leak, doesn’t it? So many victims so suddenly incapacitated? The closed environment? And the survivors rallying after being removed from the plane?”
Nora said, “Except that the air circulation quit when the electrical did, right after landing.”
Director Barnes nodded, folding his hands in consideration of this. “Well, it’s a lot to process, no question. But, look here—this was a very good drill for your team. You’ve handled it well. And now that things appear to be settling down, let’s see you get right to the bottom of it. Just as soon as this damn press briefing is done with.”
Eph said, “Hang on. What?”
“The mayor and the governor are holding a press conference, along with airline representatives, Port Authority officials, and so on. You and I will represent the federal health response.”
“Oh—no. Sir, I don’t have the time. Jim can do that—”
“Jim
That was why all this bluster about no detention or quarantine. Barnes was laying down the party line. “But I really don’t know anything yet,” said Eph. “Why so soon?”
Director Barnes smiled, showing his enamel again. “The doctor’s code is, ‘First—do no harm.’ The politician’s code is, ‘First—go on television.’ Plus, I understand that there is a time element involved. Something about wanting to get the broadcast out before this damn solar event. Sunspots affecting radio waves, or something.”
“Solar…” Eph had forgotten all about it. The rare total solar eclipse that was to occur around three thirty that very afternoon. The first such solar event in the New York City region in more than four hundred years, since the advent of America. “Christ, I forgot.”
“Our message to the people of this country will be simple. A profound loss of life has occurred here, and is being investigated fully by the CDC. It is a human catastrophe, but the incident has been contained, and is apparently unique, and there is absolutely no further cause for alarm.”
Eph hid his scowl from the director. He was being made to stand up in front of cameras and say that everything was just dandy. He walked out of the containment area and through the narrow space between the great doors of the hangar, into the doomed light of the day. He was still trying to figure a way out of this when the mobile inside his pants pocket buzzed against the top of his thigh. He pulled it out, an envelope icon slowly revolving on the LCD screen. A text message from Matt’s mobile. Eph opened it:
Yanks 4 Sux 2. gr8t seats, wish u wre here, Z.
Eph stood staring at this electronic dispatch from his son until his eyes lost focus. He was left staring at his own shadow on the airport tarmac, which, unless he was imagining things, had already begun to vanish.
OCCULTATION
Approaching Totality
Anticipation grew on the ground as the slender nick in the western side of the sun—the lunar “first contact”—became a creeping blackness, a rounded bite gradually consuming the afternoon sun. At first there was no obvious difference in the quality or quantity of light on the ground. Only the black gouge high in the sky, making a crescent of the normally reliable sun, marked this day as being different from any other.
The term “solar eclipse” is in fact a misnomer. An eclipse occurs when one object passes into a shadow cast by another. In a solar eclipse, the moon does not pass
The earth’s distance from the sun is approximately four hundred times the moon’s distance from the earth. In a remarkable coincidence, the diameter of the sun happens to be approximately four hundred times the diameter of the moon. This is why the area of the moon and the sun’s photosphere—its bright disk—appear roughly the same size from the perspective of earth.
A total occultation is possible only when the moon is in its new phase, and near its perigee, its closest distance to the earth. The duration of totality depends upon the orbit of the moon, never to exceed seven minutes and forty seconds. This occultation was due to last exactly four minutes and fifty-seven seconds: just under five minutes of uncanny nighttime in the middle of a beautiful early fall afternoon.
Half-covered now by the new (and otherwise invisible) moon, the still bright sky began to take on a dusky cast: like a sunset, only without any warming of the light. At ground level, the sunlight appeared pale, as though filtered or diffused. Shadows lost their certainty. The world, it seemed, had been put on a dimmer.
As the crescent continued to thin, being consumed by the lunar disk, its smothering brightness blazed as though in a panic. The occultation appeared to gain momentum and a kind of desperate speed as the ground landscape went gray, colors bleeding off the normal spectrum. The western sky darkened faster than the east as the shadow of the moon approached.
The eclipse was to be partial in much of the United States and Canada, achieving totality along only a lengthy, narrow trail measuring ten thousand miles long by one hundred miles wide, describing the moon’s dark umbral shadow upon the earth. The west-to-east course, known as the “path of totality,” began at the horn of Africa and curved up the Atlantic Ocean, ending just west of Lake Michigan, moving at more than one thousand miles per hour.
As the crescent sun continued to narrow, the complexion of the sky became a strangled violet. The darkness in the west gathered strength like a silent, windless storm system, spreading throughout the sky and closing in around the weakened sun, like a great organism succumbing to a corrupting force spreading from within.
The sun grew perilously thin, the view—through safety glasses—like that of a manhole lid being slid shut high above, squeezing out the daylight. The crescent blazed white, then turned to silver in its agonal last moments.
Strange, roving bands of shadow began moving over the ground. Oscillations formed by the refraction of light in the earth’s atmosphere—similar to the effect of light moving on the floor of a swimming pool—writhed like shadowy snakes at the corner of one’s vision. These ghostly tricks of light made the hair stand on the back of every viewer’s neck.
The end came quickly. The last throes were chilling, intense, the crescent shrinking to a curved line, a slicing scar in the sky, then fragmenting into individual pearls of fiery white, representing the last of the sun’s rays seeping through the deepest valleys along the lunar surface. These beads winked and vanished in rapid succession, snuffed out like a dying candle flame drowned in its own black wax. The crimson-colored band that was the chromosphere, the thin upper atmosphere of the sun, flared for a precious, final few seconds—and then the sun was gone.
Totality.
Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens
KELLY GOODWEATHER could not believe how quickly the day went dark. She stood out on the sidewalk, as
