Still, the tour was interesting—no, fascinating! She had never been in a home like this. The paintings were on every wall, and they were every style and school she had ever heard of. The silver service on the dining room sideboard was lustrous sterling. The pool table in the game room, the one-armed bandits that stood along the wall, each with a fire-bucket of quarters next to it; the stereo speakers in every room, the deep-pile rugs, the sculpted plaster ceilings—it was what she had imagined Hugh Hefner’s pad to be like. Or Louis the Fourteenth’s. Danny saved the best for the last, of course, and of course that was his bedroom. It did not have its own bathroom. It had its own bath suite, three connecting rooms: one with toilet and washstand, one with a vast shower and a marble tub, one with a ten-foot Jacuzzi. The bedroom itself was almost bare—he demonstrated the concealed closets and dressing tables in the walls—with the bed, circular, to be sure, on a pedestal in the middle of the room. She resolutely stayed in the doorway. “How come no mirrors on the ceiling?” she asked.
“That would be gauche, doll. Nobody ever said Danny Deere was gauche. Of course,” he added, taking her shoulder to guide her to the French doors, “if you don’t like it inside, we could always go out on the nice soft grass outside.”
“It’s raining outside.”
“It never rains on my outside, doll.” He pressed a switch, and the same enclosed atrium she had seen from the living room was visible again. As promised, the glass roof kept it dry; but Danny gave a sudden shout of rage. “Son of a bitch, you get your kicks peeping into my bedroom? Get out of there! Vamoose!” The man of the roof, who had been gazing at them in open-mouthed fascination, almost dropped his bucket of tar as he scrambled down.
“Sorry about that, doll,” said Danny. “Well? What about it?”
Rainy laughed out loud. For the first time since she entered on Danny Deere’s turf, she felt in command of the situation. “What about which?” she asked.
“Either way, doll. I give you my word. Either way, you truly will not regret it.”
She shook her head ruefully. “I guess I’ll never know,” she said. “It’s time for me to go home now.”
Danny saw her off, the envelope still in his hand—you never could tell, sometimes they changed their mind at the last minute. Not this time. He watched the limo snake down the road, glowered at the skeleton of the condo outlined against Los Angeles’s red sky glow and then, for perhaps the three thousandth time in his life, closed the door, made himself a drink and turned the stereo on loud to put some life into his empty house.
With Dizzy Gillespie blowing from all four corners of the room, Danny pushed aside the big Emshwiller and spun the combination on the safe behind it. He riffled through the banded twenty-dollar bills, dropped the envelope on top of several others and picked up the three-by-five index card on the bottom shelf. It bore cryptic rows of letters, as though someone had been playing write-it-down Scrabble; Danny wrote the letters TSSS under the last line and added the total in his mind.
That was one of the ways in which Danny amused himself when no one was around: by keeping his records in code. He had two codes, each based on a ten-letter phrase, one for the office and one for no one but himself. He had begun the system when a bright secretary had taught it to him, years ago. You selected a ten-letter word or phrase—Danny had picked out “FILM STAR, HE”—and assigned a digit to each letter:
F 1 I 2
L 3 M 4 S 5 T 6 A 7 R 8 H 9 E 0
Then it was simple to record all your private notes on asking prices and-real prices and rock-bottom prices in code. So every associate on his staff could write that a house whose asking price was $850,000 but whose owners needed the sale badly enough to let it go for $615,000 in a pinch was an RSE/TFS—you didn’t have to write down the final thousands—and no customer would be able to peek over anyone’s shoulder.
But Danny also had a private code that no one else knew, not even Joel, for the “off the books” money in the safe and the safe-deposit boxes and what looked like an unopened box of Kleenex in his private bathroom. The code phrase for that was “FUCK THE IRS”. According to the card, the living room safe at the moment held IERTS in cash, which was to say $87,950.
Which was not enough. Or too much. Not enough to cover his ass if some of the buy offers he was making got taken up; too much to be sitting there idle and eroding every day with inflation. Of course, there was more in all the other places, and even in the legitimate accounts of Danny Deere Enterprises, Inc.; but all of it was not enough.
Danny roamed restlessly into his playroom and switched on the projection TV without looking at it. There were too many problems. He had not expected money to be one of them. Not with all his assets! But when you came right down to it, what good did they do him right now? He could sell some stock; but he had gone to a lot of trouble to conceal ownership of most of his securities. He could mortgage his house—-there was a million dollars there, easily enough—but that meant declaring its real value. Another trail blazed for the IRS. Besides, there was a softness in the mortgage market right now. Maybe it was his own doing; maybe he had scared off some investors.
There remained the contents of the wine cellar in the basement, none of which were wine.
Danny switched off the television and went down the stairs. The gentle purr of the air conditioning greeted him as he opened the door. He switched on the daylight fluorescents that were the closest thing you could ever get to actual sunlight indoors.
This was the treasure room. This was where the real stuff was. He ran his fingers over the canvas-covered stretchers in their racks and lifted the little labels on a couple of the paintings. USS. FTTS. There was even one at KERSS, nearly fifty thousand dollars. He had paid out in actual cash nearly two million dollars over the years, and they were easily worth twice that now. Probably much more, if he sold them carefully, in the right places, a few at a time.
But if he had to get cash in a hurry, he might not have time. He especially might not have time to cover his traces well enough to keep the tax snoops at bay.
He sat down in a red leather Barcalounger at the end of the main aisle, gazing unseeingly at the line of racks.
There was one place where, Danny was sure, he could always get money. As much as he needed. The interest would be ridiculous, and the penalties for slow payment severe.
But maybe….
Saturday, December 26th. 11:00 AM.
Tidal waves have nothing to do with tides, for which reason they are properly called “tsunamis”. Perhaps the tallest tsunami ever reported (although somewhat ambiguously) by an eyewitness took place in Alaska when it was still a Russian colony, on August 7th, 1788. According to I. Veniaminov it was a wall of water three hundred feet high. Much higher ones have been inferred from wave and water marks on cliffs and mountains, particularly in the western Mediterranean, where one apparently reached a fifth of a mile.
The quadrille of the elements had begun a new figure. Fire gave place to Water, while Earth and Air responded. There were no more brush fires, but there had been warnings of mud slides. No more gasping for breath in the Santa Ana, but a dank chill that even Tib’s car windows did not keep out: And none of this affected Tib Sonderman’s spirits in the least, because he was thinking about Rainy Keating. It was pleasurable thinking. It made him feel impatient with the car and careless of the rain; it made him want to get out and walk or run or, actually, he admitted to himself, to make love.
Over the years Tib had had a fair number of lovers. Nothing at all, really, compared to the scores some of the twenty-year-olds on his surveying teams bragged about. But still, not a few. Rainy was something special. She was a lot younger, relative to Tib, than any woman before her. She was also the only one who happened to be a scientist. Tib had had chances with female scientists, and some of them very attractive. But on all those field trips he had stayed away from his colleagues. It was only common sense. You did not invite that sort of trouble. But it was also true that Tib had a romantic view of
marriage. He was never untrue to Wendy when she couldn’t possibly catch him at it.
So any new woman was a major event in Tib’s life, Rainy more than any recent other. New airs and graces, unfamiliar tastes and textures. And a trained mind! Pillow talk with Rainy Keating added a whole unexperienced dimension.
There was also the fact that his loins ached to invade her again.
It was only the vibration of the car, he told himself severely, and leaned forward to thrust a cassette into his tape deck. It was not music; it was a recording of a recent session at the New York Academy of Sciences. He had not been able to attend, and it would be many months before the papers appeared anywhere. By the time he reached the neighborhood of Pedigrue Center he had absorbed three reports on theories of earthquake prediction, ranging from measurements of radon gas emission to the behavior of barnyard animals. But out of it he had learned nothing new, only something quite old: there were no reliable ways to predict earthquakes.
They were at it again. The young people in flame-red shirts and blackened faces crossed Santa Monica Boulevard at the traffic light, their faces streaked from the rain and the makeup smudging their collars. There were more than there had been at the ASF meeting, and better organized by far. They had become a whole hell of a lot more professional. No one in the cars stopped at the light, no pedestrian, no person at the windows of the buildings nearby missed them. LET the world know…it’s OVER. The chant was backed by sticks on a drum-rim, with a double boom on “over”. Shaking his head, Tib pulled into the down-ramp for the underground garage, surrendered the car to an attendant, and entered the Pedigrue Mall.
Los Angeles, which could not manage to build a subway in its silty soil, had nevertheless found ways to put up fifty-story skyscrapers and dig catacombs beneath them. The Pedigrue Mall did not look like a catacomb. It looked like the corridors of some very large hotel, lined with shops and restaurants. It seemed to go on forever, on three underground levels. Tib had been in the mall before, but not often enough to help him find his way. It took twenty minutes of turning corners and taking escalators, past the smells of Mexican food and Chinese food and frying eggs and pizzas, to find the radio station. He identified it at last by the rows of benches in front of its plate-glass window. What was being broadcast at the moment seemed to be a cooking demonstration, but there were still nearly ninety minutes to go before air time; and, satisfied, Tib took the elevator to the offices of the Pedigrue Foundation. Most of the desks were empty—Christmas weekend, after all. But Tib had no trouble finding the conference room where the briefing was to take place. He simply followed the shrill sound of Tommy Pedigrue’s voice.
He was surprised to see how many people were present. The first one he noticed was Rainy Keating, her expression troubled but managing a wink to Tib as he entered; but Meredith was there, and the senator and the old man Pedigrue in his wheelchair, Tommy, of course, bullying Rainy Keating about something, Myrna Licht dutifully taking notes at the foot of the oval table. Tommy glanced up at Tib without interrupting what he was saying. “You should have reported it at once. Not the next morning. Right away!”
Rainy shrugged. “I didn’t know what to think. I thought of calling you. Then I thought of calling Tib, but he wasn’t home. So this morning I went over to see Meredith, and we talked it over and came down here.”
“Excuse me,” said Tib, taking his seat, “but what are we talking about?”
“A bribe attempt!” said Tommy angrily. “Tell him, Rainy.”
“Well,” she said, “last night I got a call from Danny Deere—” She reported it like a paper at a scientific congress. Tommy listened to the repetition with a scowl on his face, drumming his fingers on the conference table. He didn’t give Tib a chance to comment.
“So what I’ve been saying,” he took up, “is that Rainy shouldn’t have waited—”
His father looked up from the sheaf of papers in his hand. “We know what you’ve been saying, Tommy,” he said. “That’s not what we’re here for, though.”
“But, Dad—”
“This Danny Deere needs looking over, that’s agreed. Townie? What about the Senate Banking and Finance Committee?”
The senator stirred. “Maybe so, Dad. I’ll give Harris a call and see if they want to look into it. And I’ll check it out with the state attorney general, too.”
“That’s fine,” said his father. “Now let’s get back to business. We’ve got a show to do, and I have to tell you I’m not satisfied with these preliminary reports of yours I’ve been reading. They’re all yes and no and on the other hand maybe, and there’s not a statement in them a man can get his teeth into. I see by the account books that the foundation has laid out fifty-three thousand dollars so far, and that’s not a lot to get for fifty-three thousand dollars.”
“That’s the way science is, Mr. Pedigrue,” said Meredith Bradison.
“Yes, Mrs. Bradison, that’s right, but as you know that’s not the way politics is. So we’re going to make a little change in this show today. I’m going to ask my son Thompson to sit in along with you, Dr. Sonderman. You’re free to say anything you like about science, of course, but Frn going to ask that my son give any concluding remarks. Especially about recommendations for action.”
Tommy scowled. “I don’t know about that, Dad. Is the station going to let me just walk in on their program like that?”
“That station is our tenant for the next nine years, Tommy, so don’t worry about what they’ll let us do. Dr. Bradison, I’ve been informed that your grandson is also going to be on the program. Do you want to join us?”
“Heavens, no!” said Meredith. “It sounds like there’s going to be a whole circus parade there anyway. I don’t want to make it worse.”
“Then, with your permission, let’s go over what we’re going to say. I see in your report some remarks about a ‘Palmdale bulge’, Dr. Sonderman. Would you mind telling me what that is, exactly?”
Saturday, December 26th. 1:40 PM.
An astronomy major at UCLA was studying in a text on cosmology. The prevailing theory, she discovered, was that all the elements heavier than helium were formed in supernova explosions. When her date came for her she was preoccupied with a nagging thought that took several hours to come to the surface. They were eating Big Macs when it came clear. She put down the french fries and stared around her. The aluminum and steel in the table, the carbon and nitrogen in the hamburger meat, the calcium and phosphorus in her body, the silicon in the rock of the earth itself-—they had all come from the same place. Except for the hydrogen that made up the water in her tissues, every atom of her body had once dwelt in the core of an immense exploding star.
Being in the studio was like being in an aquarium. There were five of them scattered around the doughnut-shaped table, fish circling a vacuum, while outside the tourists gaped. Dennis Siroca took his seat between the host and somebody named Jeremy Lautermilch and gazed around with interest. He had never been in a broadcasting studio before. He examined everything: the microphones at each place, the complicated button board at the place of honor where Stephen Talltree flipped irritably through his notes on commercials and promos, the two engineers balancing coffee mugs on their control boards benind the double glass windows. Counting off from Talltree, the host, at the twelve o’clock position, there was himself; then Lautermilch, then Thompson Pedigrue, then the geophysicist Tibor Sonderman, then an empty seat, and finally a black woman in a lavender sari and turban. Her name was Mrs. Rugby, and before sitting down she had left her business card at every place:
Mrs. Rugby World Renowned Psychic Reader ir Advisor This religious holy woman can with the help of God remove bad influences and guide you through peril.
Located in a refined neighborhood.
The card was not going over very well with Tib Sonderman. He was glancing incredulously from it to the woman, who had folded her hands on her forty-four inch bosom and had closed her eyes in meditation. Dennis grinned to himself. It was
a good thing there was an empty seat between them.
Outside, on the audience benches, there were no empty seats. After they had circled Pedigrue Center twice the Jupes had marched solemnly down through the mall to the studio, and occupied every vacant seat. Before long the seats that hadn’t been vacant were mostly vacated; civilians did not like sitting next to a young man or woman with charcoal smeared on his face. They liked even less the smell of wet sheep that the Jupes were giving out, because every one of them had been drenched on the way in. So had Dennis, of course, and of course the studio was air-conditioned down to the misery level. He shivered and looked invitingly at the coffee of the engineers. He decided he was wrong; being here wasn’t like being inside an aquarium, it was like being inside the frozen-food cases at a supermarket.
Stephen Talltree picked up his phone and whispered into it, scowled, snarled something, hung up, thumbed through his papers, whispered once more into the phone and then raised his hands, eyes on the engineer. When the engineer pointed a finger at him, Talltree began speaking at once. There was no trace of the frantic irritation of a moment before as he said, “Good afternoon, friends of the Southland. This is Stephen Talltree with you again, and today we’ve got with us some very interesting friends from the Southland who are going to tell us about the World’s First Myst-O-Rama, which is coming up next week, and then we’ve got a couple of other guests who are going to explain what’s going to happen to Los Angeles when all the planets come into conjunction—right after these messages.”
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