Spruance Del Curtin had come to the Astronomy Department a little early today in hopes of touching base with Dr. Doorne, not just about his ongoing work for her, but also about the statistics class which had been in a state of suspension ever since the first serious CME threat. However, he arrived to find the entire department in what could only be described as a situation of organized chaos.
People were coming and going, about half of them talking on their phones. From the halfalogues he could hear, it sounded like most of them were talking to colleagues elsewhere in the Earth-Moon system. Whatever it was, it clearly had them worried, but most of what they were saying was way too technical for him to make heads or tales of. A lot of numbers, terms that made him think of the engineering side of radio broadcasting, all of which soon became such an intense information overflow that there was no way he could even hope to follow it.
And then here was Dr. Doorne, breaking off a conversation with someone on the other end of a phone connection. “Sprue, I have a new data set I need you to sanitize ASAP. You’ll find it in the usual folder.” She rattled off a file name that was an alphanumeric string.
There was nothing to do but say, “Yes, ma’am” and hurry over to the computer. Already Dr. Doorne was heading off to confer with someone else about whatever she was getting from her colleague elsewhere.
As soon as Sprue logged on and pulled up the data file, he had a good idea what it probably was. However, Dr. Doorne’s tone made it pretty clear that he was not to ask any questions or or otherwise do anything that would compromise his ability to get the data ready for whatever she was planning to do with it. Whatever it represented, it was so critical that there was no time to risk introducing bias because he just had to find out what he was looking at.
And if he was right and it did involve solar activity data, it might well be a matter of life and death for people in space and some of the smaller lunar habitats that weren’t nearly as well shielded as a big settlement like Shepardsport.