Ursula Doorne went over the latest solar activity data, seeking the patterns that warned of imminent instability in the Sun’s magnetic fields. Normally she’d be reasonably confident of her ability to scan through the data and pick out those patterns, although it wasn’t her specialty. After having been surprised twice now, she was no longer feeling so confident.
In fact, she was feeling very much like a rank beginner all over again. A whole lot of stuff she had assumed about the way in which the Sun — and by extension main-sequence stars of that size in general — operated was now very much in question once again. Theories that had been considered pretty much standard when she was doing her undergraduate work were now having to be reconsidered.
When she’d been a student, she’d thought it would be so exciting to be a scientist during such a major paradigm shift. And quite honestly, it might well have been, if the science she was dealing with were something in distant galaxies, so far away as to effectively be abstract. But this was stuff that could mean the difference between life and death for thousands of people up here on the Moon, millions down on Earth. And not just faceless masses, but her own family, her colleagues, her neighbors. Her own husband was a pilot-astronaut, and while spacecraft shielding was a hell of a lot better than in the early days of Apollo and Zond, it still provided only sufficient protection for ordinary solar storms. For the big X-class ones, the astronauts depended in getting sufficient warning that they could get to shelter, whether in one of the larger orbital facilities or on the surface.
And if the Sun isn’t behaving the way our theories say it should, our forecasts are going to be just as unreliable.
Maybe that was why she felt as much at sea as right after the Expulsions began, when she got a message from the training department that she was being assigned an intro to astronomy class. And not even an undergraduate-level one. This one was going to be aimed at middle-school kids, at a time when she wasn’t even sure how to talk to kids that age, let alone describe the discipline she’d spent a lifetime mastering in words they could understand.
And you went back to first principles. Started with the story of early humans looking up at the sky and seeing the lights in them, and realizing over time that there were patterns to their movements. There’s got to be a new set of patterns in the data, but we just don’t know how to see them yet. Best case, it’ll turn out that our current theories are a special case, and we just haven’t seen the conditions that are leading to what we’re observing. Let’s hope we don’t have to throw out everything we thought we knew and start all over.
And then her phone rang. She’d halfway expected it to be one of her colleagues with a new insight on the data. Instead it was Ken Redmond from Engineering.
“Dr. Doorne, we’ve got a problem down here at the station. You’re our best signals processing person who isn’t tied up in one kind of quarantine or another. Can you get down here and take a look at it?”
In this context “the station” would refer to Shepardsport Pirate Radio. For the most part she’d viewed it as something on the order of the underground newspaper that had been circulated at her high school, albeit a little more approved by the authorities than those photocopied sheets that passed from hand to hand every morning. But given that the head of Engineering was specifically requesting her skills, there wasn’t much way of saying no.
“I’ll be on my way.”