Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  “Shall I take you to your house?”

  “No—not unless you wish to be alone,” he said. “My car is, after all, still at yours. Oh,” he added, “I forgot your paper. Let me see, can I turn on this little light in the glove compartment?” He leaned forward, peering at the first page. “It appears to be a scientific paper by a T. T. Khrembullin from, how would you say this, from the Institute for Theoretical Astronomy in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. I do not know his name, but he is an academician, therefore important. The title you would call ‘Second Order Gravitational Focusing Involving Major Planets’. There are a number of equations which I imagine you will be able to read as well as I, since they are not in Russian but in mathematics.”

  Rainy started to smile, to show appreciation for another pleasantry—the second attempt at humor in only a couple of hours!—and then what he said struck her.

  “Major planets!” she cried. Tib turned to look at her inquiringly. “Yes, major planets! The planet Jupiter, for instance! Fasten your seat belt, Tib, I want to get home and read that!”

  Monday; December 28th. 7; 10 PM.

  A wind gust of twenty-five miles an hour can turn your umbrella inside out. The highest velocity ever recorded in a hurricane in the United States was 183 miles an hour; there were higher velocities, but not recorded, since the wind blew the instruments away. Since the force exerted by a wind, and therefore the destruction it can cause, increases as the cube of the velocity, peak hurricane winds are not merely seven or eight times stronger than a stiff breeze, they are nearly four hundred times as damaging.

  The best thing that happened in a bad, bad day was when they were stopped on the freeway and shunted off to city roads. Good things come in disguise. It looked at first like just one more disaster, and Danny Deere met it as he met i them all. “Oh, shit, Joel, now what? Can’t you for God’s sake just get me home?”

  “Sure thing, Danny,” Joel said over his shoulder, “but the road’s blocked. Looks like that whole condo development’s down the tube.”

  “Down the tube,” Danny repeated in sudden delight.

  Well! You always get a little something for a consolation prize, and this wasn’t a bad one. Anything that saved his view and bitched that bastard Boyma at the same time couldn’t be all bad. He chewed the news over, tasting every crumb, because it was a hell of a lot better than thinking about the rest of his day.

  Which had been a bummer from the minute he woke up. He drummed his fingers on his attache case, which still contained exactly the $87,950 he had put into it when he awoke and emptied his living-room safe. No business was done that day. By the time the fucking phone company got the fucking phones working, the first call he got was from his fucking lawyer, and it was all bad news. He had made a bad mistake talking to the Keating woman the way he did.

  “We got to go clear around up the hill, Danny,” Joel called. “See, a lot of the freeway cut got flooded, and I have to—”

  “So do it, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Sure thing, Danny. Danny?”

  “What?”

  “Are they going to pull your license, Danny?”

  “Just drive! Drive! Let me worry about that!”

  But there wasn’t any point in worrying about it, because either they would or they wouldn’t, and the fucking lawyer just spread his hands and said there was a lot of heat, oh, yes, a lot of heat. The whole Pedigrue family was out to get him personally, and even old man Bradison had been making phone calls all over the state.

  Danny sighed, and stared out at the unfamiliar side roads. He opened the dispatch case just a crack to feel the neatly banded bills, thinking it might soothe him. And actually it did. When you had money, what did you care? He had plenty! The worst they could do would be to put him out of business maybe, maybe eat him up with a few hundred thousand in fines and lawyers, maybe make him look bad—so what?

  “Now what, for Christ’s sakes?”

  Joel was slowing. “It’s Manuel and his boys, Danny, they’re waving to us.”

  Monday, December 28th. 8:10 PM.

  A supernova explosion of a star close enough to greatly damage or even wipe out life on Earth occurs about once every seven hundred and fifty million years, according to Carl Sagan. About six have occurred in the time since the formation of the Earth. About nine more will occur before our own Sun makes life on Earth impossible.

  As soon as they were inside her apartment Rainy flung her coat at a chair, spread the Russian-language typescript on the kitchen table and took her calculator out of its case.

  Although Tib was convinced he had made a fool of himself in front of the governor, he felt peaceful. The “Forget Manuel! Just keep going! I want to get home!” They were at the top of the little crest above his property now, on the old access road that the trucks had carried I avocados along before the freeway was built. Danny glanced at the woebegone wet Mexicans contemptuously. Whatever they wanted, they were no problem. Or no problem except to themselves, because likely enough he’d have to fire all their asses right off the land—so what again? Let ; the goddam trees go. Joel could handle everything else around the house. Of course, they’d have to recalculate Joel’s salary—

  He lunged forward as Joel slammed on the brakes. “Oh, ! my God, Danny, look!”

  And Danny looked, down at the muddy lake that had been his estate, where the slide into the freeway had blocked the runoff, where the old avocado trees rose out of three feet of water, where his house itself was awash to i the middle of the first floor and the basement completely submerged, where all the chalks and canvases and pig-I ments of all the paintings and sketches and playthings that i were his treasure were now sodden trash, not much dif-; ferent in appearance from the mud along the roadside, and not much more valuable.

  The storm outside was coming to an end, and so was the storm within. Nothing had really happened. Certainly nothing to compare to the people you heard about on the radio, trapped in cars, pinned against their own bedroom walls by avalanches of mud, carried away in storm drains. Nothing like Rainy, who now had some fascinating data to play with, or even like Sam Bradison, who at least had a new crusade. And yet he felt a sense of release. He moved over to the kitchen table, admiring Rainy’s blind concentration as she worked with calculator and pencil, scribbling notes to herself on lined yellow pads. He brushed against the orrery on the windowsill, sending the planets clashing against each other, and Rainy looked up, eyes unfocused behind the huge glasses. “Give me the pages you are not using,” he said, “and I will make an abstract for you in English.”

  She nodded, and pushed most of the sheets toward him. He’d put them in order, captured one of the yellow pads and studied the handwritten notations at the top of the first page. “This is interesting,” he said. “This paper was withdrawn from publication by the author, on instructions from someone who signs only initials.”

  Rainy nodded absently.

  “I suppose that was why Mihailovitch smuggled it to you, then. I think he took some risk.”

  She looked up. “Could we hold that down for now, Tib? I’ll just be a little while.”

  He pursed his lips and shrugged. It took him only a few minutes to make a quick synopsis of what the paper had to say, mathematics aside, and occupied only a small part of his mind. When he was finished he amused himself by spinning the orrery with one finger, while the greater part of his mind continued its slow circling toward some sort of decision, until Rainy sat up, her eyes glowing. “Oh, Tib,” she said, “this is great. Here, look at this.”

  She sketched quickly on a lined yellow pad. “Remember the drawing of the sun as a lens? That was right—up to a point. But what this person Kerfloozilim, or whatever his name is, says is that Jupiter too did some focusing. Here!”

  She pointed to the sketch:

  “On the left we have the star that was the source of the radiation, then comes the sun, gravitationally focusing the radiation, then old Jupiter! Remember? We know Jupiter and the sun an
d the spacecraft were in an exact straight line, because we were about to observe a transit! So the focusing effect became a real telescope, not just a magnifying glass, with a second lens!”

  “I see, ” Tib said, watching her face instead of the diagram.

  “I wonder if you do,” she said, but she was smiling. “The focusing was really tight! Not just the radio and light but everything, X rays, infra-red, ultra-violet. My poor old Newton-8 got clobbered with a heat ray!”

  Tib tried some focusing of his own. “Ah, yes. I do see,” he said, “but I don’t understand all of it. If this works, why doesn’t it happen more often? For instance, why don’t we see flares on Saturn and Uranus every time they go by Jupiter and happened to get in line with some star?”

  Rainy shrugged. “I don’t know. Because they’re; too big? They’re very large heat sinks, and if a couple dozen square miles at the top of the atmosphere got hot. we’d never notice it. Mostly because they’re never in a line! All the planets go around the sun in the same general plane, the ecliptic, but each one’s orbit is tilted a little compared to the others—and a little’ means anything up to millions of miles…. Tib? Are you listening to me?”

  He said heavily, “They thought I made a fool of myself, didn’t they?”

  “You mean the governor and all? Certainly not!”

  He shook his head. “I think I did. I forgot KISS.”

  She looked puzzled, but offered her lips. “Yes, thank you,” he said, kissing her and then smiling for the first time in some while, “but that is not what I meant, I meant K-I-S-S, the acronym: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Put simply, I should just have said I will sell my house.”

  Rainy took off her glasses and sat back to look at him better. “Tib, dear,” she said, “—KISS? Even KISS-er?”

  “Yes, I realize I am obscure. All right, I will spell out the steps. The slope behind my house has always been a danger, either of fire or of mud. It is not surprising that no one will listen to what I say when I myself live without regard to risk. I see that I have been deceiving myself. I have tried to set an example in, for example, limiting energy consumption, but it is not enough.”

  Rainy was staring at him, shaking her head—not a negative; it was wonder. “Are you planning to set yourself up as a model for the human race?”

  Tib considered. “Yes,” he said at last. “Exactly, although I know it sounds vain. But it is also Kant’s categorical imperative.”

  “And you think people will listen to you?”

  “No,” he confessed, “I do not. Let me admit to you how much vanity I have: I was thinking, while we were driving here, that I might retain a publicity agent, so that I could appear on more radio and television shows. Or write a book, or in some way find an amplifier for my own voice…. But those are fantasies, of course. So I will settle for less. I will sell my house. To be quite consistent,” he said, looking suddenly troubled, “I should sell my car, too, and that means I should not live in Los Angeles, should I?”

  “Oh, now wait a minute, Tib,” said Rainy, feeling suddenly threatened. “Your job’s here.”

  “There are other jobs. “

  Rainy pushed the papers together thoughtfully. “I’ll miss you if you leave Los Angeles,” she said.

  For a moment they sat silent, and then Tib said, “I think I’ve made a fool of myself again. Please excuse me, Rainy. I think I will go to my own home now.”

  Tuesday, December 29th. 5:10 AM.

  The moon shows about 30,000 meteorite craters; the earth, which has about 50 times the cross-section capture area of the moon, presumably would have nearly a million and a half visible signs of something large striking it from space if it were not for the fact that air and water erase the traces. Even so, some traces remain quite visible, like the i Barringer Crater in Arizona, and others are suspected. A few astronomers think Canada’s Hudson Bay is a drowned meteorite crater. Even fewer suspect that the entire In-I dian Ocean may be. North America would not survive another impact like that which may have created Hudson Bay; the earth would not survive another Indian Ocean. An impact like either of those is quite unlikely in any given million-year period; but it is not impossible; and it is not the only impact from space that could greatly affect human activities.

  When the telephone rang, Tib was not in his bed, and was not at first sure just where he was. There was no light, he was fully dressed, he was alone. As he fumbled for the phone he realized that he had fallen asleep in his workroom. Since there were no windows he had no idea of the time.

  He said hello, and the voice that answered was Rainy’s, queerly strained, almost jubilant. “Did I wake you? That’s a silly question, of course I did. I haven’t been to bed yet myself. I’m at the Lab.”

  Tib found the reading light and snapped it on, and the familiar tiny room appeared around him. He was not yet fully awake. “The Lab?” he repeated.

  He could hear the smile in her voice, “just listen, okay? Are you awake?”

  “No—oh, my God.” He had just discovered what time it was. “Rainy, believe me, I would listen better if I had i some coffee. Let me call you back in a few minutes.”

  “Just listen!” she cried. There was a scraping noise on I the telephone, a wait, another scraping noise. Then silence.

  Tib said tentatively, “Rainy, are you there?”

  Her voice came from off the microphone, and impatient. “Hang in there, will you?…Ah, there it goes.”

  There was a second of tape hiss and then a blast of sound. Tib yelped and pulled the phone away from his ear, half deafened; even at arm’s length he could hear perfectly what was coming out of it. What it sounded like, more than anything else, was some sort of motion-picture sound effects, the cry of a computer about to decide to wipe out the human race, or a mad scientist’s laboratory. It clicked and beeped and rattled, and it went on for a full thirty seconds.

  Then there was a click as it was switched off, and Rainy came back on the phone. “Did I get it too loud for you? I’m sorry; I guess I’m kind of fatigued. Do you know what you were listening to?”

  “No, should I? Or wait—” Tib pursued a vagrant memory, then pounced on it. “Your spaceship? The noise it made when it blew up?”

  She said with satisfaction, “You’re very quick, old Tib. Exactly. The noise my spaceship made when it blew up, although I’ve slowed it down by, let’s see, I guess this one’s about eight hundred times. And do you know what it has, Tib? It has structure!”

  “Structure?”

  “Oh, wake up, man!” she cried. “Don’t you understand what I’m saying? I’ve been up all night playing it, slowing it down, playing it again, and I’m sure. I put it on an oscilloscope and measured it, and it’s regular…and it doesn’t repeat.”

  He stood up and switched on the wall lights; this was not an occasion for shadows. He was wide awake now. “If I understand what you are saying, Rainy, it is—it is that you believe this to be a—message?”

  “A communication,” she corrected.

  “I do not see the difference.”

  “A message would be directed at us. I doubt it was. The focusing focused everything, light, heat, X rays—and radio; and so we heard a broadcast that otherwise would not have been detectable in any way. I doubt very much that it was intended for us, and I don’t know what it was. A love letter, a warning, a weather report, a navigation beacon—I don’t know. But it’s definitely an artifact, and it comes from another star. I’ve even located the star. It’s a K-6, not visible to the naked eye; it doesn’t even have a name, but it was in line with Jupiter and the satellite and the sun…and it was where the communication came from. Tib? The human race isn’t alone any more.”

  They were both silent for a moment, and then Rainy finished, “So come on up here, Tib! I want you to help me announce it.”

  “Me? What would I have to say, Rainy? I’m not an astronomer.”

  “No. But you’re a person who was saying just a little while ago that you saw no way of being
heard, and now there’s a way.”

  Tuesday, December 29th. 11:25 AM.

  The noise in the Von Karman Auditorium was extreme; people were still coming in, summoned at the last minute, and for each new batch of TV and press, of scientists from JPL itself and all the surrounding schools and laboratories, the tapes had to be repeated, and Rainy had to answer the same questions again: “How can you tell?” and “Is this really proof?” and, over and over, “Are you sure?”

  But of course no one was sure! In science one was not sure, one merely made an assumption and then contrived tests to see how nearly it was true. And of course Rainy was trying to explain that, as politicians and press, scientists and scholars whispered to each other and wondered.

  Sonderman gazed at the list he had been doodling before him. It was headed “Childish vices”, and it said:

  Nuclear war.

  Waste of irreplaceable resources.

  Lack of prudence.

  Failure to learn.

  And that summed them up, he thought, and the last was the worst of the four.

  The tape came to its hissing, moaning end for the tenth time and Rainy, eyes blinking against the lights, tired but still on her feet, held up her hand. “That’s enough of that,” she said. “Now I would like to introduce my collaborator in this work, Dr. Tibor Sonderman.”

  Tib rose and walked slowly to the podium, giving the audience a chance to sort themselves out. The press conference had been arranged on short notice; there had not even been time to set up chairs, and the people staring at him were moving around in knots and clusters. Strobes flashed, TV lights burned his tired eyes, and the buzz of talk did not die down. He cleared his throat and said:

  “I have nothing to add to Ms. Keating’s report as to the receipt, for the first time in human history, of a communication from an intelligent race other than our own. I wish only to comment on an implication of this fact.