Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  Somebody would pay for this! He had already marked a dozen somebodies, three or four of his own men, a lot more of the people in government who owed him. He yelled for his driver, off taking another message to the handful of workers on the hill—actually the same message, Do something! But the storm made it impossible to be heard, of course….

  The storm and something else. Something new was happening. Even over the sound of the rain and the wind, he could hear shouting.

  Chapparal had once covered the hillside, but it had been ripped out to get the ground ready for sodding in planting. In two months it would be a handsome park, to compensate condo owners on the convex side of the curve for missing the ocean view on the concave—would be if any of it remained for two months. But the water was seeping under the plastic. Each drop carried one grain of dirt an inch or two. Many drops had carried much earth, and the cohesion of the soil was almost gone.

  In spite of the best efforts of the men frantically battening it down, the wind lifted a corner of the plastic. Five men rushed to fight it back where it belonged; the wind tugged at the places they had left. It bellied the edges between the stacks of cement blocks and the drums of wall-finishing that weighted the plastic down, and the plastic tore; and the whole hillside began to slide. A crack opened. One of the men saw it and yelled; the others saw it, and ran. None of them was caught, but the hill was on the move.

  The foundations had gone down to bedrock, and they held. It did not matter. All they accomplished was to create a holding pond for the fluid mud. Earth and plastic, barrels and cinder blocks all slid together. They filled the lower floors of the condo with gluey mud and spilled over to block the freeway cut.

  The workmen stared, astonished, at the building still standing and the giant crane poised over their heads. Each j one was certain that it would fall, but it did not.

  But in the dammed freeway cut, a pool of water was forming.

  Boyma stared, paralyzed with fear. He thought the crane was his enemy; he did not notice the row of temporary power lines. The crane swayed but remained erect; but the mud pulled the lines down with a rattle of artillery fire and great flashes of light.

  “Now they’ve done it!” Boyma shouted. He was beside ( himself with rage at “them”—whoever they were—at everybody! There was no one to yell at. Even his driver was gone, ordered to carry orders to the top of the hill. Boyma wanted to get out of there, to his comfortable home where he could change his clothes and plan his retributions—and wanted it soon, because he saw that a pool of water was forming along the freeway. He opened the door of the car to yell for his driver.

  The men on the hill saw him and waved madly, but Boyma paid no attention. He shouted furiously as he stepped down into the water. The fallen power lines lay no more than twenty yards away in that same stream; and when he stepped into it he died.

  Monday, December 28th. 5:50 PM.

  The most violent earthquakes in the history of the United States stopped clocks in Boston, set bells ringing in Norfolk, Virginia, created large, permanent new lakes in Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee and destroyed 150,000 acres of forest. The epicenter was in New Madrid, Missouri. There was not many human deaths. There were not many human beings in the area, and especially there were no large buildings to fall and crush them, since the shocks began in December, 1811. Now millions of people live in the affected region. Many live and work in vulnerable high-rise buildings, and almost none of them have any idea that they are at risk.

  What Rainy had expected to find at the Bradison house had not been very clear. The phone had rung, to signify that it was working again, and it was not Meredith but Sam Houston Bradison himself, demanding they come over to see the governor. He sounded peremptory and hurried. He’d been trying to get through for hours, he said, and did she know where Dr. Sohderman was so he could come too? At that point there was some slight embarrassment in Rainy’s mind at how to explain that she knew very well where Dr. Sonderman was, and she had failed to get clear just why the governor was going to be at the Bradison home. Nevertheless, they obeyed, driving with as much speed as they could manage with caution, and as much caution as they could afford with speed; the rain was only occasional now, but the streets were still as likely to be flooded as not.

  By the time they got there it was late. She half expected the governor would have been and gone by then, but apparently he was having his own troubles with the storm. What was happening was that a young black girl was dusting end tables while Meredith was straightening the books on the shelves. Sam Bradison himself let them in through the kitchen, where he was busily washing dishes and putting them away. Obviously the governor had not yet arrived, and, obviously, what Rainy found herself doing very soon after that was pushing a vacuum cleaner over somebody else’s carpet. It was not what she would have chosen, not least because Tib had been drafted into the kitchen with Sam Bradison, and she could not hear what they were saying to each other.

  Not that she could hear much of what anybody else was saying, over the noise of the antique Hoover. She was not even aware that Meredith had left the room at first—no doubt to flap over the bathrooms or the halls. The little girl was talkative enough, but not directly informing. She did not appear to know who the governor was, much less why he was coming. She managed to convey that her daddy was asleep somewhere in the house after a hard day of shoveling mud, along with Meredith’s grandson, and that she didn’t think much of Meredith as a housekeeper, but Rainy had already formed her own opinions of that. She pushed back an armchair to get at the accumulated pencil stubs and cigar ash underneath it, reconsidered, and carefully pushed it back again. By the time she had gone over all the exposed surfaces Meredith was back.

  “I guess we’re as ready as we’ll ever be, ” Meredith said, surveying the room with satisfaction. “You’re really sweet, Rainy—and Afeefah, of course!”

  “You would have done it for me,” Rainy lied. “You don’t get the governor coming every day. Speaking of which—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well—what is this going to be?”

  Meredith sat down on the couch, pushing a scrap of paper Rainy had missed underneath with her foot. “It’s all Sam’s idea,” she said. “I don’t always understand Sam’s ideas. Afeefah? That’s good enough, honey. Why don’t you just sit down and rest for a while?”

  The little girl frowned. “Got to do the windowsills yet,” she said. “Lady? You going to give the lady the thing that came for her?”

  “Oh, good heavens, thank you, Afeefah. Of course! Now where in the world did I put that?” She stared around the room as though it were someone else’s, then disappeared down the hall. Rainy sighed and got up to help Afeefah with the windowsills.

  By Rainy’s calculation the governor was now more than an hour late for whatever it was he was late for, and she was beginning to get hungry. Or else she was about to start her period. Or, most likely, both.

  Rainy was uneasy in her mind, and she hoped that was the reason; she was not sure just what she was uneasy about. Her—she said the word to herself again to get used to it—her lover, the Herr Doktor Sonderman with his middle-European ways, was probably not the reason. He had been very silent all day, and withdrawn except when they were making love; something was on bis mind, and it was trying to be on hers too, if she had only known what it was. She relished the chatter of her housecleaning associate because it took her mind off that unfocused concern. Afeefah was seven years old and in her last school she had been in the top ten in her class. She didn’t know what she would be in her new school, because she didn’t yet know where they were going to live, but she wasn’t worried. She was going to be a nurse when she grew up, that was why she was so good at cleaning, because that was mostly what nursing was, wasn’t it? Unless if she got a scholarship, she explained, which she probably would do, in which case she would be an obstrician and help people have babies. And it was all right that Rainy was white, although her dad didn’t like her getting too close to
white people, because that was mostly because her mom had been white and she tooken off. It seemed unlikely that any seven-year-old really had that much to say about her life, but Afeefah showed no sign of stopping until Meredith came back into the room. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I put it away where I wouldn’t lose it, and I forgot where. But here it is. Goodness! Are those sirens?”

  She wandered off to peer out the window while Rainy unwrapped the little envelope. She recognized the name on the envelope as her own, but who it was from was obscure; even more obscure after she opened it, because all it contained was a Xerox—no, not even a Xerox, one of those oily thermo-copied things—of a typewritten paper. The difficulty was that the typing was in Cyrillic characters, totally opaque to Rainy.

  Since the only Russian she had had any contact with was the cosmonaut who was of so much interest to the F.B.I., she supposed it might have been from him. But that did not solve the problem of what was in it.

  The sirens were growing louder, very much louder, and then abruptly, right in front of the house, they cut off. “It’s the governor,” Sam Houston Bradison called from the kitchen. “Do let him in, someone.”

  Meredith was already at the door, holding it open while the governor’s party sorted themselves out in the driveway; besides the governor’s own car there were two black-and-whites and one drenched policeman on a motorcycle. Tib joined Rainy at the window to watch. “Look what I got from, I guess, Mihailovitch,” she said, handing him the stapled sheets. “Do you have any idea what it is? It’s all Greek to me.”

  Tib unfolded the slick sheets and glanced at the heading. “Yes, I think I can translate—perhaps after we are through with this meeting. It is not Greek, of course, but Russian—but I also read a little Greek, you know.”

  It took Rainy all the time until the governor was there, introductions had been performed, and they were all seated before she made up her mind that that had been a small joke, or at least a pleasantry; it was good to know that his mood allowed pleasantries! Tib seemed quite interested in what was going on, studying California’s trendy governor with his dove-gray, soft leather shirt and his mid-calf boots. But his interest did not extend to taking part in the conversation. He shook the governor’s hand politely when they were introduced and retired to a straight-backed chair between the governor’s secretary, or whatever he was, and someone who seemed to be a Los Angeles city councilman. He maintained a polite expression while the governor and Sam Bradison told each other how well they remembered each other, and while everyone else in the room told what they thought of the storm, and while Sam Bradison explained what he wanted the governor to do. Which led to Rainy’s being asked to recount her experience with Danny Deere, and Meredith to repeat some of the things her grandson had told her about the Jupiter Fulgarians. The governor listened attentively, frowning in the direction of his secretary. “Have you got all that, Jake? I want the A.G. to get on that right away. The only thing, Meredith,” he added, turning back to his hostess, “I don’t see what this has to do with the storm.”

  “Not a thing, Governor,” Meredith assured him, but her husband was shaking his head.

  “It does, you know. There’s a climate of fear in this town, and it’s been deliberately whipped up by people who make a profit out of it. Not just Danny Deere or the Jupes. I hold the Pedigrues responsible for a good deal of it. The whole committee was a fraud in the first place; there’s no way to know whether the so-called Jupiter Effect is real or not, and the publicity given to it is dangerous. Really dangerous. I’m going to send you drafts of three bills I think you may want to offer the legislature, Governor. One to make spreading false warnings a criminal offense; one to make people who do that civilly liable for damages; and one to create a bona-fide commission to examine the risks of catastrophe of all sorts, and recommend appropriate building and zoning ordinances. “

  The governor nodded slightly. “You do that, Sam. I’ll be looking forward to them. What about you, Dr. Sonderman? Everybody else has had a chance to talk.”

  For the past ten minutes Tib’s eyes had been in his lap, turning over and over the sheaf of papers Rainy had given him without really looking at them, deep in thought. He looked up. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

  And then he was silent, pursing his lips thoughtfully, until Rainy began to fidget and the governor’s slight smile grew strained.

  “You see,” Tib said, “I wish to disagree with most of what has been said here. Not as to facts, but as to implications.” Afeefah was passing around the room with a plate of salted nuts, and Tib absently reached out for a handful. “For example,” he said, “Dr. Bradison, the Dr. Sam Bradison, concludes that you require better licensing arrangements so that, for example, no one will build a skyscraper that will fall down, and that in my opinion is useless. Nearly useless. One should build well, but it is impossible to build any structure so that it cannot be destroyed. ” He chewed thoughtfully for a second, and then went on.

  “I wish to try to do something that one does not usually do in public, that is to speak to you in truth in the strong sense. That is to say, not only the absence of untruth but the entire conceptual statement, and with no attempt to manipulate the listener. Do you understand me? I will not tell you what I want you to hear because I have come to certain conclusions of my own and want you to take certain actions. I will tell you what I believe to be objective fact, and then I will tell you the conclusions I, myself, have drawn. What you then choose to do you must decide for yourself. I am open-minded about this,” he added fairly, “because I have little expectation that anything you do will matter.

  “In the first place, you see, all works of man are transient; nothing survives. Even the pyramids will go within a certain not very large number of thousands of years. They will be survived by a few artifacts, for a time—abandoned open-pit mines, let us say, or radionuclide waste dumps—but in a finite time even those will be subducted down into the magma and cease to exist as organized matter. This is a geologist’s point of view; I am speaking, obviously, of the very long term. But it is important to understand this principle, because in the short term it is nearly completely true as well.”

  The governor’s secretary opened his mouth, but the governor shook his head without looking at him and Tib went on. “So to try to achieve permanent safety is impossible over time. The only question is, how much time? While I have been sitting here, I have been trying to calculate some rough risk assessments. I have taken very round numbers to make the mathematics easy, but I think they are not orders of magnitude wrong, at least.

  “There is a general distributed risk attached to anything on Earth: a dwelling may burn, or be struck by a nuclear weapon or some other instrument of war, or someone may destroy it in a riot or out of vindictiveness, or it may be destroyed by a large meteorite, or annihilated in many other ways; and all these events may occur regardless of what building codes you enact or what caution the owner displays. I have given a number to this general risk, point zero one, one chance in a hundred of being destroyed in any particular year, so that, on average, one can expect any given building to survive for one century of useful life. I do not know that this estimate is correct, but I would suppose that if anything it is, on the average, quite high.

  “But let us now move this hypothetical building to a new location. Say, one of the Hollywood hills. Let us say its back yard is covered with chapparal, like my own house, and subject to the Santa Ana and to mud slides, also like my own house. In certain areas, at least, we can estimate the danger of fire at, again, one per cent per year; and the danger of mud slides also at one per cent a year, and now do you see what has happened? The danger is now three times as great, and the house has now a useful life expectancy of thirty-three years four months. Add to that the risk of earthquake, which I will put at one per cent for certain areas: life expectancy has now been cut to twenty-five years. Add to that that this particular house is, let us say, built in the flood channel of an earthwork dam, a
nd we now have a house which in all seriousness cannot expect to survive until its mortgage is paid off.

  “And for some hundreds of homes in this area, perhaps for quite a few thousands, such calculations can be made and this is the result. To own such a house is to play Russian roulette.

  “Similar calculations, of course, can be made for other risks, and for loss of life or health as well as of property; I have not attempted to do this, since I have no expertise in these last areas.

  “I believe that is all I have to say,” he finished.

  The governor’s secretary looked nervously at the governor, seeking to learn whether he should laugh, swear or applaud, but the governor took his time giving him an indication. He too had been hitting Afeefah’s party foods, and he finished chewing before he said seriously, “I appreciate what you’re saying, but I’m not sure just what action government can take.”

  “You have understood me exactly,” Tib said, nodding. “I, too, am not sure that there is any.”

  The governor sat back. He was a man who had made his reputation on understanding what the general run of polit-icos did not, counter-culture people, artists, scientists, doomsayers, idealists, and the like. “Thank you, Dr. Sonderman. Now. Before we go, Sam, would it be possible to see your grandson and this young lady’s father for a moment?”

  Tib got up and came over to Rainy’s chair. “I think they have no further need for us. May we go home now?”

  He seemed sunk in gloom in the car. The downpour was now only a sort of greasy drizzle, and Rainy felt secure enough to watch him out of the corner of her eye as she drove. “I think you confused them quite a lot,” she offered.

  He sat up. “Yes. ” He looked out the window for a while before adding, “I must work this out for myself.”