Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [83]
‘How long will this one last?’
Abby turned back to face her computer. She looked at the depiction of the solar flare on the screen, pursed her lips in thought.
‘I don’t know. It’s a big one. I’d say about five days,’ she said.
A short silence followed as what she said sank in to everyone in the room.
‘Five days,’ Rebound breathed from behind Schofield.
Schofield was frowning in thought. He turned to Abby. ‘You say it disrupts the ionosphere, right?’
‘Right.’
‘And the ionosphere is . . .’
‘The layer of the earth’s atmosphere about 50 to 250 miles up,’ Abby said. ‘It’s called the ionosphere because the air in it is filled with ionised molecules.’
Schofield said, ‘Okay. So, a solar flare explodes on the surface of the sun and the energy it emits travels down to earth where it disrupts the ionosphere, which turns into a shield through which radio signals can’t pass, right?’
‘Right.’
Schofield looked at the screen again, and stared at the black splotches on the yellow-white graphic representation of the solar flare. There was one larger black hole in the middle of the yellow-white blob that held his attention.
‘Is it uniform?’ Schofield asked.
‘Uniform?’ Abby blinked, not comprehending.
‘Is the shield uniform in its strength? Or does it have weak points, inconsistencies, breaks in the shield that could be penetrated by radio signals? Like these black spots here.’
Abby said, ‘It would be possible to penetrate them, but it would be difficult. The break in the flare would have to be directly over this station.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Schofield said. ‘Is there any way that you could figure out when or if one of those breaks would be directly over us? Like, maybe, this one here.’
Schofield pointed at the large black hole in the centre of the yellow-white blob.
Abby studied the screen, evaluated the possibilities.
Finally, she said, ‘There might be a way. If I can bring up some previous images of the flare, I should be able to plot how fast it’s travelling across the continent and in what direction. If I can do that, then I should be able to make a rough plot of its course.’
‘Just do what you can,’ Schofield said, ‘and call me if you find anything. I want to know when one of those breaks is going to pass over this station, so we can be ready to send a radio signal to McMurdo when it does.’
‘You’ll have to fix the antenna outside –’
‘I’m already on it,’ Schofield said. ‘You just find me a break in that flare. We’ll get your antenna up again.’
In Washington, Alison Cameron was also sitting in front of a computer.
She was in a small computer lab in the Post’s offices. A microfilm viewing machine sat in the corner. Filing cabinets lined two of the four walls. Half a dozen computers filled the rest of the space in the small lab.
Alison found the screen she was looking for. The All-States Library Database.
There is a popular urban myth that the FBI has a tap on every library borrowing computer in the country, and that they use this facility to track down serial killers. The killer quotes Lowell at a homicide scene, so the FBI check up on every library in the country to see who’s been borrowing Lowell. Like all good urban myths, this is only a half-truth. There is a system (it is an updatable CD-ROM service) which crosslinks every library computer in the country, telling the user where a certain book can be found. It doesn’t list the names of every person who has borrowed that book. It just tells you where a particular book is located. You can search for a book in several ways: by the author, by the book’s title, or even by any unusual keywords that appear in the text of a book. The All-States Library Database was one such service.
Alison stared at the screen in front of her. She tabbed down to the ‘SEARCH BY KEYWORD’ button. She typed:
ANTARCTICA.
The computer whirred for about ten seconds, and the results of the search came up on the screen:
1,856,157 ENTRIES FOUND. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE A LIST?