She fell silent, staring at the paper.
“Only what?” Tib prompted.
“Only it’s in the wrong place! According to Eshleman, the nearest focal point is 550 A.U. out—five hundred and fifty times the distance of the earth from the sun. Way outside the orbit of Pluto. And Newton wasn’t anywhere near that far.” She brightened. “But, what the hell, maybe Eshleman made a mistake in his arithmetic! Or even if he didn’t—”
“He didn’t,” Tib said. “The offprint’s from Science. It’s been refereed.”
“I know that! But even if he didn’t, it’s at least something to show the Feds. Get them off my back. Maybe get the idea that the Russians did it out of their heads. Tib! This calls for another drink!”
Since Tib was not really sure of his motives in visiting Rainy, it was confusing to him that he felt somehow frustrated. She was friendly enough. But her mind was on her satellite, and she excused herself to spend some time at her desk. Tib turned on the television and browsed through her slim library. Either she was not a reader or she hadn’t acquired many books since the separation from her husband. It was not cfear in Tib’s mind just how recent that event was. Or, for that matter, how real. Half the couples he knew spent half their lives moving out on each other; he and Wendy had been a curiosity in their social circle for having had only one definitive split.
“What’s this thing?” he asked, twirling a sort of mobile that stood by the window. It seemed to represent the planets.
“What? Oh, that’s a funny thing, Tib. It’s an orrery, and it came for me yesterday. I think it’s from Meredith Bradison’s grandson—anyway, he broke one in Puerto Rico, and I can’t think who else would do it. There wasn’t any name.”
“I wouldn’t have thought he had the price of something like this,” Tib commented, pushing Jupiter around and watching the other planets spin to keep up.
“Me, too—it’s all hand-made. Listen, I’m being a lousy hostess, I know, but this Eshleman thing—”
“That’s all right.” He was not unhappy that she was concentrating on something other than himself, but he was restless. His wanderings took him into the kitchen. The doors of the cupboard over the sink were ajar; he pulled them a little more so and found what he had expected, ajar of instant coffee. He made the decision that it was less impolite to go ahead and make it than to interrupt her to ask if he might. While the water was boiling he realized what it was that pleased him so about Rainy’s apartment. It smelled feminine. It was a scent that Wendy’s visit had reminded him to miss.
He brought the coffee to where Rainy was sitting over her desk, cheek on the hand that was supported by the desk, scratching absent-mindedly behind her ear and scribbling slowly.
“Coffee? Hey, what a good idea.” she said, coming back to the planet she was on. “This isn’t working anyway. The damn satellite has a tangential velocity of about six miles a second, and according to Eshleman the spot of focus is only tens of meters across. So I have to know the exact time when it began to screw-up—not when we received the signals in Arecibo, but when it happened, out there past Saturn—before I can locate the position of the probe precisely enough to take the reciprocal coordinates and identify the star—if there really was a star—if I had a good enough star catalogue, which I don’t have here anyway. I thought I could do it on my calculator, but it only goes to eight places—eleven if you coax it, but then I always forget what the first few significant figures were—”
“I’m not understanding a hell of a lot of this,” Tib objected mildly.
She grinned, took off her glasses, put down her pencil and turned to face him. “You understand that I’m stuck, right? That’s what it comes to. Tomorrow I’ll go up to JPL and let the big machines work it all out. And then—wow! Wait’ll I tell the Feds!”
Tib leaned toward her, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Why?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why should you wait? These agents work around the clock to defend our freedom and complete their paperwork. Why don’t you call them and tell them the good news now?”
She looked perplexed for a moment, then sunny. “You have real good ideas sometimes, you know that?” She jumped up, put her glasses back on, and began to rummage through the drawer in the telephone table. Feeling pleased with himself, Tib stood up and stretched. He had been so taken up with the tensions of, what did they call it? dating?, that he had not really looked at her apartment. It was obviously new to her; the furniture all new, the floors skimpily covered with throw rugs, also new. She had impressed her own personality only in patches. Over the couch was a huge, framed monochrome of herself. The slit-bamboo roller curtains were an obvious temporary expedient before investing in drapes, but she had tacked up a variety of badges and buttons on one of them. Keepsakes and souvenirs: he recognized her I.D. badge from the Arecibo meeting, along with one from the ASF, in among political badges and jokes: “We’re All from an Unratified Country—ERA” next to “If You Can Read This You’re Too Close”.
She found what she was looking for and punched out a number. “This is Georgia Raines Keating,” she said into the phone, “calling Burnett Harscore. I’m sorry it’s so late, but I’ve just received some important information.”
She was evidently enjoying herself. She held her glasses in her hand, gesturing with them to make her points, and her face was far more relaxed and, yes, sexually attractive than he had seen it for some time. “He’s not there? Then write down this message. Have you got a pencil?—Oh, silly me, of course, you’re taping the whole thing. Well, I believe I have an explanation for the event he has been discussing with me. I’ll give you the literature citations; he can look them up and then, if he needs further information, he can call me.” She rattled off the Einstein and Eshleman citations from Science, and finished, “Of course, I am not sure that the phenomenon described is what actually happened, just that it’s a lot more likely than either that I screwed it up or the Russians did. What? Yes, you’re welcome. And Merry Christmas.”
She hung up and turned, grinning, to Tib. “I didn’t even promise to keep it quiet. Maybe I can get a paper out of it!”
She looked so pleased that he put his arms around her and kissed her to celebrate. She kissed him back and then freed herself. “Hey, Tib? I don’t want to go to bed with you. “
He stroked her hair. “Yes, many women have that attitude,” he agreed.
“No, really. I don’t mean I don’t like you. Listen, I don’t want you going bananas like in Arecibo—”
Tib bristled. “I did not go ‘bananas’.”
“Yes, you did, so let’s leave it there, all right? Anyway, it isn’t you, honestly, Tib. You’re a pretty attractive man, not counting going bananas every now and then. It’s Tinker.”
“Tinker?”
“My ex-husband,” she explained.
He said seriously, “No good person has ever been named Tinker.”
Rainy laughed and reached for the coffee cups. “Would you like some more? Come on in the kitchen.” As she was heating the water she added reflectively, “It’s actually worse than just Tinker’. It’s from when he was a baby. His mother used to call him ‘Little Stinker’, and when he got bigger they just cleaned it up a little. But he’s really a good person, Tib.”
“Yes?”
Her expression was getting stubborn. “I made him this promise,” she said, paused, and then shrugged. “He’s sort of a sad person sometimes. Very jealous. I don’t want to hurt him. So I, uh, I promised him I wouldn’t get involved with anybody else here in L.A. Conventions and trips and so on, that’s something else, I didn’t make any promise about that.”
Tib threw his head back and laughed. “That’s, excuse me, the stupidest thing I ever heard of. “
“Stick it up your nose!” she .flared.
“No, let me understand,” he persisted. “I had my opportunity in Arecibo, then, and missed it?”
“You had no chance in Arecibo, buster!”
>
“I mean in a theoretical sense. I am simply trying to understand the rules. That would have been okay, correct? Or also at the ASF, because that was a convention?”
“Now, look! Don’t push too hard on this. We didn’t sign a treaty, it was simply a kindness for someone I don’t want to hurt. “
“Yes, of course, but you have interested me in this. I believe I understand the terms of reference now.” He thought for a moment, then nodded. “Excuse me,” he said, turning back into the living room. She followed him to the archway, staring as he considered the array of badges on the bamboo blind. “Tib?”
He nodded and selected two. “Yes, these will do,” he said. “Here, one badge for you, one for me. The name is wrong on mine, but I will change that.” He took a pen from his pocket and crossed her name out, substituting his own. “Fine. Now we are at a convention, all right? We have had a scientific session about your spacecraft, you have delivered your report, and now we are at a room party.”
She glared at him, outraged, and then her expression began to clear. “I have to say you’ve got some cute aspects, Tib Sonderman.”
“Oh, yes, sometimes cute,” he agreed, “but I am not making you an appeal from cuteness. This is only to comply with the technical requirements of this technical undertaking you have made, and now we can consider this situation on its merits.”
“Oh, can we?”
“Yes. And as someone said to me, I believe in Arecibo, though perhaps in different words, if one is through with a marriage one should be through with it.”
She looked at him for a moment, shaking her head ruefully. “You strange man, the water’s boiling. You’re going to make me ruin my teapot.”
“I will be glad to turn it off for you, but that is not the point, as I see it. That point is that what I would really like now is not coffee but to make love to you. Please excuse my nervousness. It is because of that that, I know, I am talking too much.”
She sighed. “Much too much,” she agreed. “Why don’t you go turn off the coffee?”
They were both eager; they were both clumsy, and forgiving of each other’s clumsiness. Tib Sonderman was not inexperienced with women, but he had run up no Leporello lists; after Wendy left he counted on his fingers all the women he had ever made love to and discovered, to his chagrin, that all ten fingers were not needed.
Nevertheless he had learned a great deal in his sexual experiences. The most interesting discovery was that women were individuals. They were not all the same. They did not say the same things. They did not feel the same or taste the same, and the terrain of each woman’s erogenous zones was different from every other; the road maps in the textbooks could not be trusted.
It was astonishing, and greatly pleasurable, and he was eager to learn more. So while he and this newest of his—could the word still be “conquests”? (And “Number seventeen!” crowed the calculator in the back of his mind)—while he and Rainy Keating, that was to say, were making love, Tib was storing data in his retrieval system. This seemed to please her. This other did not. There was never a time when Tib Sonderman’s conscious mind was not observing, recording, and analyzing.
Nevertheless they spent themselves gloriously and rolled only inches apart when they were through, their fingers still interlocked. It was not surprising that it had gone so well. Both had been for some time deprived. And as soon as Tib had caught his breath, he propped himself on an elbow and said seriously, “I think it will get better as we go along, my dear Rainy. “
She said, “Oh, my God.” She freed her hands and reached out to the night table for her glasses in order to inspect this person. “Tib, honey,” she said, “look. I just as soon not have the instant analysis, all right?”
“It was all right, then?” he asked.
“It was at least all right,” she agreed, peering at him with warmth and amusement. She stroked his cheek with her finger and touched his shoulder. Her eyes were big and unfocused behind the glasses. “What’s that?” she asked.
He shrugged away from her touch and sat up. “Look at the window!” he said. “It’s getting light!”
Rainy glanced uninterestedly at the gray, dismal morning. “We got a late start,” she said, and sat up beside him. “Are you going to tell me what it is?”
Tib glanced down at the tattoo on his upper arm, just about where most people his age had a vaccination. “The guards at the concentration camp put it there,” he said reluctantly. “Oh, Tib!”
He said slowly, “That is where I was born. In the camp. My father was a Yugoslav partisan, and the Nazis took my mother hostage to force him to surrender. He did not surrender. He was killed in battle. Of course, since my mother was pregnant with me at the time, I also became a hostage.”
“Oh, Tib,” she said again; there was nothing else she could think of to say.
But his face was relaxed. “It is not that terrible, you know. At least it was not for me. What did I understand of what went on? By the time I was a year old and able to understand, to begin to understand, the war was over. We were at home in Zagreb, with my mother’s family. This has been troubling me, Rainy,” he added, “that we know so little about each other.”
She stretched and yawned, and reached for a robe. “There’s time for that, Tib. I have to go to my parents’ for Christmas, but when I come back you can take me out somewhere for a taco and you can tell me all about Bulgaria—”
“Yugoslavia!”
“—about Yugoslavia, and I’ll tell you about Lehigh County, Pennsylvania.”
“You have to drive to San Diego? And I have been keeping you awake all night!”
She grinned. “I should certainly think so, and, listen, don’t start apologizing, you hear? You’ve got some strange ways, dear Tib. “
“Yes, so you have told me,” he said stiffly. “Well, you do. And I do have to get dressed. And I suppose you have something you have to do—or had you planned to stay here all through Christmas?”
“Not at all!”
“Aw, come on, Tib, that was a joke.” He said seriously, “I know you joke with me a lot, and I am not always sure when it is at my expense.” He hesitated, and then confessed, “I am not at ease with women. I do not know why, but every relationship I enter leaves me with guilt feelings at the end. As early as seventeen, in London, I must tell you—”
“No, you mustn’t,” she said fondly. “Go home, Tib. Dear Tib. But go home.”
Thursday, December 24th. 10:45 m.
The supernova in Virgo had completed its contraction and explosion, and by now it was radiating one billion times as much energy as the sun. It was far the brightest object in our galaxy, in itself, but so far away that gas clouds and distance would keep its light ever from reaching the earth. Such events are not rare. On an astronomical scale, even supernovae near the earth are not specially rare; one occurs every one or two hundred million years, on average. They are dangerous. The cosmic rays from the supernova damage the earth’s ozone layers. The ozone layers can no longer filter out the destructive ultraviolet from sunlight. All exposed organisms suffer extreme sunburn, cancer, often death. In the last six hundred million years there have been perhaps eight such nearby supernovas. There have also been about eight episodes in which all life on Earth was decimated.
In the suite of offices belonging to the Pedigrue Foundation, which was in the Pedigrue Tower, located in Pedigrue Center, Tommy Pedigrue had the third best private room. It was not a corner office. It did not have a wet bar, like his father’s, or a complete taping and sound system, like his brother’s. But it had two windows and a couch, and a door that locked even against his family. It was all right. When the time was ripe he would move to his brother’s office, and no doubt his brother’s seat in the Senate—whenever his brother made the move to those larger offices on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
He sat at ease behind his desk, and Myrna Licht looked in on him as he was dialing his telephone. “Tib Sonderman isn’t answering, Tommy,” she re
ported. “Do you want me to leave a message on his machine?”
“Oh, hell,” he said in annoyance and frowned, considering. “Yeah. Tell him to call me—no, wait. Tell him he’s booked to appear on the Sunland Saturday television show, and I want him down here two hours before the show for briefings—you know what to tell him,” he added quickly, as the phone in his hand came alive. He waved to Myrna and addressed the phone. “Walt? Merry Christmas! This is Tommy Pedigrue, calling for Townsend and my father and all of us. Townie’s stuck in Washington, otherwise he’d be calling you himself…. No, he won’t be able to take part in the tree-lighting ceremony tonight. My father’s going to do it for him. But we’re hoping we’ll all be together tomorrow for Christmas dinner…. Thank you, Walt. And the same to you and—” he ran his finger down the list of names—“to Mary Ellen and the boys.” He hung up, checked off name number fifteen on his list and put another card into the automatic dialer. As he leaned back he could see the great dark tree at the enter of Pedigrue Plaza. Tonight it would be his father who would make the little speech and press the button that would light it up, but sooner or later…. “Hello? Rachel? Yes, this is Tommy Pedigrue,” he said, “and we wanted to wish all of you the best of the season—”
It was astonishing how important these little things were. Tommy did them very well. He had begun when he was five. Now he had thirty-five heavyweights on his list for personal greetings. Of course, his brother had fifty, the even heavier political people around the state that he would call from Washington on his WATS line, and, even more of course, his father would be the one to call the dozen and a half big money contributors and old family friends. It was a nice personal touch. Christmas cards were computerized, gifts could be left to Myrna and the girls. But Christmas calls had to come from a member of the family.
It did not, however, require a functioning brain to make them. All the time he was working down the list of VIPs, or Fairly IPs, his eyes were on the couch that he and Myrna had found so many good uses for, and his thoughts were on the evening. Not the early evening—that was compulsory attendance at the tree-lighting. Not the late evening, that was Christmas Eve church services with his family. But the three hours between six and nine, when he would stop by Myrna’s flat and give her her Christmas gift, and she would give him her very special gifts in return. She was a good person, Myrna, Tommy thought indulgently. The best thing about her was that she really, seriously did not expect, or even want, to think about marriage.
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