Today Frye had made it his godly mission to get to the EOF well ahead of the polyglot horde, and was probably at his workstation hours before they had begun to yawn, blink, and stretch through their morning wake-up routines. He himself had been unable to catch any sleep after bringing home printouts of the previous evening’s final MDI/ SOI data logs, and using them as the basis for an intricate series of equations prepared with what remained his three favorite computational tools—a #3 pencil, a legal pad, and his own scrupulously logical brain. All the observables told him that the sun’s helioseismologic agitation had increased by tremendous—in fact, nearly exponential—leaps and bounds in the last twenty-four hour period, and he’d been eager to do two things: check the overnight logs for further changes, and see how his data and math jibed with the latest information from SWAN, whose nonresident Auslander monitoring area just happened to be on the other side of a glass partition from his own true-blue resident project scientist area . . . and, well, well, wouldn’t you know, it also just happened to be unoccupied at that early hour.

Now he sat at a bank of display terminals, pondering SWAN’s most recent full-sky maps of the sun . . . or more accurately, the sun’s hydrogen envelope. Each spectroscopic image had been composed over a regular three-day interval, and was color-graded to profile the radiation intensities—“hot” and “cool” spots—of different coordinates on the envelope. Because the probe was in an almost stationary position relative to earth, following its elliptical revolutions around the sun, the equatorial solar plane showed up as elongated, and each map resembled an Easter egg splashed with various shades of purple, orange, green, and yellow.

Soon Frye’s heart was pounding. He got out his cellular phone and rang his complementary half at home.

“Hello?”

“Ketch, what’re you doing?”

“Dripping shower water on my bedroom carpet at the moment,” Ketchum said. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Time for you to get your ass over here to the center.”

“What’ve you turned up?” Ketchum’s tone had abruptly swung from mild annoyance to sharpest curiosity.

“Look, you remember that bullet we dodged last April . . . the solar flare that would’ve been all hell if it hadn’t missed Earth?”

“Of course,” Ketchum said. “The X-17 . . .”

“Well, I think we’re about to find ourselves downstream from a roarer that’ll make our X-17 look like a cap gun popping off.”

“Are you certain you’re not overestimating—”

“This one looks like the beast, Ketch. I mean it. The fucking beast. And it’ll be charging right at us once it’s hatched.”

Ketchum took an audible breath at the other end of the line.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

Marble Point, Antarctica
(77°25’ S, 163°49’ E)