Overall Rick Woods was pleased. He felt appreciated, gratified, financially stable. But nothing was ever perfect. On this network, one to five P.M. weekdays was early fringe. The demographic was mainly post-boomer housewives with at least a couple of years of college—the ones who stayed away from Mountain Dew and pink polyester stretch pants, and who wanted an alternative to the soaps, courtroom reality shows, and trailer-trash clown antics. They were a tricky audience. Moving targets. You had to strike just the right balance with content, give them something that was not quite a morning magazine format, and not quite Jim Lehrer. Give them infotainment. That meant filling the spaces between lead and breaking stories with background pieces, analysis, talk, a little fluffy human interest to round out the blend.

The science stuff worked its way into the lineup maybe once, twice a week. Woods found it endurable when the stories related to ordinary people’s lives. Child-development studies, medical breakthroughs, home computing, these things he understood. But he hated when his producers got too smart for their own good, booked guests who’d start running off at the mouth with complicated theories . . . or when they bought into one of the stunts NASA regularly pulled to grab attention and justify its existence to taxpayers, such as the big load of crap it was currently dishing out—

“Rick, pay attention!” Bennett yipped over their IFB line. “Ketchum’s got a bad case of eye bounce, makes him look evasive. Bring in the young one, try to nail him down on the flare’s severity. Ask what consequences it will have for earth.”

None, Woods felt like telling him. Nugatory, Todd. This segment’s not only pointless, it’s duller than dead air.

“Dr. Frye, let’s bring you into the conversation,” he said. “To use your colleague’s weather analogy, the solar storm system that’s brewing would be exactly how severe . . . ?”

“I think Jonathan was trying to explain that we can’t be exact at this stage,” Frye said. “My belief is we’re going to experience a series of X-20’s or higher, which would be very energetic. Putting it in perspective, a flare that’s categorized below an X-9 generally has few noticeable implications for us. As its power climbs the scale, though, increasing geomagnetic disturbances may result. . . .”

“And can you please tell our viewers around the world how they should expect these, uh, X-20 solar flames—”

“Flares!” Bennett said.

“—solar flares to affect them?”

“Again, it’s tough to be certain. We can only look back at what’s happened in the past, and use that as the basis for informed guesses,” Frye said. “About thirty years back, a group of flares in the X-15 range interrupted satellite transmissions, and resulted in serious power-line voltage swings in at least two of our Western and Midwestern states. It also caused the explosion of a 230,000-volt transformer in British Columbia—”