Solstice

'And the Shuttle?'

He shrugged. 'They're still looking.'

Military vehicles, coming and going. Ambulances carrying the dead and injured to hospitals where most of the electronic infrastructure was now burned to a frizzle. There was still power generation on the base, but the city's lines were down, and would remain so for days. There were already reports of how the heat, intense, dry, and devastating, was causing secondary problems among the survivors. It was 120 in the shade and rising, so fierce you felt exhausted just from a couple of minutes under the sun. She'd never liked Vegas, but there was something so foolhardy in the way the place was built up from the desert floor that you couldn't help but admire the spirit that had put it there. Now they had to begin all over again. And Lieberman was right: It was an island of electromagnetism in the middle of an empty wilderness. If Charley Pascal wanted somewhere to use, not just as a sign but as an experiment too, Vegas came custom-designed with the words 'guinea pig' printed in bold on its calling card.

'So what's inside this ball you're talking about, Larry?'

He grinned wryly, an expression that said he was on shaky ground. 'The best estimates say the temperature could be between fifteen and thirty thousand degrees Kelvin, with a pressure of ten to twenty atmospheres. That would explain the violence of the explosion if these things don't decay.'

'You're not telling me what causes it.'

He shook his head. 'I can't. We don't know. This is at the edge of everything we understand.'

'Sorry.' She wished he didn't look so out of sorts. They needed every smart mind they could get. 'I didn't mean to push you into a corner.'

"That's okay. What we do know is that it's usually linked to thunderstorms. But not always. The biggest sightings we've had up until now were associated with electrified underwater volcanic dust vents. You get these off Japan. When they erupt, you get balls rising from deep on the ocean bed, through the water and eventually becoming airborne. There's an event recorded back in the thirties where one six metres across came on shore and lasted for two hours. Alternatively…'

He was looking up from the computer, waiting for her attention.

'I'm sorry,' she said, wondering why she felt the need to talk to Lieberman right then. ‘I was somewhere else. Alternatively?'

'In 1957 a guy called Arabadzhi came up with a theory that what was really happening was the focusing of radioactive cosmic ray particles. Usually by the thunderstorm.'

'Cosmic rays?' Her mouth was dry just thinking about this.

'Precisely.'

'If you're right, the Children can skip the thunderstorm and the underwater volcanic vents altogether. What you get, when you focus it, is what we saw. One giant chunk of plasma that decays into the smaller spheres we saw coming out from underneath it.'

She tried to remember the details of the plane crash. 'Even when the solar storm was weaker, do you think this could have brought down Air Force One? And the other plane?'

'You bet. It was localized.'

'And all the telecommunications failures?'

'No. That's different. We were getting that anyway, without Sundog, just on a smaller scale. That's straight electromagnetic bombardment and they make it worse by feeding some data into the white noise. What we saw here… I guess this is what happens when they turn the dial that's marked "destruction" and focus it on one spot.'

It was so small. But it was something solid. 'We need to warn the people here about the radiation risk.'

'You're not going to stop them from going in there just by telling them it's hot. Those guys won't quit until they've got everyone out of that hellhole. Besides, I suspect it's marginal. This thing seems to dissipate pretty quickly.'

He was right about their determination. She knew that. Even if there were big yellow radiation signs posted all the way down the Strip they'd still be out there, combing the wrecked hotels and casinos, looking for survivors, not caring about tomorrow.

'All the same, Larry, we need to make people aware of what we think this is. And figure out some way of using that information.'

He was still quietly tapping away, with a calm, clinical detachment that she thought she could begin to find annoying. Maybe Levine wasn't playing some deep game by passing over Wolfit for the acting directorship. There was a coolness in the man that was hardly inspirational.

'There's a theory,' he said, 'that the stuff gets repelled by dead electrical circuits and attracted by live ones, which is the opposite of normal lightning, of course. If that's right, maybe we could channel it. If she attacked cities, we could try to divert it away from key areas.'

'You mean turn everything off?'

'Jesus. Not everything. If you did that the only faint electromagnetic current you'd get would be the one you found in living organisms. No, you need to think of ways of focusing it away by leaving some stuff on.'

He didn't say it; he didn't have to. They both knew the reports. Of people exploding, being torn apart in thin air. A kind of spontaneous super combustion. This phenomenon fitted more exactly the longer she thought about it.

'But we can do something. I need Lieberman in with us here. He's got the kind of mind that can get around all this. Get me through to him when you can. And I want to hear about this woman he's found. We're getting somewhere, you know.'

'Yeah,' he said laconically.

Maybe Wolfit just never got excited, she thought.

'If you want my honest opinion, we're pissing in the wind,' he said. 'Either the Shuttle knocks Sundog out or we just sit back and burn. Maybe we should be thinking about that second option a little more.'

She wished she had the energy to be mad at him. 'That's defeatist crap, Larry. You don't think that. I don't think that.'

'Scientifically — '

'Let's leave the dialectic, Larry. We don't have time.'

'That is a much-misused word,' he bristled. 'I am merely pointing out the facts. She told us to prepare. Maybe we ought to listen a little.'

A quiet man, with an incisive, quick intelligence, she thought. And, in a way, he was right too. There was precious little contingency in the works. 'Larry, we've gotten nowhere with the imaging efforts, the FBI is at a dead end with their investigation, and I'll be damned if I'm going to put every last hope we have on the Shuttle. Let's make the most of what we've got. There's got to be some research projects into this subject we can tap into. Get me some experts.'

He shook his head. 'Most of the research got killed in the cuts in the eighties. I mean, it's understandable. This is pretty peripheral stuff.'

'But there is material out there. You're quoting it.'

'Sure. And it's old. Like I said, that cosmic ray theory goes back to the fifties.'

'There must be someone.'

Wolfit nodded in a way she didn't quite understand. 'Sort of. I was coming to that.'

She sat down next to him and said, 'Show me.'

He hit the keys. 'Back in the early nineties there was some postgrad work done at Berkeley. Basically one guy. Looks like good stuff too, what I can see of it. A lot of the files seem to be missing. We can check but I doubt we're going to pick up more.'

'What he says… it backs the theory up?'

'Absolutely. A lot of it's pretty basic, but this guy claimed to have reproduced ball lightning in the lab. On demand. He knew the preconditions. He was able to create the stuff. Brave fellow.'

She peered into the screen. It was a sea of text and flashing hot links. 'This is the man we need, Larry. Get a phone number. Or better still, an address. We'll pull him in right away.'