“I think I have most of the rough edges smoothed out of our cooling system,” said Anjin. “You’re going to love this.”

“I expect I will,” said Tam. “It had better be good.”

Tam did not interrupt the engineer as he explained the production and detonation of the little “absorbic bombs” that now made human survival possible near the bottom of the solar corona. The instantaneous conversion of energy to matter: the bombs were so childishly simple that it would have taken an Einstein to think of them, or an alien invasion forcing the redesign of Anjin’s brain chemistry to quicken him into seeing the obvious.

“Detonated in tandem, just below the comet’s surface, they form a cold barrier through which none of the Sun’s heat can possibly seep … unless we want it to—”

Tam was well aware that the temperature outside was comparable to standing within a half kilometer of the Hiroshima bomb. Removing all that heat before it could wear away the comet’s outer layers of rock was going to create a constant buildup of mass—which, according to the chart taking shape in her imagination, would, over the course of many years, drag the comet down into violently rising and falling columns of gas even if the accumulation rate was only a few grams of matter per minute. But Tam found comfort in the certainty that she could not possibly be the first to imagine the problem, and guessed that Anjin had already found a way to thwart what seemed an inevitable and irreversible progression.

“I would never want to make a gross claim that my absorbic bombs alone can keep us alive. In fact, without some very careful fine-tuning we could easily be floating in this room at near absolute zero right now, frozen to death even as we go into the circle of hell. Now, two things are happening to us as we ride through the solar atmosphere, neither of which is very good for sustaining orbit.”

Tam nodded and smiled knowingly, and Anjin returned the smile, even though both of them knew that their confidence was still waging war with their doubts.

“I don’t intend to sound cocky,” Anjin said persuasively, “but I think we’ve come up with a system that can solve both problems. It’s mostly protons and electrons out there—all positive and negative charges. We simply project magnetic field lines ahead of the ship and shunt the particles to either side, like the prow of a boat slicing through water. Now, even though none of these particles will touch us, contact with our magnetic field will still impart some slowing to the ship itself. All our magnetic prow can do is provide some shielding and streamlining. If we want to stay aloft, we need a propulsion system suited to these conditions.

Now, at the velocities we will soon be attaining, there is an opportunity to magnetically guide, or funnel, some of these protons precisely where they’ll do us good—say, into the engine intakes— and also to eject some of our gradually increasing mass as thrust.”