I Know This

There were no old buildings on the campus of Star City University. The Colony itself was only 32 years old— nearly 33, if you counted from Charter Day coming up in January. Or 37 if you counted from the day construction began. The “ground” which the campus occupied would be somewhere in between, depending on when the construction got around to that particular piece.

Where was I going with this? Linda Ryder paused and frowned. Her train of thought had been derailed by nitpicking Star City’s age. No old buildings…

Right. She’d been looking at the ivy trained to grow up the faux-brick walls of the Admin building and wondering why the designers had been so set on imitating the appearance of planetside colleges with centuries behind them.

What was the need for an above-decks campus at all, really? Intramural fields, some nice grounds to relax in between classes— that’s all that had to be there. Everything else would do just fine occupying the layers of decks below her feet.

Still, someone had thought the only major offworld university needed to look like someone else’s idea of what a university ought to look like, and so it was, with most of the classroom and research buildings heaving themselves up above “ground level” as if they were planetside, freestanding buildings instead of just upper floors on top the fully occupied decks below.

Maybe it was because Star City was so young. It was the third youngest of all the O’Neill Colonies. Linda grew up in the oldest: Aurora, coming up on its 70th Charter Day. Still a baby by comparison to Earthly cities, but at least there the structures that looked out-of-date did so because they actually were.

Her daily run took her on past Admin and toward the student center. Okay, she admitted to herself, the outdoor seating area for the coffee bar is nice. But even so, the rest of the student center could have been one deck down, with stairs up to the patio.

She spotted her friends at a table next to the Tree (a campus landmark: there were plenty of trees in Midway, but the Tree had been brought up from Earth as a sapling rather than a seed, and was now twice the size of any other tree on campus) and headed in their direction. They’d already ordered, and had a bottle of water waiting for Linda— she’d get coffee after she cooled down.

“I don’t know why you do that to yourself,” David said as Linda grabbed a paper napkin from the table and mopped her face.

“Because otherwise the sweat runs into my eyes,” she answered.

“That’s not what I meant.”

Linda knew that but ignored it. She opened the water bottle and took a long drink.

“Exercise is good for you, David,” Jenny said. “You should try it sometime. Otherwise you’ll drop dead of a heart attack before you’re forty.”

“You’re one to talk, when was the last time you did anything physical?”

“By day or by night?” Jenny replied with a calm smile.

Jenny Terrell, David Rose, and Frank Lewis had become Linda’s central circle of friends over the last couple of years, ever since they got grouped together in freshman Physics lab. Jenny and Linda had tried being roommates their sophomore year but it hadn’t worked out: they got on each other’s nerves too much while sharing a dorm room, and after a year had each found their own place off campus.

Frank now broke into the conversation to ask, “Linda, have you done the Quantum homework yet?”

“Working on it,” she answered carefully. In fact she’d known the answers at a glance, and finished the assignment pretty much as fast as she could enter the equations on her handscreen. But she didn’t want to say that.

Her friends knew she got straight A’s, at least on everything in the Physics department. She didn’t want them to know how easy it was.

“What time is it?” she asked. She needed to shower before her next class.

“Twelve thirty,” Jenny said.

She had an hour. No problem.

When it started getting darker, her first thought was that something had malfunctioned. Something had kicked the Colony into night mode accidentally, and the transparencies were polarizing to shut out the light. Or worse, the mirrors themselves had lost tracking on the Sun.

But that wasn’t it. Instinctively she lifted her eyes upward, squinting for a glance at the Sun, and its disk was right where it should be. But the Sun itself was darkening, yellowing on its way to orange.

“What’s going on?” Frank looked around at the suddenly dim patio. He didn’t look up: he hadn’t caught on yet.

Others had. Linda heard sudden shouts in the distance.

She didn’t have to squint to look at the Sun now.

“Oh my God,” Jenny whispered. “It’s the Sun.”

All four of them stared upward now.

“It’s impossible,” David said. “Impossible.”

“Something must be blocking it,” Frank said. “A dust cloud, or something is wrong with the mirrors. The Sun can’t cool down that fast, it’s not physically possible.”

The light reminded Linda of sunset pictures from Earth. But the Sun wasn’t setting. Its reflected image stood there in the sky, going out.

“It’s just a fluctuation,” Jenny said. “It must be. The Sun’s been flickering twenty years, this is just a bigger fluctuation.”

Darkness fell, and a dim emergency light came on over the door into the student center. Not the usual nighttime lighting, the battery system used during a power failure… or eclipse.

Linda found herself holding her breath. With difficulty, she forced herself to exhale, and breathe again. She said, softly, “What if it doesn’t come back?”

“It has to,” Frank said. “That much heat energy can’t just disappear.”

Linda heard more shouting, but it was distant. There didn’t seem to be any panic nearby: everyone was just stunned. People below decks probably didn’t even know what was happening, would think it was just a power malfunction. Linda and her friends continued to stare, transfixed, at the now dim, black circle of the Sun, surrounded by a sullen red corona.

“Will it go nova?” Jenny asked. “With no internal heat to keep pressure, there’ll be a gravitational collapse…”

“The Sun’s not big enough for a nova,” David said.

“I’m telling you it has to come back,” Frank insisted. “An object the Sun’s size, even if you stopped all fusion inside it on an instant, it can’t cool down that quickly. The energy has to go somewhere! Something is containing it, or screening it, or, or…”

“…or sending it elsewhere.” None of the others heard Linda’s quiet remark. The thought had come to her, in the same intuitive way as the answers on her physics homework, but she couldn’t pin it down.

She tore her eyes away from the Sun and looked at her friends. They continued to stare at the darkened Sun, but their faces, and their conversation— though whispered, filtered through astonishment— they didn’t seem afraid.

God help us, she thought, the world is ending, and we’re fascinated.

Suddenly there was a bright flash. Her friends cried out and turned away, covering their eyes in momentary pain from the sudden flare. Even Linda, looking away from the Sun at the moment of the flare, was dazzled and for a moment could see only glaring afterimages. By the time her eyes readjusted, everything looked normal, the Sun as bright as it ever was.

The others were still rubbing their eyes. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Frank lowered his hand and blinked. “Like a strobe light going off right in your face. But I think it’s okay.”

David and Jenny also seemed to be recovering. At least no one was saying they were blind.

After a few moments recovery, they stared at each other.

“Told you it had to come back,” Frank finally said.

#          #          #

There was general chaos around campus in the wake of the… whatever-it-was. Probably the same was true all over Star City— over all the Colonies.

The emergency had passed, at least for now. It had passed before shock could turn into fear and panic and now everyone was trading rumors, asking each other the same questions: “Did you see it? What do you think it was? Will it happen again?”

No panic, but new fear lurked in the background. Linda could feel it in the air, hear it in the tones of every voice. No one knew whether this would be an isolated event, a new pattern for the Sun’s unexplained fluctuation, or the sign that something worse was coming.

The clock counted its way around to 1330  and time for afternoon classes. With no better plan, Linda and the others headed to class, though they weren’t entirely sure it would actually happen.

They found about half the class had shown up. Professor Schaller was there, but he dispensed with the lecture planned on the syllabus and let the class discuss— or more like aimlessly chatter about— the Sun’s brief outage. He had data from the Astronomy Department’s solar observatory up on the lecture hall’s main screen and talked over what it showed, but it was easy to see he was as shaken as anyone else.

Linda, though, found herself frowning at the graphs on the screen, showing the drop in the Sun’s light and heat over time, and then the flash that ended the event. It wasn’t a steady drop, the line dropped in an odd sort of wobbly pattern, and looking at it she had a sudden sense of déjà vu.

“I know this,” she muttered to herself. “I’ve seen this before.”

The feeling only grew stronger as Professor Schaller overlaid a series of graphs showing how the Sun’s output had dropped in different wavelengths. The data showed the Sun hadn’t simply dimmed while keeping the same spectral features, as it might have appeared if something partly opaque had passed between it and the Earth-Moon system. Instead the graph showed a rapid cooling, followed by a sudden high-temperature flash a good deal hotter than the Sun’s norm, and then a lapse back to the normal range of fluctuations.

“No doubt this is significant,” Schaller said, working at the lectern controls to highlight parts of the graph. “If we integrate over these curves, taking the Sun’s average output as a baseline, we find that the extra energy emitted during the flash was exactly the amount that the Sun fell short during the cooling event.”

“So conservation of energy remains intact,” Frank said quietly. “It’s as if it was, I don’t know, bottled up somehow.”

“As if the Sun held its breath for a moment, and then let it out in one big puff,” Jenny said.

“I’m pretty sure that’s what the whole human race did, anyway,” David said.

Linda did not join in the conversation. The more data Professor Schaller displayed, the stronger her feeling of recognition grew.

Something contained the energy, almost the whole energy the Sun puts out, she thought. But then immediately: No, that’s not it. Something drew the energy away, cooling the Sun down as its heat got sucked right out of it. Like a machine drawing amps from an electrical circuit— only instead of using the energy for something, whatever had taken it then coughed it right back out again.

But what could draw enough power to drain a whole star? What sort of heat sink could drain so much?

She looked at the graph on the screen again, the strange but distinctive wobbly shape of its descending curve, and thought the answer was right on the tip of her mind. She’d seen that graph before. Somewhere.

“I know this,” she said out loud. “I know this.”

 

TO BE CONTINUED

1 comment for “I Know This

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *