by Larry Niven
None of it paid for, and you can’t do what you want on the job, a malicious voice said inside his head.
Harvey ignored it.
The comets were not alone in the halo.
Local eddies near the center of the maelstrom — that whirling pool of gas which finally collapsed to form the Sun — had condensed into planets. The furious heat of the newly formed star had stripped the gas envelopes from the nearest, leaving nuggets of molten rock and iron. Worlds further out had remained as great balls of gas which men would, in a billion years, name for their gods. There had also been eddies very distant from the whirlpool’s axis.
One had formed a planet the size of Saturn, and it was still gathering mass. Its rings were broad and beautiful in starlight. Its surface churned with storms, for its center was furiously hot with the energy of its collapse. Its enormous orbit was tilted almost vertically to the plane of the inner system, and its stately path through the cometary halo took hundreds of thousands of years to complete.
Sometimes a comet would stray too near the black giant and be swept into its ring, or into the thousands of miles of atmosphere. Sometimes that tremendous mass would pluck a comet from its orbit and swing it out into interstellar space, to be lost forever. And sometimes the black planet would send a comet plunging into the maelstrom and hellfire of the inner system.
They moved in slow, stable orbits, these myriads of comets that had survived the ignition of the Sun. But when the black giant passed, orbits became chaos. Comets that fell into the maelstrom might return partially vaporized, and fall back, again and again, until nothing was left but a cloud of stones. But many never returned at all.
January: Interlude
Be the First in Your Block to Help Blow Out the Electric Power Network of the Northeast
East Village Other is proud to announce the first annual blackout of the Werewolves which is fixed for 3 P.M. on Wednesday, August 19, 1970. Once more let me put the system to the test. Switch on all the electric equipment you can lay hands on. Help the companies producing and distributing electric power to improve their balance sheets by consuming as much as you can; and even then find some way of using a bit more. In particular, switch on electric heaters, toasters, air conditioning, and any other apparatus with a high consumption. Refrigerator’ turned up to the maximum, with their doors left open, can cool down a large apartment in an amusing way. After an afternoon’s consumption-spree we will meet in Central Park to bay at the moon.
TUNE IN! PLUG IN! BLOW OUT!
Hospitals and other emergency services are hereby warned, and invited to take necessary precautions.
The East Village Other (an underground paper) July 1970
On a clear day the view stretched out forever. From his vantage point on the top floor of the San Joaquin Nuclear Project, Site Supervisor Barry Price had an excellent view of the vast lozenge-shaped saucer that had once been an inland sea, and was now the center of California’s agricultural industry. The San Joaquin Valley ran two hundred miles to his north, fifty to the south. The uncompleted nuclear-power complex stood on a low ridge twenty feet above the totally flat valley — the highest hill in sight.
Even at this early hour there was a bustle of industrial activity. His construction crews worked a full three shifts, through the night, on Saturdays and Sundays, and if Barry Price had had his way they’d have worked Christmas and New Year’s too. In their latest flurry of activity they’d finished Number One reactor and had a good start on Number Two; others had begun excavation for Three and Four, and none of it did any good. Number One was finished, but the courts and lawyers wouldn’t let him turn it on.
His desk was buried in paper. His hair was cut very short, his mustache was neatly trimmed and thin as a razor’s edge. He wore what his ex-wife had called his engineering uniform: khaki trousers, khaki shirt with epaulets, khaki bush jacket with more epaulets; pocket calculator swinging from his belt (when his hair was all brown it had been a slide rule), pencils in his breast pockets, notebook in its own pocket sewed to the jacket. When forced to — as he increasingly was by court appearances, command performances before the Mayor of Los Angeles and its Commissioners of Water and Power, testimony before Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the State Legislature — he reluctantly put on a gray flannel suit and tie; but on his home turf he gratefully changed back to field clothing, and he was damned if he’d dress up for visitors.
His coffee cup was empty, dead empty, and there went his last excuse. He keyed the intercom. “Dolores, I’m ready for our visiting firemen.”
“Not here yet,” she said.
Reprieved. For a little while. He went back to his papers, hating what he was doing. As he worked he muttered to himself. “I’m an engineer, dammit. If I’d wanted to spend all my time with legal briefs or sitting in a courtroom, I’d have been a lawyer. Or a mass murderer.”
Increasingly he regretted taking the job. He was a powersystems man, and a damned good one; he’d proved that by becoming Pennsylvania Edison’s youngest plant supervisor and keeping the Milford nuclear plant operating with the highest efficiency factor and best safety record in the country. And he’d wanted this position, to be in charge of San Joaquin and get the plant on line, four thousand megawatts of clean electric power when the project was completed. But his job was to build, to operate, not to explain. He was at home with machinery; more than that, with construction people, power operators, linemen and switchyard workers, his enthusiasm for nuclear power was infectious and spread through all those who worked for him — and so what? he thought sourly. Nowadays he spent all his time on paper work.
Dolores came in with more urgent memos that had to be answered. Every one of them was a job for a public-relations type, and every one of them came from people important enough to demand the time of the supervising engineer. He hefted the stack of memoranda and documents she dropped into his IN basket. “Look at this crap,” he said. “And every bit of it from politicians.”
She winked. “Illegitimi non carborundum,” she said.
Barry winked back. “It ain’t easy. Dinner?”
“Sure.”
He felt the anticipation from the bright promise in her quick smile. Barry Price sleeps with his secretary! I suppose, he thought, I suppose the Department would get upset if they knew. And to hell with them.
He felt the quiet: The building should be humming with the faint vibrations of turbines, the feel and sound of megawatts pouring into the grid, feeding Los Angeles and its industries; but there was nothing. Below him was the rectangular building that contained the turbines, beautiful machines, a paean to man’s ingenuity, weighing hundreds of tons and balanced to micrograms, able to spin at fantastic speeds and not vibrate at all… Why couldn’t people understand? Why didn’t everyone appreciate the beauty of fine machinery, the magnificence?
“Cheer up,” Dolores said, reading his thoughts. “The crews are working. Maybe this time they’ll let us finish.”
“Wouldn’t that make the news?” Barry asked. “Actually, I’d rather it didn’t. The less publicity we have, the better off we are. And that’s crazy.”
Dolores nodded and went to the windows. She stared across the San Joaquin Valley toward the Temblor Range thirty miles away. “Haze out there,” she said. “One of these days…”
“Yes.” That was a cheerful thought. Southern California had to have power, and with natural-gas shortages the only ways were coal and nuclear — and there was no way at all to burn coal and not get some haze and smog. “We’ve got the only clean way to go,” Barry said. “And we’ve won every time the public got to vote. You’d think even lawyers and politicians would get the message.” He knew he was preaching to the converted, but it helped to talk to someone, anyone, who would be sympathetic, who understood.
A light went on at his desk and Dolores flashed a parting smile before hastening out to greet the visiting delegation from the State Assembly. Barry prepared for another long day.
M
orning rush hour in Los Angeles: streams of cars, all moving, thin smell of smog and exhaust fumes despite last night’s Santa Ana wind; patches of morning mist from the coast dying as warmer winds from inland swept them away. There was this about the morning rush hour: The freeways were jammed, but not necessarily with idiots. Most drove the same route at the same time every morning. They knew the ropes. You could see it at the off ramps, where nobody had to swerve across lanes; and at the on ramps, where the cars seemed to take turns.
Eileen had noticed it more than once. Despite the stand-up comics who had made California drivers the joke of the world, they were much better on freeways than any people she had seen anywhere else — which meant that she could drive with half her attention. She knew the ropes, too.
Her routine seldom varied now. Five minutes to finish a last cup of coffee before she got to the freeway. Stow the cup in the little rack she’d got from J. C. Whitney, and use the hairbrush for another five minutes. By then she was awake enough to do some real work. It would take another half-hour to get to Corrigan’s Plumbing Supplies in Burbank, and she could get a lot done with the dictaphone in that time. It improved her driving, too. Without the dictaphone she would be tense and nervous, pounding the dash in helpless frustration at every minor trafiic jam.
“Tuesday. Get on Corrigan’s back about the water filters,” her voice said back to her. “We’ve had two customers install the damned things without knowing there were parts missing.” Eileen nodded. She’d taken care of that already, and smoothed out the rage of a guy who’d looked like a barge tender and turned out to be related to one of the biggest developers in the valley. It just went to show, you could never kiss off a deal just because it looked like a one-item sale. She hit the rewind, then recorded: “Thursday. Have the warehouse people check every one of those filters in stock. Look for missing Leed nuts. And send a letter to the manufacturer.” She returned to PLAYBACK.
Eileen Susan Hancock was thirty-four years old. She was on the thin side of very pretty, and the reason showed in her hands, which were always in motion, and in her smile, which was nice, but which flashed always too suddenly, as if she’d turned on a light bulb, and in her walk. She had a tendency to leave people behind.
Somebody had once told her that was symbolic: She left people behind both physically and emotionally. He hadn’t said “intellectually,” and if he had she wouldn’t have believed him, but it was largely true. She’d been determined to be something more than a secretary long before there was anything like a women’s rights movement; and she’d managed that despite the responsibilities of a younger brother to raise.
If she ever talked about it, she laughed at how trite the situation was: Older sister puts younger brother through college but can’t go herself; helps younger brother get married, but never marries herself; and none of it was really true. She’d hated college. Maybe, she sometimes thought (but never said to anyone), a very good college, a place where they make you think, maybe that would have worked out. But to sit in a classroom while a timeserver lectured from a book that she’d already read, to teach her nothing she didn’t already know — it had been sheer hell, and when she dropped out the reasons weren’t financial.
And as to marriage, there wasn’t anybody she could live with. She’d tried that once, with a police lieutenant ( and watched how nervous he was to have her living there without benefit of City Hall license), and what had been a good relationship came apart inside a month. There had been another man, but he had a wife he wasn’t going to leave, and a third, who’d gone east for a three-month assignment that hadn’t ended after four years; and…
And I’m doing all right, she told herself when she thought about such things.
Men called her “hyperthyroid” or “the nervous type,” depending on education and vocabulary, and most didn’t try to keep up with her. She had an acid wit that she used too much. She hated dull talk. She talked much too fast, otherwise her voice was pleasant with a touch of throatiness derived from too many cigarettes.
She’d been driving this route for eight years. She took the curve of the four-level interchange without noticing; but once, years before, she had swept her car down that curve, then pulled off at the next ramp and parked her car and strolled back to stare at that maze of concrete spaghetti.
She’d been laughing at her own picture of herself as a gawking tourist, but she’d stared anyway.
“Wednesday,” the recorder told her. “Robin’s going to come through on the Marina deal. If he does, I stand to be Assistant General Manager. If he doesn’t, no chance. Problem…”
Eileen’s ears and throat were red in advance, and her hands shifted too often on the steering wheel. But she heard it through. Her Wednesday voice said, “He wants to sleep with me, it’s clear it wasn’t just repartee and games. If I cool him, do I blow the sale? Do I go to the mat with him to clinch the deal? Or am I missing something good because of the implications?”
“Shit-oh-dear,” Eileen said under her breath. She ran the tape back and recorded over that segment. “I still haven’t decided whether to accept Robin Geston’s dinner invitation. Memo: I should keep this tape cleaner. If anyone ever stole the recorder, I wouldn’t want to burn his ears off. Anyone remember Nixon?” She switched the recorder off, hard.
But she still had the problem, and she still felt burning resentment at living in a world where she had that kind of problem. She thought of how she’d word the letter to the goddamn manufacturer who’d sent out the filters without checking to see that all the parts were enclosed, and that made her feel a little better.
It was late evening in Siberia. Dr. Leonilla Alexandrovna Malik was finished for the day. Her last patient had been a four-year-old girl, child of one of the engineers at the space development center here in the Soviet northern wastes.
It was midwinter, and the wind blew cold from the north. There was snow piled outside the infirmary, and even inside she could feel the cold. Leonilla hated it. She had been born in Leningrad, so she was no stranger to severe winters; but she kept hoping for a transfer to Baikunyar, or even Kapustin Yar on the Black Sea. She resented being required to treat dependents, although of course there was little she could do about it; there weren’t many with pediatric training up here. Still, it was a waste. She had also been trained as a kosmonaut, and she kept hoping she’d get an assignment in space.
Perhaps soon. The Americans were said to be training women astronauts. If the Americans looked likely to send a woman into space, the Soviet Union would do it also, and quickly. The last Soviet experiment with a woman kosmonaut had been a disaster. (Was it really her fault? Leonilla wondered. She knew both Valentina Tereskovna and the kosmonaut she’d married, and they never talked about why her spacecraft had tumbled, ruining the chance for the Soviet Union to make the first space docking in history.) Of course, Valentina was much older, Leonilla thought. That had been in primitive times. Things were different now. The kosmonauts had little to do anyway; ground control made all the important decisions. A silly design philosophy, Leonilla thought, and her kosmonaut colleagues (all male, of course) shared this view, but not loudly.
She put the last of her used instruments into the autoclave and packed her bag. Kosmonaut or not, she was also a physician, and she carried the tools of the trade most places she went, just in case she might be needed. She put on the fur cap and heavy leather coat, shuddering a little at the sound of the wind outside. A radio in the next office had a news program, and Leonilla paused to listen when she heard a key word.
Comet. A new comet.
She wondered if there would be plans to explore it. Then she sighed. If there was a space mission to study the comet, it wouldn’t include her. She had no skills for that. Pilot, physician, life-support-systems engineer; those she could do. But not astronomy. That would be for Pieter or Basil or Sergei.
Too bad, really. But it was interesting. A new comet.
On Earth there was plague. Three billion years after the planet
’s formation there came a virulent mutation, a form of life that used sunlight directly. The more efficient energy source gave the green mutant a hyperactive, murderous vigor; and as it spread forth to conquer the world, it poured out a flood of oxygen to poison the air. Raw oxygen seared the tissues of Earth’s dominant life and left it as fertilizer for the mutant.
That was a time of disaster for the comet, too. The black giant crossed its path for the first time.
Enormous heat had been trapped in the planet’s formation; it would be pouring out to the stars for a billion years to come.
A flood of infrared light boiled hydrogen and helium from the comet’s tissues. Then the intruder passed, and calm returned. The comet cruised on through the cold black silence, a little lighter now, moving in a slightly changed orbit.
February: One
On the other hand, it is necessary to shape the social structure of the worker’s world in such a way as to take away his fear of being a mere cog in an impersonal machine. A true solution can come only through the conception that work, whatever it must be, is the service of God and of the community and therefore the expression of man’s dignity.
Emil Brurmer, Gifford Lectures, 1948
Westwood Boulevard was not even remotely on the way between the offices of the National Broadcasting System and the Randall home near Beverly Glen, which was the main reason Harvey Randall liked the bars there. He wasn’t likely to run into any of the network officials and he wasn’t likely to find any of Loretta’s friends.
Students wandered along the wide street. They came in assortments: bearded and wearing jeans; clean-cut with expensive jeans; deliberately weird, and young-fogey conservative, and everything between. Harvey strolled with them. He passed specialty bookstores. One was devoted to gay lib. Another called itself the Macho Adult Bookstore and meant it. And another catered to the science-fiction crowd. Harvey made a mental note to go in there. They’d probably have a lot of stuff about comets and astronomy geared to a general readership; after he read that he could go to the UCLA campus store and get the really technical material.
