Phase Shift (15 page)

John Rice made his living stargazing.

Little Johnny Rice got his first telescope
when he was ten. Back then, he'd made a habit of setting his alarm
for the wee hours of the morning when everyone was still asleep,
save for the farmer a-milking his cows, just to watch the stars.
Through the filter of his telescope lens, John saw everything from
satellites to shooting stars, from comets to planets.

Even all those years ago, John Rice knew.
Knew that short of becoming an astronaut, short of being able to
literally reach out and touch the stars, no job would ever satisfy
him.

It was tough in the beginning, living a life
surrounded by people grinning and nodding. Grinning and nodding and
replying "Of course you are," in a condescending tone whenever they
asked Little Johnny Rice what he was going to be when he grew up.
But soon enough, they came around.

During his undergrad he studied physics and
astronomy. It was sometime during those three years he sobered up
and realized a life with his head literally in the stars was not
for him. He was afraid of heights for one. Needed thick
prescription glasses to correct his vision, too, something that
could not be achieved with contacts (Can you even wear contacts in
space? he often wondered). And he was way too chicken-shit to go
under the knife—no way was anyone going to start carving away at
his eyes like a Thanksgiving Day turkey.

John soon discovered that being an
astrophysicist was almost as good as being an astronaut, as far as
the chicks were concerned. And that was good enough for him.

So that was how John Rice, grad student in
astrophysics at the University of Florida, found himself stationed
right back in his home town at the Goddard Space Flight Center for
his internship, helping some know-it-all post-doctoral student do
his research.

A job in astrophysics, it turned out, was
not all it was cracked up to be. More often than not his job was to
sit at his desk, staring at bullshit statistics streaming across
the computer screen like Matrix code. When he wasn't staring at the
computer screen, he found himself pouring over printouts
documenting the same bullshit statistics. Officially his job was to
look for patterns in the data, for evidence of sun spot flare-ups,
though mostly what he did was count the hours until the clock said
four-thirty and he could go home. As far as Rice was concerned,
even watching the paint peel on the walls of his dive flat was more
interesting.

Rice looked over to his so called "research
partner", Henry Osmond III. The way Rice saw it, Ozzie (as he liked
to be called) was most comfortable when he had one finger up his
nose and his head up his asshole. Ozzie was supposed to be Rice's
partner on the project, even though Rice wound up doing most of the
work. Ozzie was one of those guys who was too cool for school. Had
a father in a high place that got him into the program, regardless
of his undergrad performance. No matter.

On that particular day, Rice found himself
sitting at his computer monitor, watching the same boring
statistics he'd been watching over the past six months, when he
noticed a blip. He re-checked the stats, and sure enough, there it
was—a blip. So Rice called his buddy Ozzie over, quiet-like, so as
not to alert everyone in the room, in case it was nothing.

"What's crawled up your butt, Rice?" That
was good ol' Ozzie, alright: rude, crude, and heavy on the
'tude.

"This is serious, man," Rice told him, as if
Ozzie'd ever been serious a single moment in his life. "It's SOHO.
I think there's a problem," he said, pointing to the line of data
containing the anomaly on his computer screen.

Ozzie stood behind him, staring at the line
of data on the screen just above Rice's fingertip. Rice figured
maybe, if Ozzie'd stare long enough at the screen, something would
give—either the stats would start to make sense to him, or he'd pop
a blood vessel. Probably the latter was more likely. Rice was just
about ready to share this bit of insight with Ozzie when he said,
"So there's an error. Reload, Ass-wipe." Rice suspected that for
Ozzie, 'Ass-wipe' was a term of endearment. It was almost enough to
give him the warm fuzzies.

"I already have," Rice told him. "The data's
still the same."

"'SOHO9500'?" Ozzie read. "What the fuck is
that?"

Ozzie's off-color language was an acquired
taste, and in that somewhat educational setting, Rice had yet to
acquire a taste for it, even after weeks of working with him. "I
don't know," he said. It was true. More incredible than what the
data indicated—a small solar flare originating from Earth as
opposed to the sun—was the handle of the satellite reporting the
anomaly—SOHO9500. Because, as far as Rice knew, they didn't have a
satellite using that handle.

Rice turned to look at Ozzie who was still
standing behind his chair. Ozzie stared back at him,
expressionless, a look that was par for the course where Ozzie was
concerned. "Do you think we should call Bob?" Rice asked.

"Fuck if I know," Ozzie replied.

Seeing that Ozzie wasn't going to be
offering an opinion on the matter any time in the near future, Rice
made the decision for the both of them. "I'm calling Bob," he
said.

Bob Diaz, post-doc at the University of
Maryland and supervisor of the work study program at Goddard
arrived post-haste. Rice showed him the data upon his arrival. Diaz
was speechless for a moment. He stood there shaking his head and
scratching his scalp.

"A C1 radiation burst," he finally said.
"And from SOHO Prime, no less. I'll be damned."

"Holy shit! A C1!" Ozzie blurted.

"Check your manual, Osmond," said Diaz
flatly. "C-class solar flares are small and usually have no impact
on Earth."

"I know that," Ozzie quietly defended.

"Uh, Bob," Rice said, "what's SOHO
prime?"

"The Solar Heliographic Observatory, unit
one."

"Unit one? I thought 9501 was unit one."

"Hence the number one in its ID?" Ozzie
muttered, either in an effort to show he was smarter than Rice to
have figured out something Rice couldn't or in an attempt at simple
sarcasm. Very simple.

Diaz seemed to ignore Ozzie (as most people
at Goddard were wont to do) save for a quick frown in his
direction. He took another long, hard look at the data and then
began to fill Ozzie and Rice in on the history of the first Solar
Heliographic Observatory unit, SOHO9500.

In the early nineties, Bob explained, NASA,
in partnership with the European Space Agency, sought to place a
satellite at a point mid-way between the Earth and the Sun in order
to observe solar activity. Shortly after launch, however,
technicians detected a problem, a failure in the stage two rocket
burn designed to take SOHO Prime into its monitoring position. The
rockets never fired. Try as they might, the astronomical societies
of the planet could not hail her in order to make the necessary
corrections to her flight plan. As a result, SOHO Prime was
abandoned, destined to spend eternity in high synchronous orbit
somewhere above the planet.

Rice chanced a look at Ozzie. His eyes were
glazed over, his mouth wide open, par for the course when
explaining something to Ozzie.

Almost immediately, Diaz continued, a second
SOHO unit was commissioned, an exact clone of the first, with a few
minor adjustments to the stage two rockets and the addition of a
few more instruments to her payload. And so—just like that—SOHO
Beta replaced SOHO Prime. SOHO Prime was all but forgotten. And why
not? Why belabour the loss of a few million dollars worth of finely
calibrated, extremely delicate equipment, no matter how
useless?

"Anyway, SOHO Prime has remained no more
than a hunk of worthless space junk ever since."

"Why would we start getting readings from
her now?" Rice asked. "You said she was shut down,"

Diaz shrugged. "A large solar flare can
wreak havoc with satellites in orbit, maybe it coaxed her into
re-booting. Or maybe it was nudged by a meteorite and that did it.
Damned if I know.

"One of the reasons she was put out of
commission was because she was in the wrong orbit and couldn't
report the required readings." Diaz seemed to consider the
possibilities. "Up until today, scientists believed she was facing
Earth, but sometime in the past decade or so, the orbit must have
shifted.

“As near as I can figure, the blast could
have come from one of three locations." Diaz righted his baseball
cap on his head, pulled over a chair and straddled it backwards,
resting his chin on his hands on the back of it. "The best case
scenario is that the satellite just happened to be facing the sun
when the C1 was released.

"Alternately, the blast might have come from
deep space." Diaz visibly shuddered as he considered his final
option. "If the C1 didn't originate from the sun, and it didn't
originate from space, that means the only other place it could have
originated was on Earth. And if it originated on Earth, well
then..." He let his voice trail off, as if he could not bear to
finish the thought.

"Terrorism. Anarchy. Third World War," Ozzie
said, finishing the thought for him. He smiled. His eyes seemed to
gleam, as if energized by the thought of Armageddon. Rice stared at
Ozzie for a long, hard minute, surprised to hear anything from
Ozzie at all at that point, shocked he was following the
conversation, let alone understanding it.

"I want a full work up on SOHO Prime's
telemetry," Diaz told Rice. "I need to know the attitude and period
of her orbit. When you got that, back-trace her telemetry. I need
to know her exact location and the position of her sensors when she
detected the C1."

"Yes, sir," Rice said.

Ozzie shot Rice a glance that had "Ass-wipe"
written all over it.

"How long until we have a grasp on that, do
you think?" Diaz asked.

"I don't know, sir," Rice said. He thought
about it for a moment. "A few hours maybe?"

"I want a preliminary report in three."

Rice smiled, nodded, and turned his chair so
he was facing his monitor again.

"Hey, Bob?" Ozzie called. He caught Diaz as
he was about to leave the room.

Diaz stopped dead in his tracks. Rice could
almost hear him groan when he realized it was Ozzie—the Eddie
Haskell of the Observatory—calling him. He turned to face him.
"What is it, Osmund?"

"Should I help Rice with the telemetry, Sir?
Or is there something else you'd like me to do?"

Rice believed Diaz was probably thinking
about what duty he could assign him, thinking about what might be
the simplest job in the observatory, the one thing Osmund’d be the
least likely to screw up. At last he spoke: "Monitor the
television, radio broadcasts and Internet. See if there's anything
about anything about the blast in the news."

Ozzie's face lit up. He balled up his fist
and pulled on an invisible air horn in celebration. "Thanks, Bob,"
he said quietly, though he could not mask the wide smile growing on
his lips after being sanctioned to do nothing but watch TV, listen
to the radio, and surf the Web for the next three hours.

For at least the tenth time over the past
few hours, Ozzie cycled through the channels on the small, black
and white in the corner of the student lounge.
Springsteen got
it all wrong
, he thought.
Fifty-seven channels? Hell, there
were over two-hundred in reception at the observatory (they had
cable—fucks were too cheap to spring for satellite—go figure) and
there was still nothing on. Hours of surfing channels and stations
and sites and absolutely squat on the C1 blast.

Ozzie looked at his watch and tried to do a
quick calculation as to how long had it been since this whole thing
began to play out. Two hours? Four? His entire shift?

Fuck, isn't it over yet?
wondered
Ozzie, bored silly. He switched off the television and turned on
the radio making two full sweeps of all stations on the FM dial and
one on the AM. There were no news reports on the FM and seemingly
nothing but talk on the AM, but
nada
when it came to
anything about any radiation blasts, C1 or otherwise. He poured
himself a cup of coffee and tried to psych himself up for another
hour surfing CNN and other news sites to see if there was any
late-breaking news about the situation.

Ozzie arrived in the main computer room to
see Diaz and Rice hunched over a stack of paper on Diaz's desk. He
decided to join them.

Rice was telling Diaz he was pretty sure the
orbit was geosynchronous and pointed directly at Earth somewhere
over North America. "Good work, Rice," Diaz said. "Now all we have
to do is wait, see if we can't pinpoint any other readings from the
satellite if it happens again.

"Ozzie," Diaz called, "you're with Rice on
this one."

Ozzie thought he might blow chunks at the
thought of spending another minute, let alone the rest of his
shift, working with that homo Rice, but once again exerted perfect
control and said nothing. Having spent the better part of the last
three hours channel hopping, Ozzie was done. He wanted nothing more
than to kick his shoes off, order a pizza, pop open a brewski, let
rip with the gas he'd been saving for over an hour now, and channel
surf some more.

"That's it, my friends," Diaz announced,
clapping both Rice and Ozzie on the back simultaneously. "With SOHO
Prime back on track, there's nothing more to do here but sit back
and wait for the next reading."

Ozzie watched as Diaz retreated to his
office, watched through the half-glassed walls as Diaz pretended to
work on the stack of reports on his desk.

Very little sleeping went on at the
McBride-Richardson house that night. Palmer wanted to know every
minutia of my "trip" and I could think of nothing but. By the time
I had finished talking, there was nothing left to do but get washed
up and report for classes. To make matters worse, I nodded off on
the subway, missed my stop and had to double back. Don't ask me
how, but I managed to make it through my classes. My plan to grab
my snail-mail, log-on long enough to check my e-mail, then go home
for a long shower, and an even longer nap was derailed almost at
its inception.