Cold War

handed as far as pilots go, but I’ll explain that later. Meanwhile, I think I’ve figured out how to kill two birds with one electronic stone.”

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, Maryland

The men were known as Ketchup and Fries.

These were of course not their given names.

Ketchup was really Jonathan Ketchum, a sixty-year-old project scientist at the Experimenters’ Operations Facility in Goddard’s Building 26, the operational nucleus of the SOHO project. He had been with the EOF’s permanent MDI/SOI team since its establishment in the mid-nineties, and was considered one of its top men by the principal investigator.

Fries was Richard Frye, another member of the MDI/ SOI team. At twenty-six, he was its most recent addition, regarded as a babe in the woods by senior group members. This is the embedded reflex of those with tenure who are protective of their own status. Ketchum saw in Frye an inquisitiveness and joy of discovery that was like a bright reflection of himself as a young man. He knew Frye was already a better scientist than most, and had potential to be the best by far.

Ketchum had taken Frye under his wing from the start of the young man’s NASA employment, but their student-mentor relationship soon grew into an intellectually stimulating bond of equals. Ketchum imparted a maturity of understanding to Frye; Frye helped recharge Ketchum’s sense of wonderment daily.

Together they had become a team within a team.

Ketchup and Fries.

Nobody could say with any certainty who had cooked up the nickname. Because its ingredients included a heaping measure of disparagement, and perhaps a pinch of envy, credit went unclaimed and unassigned.

In the beginning they found the label vexatious. Eventually, however, they came to bear it with a certain defiant fondness. At some point their feelings became almost proprietary. Ketchup. Fries. What would one be without the other?

Besides, just look at the crap the visiting observers regularly threw at them.

The Auslanders, as they’d been tagged (again without attribution), were a group of scientists from institutions in France, Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., and a handful of other European Space Agency nations who had either contributed to the design and construction of SOHO’s gadgetry or were involved in studying its returns. All SOHO’s participants could retrieve this information from an archived, indexed, easily searchable electronic database without ever leaving their respective countries, but guest committees from abroad would sometimes show up at Goddard during research campaigns that engaged several of the observatory’s instruments at once.

Ostensibly their motivation was pure and unselfish, springing from a desire to help foster a spirit of international collaboration and share in the immediacy and excitement of these campaigns. The real, dirty scrub was that the Web curators of “collaborating” institutions often delayed inputting e-base updates about major discoveries, while their employers raced to contact news organizations and grab the glory — and subsequent funding windfalls — for themselves. It was a good bet that every principal investigator had a number that would provide fast access to a local CNN bureau chief programmed into his phone’s memory.

A joint operation to examine the current cyclical peak of sunspot activity had been under way for over two years now without the EOF group’s foreign colleagues showing any inclination whatsoever to pay them a house call. Then, lo and behold, with the recent evidence from SWAN and MDI/SOI that the sun had developed an acute case of the measles on its far side, they had come pouring into Goddard from astrophysics labs around the world, arriving with effervescent camaraderie, bon jour, gutten tag, and cheerio. And though the NASA scientists did acknowledge that both solar observation devices primarily responsible for the new findings were European in origin, they were resentfully convinced their co-investigators — a.k.a. unwanted party crashers, a.k.a. the Auslanders — were pushing and bumping their way through the door for one reason, and one alone: to make sure nobody at NASA beat them to the flash-dial button.

Today Frye had made it his godly mission to get to the EOF well ahead of the polyglot horde, and was probably at his workstation hours before they had begun to yawn, blink, and stretch through their morning wake-up routines. He himself had been unable to catch any sleep after bringing home printouts of the previous evening’s final MDI/ SOI data logs, and using them as the basis for an intricate series of equations prepared with what remained his three favorite computational tools — a #3 pencil, a legal pad, and his own scrupulously logical brain. All the observables told him that the sun’s helioseismologic agitation had increased by tremendous — in fact, nearly exponential — leaps and bounds in the last twenty-four hour period, and he’d been eager to do two things: check the overnight logs for further changes, and see how his data and math jibed with the latest information from SWAN, whose nonresident Auslander monitoring area just happened to be on the other side of a glass partition from his own true-blue resident project scientist area… and, well, well, wouldn’t you know, it also just happened to be unoccupied at that early hour.

Now he sat at a bank of display terminals, pondering SWAN’s most recent full-sky maps of the sun… or more accurately, the sun’s hydrogen envelope. Each spectroscopic image had been composed over a regular three-day interval, and was color-graded to profile the radiation intensities—“hot” and “cool” spots — of different coordinates on the envelope. Because the probe was in an almost stationary position relative to earth, following its elliptical revolutions around the sun, the equatorial solar plane showed up as elongated, and each map resembled an Easter egg splashed with various shades of purple, orange, green, and yellow.

Soon Frye’s heart was pounding. He got out his cellular phone and rang his complementary half at home.

“Hello?”

“Ketch, what’re you doing?”

“Dripping shower water on my bedroom carpet at the moment,” Ketchum said. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Time for you to get your ass over here to the center.”

“What’ve you turned up?” Ketchum’s tone had abruptly swung from mild annoyance to sharpest curiosity.

“Look, you remember that bullet we dodged last April… the solar flare that would’ve been all hell if it hadn’t missed Earth?”

“Of course,” Ketchum said. “The X-17…”

“Well, I think we’re about to find ourselves downstream from a roarer that’ll make our X-17 look like a cap gun popping off.”

“Are you certain you’re not overestimating—”

“This one looks like the beast, Ketch. I mean it. The fucking beast. And it’ll be charging right at us once it’s hatched.”

Ketchum took an audible breath at the other end of the line.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

Marble Point, Antarctica (77°25’ S, 163°49’ E)

“Hey, Russ, you’re back in right the nick. Got an e-mail inside from that unbelievable redhead over at Cold Corners.”

Russ Granger jumped from the Bell’s cockpit onto the helipad, his boots mashing down on thumbnail ripples of white powdery snow, a coat he figured had to be close to a foot deep. When he’d left two hours earlier to fly a sling-load of food rations out to the Lake Hoare camp in Taylor Valley, the landing area was clear, its markings visible from a good altitude. But that was how it was in this place. Sastrugi, as the wavy drifts of snow were called, formed quickly parallel to a rising wind, and it had picked up a great deal since his departure.

He looked at the parka-clad station manager. Though the sky was still showing a lot of blue, snowflakes were blowing through the air from some widely spaced cloud scuds that had come in over the ice shelf.

“Megan Breen?” Granger said.

The station manager’s hooded head bobbed up and down. “You heard me say ‘unbelievable,’ right? Should I have added the word ‘hot’?”

Granger pulled up his own fleece-trimmed hood against the stinging flurries.

“That woman’s a hundred percent business, Chuck,” he said. “Take my word for it, there’s nothing in that message to make either of us sweaty.”

Chuck Trewillen motioned to his rear. Beyond the depot’s fuel lines stood three orange Quonset huts and a