“They record when the waste was picked up and when it was transferred to the next shipper,” said the secretary. “The main copies are filed with the commission.”
“UKAE.”
“Yes.”
“Why would Mr. Mackay be looking through them?” Gorrie asked.
“To help plan for another shipment of spent waste, if he was. Would you mind terribly, Inspector, if I went back to work?”
Gorrie nodded, but the secretary hesitated. “I heard — the woman Ed…”
“Aye, Cardha Duff. I wouldn’t call it suicide,” he added. “Probably an accident due to medication.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head, then turned away quickly to her desk to have a cry.
Gorrie went back to the documents. Except for the dates and some slight variation in the waste amounts, they could have been identical. The pickups were always made around the same time, late at night, moved by the same route, and were presented at the dock loading area roughly sixty minutes later.
Gorrie took out his notebook. Cameron’s pad had mentioned Lin Firth Bridge. The bridge wasn’t noted here— it wasn’t much of a landmark — but the truck would have crossed over it.
So that’s what Mackay had found.
Gorrie took down the dates of the transport, knowing even before he checked that one would include the few days the bridge was closed.
NINE
Marked against the sun’s 4.5 billion years of existence, the coming event was nothing truly anomalous, but a result of the natural interplay between its atmospheric and orbital processes.
A body of seething gas and plasma, the solar sphere does not rotate on its axis in the same coherent way as the solid globe we inhabit. Rather, its rotation is fluid, the radiative and convective zones that compose its outer layers — and 85 percent of its radius — turning faster at the equator than at its poles. This causes its lines of magnetic force, which run longitudinally from positive north to negative south, to stretch and twist.
The phenomenon is easily understood with this modeclass="underline"
Imagine a ball sliced into three crosswise sections. Now imagine rubber bands attached to it, top to bottom, with pins inserted into each section. Give the middle slice of the ball a faster spin than the others, and the rubber bands are stretched along with its movement. Continue spinning it faster and the rubber bands coil tightly around the ball, eventually tangling and kinking up in places… assuming they have sufficient elasticity not to snap first.
As the sun turns in its differential rotation, the lines of force running through its gaseous outer layers stretch and intertwine until they develop similar kinks — wide, swirling magnetic fields that most often occur in leader-follower pairs that are bonded by their opposite polarities and drift across the surface in unison with smaller fields strung out between them like ships in a flotilla. Attenuated lines of force bulge up from the positively charged leader fields, and are pulled back to the negative followers, forming closed bipolar loops that reach many thousands of miles outward toward the sun’s corona. Pressure exerted on the solar atmosphere by the intense magnetic fields dampens the upward flow of hot gas from the interior. The regions covered by the fields are, therefore, about two thousand degrees cooler than those surrounding them and appear as dark blemishes to observers on earth.
These we call sunspots, and their number rises from minimum to maximum levels in eleven-to-twelve-year cycles. A typical sunspot grows in size over a period of days or sometimes months, and then shrinks after the cycle peaks and the bands of magnetic force unwind. A spot moving across the sun as it rotates on its axis will take twenty-seven days to complete a journey around the equator and thirty-five days to circle the upper and lower hemispheres.
Like rubber bands, the lines of force extending upward from sunspots do occasionally snap. This happens when they stretch past a critical height 250,000 miles above the surface of the sun and break through its corona, releasing their stored energy in a fiery maelstrom of subatomic particles that lashes into outer space and goes sweeping across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
We call these solar flares, and their emissions will bombard Earth within days if angled toward it. Major flares have been known to cover eighty thousand square miles of the sun — an area ten times larger than our planet — and equal millions of hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb blasts in strength, triggering worldwide disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field. They cannot be forecast with absolute certainty, though any significant increase of sunspot activity is considered to be a possible indicator of solar flares in generation.
On the third day of March, during a peak in the sunspot cycle, a group of frecklelike spots that seemed the very definition of unremarkable to astronomers who routinely track them moved to the far side of the sun in their orbital course. There over the next two weeks, beyond the range of visual observation, they began to enlarge, multiply, and align in long, close-grouped strings. By the twelfth of the month the spots had become highly asymmetric; their heavy concentration resembled a spreading, blotchy rash on the hidden face of the sun. The escalated growth and proliferation would continue for several days to come.
Again, in the long view, this outbreak was a blip. A millennial tickle in the life of the sun.
Nothing extraordinary.
As the time line of human history goes, it was without documented scientific precedent.
Later, debate would arise over a suggestion by some scholars that the last comparable episode occurred in the summer of 480 B.C., a year for which Chinese, Korean, Babylonian, Celtic, and Mesoamerican records — including glyph-dated early Mayan stelae — present what has been interpreted as correlative evidence of rapidly changing sunspot patterns, and brilliant, tempestuous displays of the northern and southern lights many thousands of miles from the poles. That is the same summer King Leonidas I and his three hundred Spartan warriors made their heroic resistance against thousands of invading Persians at the Hot Gates, a narrow mountain pass between the Aegean coast and central Greece, only to be undone by a local betrayer, who showed the Persian force a route that led them over the mountains to a rear assault upon the defenders, killing them almost to a man.
A coincidence? Likely so. Although the oracle Leonidas consulted before deciding to hold the pass is said to have been influenced by his interpretation of some obscure cosmic portent.
Such speculation aside, it remains doubtful that a magnetic storm of even the greatest severity would have had a consequential impact on affairs in Greece or elsewhere in that ancient era.
This was, after all, many centuries before civilization became dependent on the telecommunications networks and electrical power grids that would be thrown into utter chaos by its shock waves.
In more than one sense, Pete Nimec’s trip to the hallway rest room was another step up the learning curve he’d foreseen at McMurdo.
Nimec supposed it was partly his own fault. The three or four cups of coffee he’d drunk in Willy’s passenger lounge had worked their way through him soon after the Herc was off-deck, but a peek behind the shower curtain enclosing its cargo section’s makeshift latrine — a fifty-five-gallon steel drum with an attached funnel for a urinal, and a loathsome, sloshing plastic honey bucket — persuaded him to try to hold out until after he reached Cold Corners. And he’d succeeded, asking Megan to show him where he could make a pit stop on the way to her office.