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simulation was forty-two thousand to one. At that setting the Moon provided the observer with a natural feel for the pulse of events. Once a minute the sunlit white marble made its four-hundred-thousand-kilometer sweep around Earth, oscillating four or five degrees above and below the plane of the ecliptic.
    At that rate, the display of the period from the present to the time of maximum flux energy would take a hundred minutes; long before that John would be at Sky City. He called for a tripling of simulation display rate and settled back to watch. Already he was having premonitions. Will Davis would never suggest such a viewing unless the implications were severe.
    In any case, John would have caught the problem even without prior warning. He remembered the results of the simulation from four months ago. Superimposed on the blue web you would always see a scattering of pink patches, within which the flecks of green and orange came and went apparently at random.
    Today was different. Eight minutes into the display— less than two years ahead in real time—the pattern began to change. Pink patches spread. Within them he saw few flecks of green. The orange glow of worsening problems dominated.
    Something had changed, rapidly and for the worse. It surely had to be something more than the number of uncharged particles, which John still judged acceptably low. He kept watching until the simulation reached the time of maximum flux. By then the space shield had become a sieve. In such a future, Earth would suffer far more than during the initial wave of twenty-seven years ago.
    His imagination, heightened by the boost, flashed to scenes of disaster made vivid by early childhood. The first effects of the Alpha Centauri supernova had been calving of the Antarctic ice shelf, blizzards at the equator, tidal waves, and nested sets of tornadoes. When the gamma pulse hit, planes dropped from the sky, telephones and television and radio became useless, and mayhem, starvation, and disease took over.
    That surprise would not happen again—the gamma pulse would not be repeated. But there was scope for new and worse disasters. His boosted consciousness threw images at him with awful clarity.
    The upper atmosphere had shielded Earth from the direct effects of the gamma-ray pulse. It would not do the same for the particle storm now on its way. The charged nuclei, predicted to be mostly bare protons, would come like a hail of tiny bullets, smashing into the air at relativistic speed. Most would be absorbed on the way down, producing a cascade of forward-scattered mesons, electrons, and gamma rays. Some of those would in turn be absorbed and scattered, some would continue. The atmosphere would turn into a cloud of charged nitrogen and oxygen ions, opaque at every wavelength from hard ultraviolet to short-wave infrared. In the darkness below, a deadly blend of radiation and particles would hit the surface. That final mixture would depend on the type and energy spectrum of the incident particles.
    Marine organisms would be lucky, at least at first. Water was a fine absorber, and within a few feet of the surface it would quench the main radiation storm. Troubles would begin at the bottom of the food chain, when plankton and algae lacked solar radiation for photosynthesis. Starvation would work its way steadily up, to the krill, to the vertebrate fishes and crustaceans, finally to the seals and dolphins and whales.
    Long before that, all land forms would be in trouble. Water was a good absorber for the torrent of high-energy radiation and particles, but unfortunately most plants and animals were at least seventy percent water. Microscopic explosions would happen in a billion cells at once, disrupting protein synthesis and demolishing the delicate nucleotide sequences in the germ plasm. Old organisms would sicken and die, embryos would form with mutation levels high enough to kill, and all under a smoking sky of reactive ions and toxic rains.
    Things