Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  “That’s my baby. Its name is Newton-8, and it is right now—mark—” she raised her hand and leaned forward to read the counter over the keyboard—“one billion three hundred sixteen million sixty-four thousand and about two hundred miles from us—now.” She dropped her hand. “We have about eight minutes before it observes Jupiter transiting the sun, so I’d like to tell you a little about it. What you see is a quarter-scale model. That long thing sticking out is the magnetometer—the important one, that is still working; with that one we expect to be able to measure the sun’s magnetopause, which is to say to find out just how far the sun’s magnetic influence extends into space. The round thing sticking out on this side, that looks like a wok—that’s the little brother to the big dish outside here, the parabolic radio transmitter. On the real spacecraft it’s about eight feet across, which gives you an idea of size. The whole thing weighs about as much as a motorcycle, say five hundred pounds plus, and it is the farthest outpost of the human mind right now.” She thought for a moment and added, “The Russians have nothing like it. All the data they have on transmartian space they get from us, and a lot of the best of it is what we get from Newton-8.”

  They were quiet, and seemed attentive. She paused for a moment, to let the people absorb the faint trills and clicks and peeps from the instruments and to see the wave forms displayed on the CRTs. “Over here at the console,” she went on, “that big screen at the top is going to show us the first pictures ever of the planet Jupiter as it crosses in front of the sun. No human being has ever seen that before. We in this room will be the very first—yes, Senator Marcellico?”

  The plump little man stood up good-humoredly. “What about those little green men?” he asked.

  Rainy almost dropped the pointer she was holding. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’d better speak up,” he grinned. “The thing is, all this morning we were listening to Dr. Sonderman over there telling us how lucky we were we didn’t have Mount Saint Helens blowing up in our laps every other day, and then those young people came and entertained us with some other stuff about how the world was coming to an end, and, well, I just wondered if you were going to cheer us up some more. “

  There were a few smiles in the audience, but more scowls—unfortunately the scowls all came from scientists. Rainy managed a smile of her own. “Not at all, Senator,” she declared. “Newton-8 is purely a science experiment. We are simply now in a position to see the planet Jupiter—”

  “Yes, I know about Jupiter,” he said courteously. “But aren’t you the young lady who said that little men from space were coming to call on us any minute?”

  “Certainly not, Senator! I—”

  He persisted, “But I have right here—” he fished a paper out of his briefcase—“a copy of a document that p’ports to be your thesis for your master’s degree.” He put on his spectacles and studied it. ‘Uh-huh, your name’s right on it—of course, it was just ‘Georgia Raines’ then, but that’s you, isn’t it? Let’s see, here. The title says, A Numerical Estimate of Intervention Events from Extra-Terrestrial Sources. Seems to have a whole lot of troublesome things in it, Miz Keating,” he added, flipping slowly through the pages.

  Rainy laughed shakily. “Oh, that,” she said. “Yes, that’s mine, Senator. Of course, I had to write something to get my degree, and I was more or less limited by what my degree advisor would accept. But there certainly aren’t any little green men in it. The paper is an attempt to quantify the probabilities of some event outside the earth that will affect humanity deeply. There have been many such in the past, as I’m sure you’re aware. For example, there was the Lower Cretaceous episode, when apparently almost all higher life forms on Earth became extinct at once and—”

  “Lower what was that, Miz Keating?”

  “Lower Cretaceous, Senator. That’s a geological term. It refers to a time about sixty-five million years ago, when apparently some great disaster—”

  “Miz Keating,” the senator said good-humoredly, “it’s that word apparently’ that does me in every time, not to mention that other word sixty-five million years ago’. You ever hear of the Golden Fleece award, Miz Keating?”

  She saw Tommy Pedigrue nudge his brother, who took pity on her. “Bert,” he said, reaching over to touch the other senator’s shoulder, “that’s all very interesting, but as I understand it there’s a very important event coming up in just a few minutes—”

  “That’s all right, Towny,” said Marcellico, chuckling, and sank back into his seat. “I don’t want to miss that. Please accept my apologies and go on, Miz Keating. I was only trying to clarify something in my own ihind.”

  Rainy glanced at her watch, biting her lip to regain control. She smiled politely. “Just above the monitor,” she said, “you’ll see a drawing of the position of the sun, Jupiter, and Newton-8 as they are right now. It’s not to scale, of course. As you can see, our spacecraft is rapidly approaching its rendezvous point, the position from which it will observe the planet cross the disk of the sun. Please give us the pictures as they are received now, Marguerite.” The technician nodded. The screen went to black, with a very bright spot the only thing visible in the center of it. Rainy went into her pitch.

  “What I’d specially like to emphasize,” she said, smiling warmly at Senator Marcellico, “is that this is like being given a whole new spacecraft free. Newton-8 finished paying for itself when it exited the Saturn system. Every bit we get now is pure profit—Senator?”

  Townsend Pedigrue was leaning forward for attention. His expression was amiable enough as he said, “Please feel free to interrupt me whenever you need to for this demonstration. Like Senator Marcellico, I always worry when I hear certain words, and one of them is that word ‘free’, Miz Keating. Isn’t it so that we still have to pay for the radio receivers, and all this fascinating looking hardware, not to mention a salary for your own good self?”

  Rainy maintained her smile. “That’s right, Senator, the ground support still has to be maintained. But the spacecraft itself is worth three hundred million dollars. That’s paid off. We’re getting information from a volume of space never before explored, and it’s on the house. Let me show you some of it.”

  She nodded to Marguerite, who turned up the audio gain. A soothing hiss came from the loudspeakers. Rainy listened for a moment and said, “That’s the sound of neutral hydrogen. Newton-8 is programmed to scan a whole band of frequencies, something like those radios that zip through the police and fire frequencies and only stop when there’s an actual transmission. Newton listens to each signal until it can match it against its data store. If it is something already on record, like this neutral hydrogen emission, it will drop it and go looking for something else. Give it a second—”

  On track, the sound changed.

  “There it goes,” she said, satisfied. “Let’s see what it finds next.”

  There was a staccato teep-teep-teep from the audio speakers, the hunting cry of the frequency scanner as it sought a new source. Then it locked and delivered a warbling hiss which Rainy quickly identified as the song of the hydroxyl radical; then another, then another. Rainy watched the audience carefully. She had made her main points already, and it was only necessary to let them sink in. Maybe to reinforce them from time to time? She focused her attention on the row of other committee aides and said, “I think you’ll be interested in the way Newton-8 deals with emergencies. For instance, we had a failure in the radioisotope thermoelectric generator, so we’re limited to solar power. At Newton’s distance from the sun, there isn’t much of that. But we managed to command an extension of the solar electric panels—the things that look like wings on the model. We get about twenty-two watts, which is enough to run the important instruments full-time and the rest when they are needed.”

  “That doesn’t sound like enough for a radio broadcast from, what did you say? Two and a half billion miles away?” It was one of the women whom Rainy had not met, an aide to the
minority leader of the committee. At the last moment Rainy came up with the name.

  “We don’t need much, Miz Landro,” she said. “The data transmission only takes eight watts of radiated power on the one-millimeter wavelength. At that rate, we expect to continue data acquisition and tracking capability for an indefinite period—maybe another twenty years. “

  Eve Landro said frostily, “Does that mean you want to spend the next twenty years on the public payroll?”

  It had been a mistake to open those top two buttons after all, Rainy realized. “Well,” she said warmly, “there’s the information, Ms. Landro. We can take it, or we can let it go to waste—What is it, Marguerite?”

  The radio technician was signaling distress, and Rainy could hear why. There was a new sound coming from the speakers. Rainy frowned, trying to identify it. It was at the threshold of hearing, and quite unlike anything her spaceship had ever produced for her before. “Turn up the gain, Marguerite!” she ordered. But even at maximum amplification there was more background noise than signal.

  Once Rainy had heard a Moog synthesizer concert in which the human voice had been superimposed on the frequencies of a rock band. What she heard now reminded her of that—though what she heard could not be human language, or even any language at all, considering where it came from. It was as though an animal’s cry had been blended with the whines and rumbles of a machine on the verge of breaking down. “Check the telemetry!” she cried to Marguerite; and then, collecting herself for the sake of her audience, “Either we’re getting a new kind of signal that’s right outside of my experience…or there’s a malfunction of some sort. “

  Eve Landro looked almost pleased. “Twenty years went very quickly, Miss Keating,” she observed.

  No one laughed. Rainy said honestly, “I have to think you’re right. Something has gone wrong. But that’s happened before, and the chances are we can clear it up.”

  “Rainy?” It was Marguerite, from behind her; but Rainy went on.

  “The difficulty is distance. Newton is nearly two light-hours away. That means what just happened happened two hours ago, and any commands we transmit won’t get to it until two hours from now—and we won’t know the response until two hours after that. Then—”

  “Rainy.”

  Marguerite could no longer be ignored. Her face showed dismal news. “We’re getting very strong inputs in the solar electrical generating systems, Rainy. Close to maximum tolerance, and still climbing.”

  “Solar energy? That can’t be, Marguerite! If there were a solar flare or anything we would have known!”

  Wordlessly, Marguerite pointed to the oscilloscope trace above the instruments. It was surging higher, so high that the top of each new wave was off scale entirely.

  Everybody’s face was turned toward her. Rainy caught at the buttons on her shirt, twisting them while she tried to think. The Newton-8 electrical system had automatic surge controls, to limit damaging inputs—but they had been programmed out of circuit more than two years earlier to save power. But there was no need for them! There was absolutely nothing anywhere near the spacecraft that could provide damaging radiation! And yet—

  The gabble of noise, fading in and out of the background static, was getting on her nerves; but when it stopped it was worse.

  The signal cut off as though a switch had been thrown. Rainy waited, afraid to ask, while Marguerite checked the parallel control circuits; and then she looked up and shook her head.

  “Telemetry’s gone too, Rainy. Nothing’s coming in to the DSN. The system’s crashed.”

  Rainy stared emptily at her audience. After a moment Tommy Pedigrue cleared his throat. “Would you say the free ride is now over, Miz Keating?”

  “Not necessarily,” she said quickly, out of instinct. “We’ll certainly try to re-establish contact. We’ve had temporary interruptions before and cleared them up—”

  But not like this. Whatever she told the senatorial committee, inside herself Rainy had no doubt. Her spacecraft was dead.

  Friday, December 4th. 8:20 PM.

  LOS ANGELES

  In California, half a dozen earthquake engineers were playing a board game. The board was a motorized table twenty feet square, with a model of an office building in the middle of it. The table team u)ere trying to shake the building down. The building team, by tightening and slackening steel cables inside the model, were trying to save it. So far the building team had won three times in a row, all the way up to a scale equivalent of a 7.0 Richter shock. But the table team had timed the building’s sway. On the next trial they reduced the shock to Richter 5.5, but slowed the shaking to match the toy building’s natural frequency.

  They won that game. The structure collapsed in upon itself. It wasn’t a surprise. Sooner or later, the destruction team had won every other game, too.

  The plane was two hours late out of O’Hare, because there had been a bomb scare. No one believed the bomb was real, but no one would take the chance, either. So they all marched out of the plane into one of the already overcrowded passenger lounges, their belongings on their backs and in their hands. Then they all marched into another plane, but as it was a DC-10 instead of an L-1011 the seat configuration was all different, and Tib lost his place by the window. That was taken by a black man with a face like Eldridge Cleaver, with a little black girl on his lap. On the aisle was an elderly woman who began calling for Bloody Marys before the plane had reached the runway. As soon as they took off Tib, despairing of getting back to his strain-gauge reports, pushed his seat back and closed his eyes.

  “Are you sleeping?” the little girl said. Tib opened one eye enough to glare at her as she added, “Because that man wants to talk to you.” Her father glared at Tib and began whispering in the little girl’s ear, and from the aisle, holding on to the seat back, Tommy Pedigrue said, “Dr. Sonderman? Thought I saw you aboard. Have you read this?”

  He was holding out a paperback book. Tib reached carefully over the woman’s tray of two glasses of tomato juice, two tiny bottles of vodka, and a bag of peanuts to take it from him. It was called The Jupiter Effect. “Ah, yes,” he said. “That crazy hippie.”

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s all crazy,” Tommy Pedigrue said uncertainly. “I was sort of hoping you could tell me. I picked it up at the airport, but it’s kind of out of my line—I had a double major, biology and pre-law. Want to give it a quick look?”

  Tib turned a few pages, glanced at the introduction, shrugged. “Yes, why not?”

  Pedigrue nodded, started to turn away and checked himself. “Uh, there’s a seat open next to me in first class,” he said. “My brother decided to stay over in Chicago. So if you’d like to—?”

  Tib frowned. “Surely there is a regulation against that?”

  Tommy Pedigrue grinned. “Not if you’re a senator’s brother,” he said.

  “Well—thank you. But no.” Certainly not! It was bad enough he should have to read what this man gave him. It would be far worse to have to talk to him for two thousand miles. “But perhaps this little girl would be more comfortable—” he suggested, dead-pan.

  Her father, who had not appeared to be listening, jerked around and said, “No way!” Pedigrue retreated, his face scarlet, and Tib Sonderman, feeling more cheerful, opened the book.

  He read it straight through, all across the continent, and then he closed it and sat back.

  It was not hogwash. Forget about Edgar Cayce, forget about that stoned young man. This was not astrology, it was science.

  Wrong-headed science? Maybe. That didn’t mean much.

  A lot of theoretical science was false. That was what science was all about: forming theories, many of which were bound to be wrong, and then attacking them as hard as possible. A theory was no good unless it was falsifiable. If it could not be subjected to an experiment that could show it to be wrong, then it was merely a speculation, not a theory.

  The book, to be sure, was speculative science. Much of what it suggested res
ted on presumptions and inferences. There was much in it that was unproved. But nothing that struck him as wrong.

  The argument came in a number of steps. The first was that the sun and all of its planets, and every atom of each one of them, were a single system, and that each part affected every other.

  In strict theoretical terms, there was no argument there. In strict theoretical terms you could go a lot farther. Every atom in the universe was tied to every other, by a sea of photons and a network of gravitational force. The practical fact that the ties between a hydrogen atom in the center of the star Betelgeuse and one in the melting ice cube in the plastic cup before him were terribly tiny in comparison with those that linked nearer particles did not make the statement untrue.

  According to the book’s authors—their names were not wholly unfamiliar to Sonderman; Gribbin he had heard of, of Plagemann he was less sure—in the spring of 1982 a somewhat unusual event would take place in the solar system. All of the major planets would be on the same side of the sun. Not for long. Just for six or seven weeks, but for that little while the solar system would be asymmetrical, as happened from time to time but not very often—once every 179 years, the authors said, and Sonderman could see no reason to doubt them.

  The next step in their paper chase of logical sequences was less certain. According to them, there was some sort of connection between the position of the planets and the activity of that boiling, burning hurricane of hot gases that was the sun. They conceded the effect was not large, and that it wasn’t very obvious, and that there was not any good theoretical basis for understanding’ why it should be ! there at all. But they claimed it existed. Sonderman was willing to suspend disbelief—at least until he checked it out.