Actually the contrary. My personal experience is that sane people accept that the world is bafflingly complex and arbitrarily unfair. Lets face it, thats certainly true in the Army! The crazies are the ones who think they understand it all.
So the fact that I cant make any sense of all this inclines you to believe me, she said dryly.
I didnt quite say that, he cautioned. But I knew from the moment you walked in that you are telling the truth, as you see it. I just havent yet been able to rule out the possibility all this actually happened A softscreen lit up on his desk. Excuse me. He tapped the surface, and she glimpsed tables and graphs scrolling.
After a moment he said, Your report from the sawbones has come in. Youll have to discuss the results with her, of course. But as far as I can see youre certainly who you say you are: your DNA and dental records prove it. Youre healthy enough, though you appear to bear the relics of a number of rather exotic diseases. And your skin has soaked up rather more ultraviolet than is good for you.
She smiled. On Mir, the climate broke down. We all got sunburned.
Andah. He sat back, gazing at the screen.
What is it?
According to this resultthe quacks looked at your telomerase, whatever that is, something to do with the aging of your cellsyou are more than five years older than you should be. He eyed her and grinned. Well, well. The plot thickens, Lieutenant. He seemed rather pleased at the way things were turning out.
17: Brainstorm
Once more Siobhan sat with Toby Pitt in the Council Room of the Royal Society.
From a wall-mounted softscreen the crumpled, rather melancholy features of Mikhail Martynov peered out. Siobhan thought he always looked as if there ought to be a roll-up cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth, but even the latest noncarcinogenic, nonaddictive, nonpolluting comfort smokes would never be allowed in the enclosed environment of a Moon base. Mikhail said, If only the problem were simplerif only we faced nothing worse than an asteroid coming to knock us on the head! Where is Bruce Willis when you need him?
Toby asked, Who?
Never mind. I have an unhealthy fascination with bad movies of the last century
Siobhan let their nervous banter roll on. A week after her second return from the Moon she was overtired and stressed out, and a headache niggled behind her eyes. After interplanetary space she felt smothered in the fusty atmosphere of the Society, with its smell of furniture polish, the huge coffee dispenser gurgling away to itself in the corner, and the vast heap of digestive biscuits on a plate on the table. And she was close to despair. Since accepting Miriams mandate to find a way to deal with the solar event, after a month of research she had elicited nothing but waves of hopelessness and negative thinking from experts around the world.
Mikhail and Toby, this motley crew, was her last gamble. But she wasnt about to tell them that. She said briskly, Lets get on with it.
Mikhail glanced at notes off camera. I have Eugenes latest predictions.
Graphics glowed in the smart top of the table before Siobhan and Toby, showing energy flux plotted against wavelength, particle mass, and other parameters. Nothing substantial has changed, Im afraid. We are looking at a major influx of solar energy on April 20, 2042. It will last most of twenty-four hours, so that almost every point on Earths surface will be turned directly into the fire. We wont even have the shelter of night. As we will be close to the spring equinox, even the poles wont be spared. At this stage do you need the details of what will become of the atmosphere, the oceans? No. Suffice to say the Earth will be sterilized to a depth of tens of meters beneath the ground.
But, Mikhail went on, we now have a much more precise handle on how the energy will be delivered. We are looking at flaws in the radiative and convective zones, where a great deal of energy is in normal times stored He tapped the hidden surface before him, and one tabletop chart was highlighted.
Ah, Siobhan said. The intensity will peak in the visible spectrum.
As the spectrum of sunlight does normally, Mikhail said. In green light, as it happens. Which is where our eyes are most sensitive, and where chlorophyll works bestwhich is why, no doubt, chlorophyll was selected by evolution to serve as the photosynthetic chemical that fuels all aerobic plant life.
Then thats what we face: a storm of green light from the sun, Siobhan said firmly. Lets talk about options to deal with it.
Toby grinned. The fun part!
Mikhail offered, Shall I begin? He tapped at his softscreen, and on the displays before Siobhan a number of schematics, tables, and images came up.
As it happens, Mikhail said, even before our present crisis a number of thinkers have considered ways to reduce the solar insolationthe proportion of the suns energy flux that reaches the planet. Of course this was mostly in the context of blocking sunlight to mitigate global warming. He brought up images of clouds of dust injected into the high atmosphere. One proposal is to use space launchers to fire sub-micrometer dust up into the stratosphere. That way you would mimic the effects of a volcanic eruption; after a big bang like Krakatoa you often get a global temperature drop of a degree or two for a few years. Or you could inject sulfur particles up there, which would burn in the atmospheres oxygen to give you a layer of sulfuric acid. That might be rather lighter and so easier to deliver.
Siobhan said, But how much of the storm would this screen out?
Mikhail and Toby displayed their figures. It turned out to be only a few percent.
Enough to mitigate global warming, perhaps, Mikhail said sadly. But far from adequate for the problem we face now. We are going to have to take out almost all of the incoming radiationletting even one percent through may be far too much.
Then well have to think bigger, Siobhan said firmly.
Toby said slyly, Bigger it is. If you want to inject dust into the air, rather than trying to mimic a volcanowhy not just set one off?
Mikhail and Siobhan glanced at each other, startled. Then they went to work.
Coming up with such ideas was precisely why Siobhan had invited Toby to these sessions.
He had been unsure. Siobhan, why me? Im an events manager, for heavens sake! My contribution should have ended at making sure there were enough biscuits to go around.
She had studied him with fond exasperation. He was a big, somewhat overweight, shambling man, with raggedly cut brown hair and a weak chin. He wasnt even a scientist; he had majored in languages. He was a peculiarly English type who would always be valued by stuffy British institutions like the Royal Society, not only for his intelligence and obvious competence, but also for his comforting air of upper-middle-class safeness. But he had one typically English characteristic that she, born in Northern Ireland and so something of an outsider, didnt value so highly, and that was an excess of self-deprecation.
Toby, youre not here for biscuits, appreciated though they are, but for your other career.
He looked briefly baffled. My books?
Precisely. Toby had published a whole series of lyrically written popular histories of forgotten corners of science and technology. And that was what had prompted her to turn to him. Toby, were faced by a megaproblem. But since Tsiolkovski people have been dreaming up a whole suite of more or less wacky mega-engineering possibilities. And thats what I think were going to need to draw on now.
There had been one group in London she was thinking of particularly, called the British Interplanetary Society. I gave them a chapter in one of my books, Toby had told her when she mentioned them. The Society has been absorbed into a pan-European grouping now, and doesnt seem to be half so much fun. But in its heyday it was a place to play for a lot of respectable scientists and engineers. They dreamed up lots of ways to bother the universe This sort of fringe thinking was what they needed to draw on now, she believed.