Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  The risk was always there, no risk but a certainty; but there were times that were worse than others. Today was one. The rain exacerbated the geology.

  How many days a year like this were there? Perhaps as many as ten? And how often did damaging shocks, say Modified Mercalli VIII or higher, occur? Maybe one every five years? Tib wished for his calculator, but the probability computation was not too hard to do in his head. Say the odds against a damaging earthquake on any particular day were 1800 to one. Say the odds against that day being one when the ground was saturated and ready to be shaken into thin soup—as happened in China, with half a million dead; as happened in Alaska, when buildings toppled into the gruel—were 36.5 to one. Then, cumulating them, once every 65,700 days, say 180 years, the lethal combination should strike.

  Once in 180 years did not seem like much. But Los Angeles was over a hundred years old; it was hallway there.

  Rainy stirred in the bed. She lifted herself on one elbow and spoke to him; her eyes were open, but she was still asleep and in a moment she put her head down and closed her eyes again. Tib sat immobile until her regular breathing resumed. And he saw his error. Two errors! First, the city of Los Angeles of a hundred years ago was not the city of today, with split-levels and ranch houses dug into every hillside. The second error was more serious. He had been thinking geology again, and the question was still moral.

  He was certain of that. But the precise formulation of the question eluded him. His orderly mind was crumbling in disorder; Tommy Pedigrue and the Jupiter Effect, the death of Myrna Licht, and the wickedness of Danny Deere were all spinning around in his head, and tranquility was not even a hope.

  “You look,” said Rainy from the bed, “like somebody who can’t find his car keys.” This time she was wide awake, and had been watching him without moving.

  “What I think I’ve lost is my mind.”

  “Maybe you left it in the bed? You want to come back and look?”

  “Oh, my God,” he said, “how flattering you are.” He came over to sit on the edge of the bed, kissing her good morning. All the turmoil in his head receded to a distant pinwheel whirl, no longer an obsession. “You do cheer me up, dear Rainy. I have noticed that since you got the federal police off your back you have been in a real good mood.”

  Rainy lay back, regarding him. “Think so? Um.” She considered for a moment. “I would point out, my dear colleague, that, first, they are not entirely off my back; they were here last night; so your theory is not sufficient; and, second, that two things happened at the same time, i.e., it also happened that you and I became lovers. So it is not necessary, either; and a theory which is not both necessary and sufficient is no theory.”

  Tib gazed down at her. “It is funny that that should sound so strange to me. Is that what we are, lovers? Not dating’ or going with’?”

  Rainy picked up his hand, lifted it to her mouth and touched the fold of flesh between thumb and forefinger with her tongue. “It’s what I would like us to be, I guess,” she said. “Now! Your endless sexual indulgences have made you smell like a goat. Come shower with me.”

  It was not a thing Tib Sonderman had been used to doing, and he was awkward with her at first. Not for long. It turned out to be about as pleasant, in a gently sexual way, as anything short of intercourse, and marvelously relaxing as well. It even stimulated conversation, and he found he was telling her his perplexities and puzzlements. It brought them no nearer solution, but it seemed to bring Tib and Rainy closer to each other, while the water of Mono Lake and the Colorado River splashed over them and into the drain and Tib did not give it even a thought. In spite of the considerable sexual indulgences of the past eight or ten hours they might easily have wound up on the convertible bed again if Rainy had not heard a sound imperceptible to Tib, excused herself, wrapped herself in a towel, and disappeared.

  Reluctantly, Tib turned off the shower. She had closed the door behind her, but he heard an exclamation, then sounds of scrambling around the room, then a brief low-voiced conversation of which he only caught one word, but that word was one he had not wanted to hear: Tinker.

  He stood on the fluffy pink mat with the towel in his hand and a whole scenario unrolled inevitably before him. The name of the skit was Returning Husband Discovers Wife’s Lover, and he was playing one of the leads.

  How very embarrassing, he thought. Now, what were the traditional stage directions? Under the bed, in a closet, out the window? But none of those were available; not even his clothes were available. No. Of course they weren’t. They were exactly where he had left them, namely draped across the kitchen chairs.

  He might have gone on drying himself indefinitely, but he heard the door close, peeked out and saw Rainy, all by herself, wrapped up in a robe she had grabbed from somewhere, the towel turbaned around her wet hair, staring thoughtfully at Tib’s trousers. She looked around. “That was Tinker,” she said. “He said he was worried about me. He said the back road is open now, so we could get out if we wanted to. “

  Tib nodded. Her face was so blank that he could not tell whether she was closer to laughter or tears. In the event, there was neither. She moved into the kitchen to start water for coffee. “He’s really a sweet man,” she said. “But we’re really not married any more, and now I guess he understands that.”

  Monday, December 28th. 11:40 m.

  About seventy million pieces of solid matter strike the Earth’s atmosphere every day. Fortunately, all but a few of them are extremely small, of the order of a billionth of a gram. But any person who spends much time walking, sunbathing or playing golf is, on average, “struck” by several of these micrometeorites each week—with so little force by the time they reach the Earth’s surface that they are indistinguishable from ordinary atmospheric dust.

  Saunders Robinson got up from the canvas cot where Dennis was sleeping to get his fifteenth cup of coffee. He didn’t even drink coffee. But he didn’t want to sleep, not covered with mud, not in this high-school gymnasium with the canvas cots all over the basketball court. They had been up all night, shoveling mud into potato sacks up along Mulholland Drive for three hours, then back here in the emergency shelter for nearly another three. The Red Cross woman handing out the coffee had a radio going, turned down low in case any of the five or six families who had elected to try the shelters were really trying to sleep—few of them were—and reports were coming in from what seemed like the entire world: Mandeville Canyon, Rustic Canyon, Montebello, Pacific Palisades, all over the Santa Monica Mountains, Mount Olympus, the San Gabriel foothills, Encino, Monterey Park. The Pacific Coast Highway was closed (surf); so was the Ventura Freeway (slides). Malibu residents were ordered to boil their water. The governor had been asked to declare a state of emergency, and the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu was flooded.

  There was not much loss of life. Quite a few highway deaths, but that was not unusual for a Southland Monday morning, where you could almost always count on one or two motorists winding up guillotined in a windshield, or with an engine in their laps. But the property damage! Half of Los Angeles had leaking roofs. Another half was worried about its houses slipping down the hillsides, and some of them were seeing it happen. The black family in the shelter had an unusual story: they had been burned out in the middle of the night, when their cellar flooded, silently and without fuss. The water had risen to the base of the natural-gas hot-water heater, half a foot a minute. It covered the jet, but the flame did not go out: the gas bubbled through the rising water and burned in spatters of flame at the surface. When it came close to the two-by-sixes that held the floor of the living room in place, they began to smolder. The smoke alarm woke the family in time to see their house burn from the inside, with all the water in the world surrounding it on all sides.

  Robinson realized his fifteenth cup of coffee was empty, and wandered back to the urn for number sixteen. There were not many people in the refuge. Most threatened families had refused to leave their homes—or been afraid to. Of t
he forty people in the room that could have sheltered five hundred, more than two dozen were volunteers like himself, from the Red Cross lady at the coffee urn to the handful of Tree People and casual volunteers who had responded to the radio appeal. Most of them were silent, staring around as though they were wondering what they were doing here. Robinson wondered that too. It had been his idea to volunteer, and the word “penance” stuck in his mind when he suggested it; but he knew he had beaten Dennis to the point of making it articulate only by moments. He debated trying to call Afeefah to tell her he was all right—mostly to see if she was—but the nearest phone was in the school office, and the effort seemed considerable.

  A man came in from the rain. He didn’t trouble to take his rain hat off, or even to close the door. He would not be that long. “Okay, troops,” he called. “Saddle up.”

  They could see little outside the canvas top of the National Guard six-by-six, but there wasn’t much to see. Dennis craned past Robinson’s shoulder to peer out at the rain and the hillsides, accepting the penalty of blown drops in his eyes; it was nearly seventy degrees outside, and a lot hotter than that inside the truck. They were barely crawling along, on a stretch of the freeway that had been closed to all but emergency traffic for the past twelve hours. The driver didn’t seem to know where he was going. Twice he started on a down ramp, stopped, muttered with the L.A. County Flood Control engineer in the seat beside him, and then grindingly backed onto the freeway again. It was lunch time, and Dennis was beginning to be very hungry. He had slept through the sandwiches at the high school, and now he regretted it.

  On the hillside just ahead of them the slope was rather gentle, and there were no split-level houses to dam and channel the water. The rain soaked in where it fell and did no harm. As long as it could. Until the ground was saturated, and the soil would not accept one more drop. Even then it only flowed gently down the gentle slope. It did not channel scabland trenches into bare soil, because the soil was not bare; it was once dense turf, now grown to weeds and tangles but all the better able to hold itself together because of that. And it did hold, through the first four-inch downpour, and the three days of lesser rains that followed, even through the three inches that had fallen overnight; but by that time on Monday it was no more firm than Jell-O. Worse. The structural integrity had been violated. All along the side of that hill, row on row, over a period of decades, holes had been dug. They were quite uniform holes, each one of them eight feet long^forty-two inches wide, and seven feet deep. The hillside had been perforated like the stub of a check.

  At the farthest corner a wedge of dirt slid suddenly into the shoulder of the freeway.

  Moments later, a hundred feet up the slope, the bonds that had held the soil together had lost all their strength. They surrendered to the gravity of the slope. A crack three hundred feet long zipped itself open, and the entire slope dissolved into mud, pouring thickly over the lip of the concrete abutments onto the freeway. The flow carried with it the rusted old flowerpots, the marble markers that had headed each hole, and the contents.

  The first Robinson knew of it was when the truck slammed on its brakes. “Jesus, would you look at that?” somebody cried from the front seat. Robinson and Dennis pushed back to the crack in the truck’s cover and peered out. It was hard to see anything, because they were down in a cut; far ahead they could see the construction work that they had been supposed to be heading for, with a huge crane vibrating in the wind. But they could not see just what was on the side of the road. There was an off-ramp marker, but there was no ramp. There was not even a shoulder. The truck had moved gradually over into the center lane, then even into the fast lane…and Dennis saw wonderingly that the other lanes were gone.

  The road was completely blocked. The entire northbound section of the freeway was filled with mud, a slide that went up twenty feet on the right to join the slope of the hill and filled all three lanes to the concrete divider on the left. “Back it up, dummy! Back it up,” somebody squawked from in front, but the gears ground and the wheels spun, and the truck would not move. The mud had the car. “Oh, shit,” yelled the engineer. “Now you’ve done it.” And then, louder, craning toward the back, “Everybody out; from here on we walk!”

  The dozen men in the truck looked at each other, then sprang from the tailgate. They barely made it. They slogged through the quicksand-flowing mud to the hillside and found it was coming to meet them. The only way was back, along the freeway, to a point where a retaining wall still held, and then they turned to look back.

  The river of mud had already filled the inside of the truck. It was cresting over the top, like slow-motion surf, and riding the top, like a sort of surfboard, was a huge mahogany box, earthstained and crumbling. As they watched, the side ripped open, and the contents, staring emptily at the^storm, slid out.

  From the hilltop a quarter of a mile away Manuel could not see the earthslide, but he saw the sad remaining cypress dip and bow. He crossed himself, not sure he had actually seen it.

  Manuel was not a stranger to hard work, because you could not grow up to child-rearing age in the Sierra Madre without tens of thousands of hours of it; but in Aguatarde it had been his own land he fought for. Not Danny Deere’s. Especially not this real-estate corporation who was hiring his family today.

  Especially not when any man could see that it was all useless; the walls would stand or they would not, and what foolishness they tried with sandbags and plastic sheets would make no difference. In any case, the five men of his own family and the fourteen construction workers, all who had shown up at the job that morning, were not enough to make a difference. From his great car on the road the fat boss had been sending orders here, there, everywhere, some on the telephone in the car, some by his narrow-eyed men who plowed up through the mud in their narrow shoes, destroying their cream-colored slacks and spoiling their pale trench coats forever. Manuel knew he had been demanding help from the county for many hours, but he was not the only one demanding. Meanwhile, a man had to think of himself. The young men were out there; Manuel had found a spot on the second floor of the building, where the rain came in only in driplets from the canvas-covered windows and where, if anyone should appear, he could make a great show of putting the canvas back where he had prudently ripped it loose an hour before. It would be worrying if the person who came, if anyone came, should observe that his poncho was dry, so Manuel was careful to stand by the open window every now and then to soak it a little.

  All this would pass. Everything always had. All the same, Manuel was not at ease in his heart. There was a worry he had never had before, and he could not know if it was real. He inclined to think that it was only a filthy imagining of his nephew Jorge’s cousin Pilar, the puta. Against his orders, she had sneaked into his house in his absence, not once but often. Always she brought disgrace on the family, not to mention the sickness of the privates that his nephew and even his sons could not be persuaded to fear. She had been one of those people on television, with the shoe-blacking on their faces. Manuel himself had seen her on the six o’clock news, being chased by the doorman of a great hotel in Beverly Hills. Yet she had seemed for once in her life sincere! Was it possible? Was it true, as she had once told Jorge and Jorge Manuel himself, that those little nuisance earthquakes that happened any time—one never even noticed them until one saw the reporter joking about it on the newscasts—these tiny shudders, with the ground so wet, could be serious indeed? He did not know. He did not want to know. He had nearer concerns. He had left the women with instructions to move everything of value to the back of the truck, and to drive the truck for high ground at need. The Danny Deere might believe that his home was safe from natural disasters, but he was a man who could afford to be wrong; a poor man could not. Yet who knew if the woman would remember? Or if she could drive the truck without destroying it? There were many worries!

  He observed that he was truly not needed, because at last the fat man’s bellows had been heard; eight or ten new men we
re slogging up through the mud toward the work crews behind the project. That was good.

  But not altogether good, Manuel perceived, because he was not there; and with all those men there would be a need for an underboss. Who better than himself? And an underboss could almost certainly demand more than the three dollars and fifty cents an hour that was all these scoundrels would pay for the risk of a man’s health and life. It would be necessary to get very wet again.

  But it was worth it. Manuel looked around at the room, sighed and left the building to climb toward the top of the hill. Just in time.

  Buster Boyma had not set foot outside his car the whole time he had been there. It hadn’t saved him. His russet-brown jogging suit was spotted with water and mud, the carpeting in the car was filthy, even his hands were smeared with soil. It gave Boyma pain to have his hands dirty; they felt dry and cracked. It was just one more thing to make him furious. For this he had failed to show at a grand jury hearing! His lawyer would smooth it over, no doubt, that was what he was paid for; but his lawyer would expect to be paid accordingly. And for what? His whole purpose in being here was to make sure his property was safe, but what good was he doing? He had kept the car phone busy with appeals to everyone in California for help, and where was the help? Fourteen volunteers were supposed to be on the way, but what good would fourteen men, shovels and bare hands, no earthmoving machines, no engineers even, do against this rain?