If they are you ought to back it, Alfred said. Monica, we don’t have the faintest understanding of what we’re seeing here. Right now Venus is on the far side of the sun. It took around fourteen minutes for the light curve to show up here. Photons, travelling at light speed. A minute later, a cosmic ray shower showed up.

“Cosmic rays, from Venus?”

You heard right. Very high energy panicles. And in about four hours we’re expecting a blast shell to impact the top of Earth’s atmosphere. The lower energy stuff, coming at thirty or forty million miles an hour. Monica, it’s as if a miniature supernova went off in our back yard. Hell, we’re even seeing a neutrino flux.

“That’s impossible.”

Nevertheless. I’m not anticipating a lot of sleep in the next few days. Monica, that thing is going to be naked-eye visible, even at noon. It’s going to be unmissable.

So the public would wake up to it, to funny lights in the sky. Monica was one of the President’s senior science advisors. How was Monica going to brief her on this? “Tell me what to expect.”

The low-energy cosmic rays will be deflected by the Van Allen belts, which will fill up. We have to expect auroras. Spectacular stuff. Alfred sounded excited, as well he might, she mused; it sounded as if he might get priority on this discovery. The higher-energy stuff will make it through to the atmosphere. Crack the air molecules, create showers of secondary panicles. We have to expect a significant increase in background radiation.

“How much? For how long?”

We don’t know, Monica. We’ve never seen anything like this before. There is also the shower of X-ray and gamma rays. We don’t know how strong it will be at its peak. Maybe there will be some immediate deaths. More likely we will see a pulse of internal cancers, skin cancers, cataracts, in the coming months and years. We will have to monitor the food chain.

“What should the President tell people?”

To take radiation precautions. Get underground if they can; rock and soil is a good shield. The military and politicos ought to get into their nuclear shelters. If they still have them.

“They have them.”

If the shower persists we’ll have to think about lead-lining our surface buildings. Oh, air travel ought to be curtailed, at least monitored. And we ought to think about bringing the astronauts home from the Space Station.

“Enough. All right, Alfred. Thanks. I ought to make some calls.”

Yes. Take care, Monica.

“And you. Keep in touch.”

Oh, I will.

She put down the phone, and tried to think this through.

It was hard to focus on anything outside her own, failing body. As if she was a self-obsessed character in some daytime soap.

But, it seemed, she was still engaged with the world.