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away from the sun.
Bud half listened to the words, and watched the two astro-
physicists. They were suffering, Bud could see that. Mikhail s face
was grooved with weariness, the shadows deep as lunar craters
around his eyes; Bud had never seen him looking so old.
Eugene s expression, creasing up that bland jock s face, was
more complicated, but then so was Eugene. Rose Delea used to call
Eugene  autistic to his face, Bud remembered but poor Rose
was dead now. Bud, however, had never thought of Eugene as some
inhuman calculating machine, and now Bud thought he could read
the emotion in those pale blue eyes, an emotion any military man
would sympathize with: The operation is fucked. And I fear, dear God,
that it might be me who screwed the pooch.
Bud rubbed his eyes and tried to focus, to think. After his own
six-hour jaunt out on the shield, he was still in his grimy thermal
long johns. He could smell the sweat and vomit crusted on a face
that had been cocooned in a bubble helmet for too long, every mus-
cle was stiff as a board, and he ached for a shower.
He said carefully,  Eugene, you re telling me your models
didn t foresee this.
 No, Eugene said miserably.
Mikhail said gently,  There s really no reason why they should,
Colonel Tooke. Oh, perhaps some such ejection might have been
foreseen. The turbulence at the heart of the sunstorm was like an
active region. Such regions spawn flares, and they are sometimes,
but not always, associated with mass ejections too. If there is a
causal link it is a deep one we have yet to untangle. We have yet to
understand the basic physics, you see. And besides, our models
could see only as far as the great outpouring of energy of the sun-
storm itself which we got mostly right. But beyond that point our
models ran into a singularity a place where the curves shot off to
infinity, and the physics broke down altogether.
 We patched in a solution for the follow-up, Eugene said deso-
lately.  Continuous to the third-order derivatives. Over most of the
sun the patch seems to be working out. All except for this vicious
bastard.
S U N S T O R M " 2 9 7
Mikhail shrugged.  In retrospect that anomalously high
gamma flux we observed at the start of the storm may have been a
precursor. But we had no time for remodeling, not then, as the
storm itself broke 
Bud said,  You feel like the sun itself has let you down, don t
you? Because it didn t behave like you told it to.
Mikhail said,  I have tried to explain to Eugene that no fault is
attached to this. Eugene s is the single most brilliant mind I have
ever worked with, and without his insights 
 We would never have seen the storm coming, would never
have got the shield built would never have saved all those lives.
Bud sighed.  You mustn t feel bad, Eugene. And we need your help
now, more than ever.
 We don t have much time, Mikhail said.  It s moving a lot
more quickly than a normal mass ejection.
 But this isn t a normal day, right? How long?
 We have an hour, Mikhail said.  Maybe less.
The answer was ridiculous; Bud could barely believe it. What
could he do about this in an hour?  So what comes first?
 An advance shock wave, Eugene said.  More or less
harmless it will give us a lot of radio noise.
 And then?
 The bulk of the cloud will hit, Mikhail said.  A fog bank as
wide as the sun itself, more than a million kilometers across, head-
ing right for Earth. Unusually, it is quite shallow, a kind of lens. Its
shape is an artifact of its unusual formation, we think. It is made up
of relativistic particles mostly protons and electrons.
 Relativistic, meaning moving close to the speed of light?
 Yes. And very energetic. Very. Colonel, a proton can t outrun
light, but in getting closer to that final limit it can take on board an
awful lot of kinetic energy 
 And those energetic particles will do the damage, Eugene
said.  Colonel, it will be a particle storm.
Bud didn t like the sound of that.
On June 9, 2037, a similar cloud of fast-moving particles had
hurled itself against Earth. Most had been trapped by Earth s mag-
netic field. The bulk of the damage done that day had been caused
2 9 8 " C L A R K E & B A X T E R
by fluctuations in the Earth s field, which had induced electrical
currents in the ground.
 This time it will be different, Mikhail said.  The ground will
be directly engaged.
Bud snapped,  What does that mean? Stick to English, damn
it.
Eugene replied,  These solar particles are so energetic that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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