Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  The third step in the chain was much firmer. There was i a definite cause-and-effect relationship between solar ac-j tivity and the Earth’s weather. That Tib accepted; it was j close enough to his own specialization that, as a matter of course, he had more or less kept up. He knew that changes in activity on the sun were followed by changes that could be measured on the earth—in the aurora, and even in the j intensity and distribution of highs and lows. Among these weather effects, the book said, was an increase in ionization and heating of the air, which appeared to have the result of causing the ocean of air to expand a tiny bit.

  He frowned. That seemed reasonable enough, although he had never thought of it in those terms. But yes. That was why Skylab had come crashing down early, because of atmospheric expansion and—

  “Is that a good book?” the little girl asked him.

  He saw with dismay that she was leaning over, staring at the pages. Tib was fairly sure she couldn’t read, because her father had been dutifully reading to her the words on the cover of the airline magazine and the descriptions of ditching procedures from the safety instruction card. But I now the man was asleep and the girl was bored.

  “Yes, thank you,” he said heavily.

  “I didn’t think it was,” she said, “b’cause you were making such faces.”

  He smiled. As detached and discouraging a smile as he could manufacture. “It’s a very good book,” he said, “and I really want to go on reading it.”

  “Do you want to read it out loud?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. She nodded without sur-I prise, peering at the cover.

  ” Trig-gers ofdev-dev-devastating? earth-earthcakes?’ “

  “Earthquakes, ” he said. ” Triggers of devastating earthquakes.’ ” She was older than she looked, he saw, and much, much smarter.

  Sonderman was saved from continuing the conversation, as the father woke up enough to sit up, nod neutrally at Sonderman, pick up the little girl, and turn her toward the window before he fell asleep again.

  Sonderman returned to the book. The next step: The earth’s rotation is not perfectly smooth. Every now and then it slows down or speeds up unexpectedly—the changes are called “glitches”—not much, to be sure. (Sonderman nodded.) And there was some reason to suspect that changes in the atmosphere caused the glitches. (He scowled at that. What reason?) The basis behind the suspicion lay in the conservation of angular momentum—in, in lay terms, the same effect that made an ice skater whirl more slowly when she extended her arms. (Sonderman made another mental note to check further.)

  Next to the last step: Plate tectonics.

  Sonderman frowned thoughtfully. These people seemed to have quite a reasonable layman’s understanding of the basis for crustal geology. The theory of plate tectonics was not yet twenty years of age, at least in any form except an amusing speculation. Not everyone understood it. For him, of course, it was the core of his specialty. But Plagemann and Gribbin, he saw by skimming, were pointing out that the surface of the Earth was made up of “plates”—hardened rock “skin”—which float on the molten rock inside the globe. The plates move. They rub up against each other, like floating slabs of ice on a freezing stream. And where two plates rub together there is a break, called a “fault line”…and all of that, Sonderman saw, was as close as anyone needed to get to the basics of the theory. But the part that came next—

  “My name is Afeefah.”

  Sonderman jerked his head to the right. “What?” The girl was looking at him again, and, studying her narrow face under the tight corn-rowed scalp, Tib was sure she was not two years old or less, as she was meant to be to ride free on a parent’s lap.

  She said quite clearly, “Afeefah means chaste .” Did children talk that well at two? Not bloody likely.

  “I need to read my book, Afeefah,” he said. It did not turn her gaze away. He thought of the snack untouched before him and broke open the cardboard box. “Do you like cookies?” he asked.

  She neither answered nor took them from him. He sat there, half turned toward her, the plastic package of Oreos extended.

  “Don’t do that,” her father said without changing position. His eyes were half open, looking at Sonderman.

  “I was just—”

  “Don’t do it.” This time he didn’t move the girl on his knee, he just continued to watch Sonderman, face impassive, eyes still not wholly open.

  Tib shrugged, dropped the cookies back in the box and turned again to his book. The next part he did not need to read at all, since it was all his own domain and he knew it better than the authors. California’s great fault line was the San Andreas. The huge North American plate, the one they had been flying over for two hours without covering half its breadth, was trying to move one way. The even huger Pacific plate was trying to move a slightly different way. The edges rubbed together. Friction made them stick for a while—perhaps for fifty years at a time, or a hundred. Then they would slip. And that slip was, for instance, the great San Francisco earthquake of the 18th of April in 1906. The rubbing movement was very slow, but it was very strong and it never stopped. And between slips the shearing force was building up all the time. When it got big enough, even some quite small force could trigger it and release all that energy. And then you had your earthquake.

  And all that was very true, but what Plagemann and Gribbin added was that the Jupiter Effect—the unbalance in the solar system, tugging at the core of the sun, increasing its activity, warming up the earth’s atmosphere, slowing it down by a microsecond—would be the small force that could trigger it. They didn’t mince words or pull back from the conclusion of their train of logic. They said it loud and clear: “A remarkable chain of evidence…points to 1982 as the year in which the Los Angeles region of the San Andreas fault will be subjected to the most massive earthquake known in the populated regions of the earth in this century.…in 1982 when the Moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars’ and with the other seven planets of the Solar System, Los Angeles will be destroyed. ”

  Sonderman slipped the paperback book into his pocket and leaned back.

  Was there any truth to all of this?

  There was some. He had to agree there was some. The San Andreas fault was surely an earthquake waiting to happen. One of the sources of energy that drove the slowly boiling mass of anger that was always inside Tib Sonderman, waiting to erupt, was that not one in ten thousand of his fellow human beings seemed willing to look that fact in the face. Gribbin and Plagemann had at least done that much.

  But what about the rest of it?

  As far as his own knowledge was concerned, he could only grant that their statements might be true. The position of the planets might affect the core of the sun. The enhanced radiation might cause changes in the volume of the earth’s atmosphere. The extra moment of inertia might trigger crustal events.

  But they were all mights; did three mights make a right? At this point Tib reached for his pocket calculator. He set minus 179 as a constant, since the authors had said that this position of the planets recurred every 179 years, and punched in the date 1982. As fast as he could copy them down he had a series of dates: 1803, 1624, 1445, 1266…at that point he stopped, because the records were not likely to be very complete that far back. If they were even in 1624. As soon as he got back to his computer he would start a search to find out if those dates were associated with abnormal earthquake years. If they were, the theory deserved investigation. If they were not—well, that was just one more example of the sort of thing Tib hated most.

  “Can I play with that?” Afeefah’s father was dozing again, and the little girl was gazing covetously at the TI-55.

  “I don’t think your father would like it, dear,” Tib said, putting the instrument back in his pocket. The man opened his eyes.

  “You know?” he drawled. “You right.” He sat up straight and turned Afeefah around in his lap again, facing away from Tib. Tib glowered and stared down at his notes, but the s
ubdued giggling from Afeefah made him steal a look. Her father was searching through her corn-row hair, nipping at invisible things with his fingernails, inspecting them and dropping them on the floor. Sonderman was shocked and repelled. Then he saw the strain of a suppressed grin in the man’s cheeks and realized that that was what was intended.

  What a surly brute! He closed his eyes and allowed himself to feel the anger that was always inside. Such mean-hearted people there were in the world, and such stupid ones! This man was a symptom, just as the stoned young hippies at Arecibo were symptoms, of what he disliked most in the world he lived in. He could not define it exactly, but it included violence and carelessness and stupidity and ugly behavior in public places. He responded to it as he had practiced to do; he closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.

  His expression was placid enough, but that was an artifact. Tib Sonderman was rarely placid. He would have spent half his life gnashing his teeth if he had allowed the internal rages to reach the surface. He had given up anger. Or thought he had; he rarely allowed his internal fury to erupt into flame. He had learned that lesson very young. When Tibor Sonderman was a newborn in the “resettlement” camp in Hungary, the thing his mother feared most was that her baby would cry. As the wife of a known partisan, fighting the Germans somewhere out in the gorges, her life balanced very precariously in the camp, if the baby cried the guards might hear. And be annoyed. And move them one step closer to the gas ovens. She had taught him self-control, and he had never forgotten.

  Friday, December 4th. 8:22 PM. PST

  Near a spot on the surface of the sun a surge of great heat released a burst of X rays. The source itself was tiny—it was no larger than Australia—but its fierce explosion was only the start of a huger event. An immense plume of hot gas sprang up from the sun’s surface, tunneled through the diffuse bright gases that surrounded it, and flew out into space. On Earth, astronomers recorded a minor solar flare.

  Saunders Robinson, later Khalid Mustafa Muhammad, later still (and at present) Saunders Robinson again, carried his daughter off the plane and put her down on a bench near the phone booths. “You go to sleep a minute, Feef,” he ordered. Obediently she squeezed her eyes shut, the corners wrinkled with the effort. “No foolin’, now! And don’t talk to nobody.”

  “Specially if he’s white,” she nodded, the eyes still tightly closed.

  “No matter who he is! Yeah, specially if he’s white, though.” He tucked her sweater under her head and raced to the phone in time to beat an elderly black woman into it. He grinned at her in a brotherly way as he dumped a handful of change onto the counter and began the job of finding him and his daughter a place to stay. He dialed a number and smiled widely into the telephone. “Jesty! What’s happening? What do you mean, who’s this? It’s Rob!” The smile faded as he talked. “Yeah, later, man,” he finished, pushed down the phone hook and tried again. In the first five phone calls the best he did was the suggestion that he go to the mosque for help. But he didn’t want to do that. He owed something to Al-Islam. When he got out of CMR-East he found they’d taken care of Afeefah for him—not Afeefah’s mother; she’d sloped off somewhere. But owing them something and getting tight with them again were two different things; he couldn’t hang in there with Allah. It took twelve phone calls, and almost all the change he’d saved up, before he got an offer. Some kind of ashram, way down off Wilshire. No money. But he could crash there, and maybe get something to eat. The good thing about it was that the airport limos went to the big hotels across the freeway, and then it would be only about a ten-minute walk. He picked up the five dimes remaining of his change, investigated the coin return for mistakes, and went over to wake Afeefah up. He almost bumped into a very young-looking man with a fretful expression, heading for the men’s room. Robinson recognized him without being sure where he recognized him from, and then put it together. It was the honk from the first-class section, the one with his hand over his nose to keep out nigger smell. Most of the passengers were gone now, and Robinson thought for a moment of following Mr. First Class into the toilet to see what he might have in his pockets.

  But he’d given all that up. “Come on, Feef,” he said. “We got to go on home now.”

  Friday, December 4th. 8:25 PM.

  The Santa Ana had been blowing for two days. Down in the canyons the chaparral was dry as matchwood. When it caught a spark or a cigarette butt it burned, and kept on burning.

  First class wasn’t really first class as long as you had to fight everybody else for the exits. Tommy Pedigrue had learned how to deal with that. You sit back and chat up the stewardesses while you wait for the traffic jam to end, because you don’t have to worry about getting out fast since your driver will be right there waiting for you.

  The other thing wrong with first class these days, however, was that all those affirmative-action and sexual-discrimination lawsuits had resulted in putting the most senior stews in the most attractive jobs, instead of putting the most attractive stews in with the most senior passengers. There was only one who was really worth hitting on, and she claimed to be happily married. That was okay, though. Tommy Pedigrue expected to bomb out now and then. When you counted up for the year, his batting average worked out pretty high, though not as high as his brother’s.

  What wasn’t okay was that his driver wasn’t waiting for him. Worse. He needed to pee. He didn’t like to pee in public washrooms. He wished he had thought to go in the airplane, but who knew the driver wouldn’t be there? Now if he ducked into the toilet it was just as likely as not that the driver would come running in, not find him, and tear-ass off in some other direction and they’d never get together.

  Tommy fumed, standing indecisively in the middle of the lounge. He couldn’t try calling the car; the phone booths were all filled. Probably he would have to take a taxi all the way out to Hidden Hills. Probably he would have to find his own baggage, and schlep it out to the curb. Probably—probably the driver would hear about this, he thought grimly, marching toward the john.

  His first thought was that the men’s room was empty, which was a whole grateful surprise. Then he saw he was wrong. A young boy, thirteen or fourteen at the most, was standing in front of the full-length mirror by the door. He was sloppy-looking, sullen-faced, not, evidently, recently cared for by a mother; and what he was doing gave Tommy Pedigrue a brisk electric shock. The boy’s fly was unzipped, and his penis was in his hand. He was not looking in the mirror. He was looking at Tommy Pedigrue, with an unwinking, uncommunicating stare.

  Damn the little pervert! Pedigrue stalked past him, to the very end of the long row of urinals. He turned his body as much away as he could.

  What a downer this whole trip had turned out to be! Those spacey kids at Arecibo, the delayed flight, the middle-aged stewardesses, the missing chauffeur. Now this! It was a considerable nuisance. Sometimes Tommy couldn’t get going when people were looking at him. He could almost feel the boy’s on him clear across the empty room—

  It was worse than that.

  The boy moved up to the urinal right next to him, his face absolutely blank, looking straight at the wall, slowly stroking his penis.

  For a moment Tommy Pedigrue felt as though he were exploding with rage. Then he felt as though he wanted to cry. Why me? he asked the universe. The caution signal in the back of his brain was flashing furiously. What was the use of being careful with everybody you met, limiting yourself to two or three drinks on the plane, watching your mouth when you talked to the stews, if you then walked into something that, if it went the wrong way, might mean the worst kind of scandal? What if someone walked in right then—someone who recognized him—and saw the two of them there, like that?

  Friday, December 4th. 8:38 PM.

  Although Neptune is an immense planet, seventeen times the mass of the earth, it is so far away that it is invisible to the naked eye. It is a curious and poignant fact in the history of astronomy that—with all the vast sphere of the heavens for it to hide in—the
first human being who could possibly have seen it, the inventor of the telescope, Galileo, was in fact the first person who did, in the year 1612. He did not know what he had seen. The notion of planets even farther from the sun than Saturn had not yet occurred to anyone, even him. He took it for an ordinary, if somewhat perplexing, star.

  It was nearly nine o’clock, but Wes Grierson was a late person. Tib Sonderman checked his watch and saw that, because of the plane’s lateness, he had nearly half an hour before he could get a bus to Studio City; it was worth trying to reach the information-retrieval man.

  Grierson answered the phone himself. “Wesley? This is Tib Sonderman. I’m sorry to bother you so late, but I want you to dig up some papers for me. Are you taping this?”

  “Of course I am, Tib.” His voice was almost offended.

  “I want everything in the last five years that references a book called The Jupiter Effect, by two people—I’m not sure of their names—”

  “Gribbin and Plagemann. That’s easy if you’ve been reading the papers. What else?”

  “That’s it for now. Send the list through to my home, you’ve got the number?”

  “Of course I do, Tib.” Grierson’s specialty was information retrieval; it was almost insulting to ask him if he had a computer terminal number, or a Social Security number, or the number of the hotel you stayed in in Philadelphia last time you were there, eighteen months ago; that was his business. “I didn’t know you were into astrology, Tib.”

  Sonderman scowled at the telephone. “What are you talking about? I read the book. It’s got nothing to do—”

  “Not the book. The people who re taking it up.” Grierson chuckled. “I guess you’re not one of them, but you had me worried for a minute.”

  “It’s just something I need to know about.”

  “Sure, Tib. At this time of night. I’ll get the stuff out to you…. Oh, Tib?”