He walked into the big barn and was immediately grateful for the cool, dark interior. There were six people in the big open main room. It was full of PCs and wall charts, nice, classy wooden desks, high-backed executive chairs, and the buzz of people busying about their work. Three of the inhabitants were pushing papers around their desktops. The rest stared straight at him as he came through the door.
'Michael,' Bennett said, smiling, and held out a hand. Simon Bennett was probably in his mid-fifties, stockily built with neatly cut grey hair, a round face, and half-moon glasses of the kind adopted by Oxbridge academics of a certain age. He peered at Lieberman with bright, curious eyes. Bennett was wearing grey slacks, a white shirt, and a red club tie. It seemed incongruous in the surroundings.
The three paper-shufflers looked briefly at them, then left the room without saying anything, closing the door behind them as they went.
'You got many people here, Simon?'
'Thirty-two — not all on this single site, of course. We have another base in the mountains at Puig Roig. That's why we spend so much money on helicopters.'
'And… um.'
Bennett Looked puzzled for a moment. Academia didn't always teach you the niceties, Lieberman thought.
'Oh. Good Lord. I do apologize. This is Ellis Bevan, our head of operations. And Irwin Schulz, who runs the computers here, and a lot more than that too. Ellis's work I can begin to understand. I do have to sign off the budget, after all. Irwin, I'm afraid, may as well be talking double Dutch as far as I am concerned but he is, I assure you, a genius.'
Schulz blushed. He couldn't have been more than twenty- five or so, Lieberman guessed, a short, slightly overweight figure in a bulging T-shirt and jeans, and sporting round wire-rimmed glasses — all in all classic geek material. He held out a pudgy hand.
'Hey,' he said, 'I'm just the average propeller head. Don't believe anything else. You worked at Lone Wolf?'
'For a while.'
'Some place. I was there a couple of weeks ago. You people ought to blow your trumpet some more. We got this woman on the case there, Jesus, so bright.'
'Sara?'
'You know her?'
'I was married to her for a while.'
'Oh.'
Lieberman felt like kicking himself. Schulz was blushing all over his fleshy face.
'Hey, that's no problem. We're still friends.'
'Nice,' Schulz said. 'I never understood until recently how tiny the whole solar flare community really is. I guess you guys must know each other real well.'
'If only by reputation.' Bennett smiled.
Ellis Bevan peered at Lieberman and said, 'Good to meet you.'
He was about thirty, Lieberman guessed, tall, straight, and muscular, with close-cropped hair and a slightly sour expression on his thin, sharp-featured face. Bevan had the word 'administration' written all over him, Lieberman thought, and cursed himself immediately. It was wrong to judge people so quickly, but Bevan had the look of someone you turned to when you wanted to do some firing, when the budget was overrunning, and when the plumbing didn't work.
'Operations?' Lieberman said.
'Yeah,' Bevan replied in a flat East Coast accent. 'Everything outside the academic part of the project is down to me. Telecommunications. Transportation. Finance.'
'And a very good job he does too,' Bennett added. 'That's the last thing we want on our plates.'
'I'm sure,' Lieberman said. 'So what exactly is on our plate?'
The smile disappeared from Bennett's face. 'You mean you don't know?'
'Hey. I just got a last-minute call from the Agency saying you people wanted some advice in my field and you were paying real money. That's as far as it got.'
Bennett said nothing and Lieberman began to feel he'd lost a point. A real academic, someone who wasn't on the edge of burnout, would, at the very least, have asked.
'I see,' Bennett said after a couple of ponderous moments. 'These are big issues, Michael, and I don't have the time to go into them all right now. This evening I want to run a full briefing session. Mainly for your benefit.'
'I'll look forward to that,' Lieberman answered. 'You've got a lot of people here.'
'Most of them are engineers,' Bevan said. 'We need a lot of support for the kind of telecommunications rig we're running. You don't need to bring every last academic to the experiment these days. We've got a virtual network running between here, Lone Wolf, and another base we have in Kyoto.'
Thirty people to keep the network running? Lieberman still couldn't get a picture of it in his head.
'But-'
'Michael,' Bennett said with a thin smile on his face, 'we really are very busy. Can you leave your questions to this evening? I promise to talk a lot more then. And believe me, you'll find what I have to say… interesting. I just want you to know your role here is an important one.'
'Crucial,' Schulz said. 'We really need it.'
'I've followed your recent work,' Bennett continued. 'It's most encouraging. What we need from you is what you do best. An analysis of when and where the sunspot activity is shifting. We're trying to work out how much of the climatic and electromagnetic effects we're experiencing just now are due to the changes in the state of the solar disc. If you can give us an idea of where it's headed, we can tune the systems we have to make the most of the position.'
Lieberman blinked, surprised to feel a certain wounded pride. 'You mean that's it?'
Bennett nodded. 'Reports every hour. Irwin will set up a channel on the system later this afternoon. We're all pretty much on a war footing until the zenith has passed.'
'Great. So I'm kind of the weatherman here and that's that.'
'A very well-paid weatherman, Michael,' Bennett said quietly. 'And it's not exactly clerical work, trying to predict what happens on the face of a star ninety-three million miles away from us. Now, is it?'
'No? You sure Ellis here doesn't want me sweeping up too?' As soon as the words escaped his lips, he wished he had them back. Why must you insist on being a pain in the ass? he chided himself.
Bennett was back to shuffling papers. The interview was over. For today, at least, it looked like his role was to play tourist.
CHAPTER 5
Straight-in Approach
You don't just fall out of the air. Ian Seabright knew that, had it drilled into him from the first time he'd left the earth, behind the twisting prop of that long-dead Chipmunk. The aircraft did what it was supposed to do when it lost its source of thrust. It settled into the long, steady glide that was determined by the angle of its control systems and the aerodynamic profile they presented to the air as it flowed over its wings and fuselage.