They were both silent for a while, letting NASA clock up some expensive dead time on the satellite uplink.
'You're going out tonight,' he said, wanting to lighten this a little. 'You've got that nice clean look about you I recognize. It says, "The hell with all this, I'm going to go out, I'm going to get taken to some nice, expensive restaurant somewhere and order lobster tails and Chardonnay." Am I right?'
She smiled a little; that was enough.
'Okay. You're right.'
'With him?'
'Him?'
'You know. Do we need the water torture right now? Do I have to spit out the syllables?'
'You mean "him" as in "my husband"?'
'Present husband. I have to correct you there.'
'Present and only husband.'
'Yeah. Some guy.'
She wasn't interested in this, she never was. Her mind was elsewhere. It was so obvious in her round, open face, and the way those big almond-shaped eyes kept staring at him — with some sadness, some worry he didn't want to see.
'Michael, talk to me. Please. We lost the satellite links through to Kyoto twice this afternoon. The solar flares got really bad and they just went down with all the damn electromagnetic activity. Not for long. Just a few seconds.'
'How bad?' he sighed.
'It put out some entire power systems, complete domestic and industrial grids down. Some suburbs in Tokyo. Australia a couple of places. Some telecommunications links went out too. Shut the Tokyo Stock Exchange for forty minutes, killed most of the high-speed data lines between some of the main Asian hubs and the West Coast. Plus they closed the airport in Hong Kong for three hours because they had no air-traffic control. Some big magnetic wipeout, they think, but my guess is they don't really know. People are too busy fixing things to find out what really happened. I guess that's understandable. And people are mad too. It got close to a full-scale riot in Tokyo when they closed down the Nikkei. On the TV there are these guys in shirtsleeves in the street screaming at each other like they could kill someone.'
He could picture this. He could see this angry scene in his head, and match it against all the others he'd seen since this particular heat wave began. This was the age of the frayed temper. Sometimes it felt as if the heat were just peeling off some outside layer of humanity from your body and letting the sky take a long look at the beast that lived underneath.
'People get mad in cities these days, Sara,' he said, and hoped he sounded convincing. 'Hell, they always did. What's new? How long did the burst last?'
'Peaked at nine seconds or so. That's all, and look what it did. You believe that?'
The day was getting brighter by the second. It beckoned him.
'We're scientists, Sara. It's our job to accept anything that happens provided there's some proof it exists. Are these emissions just magnetic or are you seeing X-ray activity too?'
She stared at him, looking a little blank. 'Search me, Michael. We're still waiting on the data. Like I said, most of the links were down and these things don't just come back up again like a dog begging for a bone, not after they get hit that bad. Once we get it, once it's been through analysis, we'll post it. You take a look. See if it makes sense to you.'
'Yeah. You bet. Some coincidence, huh? You and me getting lumped together on the same job like this? I'm really glad it happened.'
Sara was scared, he thought, and even if he didn't have the words to chase away the demons, he could just try a little old-fashioned courtesy.
'I guess this is our field, Michael, and it's a pretty specialized one. Who else are they going to drum up?'
Sara felt flushed, wondered if he was going to embarrass them both. But when she looked he was back running his fingers through his hair again, not thinking about her at all, or even noticing the impatient way she was watching him from the monitor.
'True,' he said. 'It's nice to be wanted. Why don't you go eat, Wong girl? You look hungry. Jesus, you look starving.'
Her face came back at him from the monitor, so open, so truthful, and she didn't need to point out how very wrong he was.
'You think anyone knows what's going on here, Michael? All this climate change, all this unpredictability. Why don't these things fit the way they should? Why are we going through this stuff now? Not in two years' time when this solar cycle is supposed to peak? What the hell's happening?' 'Sara,' he said, and wished his voice didn't sound so grown-up, 'nature's happening, and we're just baffled because we're too dumb to understand it. There's no evidence this is anything other than the usual chaos we have to deal with the more we understand what's going on around us. What bugs us is that it's out of our control. This isn't global warming. We don't just persuade Gillette to take CFCs out of their shaving cream, pay the Chinese to burn gas, and then wait for the ozone hole to close. All that kind of stuff is just a kid's game here. We're dealing with the sun, and whatever it's planning to do, it will do. I know some people find it hard to believe there can be anything in this universe that human beings don't control, but the sun is one of them. We don't write these rules, we never did, and if something out there feels like changing them from time to time, then that's its business.'
Mistake, he thought immediately, as soon as he saw the heightened fear in her face.
'B — but don't get me wrong,' he stuttered. "There's nothing here that suggests we're seeing more than a few climate changes that have been going on unnoticed for centuries. The thing that's changed is that we can kid ourselves we understand a little more this time around. Welcome to the circus.'
'Yeah, I guess you're right,' she said, not sounding convinced. 'Take care, Michael,' she added, sighing. She blew him a kiss down the screen, her big almond eyes examining him in a way he didn't even begin to want to think about.
'You too, Sara.' He watched the video panel collapse back into the monitor, leave a soft grey blankness in its wake.
Lieberman got up from the desk and walked over to the window. Out to the east dawn was marching in, good and yellow, none of the pretty colours associated with smog and pollution, just plain old sunlight, which was (he guessed; no one had actually said as much) one of the reasons the project had chosen La Finca in the first place. All this isolation helped when you wanted to measure the stuff that poured from the heavens: There was no pollution, no radio interference, no ground lighting to ruin the night sky. Just pure data, and whatever else the heavens wanted to rain down on you.
Nice, he thought, and wished to God he could shake that last picture of Sara out of his head. She looked unhappy, scared, which wasn't like her. It wasn't like anyone who worked in Lone Wolf, which — until he got fired for taking a drunken poke at Sam Smith, the director, at that Christmas party three short years before — had been as close to paradise as he was ever likely to find.
'Work,' Michael Lieberman said quietly into the room. Then he buried himself in the pile of reports sitting on the computer.
CHAPTER 3
Turbulence
The man was about his own age, Seabright reckoned, and probably out of condition. He was marginally overweight, with a round, flabby face, receding hairline, and bright blue staring eyes. They'd reclined the seat in business as much as they could, let him lie back, bleeding all the time. It was everywhere, on his jacket, on the seat, and, most of all, on his face. The scarlet gore was still pumping out of his nose, fast and furious, big sticky bubbles of it, coming through his fingers whenever they took away the wet paper towels to let him snatch some extra air.