The Rape of The Sun Read online

  “Lately they haven’t been all that regular.”

  “Quite so; I’ll get to that. Also, a rhythmic cycle in the signals of pulsars. And so on. For instance again, the Cepheid variables grow and decline and grow and decline with periodicity. Sven, dammit, there are strong suggestions of holistic star-experience—not brains, just experience. You don’t have to have a nervous system to be alive and organized; protozoa do excellently well without nerves.’’

  “You,” I declared, “are getting at something about our sun. Get on with it, man!”

  “All right, here it is. Astronomy now has pretty good records of solar magnetic storm cycles. We can sort of predict them. But none of us could have predicted the erratic bunching of the storms which have hit us recently. And we know from Collins that currently the sun is being buggered. Do you suppose that maybe Sun feels buggered?”

  Softly said Collins: “I can believe that. I can also believe that Sun may seek some kind of readjustment”

  Wel queried: “Would we survive such an adjustment? Indeed, would the solar system survive it?”

  Bill answered in a semi-lost voice: “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  21

  Most of Day 24 was jerky-normal; but by evening our shiver-shake yawing had recommenced. We spent the night strapped into our cradles. It felt like enough to tear the moon loose; I kept praying for the radiation impermeability of Jacobite.

  Strapped into duty-chairs, all during Day 25 we fought storm-crazed space in the process of preparing for orbital insertion tomorrow while expending precious power to hold our ship and its missiles and our distant satellites on courses. To make it all the more murderous, the storm kept jamming our in-ship instrumentation and out-ship telemetric signals. At one point Sven grumbled, “I’d abort the mission if I could— but I can’t, until we build up escape power, and by that time it won’t be abortion.”

  Our insertion on Day 26 was hairier than a saint’s undershirt. Sun, filling ten degrees of arc, glared and spat at us; solar flares licked out toward us, looking as though they were going to engulf the ship although Mazda was many million kilometers beyond reach of the flames. The capsule rolled and tossed and yawed, filling our interior air with creakings and groanings from welds being stressed almost to limit. Instruments told us that our four satellites, now fifteen million kilometers distant, were dodging and darting like frightened nighthawks. And it was hot, hot; we wondered whether it would stay so hot; either Graben and Mullett had miscalculated the insulating value of our Jacobite coating, or it was (God forbid) cracking from turbulent stress, or else (as Bill muttered) the surface temperature of Sun had gone up with the storming.

  Wel finally reported that satellite One was in orbit, and that the three others were satisfactorily spaced out behind One over a total distance of sixty million kilometers. Counting us, that was one out of five. But Mazda still had a way to go: her orbit would be closer in, at 7.7 million kilometers from sun-surface as against ten million for the satellites.

  Falling toward the inner orbit at 400,000 kilometers per hour and accelerating, we, held tight during more than four unendurably long hours. Then Sven announced coolly: “We’re in orbit—only it’s the wrong orbit.”

  We sat digesting that. Between turbulence and instrumental malfunction, the orbit we were precariously teetering in was the right distance out, more or less, but tilted at nearly a ten-degree angle from the one we had chosen. Around Sun, a ten-degree difference meant 2.5 million kilometers division at maximum. If we should hold to this orbit, the efficiency of our satellite inspection and control would be significantly reduced.

  Ultimately Sven decided: “We’ll have to correct, but I can’t do a thing in this turbulence. It has to ease off sometime. Anybody for lead-weighted cards?”

  “Not me,” Wel said. “I have to keep herding the skittish ducks, especially way-out Skiddoo.”

  “Not me,” came Bill’s voice on intercom. ‘The surface of the sun is very interesting. Tell you later.”

  No comment from Collins, who was somewhere doing something.

  Thrown sideways in his chair by a flare-yaw, Sven uttered: “This is going to be one hell of a boring orbit.”

  During another four days we continued to be belabored by solar explosions, nine cockleshells in a cosmic hurricane. To worsen the situation, after the first day of our wrong orbit, no longer could Wel control in the last three satellites: the body and corona of Sun intervened, and the totality had grown to overpowering size in our perspective. Despite our buffeting, frequently we got ourselves arduously aft to watch the sun close-in through Bill’s three-dimensional photoviewer which could filter out all light except a chosen wavelength. To watch, up close, the boiling variability of the sun-sphere was a frightening, soul-filling activity—especially when we departed Bill’s holograph, went forward, and momentarily opened a Jacobite shutter to gaze with heavily shaded eyes out a control-room window to watch turbulent Sol in coruscating white light.

  Eating was a near impossibility; we would work our individual ways to the common room via hand-hold rails, our shoulders socket-wrenched, and snark a bite or a sip when we could, while the maddened sun kept firing away at us. If Sun was alive, intelligent he was not he didn’t know friend from foe. Interior temperature kept varying up and down, which had to mean that the Jacobite was holding and it was Sun that was varying. By now, Earth could be a disaster area. Sleep, from having been an impossibility, now had become a morbid hazard: we fought it on duty, and bounced in its clutches whenever we gave up. Orbital course corrections were draining so much power from our escape booster that we were seriously apprehensive about our ability to accumulate escape power from our remaining orbits. Aye, haggard we were.

  On the fourth day of our first orbit, we came out from behind Sun. On instruments, Wel discovered to his glee that satellite Two was in distant orbit, albeit a wrong one; while Three and Skiddoo were coming in not bad, not bad at all. Simultaneously, turbulence began to ease. Wel got Three and Skiddoo satisfactorily corrected; One was already on course, , and we were catching up to it; Two could be corrected, but AI Mazda had to be straightened—out first.

  It was time to reestablish communications with Earth: to notify NASA that sun-power transmission would soon begin. Sven called Houston.

  Nothing.

  And again, and again. Nothing.

  Sober, he turned to us. “NASA in Houston may have been taken out by an earthquake.” I quavered: “Try Cape Kennedy.” Sven tried, and tried again. Nothing. Sylvanopolis, then: Southeastern Power Headquarters. Zilch.

  “Do you get the impression,” faintly queried Wel, “that we are up here or down here in alone?”

  On our fifth day in orbit—still dismayed by silence from Earth in all quarters that we tried to contact—we passed the position where we had first achieved orbit. We had circled Sun one complete time—and still no sign of the Dhomer enemy. Taking advantage of position and relative tranquility, Sven got our orbit changed to what it was supposed to be; then Wel fixed up Two and rearranged Three and Skiddoo— by now, Three was in. We were determined to move ahead with the mission as planned.

  Bill came in from his pocket observatory, moving in something as close to a run as he could manage in the bouncing shiplet, with a large paper portfolio tucked under one arm. “These photos you got to see!” he ejaculated; and he began spreading them on the control-room table, swaying on sea-legs while he did it. We gathered around, gripping table-edges. It was the sun:surface, a cluster of areas, taken with instant-print film in full color within the past hour, some in white light, some red, some violet, some X ray; and in every print, the surface was serene, almost uneventful.

  “Then,” Sven ventured, “the turbulence we still have is residual, it will die.”

  “And rather soon,” Bill agreed, “but there is a feature that I particularly want you to notice. See here, in these X-ray photos.” He did a little pointing, then waited.

  We bent, studying. I sugges
ted, “They seem almost like-broken lines.”

  “Isn’t that ridiculous?” Bill demanded. “Look here, now. There’s a line segment, there’s another—fragments of a single line. Now look over here: apparently more line-segments parallel to the first.”

  Wel pointed: “How about this one intersecting the others?” Bill silently nodded.

  “How far apart are the two parallel lines?” I wanted to know.

  “About a thousand kilometers,” Bill told us. “Which means that each line has to be at least a kilometer wide in order to be resolvable by this camera at our eight-million-kilometer distance.”

  We brooded, noticing that the turbulence was definitely dying. “How about that cross-line?” Sven demanded. “I don’t suppose there could be Martian canals on the sun—”

  Voice behind us: “They are the strands of a forcefield net.”

  We all swung to Collins, who stood too far back from the table to be seeing the photos: stood steadily there without support, swaying gently in liquid response to the undulant motion of our vehicle.

  Collins came to the table and began to do some pointing. “The cross-line that Doctor Carr noticed has another parallel here which is not visible in the photo. And there are others here, and here, and so on. They entirely enmesh the sun. All the lines are sunk well beneath the photosphere, they more closely engage the interior core which the outward pressure of fusion and fission renders more rigid, the net and the solar radiation pressure thrust against each other to tauten the net. That is why we can see the net-strands only by X ray, and then only in fragmentary segments.”

  He waited while we worked to comprehend the gargantuan implications. Feebly Bill objected: “But the sun’s interior temperature is—”

  “Something like twenty million degrees,” finished Collins. “I know. But it will not melt the net. The net will hold.”

  Sven shot: “Will hold for what purpose?”

  “Will hold so that the Dhomer flagship engaging {he net by remote control, can take the sun with them deeper into time, and then can lead it across intergalactic space to their planet—with all of us trailing along.”

  “Mister Collins, we have completely circumnavigated the sun without seeing any evidence of outside interference!”

  “But, Captain Jensen, have we not subsequently changed orbits? My feeling is that the Dhorners are operating somewhere along the equatorial orbit which we are now following.

  Perhaps this time around we will find them—or vice versa.” I didn’t much like his disjunctive.

  “Perhaps on this equatorial orbit,” Bill suggested, “I may be able to figure why the turbulence went so high and then so suddenly subsided.”

  The small voice of Collins: “Perhaps it is merely that Sun first was terrified by the net and fought it—and then, finally netted, gave up.”

  That was Day 31. Three satellites were now in orbit: Skiddoo figured to settle in tomorrow, if it could find its own way in. Wel had given it all the assistance he could while Mazda was earthside of Sun, but by tomorrow Mazda would be beyond the limb. We had been able to check no satellite except at great distance; but as nearly as we could determine, all was going well, to the extent that Two and Three were already interplaying to send hot sunlight to the sub-moon orbiting field.

  Only, now we had reason to wonder whether Earth could use what we were sending. By now, for all we knew, the surface of our Earth might be wiped out.

  Doggedly we stayed with our mission. By tomorrow we should be at our closest approach to satellite One directly beneath it referent to Sun; for telemetry, 300,000 kilometers’ distance was immediacy for intricate checking less than the space between Earth and Moon. Like ourselves, One would be beyond the limb, not now functioning with respect to Earth; but we would be able to tell what One was still capable of doing, once it would go earthside.

  On Day 32, we did latch onto One. It was a mess; none of its appendages had released itself. “You’ve won,” I said to Sven, meaning that after all he had been right about the satellites needing a manned monitor on this pilot project. There followed many hours of work on One, with Wel on the hot spot but with Sven and me laboriously-intently helping; gravity-spin was off, down stayed uniformly sunward to facilitate orientation. Ultimately, One spread its mirrors and was ready for action.

  All at once Sven and Wel and I in the control room comprehended how weary we were. As one, we arose and air-swam into the all-purpose salon, where I caused three swivel armchairs to rise out of the floor like plant-carnivores in a mythical Venusian tropic. Having reactivated spin at five-tenths g, Sven cat-footed to the bar, mixed, returned with three. We sat, sipped, brooded.

  “I’d recommend a snack,” said Sven, “and then about eight hours of shut-eye. Where are Bill and Collins?”

  Bill’s intercom voice: “We’re both in my lab.”

  Sven: “Come join us, it’s lonesome here.”*

  I murmured: “Damn you, sir.”

  Bill: “Not quite yet, there’s business here. Listen, you guys finish your drinks, then join us and bring us a couple.”

  We three in the salon tossed off and went to the bar, where Sven mixed five, pointing them off: “Collins—Bill—Hel— Wel-me.” I scooped up the ones for Collins and myself and headed aft; Wel followed with drinks for Bill and himself; Sven brought up the rear with his own. We toe-push-floated through the crawl-tunnel which cored our sleeping cabins; gravity in the tunnel was always nil, it lay along the axis of spin. Once through, we dropped at random in any direction onto the inner cylindrical shell-floor; in my case, Bill and Collins were bending over a table upside-down above me.

  Bill, turning as we approached around the shell, registered surprise: “But you’re walking/”

  “We turned it on,” Wel explained, “but of course you wouldn’t have noticed. What’s the big deal?”

  “Part of the deal is the dog-star Sirius,” Bill asserted. “Come over here.” He led us to another table where a visiscreen showed a black field of white stars with one very bright star near center. “The big one is Sirius,” he told us. “Now look at this.” He buttoned: gray stars appeared in the black field, distorting the white stars into semi-double images; the largest gray star appeared near center but somewhat removed from the largest white star. “What’s funny?” Bill queried.

  Sven challenged: “You’re the astronomer.”

  “The big white star,” said Bill, “is Sirius where he is. The big gray star is Sirius where he ought to be. You’re looking at two superimposed positives. There’s more to say about that, but first I want you to look at these new photos of the net around Sun.” He led us back to the first table where photos were spread. “These top four photos were taken within the past two hours; these bottom four were, shot yesterday. Who wants to react?”

  We shifted attention from photo to photo: this was a subtle one. Collins watched, not helping; I had a strong feeling that Collins knew more than Bill did.

  Sven gestured. “I’m noticing again, in these photos from yesterday on earthside, that the net meshes are deeply imbedded in the sun so that only segments are visible. But in these new photos, the meshes are entirely visible—and right at this point, they are bulging slightly outward”

  Wel muttered: “I think I’m going nuts.”

  “Why, Wel?”

  “Because I have this insane impression that the net on earthside is sunk into the sun by pulling from farside—and that these new farside photos show lines bulging outward toward a puller”

  Bill pressed: “Say more, Wel.”

  “This is psychotic—”

  “Be psychotic, Wel.”

  “I am schizophrenically connecting this with the displace- . ment of Sirius.”

  Sven and I, having caught the drift, were gripping hands. Bill was intent. Collins blandly watched.

  Wel inhaled, and exhaled, and stood erect, and stated: “For guts thou canst not fault me. I will say what ought not to be said—some Caliban, netting our sun, draggeth i
t to his lair.”

  Collins applauded. I said, ‘Tor Caliban, read Tiamat.”

  “But where,” quoth Wel, “his lair?”

  “Wrong question,” Bill responded, frowning. “This displacement of Sirius does not appear to be displacement in space alone. Sirius is now, from our viewpoint at least, occupying precisely the location which he occupied when he was officially called the Dog Star and the Great Egyptian Pyramid was being oriented upon him. The correct question, Doctor Carr, is: When his lair?’ ”

  It was clear to all, as we returned to the salon and hit supper, that a showdown with the enemy was approaching. It was equally clear that we along with Earth and her companion planets and her star had been sucked deep into the past— not merely four centuries, but now five millennia deep. And the perfectly evident aftermath would be true to the Collins visions: we would be towed across shrunken past space to Andromeda; we would be stationed sky-high above Hréda’s museum, a*multi-planetary exhibit of Hréda’s museum: creatures, merely; zoo animals.

  A tag-end question dangled: how big were we now, or how small? Had we been further reduced by our plunge from four centuries to five millennia into the past, as one would expect from the natural order of things in Haley’s theory which seemed to be roughly right? Or, as he precipitated us into this further time-descent, had the enemy somehow arrived at holding our sizes constant? Not our sizes especially—we people would be incidental—but the sizes of Sun and his planets.

  Wel, while lethargically he ate, was meditating on an irony. Now was when he finally had enough objective evidence to write and file a story for Earth about the Dhomers and their quest and Earth’s consequent fate. Only, we had rounded the limb and were swiftly traveling on Sun’s farside: no Earth-communication possible. And if we should make it again to earthside, the possibility of communication was dubious; Earth had been silent, Earth might be permanently silenced. Sven had tried to raise, not only Houston and Cape Kennedy and Southeastern Power, but also Washington D.C., and then tracking stations in Moscow and Canberra and elsewhere; going farther, he had tried for several radiotelescope installations at Green Bank, Gorky, Mount Karadeg, Murmansk, Ussuri, Algonquin, Arecibo, and even the incomplete Cyclops array. Nothing. If anybody would and could call us, we would hear; we had not heard. Hard luck for Welland Carr; all the better for Earth, she had to die sometime—so why was Carr still alive!