Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  “It was a fine idea, Meredith,” Rainy assured her. “Have you read the book?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s out of my field, of course, or most of it is. I can testify that the expansion of the atmosphere does take place under the appropriate conditions, of course—that’s what brought Skylab down a few years ago. And there does seem to be a connection between large air mass activity and the glitches in the earth’s rotation. After that I’m lost.”

  Rainy said, “We really need more experts. Maybe a nuclear physicist, a planetary astronomer, somebody with special training in the reactions between the solar wind and the atmosphere—no?” she added, looking at Tib.

  He was shaking his head. “No, I think not. That’s a herd, and we’d never get anywhere. You’re all we need for the astronomical parts, Rainy.”

  “I don’t know diddly-squat about the interior of the sun!”

  “You know who to ask, though. And anyway, we’re not going to worry about the interior of the sun. As I see it, that’s the weakest link in the argument. Point two at the most, I’d even say point one.”

  Dennis, sitting on a footstool behind the couch and nominally out of range, asked, “What’s point two mean, Mr. Sonderman?”

  Tib glanced at Meredith, then, politely, to her grandson, “The probability of that happening, I would say, is only two chances out of ten. ” He held up his hand as the boy started to speak. “How do I arrive at that figure, you are going to ask? I don’t. I guess. Or, you could say, if I asked ten experts if it is so that the configuration of the planets could affect nuclear reactions in the core of the Sun, eight of them would say it was, excuse me, a load of bull. In fact, I think that is the weakest link in the argument.” He was fumbling in his pocket as he spoke and paused to ask Meredith, “Shall I?” She nodded and he pulled out a pencil. “There are eight parts to the argument,” he said. “One, the configuration of the planets, all on the same side of the sun—that we can take to be certain, probability one point oh. The effect of their gravity on the nuclear reactions I have already mentioned—does anyone want to suggest another value?”

  No one did, and the three others watched silently as he talked and wrote down a little table:

  Alignment of planets 1.0

  Effect on core reaction 0.2

  Consequent increase in flares 0.9

  Consequent expansion of atmosphere 0.9

  Consequent glitch 0.5

  Consequent strain on tectonic faults 0.2

  Consequent major earthquakes 0.5

  Net probability of Jupiter Effect ?

  Dennis, who had risen to look over his shoulder, ex-claimed, “So you think it’s about fifty-fifty?”

  Sonderman looked up wryly at the boy. “You’re averaging the chances, aren’t you? No. That’s not how you do it. You must multiply them—like so. ” He pulled out a pocket calculator and began to punch figures. After a second the little red digits displayed a figure: 0.0081. “Eight chances in a thousand,” he said. “A little worse than a hundred to one, and I would say that is generous.”

  Meredith looked at him wonderingly. “Then what are we all doing here?” she asked.

  Tib shrugged. “Add to that the fact that one of the co-authors has already recanted, and I ask myself this question too.”

  He paused, and Meredith looked at him quizzically. “And what do you answer?”

  “That if I don’t do this someone else will, ” he said.

  Meredith got up thoughtfully and handed around a bowl of peanuts. Then she said, “I have a different reason, Tib. If there’s even a hundred-to-one chance that this is going to happen—”

  “Not that much!” Tib protested.

  “Even a million-to-one chance, then I think it ought to be investigated. There are ten million people along the San Andreas fault, or at risk from broken dams, or in trouble any way at all. If it happens, I don’t want it on my conscience that I could have warned them and didn’t.”

  “Meredith,” Tib said courteously, “have you thought about all of the implications of this?”

  “Certainly I have,” she bristled. “Or—well, I don’t know. Are there some implications I haven’t thought of?”

  Tib picked up a couple of peanuts and rolled them between his fingers. “Let me tell you about the barrier islands in the Atlantic,” he said slowly. “Ten years ago or so—no, not that long ago; it was in 1976—there was a hurricane watch along the Atlantic. It was August, the middle of the summer season. All the beaches were full of people—”

  She interrupted. “That’s my specialty you’re talking about,” she reminded him gently. “I know, and I think I know what you’re going to say. Someone in the national bureau had to make a decision. Should he warn the people on the islands to leave? Or should he not? If he failed to warn them and the hurricane veered a few miles closer to the shore, every one of those islands would be drowned out by the winds and the tides—hundreds of thousands of people. If he did warn them, and they left, and the hurricane stayed offshore, he would have cost the beach merchants millions and millions of dollars. They have to make their year’s income in two months. They’d go broke by the thousands.”

  “Yes,” Tib nodded, “that is what I would have said, but there’s more. Suppose he did warn them. Along New Jersey’s shore, for instance, there is a whole series of barrier islands, just shifting sands that people have built jetties and dikes and retaining walls for, to try to keep them where they are. And there are only so many bridges. As I understand it, the warning could only be highly probable if it were given no more than a few hours before the hurricane struck?”

  Meredith nodded. “In 1976, yes—no more than six hours, really.”

  “And in six hours there was not time to get everyone across those few bridges, isn’t that right? So there would have been total catastrophe. Every bridge blocked. Cars smashing each other out of the way. So even with the warning, many, many people would have died.”

  Meredith sighed. “What you’re saying is that even if we found proof somehow that Los Angeles was going to be destroyed, we couldn’t get the people out in time?”

  Tib shrugged and didn’t answer. From his chair on the sidelines Dennis Siroca spoke up. “It is going to happen, Gram.”

  Friday, December 18th. 9:15 AM.

  In 1976 the core of a burned-out comet, identified by astronomers as Asteroid 1976 UA, came within not much more than half a million miles of the earth. It was a close miss. At Earth’s orbital velocity of more than sixty thousand miles an hour, it missed by less than eight hours.

  In the week before Christmas both Time and Newsweek carried stories on the latest outbreak of California crazies. All three networks had film clips for the evening news, and the Today show sent Jane Pauley to talk to the group petitioning the mayor of Los Angeles for immediate release of all drug-related prisoners. “It’s cruel and unusual punishment, Jane,” Saunders Robinson explained to the camera. “They’re gonna die, you know? There’s no way they’ll get out of those cells in time when the earthquakes hit!”

  Outside of California, most of the world paid little enough attention. But there were exceptions. Pickets began to appear in front of the White House, most days, except when the weather was too bad, and their placards urged a day of national penitence before Jupiter struck. A farm wife from Wisconsin announced that she had always had a talent for sensing earthquakes before they happened, and agreed to let ABC know when Los Angeles was going to get it. And a man named Jeremy Lautermilch canceled his plans for a week-long psychic seminar in Austin, Texas. There had not been all that much response to the ads, anyway. He made a few long-distance calls to Los Angeles and got on a plane.

  Jeremy Lautermilch had learned a number of survival skills that were of benefit in his profession. He was a highly trained person. With three degrees from good universities, he had not expected to need such tricks. But the kinds of careers the degrees opened to him had turned out not to be very interesting. He could have taught in some other fairly g
ood university, or done research for some fairly uninteresting employer like the United States government. He had higher ambitions.

  The degrees were not wasted. They were cosmetically wonderful. They became a major part of the “publisher’s press release” that Lautermilch himself carefully prepared and updated and made available to everyone who would look at it. The degrees helped. They didn’t keep newspaper reporters from calling him a crackpot or a fraud. They only kept them from doing it in public.

  One of Lautermilch’s survival tricks was being unfailingly polite to everyone in related professions, and so when he arrived in Los Angeles International he made the rounds of colleagues. He had prepared a map showing the locations of six persons with whom he had had previous contact: a phrenologist in Hawthorne, two palmists in Beverly HtHs, a couple of astrologers and, of course, the ashram of the True Believers in Jupiter Fulgaris. In his first four hours in California he had secured the expressed good will of his acquaintances and two firm offers of a place to stay. He turned down the ashram. He chose to accept one of the astrologers. She was not only well off, with a good address and a handsome home, she was herself handsome in a dark, dramatic way. When he moved his bags in from the trunk of his rental car he discovered she was also married, but you couldn’t have everything.

  The second survival trick he had learned was how to get a turnout for a press conference. It involved the longdistance telephone. No matter who you were, if you called a managing editor from a distant city to announce that you would be available the next day, he would seldom turn you down. So when, that afternoon, he drove up the hill to the Griffith Observatory he was gladdened to see a newspaper panel truck parked in the lot, and four people waiting for him on the terrace above the museum. He had timed it very well. The interest in the future of Southern California was climbing every day. His lecture was going to be a winner.

  Since the park was public, there was no problem about getting permission to use it. He placed himself with the observatory domes behind him and began to talk. “Thanks for coming,” he said, smiling genially as he handed out his press releases. “Shall I get right into it? All right. I am in Los Angeles to give a public lecture—the place and time are in the material you have—about the situation that confronts Los Angeles. The basic outlines have been known for a long time. According to Edgar Cayce, for example, by the year 2100 AD Los Angeles will no longer exist, because it will be at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. It will be a long way from land, too. Cayce states that Nebraska will then be a seacoast state on the Pacific. If you will look at the little map on page three of the release, you’ll see what that means. Utah and Nevada will be gone completely, along with most of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Oregon. What I am in Los Angeles to discuss is in what way the present predictions relate to this ultimate catastrophe. “

  One of the reporters looked up in perplexity. “According to this, Dr. Lautermilch, you have a degree in physics and a doctorate in mechanical engineering. I thought you were some kind of psychic?”

  Lautermilch smiled gently. “I am both, you see. I am a psychic scientist. That’s why the orthodox scientists can’t stand me, the same as with Velikovsky. The degrees are genuine. And so am I.”

  Monday, December 21st. 2:15 PM.

  Ash from violent volcanic eruptions is hurled into the upper air, where it lingers and, it is thought, reflects back some of the heat of the sun. In the year 1815 the volcano Tambora had such an eruption. In the following year, crops failed to ripen in much of Western Europe, and in the United States the summer was so cold that the year was called Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.

  Danny Deere leaned forward and banged on the window. “Roll it down, Joel! Roll the goddam window down!”

  The driver nodded to show he had understood, and reached back to press the partition button. “Yes, Danny?”

  “Keep your eyes open now!”

  Joel grinned patiently. “I don’t have to, Danny,” he said. “I can hear ‘em.”

  Danny spluttered in indignation that his driver could hear something he could not hear, and then pressed his own button to roll down all the car’s outside windows at once. It was true. It was only a confused shouting at first, but the rhythm was unmistakable, and as the car slowed for a light on Wilshire Boulevard the words came clear: “Let the world know—IT’S OVER!” In a moment Danny could see them, at least thirty people in a double row in front of the Los Angeles County Art Museum, their shirts bright red or orange, their faces black, doing the side-to-side shuffle exactly as he had rehearsed them.

  He regarded them silently as they waited for the light to change, and then conceded, “Not too bad. Joel! Up on the corner, see her?”

  “I see her, Danny.” Opposite the May Company store there was a tall, fair-haired girl in camouflage-streaked orange denims, moving from car to car among the traffic waiting on the cross street. Her face was made up jet black, lips and all. Joel de Lawrence eased the limo to the curb just past the intersection. The girl saw Danny and came gravely over, pausing to do the shuffle on the way. She handed in the collection can and received an empty one from Danny in return. He grunted acknowledgement to her, and as the car moved off toward the next solicitor he held the can to his ear and shook it gently. “Not too bad,” he said again; by the weight it was more than half full, and the muted sound of the money inside suggested that there were bills to cushion the silver. There were three of the collectors stationed along the block across from the museum, and Danny gave each of them a fresh collection can in exchange for a partly filled one. “Make a U-turn, Joel,” he ordered.

  “Danny, if there’s a cop anywhere around—”

  “Make a U-turn, Joel!” He watched out the window as Joel obeyed. No cops. They made the U-turn successfully, but as they glided to a stop before the plump young man in blackface at the park entrance Danny saw that his hands were empty.

  “It isn’t my fault, Danny,” he began at once. “Some guys ripped me off. “

  Danny regarded him with distaste, then opened the door. “Get in,” he barked. “Joel, get on over to the ashram.”

  “They were heavy guys, Danny,” the young man said apprehensively. “I think they had a gun.”

  “You think? You didn’t see it?”

  “I didn’t argue with them, Danny! ‘Hand it over,’ they said, so I did. I didn’t sign up for any shit like this.”

  “Shut up,” Danny said, staring out the window as Joel made a right turn, heading for Melrose. “What’s your name?”

  “Buck. Buck Swayne. Listen, there wasn’t much in the can anyway. Nobody goes into the park from there, and if they do they don’t see the main bunch first. If I had a corner with a light and a lot of traffic—”

  “Will you shut up?” Danny screamed. “I want to think.”

  It was the first time any of the collectors had had his money taken away from him, and it was not a precedent Danny Deere wanted to see followed. Buck was able to give a pretty good description of the two men—youngish but not really young; dangerous-looking. It didn’t sound like kids, dopers, or drifters. It didn’t sound good at all. It didn’t even sound sensible, and Danny sat glowering to himself, not speaking, all the way down Wilshire Boulevard to the side street with the ashram.

  The ashram had been dressed up considerably since he had seen it last. It was a narrow storefront, between a massage parlor and a plumbing supply wholesaler, but it stood out even against the psychedelic paint of the massage parlor. The windows were painted black, with scarlet and gold lettering:

  The True Believers of

  JUPITER FULGARIS

  A small loudspeaker played wailing sitar music from the record player inside. Danny appraised it swiftly as he got out of the car, nodded at the fund collector to follow and charged into the store. “Where’s Siroca?” he demanded of that black fellow, Robinson.

  “He ain’t here right now, Mr. Deere.”

  “Then where the hell is he?”

  Robi
nson folded his hands on his belly and rocked back. “Well, Mr. Deere, he’s been trying to score some, uh, some tradin’ goods for the troops. “

  “Trading goods? What’s trading goods?”

  “The good mellow stuff, Mr. Deere. Smokin’ weed.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Danny said, but it was not an objection. Or not exactly. He was calculating in his mind the risk involved in steering Robinson to his caretakers, who certainly had plenty to sell. It was not something Danny Deere was anxious to do; he had stayed completely away from drug dealing. “Where’s he gone for it?” he asked.

  “Well, Mr. Deere,” said Robinson, “see, I don’t exactly know. He called his lady in Puerto Rico to see did she score, but she didn’t. He was talking about goin’ with her when she comes back west. Supposed to be some great stuff on the islands. “

  “Islands?” Danny exploded. “Jesus, you guys take the cake! Well, listen, when he gets back, you tell him I want this guy fired. Right now!”

  “Buck? Buck’s one of our best men, Danny,” Robinson said mildly. “I don’t think we ought to fire him.”

  “Then stick him in with the main bunch. He ain’t fit to be trusted with the money. Get one of the big guys out with the cans.”

  Robinson shook his head slowly. “I don’t think that would work out real well, Danny,” he observed. “The little girls and the, uh, the inoffensive kind of looking guys like Buck here, they’re the ones that bring in the money.”

  Danny stared at him, frustrated. Then he stared around the room. “Just get him off the collections,” he grumbled. “What’s that stuff?” He was looking at the black drapes that draped the entire room that comprised the front half of the store. A plywood partition divided it from the private section in back, where the money was counted and the actual members of the group gathered for assignments.