Kepler touched the young woman’s arm. “I must run now, Helene. There are a few messages from Earth that have to be handled. I already put them off too long to be here for your arrival, so I’d better go now. You’re sure everything went smoothly and the crew is well rested?” “Sure, Dr. Kepler, everything’s great. We slept on the way back. I’ll meet you back here when it’s time to see Jeff off.”
The Sundiver chief made his salutations to Jacob and Fagin, and nodded curtly to LaRoque, who stood just close enough to overhear but not close enough to be civil. Kepler left in the direction of the elevators.
Helene deSilva had a way of bowing respectfully to Fagin that was warmer than most people could hug. She radiated delight at seeing the E.T. again, and redundantly said so as well.
“And this is Mr. Demwa,” she said as she shook Jacob’s hand. “Kant Fagin spoke of you. You’re the intrepid young fellow who dove the entire height of the Ecuador Needle to save it. That’s a story I insist on hearing from the hero himself!”
A part of Jacob winced, as always when the Needle was mentioned. He hid it behind a laugh.
“Believe me, that jump wasn’t made on purpose! In fact, I think I’d rather go on one of your little solar, toe-frying junkets than ever do that again!”
The woman laughed, but at the same time she looked at him strangely, with a certain appraising expression that Jacob found himself liking, although it confused him. He felt oddly at a loss for words.
“Um… anyway it’s a bit odd being called a ‘young fellow’ by someone as young as you appear to be. You must be a very competent person to have been offered a. command like this before any worry lines have shown.”
DeSilva laughed again. “How gallant! That’s very sweet of you, sir, but actually I have sixty-five years worth of invisible worry lines. I was a junior officer on Calypso. You may recall we got back in system a couple of years ago. I’m over ninety years old!”
“Oh!”
Starship crewmen were a very special breed. No matter what their subjective ages, they could pick their jobs when they came home… when they chose to keep working, that is.
“Well in that case, I really must treat you with the respect you’re due, Granny.”
DeSilva took a step back and cocked her head, look-big at him through wryly narrowed eyes. “Just don’t go too far the other way! I’ve worked too hard at becoming a woman, as well as an officer and a gentleman, to want to jump from ‘jail bait’ straight into social security. If the first attractive male to arrive in months who isn’t under my command starts thinking of me as unapproachable, I just might be persuaded to throw him in irons!”
Half of the woman’s referents were indecipherably archaic (what the devil was ‘jail bait’?), but somehow the meaning was clear. Jacob grinned and put up his hands in surrender — willingly enough,. Somehow, Helen deSilva reminded him a lot of Tania. The comparison was vague. There was an answering tremor, also vague and hard to identify. But it felt worth following.
Jacob shook aside the image. Philosophical-emotional bullshit. He was very good at that when he allowed himself. The plain fact was that the Base Commandant was an awful damned attractive fem!
“So be it,” he said. “And dammed be he who first says, ‘Hold, enough!’ ”
DeSilva laughed. She took him lightly by the arm and turned to Fagin.
“Come, I want you both to meet the dive crew…
Then we’ll be busy getting Jeffrey ready to leave. He’s terrible about good-byes. Even when going on a short dive like this one will be, he always bawls and hugs everyone who’s staying behind as if he’s never going to see them again!”
PART IV
Only with the Solar Probe is it possible to obtain data on the distribution of mass and angular momentum in the solar interior…obtain high resolution pictures… detect neutrons released in nuclear processes occurring at or near the solar surface… (or) determine how the solar wind is accelerated. Finally, given the communications and tracking systems and, perhaps, the on-board hydrogen maser… the Solar Probe will be by far the best platform to use in the search for low frequency gravity waves from cosmological sources.
10. HEAT
Like taffy twists and feather boas, the ochre shapes drooped in a pink misty background, as if suspended from invisible strings. The row of wispy dark arches, each a fluffy rope of gaseous tendrils, led off into the distance, each farther arch smaller in perspective than the one before, until the last faded into the swirling red miasma.
Jacob found it difficult to focus on any one detail of the recorded holographic image. The dark filaments and streamers that made up the visible topography of the middle chromosphere were deceptive in both shape and texture.
The closest filament almost filled the left forward corner of the tank. Wispy strands of darker gas soiled about an invisible magnetic field which arched over a sunspot almost a thousand kilometers below.
High above the place where most of the Suns energy production leaked out into space as light, an observer could make out details for tens of thousands of miles. Even so it was still hard to get used to the idea that the magnetic arch he now looked at was about the size of Norway. It was merely one filigree in a chain that arched for 200,000 kilometers over a sunspot group below.
And this one was a wimp, compared to many they’d seen.
One arching spectacle had stretched a quarter of a million kilometers from end to end. The image had been recorded several months back, over an active region that had long since vanished, and the ship that recorded it had kept its distance. The reason became clear when the top of the gigantic, twisted faerie arch erupted into the most awesome of Solar events, a flare.
The flare was beautiful and terrible — a churning, boiling maelstrom of brightness representing an electrical short circuit of incomprehensible magnitude. Even a Sunship would not have survived the sudden surge of high energy neutrons from the nuclear reactions driven by the flare, particles immune to the ship’s electromagnetic shields, too many neutrons to damp away using time compression. The Sundiver Project chief emphasized, for that reason, that flares were usually predictable and avoidable.
Jacob would have found the assurance more comforting without the proviso, “usually.”
The briefing had been rather routine otherwise, as Kepler led his audience through a quick review of solar physics. Jacob had learned most of the material earlier in his studies aboard the Bradbury, but the projections of actual dives into the chromosphere were, he had to admit, fantastic visual aids. If it was hard to comprehend the sizes of the things he saw, Jacob could blame no one but himself.
Kepler had briefly covered the basic dynamics of the Sun’s interior, the real star, to which the chromosphere was just a thin skin.
In the deep core the unimaginable weight of the Sun’s mass drives the nuclear reactions, producing heat and pressure and preventing the giant ball of plasma from contracting under its own gravitational pull. Pressure keeps the body “inflated.”
The energy given off by the fires at the core works slowly outward, sometimes as light, and sometimes as a convective exchange of hot material from below for cooler stuff returning from above. By radiation, then convection, then radiation again, the energy reaches the kilometers-thick layer known as the photosphere — the “sphere of light” where it finally finds freedom and leaves home forever, for space.