Shield Down

By William de Berg

SGR 0245+05, a dangerous magnetar within close galactic proximity, shows signs of erupting just as the Earth is in a magnetic reversal and losing its magnetic shield. Professor James Templeton, a brilliant but maligned astrophysicist who alone predicted the eruption of “+05”, is summoned to Washington, DC, by Dr. Jacqueline DeFazio, his former lover and head of NASA’s Space Life Sciences Division, to consult with high-ranking governmental officials about the prospects for a major starquake in “+05”. He tours one of over one hundred American underground mini-cities that were built in the preceding decade based on his scientific predictions and is astounded by the realization that NASA and Dr. DeFazio were following up massively on his predictions of doom, even as they were attacking him in public. The magnetar strikes almost immediately after the high-level briefing and before he and DeFazio can reignite their relationship. Templeton is trapped in DC but manages to return home after a harrowing cross-country trip across a dystopian America in the initial stages of societal collapse. After two hundred years, the restoration of the magnetic shield leads a small number of underground survivors to eventually resurface to a feudal world of warring tribes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781490798806

William de Berg

William de Berg is an American author who has written three previous conspiracy fiction thrillers dealing with topics such as September 11, CIA drug trafficking, the occult financial system, oil wars, media control, and the Bilderbergers. His novels contain a mix of historical facts and analysis wrapped in thrilling action and suspense. “Shield Down” is his first science fiction novel.

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Copyright 2020 William de Berg.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-9879-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-9881-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-9880-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019921203

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover: An artistic rendition of a magnetar:

https://www.esoorgpublic/images/eso1034a/ (credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

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CONTENTS

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part II

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part III

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

To Jarrah White

Vox clamantis

in deserto

Even if Earth were hit by an asteroid or some other cosmic catastrophe, humans would still have an infinitely better chance of surviving for hundreds of years underground on Earth than on other planets and moons with poisonous atmospheres and no water, organic matter, or easily exploitable resources.

—The Dopaminergic Mind in Human Evolution and History, p. 167

PART I

CHAPTER 1

C ARLETTA JACKSON HAD JUST LEFT THE BATHROOM of the Swift operations center and was slowly making her way back to her desk, passing by old candy bar wrappers on the floor and a couple of half-empty Styrofoam coffee cups on the tables. It was three in the morning on a cool mid-April night, and most everyone had long since left for home. Only she and a young male graduate student were manning the center.

As she was about to sit down, Jackson suddenly became transfixed by one of the computer screens as it lit up with a huge spike followed by a series of periodic smaller ones, gradually diminishing in amplitude over the next minute. The Swift sensors went into automatic drive, directing the telescope to the new coordinates and alerting other observatories around the world of the interstellar event. The gamma eruption almost certainly emanated from a magnetar, with more details available once its cosmic radiation trail was captured for analysis. When the coordinates came in and the magnetar was identified, Carletta instantly recognized it … and its danger.

Carletta knew that it would be a stressful night now, and the next day would be worse once the news reached the larger astrophysical community and the media. Despite the late hour and the sudden jump in her workload, Jackson quickly reached for her cell phone and began texting her old mentor: "05 has risen from the dead—right on schedule."

* * *

SGR 0245+05 was the designation for the nearest soft gamma repeater ever observed, its numbers referring to its ascension and declination in the sky.¹ Soft gamma repeaters were galactic events associated with starquakes—perturbations of neutron stars that constituted collapsed cores of supernovae only a few kilometers in diameter but with several times the mass of the sun and magnetic fields quadrillions of times larger than Earth’s own.² Their flares released an enormous amount of electromagnetic energy in the form of gamma and x-rays that flooded the galaxy with a trail of charged particles. The first set of soft gamma repeaters were recorded by telescopes in 1979 within a period of a few months. Only a few had been discovered since, and only one—SGR 0245+05—had shown up more than once.³ Most astrophysicists were aware of SGR 0245+05 for that reason and also for its close range to Earth—only five hundred light-years away, just shy of five quadrillion kilometers, beyond the star Alpha Ceti in the constellation Cetus.⁴ But because SGR 0245+05’s output during both of its previous quakes was low by gamma-ray burst standards, few in the astrophysical community expressed much interest in it—except her mentor, the famous astrophysicist James Templeton, and, of course, Jackson herself.

There were many telescopes and observatories around the world that could detect gamma rays, but the most important of these was the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory,⁵ named after its creator (Neil Gehrels) and one of the fastest birds in nature (the swift).⁶ The Swift telescope was, like its avian namesake, not only rapid in its ability to automatically slew onto its target, but it also had the advantage of viewing a large portion (one-sixth) of the sky through its sensors. The observatory could detect multiple electromagnetic frequencies, but its primary mission was to search for gamma signals. It had detected over one hundred gamma bursts since its launch,⁷ but finding SGRs was harder since they were less common.

Carletta Jackson had inherited a scientific fascination with galactic gamma ray sources while studying with Templeton at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was only natural that she would apply for a postdoctoral position at Goddard, the major center for deep space monitoring in the United States and home to the Swift and the place where Templeton had done his own postdoc many decades earlier. Initially, she mostly analyzed Swift data collected from existing projects at the Goddard headquarters in Greenbelt, Maryland. But when a new SGR was discovered later that year by an Italian observatory, she pleaded to be able to study its behavior over the next few months at the Swift operations center at Penn State.⁸

She had first heard of Templeton while a physics undergraduate student at Harvard. He and Nicholas Pavlich—an upcoming young evolutionary biologist at the time—had written a famous article for Scientific American in 2008 that discussed the contribution of interstellar events, and particularly gamma-ray bursts, to mass extinctions. This article, as well as Templeton’s earlier discovery of SGR 0245+05 and his subsequent analysis of its magnetic spin, made him one of the most famous astrophysicists of his generation. But she wasn’t yet aware of his later papers, which questioned the rationale for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) quest for life on other planets and even the ability of humans to survive beyond Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic shield. This highly controversial work turned him into a pariah in NASA and transformed his status within the astrophysical community at large into that of a rebel outsider.

By the time she arrived at the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at Boulder, Templeton was only mustering a little theoretical work and consulting, with no laboratory and no PhD students. Other students and faculty warned her that he was a cranky, embittered old man—hardly the type of adviser you’d want to help launch your scientific career. There was something about him, though, that attracted her intellectually and even personally to him. After taking his first-year seminar on High-Energy Galactic Observation, she found him to be guarded, though not unfriendly; moreover, he seemed more than willing to share his brilliant insights with anyone who dared to venture into his office. So she decided to let her intuition reign and asked to become Templeton’s first PhD student in over a decade. Templeton agreed on one condition: that she finish her master’s within the year and then her doctorate within four years as he was set to retire at age seventy-five. It turned out that he had to postpone his retirement until he reached seventy-six years of age—one day after Carletta Jackson received her PhD.

While at first the two were exceedingly professional in their relationship, she was able to melt away some of Templeton’s crustiness over time, and he began to reveal more of his personal side. He had never married, although he and Jacqueline DeFazio—a former graduate student at Boulder and now the head of NASA’s Space Life Sciences Directorate—had a serious romance while he was a young professor and she was in graduate school and on her postdoc. Everyone had expected them to get hitched, but that never occurred as their professional careers eventually got in the way. Jackson quickly found that one of Templeton’s passions was climbing, which he still did in moderation now although he had been known in his prime for having conquered all of Colorado’s fifty-three fourteeners—summits above fourteen thousand feet. One weekend in the summer after her first year, he invited her and several other students and faculty members on a day hike to nearby South Boulder Peak; and the next summer, he invited her for several more challenging mountain hikes. It was often just him and her on the trails, and they made for an interesting pair as they traipsed along the narrow paths—she the attractive trim young African American woman from The Bronx and he the lanky, white-haired Anglo man from a New England patrician family.

She and Templeton shared more than a love of intergalactic observation, for they were both tenacious intellectually albeit in different ways. Jackson’s resolve sprang from when she had been rescued from intellectual impoverishment by the Harlem Children’s Zone, a special program funded mainly by wealthy New York City financiers, which nurtured her intellect from preschool until she was eventually admitted to the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. Templeton, meanwhile, went against his wealthy New Englander family’s expectations of its only son running its large financial holdings by heading out West, dabbling in the new age, midseventies counterculture for a while before eventually buckling down and pursuing a degree in science. That stubborn independence would later surface on a much larger stage when he challenged both NASA and the astrophysical community’s orthodoxy with his controversial theories of the singularity of life on Earth and its proneness to galactic catastrophes. Templeton saw that, like a lot of graduate students, Jackson was looking for answers; but he also recognized that she was exceptionally willing to do the hard work necessary to gain those answers—starting with challenging much of what she had been taught in her classes.

Jackson’s doctoral thesis was on the geographical distribution of the estimated two thousand known pulsars in the galaxy using gamma ray data already collected by one of the other professors in the department for whom she had worked. Included in it would be the creation of a dispersion-distance map of the pulsar distribution. Because she had a NASA stipend through the university’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA),⁹ she only needed Templeton’s input as far as the rationale for the proposal, the analysis to be used, and the interpretation and write-up. Throughout her dissertation odyssey, Templeton kept her naturally expansive mind focused like a laser on the target, reminding her constantly of the age-old adage that the best dissertation is a done one. Only when she started writing up the discussion section did he encourage her to start revving up her theoretical engine. Her dissertation received a highly favorable reception at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting and had just been accepted for publication in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal—her seminal first authorship.

She applied for various postdocs but had her sights set on Goddard. She knew Templeton was on the outs with NASA, but the latter would be hard-pressed to overlook her sterling credentials as well as compelling personal story. She couldn’t predict exactly what would transpire in her research at Goddard, but she knew it would be a good stepping-stone to finding a permanent position in academia, which was ever harder to come by these days no matter how talented one was.

As she replayed the recording of SGR 0245+05’s burst and subsequent gyrations on the computer screen, she knew that this was going to be a big breakthrough if she could quickly channel it to publication. The only SGR that had produced more than one set of bursts was now on its third iteration … something truly extraordinary. For a few moments, she was entranced by the scientific possibilities of this latest discovery. But suddenly there was a flickering of the lights, which meant that subatomic particles from the magnetar’s magnetic quake were reaching the depleted ionosphere and nipping at the power grids. Jackson started trembling as she remembered Templeton’s chilling words during one of their last meetings in his office: "If our shield’s down and 05 ever erupts again in a big way … God help us all."

CHAPTER 2

J AMES ALAN TEMPLETON IV WAS STILL AWAKE IN HIS modern wood-framed house at the base of the Rocky Mountain foothills when he received the text from his former student. As with Jackson, his first reaction was of scientific excitement—that one of his theoretical predictions had come true and a test of perhaps his most outlandish claim was looming. Then a dread came over him as he realized the potential horror in his magnetar’s third coming.

Templeton had been the first to discover SGR 0245+05 as a twenty-eight-year-old postdoc at Goddard in 1982. He was lucky that one of the gamma telescopes was situated just at the right place in the sky that night, since older telescopes could not move fast enough to capture even the remnants of a magnetar’s output. The gamma burst wasn’t especially powerful and consequently didn’t create a huge sensation in the astrophysical community despite its precarious proximity to Earth. Although more attention surrounded the magnetar’s second outburst in 2007, its output was still rather negligible. Templeton, though, had a hunch that the repeat performance was no fluke and that 05, as he nicknamed it, erupted at regular intervals as its unstable mass periodically forced cracks in its outer crust, setting off the monstrous magnetic explosions. He searched through older astronomical records for evidence of a twenty-five-year cycle in the vicinity of SGR 0245+05’s predicted one, but because gamma ray sensors had only first been deployed in 1961¹⁰ and could not pick up localized sources until much later, he couldn’t prove that earlier outbursts followed the same quarter-century timing. He did note a major disturbance in the late 1850s that was powerful enough to destroy some telegraph lines and was in line with 05’s cycle; perhaps it reflected a disruption of the ionosphere caused by a gamma attack instead of a solar flare.¹¹

Being without family, Templeton’s obsession with SGR 0245+05 became a staple in his life, and he bonded with it as he otherwise might have with a spouse or a child or a dog. His major focus in the first twenty years of his academic career was with the soft gamma repeaters and SGR 0245+05 in particular. He liked the fact that unlike nebulous concepts such as dark energy, which was in the end merely a fudge factor based on tenuous assumptions about the rate of expansion of the universe,¹² a gamma burst was something you could put your hands—or at least your eyes—around. There was no doubt when one exploded, as some of them were more luminous than Earth’s own moon.¹³ In time, his intuitive affinity with SGR 0245+05 led him to have strong faith in his predictions about what the magnetar would do. Unlike almost every other gamma researcher who believed large eruptions were invariably followed over the next few weeks by gradually diminishing aftershocks, he argued that soft gamma repeaters could start with smaller bursts before moving onto the big one. And he believed that gamma-burst energies were not limited to a small range but rather could vary over many orders of magnitude across eruptions. Even though he didn’t feel confident enough to publish his intuitions in a formal venue, he did speculate about them in an invited address before the American Astronomical Society in 2011. His hunch told him that 05 was not only going to faithfully adhere to its twenty-five-year cycle but also might slowly begin to rev up its energy in a future eruption until a final cataclysmic burst occurred. And now in 2032, as the first of SGR 0245+05’s new eruptions transpired, seventy-seven-year-old James Templeton felt a foreboding at what lay ahead next for the denizens of planet Earth.

He reminisced how the second recorded flare-up of SGR 0245+05 in 2007 led to the most fateful and fruitful scientific encounter of his career. Nicholas Pavlich, a young evolutionary biologist trained at Cornell and on his way to certain tenure at Colorado, had come to him one day after a faculty meeting in the fall of that year. Pavlich had just startled the scientific world with a bold new theory on how humans evolved from apes, focusing on epigenetic rather than Darwinian influences on rising dopamine levels in the brain.¹⁴ Pavlich had confronted head-on the previous scientific orthodoxy that brain size and genetics were the basis of unique human intelligence and in the process had come to believe that, far from inevitable, the emergence of modern humans was a gargantuan fluke that almost didn’t happen. Pavlich had read Templeton’s brief account of SGR 0245+05’s second flare-up in a faculty bulletin and invited Templeton to lunch, where the junior professor opened up a discussion about how unlikely it was that Earth ever produced intelligent life, let alone advanced civilizations. One major problem, according to Pavlich, was the backsliding due to mass extinctions that occurred periodically on Earth and presumably on other potentially habitable planets as well. He asked Templeton if, from an astrophysicist’s standpoint, he had any insights on the matter. Templeton admitted he hadn’t really thought too much about the issue, having paid scant attention to biology in his career. But he did relay the belief of some astrophysicists that despite the shielding power of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere, if periodic intense gamma-ray bursts, such as those he had studied, were generated close enough in the galaxy, they could eviscerate most life on Earth, pushing the path to intelligent life back to square one.¹⁵

That was all Pavlich needed to run with, and he immediately thereafter began examining whether the period between terrestrial extinctions correlated with any galactic cycles, as some had claimed. The consensus was that there was an approximate sixty-two-million-year cycle in mass extinctions on Earth.¹⁶ Pavlich met again with Templeton in the latter’s office, probing on what astronomical influence might explain the periodicity. The first thing that came to Templeton’s mind was that in its two-hundred-and-twenty-five-million-year cycle around the galactic center, Earth and the sun bobbed north of the galactic midplane every sixty million or so years. Templeton suggested that there must be a north-south anisotropy in the Milky Way galaxy that led to a periodically greater cosmic threat to Earth. The vertical unevenness turned out to have a surprisingly simple explanation: there was a greater density of stars south of the galactic equator, which helped shield cosmic radiation from entering our solar system. Conversely, the lower density in the northern galactic hemisphere posed a greater risk of cosmic ray bombardment to Earth when it moved northward.¹⁷

Pavlich was so energized that he immediately started composing a theoretical paper laying out the galactic asymmetry theory. But when Templeton examined the data more closely, he realized a galactic bobble explanation would have predicted more mass extinctions than had occurred. In the 375 million or so years between the first great post-Cambrian extinction, the Ordovician 440 million years ago, and the last great one (the Cretaceous-Paleogene) 66 million years ago, which killed off the last of the dinosaurs,¹⁸ there were three that fell within a few million years of the 60-million-year cycle. The Devonian 375 million years ago and the Permian-Triassic 252 million years ago were pretty much spot on, and the Triassic-Jurassic 200 million years ago wasn’t far off. However, two predicted extinctions around 300 and 130 million years ago were absent from the paleontological record.

Templeton wracked his brain to come up with an explanation, and it led to one of his greatest epiphanies. The same thing that prevented extinctions when Earth was in the southern hemisphere of the galaxy—magnetic shielding—also protected it at times even when Earth resided in the more exposed northern hemisphere. But in the latter instance, the shielding came not from other stars in the galaxy but from Earth’s own magnetosphere. Earth was the only known terrestrial planet in the solar system to possess even a modest magnetic field,¹⁹ emanating from convection currents continually generated in its iron core and dependent on the differential rotations of its inner and outer cores. Its magnetic field managed to trap a huge quantity of charged ions that formed an almost impenetrable shield against cosmic radiation when fully activated. The problem was that it wasn’t always activated. For still undiscerned reasons, the magnetic field would periodically shift directions, so the north pole would become the south one; when this happened, the overall strength of the magnetic field would drop.²⁰ This happened every half million years on average, but sometimes no shift occurred for up to fifty million years (in epochs known as superchrons²¹), whereas reversals occurred as often as every one hundred thousand years during other periods. There were all sorts of concerns about