The Hiccup

October 24, 2182, 0600 GMT

Eric Ivanov started awake, tense and shivering, to the sound of his bedside alarm pinging its final warning. Somehow he’d slept through the half hour of gentler sounds it started with— which normally woke him up, no problem— and now the alarm had progressed to the I’m done being subtle, buddy! stage.

It must be because of the nightmare. As the thought occurred to him, Eric knew that was the reason he was so tense in bed: he’d been fighting a nightmare all night. But the specific details faded away even as he tried to recall them. Something about a kind of red searchlight that he was trying to avoid, and then something dark casting a shadow over him. He couldn’t remember any more.

Even so, the restless night left him feeling strange and off-center as he got out of bed. The feeling clung to him as he showered and shaved, and he half expected to see some change in the mirror, like in a ghost story where the witness’s hair turns white overnight. But that only happened in stories. His twenty-nine-year-old face looked exactly like it always did, and nightmare he’d already mostly forgotten wasn’t going to change anything.

He put a news channel on the kitchen screen while he made coffee. They were replaying Alexander Monroe’s speech from the night before, just the same anti-Colonial rant as usual. “These wealthy offworlders stare down on our suffering world from their luxurious sky palaces, without so much as a pang of conscience while they steal the very air we breathe!”

Sky palaces, right. Eric looked around at his little three-room apartment. Sure, there were rich people with bigger apartments, the most expensive of which were actually on above-deck levels and had views of Midway park. But no one in the Colonies had a palace. What was the statistic? He’d read it somewhere, or maybe heard it in a speech from Charlie Safreth. The very largest single residence in Star City had 15 percent less square footage than the planetwide average for Earth. Sky palaces! Monroe’s campaign ads always put a picture of the parklands, whether Star City’s Midway or the equivalent from the other Colonies, side-by-side with the poorest hovel he could find anywhere on Earth, and implied the parks were private estates that every offworlder had.

Eric did an hour-long jog through Midway every morning, but that was as close as he came to living there. He thought the Colonies ought to put out an ad showing Midway side-by-side with the Grand Canyon, or Victoria Falls, or Mount Fuji. That would be the correct comparison.

Eric hoped to visit the Grand Canyon one day. He’d never been down to the planet.

He’d completely forgotten his nightmare, and the strange feeling it produced, when the news broadcast went to a commercial and the ad showed some product silhouetted against a bright red light. Eric didn’t even notice what they were selling, the picture brought the whole nightmare image flooding back and he hastily turned off the screen.

He was going to have to skip that run through Midway today. Sleeping to the end of the alarm cycle had put him a half hour behind. But he decided to take the above-deck tube to work instead of the usual slider. That would provide some compensation, at least he could enjoy the view of Midway as the train passed through it.

The tense, off-balance feeling followed him as he took his usual lift up to the park level of Midway. Instead of starting down the jogging path he headed for the nearest tube station. The display said the next train would be in ten minutes. He called up the book he’d been reading on his handscreen but couldn’t get into it, and after reading the same paragraph three times shut down the screen and put it away.

The train arrived, Eric boarded along with a few other commuters— it was still earlier than peak rush hour— and found a seat. He tried to cure his strange mood by enjoying the view through the transparency as the train slid out of the station. From Midway it would be a twenty-five kilometer ride to the sunward hub where Eric worked.

Eric normally took the view for granted but today paid attention. Strange— he’d never been on Earth, never seen a landscape od any other shape (at least not in person) and yet his eyes insisted on telling him the tube ran down the floor of a broad, U-shaped valley. The jumble of buildings in various styles seemed to be visibly tilted as they climbed the sides of the valley, and further away they sprouted sideways out of vertical walls. He knew, and could tell himself over and over, that those vertical walls were actually as level as the “valley floor.” He could remind himself that if he walked in that direction he’d always seem to be at the bottom of the valley, until he’d walked all the way around and back to his starting point. But he couldn’t force his eyes to see it that way. Human spatial awareness wasn’t built for a setting where the gravity came from centrifugal force.

His eyes drifted upward until he looked directly toward the opposite transparency, one of three that directed reflected sunlight into the Colony interior. The shield atop the moving train made sure he couldn’t look directly at the Sun itself, and the result showed him the nightmare image again: a central shadow surrounded by glaring light. White this time instead of red, but still…

Eric lowered his eyes. Dust it, why can’t I shake this? It was just a stupid dream.

By the time the tube train reached its final station in the sunward dome, Eric’s nervous feeling had hardened into a conviction: something was going to go wrong today.

He didn’t know what, or what it might have to do with the image of the red light and shadow that he kept seeing, but it would be something. As much as he told himself it was ridiculous, that premonitions were nonsense, that nightmares were just nightmares, he couldn’t shake the certainty. Something would go wrong.

He got out of the train and looked up. Now he wasn’t at the bottom of the valley but on stage in front of an amphitheater. An impossible amphitheater whose climbing rows curved upwards until they met overhead, hanging upside-down over his head, each riser forming a smaller concentric circle and all together revealing the giant bowl of the sunward dome, the center of business and government for Star City.

Eric thought the structures climbing the inside of the dome resembled nothing so much as the battlements of an old Earth castle, perched precariously on the amphitheater rows, and made of white metal instead of stone. Higher up, closer to the hub of the Colony’s rotation, gravity grew less and the architecture grew more fanciful, spires and balconies extending up toward the axis, seeming too fragile to stand. Architects loved the chance to design for low gravity.

The shadeside dome, at the other end of the Colony’s fifty-kilometer length, housed Star City’s industries and wasn’t nearly so decorative.

The Star City Power Systems office was high enough for gravity to be about half normal. Its location on the attractive end of the Colony was due simply to the fact that the sunward end was where most of the solar energy collected. But they didn’t have any scenic balconies looking to the interior: the SCPS office rested on the outside of the dome.

Eric was doing his time in the override control room, widely accepted as the most boring job in the whole of Colony engineering. Spending all day staring at the consoles, ready to take manual control if something happened the computers couldn’t handle— which it never did. Even the most dedicated malingerers disliked it, so no one got assigned to override control permanently. SCPS rotated people through it. When it was your turn, you did a shift.

It won’t be boring today, Eric thought.

Yes it will, he answered himself, but still couldn’t make himself believe it.

“Eric, hi!” Larry Richardson emerged from one lift just as Eric stepped out of the other. “Ready for the nap room?” Larry also had override duty that day.

“I don’t know,” Eric said. “I had some weird nightmare last night and it’s got me jumpy.”

“Well you’ve come to the right place to relax.” Larry gave a low-gravity hop about five feet into the air, then bowed as if people were applauding. “Thank you ladies and gentlemen, that was the only interesting thing you’ll see today.”

Eric managed a smile, but the truth was he found Larry’s antics tiresome even on the best of days.

They walked through reception and past the little museum where the school kids took tours, and on through the back corridors. Past the main control rooms where people were actually doing work on managing Star City’s electrical grid, and finally to override control. It was either the top floor of SCPS or the basement, depending on which side of the dome you looked from. Its position on the outside gave it windows to observe the Sun directly, just in case anyone wanted to.

Override Control: the room that existed for the sole purpose of being ready if the Sun itself, rather than any equipment malfunction, went wrong.

For twenty years the Colonies, and astronomers both offworld and on Earth, had watched the Sun flicker for reasons no scientist could explain. In all that time it hadn’t done anything that required anyone in any Colony’s power systems to do anything about it.

Would it today? Eric still couldn’t shake his premonition.

Besides Eric and Larry, Mary Pederson and the new guy were on override duty that day. Mary wasn’t there yet when he and Larry entered the room, but the new guy was. What was his name? Mike something… no, Michaels. It was his last name, not his first. Eric had heard his first but couldn’t remember it just then. Anyway, Michaels was the only one in the control room. The previous shift must have left without waiting for the entire next group to arrive. Careless. The way everyone felt about the most boring job at SCPS.

Eric and Larry took two of the four seats in Override Control, and settled down to their day of staring idly at automated screens.

After a few minutes, Larry said, “You see Monroe’s speech last night?”

“Yeah,” Eric said.

Larry shook his head. “That guy’s definitely got dust in his filters. There ought to be a low against letting crazy people run for office.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Eric answered. “Sure he’s a jackass, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. People on Earth are hurting. It sounds way better for a politician to point to an enemy than to just say ‘Sorry, it’s the Sun, can’t do anything about it.’ We’re lucky he’s only getting twenty percent of the polls.”

“Some luck,” Larry said. “They say he’s drawing most of his vote from the United Farmers, which means the Technocrats are going to win the presidency.”

“So you vote Farmer then?”

“Don’t you?”

Eric didn’t answer. He generally voted Technocrat but didn’t want to get into an argument.

He watched the data on his screen, real time measurements of solar energy striking the Colony’s collectors. The numbers wavered randomly up and down, shifting up to five percent away from their average values every few seconds, but the computer easily handled the variations, buffering the energy output on its way into the city power grid. The output numbers remained steady as a rock.

When it started, those shifts had a time period of months. Once the Sun’s flicker was noticed, astronomers went back to older data and with the advantage of hindsight saw a trend building from decades earlier still, with variations measured in years. Now it was seconds. Some astronomer predicted the period would shorten and shorten until the flickering just blurred back into a steady glow at the Sun’s average brightness, and Earth’s environmental crisis of the last twenty years would be over.

Though the period had shortened, the magnitude of the variation had remained steady as a rock: a chaotic flicker that stayed within five percent of average solar output. Eric glanced at the patch of sunlight streaming through one of the control room’s transparencies. He couldn’t see that it was flickering, but it was.

Colony power systems compensated. Colony crops flourished in their controlled environment. But the Sun played havoc with Earth’s ecosystems. It caused violent storms. It caused droughts and famine. It was wrecking the economy of the whole Terran Federation.

Today, the little voice of premonition whispered in Eric’s mind, it will do something worse.

Mary arrived a couple of minutes later, the last anything that happened for quite some time. The shift crawled by, broken up by occasional small talk but mostly just a dull ticking of minutes spent staring with half-glazed eyes at the endlessly flickering numbers on the screens.

That was how it usually went. For Eric it felt like he was on an out-of-control slider hurling him toward a bulkhead with no way to stop. It was beyond a premonition now, it was like nothing he’d ever felt before. He knew something was coming. He could feel it rushing closer and closer. And he kept seeing the image of the Red Light and Shadow: in shadows on walls, in the glow of indicator lights. He felt like he was drowning in it.

He got up and started pacing, checking one console after another, over and over.

“Eric, slow down,” said Larry. “You know if you start looking like you care about this job, they’ll make you do it all the time.”

Eric managed a smile and sat down back at his own console. His eyes kept darting between his screen, and the observation window.

It was 1231 hours.

He frowned. Did that patch of sunlight suddenly look different? His nerves were singing. He was just imagining it.

No! It was different. It had gone yellower. Eric looked back at the instruments. Every reading showed a simultaneous downswing: light, heat, radiation, neutrino emissions, magnetic field, solar wind. Everything. All already past that five percent range, and dropping fast. As if the whole Sun was just disappearing.

The alarms hadn’t even sounded yet, but Eric blew right past the protocol.

He ignored the controls at his own console. He leaped out of his chair and dove for the main buss console. He stabbed at a control. The computer demanded an ID and password. Eric cursed and tried not to let his fingers fumble at the keyboard.

The others hadn’t even noticed something was wrong yet. Larry turned toward him, mouth opening. “Eric, what—”

“Batteries!” shouted Eric. “Get all station keeping systems onto batteries now! And cut breakers to the rest of the Colony, save everything for vital systems.”

Without power to the gyros and nav systems, the Colony could drift, and it wasn’t a spacecraft ready for fast attitude adjustment. It could be days before they could get a sun lock back, unless they saved the navigation fix right now.

Assuming there was a Sun to lock on to.

Larry gaped at him and started to protest, but just then the alarms kicked in. Mary collected herself enough to say, “Eric, you’re breaking procedure. You’re supposed to adjust the power buffer to compensate—”

“It’s not going to be enough,” Eric said. “There’s not going to be any incoming power to buffer. The Sun’s going all the way dark.” Eric knew that. He realized he’d known it all morning.

“That’s crazy,” Larry said, but he sounded uncertain. The light was orange now, and they could all see it.

Eric got the crucial systems switched over to batteries and spared a glance toward the window. He could stare directly at the Sun now. Its disk was a dingy orange, deepening to red, dimming visibly fast.

Breakers next. Stop the Colony’s automatic systems from trying to run the whole city off the batteries. There were plenty of onsite emergency backups around the city but they wouldn’t trigger until the central grid went down— and it wouldn’t go down until it sucked the batteries dry.

The other two seemed paralyzed with shock, sitting at their consoles staring wide-eyed in shock, at the readings and at the darkening light from the window. Eric knew he’d have been the same if not for his premonition.

He didn’t have time to think about that now.

Other two? Eric blinked. Where was the new guy? He looked around and saw Michaels working furiously at his console. As if sensing Eric’s eyes on him, he looked up quickly. “I’m getting the eclipse program running before the Sun mirrors lose tracking.”

If Eric felt any self-satisfaction at his quick action, it vanished in an instant. Michaels had thought faster than he had, premonition or no premonition. The eclipse program would do everything Eric was trying to do piecemeal, automatically. It hadn’t even occurred to him as something he might try— normally, it ran on a schedule set by the astronomers.

“Eclipse program running,” Michaels announced.

No need for Eric to keep frantically working controls. No need for Larry or Mary to get over their shock. Not for the moment anyway.

The Sun was dull red and still fading. The corona stood out brightly but had turned red as well, rippling and glaring, and making the Sun’s disk look black by comparison—

The red light and shadow! This was what Eric had seen in his nightmare, had been seeing all day long. He felt himself freeze up as he stared at it. How? How did I know?

Everyone else stared at the window as well. “It’s impossible,” whispered Larry. “It can’t cool down that fast, it’s against every law of physics…”

Eric felt a touch on his shoulder and jumped. He tore his eyes away from the window and saw Michaels standing beside him.

“You see it, don’t you?” Michaels asked. “The Red Light and Shadow.” Somehow Eric could hear the capital letters in Michaels’ voice.

“It looks like that, doesn’t it,” Eric said.

“No. I mean you see It. Don’t’ freeze up on me, it looks like you and I are the only ones who weren’t caught off guard.”

Their eyes locked for a moment and Eric was startled by a bright gleam of green in the other man’s. Then it passed, and they both turned back to the window.

#          #          #

Darkness fell across Star City, across the other twenty-two other O’Neill Colonies and the hundreds of smaller orbital platforms, across Copernicus on the Moon. On Earth, night fell everywhere. The sun was only a sullen red snarl, and the cold stars illuminated nothing.

#          #          #

“It’s going to flare when it comes back,” Michaels said.

“I know,” Eric answered, but didn’t know how he knew.

The eclipse program had shut down power to most of the Colony. All around Star City, local battery backups were keeping emergency lights on. The program was waiting for power to resume coming in from the solar collectors before it reconnected but it wasn’t expecting any flare when the light came back. The power surge, with nowhere to go, would burn out the central grid.

Eric raised his voice. “We need to modify the eclipse program. Cut all the breakers around the collectors. We don’t want any overloads when— if the Sun flares up as much as it’s gone down.”

Larry’s face was chalk white, and for once he lacked a flippant remark. But he returned to his console and started working. Immediate shock had passed. Mary joined Michaels at the main buss panel. For a few minutes everyone worked in silence.

“All collectors to standby,” she said. “All breakers open.”

“It’ll be any second now,” Michaels said.

There! The Sun flashed back into life like a strobe light going off, and Eric didn’t need the instruments to know Michaels had been right: that first surge was way over normal. It lasted only a few seconds, and then with shattering suddenness, every readout settled right back to normal— including a five percent flicker, ruffling up and down as if nothing unusual had happened.

A few more seconds of stunned silence and then the room resounded with relieved cheers from the small override crew. Eric heard sounds echoing down the hallway: louder cheers from the larger staff in main control.

“Dust, I’ll never complain about override duty being boring again,” said Larry, his voice shaking. His laughter had a hysterical edge to it.

“Don’t relax yet,” Mary said. “It could happen again.”

Eric silently shook his head. It wasn’t going to happen again. Not today, anyway. But he could no more explain how he knew that than he could try to tell anyone how a nightmare had warned him it was coming.

A commotion at the door: the shift supervisor from main control, Ted Martens, appeared with a crowd of other technicians behind him. “Dusted good work, people,” he said. “Dust, we were all still staring at the screens with our mouths hanging open, and you had the systems prepped by the time we even knew what was happening.”

“It was Eric,” Larry said. “He jumped right on it, even before I noticed anything was wrong.”

“Good work, Ivanov.” Ted turned toward Eric and gave him a hearty clap on the shoulder.

“It was the new guy more than me,” Eric admitted. “He had the idea to use the eclipse program while I was still trying to patch the systems one by one.”

Ted looked at him blankly. “New guy? What new guy?”

Eric frowned. “Michaels.”

“There was an unauthorized person working here?”

“I assumed he was taking a shift here, like the rest of us.”

Ted shook his head. “Only the three of you were assigned to override for this shift. Who was this extra guy?”

“His name’s Michaels, I don’t know his first name. He just started work a couple of days ago.” Eric stared at his boss, waiting for him to say Oh that guy, right, I did assign him to override control today. But that wasn’t it. Michaels must have decided on his own to drop in on the override control room. As if he’d also had a premonition— and understood it far better than Eric had, and went where he knew he’d been needed.

But Ted’s puzzlement was more than that. “Eric,” he said, “we haven’t had a new hire in two months.”

“But—” Eric blinked. He turned to his coworkers looking for help. They knew Michaels, Larry was there when he introduced himself a few days earlier.

But both Larry and Mary were staring at him like they didn’t know what he was talking about.

For some reason, Eric found that even more disturbing than what had just happened to the Sun.

 

TO BE CONTINUED