by J. Thorn
“It will loop,” Chien said, referring to the sun’s habit of bending much of its escaped energy back into the thermonuclear maw. As turbulent as the imagery made the sun appear, most of the activity took place deep inside, where hydrogen and helium burned away at astonishing temperatures. It took light 200,000 years to emerge from the center of the sun to the surface, and from there a mere eight minutes to reach the Earth.
Chien thought he would share that little factoid with Summer when he dropped by her apartment tonight. It was the kind of romantic bon mot that would wash down well with a glass of Chablis.
“Even with a loop, it will likely shoot some electrons our way,” Katherine said.
“Should we log a report?”
One of the center’s responsibilities was to warn of potential interference with satellites and telecommunications equipment, which helped justify the $18 billion NASA budget. A caricature of a notoriously penurious Republican senator was pinned to the bulletin board near the restrooms, bearing a handwritten admonition: “A phone call a day keeps the hatchets away.” Providing a practical public benefit was essential to the long-term survival of the center.
“The usual,” Katherine said. “Possible disruption of regular signal transmission but no need for extraordinary measures.”
“A little static on the cell phone,” Chien said. “A little snow for the TV viewers with a dish. No Doomsday on the radar.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed.”
“I’m thrilled. An apocalypse would be terribly inconvenient. I’ve got a hot date tonight.”
Katherine managed a rueful smile. “Wish I could say the same. Take my advice and never get married.”
Chien didn’t want to tiptoe through those conversational landmines, so he shifted back to business. The bulging projectile of the solar flare clung to the sun’s surface like a drop of water on the lip of a leaky faucet. Usually, the flare would collapse again, the charged particles of helium and hydrogen reeled back by the intense gravity. But this one kept swelling, a ragged dragon’s breath of plasma leaping into space.
Chien flipped through the suite of instruments, observing the flare at different wavelengths. “Are you seeing this, Katherine?”
“Let me get this bulletin out first.”
“I’d hold off on it for a moment. We might be upgrading.”
“We can’t upgrade. This is M-1 already.”
Chien’s mouth went dry and his heart hammered. The solar flare’s footprint grew both on the surface and in its bulge in the heliosphere. “Looking like an X.”
“Daniel, that’s serious. It means rerouting high-altitude aircraft and damage to satellites. If we send out a red alert, we’d better be right.”
“The sun doesn’t care who’s right or wrong,” he said, watching the ragged hole on the sun’s surface widen further and the plume take an immense leap.
X-class solar flares dispensed radiation that could threaten airline passengers with exposure if they were not adequately shielded by the Earth’s atmosphere. Such flares were rarely recorded, but Chien was well aware that human measurement of such phenomena was but the blink of an eye against the ancient history of the sun. No doubt thousands—perhaps millions—of massive flares had swept across the Earth in ages past, scouring the planet with radiation and scrambling its geomagnetic fields. Chien was alternately excited and frightened that he might be witness to one of them.
But Katherine was right. Issuing an X-class bulletin would set a whole range of actions in motion, affecting the telecommunications industry, defense, and air transportation. Rerouting flights alone would cost millions of dollars, not to mention throwing off flight schedules that could disrupt international travel for weeks. Any shutdown of telecommunications and satellite service could quickly run costs into the billions as well. This was a panic button that, once pressed, could not be easily dismissed.
“You know what happens if we cry wolf,” Katherine said.
As project director, Katherine would be the scapegoat for any political fallout, but Chien would likely be drummed out as well. Sure, he could always return to university life, where notoriety was little more than a mildly eccentric selling point on the tenure track. But he’d likely be done in the field of government-funded research, and there wasn’t a whole lot of private-industry opportunity.
But facts were facts, and the numbers were screaming X all the way. “We can’t close our eyes to this,” he said.
“Okay, I will give a warning of ‘possible disruption, monitoring closely,’” Katherine said. “That should keep us covered until we can crunch all the corn flakes.”
She issued the alert to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and the departments of Defense and Homeland Security. Katherine rated the threat a G3, a strong geomagnetic storm as measured on a scale of one to five. She logged the data and noted the time, saying to Chien, “Your shift is up. You better go play Romeo.”
“No way,” he said. “The solar cycle doesn’t peak again for 11 years, and I’m not getting any younger.”
“Your call. But take my word for it. When you get to be my age, you wish you’d had more dates with people and fewer dates with computers.”
The solar plume on the screen had grown to epic proportions, so much so that Chien had to zoom out on the imagery just to fit it on the screen. Even for a trained scientist, it was difficult to equate what looked like a bit of Hollywood illusion with billions of tons of solar material hurtling toward the Earth at two million miles an hour. Even if the plume proved truly dangerous, the solar wind and its charged particles wouldn’t reach Earth for at least a day, maybe two.
“Something’s got me worried,” Chien said. “The SDO has only been operating for four years, and in that time we’ve had no major solar storms.”
“So?” Katherine had apparently already swallowed her own downplaying of the threat and accepted mild space disturbance as fait accompli.
“The SDO is itself a satellite. With a vicious enough solar wind, we’d lose uplinks and downlinks, as well as orientation. Worst-case scenario, we won’t be able to track the effect.”
“Well, let’s just pray it’s not a worst case, then,” Katherine said, with a wry smile. Religious references were rare in the space center.
Chien, a Taoist, was not amused, nor was he comforted.
CHAPTER TWO
“It’s a bird,” the girl, Madison, said.
“I see that,” Rachel Wheeler said. “It’s pretty. Why don’t we put it in the sky?”
Madison had snipped the misshapen bird from a sheet of black construction paper. It was part of a collage, a series of different shapes held in place with paste. The bottom was a strip of green paper and the sky was a strip of blue paper. There was a square for the house, and a block with wheels that represented Daddy’s truck. The forked brown tree was topped with a clump of green for leaves, and three scallop-edged dots of white were drifting clouds. The biggest object in the collage was a wobbly orange oval, a sun that projected brightness and cheer.
But Rachel’s main interest was the hidden interior of the house.
“Right here?” Madison said, setting the bird in the tree.
Tree. Perhaps she sees security there, maybe a nest.
“Wherever you want,” Rachel said.
“There,” Madison insisted.
“Okay, let’s put the paste on the back so it will stick.” Paste had not changed much from Rachel’s own grade-school days, and she helped Madison dab it on with big, greasy strokes using a wooden Popsicle stick.
Madison stamped the bird into place and frowned. “Maybe it should fly away.”
“How come?”
“So it won’t hear what’s happening in the house.”
“Would the bird be afraid?” Rachel kept her voice level, suppressing any eagerness. She was painfully aware of Do-Gooder Syndrome and those who wanted to help no matter the c
ost.
Madison shook her head, swishing fine blonde hair across her thin shoulders. “No, because the bird can fly away.”
“Do you sometimes wish you could fly?”
“Yeah, because Daddy won’t let me ride the school bus and then I could come to school.”
Madison had repeated the second grade because she’d missed twenty-seven days in the last school year. Despite the intervention of the Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services, Madison’s father didn’t feel compelled to follow the law. Her mother was serving three years in prison for the manufacture, sale, and delivery of methamphetamine. Because the county had little funding for child services, Madison would remain in her father’s custody unless he committed some unforgiveable atrocity on the order of molestation or murder. The “welfare state” was just one of the many oxymoronic catch phrases Rachel had encountered as a school counselor.
“What if we put a window on the house?” Rachel said, edging a little more deeply into her inquisition.
“Daddy says windows are for nosy people. Says you better keep the curtains closed.”
“But then you can’t see the sunshine. It’s dark all the time.”
Madison shrugged. “Not if you turn on the TV.”
Hard to argue with that one. Rachel glanced at the clock. It was almost two, and Madison was her last client of the day. She hated that word “client,” but “student” wasn’t exactly accurate, either, since she didn’t really teach. Rachel had finished her two-year Masters program and was currently conducting an internship at Greenwood Academy. The charter school was in a renovated warehouse on Charlotte’s rundown east side, a politically popular nod to school choice that had the ulterior motive of moving education costs from the tax coffers to parents.
Mrs. Federov, the dour and scrawny principal, had approved Rachel’s internship with the condition that no parents would be involved. Rachel was free to meet with students individually, but she wasn’t allowed to probe into anything besides school and peer subjects—as if home life had no role in academic performance and character education.
Rachel was under no illusions that she was here to save the world. She was here to save herself. Most notably from guilt over Chelsea, her little sister.
Madison wasn’t the only one who knew about loss.
“We don’t have TV at school,” Rachel said.
“We have a ’puter,” Madison said.
“Yes, we do have computers.” Rachel didn’t have an office, instead meeting with her clients in a supply room. That was handy for paper cut-outs, but not for technology. The media center had a bank of computers, but the one in Mrs. Federov’s office was the best in the school. Of course, it was Mrs. Federov’s personal property.
Which made using it even more fun, because it was off limits.
Rachel checked the hall, closed the supply-room door, and opened the side door that led to Mrs. Federov’s office. Mrs. Federov had a polished walnut desk that must have cost the nonprofit school association a thousand dollars. On it sat a MacBook, gleaming white like a futuristic relic. Madison pressed behind her, eager to enter.
“On one condition,” Rachel said.
“Not to tell?”
The kid is sharp. But then, aren’t they all, until grown-ups grind off all their edges? “I wouldn’t want you to lie. If a grownup asks, always tell the truth.”
Madison nodded, her brown eyes solemn. “What condition, then?”
“Can you tell me what’s inside the house?”
Madison’s brow furrowed as if she had already forgotten the collage. “House?”
“The one without a window.”
“Oh. Is this one of those times when I have to tell the truth?”
“I won’t tell anyone else. There’s a difference between a lie and a secret. And this would be our secret. Just like the computer.”
Madison looked longingly past Rachel to the computer. “Okay then. Daddy’s asleep on the couch. Drinking beer. He has a gun.”
A lovely combination. She could picture him, his shirt unbuttoned and hairy belly bulging, a platoon of empty bottles on the floor around the couch. The gun was a disturbing addition to the scene.
Great. Now I don’t just have to worry about him showing up in the principal’s office, I have to worry about him gunning down fifty innocent kids.
“Does he say anything about the gun?” she asked.
Madison shook her head. “Just said the gum…the gub…the guvment…is not taking his.”
Her father actually didn’t sound all that much different than many other Charlotte residents. The South was a conservative stronghold, despite the liberal university communities in North Carolina. The Mecklenburg school board was having a serious debate over whether to allow teachers to carry concealed weapons. Rachel wondered how long it would be before bulletproof vests were a classroom requirement.
“Okay,” Rachel said. “Let’s play some Dora the Explorer.”
When Rachel booted up the MacBook, it was already set to Mrs. Federov’s Yahoo! page. Rachel had no interest in the woman’s private habits, but she did notice an orange ball of fire in the news thumbnails. The accompanying teaser said, “Killer Solar Flare Heading for Earth?”
Rachel was well aware of Yahoo! and other news outlets using provocative headlines as click bait. She’d survived Y2K, collision-course asteroids, and the Mayan prophecies, accepting them all as hysteria. But she couldn’t resist, not after her grandfather had drilled doomsday paranoia into her skull from an early age. She clicked on the article.
“What’s that?” Madison said, pointing at the photograph that was credited to NASA.
Never lie to kids. “Scientists say the sun is giving off an awesome amount of energy that will reach the Earth by tomorrow.”
“Will I get a sunburn?”
August was humid enough already, so that was a legitimate concern. “No, it’s more like a type of invisible wave. Some people are worried that it will disrupt their phones, computers, and television.”
“Does that mean we won’t be able to play Dora the Explorer?”
“I’m sure it will be okay. People write these stories just to get our attention. If trouble was really on the way, don’t you think they’d be trying to do something about it?”
That logic sounded silly even to Rachel’s own ears. Pollution, global warming, gun violence, disease, and starvation were real and constant threats to human survival, yet no one seemed to be doing anything about them. Yet a bizarre menace straight out of a science-fiction movie drew eyeballs. She quickly scanned the rest of the article, slowing near the end to absorb a particularly sensational paragraph:
While unlikely, in extreme cases electromagnetic radiation from solar flares can damage electrical transformers, essentially shutting down the nation’s power grid. An intense enough solar storm could also destroy circuitry in modern technological devices, including the electronic ignitions and other systems in motor vehicles and machinery. Most scientists agree that the Earth’s atmosphere would shield the planet’s surface from much of the electromagnetic effects. However, Dr. Daniel Chien of the Goddard Space Flight Center said, “We don’t know the possible effects of a massive solar storm on our modern infrastructure simply because we haven’t had one.” Chien paused before adding, “Yet.”
The article concluded with an aide to the president downplaying the threat but assuring the public that the situation would be closely monitored.
“Is the sun going to blow up?” Madison asked, as if it were just another video game.
“No, honey, it will come up tomorrow just like always.”
She booted up Dora the Explorer and let Madison start her usual fifteen minutes with the game. Then she went to the office door to keep an eye out for Mrs. Federov.
If the school board passed the concealed-carry requirement, Rachel was sure the leathery old bat would be the first in line to get a permit.
CHAPTER THREE
Franklin Wheeler stood o
n a small wooden platform he’d built in the crotch of a massive oak tree.
He’d built the platform two years before, one of the first additions to the compound he’d constructed on national park land in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In those days, he slept in a tent that was tucked under a rock ledge, surviving out of a backpack that contained a collapsible fishing rod, ready-to-eat military surplus meals, a few basic hand tools, a Coleman liquid fuel lantern, a first aid kit, and a water-purifying system. His Snow Leopard sleeping bag was rated to forty below zero, but the summer nights had been warm enough for him to sleep under open stars. That initial expedition led him to choose the isolated ridge as the perfect site for his compound.
From the platform twenty feet above the ridge line, he could see miles in the distance, the great Appalachian ridges rolling away like blue-green waves into the distance before leveling off across Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. Although the haze of Ohio coal-burning plants often veiled the sky, on clear, cool nights the fuzzy lights of Charlotte were visible 150 miles to the southeast. Now, though, all he saw was the late-summer foliage, pocked here and there with great windows of speckled granite, and the tiny rooftops of distant homes burrowed in the slopes. A mile beneath him wound a ribbon of asphalt known on the maps as the Blue Ridge Parkway, a national scenic route, but which Franklin considered the tyrant’s racetrack for overland invasion.
Franklin scanned the road with his binoculars. The usual intermittent stream of tourist traffic passed below, Floridians and New Yorkers making their own type of invasion. But they were harmless next to the slumbering beasts in D.C., Beijing, and Moscow. But all dragons appeared to be sleeping in the day’s heat. The platform didn’t quite afford a full panoramic view, but between his makeshift crow’s nest and other lookout points on the ridge, Franklin figured his compound was secure for another day.