Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  Danny Deere didn’t own a pair of boots, but Maria had insisted on lending him her husband’s. Or nephew’s, or son’s; at any rate, he was dressed for the weather. Joel took no chances, however. He was out of the car and at the door, with an umbrella over Danny’s head while he escorted him to the door. “You sure you want to do this, Danny?” he chattered. “It’s no day for a drive in the country.”

  Danny didn’t answer, except to tell him to get the umbrella out of his face. It wasn’t doing any good; the wind was as bad as the rain, and the drops came horizontally into his eyes and down the collar of his trench coat. Danny jumped into the car and began removing as much as he could of the rain gear while Joel ran around and started down the driveway.

  Joel was watching him in the mirror. “He didn’t seem like that bad a kid, Danny,” he offered. “Uptight, sure. Messed up. But I never figured him for a killer.”

  “Watch the road!” Danny ordered, drumming his fingers on the armrest. He glowered at the condo as they turned into the freeway. It didn’t look any better in the rain. The great crane hung idly over the near side of the building, two loops of cables swinging beneath it in the wind. There were no windows in the building yet, and the scaffolding that ran up one side showed just how far the work had got. Too far. It wasn’t going to go away.

  “Would you like me to turn on a little heat?” Joel inquired.

  “Will you shut up?” Danny demanded, but his heart wasn’t in it. He leaned back and closed his eyes, hoping Joel would think he was asleep. He wished he were. He didn’t want to listen to the radio, because the part that wasn’t about the lousy weather was about the lousy fink, Buck. He especially didn’t want to think, because everything he thought was even lousier.

  The trouble with pretending to sleep was that you sometimes went ahead and did it. Danny roused slightly as the car turned off the Hollywood Freeway and began to move carefully through the drenched, almost empty city streets. But be didn’t come fully awake till he felt Joel slam on the brakes and cry, “My God, Danny, look at that!”

  “What? What?” Danny barked, but then he saw. They were slowing down as they approached the ashram, and it was a mess! Shards of glass spangled the sidewalk. The sign over it had been pulled down and swayed crazily in the wind. The black man, Robinson, was boarding up the shattered windows while a little girl in a poncho too big for her was handing him nails.

  “Somebody really had himself a time,” Joel marveled, pressing the button that rolled the side window down as he slid in toward the curb. Danny jumped up.

  “Close that goddam window! Keep going. Don’t stop! Right on by, you hear me?” He cowered down out of sight, but it wasn’t necessary. The little girl looked at him with absent curiosity, but her father’s attention was firmly focused on the boards he was nailing.

  “You don’t want to stop, Danny? I thought you said you wanted to talk to—” _

  “Will you for God’s sake keep going?” He lifted his head and peered back. From a distance the damage looked even worse than it had close up. He tried to tell himself that the storm had done it, but he knew better.

  “Go where, Danny?”

  “Just keep driving! Let me think a minute.” God, how rotten everything had gotten, and how fast!

  For the first time in years, Danny wished he had someone to talk to. Really talk. Joel wouldn’t do, nor his lawyer, nor any of the women he scored in that big elevated bed when the mood moved him. None of the people he knew would do, because they were all wimps; what he needed was a friend, and he didn’t have one.

  •Ae thing was, he had made some mistakes. Maybe a lot of mistakes. Maybe the worst of them was tipping his hand to that Keating woman. But who knew there was going to be a shooting? If it hadn’t been for that—There was no point in thinking in that direction; it had happened, and the shit had hit the fan. There was a time to cut your losses, and it was getting close to that time.

  “I could just keep on driving like you said, Danny,” Joel called, “but the driving’s pretty hairy. Why don’t I just park for a while?”

  “Park, park!” Danny barked. “What do I care if you park? Just shut up, will you?” He looked around. They were on Wilshire, in the middle of the Miracle Mile, and there were very few cars in sight in the driving rain. Danny realized it wasn’t just the weather; my God, it’s still Christmas weekend! He wrenched his thoughts back. Cut your losses. How? He had a little time, he realized; this Christmas stuff wasn’t a bad thing, because no business was being done anywhere. If the scam was irreparably damaged it would be a day or two before it could be felt. And a lot could be done in a day.

  If you had the cash.

  “Joel,” he yelled. “Head for the freeway.”

  “Sure thing, Danny. Are we going home?”

  “No, we’re not going home! Just shut up a minute.” He was thumbing through his private address book for a number he had never really intended to use. “Yeah, okay, here it is. Out Brentwood way. And move it, you hear me?”

  The security was everything that Danny’s own pretended to be and was not. The gate across the driveway had the same voice communications and electric lock as his own. It also had more. It had a closed-circuit television system—no, it had two of them! Two separate cameras! One peered inside the car while the other swiveled down to check the license number. A voice said something, and Danny gave his name to the air.

  There was no answer, but after a moment the gate slid into its housing to let them in. Watching everything, it was not lost on Danny that four rows of tire spikes retracted themselves into metal plates on the roadway at the same time. Now, that was security. You could break through the gate, maybe. But you couldn’t get much farther.

  But what a house! Danny wrinkled his nose at the simple ranch house that appeared at the bend in the driveway—a two-bedroomer, one fifty, one seventy-five tops. It wasn’t until he was inside the building that he realized this could not be Boyma’s home. A place for admitting visitors, maybe, especially visitors Boyma didn’t specially want. No doubt the place where Boyma actually lived lay farther within the estate, and no doubt Danny Deere was never going to see it.

  No one frisked him, but the man who let him into the living room did a good job of looking him over. He was kept waiting for twenty minutes, then admitted to what had obviously been built as one of the bedrooms and was now Boyma’s office. The mobster was behind a desk, but not sitting down; he was standing, seesawing up and down on his toes, his hands clasped behind him. “You saved me a trip, Deere,” he said approvingly. “That’s nice, for a friend.”

  “You were coming to see me?” Danny wet his lips. “Oh, about my source into that committee? Well, that one dried up, but I, uh, I’m working on a new one. What I came for, I want to borrow some money.”

  “Oh, you want money?” Boyma nodded, playing with the zipper of his maroon jogging suit. “How much?”

  “A lot, Mr. Boyma,” Danny said. His lips were very dry and he looked longingly at the wet bar at the side of the room. “Maybe as much as half a million dollars.” It was easier to say than he expected it to be, but still—half a million dollars! He had never thought of asking anybody for that kind of money before.

  “You got big ideas,” Boyma said, letting go of his zipper. “You know what that would cost you? I got to go for ten points, you see.”

  “Ten per cent a week?” Danny yelped.

  “It’s inflation, Deere. You heard of inflation. I could put the money in the bank and get what we used to get on the street. Not counting you’re a bad risk. First there’s your guys shooting women—”

  “No, Jesus, really, Mr. Boyma! I had nothing to do with that!”

  “—then there’s this other thing. I wanted to be friendly, Deere, but look what my friends found in that joint of yours.” He opened a drawer and passed over a white flyer, letter-size paper, with a picture of the very condominium that blighted Danny’s life every morning he looked out the window.

  “Jesus, Mr.
Boyma, I didn’t know that was yours,” he said, rubbing his throat.

  “Nice little circular, right? But the units haven’t been moving the way they ought to be, and what I found in that place of yours was this one. Somebody stole like two hundred of them and fixed them up, see?”

  He passed over another, identical circular, but someone had mimeographed over it in green ink. It was now an underwater scene. Green fishes were swimming in and out of the upper stories, and wavy green lines overhead told the story. Across the bottom, in the same blurred green ink, a legend read: Don’t you know IT’S OVER?

  “I didn’t know you were in it,” Danny said desperately.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m in it. I’m in it twenty-six million dollars worth, Deere.”

  “I’m sorry. Look! I’ll go right down to the ashram now and tell them to lay off—”

  “You won’t have to do that, Deere, because I already had my boys put them out of business. No. You can forget about them. What we’re talking about now is you. You’re going to quit depressing the real-estate market. It isn’t good for business, Deere, and it isn’t good for you personally.”

  Sunday, December 27th. 7:00 PM.

  When natural gas is found with oil in remote parts, it is often flared off in immense, permanent flames. The only way to save the energy is to freeze the gas to -260° F. and ship it as Liquid Natural Gas, or LNG, to where it can be used. The first LNG plant was built in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1944 the storage tanks turned brittle from the extreme cold. They cracked. The liquid gas spread quickly into gutters, sewers and cellars. Eventually it reached a flame. The firestorm that followed cremated 128 people and incinerated three hundred acres of the city of Cleveland. The present LNG plants are very much better constructed than that in 1944. They are also very much larger.

  It was not only gritty, grimy weather, it was a gritty and grimy world, and how suddenly it had become that way! Rainy Keating pushed the vacuum cleaner over the rug, with one eye on the window, and sometimes one eye on the telephone, and her thoughts grimier and grittier than anything else around. It was over an hour since Tib had called to say that he was coming over. She, wished he would get there. It was not a reasonable wish, because she only had to look out the window to see what was keeping him. But she wished. Failing that, she wished the phone would ring, even if it was only Tinker. But not even Tinker had called her that evening.

  Rainy hadn’t known Myrna Licht at all, really. Not as a human being, anyway. Only as a subject for offhand gossip, like any other of Tommy Pedigrue’s girls. And then, when the shooting happened, she had been much too astonished to feel anything for the young woman whose life had been terminated. It was like any prime-time cop show. It was not a thing that happened to real people. It was a TV series, full of uniformed police and plainclothes detectives and ambulance orderlies and all sorts of stock characters from the casting offices. There had been no sense of personal involvement. Certainly none of fear—though the murderer obviously was not going to give any further trouble, with that black man sitting on him.

  Nevertheless she was feeling this sense of loss, and it was not the loss of Myrna, it was the loss of a kind of innocence. And not just her own. Los Angeles was an itchy sort of city at best, too big to be a community, too sprawling to unite on any ground except the common contempt for everyone who had not had the wit to move there. It was itchier than ever now. Not terror. Not even belief, in spite of the hundreds of people you saw walking around with smudges of black on their foreheads, copying the Jupes. They were not really believing, just displaying that itchy, resentful concern. Rainy put the vacuum cleaner away and began to fill the mister for her plants, wishing Tib would get there so she could talk to him about it.

  When the doorbell rang she was more astonished than pleased; how had he got past the doorman?

  But it wasn’t Tib. “Good evening, Mrs. Keating,” said the taller of the F.B.I, men, “may we come in?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just brushed past; of course, they hadn’t let any doorman deflect them from the swift completion of their appointed rounds! “Come in,” she said to their backs. “You know, I was kind of hoping I was through with you guys.”

  “Not just yet, Mrs. Keating,” the short one smiled, shaking off his raincoat on the rug she had just vacuumed.

  “You could have called first.”

  “No, we couldn’t, because your phone’s out. And we do have a few questions.”

  “Didn’t you get my message? I passed on the citations about the Einstein effect—”

  “Yes, you told us that,” he nodded, “but you haven’t told us about your relationship with a Soviet national, one Lev Mihailovitch.” He reached out without looking, and the taller one put a gray-bound folder in his hand.

  Rainy sat down, feeling more baffled than ever. “The cosmonaut, sure. I met him once.”

  The F.B.I. man looked at her quizzically, then referred to the folder. “At least once, yes,” he agreed. “You were in his company for approximately three hours here in Los Angeles, at which time you are reported to have discussed what you termed ‘secret police’ matters with him.”

  “Oh, my God, what nonsense! We had a few drinks.”

  The agent turned over a sheet, then nodded. “Yes, quite a few,” he confirmed. “Furthermore, he has telephoned you on a number of occasions within the past few days.”

  “Absolutely not! No, that’s all wrong, believe me.”

  “I’m afraid we have information that it is so, Mrs. Keating.” The agent took out a Kleenex and wiped his nose before reading from the list. “Let me see. Three times on the twenty-third of December. Then at nineteen hundred hours on the twenty-fourth and several times on the twenty-fifth.”

  “Now, that’s absolutely untrue,” Rainy argued. “You’ve made some dumb mistake. I wasn’t even home most of that time!”

  The agent waited patiently, looking at her. “Oh,” she said, “wait a minute.” She remembered the infuriating messageless beeps on her answering machine. “I suppose it’s possible that he may have tried to call my number, but I wasn’t there so he hung up.”

  “Or alternatively,” said the agent, “when he finally found you in he went to an outside phone to make his call, in order to defeat^any, ah, monitoring of his own telephone in the hotel in Mexico City.”

  “Is that where he was? I didn’t know—well, maybe I did, but anyway I certainly didn’t speak to him!” She took a breath, and then anger broke through. “And how dare you tap my telephone! That’s against the law!”

  The agent regarded her frostily. He glanced at his colleague, and then said, “If you feel your civil rights have been compromised you have the right to make a complaint to the supervising agent. The number of our Los Angeles office is two seven two, six one, six one. Alternatively, under the Freedom of Information Act—”

  “Oh, shove your Freedom of Information Act!” She was angry at herself as much as at the F.B.I, man, even angrier at the whole grimy world. “Listen. If Mihailovitch called me, I didn’t know it. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him since the ASF meeting, and I don’t expect to, ever. Do you have any other questions before I throw you out of my house?”

  Her cheeks were flushed, and behind the huge glasses her eyes were misting with anger. The F.B.I, man studied her for a moment before he glanced at his colleague. They exchanged a little smile; they had seen this sort of display many times before.

  He put his raincoat back on. “If we do,” he said, “we’ll certainly come back to ask them. And do have a Happy New Year.”

  There had been many times in Tibor Sonderman’s life when he had not known what to do next. Not surprising, in someone who had become an orphan at ten in Yugoslavia, desperate for an education and a place in the world in a country that was seeking both for itself. But he had always known what to do in order to find out what to do next. You study, you ask questions, you read what other people have written on the subject. Now he had not even that knowledge. He was stuc
k in dead center.

  He was dithering. Upstairs to fill a cup of instant coffee from the kitchen sink; into his bedroom to glower at the rain; back down behind the fake bookshelves to sit before his computer and wonder what commands to give it. It was maddening. It was maddening in the literal sense, that the thought crossed his mind that he was going mad. He did not know what he wanted.

  He ordered up the latest series of reports from the center for the study of transient phenomena—aurora sightings, a red tide, an ultra-violet nova in the constellation Ursa Minor—and when he had them did not know what he wanted with them. He stared at the neat typing on the CRT, uncomfortably aware that this logged-on time was costing money. Not his money, to be sure, since he was charging it all to Pedigrue’s committee. But to charge it to the taxpayer was even worse…. Although you could argue that, he thought, because it was simply diverting tax money to a useful scientific purpose, i.e., subsidizing the database people, at no cost to himself…

  He swore out loud. That was exactly the sort of meandering substitute for thought he had been guilty of all day! He should have given it all up and gone off to Rainy’s when she called. Or he should have told her that the weather was simply too bad for driving and there would certainly be no cabs; either one, but what he had done had been to postpone decision by telling her he would come over later.

  Firmly he picked up the telephone and dialed her number, to tell her that, after all, he would not be over.

  But even that definite act was denied him. There was no answer, only a weird quavering signal. Perhaps her phone was out of order because of the storm.

  He groaned, turned off his computer, turned off most of the lights, struggled into his raincoat and left the house. Now he had no choice but to go, and he would be seriously late.

  He would be very late, he discovered, driving along the rainswept streets toward the main avenues, because the storm was even worse than he had expected. Tib disliked driving and did it as seldom as he could; in moments of self candor he conceded that his preference for public transportation had almost as much to do with his driving skill as with his morality. With his little car skittish on the slippery streets and buffeted by the winds, Tib felt wholly inept; and not merely as a driver.