Eileen’s laughter cut off. She went back to the calculator, and now she wasn’t even smiling.
“Okay,” Corrigan said. “What’s the punch line?”
Eileen looked up with wide eyes. “What? Oh, no. I couldn’t possibly tell you.”
“If you drive me nuts, you think you can gain control of the company, right? Because it won’t work. I’ve covered that.” Corrigan liked to see her like this. Eileen was all-or-nothing: very serious and hard at work, or enjoying herself to the full. “Okay,” Corrigan sighed. “I’ll give away my secret for yours. I’ve had the decorators in. You see, Robin Geston signed up for the Marina deal.”
“Oh? That’s good.”
“Yup. Means we’ll need more help. As of the first, you’re Assistant General Manager, if you want the job.”
“Oh, I want it. Thank you.” She smiled flickeringly (like a flashbulb, on and off almost before you saw it) and turned back to the desk calculator.
“I knew you would. That’s why I had the decorators in. They’re turning that room next to mine into a new office for you. I’ve told them to consult you after they do the preliminaries.” Corrigan lowered his weight onto the corner of her desk. “There. I was keeping it for a surprise. Now what’s your secret?”
“I’ve forgotten,” Eileen said. “And I do have to get these estimates done so you can take them to Bakersfield with you.”
“Okay,” Corrigan said. He went back to his office, defeated.
If he knew, Eileen thought. She had an urge to giggle, but she held it back. She wasn’t really trying to tease Corrigan. She had been thinking: Well, I did it. And Robin was nice. Not the world’s greatest lover, but he didn’t pretend to be, either. The way he’d suggested a rematch: “Lovers need practice,” he’d said. “The second time is always better than the first.”
They’d left it vague. Maybe, just maybe, she’d take him up on it sometime; but probably not. He’d also told her definitely that he was married; she’d only suspected it before.
Never had there been any suggestion that business had anything to do with their private lives. But he’d signed up with Corrigan’s Plumbing Supplies for a very large deal—and she felt funny about that, and wondered if she’d have been as careless about finding out Robin’s marital status if the deal hadn’t been pending. But he’d signed up.
So here she was, adding up numbers, pushing papers around, and suddenly she’d asked herself: What does this have to do with plumbing? I don’t make pipe. I don’t lay pipe. I don’t ream it out, or tell people where to put it. What I do is push paper around.
It was an important job. Measure it by the chaos she could create with one random mistake or one malicious error: Thousands of tons of supplies might be sent to the ends of the Earth by a slip of her pen. But what she did had no more to do with creation, with making the things that held a civilization together, than income tax, or being the fireman on a diesel train.
Mr. Corrigan would probably spend the whole day wondering why she’d suddenly burst into sparkling laughter, and there was no way she could tell him. It had just come to her, unexpected and irresistible: What she had done with Robin Geston on the night before last was the closest she had ever come to any activity actually connected with plumbing.
■
The car wouldn’t be reported stolen for hours. Alim Nassor was pretty sure of that, sure enough that he would sit in it for another ten minutes. Alim Nassor had been a great man. When he had made himself great again, he would have to hide what he was doing now.
Before he was great he had been George Washington Carver Davis. His mother had been proud of that name. She’d said the family was named for Jefferson Davis. That honky had been a tough dude, but it was a loser’s name, no power in it. He’d had a lot of street names since. His mother hadn’t liked those. When she threw him out he took his own.
Alim Nassor meant wise conqueror in both Arabic and Swahili. Not many knew what it meant, and so what? The name had power. Alim Nassor had a hell of a lot more power than George Washington Carver ever did. You could read about Alim Nassor in the newspapers. And he could still walk into City Hall and get in to see people. He’d been able to do that ever since he broke up a riot with his switchblade and the razor blades in his shoes and the chain he carried around his waist. There was all that Federal money around for a tough dude. The honkies shoveled out money. Anything for quiet in the black ghetto. It had been a damn good game, and too bad it was over.
He cursed quietly. Mayor Bentley Allen. Los Angeles had itself another black mayor and this goddam Tom had cut off the pipeline. New people in city council. And that stupid son of a bitch of a black congressman who couldn’t be satisfied with the take, no, that asshole had to put all his relatives on the community payroll and the fucking TV reporters found out. A black man in politics needed a snow-white rep these days…
Well, the game was over, and he’d started another. Eleven jobs, each one worked fine. They’d taken…what? A quarter of a million dollars in loot in four years? Less than a hundred thousand after the fences went through it. Twenty thousand each for four men in four years. That wasn’t even wages! Easy to say, now, that some of it should have been stashed for lawyers’ fees, but at five thousand a year?
This would be the thirteenth. It wouldn’t be long now. The store did a lot of business. Alim waited, always aware of the time. Two customers left, and nobody was coming down the street.
He wasn’t happy about this job. He didn’t like ripping off blood. Honkies were fair game, but you ought to leave brothers alone. He’d hammered that into his followers’ heads, and what were they thinking of him now? But he was boxed in, he had to act fast.
The place was ripe, and he’d been saving it for an emergency, and this was one shitpot motherfucker of an emergency. His honky lawyer would probably beat this for him, but lawyers and bondsmen wanted bread, and now. It was crazy, robbing a store to pay a lawyer to get him off for robbing a store. Someday things would be different. Alim Nassor would make them different.
Almost time. Two minutes ago one of his brothers had got himself stopped for a traffic violation fourteen blocks away, and that took one pigmobile off patrol. Twenty minutes ago another brother had a “family argument” and the sister called the station house, and there went the other fuzzwagon. There’d be only the two. Black areas didn’t get patrolled the way honky business districts did. Blacks didn’t have big insurance policies, or know how to kiss ass down at City Hall.
Sometimes he used as many as four diversions, with traffic jams thrown in; they only took spreading some bread among the kids to get them playing in the streets. Alim Nassor was a natural leader. He hadn’t been busted since juvenile days, except for that last one where an off-duty cop had come out of a Laundromat. Who’d have thought that brother was a pig? He still wondered if he should have shot it out. Anyway, he hadn’t. He’d run into an alley and ditched the gun and the mask and the bag. Lawyers could take care of those. The only other evidence was the honky storekeeper’s identification, and there were ways to talk him out of testifying.
Time. Alim got out of the car. The mask looked like a face; from ten feet away you wouldn’t know it was a mask at all. The gun was under his windbreaker. Windbreaker and mask would be gone five minutes after the job. Alim’s mind closed down, shutting out past and future. He walked across at an intersection. No jaywalking, nothing to attract attention. The store was empty.
It went down nice. No problems. He had the money and was on the way out when the brother came in.
A man Alim had known for years. What was that bastard doing over in this part of town? Nobody from Boyle Heights ought to be here below Watts! Aw, shit. But that brother knew. Maybe from his walk, maybe anything, shit, he knew.
It took him a second to make up his mind. Then Alim turned, aimed and fired. A second shot to be certain. The man went down, and the old storekeeper’s eyes were big with horror, and Alim fired three times more. One more robbery wouldn’
t have upset anyone, but the pigs worked hard on murder. Best leave no witnesses. Too bad, though.
He came out fast, and didn’t go to the stolen car across the street. Instead he walked a fast half-block, went through an alleyway and came out on another street. His arm still tingled with that unique, atavistic thrill. Man was made to use a club, and a gun is the ultimate in clubs. Point and make a fist, and if the enemy is close enough to see his face, one blow will knock him over dead. Power! Alim knew people who had got hooked on that sensation.
His brother (mother’s son, not just blood) waited for him in a car that wasn’t hot. They drove off just at the speed limit, fast enough not to attract attention, slow enough not to get busted.
“Had to waste two,” Alim said.
Harold winced, but his voice was cool. “Too bad. Who were they?”
“Nobody. Nobody important.”
March: Two
Most astronomers envisage comets as forming a vast cloud surrounding the solar system and stretching perhaps halfway to the nearest star; the Dutch astronomer J. H. Oort, after whom the cloud is usually named, has estimated that the cloud contains perhaps 100 billion comets.
Brian Marsden, Smithsonian Institution
They loaded them up well in the Green Room. Two ushers and an astonishingly pretty hostess poured their glasses full as soon as they were half empty, so that Tim Hamner had drunk more than he liked. At that, he thought, I’m well off compared to Arnold. Arnold was a best-selling writer, and Arnold never talked about anything that wasn’t in his books. When Tim told him Hamner-Brown was now visible to the naked eye, Arnold didn’t know what Tim was talking about; when Tim told him, Arnold wanted to meet Brown.
One of the ushers signaled and Tim got unsteadily to his feet. The stairs hadn’t seemed so steep when he came down them. He arrived onstage to hear the last of Johnny’s smoothly professional monologue and to bask in the audience applause.
Johnny was in full form, joking with the other guests. Tim remembered from the monitor downstairs that Sharps of JPL had been giving a lecture on comets, and that Johnny seemed to know a great deal about astronomy. The other guest, a dowager whose breast equipment had, twenty years ago, given a new word to the English language, kept interrupting with off-color jokes. The dowager was quite drunk. Tim remembered that her name was Mary Jane, and that no one ever called her by her stage name anymore. At her age and weight it would have been ridiculous.
The opening chatter got Tim through a terrible moment of stage fright. Then Johnny turned to him and asked, “How do you discover a comet? I wish I’d done that.” He seemed quite serious.
“You wouldn’t have time,” Tim said. “It takes years. Decades sometimes, and no guarantees, ever. You pick a telescope and you memorize the sky through it, and then you spend every night looking at nothing and freezing your can off. It gets cold in that mountain observatory.”
Mary Jane said something. Johnny was alarmed but didn’t show it. The sound man with his earphones gave Johnny a high sign. “Do you like owning a comet?” Johnny asked.
“Half a comet,” Tim said automatically. “I love it.”
“He won’t own it long,” Dr. Sharps said.
“Eh? How’s that?” Tim demanded.
“It’ll be the Russians who own it,” Sharps said. “They’re sending up a Soyuz to have a close look from space. When they get through, it will be their comet.”
That was appalling. Tim asked, “But can’t we do something?”
“Sure. We can put up an Apollo or something bigger. We’ve got the equipment sitting around getting rusty. We even did the preliminary work. But the money has run out.”
“But you could put something up,” Johnny asked, “if you had the money?”
“We could be up there watching Earth go through the tail. It’s a shame the American people don’t care more about technology. Nobody cares a hang as long as their electric carving knives work. You ever stop to think just how dependent we are on things that none of us understand?” Sharps gestured dramatically around the TV studio.
Johnny started to say something—about the housewife who ran a home computer as a hobby—and changed his mind. The studio audience was listening. There was a careful silence that Johnny had long since learned to respect. They wanted to hear Sharps. Maybe this would be one of the good nights, one of the shows that ran over and over, Sundays, anniversaries…
“Not just the TV,” Sharps was saying. “Your desk. Formica top. What is Formica? Anyone know how it’s made? Or how to make a pencil? Much less penicillin. Our lives depend on these things, and none of us knows much about them. Not even me.”
“I always wondered what makes bra straps snappy,” Mary Jane said.
Johnny jumped in to give the show back to Sharps. “But tell me, Charlie, what good will it do to study that comet? How will that change our lives?”
Sharps shrugged. “It may not. You’re asking what good new research does. And all I can answer is that it always has paid off.
“Not the way you thought it would, maybe. Who’d have thought we’d get a whole new medical technology out of the space program? But we did. Thousands are alive right now because the human-factors boys had to develop new instruments for the astronauts. Johnny, did you ever hear of the Club of Rome?”
Johnny had, but the audience would need reminding. “They were the people who did computer simulations to find out how long we could get along on our natural resources. Even with zero population growth—”
“They tell us we’re finished,” Sharps broke in. “And that’s stupid. We’re only finished because they won’t let us really use technology. They say we’re running out of metals. There’s more metal in one little asteroid than was mined all over the world in the last five years! And there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids. All we have to do is go get ’em.”
“Can we?”
“You bet! Even with the technology we already have, we could do it. Johnny, out there in space it’s raining soup, and we don’t even know about soup bowls.”
The studio audience applauded. They hadn’t been cued by the production assistants, but they applauded. Johnny gave Sharps an approving smile and decided how the program would go for the rest of the night. But first there was a frantic signal: time for a Kalva Soap commercial.
There was more after the commercial. When Sharps got going he was really dynamic. His thin, bony hands waved around like windmills. He talked about windmills, too, and about how much power the Sun put out every day. About the solar flare Skylab’s crew had observed. “Johnny, there was enough power in that one little flare to run our whole civilization for hundreds of years! And those idiots talk about doom!”
But they were neglecting Tim Hamner, and Johnny had to bring him into the conversation. Hamner was sitting there nodding, obviously enjoying Sharps. Johnny carefully maneuvered the scientist back onto the comet, then saw his chance. “Charlie, you said the Russians would get a close look at Hamner-Brown. How close?”
“Pretty close. We’ll definitely pass through the tail of the comet. I showed you why we can’t tell how close the head will come—but it’s going to be very close. If we’re lucky, maybe as close as the Moon.”
“I wouldn’t call that luck,” Mary Jane said.
“Tim, it’s your comet,” Johnny said. “Could Hammer-Brown actually hit us?”
“That’s Hamner-Brown,” Tim said.
“Oh.” Johnny laughed. “What did I say? Hammer? It would be a hammer if it hit, wouldn’t it?”
“You know it,” Charlie Sharps said.
“Just what would it do?” Johnny asked.
“Well, we’ve got some pretty big holes left from meteor strikes,” Tim said. “Meteor Crater in Arizona is nearly a mile wide. Vreedevort in South Africa is so big you can’t see it except from the air.”
“And those were the little ones,” Sharps said. They all turned to look at him. Sharps grinned. “Ever notice how circular Hudson’s Bay looks? Or the S
ea of Japan?”
“Were those meteors?” Johnny asked. The thought was horrifying.
“A lot of us think so. And something pretty big cracked the Moon wide open—a quarter of its surface is covered by that so-called ocean, which was once a sea of lava welling up from where a big asteroid hit.”
“Of course, we don’t know what Hamner-Brown is made of,” Tim said.
“Maybe it’s time we found these things out,” Mary Jane said. “Before one of them does hit us. Like this one.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” Sharps said. “Give it long enough and the probability of a comet hitting us approaches certainty. But I don’t think we have to worry about Hamner-Brown.”
■
Henry Armitage was a TV preacher. He’d been a radio preacher until one of his converts left him ten million dollars; now he had his own slick-paper magazine, TV shows in a hundred cities, and an elaborate complex of buildings in Pasadena, complete with editorial staff.
For all that, Henry wrote much of the magazine himself, and he always did the editorials. There were too few hours in the day for Henry. He gloried in the troubles of the world. He knew what they meant. They were the signs of a greater joy to come.
“For the disciples had asked the Master, ‘Tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?’
“And Jesus answered and said unto them, ‘Take heed that no man shall deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying “I am Christ”; and shall deceive many.’” Henry had seen the entry on the Inyo County, California, police blotter: “Charles Manson, also known as Jesus Christ; God.”
“And you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.”
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