Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  Sonderman stopped, just about to hang up. “What?”

  “Did you know Gribbin had recanted?”

  “No!”

  “I’ll send that along too,” Grierson promised, and broke the connection, laughing.

  Sonderman grinned too, after a moment. So he had wasted a couple of hours on somebody’s pipe dream. Well, he had wasted more on less. Now he could face the long drive home with one fewer thing on his mind. Which reminded him; he backtracked a few steps and pushed open the door to the men’s room.

  For a moment he felt a sting of shame, as though he had accidentally pushed open a bedroom door in someone else’s house. Although the man at the far end had his back turned, Sonderman recognized him easily. Townsend Pedigrue? No, the kid brother, Thompson. And his back was eloquent. The ragamuffin next to him was easier to recognize. Maybe not by name, but for what he was.

  It was evident that Pedigrue was not molesting a minor, as Sonderman had thought at once. He was still good-humored from his talk with Wes Grierson, so he said easily, “Son, if you’re still in here one minute from now I’m calling the Juvenile Division.”

  The boy turned unhurriedly and looked Sonderman up and down. Then he shrugged and walked to the door, rearranging his clothes only as he left. He paused as the door was closing to say, “Fuck you.”

  Tommy Pedigrue’s face was scarlet as he turned away from the urinals to wash his hands. He waited until Sonderman had joined him at the air-dryer to say, “Jesus! What was that all about?”

  “That’s just one of our famous Los Angeles chickens, Mr. Pedigrue. He was just showing you the merchandise.”

  “Disgusting,” Pedigrue said with indignation. Away from the presence of his brother and the stimulus of an audience, he was a much quieter, less confident person. He stayed close to Sonderman as they walked along the people mover toward the main terminal, as though he expected the young boy to solicit him again. But they were almost alone on the moving belt. Overhead the ceiling speakers murmured reminders: “—and stand to the right. If you wish to pass, please do so on the left…. Please hold handrail—”

  “I forgot to say thanks,” Pedigrue said suddenly, as they came to the end.

  “You’re welcome.” Getting on the good side of somebody like Tommy Pedigrue was as important, in its way, as setting strain gauges across Palmdale. Sonderman was unskilled in this operation, but knew that the best way to press an advantage was to leave it alone and let it ripen. “I guess we’ll be running into each other now and then, Mr. Pedigrue,” he said.

  Pedigrue grinned. “Next time we have a funding hearing, you mean. Tell you what. We’ll have a drink somewhere, before that, and you can give me the off-the-record stuff, what’s important, what we can get along without—Oh, there you are!”

  He broke off to scowl at a middle-aged black man in a chauffeur’s uniform, standing worriedly just outside the anti-hijack checkpoint.

  “I’m real sorry, Mr. Pedigrue,” the chauffeur began at once, “but they wouldn’t let me in because of, you know—” he touched the bulge under his armpit—“and I tried to have you paged, but—”

  Sonderman nodded politely, and moved on. He stood on the sidewalk just outside the door, and he could hear, over the new set of speakers that were telling him that the white zone was for the loading and unloading of passengers only, Tommy Pedigrue’s voice raised in anger. He was glad when his bus came. It was just as well to be somewhere else when your potential benefactor was losing his temper. It didn’t much matter at whom the rage was directed. It took only a small splash-over to cost you an inflation increase, or even a whole project.

  Sonderman s house in Studio City was tiny, and it clung to a hillside. Directly behind it was a sheer face covered with chaparral. If it rained, the mud might slide into his back yard; if it was dry, the vegetation would die and it was likely to burn. And then it would slide into his back yard. Living there was a constant challenge.

  Since he had slept on the plane, he was not ready for bed when he got home. He left the door open and slid two windows up to air it out, and then went at once to his basement, past the bumper-pool table and the stationary bicycle, and opened the door to his workshop.

  The workshop did not look like a workshop. For that matter, the door didn’t look like a door. It looked like a bookshelf, and was, except that the rows of books just next to the wet bar were not books. Sonderman reached up to the top shelf and hooked a finger to the top of the binding of the fattest of the fakes. It gave under the pressure of his fingers, unlatching the door, and he pulled the whole thing open.

  The hidden entrance wasn’t Sonderman’s idea, but it had appealed to him. He was away nearly half the time, and there was no one to watch the house when he was gone. Although there was not a great deal of crime in Studio City, there were neighbors who had come home to find their TV sets and stereos gone. Sonderman didn’t worry about that. There was always insurance. But insurance did not cover his papers, his instruments, his little computer; so, when the woman he was dating for a while, an interior decorator, had offered to put the secret door in, he was delighted. The woman was long gone, like all the others he had gone with after the divorce. But the door remained.

  The room behind it, as always, looked like a mess. The every-Thursday cleaning service never entered this room. They didn’t even know it existed. Every flat surface was covered with books and papers, and folded lengths of computer printouts were on the floor next to his desk and behind his chair, convenient to reach when he wanted them. His small seismograph was slowly turning its paper roll beside one wall; his file cabinets stood against another, half the drawers partly open and papers protruding from cocked folders. Sonderman sat down before his terminal, picked up the dedicated phone, dialed a number, heard the computer squeal that said he had a connection, and placed the handset in its acoustic coupler. A green light went on next to the keyboard, and he typed:

  LOGON

  330105056

  ARCHIMANDRITE

  Having given the machine the information that he was ready to receive mail, his numerical address, and the code word that said he was really himself, he got up and began to unpack his briefcase.

  At this time of night there was seldom much competition for the shared-time services of the net. The terminal began to deliver his messages at once. Sonderman let them accumulate on the cathode screen until it was full, then decided to get them all at once afld punched out a set of instructions. The machine responded immediately by printing out hard copy on a long roll of paper.

  Sonderman thumbed through his mail. His pay check. A handful of bills. A postcard from his ex-wife—this time she was in Nogales, Mexico, doing heaven knew what and with heaven knew whom. A set of admission badges and speakers’ instructions for the forthcoming American Scientific Federation meeting. (Did that mean his paper had been accepted? Or was it just that one hand of any bureaucracy never knows what the other is doing?) Four journals, six offprints of papers, and, of course, the usual dozen or two advertising pieces.

  He sorted it out while he waited for the printer to finish his electronic mail. The junk mail he simply tipped into the brown-paper supermarket bag he used for a wastebas-ket, except for one that bore the return address of Danny Deere, Ltd., a real-estate agency. The little house that he had paid thirty-eight thousand dollars for nine years before had been going up in value ever since, and one of the amusements of Tib Sonderman s life was to look at the blind offers from realtors that came every week or so—fifty thousand, sixty thousand, eighty-five thousand; the last one he had seen had offered a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. Almost, he had been tempted to sell, but in this mad Los Angeles real-estate market what could he buy? But there was a limit to resisting temptation.

  As he started to open the envelope the printer announced it was finished, and Sonderman ran through the paper printout.

  The thing that had taken the most time was a lengthy report from the U.S. Geological Survey on earth movements al
ong some of the northern branches of the San Andreas; nothing important, but he clipped it and carefully folded it for the pile behind his chair. There was not much else except for chatter—people on the teletype net calling him for transient errands, none of them seeming important—until he came to the last item. Wes Grierson must have got right to it, and his computers must have been hunting all the time Tib was en route from Los Angeles International. There was a list of twenty-six citations for The Jupiter Effect. Sonderman clipped the paper roll and was about to throw it in the wastebasket; he had lost interest in the subject when Grierson told him the principal author had changed his mind. Then he caught sight of a postscript from Grierson:

  DID YOU EVER FIGURE OUT WHAT WENT WRONG WITH YOUR GIRL FRIEND’S SPACESHIP? SEE SCIENCE V 84 P 506.

  Sonderman hesitated. He probably had that issue somewhere in the house—volume 84 was probably only three or four years ago, and he kept nearly all of them. But Rainy Whatever-her-name-was was certainly not his girl friend, and he had relatively little interest in what had gone wrong with her ship. Sonderman dropped the whole wad into the waste bag and stood over it, with the ad from the real-estate company, ready to do the same with that as soon as he had satisfied his curiosity about the offer.

  It wasn’t an offer, however. It was a little note, and all it said was,

  Dear Mr. Sonderman:

  Because of the softening of the home market due to apprehension over the possibility of a major earthquake within the next few months, we regret that we must withdraw the offer we made recently for your property.

  Very sincerely yours, DANNY DEERE LTD.

  How very strange! Didn’t these people know that the whole thing was some sort of mistake? Was it possible they were still taking it seriously? Sonderman shook his head, and tossed the realtor’s letter after the citation list.

  Then, thoughtfully, he bent down and took them both out of the trash again.

  Saturday, December 5th. 2:20 PM.

  In a grassy river valley in southern Washington State, a young woman heard her husband calling. She ran to join him at the end of a long trench, with Mount Saint Helens looming above them. They had dug every inch of it themselves, over a period of nearly a hundred weekends and two summer vacations. He had just uncovered the license plate of a car. It was the one her parents had been in when they disappeared after the eruption.

  The airport was hung with wreaths and Yule bells; the stores along Century Boulevard had their Christmas decorations up; even La Canada High School had a Christmas tree. Rainy could not make herself feel Christmasy. She drove straight through to the laboratory, flashed her badge at the guard, parked at the far end of the employees’ lot, and slipped in to her office. Nobody saw her come in but department secretary doing some overtime word-processing. That was the way she wanted it. She was feeling threatened and harried.

  There was a thick sheaf of pink telephone messages clipped to her desk blotter. It was a measure of Rainy’s mood that she didn’t want to look at them. She knew what they would be. The pressure had started right after Newton-8 had gone silent. Every newsperson in Arecibo crowded around, the whole afternoon session interrupted; it had been pure hell. The most she could say was that she had managed not to cry. Apart from that, total loss, and it didn’t get better. The next morning, when everyone else was getting ready to leave, more reporters arrived and she had to hold a news conference. When she finally tore loose from the observatory, it was too late to make her plane. So she got a ride into San Juan and checked into a motel. She spent the whole afternoon in the pool, gloriously; nobody knew where she was. Then she sneaked onto the first flight the next morning—

  “Rainy!” Her boss burst through the door. “Sheila said you were here! I’ve been trying to call you all over the place!” He mopped his forehead. “What a mess,” he moaned, his plump face filled with worry.

  “I’m really sorry, Dr. Teppinger—”

  “Oh, hell, Rainy, it wasn’t your fault. I mean—No, of course it wasn’t. But you wouldn’t believe the heat we’re getting!”

  “Yes I would.”

  He blinked. “Well, anyway,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here. Listen. You’re just in time. The Lab’s going to have a news conference on the Newton-8 at four o’clock. They’ve been prayiiig you could get there.”

  “Another news conference?”

  He shrugged. “It seems to be big news,” he said morosely. “God knows why. Spacecraft stop functioning every day and nobody pays any attention.” He scratched his bushy moustache. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to build our presentation around a spacecraft on its last legs,” he said.

  Rainy kept her mouth shut. It had been his idea, after all. “Uh, Dr. Teppinger? How’s this going to affect me?”

  “Oh, God, Rainy, who knows about that?” He considered for a second. “As far as your grant’s concerned, of course, well, that’s just out the window. Of course, you’ll get severance pay.”

  “Dr. Teppinger! I just bought three rooms of furniture!”

  “I’m really sorry, Rainy. Listen, you’ll connect somewhere—I tell you what I’ll do. Were you going to the ASF meeting next week? Well, I think you ought to; it’s a pretty good slave mart, especially if you make yourself visible. I’ll see if I can get you a spot on the program, although it’s the last minute.…” His voice trailed off and he sat on the edge of her desk, staring unseeing at the launch photograph of the Newton-8 on her wall. “Rainy? What do you suppose did happen to the son of a bitch?”

  “I wish to God I knew,” she said.

  By the time she finished discussing that with him, they had gone over every possible disaster that either of them could imagine, and there were only twenty minutes left before the news conference. Rainy sighed, pulled a yellow pad toward her and began to make notes on what she should say.

  At approximately 1830 hours on Wednesday, December 2d, Universal Mean Time—that would have been about ten-thirty AM, Pacific time—the spacecraft Newton-8 abruptly ceased transmission. The spacecraft had already completed every scientific mission for which it had been designed and budgeted. It was functioning normally until—

  Rainy’s phone rang.

  For a moment she wished she dared not answer it, but the habits of a lifetime won out. Of course, it was Tinker. His soft, melancholy, undertaker’s voice said, “Rainy, I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”

  “I know that, Tink.” At least five of the phone slips had been from him. “Tink, I’m really busy—”

  “I know that, honey. Have you seen the paper?”

  Had she not! Someone had carefully folded back the late edition to display the headlines. “Oh, yeah,” she said, reading. “Let’s see. ‘Hippies Frolic at Space Mirror. “Gang Boss Indicted in Conspiracy Trial.’ “

  “No, no! I mean—”

  “Tink, I know what you mean.” Her story was right between them, and the biggest of the three. “It’s been rough, and thanks for calling. “

  “It’s been rough around here, too,” he said mournfully. “The garbage disposal broke yesterday. I just turned on the dishwasher and water spouted out through the sink. The repair man said he’d never seen anything like—”

  “Tink! For God’s sake, have mercy! I’ve got the most important meeting of my life coming up!”

  “And what’s my life, Rainy? There’s only half of me here. I’m not complete without you—wait a minute,” he added quickly, hearing her intake of breath. “Don’t hang up. I’ll let you go in a second, only there’s something I want to ask you.”

  “Ask, damn it!”

  “Aw…you know.”

  “Tink,” she cried, “you’re just not to be believed! You want to know if I’m screwing around, right?”

  “I want to know if you’ve kept our agreement,” he insisted.

  “Yes! To the letter! Now, good-bye!” Shaking, she slammed the phone into its cradle and reached again for the pad; but there was no time. “Oh, sweet God,” she moaned,
jumped up, glanced at herself in the mirror, gave up and half-trotted down the hill to the Von Karman Auditorium. A few days ago it would have been a pipe dream to think of herself as the central figure in Von Karman…but a few days ago the world had been entirely different. In the sweltering Santa Ana she could feel her blouse sticking to her; what a mess she was going to look!

  But that wasn’t the thing that bothered her most.

  What bothered her most was a little voice in the corner of her mind that kept pointing out to her that, if only she went back to her husband, she wouldn’t have to worry about her professional reputation, or rent, or car insurance, or meeting the payments on all that furniture.

  She was braced for the press conference; she didn’t panic, she didn’t lose her voice, she didn’t fumble for words; all the same the questions astonished her. Such questions! “Do you have any reason to believe the Russians sabotaged your spacecraft?” “Can the space shuttle get a crew up to repair it?” “What would you say the cash value of the spacecraft is—I mean, how much has losing it cost us?” And the worst one: “According to reports, you have believed for some time that we were in danger from space. Is that in any way connected with the loss?” But she had hung in doggedly, and had managed, every time, to be polite.

  And at least it was over. Or almost. On the way to the door she was stopped three times—a picture; questions about her childhood and her reasons for becoming an astronomer—even her sign of the zodiac. By the time she got out of the room it was almost empty, but two men were waiting outside. She had seen them during the news conference, in the back of the auditorium. They had been listening intently and apparently taping every word, but they had asked no questions. “Oh, gee,” she said, “haven’t I said enough on the subject yet?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Keating,” the taller one said. He flipped open a wallet. “We’re from Air Intelligence. Let’s go to your office for a minute. “