‘Thank you,’ Raul said after a beat, looking straight into Ben’s eyes.
‘For what?’
‘For sticking with me. For being here.’
Ben shrugged. ‘What else have I got to do?’
The food arrived, and Ben stopped talking and occupied himself with eating and drinking. The steak was tender and rare in the middle and served with green salad and sautéed potatoes. The wine was a three-year-old Côtes du Rhône called Plan de Dieu. God’s Plan. After studying theology on and off for half his life Ben still had no idea what God’s plan was. His own was simply to polish off the rest of this excellent food and then get on with the task in hand. Which was to get back up to his room and lay out Catalina Fuentes’ stuff and try to figure out exactly what the hell she’d got herself mixed up in. He’d devoured most of the steak and nearly half the wine when he looked up and saw that Raul was sitting staring at an untouched plate.
‘I don’t think I can eat.’
‘Force yourself,’ Ben said. ‘I can’t have you running on empty. You and I have work to do.’
Ben finished his wine while Raul picked at the fish. By the end of the bottle Ben still wasn’t any the wiser about God’s plan, but the muscular tension in his neck and shoulders had unknotted itself, and he felt mentally loose enough for what promised to be a long session of combing for whatever clues it might be possible to unearth when neither of them had the first idea what they were looking for.
The night was still young, just before nine o’clock. Ben paid the bill from the roll of notes. Then they left the dining room and returned upstairs.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Back in his room, Ben emptied all the stuff out of his bag that he’d taken from Catalina Fuentes’ study. He laid the paper files in a stack on the bed, with the laptop next to them.
‘You know anything about computers?’ Raul asked.
‘I know how to turn them on,’ Ben said. ‘I can do the basics of internet searches and such. Beyond that, not really.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Raul picked up the laptop and carried it over to the little table, pulled up the room’s single chair and flipped open the screen and sat hunched over the keys like a pianist about to launch into a concerto.
Ben let him get on with it, and focused on the files. He found a cheap ballpoint and stuck it in his mouth like a cigarette, ready to make notes. Sitting on the bed, he made himself comfortable and then opened the cover of the first file in the stack, a thick and heavy one labelled SOLAR VARIATIONS TO 2015. It was a random choice, the equivalent of closing his eyes and sticking a pin in a map. When you didn’t know where you were going, one road was as good as another.
The top page was penned in the same neat, feminine handwriting as the label on the cover. Ben spent a moment looking at it, then turned that page and stared at the next one.
He swallowed. This might actually be less easy than he’d imagined.
Because there was an awful lot of science. In fact, there was nothing but science. The pages were black with it, and his brain was instantly swimming.
Ben was modestly aware of the fact that he wasn’t an entirely uneducated or unintelligent person. His academic record was well above average. At age eighteen he’d burned out his brain sitting in Oxford’s Bodleian Library poring over swathes of ancient Greek and Hebrew texts. Years later in the army, he’d laboured over the complexities of battlefield forensics. Struggled with the complicated concepts of classical mechanics involved in understanding the forces governing projectile trajectories. Crammed his head with Stokes’ drag and Newtonian drag and gravity and inertia and momentum and the categories of internal and transitional and external and terminal ballistics that described the flight of a missile from muzzle to target; and all kinds of other initially baffling technical information that had ultimately helped him to become that little bit better at his job of destroying buildings, materiel and human lives, all in the name of Queen and country.
In short, without getting too big-headed about it, and all moral considerations aside, he’d learned that he could grasp pretty much anything he turned his mind to.
But this here was on another level entirely. It would take him fifteen years of study to even begin to get to grips with the brain-numbing forest of numbers and graphs and charts and equations that seemed to cover every page from top to bottom. Even where the damn stuff was presented in actual words, he could seldom go a quarter of a line without ramming headlong into a wall of specialised terminology that might as well have been the native language of alien creatures on some far-distant planet in another galaxy that humans would never know existed.
In other places, meanings suggested themselves to him, but only in the vaguest possible terms:
2001
Solar wind velocity = 454.7 km/s
Density = 6.0 protons/cm³
2014
Solar wind velocity = 412.8 km/s
Density = 2.1 protons/cm³
Which definitely looked like a comparison of data for different years, telling him that something had decreased during that time period. Something, being solar wind velocity and density, but that was as far as he could follow it.
Ben ploughed on, or tried to. He spent a few moments trying to decipher a graph that looked a little less complex than some of the others. It was headed X-RAY FLUX (1 – MINUTE DATA), FEB 2014 150000 UTC. Its left axis was graduated in meaningless power numbers in watts m-², and down its right side was written GOES 13 0.5 – 4.0 A / GOES 15 1.0 – 8.0 A. The graph showed a slightly squiggly red line that was almost flat, and another beneath it in blue that was jagged and wild with peaks and troughs.
Nice colours.
Time to move on.
Here and there, Ben saw disparate words and phrases he was able to latch onto, in the hope they might yield something comprehensible. Comprehensible, being the first step to significant, being the first step to important. On one page of notes he found a line standing proud of the rest, which read:
1980 54 Piscium mag activity slumped
Which was the only place so far in Catalina Fuentes’ files he’d found as many as four words in consecutive order creating anything like a meaningful phrase. The only question was, what did it mean? 1980 was clearly – or was it? – a date, but apart from the fact that it had been the year in which John Lennon had been shot, and the year of the Iranian Embassy siege in London that had catapulted his future regiment, 22 SAS, to massive (and generally unwelcome) international media stardom, in this context it meant nothing to him.
Raul appeared to be busy on the laptop and Ben didn’t want to disturb him, so he reached for his smartphone and started dialling up an internet search.
‘Hey,’ Raul said, noticing what Ben was doing. ‘I thought we had to be careful about those things.’
‘Relax,’ Ben told him. ‘This phone can’t be traced to me.’
‘I don’t even want to know,’ Raul said.
‘Then don’t bother me with useless questions,’ Ben replied. He keyed in ‘54 Piscium’. A few moments later, he learned that it was the name of a star in the constellation Pisces. More correctly, an orange dwarf.
Orange dwarf. Ben blinked away the surreal image that threw up in his mind, and tried to focus: 54 Piscium was approximately thirty-six light years away, his internet source informed him. Thirty-six years of travel in the fastest spacecraft never invented. Return journey, virtually a whole human lifetime. At that moment, he felt about that far away from understanding. What was ‘mag activity’? To do with magnitude?
Ben put the phone down and returned to Catalina’s papers. A little further down the same page was another name, Tau Ceti. Ben had never heard of Tau Ceti before, but he could hazard a guess that it was the name of another star. Looking that one up as well, he discovered he’d been absolutely right. Constellation of Cetus, twelve light years from Earth. Barely a hop and a skip away. A rather large star, as far as he could gather, comprising something like seventy-eight percent
of the mass of the sun. Magnitude again. However million times that made it bigger than the puny little planet he was sitting on at this moment, Ben had no idea. He now felt as insignificantly minute as he did utterly clueless.
Flick, flick. Page after page, graph after graph. Ben chewed his pen. His heart was sinking faster than a burning Zeppelin.
Now he came to a page containing only a vertical list of hastily scribbled figures that looked like someone working out their thought processes on paper. The figures were all four digits long. There was nothing there to explain what they were, but to Ben’s eye they could have been dates. If they were, most were long gone in history, apart from the last.
1010
1280
1460
1645
1790
2016 –?
Okay, he told himself. Here was something he could potentially grasp. If they were dates, they were spaced out – albeit loosely – at rough intervals that averaged just under a couple of centuries. And if they were dates, the last one with its question suggested some kind of relevance to modern times. But the concept of relevance could only be understood if you had at least two variables to play with: such as the relevance of a to b or x to y, whether those were miles to kilometres or apples to oranges. Or clever to stupid. With nothing at all to go on, the whole number sequence fell flat, meaningless and worthless.
The question mark after the last date stood out. Like a reference to the unknown future, a note of uncertainty in the midst of all the inflexible hard data. Or maybe it just stood out because it echoed the giant question mark in his own mind that made him ask himself why he was even bothering with this stuff.
Ben sighed and closed the file. Forget it. There was no point in this. No point at all.
He laid the file to one side and went on sifting through the stack. More random choices, more roads leading nowhere.
Until he came back across the file that said HERSCHEL / SUN.
Chapter Thirty
Prior to that moment, all Ben had ever known about the astronomer called Herschel was that Catalina Fuentes had named her pet moggy after him. As he opened the file and began to scan the first page, he saw he was about to learn some more about the man.
The contents of the file were distinctly unlike the rest of the papers Ben had taken from the observatory. The first difference was that, to his relief, they were written in language he could understand, free of dense number equations and technical graphs and charts. The second was that the text was typed up and printed off, rather than handwritten, although it was heavily edited in green pencil, with crossings out and underlinings and asterisks scattered liberally everywhere. The margins were crammed with rephrasings and insertions, and arrows pointing here and there to indicate how certain lines and paragraphs should be reordered. It looked like an essay, or a first draft of an article written by a self-critical author striving to get the wording exactly right. With the corrections in place, the first paragraph began:
In the history of astronomy, few characters are as colourful and diverse as the German-born English astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822). A true polymath who seemed capable of turning his talents in whatever direction he chose, Herschel was a pioneer of the study of binary stars and nebulae, the discoverer of infrared radiation in sunlight, a skilled mathematician, optical lens grinder and telescope maker, a ground-breaking naturalist and a prolific classical composer, to name just some of his achievements. His discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781, as well as two of its moons and two more moons of Saturn, garnered him fame, acclaim and a place in astronomical history. However, not all of Herschel’s scientific work was equally well received, and not all his discoveries are as well known today.
Ben paused reading and thought about the tone of the piece. For a start, he was struck by the fact that he could understand it at all. Which clearly meant it wasn’t intended to be a serious piece of academic writing, but accessible to be read by a wider audience.
Audience. That sparked off another thought in Ben’s head. Maybe the text wasn’t intended to be read at all. It had a certain kind of ring to it that suggested to his ear that maybe it was intended to be heard.
‘How’s it going?’ Ben called over to Raul, who was still at the table, hunched over the laptop as if he could will it to yield its secrets by staring hard enough at it.
‘Like shit,’ Raul said.
Which Ben didn’t want to get into at that precise moment. He had something else on his mind. ‘Listen, did you say she presented an episode of her series all about this guy Herschel?’
‘William Herschel? Yes, that’s right,’ Raul replied distractedly, without turning away from the screen. ‘She did lots of research into his work. Said it was incredible and revolutionary. Why, what have you found?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ Ben muttered, and fell silent again as he went back to reading what he now understood was an early version of what had later become a television script.
One of Herschel’s key areas of study, and a subject of great fascination for him, was those stars that seemed to change their brightness: what we now call variable stars; and he was responsible for much of the progress made in the understanding of these distant suns. His son, John Frederick Herschel, wrote in the 1833 A Treatise on Astronomy that, thanks to his father’s catalogue of brightness of the stars in each constellation, ‘amateurs of the science with only good eyes, or moderate equipment, might employ their time to excellent advantage’.
In today’s science, we know why variable stars vary in brightness. But in Herschel’s time, this was still a source of some mystery. As he sought to understand why these stars appeared to change, he attempted to correlate the phenomenon with another that he had studied extensively, namely the existence of sunspots on our own planet’s nearest star. Herschel posed the hypothesis that these more distant suns might also possess spots, which perhaps were the cause of their vacillation from brightness to dimness. Just two centuries after Galileo had proposed that sunspots were dark clouds floating about in the solar atmosphere, Herschel shared the contemporary scientific view that the greater the number of spots on the sun, the more these would block out the light energy radiated to Earth: hence, the ‘spottier’ a variable star, the less bright it would appear from Earth.
Spurred on by the fact that he had perfected a telescope that gave him a view of the sun whose clarity was unprecedented at the time, Herschel deepened his study of sunspots, and this led him to form a new and radical notion: the possibility of a correlation between the number of sunspots and Earth’s climate.
He had noticed that, between July 1795 and February 1800, there had been a number of days when there had been no sunspot activity at all. Then, they had suddenly returned in abundance. He wrote: ‘It appears to me … that our Sun has for some time past been labouring under a disposition, from which it is now in a fair way of recovering.’ In 1801 he presented a paper to the Royal Society entitled ‘The Nature of the Sun’, in which he wrote:
‘I am now much inclined to believe that openings [sunspots] with great shallows, ridges, nodules and corrugations, instead of small indentation, may lead us to expect a copious emission of heat, and therefore mild seasons … A constant observation of the sun with this view, and a proper information respecting the general mildness or severity of the seasons, in all parts of the world, may bring this theory to perfection or refute it if it be not well founded.’
But how was Herschel to back up his hypothesis?
Hampered by the lack of precise meteorological records by which to test his theory, he persevered by lateral thinking. Given the effects of lesser or greater quantities of sunshine on vegetation, it struck him that records of good or bad harvests might provide him with the data he needed. Any correlation between these and periods of many or few sunspots would theoretically support his argument.
Using as his source Adam Smith’s famous 1776 book on economics, The Wealth of Nations, Herschel was able to single out five per
iods when, due to poor harvests, the price of wheat in England had been particularly high. Comparing these records to those of sunspot activity during those periods, he discovered to his surprise a clear correlation between poorer wheat harvests and a relative lack of sunspot activity. Contrary to what had been thought until then, the presence of sunspots did not reduce the amount of heat from the sun, the opposite was true: greater sunspot activity corresponded to good weather and lower wheat prices, while a lack of sunspots corresponded to high wheat prices, which implied less favourable weather.
‘It seems probable’, he wrote, ‘that some temporary scarcity or defect of the vegetation has taken place when the sun has been without those appearances which we surmise to be the symptoms of a copious emission of light and heat.’
As we now know, the sun emits greater ultraviolet radiation, causing more heating of the Earth’s atmosphere, during periods of greater sunspot activity, or Solar Maximum. But in Herschel’s time this was a revolutionary idea – and the apparent correlation with Earth’s climate made it more revolutionary still.
Excited by his findings, Herschel urged his scientific colleagues to examine solar activity in more detail. Sadly, far from praising his discovery, his peers responded with scepticism and even ridicule. A piece in The Edinburgh Review lambasted his ‘erroneous theory concerning the influence of the solar spots and the price of grain’ as a ‘grand absurdity’.
Clearly, the world was not ready to accept such stuff. For once in his illustrious career, the great William Herschel had fallen flat and his attempt to wake the scientific community to his radical idea had failed.
At which point Ben decided he’d read enough, and gave up.
Okay, he thought, so he’d learned about some bygone astronomer’s claimed, and apparently debunked, connection between these sunspots and the price of wheat in nineteenth-century England. Riveting, no doubt, for those who were interested in such titbits of science history. But to someone trying to figure out why a modern-day solar scientist was in the firing line of dangerous people, somewhat less so. What might have seemed revolutionary over two hundred years ago was hardly about to set the world on fire now, less still get anyone into trouble for researching or writing about it. And even if some deranged villain took exception to what Catalina had said about Herschel’s wheat theory, the time to do anything about it was four years ago, when the TV programme had aired. Not now.