THE WEATHER ON THE SUN
...the name “Weather Bureau” continued to be used, although the organization itself was somewhat changed in form. Thus the Weather Congress consisted of three arms. First was the political arm, the Weather Council. Second was the scientific arm, the Weather Advisors. Third was the operating arm, the Weather Bureau...
—The Columbia Encyclopedia, 32 Edition,
Columbia University Press
The mass of colors on the great globe shimmered and twisted in silence. The dials on the instruments along the curved walls dimmed and brightened each time the needles moved. The Weather Room presented an indecipherable complex of color to the untrained eye, but to the eyes of the Advisors who lounged there it presented an instantaneous picture of the world’s weather, when they bothered to look at it. The day shift was near its end, and the mathemeteorologists were waiting to go home. Now and then one of them would look at some spot on the great globe to see how the weather pattern reacted—to check on a bit of his own work carried out earlier in the day. But he was not really interested; his mind was on the evening’s date, or dinner, or a hockey game. Even Greenberg, head of the Weather Advisors, felt the general lassitude.
Anna Brackney was too bored to sit still. She got up and wandered into the computer room, plopped down again and punched a 2414 computer to check the day’s match. It was 90.4 percent. She muttered, “Lousy,” and then looked around guiltily. She punched the call-up to see what the match had been last week. Ninety point six. She started to say aloud, “Not bad,” but stopped herself in time. James Eden would not approve of her talking to herself. Idly she punched call-up and looked at the results for last month and the month before that. Then she sat bolt upright, and punched for data for the last six months. Very loudly she said, “Well, well, well, well, what do you know about that?” Ignoring the stares of two computer operators, she marched back into the Weather Room, right up to Greenberg.
“Do you realize,” she said, “that our fit has been slipping a little each week? We are now operating on a fit of a little better than ninety percent, when as recently as six months ago our fit was better than ninety-three percent? Did you realize that?”
Greenberg sat up and looked alert. “No. Are you sure?”
Anna did not bother to answer. Greenberg leaned aside and spoke into a communicator. “Charlie, get me a summary of the weekly fit for the last six months.” He touched a button and said, “Upton, come on out to the Weather Room, will you? We may have a problem.”
Greenberg touched several more buttons. In two minutes there was a circle of people around him, and he held a slip of paper in one hand. He said, “Somehow, in the last six months, we’ve slipped three percentage points in our match. How could that happen?”
The people looked at one another. Upton said, “Everybody thought somebody else was checking the long-term fit. I only compared it with the week before.”
There was a chorus of “So did I,” and Greenberg slapped his forehead. “How in hell could a thing like that happen?” He was a man who normally did not swear. “We’ve been drifting away from acceptable performance for six months and nobody even noticed it? What about the complaints? What kind of complaints we been getting?”
The people shrugged, and Upton spoke for them again. “Nothing special. Just the usual gripes. Two weeks ago the Manitoba Council complained the breeze we made to blow away the mosquitoes was too strong, but—”
“Never you mind,” said Anna Brackney. “That was my mathematical model on that problem, and the twenty-knot wind they got was just right to eliminate the mosquitoes because the foresters—”
“Knock it off,” said Greenberg. “I take it there have been no serious complaints? I’d better check further.” He talked into the phone with one of the secretaries, then said to the group, “Well, it seems we’ve been lucky. Anyhow, we’ve got to find out what’s wrong. And we’ve got to find it before somebody else notices it, or we’ll have the Weather Council on our necks. I wonder if I ought to call President Wilburn.”
The people shook their heads, and Upton said, “I don’t like to be sneaky or anything like that. But if we’ve somehow slipped in our procedures and got away with it, let’s correct them without stirring up trouble. You know politicians.”
Greenberg said, “We’ll all have to stay on this until we find it. All of you willing?”
The people gave up their visions of dinner and dates and hockey games and nodded.
“Okay, then. Each of you set up a program designed to make an independent repeat of your models for the last six months. Most of it was routine stuff, so it won’t be bad. Call in the computer technicians and utilize all of the university’s staff and equipment you need. If you need more, I’ll set up a net and we can pull in everything we need from beyond Stockholm. Monitor your steps and when you find an error feed it into the 9680 as a collecting computer. Any other suggestions?”
The people shook their heads.
“All right. Let’s get to work and solve this before anybody else even knows there’s a problem. Good luck.” A red light flashed on the phone at Greenberg’s elbow, and the operator’s voice said, “Dr. Greenberg, President Wilburn is on the phone. Some kind of emergency.”
Greenberg looked startled. He picked up the phone and listened. In a moment he turned up the audio so that the people could hear what Wilburn was saying.
* * * *
The ox was almost done, and it smelled mighty good to Big John Sommerville. He stood at the edge of the great patio and looked across it through the morning groups of people to where the ox slowly turned on the spit. A cloud of steam rose above it and quickly disappeared in the still, dry air. Beyond the barbecue pit with its automatic basters, auxiliary heaters, powder sprinklers, temperature sensors and color detectors stood one of the cattle barns, and beyond that the roll of the prairie began. It was picture-pretty: a stand of oak and maple on the forward slope, a road winding up, a stream meandering down the dip at the foot of the first hill fed from some hidden subterranean channel that groped its way to the low mountains. Big John Sommerville turned to look at the house.
It rambled and twisted behind him, cloaked in brown-stained shingles and roofed with cedar. It sprawled and sprouted unexpected wings and went on for three hundred feet. There was a story that two years ago there had been eight guests in that house for a week before Big John found out about it. It was a good house, built for comfort, and it had a sense of belonging.
Big John Sommerville hooked his thumbs in his belt and started to stroll over toward the roasting ox. His face was craggy with little sags in the right places, and his body was big with a thin layer of fat over hard muscles, a good Texas face on a good Texas body.
“Hey, John, when do we eat?”
“Half an hour, I reckon.” He walked on.
A hand slapped him on the shoulder, jolted him a little off-balance. As he turned he said, “You hungry, too, Brian?”
“Sure am.” It was Brian Travers, mayor of Austin, the third most potent political figure in the area, and he held a large glass of straight bourbon. “I can wait through another pint or so of bourbon, but then I’m going to put me away a hindquarter of that ox. Hope it’s as good as the last.”
“Ought to be. Why, hello, Henry. Just get here?”
Henry Carpenter shook hands and looked around cautiously. “Everything under control? They all here?”
Travers said, “They’re here. Quit worrying, Henry. We’ll get it.” The three of them had arranged the ox roast for a hundred of the major and minor citizens of the region to win over their support for a proposed monorail shipping line. It never hurt to line up the solid citizenry on your side before you tackled the local, state and national officials. “We’ll get them feeling comfortable on John’s bourbon and ox, and then we’ll tell them what we want to do. They’ll go along, all right.”
“Got a surprise,” said Big John Sommerville. “I got to a few ears and I made out a case for a little water table replenishment around here. In exactly an hour and a half we will have a gentle rainfall on the mountains right behind the house, just over that near ridge. The time and position will be just right for the damnedest rainbow you ever saw in your life—the pot of gold will be right on top of that rise there. I’ll announce the rainfall a half hour before it’s due, and we’ll let these fellows think I got extra-special connections at the Weather Council. When these fellows see what I can do with the Council, they’ll split their britches to get behind us on the monoline. Right?”
Travers and Carpenter raised their glasses and took a long pull in honor of Big John Sommerville.
The bourbon was smooth, the ox was tender and tasty, and the announcement came at just the right time. The clouds formed on schedule. And then the rains came. The black heavens opened up and poured out their watery hell all over the spread of Big John Sommerville. Something like twelve inches of rain fell in the first twenty minutes, and the meandering stream turned into a devastating giant that swept away the barn and the stand of trees and the winding road. The water roared down the gentle slope behind the house and burst through the glass doors that opened out on the concealed porches and little hideaway nooks at the back of the house. The basement quickly filled with water, and the water lifted the floor joists from the plates. The little subterranean waterways built up pressure and quickly saturated the soil to a depth of fifteen feet. A mud slide started that transformed the entire house into a kind of roller coaster. Big John Sommerville felt it start and succeeded in getting everybody out of the house, so there were no casualties. In a final cloudburst, the rainstorm passed away.
One hundred and three men stood on a rocky ledge and looked in awe at all that was left of the house, garages, barns, corral, fences, and trees: a sea of soupy mud with occasional pieces of lumber protruding at crazy angles. The bare bones of the hill showed, and the barbecue pit lay somewhere downslope under fifty feet of mud.
“Big John,” said Travers, “when you order yourself a rain, you really order yourself a rain.”
* * * *
It took Big John Sommerville three hours to reach a phone, and by that time his plans were made. First he called the Governor, explained what had happened and what he intended to do. It turned out that the Governor also had some information about a weather order or two that had gone wrong. So the Governor made a few calls himself, ending with a call to Wilburn’s office to say that an important constituent named Big John Sommerville would soon be calling to talk to Wilburn about an important problem, and please arrange to have President Wilburn take the call. Big John Sommerville placed a few additional calls to other district councilmen, to three other governors, to several mayors and to half a dozen wealthy industrialists. As it happened, many of these people had some small pieces of information of their own about weather mishaps. When these folk called President Wilburn’s office to suggest the President listen to what Big John Sommerville had to say, they also tossed into the conversation a few pointed remarks about weather control and sloppy management.
In two hours’ time, the communications network surrounding President Wilburn’s office in Sicily was in a snarled mess out of which, nevertheless, two pertinent facts stood out: One, many good citizens were acutely unhappy about the weather control, and, two, Big John Sommerville was acoming.
When Big John Sommerville himself got on the line, President Wilburn was sitting there waiting. The five hours of pent-up anger burst into his office while he sat and marveled. The dirty red face that glared at him, the mud-caked hair, the ripped shirt, the glorious, near incoherence of the teeth-clenched stream of words were all fascinating. Never in his political life had President Wilburn received such a dressing down. Partway through it, Wilburn had to remind himself that the situation was not funny. He was, in fact, in the midst of a totally unexpected crisis.
The screen went blank. Big John Sommerville had had his say.
Wilburn sat quietly and reflected. The world government was not so mighty that one influential and irate citizen could not shake it a little. There should be no false moves now. First, he had to find out what had gone wrong. He called Greenberg at the Advisors.
* * * *
Greenberg had just turned up the audio.
“Let me make certain there is no misunderstanding,” said Wilburn. “Every staff member of the Advisors and all associated personnel are hereby placed on an emergency basis, and you have authority to do whatever is necessary—I repeat, whatever is necessary—to get to the bottom of this and correct it. Money, time, people, equipment, anything you need you get. In twelve hours I want a preliminary report from you, and hopefully you will have the complete answers by that time. If not, your entire organization will stay on the problem until it is solved. Routine work will be suspended except for weather control requests you receive personally from me. Do you have any questions?”
“No, Mr. President,” and they hung up.
Anna Brackney said, “Why didn’t you tell him we had just discovered the problem ourselves?”
Greenberg gave her a look, then said to the group, “All right, let’s go the way we planned. I guess we were dreaming a little to think we were going to solve this before anybody else caught on.”
As they turned and walked away, Greenberg heard Anna Brackney say to Hiromaka, “But I don’t understand why he didn’t tell him we had already found out there was a problem.”
Hiromaka said, “Aw, shut up.”
* * * *
At breakfast the next morning Harriet Wilburn said to Jonathan, “I guess this will be a bad one. We’d better make it a good breakfast; lunch may be a little tense.” She poked the Diner for his coffee and then began making his onion-flavored eggs basted with pork sauce.
“Why is it,” he said, “every time something pops I wind up having the breakfast I used to have when I was a boy? You suppose there’s an element of regression there?”
“I certainly hope so. I’d hate to think it was some deep, undefined craving. Do you really think you ought to look at that now?” Wilburn had picked up a morning English-language newspaper.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I know I’m going to get the most severe castigation of my career. I’m sort of looking forward to how imaginative the press will be.” He began to read.
When his eggs were ready he put down the paper and said, “Yes, they’re in full cry. The editors, the seers and columnists say they have been fully aware that things haven’t been going right with the Weather Congress for several months, but they were just waiting to see if I would get going and do my job.”
Harriet said, “Well, you know, and I know, and your friends know the truth. Eat your eggs, dear.”
He ate his eggs. He sipped coffee when he was done, read through another paper, then went out into the soft Sicilian air, stepped on a walk and rode awhile. He got off and walked for a mile as was his custom, but a slight numbness crept into his legs, so he finished the trip on the slidewalk. He entered the Great Hall and went straight to his office through the private door.
Before he closed the door, Tongareva was there. Wilburn said, “Just the man I wanted to see. Come in, Gardner.”
On his way to a seat, Tongareva started talking. “I have been reflecting on the events. I think we are caught up in some kind of world hysteria. I think the people have resented the Congress and the Council the way a small boy resents his authoritative father, and now they have found an excuse to let off steam. On top of that, elections are coming. I think we must be very careful.”
Wilburn sank into his chair, ignoring the flashing lights on his phones and visuals. “Did you hear about that rained-out picnic in Texas?”
Tongareva nodded, a shade of a smile on his face. “That must have been the granddaddy of all rained-out picnics. The Texan knew just what to do to make an international issue out of it.”
“The way he told it to me, it was an international issue. He led me to believe that everyone of any international importance was at that picnic, except you and me. Well, let me call Greenberg to see if he’s found out what’s gone haywire here. Please stay with me, Gardner.”
Greenberg took the call in his office, with Upton and Hiromaka. “The information I have for you is incomplete, Mr. President. In fact, I hope it is so incomplete as to be incorrect. But you see, twelve hours is not really enough—”
“What are you trying to say, Dr. Greenberg?”
Greenberg glanced at Upton, took a deep breath and said, “A detailed check of all the procedures, all the mathematical models, all the parameters used here, shows that no error has been made and that our mathematical fit matches the prediction. This would indicate that the error was elsewhere. So we got in touch with Base Lieutenant Commander Markov; Hechmer and Eden are on vacation. We told Markov what we were doing and asked him to check out his results, too. We have his results now, and at least preliminarily, neither he nor we can find any fault with his operations. In short, the Weather Bureau on the Sun accomplished each of its missions within tolerance. There’s no error there either.” Greenberg stopped and rubbed his face.
Wilburn asked gently, “What is your conclusion?”
Greenberg said, “Well, since the data were used and applied as correctly as we know how, and since the theory checks out as well as ever—”
He fell silent. After a moment Wilburn said, “Well?”
Greenberg looked straight at him and said, “The trouble might be in the Sun itself. The Sun is changing, and our theories are no longer as valid as they used to be.”
Wilburn’s breath caught, and he felt his body grow cold. He understood what Greenberg had said, but he did not immediately allow the full thought to enter his mind. He held it in front of him where it could not really frighten him, where it hung like a rotted piece of meat that would have to be eaten eventually, but not now. No one spoke or moved in either office. Greenberg and Tongareva did not want to force the swallowing, and so they waited. Finally, Wilburn took it in.
He sat back and groaned, and then stood up and paced out of range of the viewer. Greenberg sat and waited. Then he heard Wilburn’s voice asking, “If what you say is true, our whole system of weather control is faulty. Is that right?”
“Yes, if it proves out,” said Greenberg.
“Our entire culture, our entire civilization, the world over, is built on weather control. It is the primary fact of life for every living being. If our ability to control weather is destroyed, our world will be destroyed. We go back to sectionalism, predatory individualism. The one factor that ties all men everywhere together would disappear. The only thing left—chaos.”
No one answered him, and for another full minute they were all silent.
Wilburn came back and sat down at his desk. He said to Greenberg, “I have to think. How much time will you need to verify your findings so far?”
“Another twelve hours. The European computer net is on it now, and we are in the process of bringing in the United States net and the Asian net simultaneously. Both of them will be on line in an hour. I might say this is the most intensive effort the Advisors have ever made, and it is causing talk already. There will be no secrets about our findings when we finally get them.”
“I understand. I have twelve hours to think of something, and I am going to assume you will confirm what you’ve already found; that’s the worst result I can think of, so I’ll get ready to face it.” The snap was coming back to Wilburn’s voice. “If anything comes up along the way that makes you change your mind, let me know immediately. And thanks for the effort, Dr. Greenberg.”
* * * *
Wilburn looked around his office. The men gathered there did not look happy, and several of them, his political enemies, were frowning. Yet Wilburn needed them all. This was the group that served as a kind of unofficial executive for the entire Council. But it was a difficult group to work with, primarily because they represented such diverse interests.
Councilman Maitland said, “I am afraid, President Wilburn, that you have brought the Council to its lowest point of public esteem that I can remember.”
Barstow reared up. “Now just a minute here. How do you—”
Wilburn waved a hand. “It’s all right, Arthur. We all agree we have an enormous problem. I called this meeting to ask this group to think about what we do now.”
Barstow sat back and nodded. The others were quiet, and then Tongareva said, “You give the impression that you have a plan to solve our present crisis, Jonathan. Are you ready to discuss it?”
“Yes. Although it isn’t much of a plan, really.” He leaned forward. “We have been this route before. We are confronted with a scientific crisis. The Sun is changing. Our weather control is no longer as accurate, and we may have other dangers we don’t even know about yet. The Advisors tell me that these unexpected changes in the Sun might be serious, far more so than our failure to control weather accurately. We don’t know what’s happening. So here we go again, but this time I’m afraid we will have to mount the largest and most expensive research program the world has ever seen. It is already possible to tell that the answers won’t be easy to get. The Weather Bureau has not seen any changes at all, so the Advisors think things must be happening deep inside the Sun. We’ve never been able to go deep, so the first scientific order of business will be to solve that one.”
“Costs, Jonathan?” It was Du Bois, always a worrier about other people’s money.
“Enormous, Georges. This is why we will have to be so careful. The tax burden will be the largest we’ve ever asked our people to bear. But unless someone can think of another program, I think we’ll have to sell it.”
Barstow said, “Do you mind if I talk to Greenberg? I want to be able to assure my constituents that I’ve looked into this personally.”
“I hope everyone here will do that, and more. Please talk to any person you want, scientific or not, on any possible solutions he may have. Let’s adjourn now and meet here in twenty-four hours to thrash it out.”
Tongareva stayed, as Wilburn knew he would. He said, “Who’s going to head up the program?”
Wilburn looked at him and smiled. “Need you ask? Aren’t Dr. Jefferson Potter and Senior Boatmaster James Eden the ones to do the job?”
* * * *
Greenberg seemed upset. “Look, with all due respect to you two, I don’t think you see the ramifications of the problem. First”—he counted on his fingers—”the trouble appears to lie deep within the Sun. Second, we don’t have a vehicle that can penetrate deeper than about two miles; in fact, Jim”—he looked at Eden—”no one has ever equaled that depth you reached some years ago on that Anderson problem. Third, we can’t even take measurements at those depths. Fourth, our theories of occurrences at those depths have never been proved out.” He dropped his hands. “We are probably in a worse position than we were when we first approached the problem of Sun control as a means of weather control.”
Potter and Eden stared reflectively at Greenberg. Then Potter said, “You know, he’s just given us an overall breakdown.” Greenberg wondered what he was talking about, then realized that Potter was talking to Eden.
Eden said, still looking at Greenberg, “Yes, and he’s the man in the best position to make the judgment so far. Four main groups along those lines, with good cross liaison. He’s come up with a great way to start out, at least.”
Potter said, “Four scientific administrators, each with a cabinet of a dozen or so people with assigned responsibilities. Each of the four groups places its own R&D and hires its own people.”
Eden said, “Each cabinet has a member responsible for cross liaison with the other groups. In fact, each cabinet member has sole responsibility for an assigned area. He’ll have his own staff to help administer his group.”
It was Potter’s turn again. “Any overlapping can be minimized by frequent meetings of the big four. Ought to work. Now let’s see. All the problems come together on the Sun, so I guess that’s where you ought to be. I’ll stay here to keep things on the track. We can get together every month or so if necessary. How’s that sound to you, Bob?”
Greenberg had caught the drift of the discussion and had been following it, fascinated. He nodded. “Sounds fine to me. Where do the Advisors come into this?”
“Seems to me you should be standing by for any extraordinary computing problems, of which there will be plenty. Don’t forget you will also have the day-to-day work going on as usual. You had better increase your staff here, don’t you think?”
Greenberg nodded. “Yes, but I can see some problems in getting enough scientific personnel to do all the work on the overall project. Well wind up with one of our groups bidding against another.”
“Bound to happen. We’ll try to keep it to a minimum.”
Potter said, “All right. I’ll get on the horn and well start the ball rolling. Wilburn ought to be explaining things to everybody right about now.”
* * * *
Only two of the two hundred councilmen were absent, and Wilburn knew those two were in the hospital. Furthermore, the councilmen sat on the edge of their seats, listening intently to the voices booming over their desk speakers. Wilburn looked down impassively from his desk, but he was deeply shaken. The debate had gone on for three hours with no interruptions for any reason, and the opposition to the proposed research program was surprisingly strong. What was worse, the mood of the Council was emotional to a degree Wilburn had never seen before. Even Councilman Reardon of 35-50 E 30-45 N, normally a cool speaker, ended his five minutes with his voice broken and quavering. Wilburn frantically tried to think of a way to break the spell, to interject somehow a rational appeal. But he could not prevent the councilmen from obtaining their five minutes to speak. Many of them were so carried away with what they were saying that they did not see the thirty-second warning light on their desks, and they were cut off in mid-sentence by the sergeant at arms when their five minutes were up, left sobbing at a dead microphone.
Wilburn quietly turned to his desk, checked his directory, and dialed the desk of the next speaker, Francisco Espaiyat, 60-75 W 15-30 N. “Frank,” he said, “you getting ready to speak?”
“I certainly am, Wilburn. I’ve come up with some reasons that haven’t been mentioned yet, so I hope to do some good here. You got any particular suggestions?”
Wilburn hesitated. “Yes, I have, Frank, but I don’t know whether to ask you to do it or not. See what you think. When you come on, simply state that you are in favor of the program, and then leave the rest of your time empty. Give us four minutes and fifty-five seconds of golden silence for a little somber reflection along with a quick trip to the bathroom. I don’t like to ask you to give up your speaking time, but nobody yet has got through to these hotheads. What do you think?”
Espaiyat thought about it and then said slowly, “I don’t know if it will work, Jonathan, but I’m willing to give it a try.”
Three minutes later, when the sergeant at arms announced the speech of Councilman Espaiyat, the Council was startled to hear, “I speak in favor of the program, but I hereby devote the balance of my time to rest and relief from this interminable speechmaking.” Espaiyat got up and started down the aisle. Immediately Wilburn got up and went out the door nearest him. After a moment’s looking around the chamber in puzzlement, every other councilman suddenly got up and headed for a door, and as they pressed out to the corridors, some of them began to laugh. A low chant of “Yay, Espaiyat” started up from a few members and quickly spread over the entire chamber and up to the galleries, which were also emptying.
When they poured back to their desks a few minutes later, the spell was broken. Men and women chatted and called to one another. The next speaker, Madame Iwanowski, 45-60 E 45-60 N, spoke against the program, but she tried to marshal some facts. She yielded after two minutes twenty-eight seconds. The crisis had passed. Other speakers disgorged their thoughts, but the tenor of the speeches was only mildly argumentative, for the sake of the constituency back home. In half an hour the question was called and the vote taken. The tabulation flashed on the great board. A small cheer broke out from the floor and gallery. The vote was 133 for, 65 against. Wilburn sat impassively, staring out over the floor, ignoring the numbness that had come back in his legs. They had the required two-thirds vote, but it was much, much too close. On a project of this size he needed all the support in the Council he could get, but about one-third of the group was against him. He sighed. This would not do. There were hard times ahead. If this program didn’t work out, he saw clearly who the scapegoat would be. For the first time a President of the Weather Congress would not so much step down as be thrown out. Well, that was politics. Harriet would be waiting for him when it was over, and they could always take up a pleasurable retirement. Key West, now, there was a place he had always loved, and perhaps the same had come to— He caught himself and straightened his shoulders. No time for retirement thoughts yet. There was work to be done. He headed for his office to call Greenberg.
* * * *
“The trouble is,” Senior Boatmaster James Eden said matter-of-factly, “the film of carbon vapor begins to collapse at these pressures. The rate of carbon consumption goes up, the sessile effect dissipates, and the boat itself is consumed.”
“Very interesting,” said Dr. John Plant. “Now don’t you think we ought to get the hell out of here before you demonstrate the point?”
Eden nodded and said into the intercom, “Up. Forty degrees. Now.” He fingered the keys and took the boat up to within five hundred yards of the surface before he leveled off. He said to Plant, “Don’t wash it out, though. Those limitations I just mentioned will allow these boats to be consumed, but there may be a way around them.”
“I don’t know what they could be. Those limitations seem pretty fundamental to me. I think we need a whole new approach to get down to the center. We’ll never do it with this kind of equipment.”
Eden shook his head and said, “I never thought I’d be sitting in a sessile boat on the Sun and hear someone say it was obsolete. Look here. The carbon toruses that surround the boat act as a mirror. They absorb all the radiation from infrared down to the hard stuff to a depth of a fraction of a millimeter and then reflect it with an efficiency of ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine eight. That’s the turnaround effect we’ve been telling you about. Carbon vaporization protects against the balance of the radiation, and the power difference is supplied by our internal reactors. So look. If we can increase the efficiency of the turnaround effect by a factor of a few thousand, we could cope with the increased temperatures and radiative effects at great depths. What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, just how do you—”
“We can still balance out the gravitational force by channeling additional power to the bottom toruses, to take advantage of the radiative pressure on the bottom of the boat. Right?”
“Well, just how do you—?”
“That’s your problem. I’ve told you how to do it. You’re the scientist. I’m just a boat captain. Now, stand by while we get this thing back to base. I’m going Earthside today.”
Plant sighed and settled back in his harness while Eden picked up the beacon and followed it back to base, through the lock and into the bay. While they were stripping off their lead suits, Plant said, “Maybe a carbon alloy.”
“What?” said Eden.
“Maybe a carbon alloy would improve the efficiency of the turnaround effect.”
“Sounds promising to me. Give it a whirl. Nice going.”
Plant looked at him wryly. “Thanks. Glad you like my ideas.” Eden was too busy to pay any attention to the slight emphasis on the word “my,” so Plant smiled at Eden’s back, shrugged and hung up his suit.
They found Base Commander Hechmer in the day room with some of the staff watching a teevee transmit Earthside. Wilburn was addressing the Weather Council, bringing the members up to date on the Sun program. He told them results were coming in. The Sun’s core was behaving anomalously. Neutrino formation at the core had accelerated and apparently was going to accelerate even more. The Sun appeared to be moving out of the main sequence a billion years ahead of schedule. Hechmer said, to no one in particular, “Gives you a nice comfortable feeling, doesn’t it?”
On the screen Wilburn said, “To finish my report to you, we should know in a few weeks exactly what is wrong with the Sun, and we should then be in a position to know what to do about it. In short, ladies and gentlemen of the Weather Council, this most massive of research efforts has borne fruit. It is isolating the problem, and it will arrive at a solution. Thank you.” The applause was long and genuine, and Wilburn made a slight bow and quickly put his hand on the podium.
* * * *
The Advisors had the jitters, so Greenberg called together his mathemeteorologists and said, “Now look. Just because we have the heavy artillery in the scientific world showing up here in a few minutes is no reason to get all upset. It’s just a high-level meeting, and they’re holding it here. After all, we’ve made an important contribution to the total research effort on this program.”
“Yes, but why here? They going to change the Advisors?”
“I hear they’re going to fire us.”
“Yeah, clean shop and start again with a new group.”
Greenberg said, “Oh, cut it out. They probably want our advice on the next steps in the program. You’ll have to admit, we have a problem there. We may have accomplished everything we can in the program.”
People began to drift in, and soon the room was full. Potter took over as chairman. “What we’ve got to do is see where we go from here. We’ve accomplished almost all the major objectives of the program. What’s left?”
Kowalski said, “We’ve fallen down on boat design. We haven’t been able to come up with a boat that will get us down to the center of the Sun and back up again. We don’t know where to turn next. We’ve explored every alley we can think of, and we have some thirty thousand people working on the project, including some real bright ones, problem solvers. All we’ve done is improve the efficiency of the boats by a factor of a thousand. We don’t know where to turn next.”
Potter said, “You can get a boat down, but you can’t get it back. That right?”
“Yes, and don’t anybody here tell us about remote control or automation. Center-of-Sun conditions are such that we can’t communicate twenty feet away. As to automation, we can’t get into the boat a computer of the size we need to make a few critical decisions. The presence of the boat is going to change center-of-Sun conditions, so someone is going to have to make a quick evaluation. Well, let Frank Valko tell you what’s there.”
Dr. Frank Valko, senior scientist in charge of evaluation of the Sun’s deep interior, smiled and rubbed his chin in embarrassment. “I wish I could tell you precisely what’s there. Then perhaps we could automate. But here’s what we have. Our Bomnak group came up with a neutrino detector of reasonable size, one we could get in a spaceship. This is a device we’ve been trying for a hundred years. If the program produced nothing else, the neutrino detector alone has been worth it. Well, we put it in a ship and orbited it around the Sun and did some scanning. This detector is adjustable—most remarkable. We ran the scale from the fastest neutrinos with the weakest interaction to the slowest with some slight interaction, and we were able to peel the core of the Sun like an onion. Each interior layer is a bit hotter than the one outside it. And when we got to the core—I mean the real core now—we found the trouble. We found the very center at a temperature of over half a billion degrees Kelvin. The neutrino energy was greater than the light energy. The electron-positron pairs do not annihilate back to high-energy photons completely. We get significant neutrino-antineutrino formation. There are also some neutrino-photon reactions. But the point is that with such neutrino formation, energy can escape from the core, right through the walls of the Sun. And there you are.” He looked around at the others brightly.
The rest of them looked at him blankly, and Eden said it. “Where?”
“Why, the Sun is in the earliest stages of decay, unpredictably early. All we have to do is dampen the core, and we get our old Sun back.”
Potter said sarcastically, “How do we do that? Throw some water on it?”
“Well, water might not be the best substance. We’re working out the theory to improve on water. I think we’ll come up with something.”
Eden said, “From a practical point of view, wouldn’t it take quite a bit of water?”
“Of course not. Oh, I forgot to tell you. The hot core —the troublemaking part—is only about one hundred feet in diameter right now. But it’s spreading. We ought to do something within the next six months.”
Potter sat back and rubbed his face. “All right. We know what the trouble is. We know where the trouble is. And we will soon know what to do about it. Fair enough?” He looked around the room. Most of those present nodded. Anna Brackney and two other mathemeteorologists shrugged. Potter glared at them for a moment and continued. “We can even get down there to quench it. But we can’t get back. Is that what’s left of our problem?” No one said anything, and there were no shrugs this time. Potter waited a moment, then continued. “Well, if that’s really all that’s left, then we may be all done. I’m certain we can find a volunteer to take the sessile boat down to the core. The question is, should we allow the volunteer to do it? Do we continue to try to find a way to get him back up?”
Eden started to speak, but before he could form the words Anna Brackney cut in. “Now, just you don’t say anything here at all. There’s going to be a lot more thought put in on this problem before we go setting up a hero situation.” She turned to Kowalski and said, “You have six months. Isn’t there a chance you can come up with a suitable boat design in that time?”
Kowalski said, “A chance, yes. But it isn’t very likely. We’ve reached the point where we know we need a major breakthrough. It could happen tomorrow—we’re trying. Or it might not happen in the next ten years of intensive work. We’ve defined the problem sufficiently so that we know what’s needed to solve it. I am not optimistic.”
Potter said, “Any ideas from any others? McCormick, Metzger?”
Metzger said, “I think you’ve summarized it, Jeff. Let’s try for another, say, four months to get a boat design and to check out what we think we know. If we finish up right where we are now, we won’t have hurt anything. We can then find someone to take a boat down, and we’ll give him a great big farewell party. Isn’t that about it?”
More shrugs from the mathemeteorologists, and Anna Brackney glared at Eden. Potter said, “I think I’ll go call President Wilburn and tell him our conclusion. Can I use your office, Bob?” Greenberg nodded, and Potter said, “Be back in a minute. Work out the details while I make the call.”
He left, and a desultory conversation went on in his absence as the group set up priorities and discussed the beginnings of the phase-out of the giant program. Ten minutes passed. Potter reappeared and stood in the doorway. Eden looked up, leaped to his feet and ran around the table toward him. Potter was pale and his face was drawn. He leaned against the door jamb and said, “President Wilburn is dying.”
* * * *
“I’m going with you, Jonathan,” said Harriet Wilburn. She sat across from Wilburn, dry-eyed, in their breakfast corner.
He smiled at her, and the cosmetics on his face wrinkled, giving his face an odd, ragged appearance. He reached across and patted her hand. “You have to stay behind to protect my good name. There’s a bitterness in some people. As long as my wife is alive, they won’t go too far.”
“I don’t care about them.” The tears were in her eyes now, and she looked down at the table to hide them. She wiped her cheeks in annoyance and said in a steady voice, “When do you leave?”
“In three days. The doctors want to make one more attempt to find out what’s causing the central myelitis; there’s got to be some reason for spinal cord deterioration. They hope they can come up with a cure someday, but first they have to find out what causes it.”
Harriet Wilburn burst out, “I don’t care about all this knowledge, all this good, all this benefit-of-man nonsense. I want you.” She put her head down on the table and frankly sobbed. Wilburn reached over and patted the back of her head.
* * * *
“I don’t really believe all this, Boatmaster,” said Technician O’Rourke. “When the first manlike creature put out the first fire something like a half million years ago, he almost certainly used water. Now here we are, quenching the core of a sun heading toward a nova, and what do we use? Water. I don’t believe it.”
Eden did not smile. His mind was on a sessile boat, now about thirty thousand miles deep within the Sun and heading deeper. He sat with Technician O’Rourke in front of the main viewer panel of the neutrino detector, monitoring the flux density at the various energy levels. Eden said, “The reaction we are trying to get back to is simply the high-energy reaction of two photons to produce an electron-positron pair. As it is now, in the core the temperature is so high that the electron-positron pair doesn’t go back to two high-energy photons. Instead they are producing a neutrino-antineutrino pair, and these pour right out through the Sun and are lost to space. If we don’t stop that energy loss, the core will collapse. Since all we have to do is reduce the temperature by absorbing photons, we have a choice of materials to use. Many substances will do it, but water is the safest to carry down there without decomposing or volatilizing and killing Wilburn. That’s why the water.”
“Well, thanks. I still say it’s a mighty funny situation. Somebody’s going to do a lot of philosophizing on it, I’ll bet you. How deep is he now?”
“About forty thousand miles.”
* * * *
Wilburn thought, “You never know. You never know until you’re there. I thought I’d be reflecting on my life, the few things I did right, the many things I did wrong, wondering what it all meant.” He glanced at a depth gauge that read 46,000, and he continued thinking, “About ten percent of the way, ninety percent to go, many hours yet.” He felt hungry, but his ability to swallow had deteriorated to the extent that it was no longer possible for him to eat normally. He sighed, and went about the business of hooking up a bottle of a solution of sugar and protein to the needle in his arm. There were other ingredients in the solution, too, so after the solution was all in, he took a long, painless nap. When he awoke, there were only forty thousand miles to go, and Wilburn realized with a shock that he had had his last meal.
He checked out the few gauges he was familiar with; his briefing period had been limited. He remembered once as a boy his father had taken him through a power plant, and the array of dials and gauges had been fantastic. There had been a large room, divided by a series of panels, and every square inch of the panels and walls of the room had been covered with dials and gauges. When the time came to kick in additional units, one of the operators had called him over and said, “Okay, son. Push that button.” Wilburn did, and his father said to him, “Don’t forget this. All the sensing instruments and dials in the world don’t mean a thing without one human finger.”
Wilburn looked at the one gauge he didn’t like—the one that recorded outside temperature. It read 678,000°K, and Wilburn looked away quickly. He was not a scientific man, and he was incapable of really believing that any living creature could exist in an environment of six hundred and seventy-eight thousand degrees. He thought of Harriet.
He had found it necessary to take steps to prevent her from using her rather significant influence to stow away on this boat. He chuckled and felt the wave of warmth he always felt when he thought of her. For her sake it would have been better to allow her to come, but there were times when one could not take the easy and most desirable path. A soft chime sounded through the boat.
He was approaching the core. He focused his attention on the two instruments directly in front of him. He could feel the deceleration of the boat as the toruses, top and bottom, became more nearly balanced. The temperature inside the cabin was one hundred and forty-six degrees Fahrenheit, but Wilburn was not uncomfortable. He had the feeling that everything was going very well, and he wished he could tell Harriet. The deceleration continued; several of the gauges on the periphery of his vision went off scale. He was very close to the core. Conditions seemed to be as predicted.
He continued to watch, and a chime softly began a beat that slowly increased in tempo. He did not know it, because there was no instrument to record it, but the temperature outside approached the one billion mark. He watched the neutrino flux direction indicator, knowing that the great quantity of water aboard was no longer in the form of a liquid, vapor or solid, and it crossed his mind to wander how that could be. And when the neutrino flux direction indicator wavered, and changed direction to show he had just passed through the very center of the core, he placed his finger on the black button. The last thing he remembered were the words, still clear in his ears, “don’t mean a thing without one human finger.” Then the walls of the boat collapsed and released the water. And the electron-positron pairs appeared instead of the neutrino-antineutrino pairs. On the neutrino detector in the orbiting ship, Eden saw the tiny, hot core fade and disappear. The technician made an adjustment to bring in the neutrinos with slightly greater interaction, and the normal core showed up again, with its normal neutrino flux. But Eden, though he stared at the screen with eyes wide open, could see nothing but a blur.