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"I'm sorry to contradict you, but it changed a little since then," Hope objected. "The comparative analysis we did, using the spectrometer, showed something completely unexpected and not very reassuring."
"That is?" Kowalsky urged, paling slightly; when too many big words began to buzz in his head he lost the focus on his speech and got nervous.
"During our research, we identified deep fractures at many Mohorovicic discontinuity locations, which are nothing but wounds in Earth's crust, at very great depths, and so we finally realized what is causing these intense localized temperature increases. The nature of solar radiation is changing. Until recently, the frequency spectrum of emissions that reached the ground has always involved a range from three to ten Gigahertz, but lately, it started to fall and touched more than once values very close to 2.45 Gigahertz.
This fact has contributed significantly to triggering the phenomena that recently occurred in the area of the Ring of Fire. Moreover, it seems that emissions are about to become more or less stable around those values."
"I still don't understand what is your point," the President confessed.
"Practically, in this phase, the Sun is gradually turning into a huge magnetron, the tube for operating microwaves."
The President questioned Ross and Kowalsky with a quick glance, who responded by sticking their chin forward to indicate they too had not understood.
"I'll explain it easier. Let's take a silicone balloon, fill it with water and put it in a microwave oven. If we..."
"I get it now," the President interrupted again. "The silicone will not change, but the liquid inside will boil, and increasing its pressure due to overheating, it will explode, shattering the casing."
"Unless fractures are created on the surface of the balloon to allow some liquid to escape and to rebalance the internal pressure," Dr. Hope pointed out.
"So according to his theory the Sun is slowly overheating all the magma contained within the Planet sending it to boil, and if the right conditions are met we run the risk that the Earth will explode" hypothesized the President; then he stopped waiting for a confirmation.
"Your theory is very fascinating, but in my opinion, it seems too much extreme, the chances such event occurs are minimal," replied Dr. Hope after thinking it over.
"Then what is the real problem? Why are we here tonight to discuss instead of saying goodnight to our children?" Asked the President angrily, he almost had the impression the scientist was having fun behind him.
"The real problem apart from the various active volcanoes scattered all over the planet lies in the chain of super submarine volcanoes located in Antarctica," explained the scientist.
"What volcanoes?"
"The British Antarctic Survey discovered them a few years ago, they are twelve volcanoes located not far from the South Sandwich Islands, a stone's throw from the South Pole. Some of them are three thousand meters high and still seem to be active."
"I don't see what problem they can cause, they are so far from civilization," the President objected.
"We know the cracks that affect the Mesosphere are so large as to favor the flow of real huge underground magma rivers, you have no idea of what could happen if all the thermal energy absorbed by the Ring of Fire would channel in that direction without getting lost along the way."
"So you tell me," the President replied impatiently, the researcher was treating him as ignorant and he didn't like it at all.
"The ashes produced by the possible eruption of many huge volcanoes would poison the sea and obscure the sky for years, depriving us in a short time of all the resources we need daily and generating a sort of nuclear winter that would affect the whole planet. The biggest explosion would then be located just where Earth's axis of rotation ideally meets the surface, and this would have irreparable consequences. In the worst scenario possible, such an explosion could give the planet a tremendous boost, that our engineers have established to be comparable to the rockets on a spaceship ..."
"That's enough!" The President surrendered, he didn't want to imagine other catastrophic scenarios. "Are you suggesting that we must wish for a further increase in seismic and volcanic activity so that Earth can, let's say," discharge "? Should we hope that many great calamities rather than one huge catastrophe occur? "
Dr. Hope raised his eyebrows as to say "there you go".
"If I'm not mistaken, you also said that the culmination of the solar crisis will come soon," the President then asked to take control of the situation.
"A fortnight, maximum twenty days. Perhaps less," the scientist confirmed.
"How many chances do we have that the sun really works like a microwave and triggers the grand finale?"
"I suppose we have good chances to survive, but I am not able to state this with certainty because we do not have similar precedents to study. Making predictions would be unscientific, but if I were forced to venture a number I would say fifty and fifty."
"And does one chance out of two seems good to you?" Ross remarked, annoyed. The scientist answered spreading his arms.
"Will there be any warning before it happens?" Asked the President.
"A maximum of four or five days' notice, I assume. The internal pressure of the magma chambers will increase exponentially by transferring part of its energy to the Astenosfera, which will be significantly affected by the effects of this phenomenon. Earthquakes and chain eruptions will occur, but it will still be a fairly slow process. The first consistent signal will be the large masses of water that will start to evaporate from lakes and rivers and then from the sea with rapidly increasing speed and intensity. When water vapor comes into contact with the colder air in the upper parts of the atmosphere tremendous storms will break loose. Once fallen, the water will immediately start evaporating again to start the cycle again increasingly devastating. Meanwhile, even living beings..."
"Did you say living beings?" Ross interrupted him, he wasn't sure he understood.
"Exactly. We, for example, we are made of water at seventy percent, what do you think would happen to our bodies in such a situation?"
"Does that mean we're destined to burst like that balloon in the microwave?"
"It's a possibility. It is not certain that all this will happen, but if it really happens then there will be no single safe place on Earth, if this is what you wanted to know."
"What can we do?" The President asked Benjamin Hope, and he did it in a way that for the first time since he had stepped into the White House had seemed humble. The scientist looked at him strangely, because he could hardly believe that the President himself had really asked him a similar question. Then the President immediately regretted asking it to him. Dr. Hope had asked him a meeting for a long time, telling him that he had to expose vital questions to him, but he had always done everything he could to avoid that meeting.
"What can we do?" Dr. Hope echoed, the President nodded and let him rub salt in his wound. To rub it in for how much superficial he had been in postponing that meeting was the least he could have done.
"As far as I am concerned tonight I will go back home and dedicate all the time I have to my family, I will try to prepare as best as I can for what could be our last Christmas on Earth," he replied quietly, without arguing. The President looked strangely at his collaborators who shrugged their shoulders, then returned to seriously look Dr. Hope because that was certainly not the answer he expected. Dr. Hope noticed it and nodded, he knew that the President was asking what humanity could work out about that specific problem and so he took a few moments to think about it.
"We have to cross our fingers, it seems obvious to me ... at this point, I can't see what else we could do!" He declared at the end of his reflections; everyone present remained speechless.
"Goodbye," he added, getting up, then put his hat on his head in an elegant manner and moved toward the door.
It was almost three o'clock and James had not yet managed to sleep. He was just about to doze off when an unexpected distant rumble of a low-speed diesel engine got his attention. He opened his eyes cursing that noise, it awakened him just when he was about to fall asleep, then he got up yawning and looked out of the window wondering who could wander at that time of night. He looked carefully through the closed shutters, but the open space in front of the house was deserted, there were no lights of any kind, and he thought he had only imagined it. Once awake, he decided to look at Harry, slowly opened the door and found him blissfully asleep. He smiled smugly and went back to bed, ready to sleep, but as soon as he closed his eyes a screeching squeak made him alert all his senses again. He listened for a few moments without being able to catch other noises, then he thought that probably a gust had stirred the unstable walls of his tin shed.
"Sooner or later I'll have to make up my mind and settle it," he thought, once again ready to fall asleep, but just a moment later he heard a new crunch. Eve grumbled something and changed position by pulling the sheet towards her.
"Did you hear that too?" James asked her as he turned on the lamp, but she was sleeping soundly with her earplugs insert. He heard yet another unusual sound and at that point, he was quite certain that someone was rummaging in his tool shed, then got out of bed, took the torch and the semiautomatic from the drawer of the dresser and ran down the stairs. Once downstairs he put on a pair of boots at his feet, put on a sweatshirt over his pajamas and lurked behind the kitchen door, the best point from which he could observe the garden without being seen. He noticed a faint glow inside the shed and decided that he would exit the back door to walk around the house passing over the hedge that bounded the property, in that way he would arrive behind the shed without being seen. He would have lurked and would have surprised the intruder at the exit; whoever it was would have dealt with, he would have let him pass the desire to go and rummage into other people's houses. He walked those thirty meters behind the hedge with his heart in his throat, thinking back to all the strange things that had happened in those last days, and he repeated several times that he had to be very careful. Arriving at the shed he flattened himself against a side wall and patiently waited. Shortly after the door opened slowly and a shadow came out, James jumped on her, seizing her from behind and pinned her to the ground, with her arms crossed behind her back, like when he makes an arrest, and before the other could try to move he sat astride on her back.
"Don't move," he growled in her ear, then he raised his arm to hit her shoulder with the butt of his pistol just to show immediately who was in charge. At that point, the intruder, frightened and put in inferior conditions, would have told what was she doing in there without resisting and without inventing stories. As soon as he began to lower his arm, however, he stopped because a light bulb had suddenly lit up in his head: when he had approached the intruder's ear he had the feeling of knowing her. The vague hint of a familiar scent, though almost completely covered by the smell of her sweat, had awakened a sensation in him. Also, thinking back, he realized that when he had belted her from behind he had touched something soft, something very similar to a breast.
"James, stop for the love of God!" Shouted Helen, terrified.
"Helen? What are you doing here?" He said puzzled lowering his arm.
"Do you want to leave me now? You are hurting me!"
James loosened his grip and moved to her side, she stood up rubbing her aching wrists and looked at him badly.
"How could I know it was you?" He justified himself. "Luckily I recognized you at the last moment, otherwise I don't know what I would have done ... lately, too many strange things happened."
"Don't tell me!"
"Why, what happened to you?"
"It would be faster to tell you what hasn't happened yet."
"In the meantime, start by explaining why you came to rummage in my garage at this time of night," he asked her again.
"Didn't Harry tell you anything about his little escape yet?"
"Don't call it that, I still don't know what happened, but now I'm more than certain it wasn't an escape. And why do you ask me that anyway? What is so important about my son to push you here in the middle of the night?"
"Nothing ... maybe I'm just becoming paranoid and now it's very late ... it's better if we talk about it tomorrow morning at the office, right now I should be guarding the police station and you sleeping with your wife," she replied pretending to leave.
"Wait a moment! Eve has earplugs in her ears and will sleep for at least another four hours, and as for paranoia, it's the same thing I've been repeating myself since this morning."
"I have to go back to the Station," Helen insisted, shaking her head without much conviction, she was still undecided whether to tell him about the two corpses and the probable connection with Harry's bike. But on the other hand, she knew that if she didn't do it at that moment she would still have to say it in a few hours, in the office.
"Don't worry, what could happen at the Police Station? Nothing ever happens there."
"You say? And then you'll hear what happened today," she replied, then she told him everything and when she finished she noticed that James was looking at her as he was looking at a Martian. "Are you saying that there were two corpses in a car in the woods up here, just behind my house, and that with all the people who walked around in the bush looking for Harry nobody saw them? And besides, if I understand correctly, do you think there is a possibility that those corpses have something to do with the temporary disappearance of my child?"
Helen nodded confidently.
"I think you were right a while ago when you said you were becoming paranoid," James commented, noticing the signs of fatigue on her face.
"Then come and see," she offered, opened the shed and pointed to the bicycle.
"It's unbelievable ... I have to go and tell Eve everything, maybe this time she will admit I am right," said James, seeing the luminescence on the handlebar.
"No, don't do it!" Said Helen with an impetus that James judged to be excessive.
"What's the matter with you? Why shouldn't I tell my wife what's going on?"
"I don't know, but I think that for the moment it is better if we say nothing to anyone ... call it women's intuition" she justified herself to respond to his perplexities. James resumed examining the luminescent powder, hesitantly reached out a hand to touch it and she abruptly pulled his arm away. He frowned because now Helen was behaving in a really bizarre way, she sighed at his glare and took the bandage off her finger to show him the necrosis.
"The other night I tried to remove that powder with this finger," she explained.
"Damn, you have to show it to someone right away."
"The finger can wait, now I have more important things to think about," Helen replied with a shrug.
"I'm serious," James insisted, continuing to study her doubtfully, she got the impression that he was really worried about her mental balance.
"All right, I assure you I will do it as soon as possible," she promised to calm him. "In the meantime, think about making the bicycle disappear. Harry shouldn't approach it for now."
"You're right, I'll go right away and hide it in the woods and if he'll look for it I'll tell him someone stole it."
"Poor Harry ... first that terrible experience, then his bike ..." said Helen.
"... and finally Toby," he added.
"Why, what happened to the dog this time?" She asked curiously, and then it was James' turn to let her know what happened.
"It all seems so absurd ..." Helen commented at the end of her story.
"Yeah ..." James said wearing his thick gardener's gloves. He pushed the mountain bike out and walked up the path to the woods and she followed him right after.
"That's it, you can be sure no one will find it here," said James satisfied, taking off his gloves. "It's late, it's time to go to sleep," he added.
"Yes, I think you're right," agreed Helen, but neither of them moved.
"How much time we spent here, lying on the grass looking at the sky ..." he murmured, raising his head to contemplate the starry night.
"And how many pranks we did. Do you remember that time we stayed three days hidden in that barn? "
"If I remember it? Of course, I do, my parents did not let me out of the house for two weeks as a punishment!" He said, they laughed happily, and immediately afterward a slightly embarrassed silence fell.
"There was a time I believed we would always be together," Helen confessed.
"I often felt this too, sometimes I even believed that one day I would have married you," said James, looking at his shoes.
"Yes, but you never proposed to me!" She replied, pretending to be offended.
"Of course, when I finally made up my mind, you found The Incredible Hulk," said James.
"It was just to make you jealous, and anyway you immediately took comfort with that fussy one."
"That grumpy one is my wife now, I won't let you talk about her in this manner!" He joked, and they laughed again.
"James, what's going on? Here it has always been all so peaceful and so ordinary..." she became sad afterward.
"God knows how much I'd like to know ..." he replied. The wind gave him her scent and he suddenly felt a slight sense of yearning. He wondered how their life would have been like if they were really married, but soon after he thought that surely he wouldn't have Harry and that certainty was enough to make him stop thinking immediately.
"Shall we take a look?"
"To what?"
"Don't pretend to fall from the clouds, I know very well that you're thinking about it too," said James, pointing to the top of the hill, but she hesitated.
"I promise we'll just take a look, and I'll also get Harry's fishing rod back. It will take just ten minutes cutting through the forest ... and then we have torches and guns, there is nothing we need to worry about."
"I do not know..."
"Come on, it's evident you're dying of curiosity too," insisted James.
Dr. Hope left the meeting and the President rested his elbows on the desk, propped his chin on the back of his hands and started brooding silently. From time to time he glanced at Ross and Kowalsky, who were visibly devoured by anxiety too, as if in their eyes he could find an answer. In a few minutes, he wondered, at least a million times, if was it really possible that starting from tomorrow there would be such a brutal event that could wipe out the entire humanity from the face of Earth in a flash. He could see it in their eyes too, that was the same question they were thinking about. The President also considered whether he should disclose that news or keep it classified; he was sure that Benjamin would not have done so because he was aware that revealing such news would only trigger a global panic, and this would produce easily predictable negative consequences. He, therefore, decided that he would not make it public, but also that he would not passively wait for events to unfold; he was a man who never gives up, because he had grown up on the streets and the first lesson he had received from his life was that if you want something you have to struggle to get it. Whatever it takes.
"Immediately track down Professor Hamilton, I want him to be here at ten o'clock tomorrow morning," he suddenly ordered his men to shake off that feverish thought process. He knew that if Dr. Hope saw right, then Professor Hamilton would be his last asset to try to save the world from that catastrophe, or at least to limit its damage.
"Are you sure, Mr. President?" If I remember well, last time we met him he gave us the impression he was no fit to think clearly anymore" said Ross unconvinced.
"Why, does this seem to you something for sane people? We don't have much time and we have no other choice, haven't you heard what Dr. Hope said before?" The President replied firmly. "And get me Dr. Abel Parker quickly, I need to talk to her as soon as possible at least by phone," he added.
"We'll get to work right away," answered Ross, standing up.
