The Three-Body Problem

“You can see that most people attending this meeting are comrades from the Redemptionist faction. I trust that the few Adventists who are here will stand on the side of the Organization. But men like Evans and you can no longer be saved. To protect the program and ideals of the ETO, we must completely solve the problem of the Adventists.”

Silence returned. A few moments later, one of the bodyguards near Ye, a young woman, smiled. She walked toward Pan Han casually.

Pan’s face changed. He stuck a hand inside the lapel of his jacket, but the young woman dashed quicker than the eye could follow. Before anyone could react, she wrapped one of her slender arms around Pan’s neck, placed her other hand on top of his head, and, by applying her unexpected strength at just the right angle, she twisted Pan’s head 180 degrees with practiced ease. The cracks from his cervical vertebrae breaking stood out against the complete silence.

The young woman’s hands immediately let go, as though Pan’s head was too hot. Pan fell to the ground, and the gun that had killed Shen Yufei slid under the table. His body still spasmed, and his eyes remained open, his tongue sticking out. But his head no longer moved, as though it were never a part of the rest of his body. Several men came and dragged him away, the blood oozing from his mouth leaving a long trail.

“Ah, Xiao Wang, you’re here too. How have you been?” Ye’s gaze fell on Wang Miao. She smiled kindly at him and nodded. Then she turned to the others. “This is Professor Wang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and my friend. He researches nanomaterials. This is the first technology our Lord wishes to extinguish from the Earth.”

No one looked at Wang, and Wang had no strength to express himself in any way. He had to pull at the sleeve of the man next to him so that he wouldn’t fall, but the man lightly brushed his hand away.

“Xiao Wang, why don’t I continue to tell you the story of Red Coast from last time? All the comrades here can listen too. This is not a waste of time. In this extraordinary moment, it is a fine time to review the history of our Organization.”

“Red Coast.… You weren’t done?” Wang asked foolishly.

Ye slowly approached the three-body model, seemingly absorbed by the swirling silver spheres. Through the broken window, the setting sun’s light fell on the model, and the flying spheres intermittently reflected the light onto the rebel commander, like sparks from a bonfire.

“No. I’ve only just started,” Ye said softly.

22

Red Coast V

Since she entered Red Coast Base, Ye Wenjie had never thought of leaving. After she learned the real purpose of the Red Coast Project, top-secret information that even many mid-level cadres at the base didn’t know, she cut off her spiritual connection to the outside world and devoted herself to her work. Thereafter, she became even more deeply embedded in the technical core of Red Coast, and began to take on more important research topics.

Commissar Lei never forgot that it was Chief Yang who first trusted Ye, but Lei was happy to assign important topics to her. Given Ye’s status, she had no rights to the results of her research. And Lei, who had studied astrophysics, was a political officer who was also an intellectual, rare at the time. Thus he could take credit for all of Ye’s research results and papers, and cast himself as an exemplary political officer with both technical acumen and revolutionary zeal.

The Red Coast Project had initially requisitioned Ye because of a paper on an attempted mathematical model of the sun she had published in the Journal of Astrophysics as a graduate student. Compared to the Earth, the sun was a far simpler physical system, made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Though its physical processes were violent, they were relatively straightforward, only fusing hydrogen into helium. Thus, it was likely that a mathematical model of the sun could describe it rather precisely. The paper was basic, but Lei and Yang saw in it a hope for a solution to a technical difficulty faced by the Red Coast monitoring system.

Solar outages, a common problem in satellite communications, had always plagued the Red Coast monitoring operations.

When the Earth, an artificial satellite, and the sun are in a straight line, the line of sight from the ground-based antenna to the satellite will have the sun as its background. The sun is a giant source of electromagnetic radiation, and, as a result, satellite transmissions to the ground will be overwhelmed by interference from the solar radiation. This problem could not be completely solved, even in the twenty-first century.