Termination Shock

To help make sense of it T.R. did something that grayed out most of the complex while highlighting a narrow shaft that angled down into the rock from the head frame Willem had noticed as they drove in. “Looks small compared to all this other shit,” T.R. said, “but it ain’t. Here’s the Pina2bo shaft for comparison.” He somehow caused a red tube to materialize on the map, beginning at the same site. It went vertically downward and it only went half as deep. “Point is, conditions prevailing here—availability of equipment, competence of the rock, et cetera—make it possible to bore at an angle and to bore deeper and wider. More barrels. Higher muzzle velocity.”

He made the red overlay fade out to provide a clearer look at the angled shaft they’d apparently finished here. “Projectiles coming out of that gun are going faster. They are starting halfway to the stratosphere already, so they don’t lose as much energy fighting their way through the lower atmosphere. And they are angled southward, away from the equator, with an over-the-ground velocity component of almost two thousand miles an hour.”

He cut to a different view, zoomed way out, showing a trajectory that started at the top of New Guinea and arced toward the Arafura Sea. The boundary of the stratosphere was helpfully delineated. The shell soared well above that, passed through apogee, and began to arc downward again as it approached the southern coast of the island. Its trail then straightened, leveled off, and became a thickening plume of yellow gas drawn southward across the airspace between New Guinea and Australia. “The burn phase,” T.R. explained. Having been through all this at Pina2bo Willem understood that this was the part of the shell’s flight when the molten sulfur was burned to make thrust, extending the duration of the flight.

Once it had consumed all the sulfur, the shell’s trajectory became a long straight glide that angled down until it hit the sea between New Guinea and the northern capes of Australia. A zoom-in showed a flotilla of barges and ships with nets like the ones on the mesa above the Rio Grande on the Flying S Ranch. Willem knew enough about the West Texas operation to guess that the shells and parasails would be refurbished and ferried back to Tuaba, whence they could be trucked back up to Sneeuwberg.

A further zoom-out provided a view of the whole Earth, but from a perspective you normally didn’t see: the South Pole was up. Willem had recovered his wind to the point that he felt it was safe to stand. This enabled him to look down on the whole Southern Hemisphere. The trails of sulfur dioxide—shown here as bright yellow smoke, for visibility—began as faint curved scratches over the Arafura Sea. But prevailing winds blurred them together into a blob and then stretched the blob westward. Over Western Australia it was dense, but it feathered out over the Indian Ocean until it had become a diaphanous veil.

“Pina2bo? Vadan?” Willem said.

“Glad you asked.” T.R. made a scooping gesture that caused the globe to spin about until it was north up. Smaller blobs could now be seen originating from West Texas and the Adriatic, spreading and fading as the Northern Hemisphere’s prevailing winds carried them eastward.

Willem regarded it for a minute, walking slowly around the table to view it from different angles. “I’m looking at this,” he said, “and I’m seeing causes but not effects. The plumes of sulfur dioxide fade and dissipate. They just look like localized sources of pollution, diluted by the immensity of the atmosphere. But you and I know that the effects will make themselves known all over the globe.”

T.R. nodded. “You’re correct that this particular visualization does not attempt to show that. I could pull up others that do.”

“And those would show—?”

“Good things for your country. For Houston, Venice, Jakarta, Bangladesh.”

“And bad things for—?”

The trailer resonated with a deep boom, felt rather than heard. All the flimsy bits, of which there were many, rattled and buzzed. Amelia pivoted toward a window, more curious than alarmed. “ANFO,” T.R. said. “We use tons of it. You get used to it.” He turned back to Willem. “It’s a smartass, gotcha question, as I think a man of your sophistication knows, Dr. Castelein. ‘Bad things’ can mean a drought, a flood, a heat wave, a cold snap. Bad things tend to be localized in time and space. Harder to predict. But we can predict them to some extent. And the more sites we have operational, the more knobs and levers we have on the dashboard, so to speak. So instead of just blundering around we are managing the situation to maximize the good and minimize the bad.”

“And who is ‘we’ in this case?”

“Whoever controls the knobs and levers, obviously.”

“How long do you expect you’ll be allowed to control them? What if someone else decides they want the knobs and levers for their own?”