4
Regardless of opinions back on Earth, Celine Tanaka did not feel dead. She felt very much alive.
Stupid was another matter. How could all the Mars crew have missed something so obvious? Logically, they ought to have known about Supernova Alpha before anyone else. After all, space was all around them, their only scenery. They should have noticed anything happening in it.
After the fact, Celine tried to justify their oversight. First, they had been on the way home for seven months, and scenery that never changes—or changes too slowly to notice—loses its charm. Second, although no one on board would mention it, they were all thinking ahead to the return to Earth. Their place in history had been secured by the Mars landing, but at the time the aerobraking problems on the way down and the loss of one unmanned lander had occupied everyone's attention. The return from the Martian surface had been uneventful but equally tense. Only on the way home, with nothing to do but wait, could you give way to the sense of anticipation and excitement.
So Supernova Alpha had begun its change when everyone aboard the Schiaparelli was off guard. Celine, as head of instrumentation, did notice the apparent malfunction of one of her star trackers. It was reporting a photon variation above threshold. Since the trackers' target stars were chosen as stable stellar references, the tracker obediently noted the anomaly and turned itself off to prevent damage. But Celine saw no reason to investigate the problem immediately. There were four other working star trackers, and in any case spacecraft attitude control was not important during this phase of the mission. A fix could be made anytime in the next few weeks. She thought she would do it at the end of the work period.
In retrospect, that was less than totally conscientious. But no one else on board—except maybe Zoe— would have acted any differently.
Ten minutes after the star tracker went off-line, Ludwig Holier wandered into the instrumentation center. He had the face of a wicked elf and the slight build to match, and Celine noticed that he moved with a free-fall grace and economy of effort that three years ago would have seemed impossible to all of them.
"Celine, I'm picking up a report from Canberra of anomalous short-period variation in the brightness of Alpha Centauri. Do we have anything looking that way?"
Although he was German, his English was better than her Philippine/Hawaii mixture. Celine glanced at the big board. "Only one of our navigation star trackers, and it's off-line for checking. None of our scopes is observing in that direction. Want me to switch into the DOS, see if it's taking a look?"
The Distributed Observation System was a complex of forty-eight telescopes in Earth orbit, all tightly controlled to observe a common target. The Schiaparelli had been designed to receive the DOS output data stream, though the crew rarely did so.
Ludwig scowled from beneath blond bangs. "Nah. I'm sure DOS is booked up weeks ahead, and it takes hours to switch targets. Can you put our big scope on it?"
"Sure. Wilmer is using it right now for super-cluster observation, but as soon as he's done we'll take a peek."
"When?"
Celine pulled a face. "You know Wilmer."
"Not as well as you do, lady."
"I should hope not. He scheduled three hours, but he often runs over. Want me to ask him if we can jump in?"
"Not worth it. Wait 'til he's done, and let me know if you find anything interesting. I'm going to rest for a while." Ludwig drifted away, heading for the second of the three interlocking modules that made up the ship.
Celine was not surprised by Ludwig's comment. It was perfectly in order to take a midday nap. The ship would awaken him if any emergency occurred. Since an emergency was defined as a situation on board the Schiaparelli, there was by definition no emergency.
Wilmer Oldfield took advantage of Celine's indulgence and made use of the ship's biggest telescope for even longer than she had expected. It was another six hours before he handed instrument control back to her. She fed in the celestial coordinates for Alpha Centauri, and as a matter of routine took a look to make sure that target acquisition had been correctly performed.
By that time, Alpha Centauri had brightened by seventeen magnitudes. Celine gave the blazing point of light on the display one glance, noted its still-increasing intensity, and immediately buzzed Zoe.
"Zo? You there? We've got something I think you'll want to take a look at."
"What?" Zoe Nash was the head of the Mars expedition, and she sounded half-asleep. It was a rare condition for her, but in this phase of the flight home lethargy seemed more virtue than vice.
"It's Alpha Centauri," Celine said. "It's superbrilliant. I think it's becoming a nova, even a supernova. More than a thousand times as bright as usual."
"Really?" Zoe became more lively. "I do want to take a look at that. Everyone else will, too. Make a general announcement, will you?"
"Sure."
Celine alerted the ship's general intercom, made sure that the scope would remain locked on Alpha Centauri, and headed aft. The ship had been designed with high redundancy, so that any one of its three sections could at a pinch become a stand-alone unit able to make the journey home. A much overcrowded journey, to be sure, and one with little margin for error if all seven expedition members were present; but the crew would reach Earth orbit alive. The price paid for that triple security was the difficulty of transition from one section to the next. Celine grumbled to herself as she squeezed through a narrow passage with an airlock at each end. Small-boned and thin as she was, it was still hard going. When she reached the observation chamber at the far end of the ship's third section, every other expedition member was already there.
She surveyed the group, wondering where to place herself. In the front row, pushing each other for extra space, were Zoe Nash, Wilmer Oldfield, and the chief geologist—and areologist—Reza Armani. Behind them were the other three crew members, Alta McIntosh-Mohammad, Ludwig Hotter, and computer specialist Jenny Kopal. Celine had hardly seen them all in one place since the return ship left the surface of Mars.
Reza in particular had almost disappeared, gloating over his collection of Mars samples like a demented miser. Celine worried sometimes about his attitude, he seemed close to irrational on the subject. True, five of the samples did contain dormant bacterial life-forms of enormous interest. Wilmer Oldfield and Celine herself had performed the genome scans. The forms were DNA-based, but their sequences were nothing remotely like any Earth organism. Reza had stood by all through the work, glowering at Celine and Wilmer as though they might attempt theft of his treasure.
The observation chamber had not been designed to accommodate all the team at once. Celine was not going to get the best viewing position, no matter what she did. She squeezed in, peered over Alta McIntosh-Mohammad's shoulder, and gasped. Direct observation was quite different from looking at something on a screen. There was no question which star was Alpha Centauri. Although still showing only as a white point of light, it was brilliant enough to cast shadows inside the chamber.
"It looks brighter than it did just a few minutes ago," she said.
"It is." Wilmer recognized her voice and spoke without looking around. "Celine, did you get a reading for a number of magnitudes increase?"
His accent was the strongest in the whole international group. He was Australian, and he had bemused Celine at their first meeting by insisting that what he spoke was standard English.
"Yes, I did," she said. "It was seventeen, when I last looked."
"Then if it's a supernova—which I think it may be, even though it shouldn't—it's just getting going."
"What do you mean, shouldn't?" Zoe Nash was a short and stocky woman of mixed Ugandan and Turkish descent. She was right where an expedition leader ought to be, up at the front of the group. She was also, because of the shortage of space, squashed by the others against the observation window.
"Alpha Centauri is a double-star system," Wilmer said, in his relaxed drawl. "Double stars can become a Type Ia supernova, but only if one of the two stars is a white dwarf. Alpha Centauri doesn't qualify."
"Then I guess Alpha Centauri doesn't know that," said Zoe. "It's not a good day to be an astronomical theorist. Hey, give me some air, folks." She wriggled around to face Wilmer Oldfield. "What do you mean, just getting going?"
"If this is a supernova, the increase in brightness will be as much as a hundred billion. We are still far short of that."
"Are we going to be safe?"
Celine listened for Wilmer's answer with special interest. In addition to being in charge of instrumentation, she was also the expedition's physician. The medical supplies and equipment were adequate for "normal" emergencies, but a supernova didn't qualify.
"Safe?" Wilmer blinked his eyes and rubbed his stubbly beard as though such a question had never occurred to him. Celine's guess was that it hadn't. He was a super scientist and a sweetheart, but sometimes he seemed on a different wavelength from normal people.
"I dunno," he said after a moment. "But I can work it out easy enough. The bigger star of Alpha Centauri is pretty much a look-alike for our sun, same spectral type but a little bit brighter. It's about one and a third parsecs away, so that's about two hundred seventy thousand times as far as the sun is from Earth. If it becomes a hundred billion times as bright as usual, it will look a hundred billion divided by two hundred seventy thousand squared as bright as the sun. So there you are."
He paused, as though that was the end of the story. "Translation, Jenny," said Zoe. "Do the calculation, would you, for people like me. How bright will it be?"
"One hundred billion divided by two hundred seventy thousand squared is one point thirty-seven." Jenny Kopal was in charge of computers, and the common view was that she had a personal one inside her head. Celine found it easier to ask the dark-haired Hungarian for the answer to calculations rather than keying it in herself.
"That's bright," Reza said. He giggled. "Sell Sunscreen 100, you'll make your fortune."
"Well, that could be off a factor of two, one way or the other," Wilmer added. "But Reza's right, Alpha Centauri as seen from Earth will be bright, maybe as bright as the sun. Of course, that's only for a month or two, then it goes dim again."
Except for Wilmer, the group in front of Celine moved in concert, edging away from the chamber window.
"Are we in danger?" Zoe asked. Wilmer shrugged. He had the long limbs and wide shoulders of an outdoorsman. That, combined with his Australian accent, had Celine in the first months of their acquaintance expecting him to talk about wombats and wallabies rather than quantum field theories. "I don't see why," he said at last. "We can handle solar radiation. We have the inner shielded area in Section One, in case of big solar flares." He looked thoughtful. "Course, when the gas shell of the supernova expands, a big slug of gamma rays will break out. We have no idea which direction they'll emerge. But we have enough shielding to handle that, too. The big problem is going to be the high-energy particle flux. That will carry a lot more energy than the visible light or the gamma rays. It'll be an absolute killer."
Zoe came bolt upright. "And you say we're not in danger!"
"We're not. The light and gammas travel at light speed, but the particles are much slower—five to ten percent of light speed. It will take them fifty years to get here."
The group relaxed again.
"Fifty years," Zoe said. "I don't care about fifty years. I was worried about fifty minutes or fifty hours."
Wilmer shook his head. "No worries. We will be fine."
"We will be fine." Alta McIntosh-Mohammad was the Schiaparelli's chief engineer, Scottish-Indian and taciturn. Whenever she spoke, the rest had learned to listen. "But what about them? Back on Earth. Will they be all right?"
"Wilmer?" said Zoe.
There was a much longer silence, during which Alpha Centauri visibly increased in brightness second by second. Celine thought of her mother and stepfather, now on a field trip in central Kalimantan. They were very resourceful, they would be fine. Wouldn't they? And her brother Hiroshi should certainly be safe enough, on the west coast of Canada. But Wilmer's lengthy pause was worrying, and the appearance of the rest of the crew suggested that they were having the same thoughts as Celine. She could see uneasiness on every face, tight-lipped control, and a reluctance to look at each other.
"That's a much harder question," Wilmer said at last—not what Celine was hoping to hear. "You put another illumination source, maybe as bright as Sol, down at sixty degrees south. It will have a hell of an effect on temperatures and global weather. In the long run, you'll see some ice melt and sea-level rise. But for good quantitative answers you need the best models on atmospheric circulation patterns. We don't have anything like that on board—though you can bet they're hard at work down on Earth."
"I hope bad weather won't screw up our landing plans," Zoe said. "The last thing we need is high winds and storms. I suppose if we have to, we can sit it out in orbit."
With hindsight, Celine would realize that Zoe had still been seeing Supernova Alpha as a problem for Earth but at most a minor inconvenience to the expedition. And everyone had taken their cue from the leader of the party. So after another half hour of watching they one by one wandered away, leaving the observation chamber for their own quarters.
Wilmer and Celine were the last to go. He was simply fascinated by the supernova and wanted to see as much of it as possible; Celine had her own reasons. She wanted a quiet place to think, and the observation chamber was as good as any.
Competition for the Mars expedition had been incredibly fierce. Each of the winners had multiple capabilities and would have multiple duties, but everyone knew that competence was only part of the picture. Politics was the other variable, beyond a candidate's control. The selection committee somehow had to achieve a mixture of crew members both competent and internationally balanced. Every crew member also had to be both vitally important and totally expendable. If someone died on Mars, there could be no sending home for replacements.
So in Celine's mind, Ludwig Holter satisfied continental European pride, handled all communications, and in a pinch took over the computers. Alta McIntosh-Mohammad pleased Britain and the Federation of Indian States and was chief engineer, while Reza Armani was American-Iranian and served as backup pilot in addition to his role as areologist. Zoe Nash herself knew all the communications systems and represented both Africa and Asia Minor. And Jenny Kopal, Hungarian with a strong dash of Russian, had spent enough time with Celine to be fully familiar with the Schiaparelli's major command and control instrumentation.
Celine still wondered how she herself had been lucky enough to survive the final cut. Perhaps it was pressure from the Eastern lobby, with a little Hawaiian help. She knew she was hardworking and pretty bright, but the others of the crew were more than that. They were spectacular.
And in that company, the stand-out oddity was Wilmer. Everyone admitted it; they were highly competent, but he was a real genius. No one on board approached him as a pure scientist—and not one of them wanted him anywhere near when they were doing their jobs. He was as clumsy as you could get, and equipment fell apart in his hands. He was also the odd one physically. The rest were below average height and weight, Wilmer was tall and deep-chested and rangy.
Their special capabilities and redundancies had all made sense, even before they headed for Mars. Only when they had been traveling for a few months did Celine conclude that the faceless selection committee back on Earth had employed yet another set of criteria. The crew were matched not only in technical skills, but in personality types. They had been paired, she suspected, before they ever left Earth. The group was not particularly highly sexed, but unless people are actually neutered or drugged into an asexual stupor, couplings are bound to occur. Reza Armani and Jenny Kopal had paired off early, followed a month later by Ludwig Holter and Alta McIntosh-Mohammad. Celine thought them unlikely duos. Reza, for example, had a deep mystical streak and sometimes seemed both illogical and half-crazy. Jenny, in contrast, was a cool and objective atheist. But of course they hadn't consulted Celine before sleeping together. And she could imagine the reactions when she and Wilmer began to share quarters: Whatever does he/she see in her/him?
Zoe Nash had no one, man or woman, and seemed content with that. She was five years older than the rest, who were all within a year of each other, and maybe she saw them as her children. And maybe they liked that. They had lots of respect for each other, but of all possible losses Zoe's would be the hardest for everyone to take.
The personality types were varied in one other way that was hard to define, although Celine had pondered it often enough. Zoe was certainly the authority figure. Reza was the class clown and cut-up king, sometimes far-out enough to make Celine wonder how he had passed the psychological tests. But what were the rest? She could never decide, with one exception: Celine herself was the expedition's worrywart, a Cassandra who could always imagine a dozen ways that things might go wrong. Unlike Cassandra's, though, her own dire predictions had never come to pass.
Yet.
And that, she suspected, was why she remained in the observation chamber with Wilmer, and stared at Alpha Centauri. She was worried, and not sure why. He hardly seemed to know that she was there, until she said, "Wilmer, we talked about what the supernova might do to Earth. Could it do anything to the rest of the solar system?"
"Nothing to worry us. It will melt the ice surfaces on the moons of the outer planets, but as Alpha Centauri dims they'll freeze over again."
"What about the sun? There will be a lot of extra heat, all pouring into one side of it."
"It's a lot by terrestrial standards. In solar terms, it's nothing."
"It couldn't cause big solar flares, or anything like that?"
"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.
And there was more. Equipment in low Earth orbit would also be affected. That included the space stations—stations on which the Mars expedition had been depending for its safe return to Earth.
Celine thought again of her parents and her brother. They were probably not in situations critically dependent on electronic technology. They were all right.
But she was not. The chances of survival of the first Mars expedition had suddenly dropped by many orders of magnitude.
Sure, they should be able to fire retro-rockets to match speed with Earth. Sure, they ought to be able to park the Schiaparelli in Earth orbit. But the most difficult part of the journey home, the final reentry, would still lie ahead. And for that reentry, they needed resources that no longer existed.