fields, and are pulled back to the negative followers, forming closed bipolar loops that reach many thousands of miles outward toward the sun’s corona. Pressure exerted on the solar atmosphere by the intense magnetic fields dampens the upward flow of hot gas from the interior. The regions covered by the fields are, therefore, about two thousand degrees cooler than those surrounding them and appear as dark blemishes to observers on earth.
These we call sunspots, and their number rises from minimum to maximum levels in eleven-to-twelve-year cycles. A typical sunspot grows in size over a period of days or sometimes months, and then shrinks after the cycle peaks and the bands of magnetic force unwind. A spot moving across the sun as it rotates on its axis will take twenty-seven days to complete a journey around the equator and thirty-five days to circle the upper and lower hemispheres.
Like rubber bands, the lines of force extending upward from sunspots
We call these solar flares, and their emissions will bombard Earth within days if angled toward it. Major flares have been known to cover eighty thousand square miles of the sun — an area ten times larger than our planet — and equal millions of hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb blasts in strength, triggering worldwide disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field. They cannot be forecast with absolute certainty, though any significant increase of sunspot activity is considered to be a possible indicator of solar flares in generation.
On the third day of March, during a peak in the sunspot cycle, a group of frecklelike spots that seemed the very definition of unremarkable to astronomers who routinely track them moved to the far side of the sun in their orbital course. There over the next two weeks, beyond the range of visual observation, they began to enlarge, multiply, and align in long, close-grouped strings. By the twelfth of the month the spots had become highly asymmetric; their heavy concentration resembled a spreading, blotchy rash on the hidden face of the sun. The escalated growth and proliferation would continue for several days to come.
Again, in the long view, this outbreak was a blip. A millennial tickle in the life of the sun.
Nothing extraordinary.
As the time line of human history goes, it was without documented scientific precedent.
Later, debate would arise over a suggestion by some scholars that the last comparable episode occurred in the summer of 480 B.C., a year for which Chinese, Korean, Babylonian, Celtic, and Mesoamerican records — including glyph-dated early Mayan stelae — present what has been interpreted as correlative evidence of rapidly changing sunspot patterns, and brilliant, tempestuous displays of the northern and southern lights many thousands of miles from the poles. That is the same summer King Leonidas I and his three hundred Spartan warriors made their heroic resistance against thousands of invading Persians at the Hot Gates, a narrow mountain pass between the Aegean coast and central Greece, only to be undone by a local betrayer, who showed the Persian force a route that led them over the mountains to a rear assault upon the defenders, killing them almost to a man.
A coincidence? Likely so. Although the oracle Leonidas consulted before deciding to hold the pass is said to have been influenced by his interpretation of some obscure cosmic portent.
Such speculation aside, it remains doubtful that a magnetic storm of even the greatest severity would have had a consequential impact on affairs in Greece or elsewhere in that ancient era.
This was, after all, many centuries before civilization became dependent on the telecommunications networks and electrical power grids that would be thrown into utter chaos by its shock waves.
In more than one sense, Pete Nimec’s trip to the hallway rest room was another step up the learning curve he’d foreseen at McMurdo.
Nimec supposed it was partly his own fault. The three or four cups of coffee he’d drunk in Willy’s passenger lounge had worked their way through him soon after the Herc was off-deck, but a peek behind the shower curtain enclosing its cargo section’s makeshift latrine — a fifty-five-gallon steel drum with an attached funnel for a urinal, and a loathsome, sloshing plastic honey bucket — persuaded him to try to hold out until after he reached Cold Corners. And he’d succeeded, asking Megan to show him where he could make a pit stop on the way to her office.
Inside the unisex rest room’s single stall, Nimec had found tugging himself out from under his boxers, long johns, flannel-lined blue jeans, and various overlapped shirts an uncomfortable exercise in patience and control. But he managed to get his business done without embarrassment.
Now he filled the sink, soaped his hands under the automatic dispenser, and washed them in the plugged basin, complying with a sign above the sink that said its taps weren’t to be left running while you cleaned up. Nimec was about to splash his face with some fresh, cold water when he read the second item on the extensive list of dos and don’ts, and discovered the limit was one basinful per person.
He dried his hands with a paper towel, tossed it in the trash receptacle, went to the door. A coin-operated condom machine was on the wall beside it. He paused and checked the sign. Unsurprisingly, the machine’s contents weren’t rationed.
Nimec emerged from the rest room. A small group of men and women looked askance at him as they walked past. Puzzled, he turned to where Megan was waiting for him down the hall.
He asked her about the plainly disagreeable glances once the two of them were seated in her office.
“I followed the rules,” he said, making the Scout’s-honor sign with his right hand. “Not that I can see how they’d know if I didn’t.”
She regarded him with amusement from across her desk.
“That bunch was mostly OAEs,” she said.
He pulled a face. “Mostly what?”
“Old Antarctic Explorers… longtimers on the ice,” she said. “Sorry. The lingo here gets contagious after a while.”
“And exactly how’s
“Isolation breeds a clannish mentality. The crew can be prickly toward outsiders. Or perceived outsiders. Their consumption of water is one of the things that raises spines.”
“Gracious,” Nimec said. “I hope they’re better hosts to those politicos who’re due for a visit.”
Megan Breen smiled her smile. It was always real. And always measured. Over the years Nimec had found that people either got the combination or they didn’t. The ones who did were usually charmed to helplessness. The ones who didn’t thought her calculating and manipulative. In the predominantly male world in which she functioned as Roger Gordian’s next-in-line, the split was close to even.
He got the smile completely.
“Our desalinization plant turns out fifteen thousand gallons of usable water on a good day,” she said. “That’s for cooking, cleaning, machine and vehicle use, hydroponics… the whole show. I know that may sound like a considerable amount, Pete. But it takes two gallons to wash your hands under a running tap, as opposed to one gallon washing in a filled basin. I could rattle off the comparative stats for high-versus-low-efficiency showers —”
“And toilets, I’m sure,” he said.
“One and a half gallons for ultra-low flush. Three to five for standard models.”
“You had that notice posted, didn’t you?”
“Worded it myself.”
“Then I won’t beat the issue of my lousy reception to death.”
They were both smiling now.
“Just wait till we get you a name patch,” she said. “When those malcontents find out who they offended, they’ll want to go scampering under a rug.”
Nimec sat a moment, glancing around the office. It was a small, well-ordered cubicle with bluish soundproof paneling and recessed overhead fluorescents. No windows. No decorative touches to enliven it. Two big maps covered nearly the entire wall to Megan’s right. One was a satellite image of the Antarctic continent.
Nimec turned back to Megan. The last time he’d seen her, she had been the embodiment of corporate chic,
