains. "My money was registered with the network when it went down....Do you know, what has the Exchange decided about assets that were in play?"

  "I have no idea," the doctor said.

  "If they do not find some equitable way to either record the trade or void it, then I will be ruined. Everything I had was on display in the booth. So, technically, it was all exposed in the transaction. Look, is there any way I can make a phone call? Are the channels even open yet?"

  "Oh, yes. The phones have been working most of the afternoon. Local only, so far. But I think you are still too unsettled to concern yourself with business just now."

  "But I have to—it's my life!"

  "Nonsense, old man. It's only money. You can make more of it. Make a ton of it in an afternoon, from the stories I've heard. And anyway, the disaster has struck all of you traders equally, hasn't it? I mean, there are three hundred and fourteen people in much the same state as yourself at this one hospital alone; hundreds more at other institutions." As he talked, the doctor fumbled one-handed with something deep in his coat pocket. "So a lot of people are going to be in the same boat as you, aren't they? I trust the officials at your Exchange will be pressed to achieve something 'equitable,' as you say." The hand came up over the edge of the bed, and the doctor's fingernail—or something sharp like that—pricked the loose skin of Winston's upper arm. "Now why don't you just lie back and let the future look after tomorrow, hey?"

  "But, my money—!"

  "Your money will be all safe and sound for you, just where you left it, my lad."

  "But in the meantime?" Winston Qiang-Phillips struggled to organize his thoughts. "While I am lying here, others will be trading at my expense. They will gather assets that I should move on… They will build… a corner… advantage…"

  Waves of white vapor clogged his skull and closed over his eyes. As he fell back, Winston's head fluttered into a billow of paper currency, all of it high denominations. Some of the money slipped off the bed and rustled onto the floor.

  Tap

  Tap

  Tap!

  Rap!

  Titan Base, March 22, 3:24 UT

  "Ms. Cormant?" The voice was that of Will Harding, her confidential secretary. "Are you awake, ma'am?"

  Lydia Cormant rolled over and looked at the digital face of her bedside clock. Almost half past three. Another hour and a half to her normal rising time. Whatever reason Harding had for disturbing her, he considered it too urgent to wait and come in with her tray of breakfast tea.

  "I'm awake now, Will," she called out "What is it?"

  "May I come in?"

  Cormant struggled up in the bed, gathered pillows behind her in a pile, and sat up with the covers over her chest.

  "Yes, come."

  He slid back the door and entered her sleeping chamber. By station standards, it was large for a single person's private quarters; thirty cubic meters. That was enough for a bed, a hanging locker, an automated desk, two chairs, and a half-bath behind an ell-panel. Her quarters were wide enough, along a section of the ring tube's outer wall, to support a window which looked down on the blank face of Titan. That scene was made white and ghostly by the moon's frozen ice layers under an atmosphere of nitrogen and complex hydrocarbons.

  These quarters represented space and privacy such as the average Cartel employee on assignment in the outer planets could hardly dream of. But then, Lydia Cormant was not an average employee. She was the general manager of Titan Base, a full voting director of InSystem Chemical Resources, Inc., and holder in her own name of three-point-nine percent of the shares in that Cartel member company. So she deserved her little luxuries.

  Harding walked lightly to the chair beside her desk. His movements were fully acclimated to the station's one-eighth spin gravity.

  "What is it?" she repeated.

  "The announcement came in on the general news and entertainment channel three minutes ago," he answered, turning on her desk monitor. "I've spooled the whole thing for you, so you can see the action from the beginning."

  "What announcement?" Lydia groped for her old-fashioned glass lenses on the bedside shelf and leaned forward to see the screen.

  By way of answering, Harding swiveled the monitor toward her. It showed a disk of silver light surrounded by a starry, black sky. That had to be a computer-assisted artist's conception, Lydia knew, because they always showed too few stars in empty space. The disk was Ouroboros, of course, viewed head-on as it came streaming in toward Earth.

  Cormant's last view of the sunjammer, seen with her own eyes more than a year ago, had been from its back side: showing the spokes of guy wires, visible only as a radial fuzziness against the luminescent film of the sail, and the three cryogenic methane tanks that trailed behind, as round and shadowed as little moons.

  The voice-over to the view that was now on display described the Ouroboros and its capacities, the Cartel and its business relations, and a brief on the state of the world market in methane. While this rendition went on, a tiny mite of a ship riding a blue flame came edgewise toward the solar sail. The narration detailed the procedure for rendezvousing with the sail and removing its cargo.

  As Cormant and Harding watched, the sail suddenly collapsed on one side, then folded around the tugboat. The entangled pair flew off at nearly right angles—moving so fast that the artist had to be compressing time for the sake of storytelling. The announcer could give no clear reason for the collapse but only repeated the speculations of sailing experts that the tug must have snaked one of the "control wires."

  The scene jumped to a real-time optical view of the Moon, which was almost at full as seen from Earth. The announcer urged the viewers to watch the area "about half an inch in from the twelve o'clock position."

  Cormant leaned closer, then got out of bed in her nightgown, crept over to the desk, and sat down with her face a few centimeters from the screen.

  A dot, a blot, something dark and slow-moving crawled vertically up the face of the Moon. If this was truly a view from Earth, then the whatever-it-was was speeding away from the planet and almost straight into the satellite. The slight vertical motion was either some trick of perspective or perhaps a final attempt by the tugboat pilot to correct his course and pass over the Moon's north pole, maybe even establish an orbit around that body.

  But it didn't work. One instant the blot or dot was crawling north into the Man in the Moon's hairline. In the next, a small bloom of bluish-white fire briefly outshone the whole gray-white face. Then it faded without a smudge.

  The voice-over told them that the crash had taken place without loss of life or property, other than the pilot's and the value of the two ships, but it was doubtful the pilot and his environment bubble had survived the sail's initial collapse. The announcer then apologized for the lateness of his report, as the accident had occurred some seven hours earlier, but interference in the Earth's upper atmosphere, which was unrelated to the sunjammer crash, had disrupted this channel's regular news-gathering operations.

  With the end of the spooled transmission, the screen went blank.

  "You say this just came in?" Lydia asked Harding.

  "Now four minutes ago."

  "And what's the lightspeed lag?"

  "About eighty-five minutes—say an hour and a half."

  "But this came in with the general news?" she asked, knowing full well he'd already told her that.

  "Yes, ma'am. The nightshift operator in the comm shack caught it in routine listening and called me right away."

  "A seven-hour
lag through general Earthside clumsiness, and an hour and a half coming here. So this accident happened when? Just about nineteen hundred hours Universal Time, I make it."

  Harding did the subtractions in his head. "You're right, ma'am."

  "What have we heard from the other Cartel members on this?"

  "Nothing."

  "You've checked receipts, of course, on all frequencies, both scrambled and clear, including the one reserved for my personal use?"

  "Of course, ma'am."

  "Damned peculiar," Cormant observed.

  "Yes, it is, ma'am."

  "All right. Get out and get me some tea. We've got work to do."

  He started for the door.

  "And, Will—" She stopped him.

  "Yes, ma'am?"

  "You are to keep this whole affair quiet. Put a quarantine on that report—"

  "I already have."

  "And bring any messages this station receives from the Cartel—that's messages addressed to anyone, you hear?—to me as soon as they arrive. Instruct the comm operators on this."

  "Right away, Ms. Cormant."

  He hurried out to do her bidding.

  Lydia Cormant did not get back in bed, but instead took her robe from the hanging locker, bundled it around her, and sat back in the chair by the desk. She glared at the computer screen from under lowered brows.

  It was darkly silent.

  In the Cartel's scale of things, this was no minor accident. The tanks trailing behind Oumboras had contained the refined product of eighteen months' work here above Titan. The capital investment alone was in excess of point-seven-five terabux, in terms of personnel wages and benefits, this orbital station, the fleet of cramships, pipes and tankage, the distillery and various support equipment, all transported out to the orbit of Saturn, rigged and tested, and run on the tightest possible schedules to produce those seven and a half billion cubic meters of free methane in three little tanks.

  True, now that those capital items were in place, the production of an endless stream of gas was possible. In the past thirteen months they had refined nearly another five gigacubes of gas, all cooled away and waiting for Ouroboras' return.

  Which would never come now.

  A replacement would take how long? At least another year to manufacture, pack away, and transship another lightsailer. Even if it were launched fully deployed from Earth orbit, it would still take that long to reach here. By that time, Cormant would have more than a full complement of product ready to ship sunward. But, with no income from that first load, which was now smeared in wreckage over the lunar highlands, her operation would be way short on cashflow.

  True, the failings of Consolidated Space Services' tugboat personnel were not her responsibility, but the auditors would hardly accept that as an excuse. The one viable product that the Cartel had managed to recover from this increasingly foolhardy venture at Saturn was methane for humankind's energy and chemical industries. And Lydia Cormant had been on the point of supplying more of it than anyone had ever brought in with one well, one field, in one hundred years of drilling and pipelining on Earth.

  All gone to a puddle and an impact-fusion bang on the Moon!

  If the Cartel were in a forgiving mood, even though she had done nothing to be forgiven, then Floding or one of his executive assistants would surely have gotten a private message to Cormant. Condolences, a reprimand, a squaring of accounts, anything—just so long as they acknowledged her as family, as someone inside the tent, entitled to get the bad news from the big picture before it went out over the open channels as media fodder.

  That was what hurt most: this lack of confidence. No one in the Cartel had thought to circle the wagons with their farthest outpost. Instead, they were just going to let the Titan crew find out through a general news broadcast.

  Lydia Cormant knew how it was going to look to her department heads and shift foremen, to her labor gangs and pilots. They were being abandoned, psychologically. From this silence, it would cross the minds of many out here—as indeed it was crossing hers right now—that without their first shipment of product to sell and with a gaping hole in their cashflow, the Cartel might be inclined not to make up the supplies that Ouroboros was supposed to bring back for Titan Base. Or not right away. And the Cartel might not even send crew replacements at rotation time.

  Cormant had no worries that the station's highly trained and fully experienced personnel might get discouraged if their paychecks were late, that they might drift away to other offworld opportunities, crippling the operation here. They could only come and go when the Cartel dispatched a transport ship. If it didn't, then they stayed. And a lot of critical functions depended on the good spirits and fiscal generosity of the Earthside executives. Like eating. And breathing.

  Cormant punched her intercom. "Will Harding to my quarters. Immediately."

  "Yes, ma'am," came the reply.

  Already, in her head, she was composing the text of a message to the people of Titan Base. It was a sad message, but one full of determination to carry forward in the face of this setback. It praised their work and their achievements beyond the orbit of Mars, but stopped short of promising them bonuses for the gas shipment that Earth's distribution networks would now never see. It was meant to reassure and to reinforce.

  "You called?" Harding let himself into the room.

  "Take a letter, Will," she said, straightening her shoulders and arranging the robe across her knees. "Addressed to me, from Einar Floding, Titan Developments, Manhattan, Greater New York City, dated March twenty-first at twenty hundred… oh, make it twenty-one hundred hours. Text begins—"

  "Excuse me…" He put down his notepad. "You said a message to you? And from Floding?"

  "I did."

  "But that's… well, it's not ethical, is it?"

  "No, Will, but it's necessary. Now, text begins—" and she recited the message from memory. Toward the end, Harding was sniffling aloud, and even her own eyes were moist.

  Chapter 21

  "You Have to Listen!"

  Thirty-nine…

  Forty…

  Forty-one...

  Forty-two…

  Vandenberg Spaceport, California, March 21, 4:55 p.m. PST

  Jord Jamison replayed the cyber simulation in his helmet and watched as, one by one, each of the forty-two Earth-orbiting platforms "hit the wall." Or that was how one junior tech had described it.

  With the cyber-recreated action vastly speeded up, compressing the two full hours of the disaster into a two-minute replay, Jamison studied the tiny glowing images which circled his head like a cloud of gnats. The sensory manipulations of virtual reality processing let him hold all of the orbital slots continuously in focus, even when they were over beside his ears or off behind his neck. As the simulation proceeded, suddenly one and then another of the gnats stalled, slowed in its trajectory, dipped out of line, and dived into the thicker air of the upper atmosphere, where it flared red, then white, then fragmented, then disappeared.

  The disaster had decimated the orderly positions in the revolving web of low-level orbits which his own NASA and the European and Japanese space agencies had engineered for the world's commercial uses. Most of the failed satellites were low-gee rotating geriatric housing, null-gee cryotoria, and vacuum- and microgravity-sensitive manufacturing platforms from the poorer nations which could not afford the cost of either staking out claims in or boosting to the upper slots in Earth's space or at the Lagrange points.

  But, whatever the disastrous effect was, no one in the Office of Orbital Mechanics which Jord Jamison headed up was able to explain the causes behind it, describe the means and medium supporting it, or predict when it might strike again.

  So, even though it was practically the end of the workday, as well as the end of the week, and the people in his unit were thinking about leaving a little early, Jamison intended to hold them here until they came up with something. To the grumblers he would only apologize that they might have finished their
work inside of office hours if that blast of electrical interference or whatever this morning had not disrupted the computer network and thrown them all back on the equivalent of pencil and paper to work up their computations. Several hours of valuable analysis had been lost in that snafu.

  Jord was not just playing the martinet, even though some of his people might think so. His quest was more than just a follow-up to an unexplained event. Until he could isolate the principles behind the effect, no one could know how many more of the orbiting platforms might be in danger. NASA had charged him with directing the work of triage and salvage.

  First, he had to establish the order in which the remaining platforms should be evacuated—which meant he had to decide which ones were likely to remain aloft long enough to accept rendezvous with a shuttle. Second, he had to determine which among the platforms might be profitably boosted to a more stable position—which meant deciding what had made the failed orbits go unstable in the first place.

  Already Jamison had gathered a few ideas from his cybernetic replays of the event.

  To begin with, the forced reentries were not all simultaneous. The platforms had gone down in some sequential fashion—a pattern that was buried in the cloud of burning, blazing gnats that he could see in his helmet

  With finger-touches on the control pad before him, Jamison turned off the visual display and asked the computer instead to rank the platforms in order of descent, correlated against various other known factors about them, such as mean orbital altitude, gross weight, exposed surface area, ferrous alloy composition—for possible magnetic interference—and so forth.

  Scanning the side-by-side lists, Jamison immediately saw the correlation. The platforms had failed in order of altitude, proceeding upward from those in the lowest positions to those at higher levels. So, whatever the effect was, it had to have come from below, from the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere, and not from empty space. This conclusion was compatible with the other available facts: that only the platforms in the lowest slots had been affected, and that no other platforms—not at the El points, nor in lunar orbit, or around Mars and the other planets and moons—had undergone similar reentries.