Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  Robinson had moved cautiously down the corridor to see if anyone was coming their way. Returning, he reported, “Nothin’ happening. Look, man. I ought to see how Afeefah’s doin . “

  “She’s okay at the ashram, man. “

  “Yeah, well, you know, I got to get things goin’, you understand what I’m saying?”

  Dennis nodded and then remembered. He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket. “Hey, this old dude gave me this telephone number. He said there’d be some bread in it.”

  “Yeah?” Robinson peered at the number, but it told him nothing. “For what, man?”

  “He didn’t say,” Dennis confessed. “He was wearing a chauffeur’s cap. Maybe some rich guy wants us for something?”

  “For what?”

  “Now, how the hell would I know? I’m just saying he said there was bread in it.” Robinson looked irresolute, and Dennis pressed. “Let’s give it a shot, okay?” Robinson shrugged. “Tell you what. Let’s take a run around the hotel and see if any of the brothers and sisters are hanging around.” He led the way out to the escalator, and Robinson followed. “If we did go back in,” he schemed, “we better not try using those badges any more. They could bust us for that, maybe.”

  “Then we’ll never get in!”

  “Oh, yeah, we can. We can go down through the shopping center and cut in through the garage.”

  “Yeah? For what, man?”

  “Well, we could—hey, hold it.” There was a black and white at the Flower Street entrance to the hotel, with two city cops talking seriously to four young men and women. They glanced at Dennis and Robinson as they passed and then looked away, and Dennis and Robinson detoured around them. At the corner they paused and looked back. “They’re not going to do anything,” Dennis decided. “If it was a bust they’d be in the car by now.”

  “Hey, look. ” Robinson pointed to the parked cars down the block, where a couple of heads were sticking cautiously above the car hoods to keep an eye on what was going on.

  “Yeah, there’s at least a dozen of us that got out,” Dennis agreed. “I think we ought to go in again.”

  “Oh, man.” Robinson shook his head. “Hey, Dennis? You takin’ this stuff serious?”

  Dennis looked at him with astonishment. “What kind of a question is that? It’s the end of the world, isn’t it?”

  “Well, now, man, the book say it is.”

  “All the books do!” Dennis shook his head. “No, it’s for real, ol’ buddy. We got four or five months, maybe, and then it’s right down the toilet. “

  Robinson looked at him wonderingly. “Hey, I got to ask you something. You really believe that, why you here? Why din t you stay a thousand miles away?”

  Dennis scratched his beard. Finally he said, “What would be the use? What would there be to stay alive for?”

  Tuesday, December 8th. 10:35 AM.

  Out in the direction of the constellation Virgo, but much farther away than the stars that composed it, a star ten times the mass of the sun had reached the end of its helium-burning period. Its core was poisoned with the iron it had manufactured, and it had no lighter elements left to fuse. The reactions slowed. The energy output of the core dropped. Radiation pressure no longer was enough to hold the immense mass of surrounding gases away, and they plummeted in. In less than half an hour the star collapsed on itself. The release of gravitational energy that resulted blew the star apart. It was a supernova, the most violent event any star can experience. In one burst of energy all the medium-weight elements in the core were hammered into all of the heavier elements, and the fierce plasma exploded into the galaxy.

  With half an hour before her panel was to begin, Rainy realized she had forgotten to eat anything. The lobby coffee shop was, thankfully, uncrowded; she got a salad and a cup of tea, and was just finishing them when she realized somebody was standing next to her. “Miz Keating, what a pleasure!” he said. “May I join you?”

  “Dr. Sonderman,” she said. It wasn’t either yes or no, but he took it for permission. He ordered coffee from the waitress and said politely, “Another interesting demonstration of stupidity just now, don’t you agree? “

  Actually she did; but there was something about the man that pushed her negative-reflex buttons. “I think they have a right to express their opinions,” she said. “There is no opinion involved, Miz Keating!”

  “Really? But I understood there was a certain amount of evidence that the Jupiter effect might be real. “

  “Not in the least! As to the book, yes, perhaps; but these loonies are not scientists.…I think,” he said gloomily, “that I am coming on too strongly again. It is a bad habit of mine. Please excuse it. “

  She looked at him with a little less hostility. “Are you on the program?” she asked politely.

  “Oh, yes,” he said vaguely, and then amplified. “It is always a good idea to be present at this sort of affair, of course.” He shrugged as though the rest of the thought need not be said, and actually it needn’t. Like everything in the world of practicing scientists, attending meetings like this was an investment. You interrupted your real work to fill out grant applications, and to sit in on faculty senate meetings, and to go to Arecibo to plead before a senatorial committee, and to come here to be seen. It was part of the job. Science was not just a matter of finding facts and assembling them into theories. It was big business. A single space shot cost as much as a hospital. A particle accelerator could use up as much tax money as a municipal library system. To both Tib Sonderman and Rainy Keating, as to almost all scientists, there was no question that the money for science needed to be spent. But the people who turned on the money spigots did not always agree. They always had decisions to make, this program or that, basic science or bigger welfare payments, a new astronomical observatory or a new bomber. Sonderman believed that if he could divert one major appropriation from, say, subsidizing sorghum farmers to geophysical research, he would have done as much for the systematic acquisition of knowledge as a Kepler or a Becquerel…. But of course, it was not for that sort of thing that you got your name in the textbooks. “And yourself?” he asked. “I have heard that your grant has been terminated?”

  “The whole world’s heard,” she said bitterly.

  “Please, don’t worry. You’ll connect. There must be two hundred Equal Opportunity Employers anxious to bring their statistics up to meet the guidelines. A female astronomer is a marketable commodity—of course, it would be better if you were black or Hispanic.”

  She swallowed the last of her coffee and called for the check. “You do have a charming way of putting things,” she said.

  He looked at her in astonishment. “Have I offended you again?”

  “I’ve got to get to my panel. I’m a respondent, so I’d better hear what I’m responding to.”

  He sat back despondently. “I have offended you,” he said.

  “Oh, not unbearably,” she conceded. “It’s just that I’ve been Xeroxing my vita and sending out two or three hundred copies of it—and I guess I’m a little edgy.”

  “Very understandable!” He steered her to the cashier. “I hope you won’t mind if I come to hear your panel?”

  “It’s not exactly your line, is it?”

  “Oh, no, but I thought—” He stopped, then paid the check and pulled her along by the elbow. “I must be truthful,” he said. “I came here only because I wished to see you again. To apologize.” It didn’t come easy to him, Rainy saw; the expression on his face was more suited to a declaration of war than an apology. “Although,” he added stubbornly, “speaking purely in general terms, I must say that I have not changed my opinion about the unequal treatment society gives men in certain sorts of relationships—”

  She stopped and peered into his face. Finally she laughed. “You’re a wonder, you know that? Listen, I accept your apology, so don’t spoil it. Let’s get to the meeting.”

  It was a dull panel, but a crowded one. The reason was obvious. The n
ext program event in this room was to be a discussion of the so-called Jupiter Effect. Even though Tib and Rainy got there a minute or two before it was supposed to begin, all the good seats—the ones near the door, where you could get up and leave without any trouble if you didn’t like what you were hearing—were already taken. Tib Sonderman followed Rainy down the center aisle. While she went on to the platform, he slid over to one of the few remaining empty seats, far to one side, in the second row.

  According to the program, there were going to be six papers, all of them astronomical and none of them of the slightest interest to Tib Sonderman. He could not really see that they would be all that interesting to, for example, Lev Mihailovitch, the Russian cosmonaut who had apparently come to the meeting principally to be interviewed on American television. Like all cosmonauts, he was fairly short, not very young, but as polished in his public appearances as any NASA spaceman. And there were others whose specialties, he knew, were nowhere near X-ray sources in the Pleiades, or a possible new anomalous supernova. Tib knew why he was there. It was because he was enjoying the company of this attractive young woman who—at the moment, at least—appeared to enjoy his.

  The longer the program went, the more crowded the room became. There was still a scattering of seats in the first row or two, but the reason was that the people coming into the room could not get to them. Capacity of the room was posted at 220 persons, but there were more than that standing at the back, sitting in the aisles, squeezed two to a chair near the doors. It was getting uncomfortably hot, and when the last speaker called for the lights to be turned out so he could show his slides, Sonderman was grateful that one heat source was extinguished.

  It didn’t help. Tib was sweating profusely, and wondering whether it was really worth staying in this tedious sauna. The speaker was feeling the strain too, because he was hurrying his presentation. His principal slide was a batch of black dots on a white background, and with his red laser pointer the speaker indicated one dot, tinier than the others. “This,” he said, “is the anomalous object. It does not appear to be an artifact of photography—next slide—and in this other negative print, made with the multiple mirror telescope at Mount Hopkins, the same object appears. There.” The laser pointed out another dot in a cloud of random dots. “We have no spectroscopy on this object. We have no other data of any kind. If it is in fact a nova, it is probably the shortest-lived ever observed. It does not appear on the plates we made the next night at UKIRT of the same section of the sky, nor in any plates made at any other reporting observatory. Except for one dubious short-exposure plate from Herstmonceux, and even electronic enhancement does not give a definite confirmation of that one. If it weren’t for the Mount Hopkins confirmation I’d write it off. But there it is. Lights, please.”

  The projectionist turned off the slide machine and the room lights came back on. In just the five minutes of darkness the audience had added another thirty or forty people, and there was something about the look and bearing of most of them that did not say “scientist”. They didn’t act in the generally orderly, sometimes lethargic manner of scientists coming to a panel, either. A dozen of them were pushing determinedly along the sides of the room, and one, a bustly little man with a shock of close-cropped hair, pushed right through the row to the seat next to Tib. He was not evidently a part of the other group, who seemed younger and far worse dressed; in fact they looked like the paper-airplane pilots from the lobby. The speaker, drumming his fingers on the lectern, waited a moment for the noise to subside and then finished. “Now, what do we call it? A nova? Possibly a collision between a previously unidentified black hole and a small, dense gas cloud? A completely different event of some kind? I don’t know. If anybody has a speculation to offer, I’d like to listen. And if there are any questions, I’ll try to answer them.”

  The newcomer next to Tib Sonderman jumped to his feet, and in that moment Tib identified him. It was Danny Deere, the real-estate man, caught out of the corner of Tib‘s eye a dozen times a week in his TV commercials, while Tib was letting his subconscious worry at a problem as he played solitaire in front of the tube. “Sure, I have a question,” Deere cried. “Is it true that the planet Jupiter is going to dump us all into the Pacific Ocean? And when does it happen?”

  Tuesday, December 8th. 11:10 AM.

  Alaska’s Columbia glacier is the only one in North America that is not retreating, but it is about to do so. Because of its position on the shoreline it will not melt harmlessly. It will calve chunks of itself in the form of icebergs. Each berg will average about a fifth of a mile in diameter. About 100,000 of them will spill into the sea each summer, near the shipping lanes of the Alaskan oil tankers.

  What a disaster! Tommy Pedigrue stood on tiptoes to try to see what was going on in the meeting room. He couldn’t see. He could hear, though, and it sounded like a catfight instead of an orderly gathering of dispassionate scientists. Pure disaster. The worst part was that his father had told him to attend the Jupiter meeting. Well, he had tried! But there had been such a terrible crush. Tommy Pedigrue did not like being caught in masses of humanity—unless they were assembled to hear him, or his brother. He didn’t like it all that much even then, but there was at least a profit to be gained from cases like that.

  From this? He fidgeted back and forth, trying to make up his mind. According to the program, this panel was supposed to be on some rag-tags of astronomical stuff, of no interest at all, really; but cannily Tommy had schemed to sit in on this one to make sure of having a seat for the one that followed. That was the one on the Jupiter Effect, and that was the one that his father wanted him to cover. But he had not been the only person with that idea. The place was packed! Not just scientists, or anyway not just the kind of scientists that he was used to have coming to him and his brother with their begging bowls. The Russian cosmonaut was there, the governor’s science advisor was there, there was even a young woman Tommy recognized as a talent scout for the Johnny Carson show there!

  And most oddly of all, Danny Deere was there. Tommy had recognized him instantly, and wondered greatly that he was present. He got his answer when Danny stood up and started the riot, but it was an answer that raised new questions.

  Then it became really disagreeable. As soon as Danny Deere got the words out, the mob at the back of the room took up the shout. Tommy hung around long enough to find out that the Jupiter meeting was canceled, and then headed for a quieter spot to think things over.

  All those people! All that excitement! His hunch had been right. There were votes in there somewhere, he could smell them. Tommy had been in Chicago, building alliances for the upcoming convention year, when Mayor Bilandic failed to neaten up the streets after the 1978 snows. He had seen the election results a year later. He had heard John Lindsay’s teeth-gritted self-abasement for the same fault in New York a few years earlier, when he was up for his second term—and those were only for snow. What would happen to his brother’s career—not to mention his own hopes of following the senator right up the ladder—if, by any chance, all this was real and they let some part of California slide into the sea?

  He made up his mind to report to the old man. He left the hotel, cut through the parking lot of the public library, hurried across a couple of typical downtown-Los Angeles streets—curb to curb with drivers who thought they were still on a freeway—and entered the grounds of the Pioneers Club.

  When downtown Los Angeles was Los Angeles, and not just a place Los Angelenos boasted of never going near, the Pioneers Club was where millionaires kept their eyes on each other. For the old-timers at least, it hadn’t changed.

  As he expected, his father was still in the dining room, playing dominos with his secretary, Tim Paradine. The old man looked up briefly and nodded to a seat beside his wheelchair. “Gus’ll bring you some coffee if you want it,” he said, “or a drink, but let’s finish this game before we talk.”

  Tommy sat down as bidden, as he always did when his father spoke, sulky with resen
tment, as he always was. T. Robert Pedigrue had given his sons everything, including the inside line to the levers of power in American society, but it was not to be forgotten that he was the Old Man. In 1940 the elder Pedigrue had been one of FDR’s personal emissaries—to Latin America, to Madrid, at last to London in the middle of the Blitz. He got there in the middle of one of the worst West End raids, and when he left London his feet stayed behind. It wasn’t a bomb. It was a bus. He stepped politely off the crowded sidewalk at Oxford Circus to let a gaggle of Wrens pass, forgetting that the traffic was coming the wrong way, and the Number 73 for Kensington High Street ground the lower ten inches of each leg to gritty suet. End of airborne diplomacy for T. Robert Pedigrue. It was almost the end of Pedigrue, too, but the surgeons at Guy’s Hospital had had a lot of practice in carpentering mutilated limbs that year, and he lived. He even thrived. FDR remembered, and the week after Pearl Harbor Pedigrue got the job he asked for. He became the head of California’s War Mobilization Board. When his wife asked what he would be in charge of, he said, “Everything. ” He still was. He was in charge of his sons, and before long one of them would sit in the chair where FDR had sat, warming it for the other one: there would be sixteen Pedigrue years in the White House, and by then everything would be shipshape.

  T. R. fitted a double-six on a spur of the domino pattern and counted triumphantly. “Forty-one, fifty, double-nine is sixty-eight and the double-twelve is eighty, and I’m out.” He flung himself back in the wheelchair like Dr. Gillespie and waited while his secretary, who doubled as his chauffeur, his bodyguard, and once in a while his procurer, added up the score. “That’s forty dollars you owe me, Tim,” the old man said. “You can wait outside until I’m finished with the boy, if you don’t mind. “

  “I don’t mind, Mr. Pedigrue,” the secretary said, and he didn’t. He didn’t mind that the old man consistently won, either. T. R. was careful not to win more than half his salary back, and as Tim Paradine easily doubled his pay with the unbought gasoline allowance and the kickbacks from the gardener, the grocery store, the garage, and whatever contractors came along to make improvements or repairs on the house, it all evened out.