Behind him, his colleagues looked up from their early-morning fogs, wondering what he was up to. Ken Murtagh, an IT IS WHAT IT IS coffee mug in hand, peered over Perry’s shoulder while the young maestro banged away at a series of computers. Terry Fitzpatrick, who’d been up with a grandbaby all night and was too tired to get out of his chair, just tiny-stepped it over across the floor, rolling up on Perry’s other side and squinting down at his screens.
Murtagh saw the various images and data streams playing past and regarded Perry suspiciously. “What is this? You playing a game?” Because the numbers couldn’t be right.
Fitzpatrick looked at the data, then at Perry. He pushed his glasses up on top of his head and asked a question.
“Glancing blow?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
Fitz just stared at the screen, absorbing the information as Perry loaded it into the simulations. “How long?”
Perry, who’d been cradling his cell phone to his shoulder, realized his neck was killing him and lifted his head, letting the phone drop to the desktop with a clatter while he inputted. From the other end of the call, the others could hear Norman’s agitated voice calling out, “Hey! Hey, you still there?!” But Perry kept typing, running one model after another, and each time one of them pinged with its COMPLETE message, the result was the same, or similar.
“Perry,” Fitz said with rising urgency, “how long do we have?”
From the phone, Norman’s voice was squawking, distorting the speaker. Murtagh reached down, turned the phone over, and hit the speaker button. Norman’s voice burst out, too loud.
“—not wrong! This shit is not wrong!”
Heads turned all over the room. Others started to filter over, and Norman’s voice distorted through the speaker. Perry held up a hand, silencing the argument behind him for a moment while he hit enter, telling the computer to run his final simulation. They all shut up, waiting for it. The computer pinged with a conclusion.
Perry looked down at his cell phone, on the desktop. “Norman? You still there?”
“Yeah.”
“You ran it?”
“Three times, with Convac’s new transformer specs. You?”
“Same.” Perry cleared his throat. “It’s Carrington-level, isn’t it?” The seven men and women who were now assembled behind him stared down at the phone, waiting for a response from someone on the other end whom none of them knew. But for some reason, everything relied on that unknown man’s reply.
From the speaker, Norman’s voice was raspy. “In the thirtieth year, in the fifth day of the fourth month, as I was among the exiles on the banks of the river Chebar—”
Murtagh interrupted, like a man who suddenly realizes he is the butt of a joke. “Excuse me, who the hell are you and what exactly are we doing here?”
Undeterred, Norman finished the quote. “—heaven opened and I saw visions from God.”
Perry looked up at Murtagh. “It’s the Bible.”
“No shit it’s the Bible. Why is that old man quoting the Bible?”
“Ezekiel’s vision, 593 B.C.,” Perry said. “Some people think it was earth’s first recorded auroral event.”
Fitz put a hand on Perry’s shoulder. “How long ’til it hits, Perry?”
“Between seven and twelve hours. Give or take. Solar winds are highly variable.”
Fitz stood up and looked at Murtagh, whose already pale face was several shades whiter than it had been a few minutes ago.
“So we’re islanding?” Fitz asked.
“I’m not calling that. Are you calling that?”
“Ken, it’s a worldwide black-sky event.”
“I’ll call a stepdown,” Murtagh said.
“A stepdown? Why not just put on a pair of sunglasses? How many plus-1,000 amps on the grid are pre-1972?”
“Top of my head? At least two thousand.”
Fitz nodded, thinking. “Start with those. I’ll call around and try to get a handle on how many of the other ten thousand have winding hot spots likely to blow with thirty DC amps per phase.”
Perry shook his head. “You’d better figure fifty.”
“OK, fifty.” Fitz was activated now, his fatigue forgotten.
But Murtagh was frozen in place. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Fitz looked at him. “Start?” he asked. “We gotta silo the whole fucking country.”
In Aurora, Norman put the cordless phone down on his desk and let their argument play out over the tinny speaker. He pushed himself up out of his chair, regarding for a moment the complex home radio setup that crowded the far end of his desk. Soon enough, he thought, that’s going to be the only way to communicate.