“I doubt it. Even if it did, Section Two of the Schiaparelli is well shielded against that sort of thing. We’ll have plenty of notice, we’ll just retreat there for as long as necessary. We’re safer here on the ship than we would be down on Earth.”
Celine could see why Wilmer was so good as a partner for her. No matter what happened, he stayed calm. And he could usually give her a sound, logical reason why her worries were groundless.
This time, though, she had the awful conviction that she would be right, and he would be wrong.
Supernova Alpha brightened and brightened. The crew of the Schiaparelli was in the best possible position to observe it. Four weeks after the first brightening — and one week before the change — the expanding gas shell around the star was big enough to show a visible disk to the on-board telescopes. From the second day, Celine had tuned their communications antennae to receive images from the DOS in Earth orbit. They all watched the fiery sphere pulsate and shiver under the force of explosions deep inside it. Wilmer did inverse calculations to determine the energy release from the observations. The numbers he quoted, in his dry, matter-of-fact way, were enough to make Celine shiver.
“If there were planets orbiting Alpha Centauri . . .” Alta said gloomily, when she, Celine, and Wilmer were together in the main galley of the Schiaparelli. She was the expedition’s number two pessimist, right after Celine.
“Then you would be quite right to employ the past tense.” Wilmer nodded to a display, where Alpha Centauri was now constantly displayed. “If they were ever there, they’re cinders.”
Celine didn’t say anything. But after they had finished eating she went again to Section Two. There she checked that the quarters they would retreat to in case of a big solar storm were fully furnished with supplies. Then she did what she had done every day since the first blossoming of Supernova Alpha; she examined sequences of visible-wavelength images of both Alpha Centauri and of Sol, looking for changes in either.
Of course, she didn’t see anything. The huge pulse of gamma rays from Supernova Alpha, when it finally came, was invisible to human eyes.
The instruments, however, had sensitivity to everything from hard X rays to long radio waves. They caught the leap in the ambient gamma-ray level in the first fraction of a second, extrapolated the upward curve, and sent a warning bellow through the whole ship.
The crew had been well trained. Better to overreact than underreact. They headed at maximum speed for Section Two. Celine, in a bizarre way, felt vindicated. She had expected trouble, and here it was — and thanks to Celine they were ready, food and water fully stocked, extra instruments installed so they would know exactly what was going on outside.
Not much space, of course. They were in an emergency shelter, not a luxury hotel. But Celine sat bug-rug-snug and not unhappy between Wilmer and Ludwig, watching the gamma-level readout.
It was calibrated so that a level of zero equaled the mean solar gamma flux with a quiet sun. The current level — sixty-three — only meant something if you knew that the readout scale was the base-e log of the gamma intensity. That was easy to deal with if you knew, as Celine did, that e3 is about equal to twenty. So an increase of three in readout value was equivalent to a factor of twenty multiplier in actual gamma-ray level. Readout level sixty-three then meant that the current gamma flux was 2063/3 of the usual value. 2021 was rather more than 1027. Space outside the shielded compartment of the Schiaparelli was hot, hell-hot, with the gamma-ray burst from Supernova Alpha.
And still Celine, who would conclude in retrospect that she was an idiot, thought they were sitting pretty inside their shield. She hadn’t even bothered to include a display showing anything of what was happening back on Earth. It was Ludwig, sitting with his miniature ear-link tuned to open communications channels, who after a few seconds grunted, sat upright, and said, “What the hell is going on?”
Nothing special, according to Celine’s displays. She turned to him. “What do you mean? What do you hear?”
He had his control unit on his lap, scanning frequencies. He shook his head. “I don’t like this. I was monitoring S-band, low data rate ground-to-space vocal. Then it went dead — and now so has everything else. I’m getting nothing at all, not even video or general communications uplinks from Earth.”
It was Wilmer, on Celine’s other side, who stirred from an apparent trance and said, “Check space to ground.”
Ludwig said nothing, but his fingers stabbed at another section of his lap set. After a few seconds he glanced across at Wilmer. “Weird. Nothing going down from low Earth orbit, voice or image or computer bit stream. But for the geosynchronous metsats, higher up, it’s business as usual. Do you want me to look at their image data stream?”
“Yes. But not what’s being sent out now. Do you receive and store past data?”
“Some. It’s a moving window. We store metsats for the past twenty-four hours, that’s all.”
“That will be ample. Tap us in to fifteen minutes ago, and run a display.”
Zoe was finally taking an interest. She had not actually been listening, but she reacted to Wilmer’s and Ludwig’s tone of voice. She leaned forward toward them. “Hey, what’s going on? How long before this gamma surge fades, and we can get out of here?”
Celine glanced across at the readout: forty-two. “It’s fading already,” she said. “It’s down by twenty-one from the last value I saw. That’s a factor of more than a billion. If it keeps going like this, we can all leave here in a few minutes.”
“I’m going to borrow your display, Celine,” Ludwig said. “Here’s the metsat images.”
Alpha Centauri vanished. In its place came the familiar and comforting sight of Earth as seen from geosynchronous orbit, thirty-five thousand kilometers above the surface. They stared in silence at the great globe, half lit by sunlight, half in darkness. Without knowing how to give a name to it, Celine could see a strangeness to the cloud patterns. Instead of broad bands or hurricane swirls, the clouds had an unusual north-south streaky structure, as though the equator — that already imaginary entity — had disappeared.
Peculiar, yes. But menacing? Not really. All seven of them sat watching in silence. At last, as Zoe was saying, “All right, I’ve enjoyed as much of this as I can stand,” it came.
A blue glow started at the South Pole and shimmered north. Like a gas discharge in a fluorescent tube, it moved until it enveloped the whole Earth. And then, while they stared and wondered if they were seeing what they thought they saw, it was gone.
Wilmer leaned back against Celine. “We’re screwed,” he said. “Dead unlucky, the geometry must have been just wrong. I knew it was a possibility, but I never thought it would happen. Ludwig, check the time codes on the data streams. I bet data loss in and around Earth began coincident with that high-atmosphere free electron phenomenon we just witnessed.”
“What will it do?” Reza asked. He had the least electronic background of anyone on board.
“If it was as strong as I think,” Wilmer answered, “it will have knocked out a lot of electronic gear down on Earth. Anything with microchips in it is probably dead.”
“Well, doesn’t that mean . . .” Reza said.
He was asking more questions. Celine could hear him, but his words didn’t even register with her. If everything containing microchips no longer worked, then the planet would be plunged back to a pre-electronic age; except that the world of 2026, unlike the world of 1926, depended on electronic devices for every phase of living.