The Fifth World Read Free Page A

she’d eaten in the Building B cafeteria, her thoughts about the university lecture they would be attending that afternoon . . . “Of course!” she suddenly exclaimed. “The university lecture, that’s it!” Suppressing an incipient smile, she searched the police officer’s eyes.
    â€œW-well,” she stuttered. “I don’t know if this means anything, but Jack Bennewitz was going to give a very important lecturethis afternoon in the auditorium of the main building. His students were all very excited about it. He was going to announce a major discovery.”
    â€œGo on, please.”
    â€œWell, Professor Bennewitz was going to announce the results of his latest work: a theoretical model capable of predicting high-intensity solar storms and eruptions. X-class eruptions, and even higher-level ones. It was rumored that the scale might have to be raised to Z class. He was especially concerned about a storm that could reach Z class. He called it the Big One.”
    Lincoln Lewis’s eyes opened wide. He had heard the techies in his department mention precisely those words, Big One, just minutes earlier. Several folders on the victim’s computer were filled with references to it.
    T HE BIG ONE.
    On the sixth floor of the United States Embassy in Madrid, Eileen Garrett and Bill Dafoe of the intelligence unit were having a heated discussion about those three words. The Spanish national police had just been asking them about it, after a journalism professor at the Complutense University had been found dead in the neighborhood of Moncloa with a briefcase full of Internet printouts about the Big One, as well as original documents that bore the letterhead of the Goddard Space Flight Center. The professor’s folder was now sitting open on a conference room table at the embassy. Apparently, what the local police had found so unusual was the way the body had been mutilated: the aggressors had removed the man’s heart and, while he was still alive, thrown his body down onto the entrance to the LaCoruña road from the overpass between the Moncloa tower and the university rector’s office.
    â€œSo, do you have any idea what the hell this Big One is, Bill?”
    Eileen’s eyes bore into the back of her colleague, who could scarcely tear his eyes away from the most recent science supplement of the Spanish newspaper El País.
    â€œWell . . . It turns out that just yesterday this Ruiz character published an article explaining it,” he said, smacking the paper with his index finger.
    â€œAre you serious? Really?”
    â€œListen: ‘In 1989 a solar eruption sparked one of the most significant plasma expulsions documented by astrophysicists to date. They classified it as an X-class flare and discovered that it had sent a proton cloud into space that took several hours to reach Earth. When it finally did, a magnetic storm shifted the planet’s field by eight degrees, short-circuited telephone and power lines in Canada, and caused aurorae borealis in nonpolar zones. Sixteen years later, in January 2005, another X-class flare showered Earth with a proton storm: high-frequency transmissions in the US and Canada collapsed, and this time the aurorae were visible in Arizona. Fortunately, none of these sudden flare-ups directly impacted the Earth; they only struck us laterally. The day we receive a frontal impact, the consequences of the Big One will be devastating.’ ”
    â€œWow! It sounds like an ad for a horror movie.”
    â€œWell, Ruiz took all of this very seriously. And get this: at the end of the article it says that tomorrow’s paper will include part two of the article in which the author promises to give readers a probable date for the Big One. The news desk at thepaper confirmed for me that they were expecting the article this afternoon.”
    â€œExcellent. Do you think this has something to do with his death?”
    â€œIt