The Storm Episode One

CHAPTER 2

  The doors closed with a hiss, and the cabin of the mountain cableway smoothly picked up speed as it was carried up at an ever-increasing rate. Kate stood facing the panoramic windows and could barely hold back her tears. That idiot had gone anyway. Left everything – her, his work; he just got up and went without even saying goodbye. He had nothing but contempt for all her persuasion, arguments, threats...

  She had never found out which blathering fool had infected him with the stupid idea of going to Cape Town. Jerome had always been stubborn, but sometimes his stubbornness reached such heights that she found it hard to believe in his intellectual maturity. It was so easy to instil something into him, to infect him with an idea – just like a child. He was utterly dependent on his companions and was just like they were: no opinion of his own, only that of the group.

  Jerome was sociable and, as suited his temperament, his companions formed quite a large group, so it was virtually a stone cold certainty that sooner or later, considering how they were drawn towards adventures, one of them would come up with a stupid idea.

  When one of the dimwits in the group learned that there was to be an unofficial surfing championship in Cape Town this year, was Jerome going to miss such an event? No, not for anything! He was surfing mad and had once been ranked in the world’s top one hundred. He was forever grumbling that the official sport was too greatly commercialised, had lost its soul. It had become a way of making money rather than gaining satisfaction by riding along on the crest of a wave...

  And now there was this championship in Cape Town, and a completely unofficial one at that, although it was rumoured that almost all the champions would be going. Or at least the ones who were still respected in the informal coterie of surfers for having remained true to the concept and not having sold their soul for money.

  It was as if the fact that South Africa was virtually in a state of civil war was nothing to worry about. Obviously Jerome had not paid it any attention. Anyway, little things like that just add to the adrenalin.

  It had all begun two months ago, when unprecedented riots broke out in Cape Town, occasioned by the latest summit of heads of state. Riots at such events were nothing new, but this time they did not end with the police throwing a few smoke canisters, squibs and fireworks.

  At first everything had looked as it always did. The chanting of left-wing slogans, bangs from squibs, the howling of police sirens, some water from water cannons, clouds of tear gas rising up from gas grenades fired into the crowd. But at a certain moment, the situation got out of control. The crowd rushed against the barrier again, and this time the water cannon could not push it back. Witnesses among the police told of people literally going crazy, sweeping everything out of their way.

  A small group of retreating policemen was cut off from the main group and forced into a narrow alley. The worst of the hotheads were kept at a distance by rubber bullets, but just a few minutes later, stones were thrown at the police. There was nowhere to run and they were pushed back against a high wall. Taking fright, they opened fire with lethal weapons. The demonstrators scattered, leaving eight wounded and four dead on the asphalt. For some time, an ominous silence fell on the city.

  This happened in the morning and by lunchtime the news had spread all over the planet like wildfire. By evening, up to half a million people from all over Africa had gathered in Cape Town. This time they were armed, well armed, and it’s hard to get your head around what happened next.

  The following day, the armed crowd rushed up to the cordon, opening fire as they went. Return fire followed immediately and, as a result, the number killed rose to dozens. Clashes continued as soon as the second wave arrived. The crowd succeeded in seizing several assault rifles and war broke out in the city.

  The summit had to be called off and the heads of state made an emergency departure by helicopters. One escort helicopter was shot down, and eight Special Forces soldiers and both pilots were added to the list of those killed.

  But the rioting did not end there, it only grew worse. The armed mob, not having managed to exhaust their vengeance and hatred on the police defending the summit, turned their anger on ordinary citizens. A wave of robberies, attacks and murders began.

  A state of emergency was declared in the city and a 200,000-strong peacekeeping force from four countries was brought in. For a month, it tried to restore order, engaged every day in what amounted to war in urban conditions.

  When the most extreme hotheads were eventually driven out of the city or killed, a fragile peace was established in Cape Town, but riots flared up in other major cities. First Durban, then Johannesburg, and after that Pretoria. Other towns followed. All against all. The country sank into the chaos of civil war.

  And that was where her boyfriend was going in search of adventure, to the very heart of it!

  “But it’s all been quiet in Cape Town for a long time now!” Jerome had nonchalantly assured her, obviously not understanding what Kate was worried about. “There were riots, but they’re over!”

  How much time she had spent explaining something that was obvious to any grown man – that it was stupid to risk your life just for more adventures, it was beyond madness. She had wept, got angry, begged him not to go, but Jerome had been immovable.

  Though he had at least promised he’d think about it. That was yesterday evening. She had begun to hope he might change his mind but this morning, when she woke up, she found a note saying he’d be back in three weeks. Oh no he wouldn’t! He might come back in three weeks, but not to her. She was sick to death of his tricks, she’d had enough.

  In less than five minutes, his things were dumped into two cardboard boxes, stamped on to pack everything in, and thrown out with the garbage.

  En route to the cableway, Kate had still been shaking with rage. But now, the soft humming of the cabin’s electric motors, and the landscape opening up below, calmed her down. Her mood gradually changed to one of humiliation, helplessness and loneliness.

  The world outside the window was immersed in semi-twilight when the cabin was enfolded in a layer of dense cloud. The lamps in the ceiling came on at once, adding to the sensation of cool comfort, and the mist outside the window gave the impression that she was actually in an aircraft being carried far away from her problems.

  The clouds gradually disappeared as if scattered by a headwind, whistling barely audibly in the door cracks, and the cabin continued to gain height. It was now above the cloud blanket.

  The artificial lighting in the cabin was switched off and replaced by the bright rays of the Sun filling everything with dazzling light. It was as if in passing through the cloud barrier, Kate had entered a new life, where there was no place for earthly concerns. All her worries, including those connected with her good-for-nothing boyfriend, had been left behind, down below. Here she would find only crystal clear air and the gigantic lenses of a telescope directed into the depths of space and the infinite abyss of the Universe.

  The cabin had slowed down and was now crawling at a snail’s pace towards its destination, visible in the distance from the large viewing platform. Having reached the locking mechanism, it shook, something outside clicked loudly and the cable stopped. The doors made a hissing sound as they opened and cold dry air rushed in at once.

  Kate hunched up, put on her woollen cardigan and buttoned it up. The wind here did not blow as it did lower down the island by the water, in gusts. Here, at an altitude of almost two and a half thousand metres, it blew constantly, never for a second loosening its icy grip. When the weather was really frosty (weather here only meant change of temperature, at an altitude of two kilometres there was virtually no precipitation), it was simply unbearable to stay outside. The wind pierced the body right through to the bones. She left the cabin at a brisk pace and set off to the gates.

  The central administration building was a good hundred metres from the cableway station, which had been specially built for the staff of the star laboratory on Tenerife. Since the tele
scope complex was automated to the highest degree, and had one of the most advanced AIs on Earth, work here usually meant working alone. Staff members replaced each other but rarely met face to face so on the cableway, she almost always travelled in splendid isolation.

  Inside, Kate found a small package on her desk. Turning it over in her hands in surprise, and not finding any explanatory note as to who had sent it or for what reason, she raised it to her ear and shook it cautiously. Judging from the dull sounds from inside, it contained sweets.

  She hesitated briefly, then carefully opened the wrapping to find a tiny gift box of truffles inside. How perfectly timed! On this miserable morning, chocolates were just what she needed.

  She made herself comfortable in her chair, switched on the console at her workplace and put a chocolate truffle in her mouth before taking a sip of her freshly-brewed coffee. The sweet aroma of cocoa and hot coffee certainly had a positive effect. Amazing! It only took a little mixture of simple ingredients to paint the world a different colour. Maybe things weren’t so bad after all? She took a deep breath and immersed herself in her work.

  The speciality of the observatory on Tenerife was the observation of the central star of the Solar System, the Sun, whose activity had been increasing anomalously for at least five years now. The number of astronomers throughout the world had also increased and they were gradually beginning to get worried about this phenomenon.

  Magnetic storms had become abnormally frequent, and their intensity had increased so much over the last five years that it had been necessary to review their classification. The strongest storms in the good old days were no more than average storms as the matter was understood today. And the storms now considered strong were previously thought of as nothing less than cosmic whirlwinds.

  Kate rapidly skimmed through the main astronomical news of her observatory and all the other observatories on Earth over the past night. She dwelt only on the large-type headlines denoting particularly important events.

  “Another ten-thousand-year storm has been recorded,” read one such headline over a short article. She grinned. An amusing combination of words: “another ten-thousand-year storm”. It did not seem to bother the author that such events had happened as many as four times in the past two years.

  Although the magnetic storms passed unnoticed by most of the planet’s inhabitants, silently raging away somewhere out in space, the severe storms nevertheless caused quite a lot of inconvenience. Apparatus, particularly of the high-precision kind, began to play up. Here and there, in various countries, mobile communication would not work, and in some places the electricity supply failed due to short-circuiting at the substations.

  The worst affected were the satellites. Each such space storm put dozens of them out of action. It was said that one big insurance company specialising in the insurance of space apparatus had even gone bankrupt after having to pay compensation for a whole group of space-based apparatus that had become unserviceable at the same time.

  Kate read the article and ran her eyes over the main parameters of the oncoming storm, then minimised the document and returned to the readings of the tracking instruments for the past 48 hours. Another “ten-thousand-year storm” (to use the terminology of the article) had taken place on the Sun and was now approaching Earth. According to the preliminary calculations of her observatory’s central computer, in thirty minutes its intensity would reach its peak and it would not die down till the end of next week. Good grief, it wasn’t just very strong, it was also of unusually long duration. If Kate had been writing the news, she might have described it as a “hundred-thousand-year storm”.

  She took another truffle from the box and carefully placed it in her mouth, as if fearing it might collapse on its way there. Groping with her free hand, without taking her eyes off the monitor screen, she firmly closed the box and pushed it away from her, so as not to be tempted by the intensive aroma from these small pieces of cocoa-sprinkled art.

  Apart from the typical inconveniences caused by the magnetic storms, flares of solar activity had recently become increasingly strongly correlated with the riots raging with unprecedented ferocity on every continent on Earth. The events in Cape Town during the last summit had coincided precisely with the peak of such a storm.

  Her thoughts drifted back to Cape Town and her good-for-nothing boyfriend, who at that moment was no doubt lying somewhere on a South African beach with a cocktail in his hand, and Kate had to make an effort to push them away.

  Here on Tenerife, there was no reason to fear large-scale riots, because there were no large towns on the island. All the same, these storms gave Kate a headache. Her observatory specialised in studying the Sun, so as soon as the next cosmic storm appeared on the horizon, her telephone rang constantly with calls from journalists from everywhere on the planet.

  It wasn’t just that explanations to one interested party after another took up a lot of her time, they also kept on misquoting her. In search of a sensation, phrases she had used were taken out of context and given a panicked tone.

  The news channels, whether by agreement or not, had played a dirty trick on her. All the reports about disturbances on the Sun were accompanied by her photograph, shamelessly taken from the observatory’s webpage. Not only that, it was probably the worst photo of her ever taken. She was now renowned throughout the world as “Miss Cosmic Storm”.

  The first call was not long in coming as Kate compiled the preliminary analysis for predicting the basic parameters of the storm. Those were the rules. Their observatory had to warn spacecraft operators, power companies, ships, aircraft and everything else sensitive to cosmic bad weather. She could have just ignored the ringing, of course, but the boss had forbidden it. This sort of publicity aroused people’s interest, including those with money. After each interview, particularly one with a photo of the pretty astronomer, contributions flooded in (and for Kate, dinner invitations).

  She looked at the phone and let it go on for several rings in the hope that the caller would lose patience and hang up, but in vain. She sighed and pressed the ‘Connect’ button.

  “Observatorio del Teide, Reyes.”

  “Good morning, miss. I am a journalist and would like to ask you a few questions about the forthcoming magnetic storm warning,” replied a voice in quite good but rather slow Spanish, with a strong English accent.

  “Hello,” replied Kate in English to speed up the conversation. Studying at Oxford had polished her English to the extent that she could speak it as fluently as her native language. “Fine, if it won’t take too long.”

  “Thank you!” The caller’s voice immediately switched to English, enabling them to converse much more quickly. “First question. Is it true that a gigantic magnetic storm is moving towards us?”

  “Well, gigantic is not quite the correct description, but you are basically right. The ejection of solar material was really strong,” replied Kate. Unlike her colleagues, she had taught herself to speak to non-specialists in language they could understand, using incomprehensible terms only sparingly.

  “Your colleagues from another observatory think that this time the storm will be so strong that serious cataclysms can be expected.”

  “As far as I know, this is the first time we have experienced such a storm...”

  “So the rumours about a mega-storm are not an exaggeration?”

  “I don’t know what these rumours you refer to are, but the storm is a strong one. We are conducting observations of such phenomena as the ejection of solar material, which has been causing magnetic storms here on Earth for a relatively short period in cosmic terms, only for about two hundred years. Over this time, we have not really observed a storm on this scale before. However, that does not mean this is the first time mankind has been faced with such a cosmic phenomenon, just that we did not have any electronic apparatus to record it or be affected by it so they passed us by unnoticed.”

  “What effect does it have on people?”

  “
It does have some effect. You may get a headache, feel out of sorts, but that will probably be all, even this time. Humans are not creatures who react strongly to changes in the magnetic field.”

  “So our lives are not threatened by this storm?”

  “If you are expecting the sky to fall down or for us all to be struck by lightning, then no.”

  “Maybe it will not have a huge effect on the body, but it is thought that the storm will have some effect on the mind.”

  “I can’t say anything about that, it isn’t my specialty. It seems to me that you know more about this question than I do. I and my colleagues here at the observatory only study the astronomical consequences of solar activity. You’d do better to ask a doctor about how the storms make people feel.”

  “Tell me, how much does the intensity of this storm exceed the norm? Maybe from that we could draw some sort of conclusions about what awaits us?”

  “Do you mean its effect on people or on machines?”

  “More on people. Yes, I’m more interested in people’s health.”

  “You can hardly expect a reliable answer from me, I’m not a doctor. But on the whole, small storms pass by unnoticed, while others of only slightly greater intensity can suddenly bring a whole host of problems. In a certain sense, their effect is nonlinear, to put it in scientific language, therefore it is difficult to predict.”

  “You mean no forecasts are possible?”

  “Not scientific ones, no. Purely speculative forecasts are always possible, but we do not make them. We deal in science.”