Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  Tuesday, December 8th. 8:40 AM.

  The kind of nuclear fusion that keeps the sun going produces neutrinos. Neutrinos are so tiny and so lacking in electric charge that detecting them is very difficult. A neutrino “telescope”, typically, consists of ten thousand gallons of cleaning fluid at the bottom of a gold mine in North Dakota. The earth above the mine filters out all other particles; atoms in the cleaning fluid react with the neutrinos. Strangely, all the neutrino telescopes consistently report fewer neutrinos than the sun’s core should be producing. One possibility is that the theories are all wrong. Another is that the sun has begun to grow colder.

  Danny Deere stopped in his breakfast room on the way to the front door. “Jesus, Manuel,” he cried in disgust, “you got the son of a bitch crooked. Has to go up on the left. You blind? Up.”

  The handyman hopped off the stool to take a look. The painting was a Reginald Marsh, just promoted from the basement. It clashed violently with the violently bright Leetig it faced across the room, but the handyman never expressed an opinion about art. “Oh, sure, boss,” he agreed, smiling and bobbing his head. “Way up.”

  “Not way up, goddamit, maybe an inch up, and don’t drop it.” He turned to the door, accepting his raw-silk sports jacket from Manuel’s wife. “Keep an eye on him,” he ordered, slinging the jacket over his shoulder.

  “Si, sehor.” She also gave him a giant smile, which he did not return. His chauffeur opened the door of the Mercedes as Danny approached the terrazzo driveway; he didn’t smile, but then he was the one who actually liked Danny Deere.

  Danny’s morning paper was neatly folded on the white leather seat, open to the real-estate section. The car was freshly polished, the stereo was whispering the morning news, the day was warm but not yet hot from the Santa Ana; and everything considered Danny Deere was in about as good a mood as was possible for a person like Danny Deere. But he knew what he would see as soon as he got out of his driveway. Halfway to the gate he found what he was looking for, an excuse to blow off steam. “Jesus, will you look at that?” he cried. “Joel! You run in the gatehouse and tell those kids they got to cut down their marijuana. You can see it from the road, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Okay, Danny.” Joel de Lawrence stopped the car gently in front of the house occupied by Danny’s peons. Although he was nearly seventy, he was sprightly as he hopped out and rang the doorbell. Danny Deere glowered for a moment at the teen-ager who came to the door but did not deign to listen to the exchange. He popped the paper open to the classifieds and began running down them with his thumb.

  When Joel was back in the car, pressing the button that activated the gate, Danny ordered, “Don’t take the freeway right away. I want to look at some houses.”

  “Okay, Danny.” Joel de Lawrence knew why Danny didn’t want to take the freeway. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at the great sprawling skeleton of steel that was going to be the biggest condominium in Southern California, and was also going to spoil Danny’s view of the Pacific.

  When Danny Deere was six years old he was famous. Between 1935 and 1942 he made fifteen movies, and every one of them made money for the studio, if not an awful lot for the kid star. When he got too pimply and awkward for kid roles he decided to become a millionaire and show them. He did. He persuaded his stepfather to put the money that was left into Los Angeles real estate. By the time he was thirty he had his million. By the time he was forty his ex-wives had most of it, but Danny had learned that you didn’t have to actually own the real estate to get rich from it. He opened an office, and in the explosive market of the 70’s he was Southern California’s fastest-moving dealer.

  When he drove downtown, which was only when he had to, Danny Deere stayed off the freeways as long as he could. His driver knew what to do. He took all the winding roads through the areas the developers had never been allowed to touch, passing the homes of the movie stars and oil sheiks and political exiles. Every big estate was an old acquaintance to Danny Deere, and he took note of every change he saw. This place’s royal palms were looking yellow at the crowns. Damn shame, that was fifty thousand off the price, at least. That one was building something—what? A greenhouse around an indoor pool? He paid conscious attention for a moment. Interesting idea. The investment couldn’t be more than sixty, sixty-five thousand at the most, and it might raise a one-seven house past the two million mark, if you found the right buyer. Not that all those one point sevens wouldn’t go to two anyhow, sooner or later—two? In ten years, who knew? Maybe three million. Maybe anything you cared to mention. There were just so many square feet of land in California, and nowhere for prices to go but up.

  Unless a smart operator could bend a little downturn into the curve.

  The big Mercedes came to a decision point, and the driver turned around. “Danny? If you want to get to that place by ten AM, I better take the freeway now.”

  “So take the goddam freeway, Joel, do I have to drive the goddam car myself?” Danny wasn’t angry at the old man. He always talked to him like that. He always talked to everybody who worked for him like that, but it gave him the most pleasure when it was Joel de Lawrence. For the twenty minutes that it took to run the Golden State Freeway to the Hollywood, and the Hollywood to the Santa Monica, and the Santa Monica to the Sixth Street exit Danny didn’t bother looking out the window. He lay back on the doubly upholstered seat, thinking about his little plan, and the various other little plans that filled his days, and smiling quietly to himself.

  He came to as they jolted off the freeway and made a sharp turn. For a moment he couldn’t remember what he was doing way the hell downtown, so far from his office on Sunset Boulevard and even farther from the real action, and then he saw the public library on his right and the entrance to the hotel just ahead.

  “Hot damn,” he said, surprised.

  “What did you say, Danny?” Joel half turned to listen, keeping his eyes on the traffic.

  “Just pay attention to your goddam driving.” But Danny wasn’t angry; he was pleasantly astonished. There was a thin loop of marchers outside the hotel entrance, carrying placards.

  “Drive right past,” he ordered. “Slow. No, don’t make a U-turn. Just keep driving, slow.”

  He peered at the signs and placards as they drifted past, scowling a little. Christ, they had everything in the world on them! Fluoridation Is Poison. Remember the Shah. But there were two or three that said things like California Is Doomed and Beware Jupiter. He sank back as they passed, then called to the driver, “Pull over. Let me out here.”

  “I can make a U-turn, Danny—”

  “If I wanted you to make a goddam U-turn I’d tell you to make a goddam U-turn. Just let me out. Then swing around the block and wait for me at the Figueroa Street entrance. Then I’ll tell you what to do next. “

  “Sure thing, Danny.” Deere hopped out at the intersection and trotted across Flower Street against the lights. There were no more than a dozen people in the picket line in front of the hotel, and they seemed to represent every shade of kookery in Southern California. A tall, skinny young man with a blond pigtail was having a desultory argument with the doorman. He wore a sandwich board which said 100 Days to Doom. Danny stood at the doorway for a moment, watching with interest, then pushed on inside.

  The lobby of the hotel was spectacular at any time, with its brightly lighted elevators running up and down immense columns in the hundred-foot lobby and its pools and pods of lounge seats cantilevered out from the upper levels. With the ASF convention in the hotel, it was a madhouse. Every person he saw wore some kind of a badge, most just the plastic clip-ons with a name and an affiliation, but others marked Speaker or Staff or other, more cryptic designations, and all of them seemed to be in a hurry. They also all seemed to have programs, which Danny Deere did not. He saw a knot of people standing by a display counter and headed toward it, but it was not a registration desk. It was a glass case that contained a model of a new apartment condominium, six arc
s of high-rise buildings that climbed a gentle green slope. It looked rather pretty in the model. Actually, it was one of the running sores that spoiled the course of Danny Deere’s life—not least because he could not get a piece of selling it. He scowled and snapped his fingers at a hurrying bellman. “Where’s the registration desk for this thing?” he demanded.

  “Two flights up. You can take the escalator over there—” The man waved toward a string of moving lights across the lobby, and then did a double-take. “—Mr. Deere,” he finished. Danny smiled and patted the bellman’s arm before he headed through a sort of random cocktail lounge toward the moving stairs. Being recognized was never unpleasant. In his late teens, suffering the humiliation of watching his old films beginning their endless television reruns without getting a penny out of it, nobody had wanted to know him; he could stroll Sunset Boulevard without attracting any attention except from cruising johns. But since his real-estate career had blossomed, he was a familiar face again on TV commercials.

  But as he reached the registration area the good feeling evaporated. There were long lines waiting to pick up the badges without which you couldn’t get into any of the meetings, and Danny Deere was not a person to stand in line. He weighed the possibility of a bribe to one of the registrars, gave it up, and moved thoughtfully away.

  The cantilevered pods on this level had been taken over by TV crews. Deere dawdled past one of them, where a stocky dark man with a Russian accent, no taller than Danny himself, was explaining how glad he was to be in America and how much he hoped for friendly cooperation in the peaceful exploration of space, and another where a rather good-looking young woman with a set smile was waiting for the cameraman to get his act together. Deere recognized her after a moment; whatever-her-name-was, the one who lost her spaceship at the same place where the kid had taken all his clothes off and first called Danny’s attention to this Jupiter business. And then, with a delayed flash, he realized that he had just seen that kid talking to the doorman outside the hotel.

  He found a staircase and headed for the Figueroa Street entrance, where Joel de Lawrence was waiting with the limousine. “Dummy! You didn’t park the car!” Danny greeted him.

  “You didn’t tell me to—”

  “Do I have to tell you everything? Here’s what you do, dummy. First, go around to the other door. There’s a skinny young guy there, blond beard, long blond hair, carrying a sign. Find out who he is and where I can get in touch with him. Then go up to the registration desk and pick up my credentials. Then just wait there till I get there.”

  “Sure thing, Danny. What’ll I do with the car?”

  It was blocking the interior lane meant for arriving guests, and already a taxi driver was leaning out his window to yell.

  . “You’ll leave it there, what else?”

  “I could put it in the garage on the way, Danny, that’s right next to—”

  “Would you quit arguing, for crap’s sake? You know what they charge in that place? Go on, I’ve got something to take care of.”

  He turned his back on de Lawrence and headed back for the TV crews. It had just occurred to him that one of them might recognize him and ask for some kind of comment and then he could be on the six o’clock news. And when did a little extra exposure ever hurt?

  The American Scientific Federation was no better than Number Two in scientific professional groups. The hoary old AAAS had twice the membership and five times the muscle. Still, ASF had pulled more than three thousand scientists to its annual meeting in Los Angeles, physicists and archeologists and mathematicians and economists. If was not the kind of place where you would expect to find the Danny Deere kind of person. So the first thing the reporter would ask him, Danny calculated as he moved genially toward the floodlights, was what he was doing there. Right. He began rehearsing answers. Maybe even a truthful answer. It struck him as strange, but it almost seemed as though the best thing he could say would be to tell them that he was interested—no, concerned; deeply concerned—in the serious threat that seemed to be confronting the city we all loved so—

  No. Not fancy; just concerned. Maybe even scared?

  It would come to him when the camera was on him, he thought comfortably, and assumed the expression of somebody who was fascinated by what this woman was telling the interviewer. The cameraman looked up from his handheld minicam and winked at him. Danny nodded back, satisfied. He had been noticed.

  The interviewer was a black woman with a carefully trained conk, and she was saying, “I guess you’ve heard the report that it might have been a Russian beam weapon that destroyed your spacecraft, Miz Keating. What do you think?”

  Rainy Keating’s smile sharpened a little, as though she didn’t like the question. “We haven’t been able to establish a definite cause,” she conceded. “So it’s hard to discount any theory, but I would say that was about the most improbable.” The newsperson started to pull the microphone back for a follow-up, but the days since Arecibo had taught Rainy some media skills and she kept on talking. “We do know some things for sure. The Newton-8 overheated. It wasn’t hit by a meteorite, because the particle counter was still functioning; it registered zero. It wasn’t some sudden malfunction in the plutonium power source, because the telemetry would have gone out before we could read the change in temperature. It wasn’t one of the tanks of propulsion fuel somehow exploding; pressure in the tanks was stable right up to the last.”

  The interviewer reclaimed the mike. “Sounds to me a lot like the way a laser weapon is supposed to work,” she commented.

  Rainy shook her head. “No, that makes no sense. Why would anyone attack a harmless old spacecraft like Newton? There are dozens right in Earth orbit, where they’re a lot easier to get to.”

  The woman said, “Maybe they picked it because it was so far away—their killer spacecraft could observe it, while we wouldn’t have a clue.” Rainy was starting to shake her head, but the woman added, “Which we still don’t. Thank you, Miz Keating. At the American Scientific Federation meeting in downtown Los Angeles, this is your reporter.” And the cameraman swung the lens around the lobby of the hotel for a cutaway. “Thank you,” Rainy Keating said dismally, but she was only talking to one person now, not the television audience, and that one person was looking around for the next interview subject. Danny Deere smiled and moved inconspicuously closer. He perceived he was just about in time, because others had noticed the television crew; Senator Pedigrue’s kid brother was strolling casually in their direction, and several middle-aged men in business suits, surely scientists of some kind, were standing awkwardly around, indicating by their bearing that their reluctance to speak in public could be overcome.

  But they were all out of luck. The noise level in the lobby suddenly increased. Half a dozen objects appeared in the air, fluttering down from the levels above.

  Somebody was having a good time. Danny scowled as a squadron of hotel security men hurried past, heading toward the stairs to the upper levels. The number of floating papers increased. They were paper airplanes, swooping and swirling among the hanging blankets of Christmas-tree lights in the tall lobby, kamikaze-ing the sliding elevator cabs, bringing little shrieks from the crowd down on the lowest lobby floor as they were dive-bombed without warning.

  Danny caught one of the paper planes as it dashed itself against his belly. It was a leaflet, crudely mimeographed on bright orange paper. It said:

  Californians!

  Wake Up!

  The end is at hand! The city of Los Angeles is doomed! Scientists say the end of our world is just around the corner. Now we are going to be punished for our sins. The shameful abuse of Women, Blacks, Gays, the Free Irish and the Palestinians has brought upon us our

  TOTAL DESTRUCTION!

  Danny turned the paper over thoughtfully. There was nothing on the other side, but then there didn’t need to be. He observed philosophically that the camera crew was scurrying to get this unexpected bonus on tape; there would be no quick interview with Da
nny Deere on the evening news this night. But what the hell, this was just about as good!

  Tuesday, December 8th. 10:20 AM.

  All over the Los Angeles basin the Santa Ana was searing the landscape like a blast from a hair blower. Up in the mountains, skiers lounged on the wide verandas of the lodges, looking mournfully up at the snow. It was pretty, and it was deep. It was also dangerous. Under the wind that curled up the slopes of the mountains the snow was softening. Every now and then an overhanging ledge slumped, cracked, broke loose and slid down a mountainside.

  Dennis Siroca raced down the passage to the Arco Building bridge and collapsed on top of Saunders Robinson. They were both giggling. They clutched at each other, keeping an eye on the passage, and just as they were sobering up Robinson said, “Oh, man!” and they broke out again.

  Thirty yards away, the noise from the hotel lobby was only a murmur. Nobody was following. They were both breathing heavily. Several flights of stairs, two or three bridges, a couple of laps around the circular balconies; it had been a pretty good workout for both of them. “Yeah,” said Robinson, peering down the passage. “What’s comin’ down now, Denny? We goin’ back in there?”

  “Not right this minute,” Dennis conceded. “I dunno.” He fished a joint out of his breast pocket and lit it, passing it to Robinson while he thought. There had not been much of a plan past the distribution of the circulars, but that had been such a resounding success that he was reluctant to let it stop there. The demonstration had been as much his idea as anybody else’s, but that didn’t give him any particular powers of leadership. The little event in Arecibo had been wholly unplanned; he was there because his old lady dealt a little drugs on the side and was scouting out East Coast supplies so she could pay her tuition when she went back to college next year. But the papers and the TV newscasts had used the pictures. Which suggested doing something like it again. Which had gone over big at the ashram. But none of them had thought much beyond the leaflets.