Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  The couple seemed serene enough, gazing contentedly at the excitement around them. The woman had been made to put a sweater over her bare upper body. She still wore her jeans, perhaps because they were too tight to get off while holding onto the gyrating rail. The man had got all the way down to swim trunks, and was still that way. He was shivering—not with cold, surely, in the muggy Puerto Rican heat. He looked up at Rainy as though she were a friend. “Tell them to let us go back and soak up the vibrations, please,” he said politely.

  “It isn’t up to me,” she said. “Why were you out there?”

  “Why?” he repeated, as though it were some foreign word he could not be expected to understand. Tardily Rainy realized that both of them were stoned blind.

  “Well, why anything, lady? Are they going to put us in jail?”

  “I don’t know that either,” Rainy began, and then realized who she was talking to. It was the creep who had broken her orrery! “I wish they would,” she said angrily. “Peeping in windows and smashing things up!”

  “Did I break something? Hey, I’m real sorry. But I hope they don’t put us in jail, because my old lady’s got a job to do, and she needs the bread.”

  The woman giggled. “No, we don’t, Dennis.”

  His expression clouded. Then he nodded, enlightened. “Oh, sure. What would we need it for, right? We’re all about to be aced by the Great Conjunction, and what’s money going to be good for then?”

  Rainy looked puzzled. “The Great Conjunction?”

  “When old Jupiter pulls hell and crap out of the sun and dumps it on the planets,” the young man explained. “What’s a few bucks going to do for you then, lady? So please, can’t we go back out there and soak up some rays while we still got time?”

  Thursday, December 3d. 12:15 PM.

  Because the earth is spinning, it is thicker through the equator than through the poles. It is as though the planet had a spare tire of fat around its waist. Calculations show how great the difference in diameters should be and, curiously, it is substantially greater than the facts permit. Perhaps the earth’s crust “froze” at an earlier time, when it was spinning more rapidly. All that heaped-up mass around the equator represents stored energy. If, through some immense crustal movement, it relaxed to its proper dimensions, it would liberate enough heat to raise the earth’s temperature by hundreds of degrees and boil away the seas.

  The planet Venus, whose rotation has been slowed by the sun’s tidal forces, is almost a perfect sphere. It has almost no equatorial hump. Its surface temperature is hundreds of degrees hotter than Earth’s, and if it ever had liquid water it has long since been boiled away.

  Almost, the buffet tables revived Tib’s spiriff. Sliced ham, fried chicken, salad materials and—what?—yes, some sort of fried bananas, and of course large trays of fresh fruits.

  Tib Sonderman was a man who appreciated food, having missed a lot of it as a child. But he couldn’t take full pleasure in it. Bits of dialogue kept coming back to him—

  “You mean, Doctor Sonderman, you want to dig this damn hole when you don’t even know what you’re gonna find?”

  “If we knew what we were going to find, Senator Marcellico, we wouldn’t have to dig the hole; that is what basic research is all about. In any case, I am not asking for funds for the Mohole at this time—”

  -All he wanted was funds for an expanded network of stations to report crustal movements. Who could be against that? The very survival of southern California, to name but one area, might depend on it! And even so, that other congressperson had affected to misunderstand: “You want, < what is it, twenty-six million dollars a year so you can carry out your figures a couple more decimal places?”

  “Mr. Congressman, that is only a drop in the bucket, compared to, say, the cost overrides on one new overkill weapons system.”

  Well, that had been a mistake. Gloomily, he knew it had been a mistake, but what was one to say? Gloomily, he carried his plate to the very end of the long table and tried to take pleasure in the food. As the table filled beside him, he responded politely to observations about the beauty of the view and the warmth of the day, but he was still replaying his presentation in his mind. They spoke so glibly of saving the taxpayers’ money! But what were there here? Perhaps forty persons, coming from twenty states—how many thousand gallons of jet fuel so that the senators might conduct their business in a nice warm place? Assume each came in a 727. Assume a load factor of 80%. Assume an average flight of, be conservative, eight hundred miles to get here. What did a 727 get, three or four gallons to the mile? One hundred people divided into eight hundred miles, times 3.5, times the forty persons here—yes, perhaps a rough-cuff ballpark estimate, doubling for the round trip and adding in the extra energy cost of climbing to 30,000 feet or so for cruising altitude…not less than three thousand gallons of jet fuel. For this one meeting! Which was meant to save money, i.e., energy for everyone!

  As Tib Sonderman had been taught in his first months of life to conceal emotions, no anger showed on the bland face he raised, from time to time, to glance around. But the anger was there. The average American expended thirteen kilowatts of energy, day in and day out—more than a hundred thousand kilowatt-hours a year. Sonderman made a serious effort to stay below that national average, and it angered him when he couldn’t do it—because he worked in Los Angeles, and how could you not drive a car several hours each day? because he was required to fly to attend meetings like this, and how could you avoid it? Three thousand gallons of oil—enough to heat a whole block of homes through a winter, enough to—

  “I beg your pardon?” he said, startled. The observatory man across from him had said something.

  The man repeated, “I thought as a geologist you might be interested in this part of the world, Dr. Sonderman. ”

  “Oh, yes?” Sonderman looked around. The bright hills stood sharply defined in the crystal air. Down below them, the great spider of the radio receiver hung from its three-stranded web over the big dish. “Eroded caves, that is what these valleys are, is that right?”

  “Exactly. The mountains are honeycombed. And that is why this telescope was such a bargain. It’s a great bubble in the rock with the top eroded off. All we had to do was line it with antenna wire and put in the instrumentation; the rest was a gift from God.”

  A couple of places down the table one of the newspersons laughed. “All you scientists are real budget-balancers, aren’t you?” she asked good-humoredly. “What do you say, Senator? Have they convinced you?”

  Senator Townsend Pedigrue was sitting, democratically, with the common people, his wavy brown hair blowing in the breeze, his jaw muscles senatorially tight. He relaxed them in a smile. “Now, you know I’m not hard to convince, Doris. I’ve surrounded myself with good, science-based people—there’s my brother Tommy right over there; he’s got a science degree himself, and that’s probably what he’d be working at if we didn’t need him so badly in Washington. Look at the record. You’ll see I’ve sponsored twenty-two separate bills, just in this session, where we’ve recommended more funding, not less.”

  “You sure have, Senator,” the woman called. “And, if I remember right, about forty recommending cuts.”

  “That’s what I’m after, Doris, saving the taxpayer money. I’m not the big bad wolf, you know; I’m the woodsman with the axe, and I use it as gently as I can—”

  Farther down the table, Sonderman saw Rainy Keating looking curiously toward him. When she saw that he was seeing her she smiled forgivingly. Tib did not smile back. What right did she have to forgive him? For what? For speaking candidly? Let her go on stimulating the testosterone flow of the young men who had clustered around her, the senator’s brother and three or four others. She had not even stayed for his presentation! And that was a violation of the unwritten rule of academia; you sit through my dull paper and I’ll help swell the audience for yours; otherwise everybody would be talking to empty rooms! Of course, she was not the only one, he ac
knowledged justly; a third of the audience had crept away to stare at the hippies who were making fools of themselves—

  With surprise, he saw that one of the hippies was quietly eating from the remains of the buffet, at a little private table a few yards away. A security man stood guard over him, but he didn’t seem to need much guarding.

  Sonderman inconspicuously left the table for coffee, and when he returned others had spotted the bearded, slim young man. Rainy Keating was talking to him; he seemed to have come down enough to be intelligible.

  “Oh, sure.” He looked up at Rainy and grinned. “We didn’t mean no trouble. Zee and I were just coming up to look, you know, and it was all so beautiful we just sat down to mellow out. Next thing you know we felt the need to get naked out in the middle of it.”

  “Is that why you broke my orrery?”

  He looked at her in dismay. “Oh, shit, lady, was that thing yours? I’m really sorry about that: It was pretty.” He accepted a glass of orange juice, originally intended for making screwdrivers, and swallowed it uncritically.

  The geologist from the morning session watched him swallow the vitamin C and said,

  “Do you think you can answer a few questions now? I’m interested. What did you hope to accomplish out over the dish?”

  The young man selected a cold chicken leg, took a delicate bite, and shrugged. “We just wanted to feel the rays, man.”

  “What rays? There aren’t any more ‘rays’ over the telescope than there are right here.”

  “That so? Well, what would I know? I was a music major. But I’m sorry I caused you trouble, Dr. Sonderman.” He licked his fingers and grinned at the expression on the geologist’s face. “You don’t remember me. But we met at the San Onofre nuclear protest. My grandmother was there, too. I was playing lead guitar in the group right before you spoke. You were pretty good,” he said, nodding. “All about tectonic faults and all that, so how come you’re not doing anything now?”

  “About what?” Sonderman demanded.

  “Why, old Jupiter. It’s all laid out in the book, man. Even my grandmother knows about it.”

  “I do not care about your grandmother,” Tib said irritably. “What book are you talking about?”

  “All the books! Cayce talked about it years ago, and now you scientists are just catching up, right? Mount Saint Helens. Naples. All that stuff—and now the planets are getting together, and when they’re all lined up just right they’re going to suck some kind of rays out of the sun and into the earth’s atmosphere. No, no shit, man!” he said, looking defensive under Tib’s scowl. “It’s all right there in that book, The Jupiter Effect. Then the like air gets all charged up, and it swells up and rubs against the ground—and, pow, there goes the old San Andreas fault. God’s sake, man! You’re a geologist yourself, aren’t you? How come you don’t know all about it?”

  Thursday, December 3d. 1:15 PM.

  One of the tiniest of the asteroids—less than forty feet across—passed between Earth and the moon. No one saw it. It was too tiny, and it did not come close to the earth. Many had come closer. On August 10, 1972, one very much like it actually entered Earth’s atmosphere and became an astonishingly bright meteorite. Because it passed through only the outermost, most tenuous layers of atmosphere, its speed was not slowed enough to prevent it from passing on through and out into space again. If it had approached at a very slightly different angle and struck the surface of the Earth at, say, latitude 41.53 N and longitude 87.38 W, the city of Chicago would have ceased to exist, and Lake Michigan would have had a quite circular new bay at its southern end.

  Senator Pedigrue’s kid brother tucked Rainy s arm in his to lead her back to the meeting room, and Rainy made no protest. Young Tommy Pedigrue wasn’t all that young—his hair was a good deal thinner than his brother’s, and he was known to be the senator’s consigliore and, occasionally, hatchet man. He could do her a lot of good. Also she was annoyed. That graceless geologist had been positively rude.

  She was as much sorry for him as angry, though; the poor man simply did not know how to protect himself.

  “Overkill” indeed! The Department of Defense was represented there too, and the DoD had a long memory. Some congressman somewhere, with a couple of airfields and an electronics plant fattening payrolls in his district, was going to pay off his IOUs by pulling a few feathers out of one of Sonderman’s projects some day. Whatever the project was. It was too bad, but that was the way the game was played.

  The other way the game was played was that you took advantage of any breaks you could get. Tommy Pedigrue’s squeezes on her forearm were definite pluses. Rainy had no objection in the world to taking advantage of the fact that she interested men; it was the little extra vigorish God had given her. If she had been born male, no doubt she could have had a different kind of edge, like the kind you got from mingling with the mighty in saunas and whorehouses. God had denied her that, but given her sexual attractiveness instead. Rainy did not feel it demeaned her status as a scientist to accept Her gift. It was not her fault that Sonderman didn’t use his assets—whatever they were. Good heavens, he had an easy job! All he had to fund was geology! Geology was how you found uranium ore and oil domes and all those good things that everybody not only wanted but knew they wanted. Not like astronomy!

  They were at the meeting building now, and she had not really heard a word the man had said. A quick look at her watch showed that she had five minutes leeway; she excused herself by pointing to the ladies’ room and escaped to freshen up and get her act together.

  She left Tommy Pedigrue looking a little surprised, because he had just been telling her about the current international crisis. But the nerve endings in her crisis centers had long since been anesthetized. Not just in hers. In her whole generation’s. To the young people born in the 1950s, the world had cried wolf one time too many; they no longer heard the alarums.

  Rainy Keating had been born in the year when Eisenhower was re-elected and John Foster Dulles began easing troops into Vietnam. She lived through fallout-shelter drills in nursery school. She reached menarche the day of the riots at the Chicago Democratic convention. That night she saw a face she recognized on television: it was her cousin Ron, clubbed bloody in Grant Park. She was eighteen when the Palestinians shot up the Munich Olympics and twenty when, every day in the newspaper, she studied pictures of starved babies in the Sahel. The father of her best high-school friend was hijacked to Cuba, and the Iranian mobs swarmed over the U.S. Embassy while she was on her honeymoon. It had all been like that. It was too much. Ayatollahs and Nixons and Idi Amins came and went, and after a while Rainy—and her generation—simply looked away.

  Or looked into the mirror, to make sure she was ready for the big event. The hair was all right. The eye makeup still fine, in spite of the muggy heat. The three-piece suit, though—no. It was a little too much, even for a pretty young female astronomer who wanted to be taken seriously. She took the necktie off, opened the top two buttons of the shirt and then, satisfied, entered the meeting room to check her equipment.

  She still had a few minutes. She spent them worrying.

  The messages from Newton-8 should be coming in right now. They were the most distant messages ever received on Earth; every second they grew a few thousand yards more distant still, as, far away, that half-ton chunk of metal called Newton-8 was taking its slow departure from the Sun.

  It had come a long way. It had left the east coast of Florida, just over the horizon from where they were now, on a plume of thundering fire a few years earlier. It had slipped through the dust storm of the asteroid belt, taken aim at the planet Jupiter, and sailed among its brood of moons. The powerful tug of that giant planet whipped it into a new orbit that grazed Saturn; then Saturn, too, contributed some of its own immense momentum to speed the spacecraft outward. At each point it had done all of its jobs. It had returned thousands of pictures from each, taken in blue light and in red, narrow angle and broad, along with temperature read
ings, charged-particle counts, magnetic field intensity measurements, and scores of other data.

  Then its assignment was complete.

  Newton-8 had added a fraction of a percentage point to the growing store of human wisdom, at a cost about equal to one week’s production of nuclear missiles. The spacecraft was through—but it didn’t die. With most of its instruments powered down forever, since there would be nothing near enough for them to observe for a good many millions of years, it climbed toward the wide, empty spaces between the stars. In another decade or two it would pass the orbit of Pluto, the outer limit of the solar system.

  But Newton-8 had had an unusually lucky flight. Its first course approximations were almost dead on the money; mid-course corrections were infrequent and small. It came to the end of its planned life with a substantial store of propellant still unspent. It was still receiving inputs from its radio and optical eyes, and so the engineers at JPL coaxed it tenderly, and it lived on. Its targeting systems could still find the planet Earth, and its attitude jets could still point its transmitter right on target. It continued to trickle information back to the great listening ears of the Deep Space Network, three posts on three continents that among them girdled the world. Then they became the property of a doctoral candidate named Georgia Raines Keating.

  And the telemetry on her control equipment showed that they were doing it faultlessly still. Supremely confident, Rainy turned from her assistant and faced the audience.

  She had a full house—every one of the senators and congressmen, most of their aides, nearly all of the news-people. Tommy Pedigrue, sitting between his brother and fat, moonfaced young Senator Marcellico, winked at her from the front row. Rainy took a deep breath—partly for air, partly to give those top two buttons a chance to do their work—and nodded to her assistant. As Marguerite pulled back the drapes from the old model of the Newton-8 spacecraft, Rainy began.