Dan nodded as George’s bushy red-maned face appeared on the screen. Quickly, in a worried whisper, George explained how he’d located Cardenas and spirited her off to the temporary shelter.
“She wants t’see Stavenger,” George concluded. “I told her I’d talk to you first. She’ll be perfectly okay in the tempo for a coupla weeks, if we need to keep her stashed there. So… what d’you want me to do, Dan?”
George’s image on the screen froze. Dan could see that he must have been at the mission control center when he’d sent the message. Good. He must’ve cleared out the place to make sure nobody could eavesdrop.
Now I’ve got to send him a reply that just about anybody can listen to, Dan thought. This is going to be like an old-time mafioso speaking into a tapped telephone.
“George, I think she’s right. Do as she asks… as carefully as you can. She’s important to us; there’s a lot she and I have to talk about when I get back. We’ve got some problems here on the ship and we’re heading back home. If all goes well, we should be back in lunar orbit in less than four days. I’ll keep you informed, and you let me know how things are going there.”
Dan reviewed his own message, decided there was nothing he needed to add to it, then touched the send button on the comm panel.
He started to get up from the co-pilot’s seat when the comm unit pinged.
“ ‘Nother message comin’ in,” Pancho said needlessly.
A young man’s face appeared on the screen. He looked annoyed. “General notice to all spacecraft and surface vehicles. A class-four solar flare has been observed by the early-warning sensors in Mercury orbit. Preliminary calculations of the interplanetary field indicate the resulting radiation storm has a ninety percent chance of reaching the Earth—Moon system within the next twelve hours. All spacecraft in cislunar space are advised to return to the nearest safe docking facility. All activities on the lunar surface will be suspended in six hours. Anyone on the surface is advised to seek shelter within six hours.”
Dan sagged back into the chair.
Pancho tried to smile. “You called it, boss: Murphy’s Law.”
STORM SHELTER
Four worried people clustered around the table in Starpower 1’s wardroom. The wallscreen showed a chart of the solar system, with the radiation cloud that the solar flare had belched out appearing as a shapeless gray blob twisted by the interplanetary magnetic field. It was approaching Earth and the Moon rapidly. Deep in the Asteroid Belt a single pulsating yellow dot showed where their ship was.
Dan said to the computer, “Show the projections for the next two days.”
The cloud grew and thinned, but surged out past the orbit of Mars and then engulfed the inner Belt and overran the blinking dot that marked Starpower 1’s position.
Pancho made a sound halfway between a sigh and a snort. “No way around it. We’re gonna get hosed.”
Amanda looked up from her palmcomp. “If we could pump all our remaining fuel into one tank, it could serve as a shelter… of sorts.”
“I thought the secondaries would get us,” Dan muttered.
“They’d be high,” Amanda admitted, “but if we could pressurize the fuel it might absorb most of the secondary particles before they reached us.”
“If we’re plumb in the middle of the tank,” Pancho said.
“Yes. Inside our suits, of course.”
“Can the suits handle the temperature? We’re talking about liquid hydrogen and helium; damned close to absolute zero.”
“The suits are insulated well enough,” Pancho said. Then she added, “But nobody’s ever tried a dunk in liquid hydrogen with ’em.”
“And we’d have to be dunked for god knows how many hours,” Dan muttered.
Fuchs had not said a word. His head was bent over his own palmcomp.
“How much protection would the fuel give us?” Dan asked glumly.
Amanda hesitated, looked down at her handheld screen, then said, “We’d all need hospitalization. We’d have to set the flight controls to put us into lunar orbit on automatic.”
“We’d all be that sick?” Pancho asked.
Amanda nodded solemnly.
And I’d be dead, Dan thought. I can’t take another radiation dose like that. It would kill me.