The final leg of the journey, a connecting flight from Frankfurt, was on a small, propeller-driven regional plane.
As soon as the plane landed, Li Dong followed Old Zhang and Old Wu out of the terminal, which was so small it was a bit bewildering.
The sky over Lower Saxony was a hazy gray, the clouds hanging low.
A few kilometers after the taxi left the airport, villages began to flash past the window, with faint wisps of smoke occasionally rising from their chimneys.
It was called a university town, but it felt more like a rural area propped up by a single university.
Li Dong pressed his forehead against the car window and watched for a while.
Forty-six Nobel Prize laureates had emerged from this rural landscape of smoking chimneys.
If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he would have found it rather jarring.
Old Wu, sitting in the front passenger seat, glanced at him in the rearview mirror but didn’t say anything.
On the other side of the back seat, Old Zhang sat ramrod straight with his hands on his knees, as if he were escorting a state guest rather than accompanying a student in his early twenties to retrieve a set of data.
The two "life teachers" had hardly spoken a word the entire trip, but Li Dong had already noticed when they were going through immigration: the IDs tucked into their passport pages were of a kind he could never obtain in his lifetime.
...
The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research was situated at the edge of a beech forest.
The institute’s main building wasn’t particularly tall.
There was no grand archway at the entrance to the campus, nor were there any security guards on duty. There was only a stone stele engraved with the institute’s name and its abstract sun emblem.
The car stopped at the entrance to the main hall.
Li Dong and the two teachers got out of the car.
A middle-aged woman was at the reception desk.
She checked the visitor registration on her computer, then looked up at Li Dong, her gaze lingering on his face for a fraction of a second.
’A Huaxia man in his early twenties with an appointment with Professor Richter. How unusual.’
’But that’s none of my business.’
"The professor is in the central courtyard."
"Follow the main corridor to the end. It’s through the door on your left."
Li Dong thanked her.
Old Zhang and Old Wu sat down in the main hall. Old Zhang even pulled a copy of the *Global Times* from his pocket and spread it across his lap. They didn’t follow him in.
Li Dong walked down the corridor alone.
The display boards on both sides of the corridor were quite interesting. On the left were mission milestones from over the years—SOHO, STEREO, SDO, Solar Orbiter. On the right were black-and-white group photos of the directors of the Max Planck Institute, from the first generation in 1957 to the present day.
He didn’t have time to look closely. He followed the corridor to the end and pushed open the glass door leading to the central courtyard.
The courtyard wasn’t actually very large. It was a rectangular space enclosed by several buildings, with a gravel path encircling a patch of lawn. A single beech tree grew on the lawn.
A tall, elderly man stood under the tree with his hands clasped behind his back, his face tilted up toward the sky.
There was no sun in the sky.
Yet he still kept his face tilted upward.
For a moment, Li Dong was a bit dazed.
He had read several review papers co-authored by this man. He knew he was a member of the German National Academy of Sciences. He knew the citation for his Haier Prize from the American Astronomical Society read that he had "redefined humanity’s statistical understanding of extreme solar particle events." But no review paper had ever told him that this man, at seventy years old, had a perfectly straight back.
As if nothing had ever been able to bend it.
Li Dong lightened his steps and walked under the beech tree.
Perhaps hearing Li Dong’s footsteps, the old man slowly turned his head.
His face was thinner than Li Dong had imagined, with a high brow and deep-set eyes.
"Professor Richter, hello," Li Dong greeted him.
Richter gave a slight nod. Without a word, he simply pointed to the row of bluestone steps behind him, indicating for Li Dong to sit.
Li Dong glanced at the withered leaves on the steps but sat down without any hesitation.
Richter sat down as well.
An old man and a young one, sitting side-by-side beneath a bare beech tree.
Looking at them from this angle, you probably couldn’t tell that one was the current president of Division X of the International Astronomical Union, and the other was a young man who had been quietly pushed to the forefront of the mathematics world in recent years.
They looked more like a grandfather and grandson who had been kicked out of the building during their lunch break.
...
Richter was the first to speak.
"Dong," he said in a very casual tone. "My Comment... it didn’t cause you too much trouble, did it?"
Li Dong thought for a moment, then nodded honestly.
"Yes, quite a bit of trouble."
Hearing this, a grin suddenly spread across the old man’s gaunt face.
"Good."
Li Dong was taken aback for a second, then gave a wry smile.
"Professor, are you always this rude?"
Richter didn’t show the slightest hint of embarrassment at Li Dong’s words.
"Dong, I was in this field before you were even born."
"Causing you trouble was my objective. If you’re in a lot of trouble, then I’ve achieved my objective."
Li Dong frowned.
"Why? Because you think I was wrong?"
Richter shook his head.
"No," he said calmly. "I don’t know if what you did was right or wrong."
Li Dong paused, not understanding.
Richter glanced at him and slowly added.
"Something that is uncertain, to me, is wrong."
With that, he stood up.
He didn’t bother to brush the dust from his trousers. He just raised his head to the sunless sky and spoke.
...
"When I was thirty-two, I saw a set of data."
Li Dong didn’t reply, listening quietly.
"That was in 1988," Richter said. "I was doing a background analysis of the high-energy channels from a new generation of geostationary weather satellites in geosynchronous orbit."
"Back then, this channel array had just been deployed. In total, there was less than eight years of concurrent global records."
"In those less than eight years of records, I saw a set of small peaks that aligned across four different orbital altitudes."
"I was young then. I believed what I saw."
"I wrote an internal memo and submitted it to the institute."
"In the memo, I didn’t dare use a term like ’Carrington Level’. I just said that if this set of small peaks persisted over the next two to three solar cycles, then humanity might have to face an event more severe than the one in 1859."
"I recommended that the institute initiate an internal alert and report it to the European Space Agency."
Li Dong turned to look at him. He didn’t recall this event in Richter’s biography.
"...The institute suppressed it?"
"Yes," Richter said calmly. "The director at the time had a talk with me. He didn’t deny my data. He just said..."
"’Heinrich, you’re thirty-two years old. You’ve just become an independent PI. If this memo of yours turns into an official warning, and what if nothing happens in the end? The rest of your career will be over.’"
"’The institute can’t let you gamble on this.’"
"I sat across from him, my hands shaking with anger."
As he recounted this, he gave a faint smile.
"But in the end, that memo still got out."
"I wasn’t the one who sent it. It was my doctoral student. He took a copy of the memo from my desk, signed his own name, and submitted it to *Solar Physics* as his personal opinion."
Li Dong’s heart suddenly lurched.
"That student..."
"His name was Michael." Richter paused. "After that Letter was published, half the people in space weather in Europe and the United States called him crazy. The other half were waiting to see him fail. Two to three solar cycles passed. Nothing happened."
"The event didn’t happen, so his name was permanently attached to that Letter."
"Michael was the most brilliant student I ever had."
"I still occasionally use the inversion program he wrote."
"He should have gotten his own independent group before he was 35, well on his way to becoming one of the next generation of solar physicists."
"Now, he’s a technician here at the Max Planck Institute."
The wind whistled through the branches of the beech tree.
Richter fell silent for a long while.
"So you see, Dong," he finally said, turning back to look at Li Dong, who was still sitting on the steps. "The institute saved me. Michael saved me. And since then, I’ve never again written about things that are just ’possible’."
"I’m giving you a little trouble now."
"So that later on, you won’t face even bigger trouble."
Li Dong slowly rose from the bluestone steps.
"Professor," he said calmly, "so now... you’re just protecting your own reputation?"
Richter’s eyes slowly narrowed.
Li Dong didn’t wait for his answer and continued.
"If a set of small peaks like the ones you saw back then appeared again now..."
"Would you still speak out?"
Richter clearly hadn’t expected this question.
He looked at Li Dong for several seconds.
Then he shook his head.
"I wouldn’t."
His voice was so soft it was almost carried away by the wind.
"For me to speak out about something I’m not even sure of myself, given my current position, would only cause panic."
He paused.
"Dong, I am no longer the thirty-two-year-old man I was in 1988."
Li Dong stood frozen, a sudden jolt running through him.
’So... Professor Richter has actually reached the same conclusion as me?’
Li Dong raised his head, about to speak.
But Richter raised a hand, cutting him off.
"I have a good idea of what you want to ask," Richter said.
"I won’t discuss this with you."
"The data you want, I can give it to you."
"But first, you have to tell me what your method is."
"I can’t just give you the raw archive of the NOAA SWPC’s extended magnetic classification for beta-gamma and higher active regions and then play house with you."
Li Dong raised an eyebrow.
’Play house?’
’When had he, Li Dong, ever asked a senior figure to "play house" with him?’
’This old professor really doesn’t mince his words.’

Comments

Loading...