Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  After the first twenty minutes Dennis was no longer aware of being cold and damp, but he was not in any sense comfortable. The whole thing was a bummer! These peo-ple were not interested in acquiring wisdom, they were each one of them trying to promote some buck-hustle or defend some establishment position. The overall vibra-tions were terrible. During the first commercial break Tib Sonderman was whispering fiercely to the Pedigrue per-son, and as soon as they were on the air he spoke up. “I was not aware that this discussion would include so-called psychics and astrologers,” he declared stiffly. “I would like to make it clear that I am a scientist, not a mystic or a faith healer, and I can see no mutual ground for discussion with these people.”

  And then, of course, it all hit the fan. Sonderman could’ve thought a long time without thinking of anything to say that would unify the table against him as well as that. The lady tarot reader opened her eyes and fixed them on him with the look of a basilisk. The host was steaming; not because of what Sonderman had said, who cared what any of the dummies he had for guests ever said? But because he had spoken out of turn. Tommy Pedigrue was furious because he had the political sense to see that Sonderman had made the others furious. And that young fellow with the horn-rimmed glasses, Lautermilch, was angry enough to pretend to be only amused. “I have to apologize for my fellow scientist, Steve,” he said easily, “but, although a lot , of scientists are coming to realize there is a lot of validity in the so-called occult sciences, you can see that there are others who haven’t reached that point yet. In The Tao of Physics, for instance, there’s an interesting anecdote—” And, wow, Sonderman was steaming over being called a “fellow scientist” by Lautermilch. What a mess. Dennis wished he were out in the bleachers with the rest of the bunch. He felt deeply depressed. Although, looking at the expressions on his comrades outside, they didn’t look real happy, either. Sanders was trying to keep two of the girls from sneaking off to the McDonald’s, Buck was in the first row, his face squeezed up in a grimace of thorough dislike—it was hard to tell at what, Buck had been so antsy lately. Only Afeefah, sitting primly next to her father’s empty seat with a lighted candle balanced carefully on her two hands, seemed at ease.

  He came back to reality. “—what?”

  The host was looking at him. “I said, we haven’t heard anything from you yet, Mr. Siroca.”

  “Oh,” said Dennis. “Well—I don’t know much about geology or any of that, but all anybody has to do is open his eyes to see that there’s a pralaya due. I mean, it’s in the Zend Avesta and all.”

  “What was that word you used, ‘pralaya’? What’s a pralaya?” Talltree asked.

  “Uh, well, there’s been four pralayas so far, and each time the world gets destroyed. If you go by Heraclitus, we’re probably about due for the next one,” Dennis explained.

  “Heraclitus? The Greek? Are you telling me that Heraclitus read the Zend Avesta or whatever it was?”

  “Oh, man, ” said Dennis, sorry for him, “what difference does that make? All those old sages tapped the same sources of wisdom. We’re going to get it, Mr. Talltree, there’s just no doubt of it.”

  The woman psychic all but reached over and patted his head. “You see,” she cackled, “out of the mouths of babes and all! I just go by the word of God, personally. ‘For then shall be Great Tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be!’ That’s Matthew 24:21, and what could be clearer? There’s gonna be the worst time ever—you just read your Second Timothy and your First and Second Thessalonians, and you’ll see. All you sci-entists with your sci-ence’s gonna be cast down into the Lake of Fire—that’s Revelations, and that’s good enough for me!”

  “Actually,” said Jeremy Lautermilch, nodding in agreement, “as a scientist I see no obstacle in accepting the revealed Word—”

  “Thank you, Dr. Lautermilch, and I’m sure our listeners are going to want to hear more about that,” the host cut in, nodding to the engineers. “And you’ll be talking about that very subject at the Myst-O-Rama on Wednesday night, won’t you?, but right now we have to take care of some business.…”

  Somehow Dennis got through the hour, wishing every minute of it that it was over, sneaking out every time there was a commercial break to mellow up with a couple of quick hits in the men’s room. But it didn’t get better. It got worse. Just at the end Tommy Pedigrue showed the stuff he was made of, hogging the camera to say, “Of course, our scientific panel has not yet made its findings public. But certainly we don’t want our good people of California panicked by irresponsible rumors. So let’s all cool it until we have some facts.” He sat back, beaming. And as he had learned how to use the medium and had kept his eyes on the clock, there was no time for anyone else to get a last word in; Talltree gave his final credits and close, and they were off the air.

  And not a moment too soon. Dennis was the first one out of the door, almost colliding with Pedigrue’s girl friend, Myrna, as she went to congratulate him on his performance. The Jupes rose to go, all but Buck, who sat grimly staring at the emptying studio. “Come on, Buck,” said Dennis. “Let’s go home. Saun? What’d you think, did it sound all right?”

  Saunders Robinson finished blowing out his daughter’s candle and took her arm. “Well, Dennis,” he said, “I’ll tell you. Like you didn’t have no chance to do no better, you understand what I’m saying, so it wasn’t so bad, you know?”

  “Yeah,” said Dennis dispiritedly. “I was afraid of that. Let’s get the troops out of here—Buck? Where the hell’d Buck go?”

  Robinson looked up. “He’s going into the studio. You, Buck, what you doing? Come on—” He stopped and his eyes got round. “Oh, sweet holy Jesus,” he said softly.

  Dennis turned around, and there was Buck, not going into the studio exactly, no, but heading toward the door with something in his hand. And out of the door Tommy Pedigrue was coming, leaning to listen to what his girl was saying in his ear, and he glanced idly at Buck coming toward him, and saw what Buck had in his hand; and he ducked aside—behind the girl—and Buck’s hand followed, and the little gun popped, not very loud. The girl gasped a long exhalation as bright blood began to slide down the pale blue front of her blouse, and she fell to the ground, leaving Tommy Pedigrue shieldless behind her, staring at Buck with the eyes of a trapped fox.

  Saturday, December 26th. 8:15 PM.

  THE STORM

  The rain had spread all up and down the coast. In Marin County, north of San Francisco, gusts made the roads slippery and the visibility poor, and five teenagers in a Toyota failed to navigate a curve.

  Just off the road was a nine-foot boulder with a curious history. It was not related to any of the rock formations near it. Long ago it had been part of the California subduction zone, had been dragged twenty miles down into the earth, churned about, squeezed, And abraded. Then, over millions of years, it rose slowly back to the surface, in time to receive the full force of the car at seventy miles an hour. The flaming wreckage scorched it, but with nothing like the heat it had already endured. More than enough, though, to char the five teenagers to indistinguishable pods of ash.

  Since he was a Pedigrue, the police gave him every care. Lieutenant Kwiatkowski took his statement in the lieutenant’s own office, sitting at the lieutenant’s own desk. There was a thick motel tumbler of good Scotch on one side of him and a plastic airlines cup of hot coffee on the other, and two of the family’s lawyers were sitting by the wall listening to every word. It didn’t take long.

  It would, actually, have taken quite a lot longer if the lieutenant had not hurried it along so. He was not impolite. Not to a Pedigrue. Just anxious to get the bare facts, and not much else. The curious thing was that Tommy could remember every detail, the color of Myrna’s blood on his cream linen jacket, the expression of the murderer, the absolute hush for a second after the flat smack of the pistol shot. He had been supercool, Tommy had, receiving every vibration. He still was. He noted the muddy trickle
of rain at the corner of the lieutenant’s window, the lock on the telephone dial, tbe American flag lapel pin on the blouse of the woman sergeant who was taking it all down. He sipped absently from either the Scotch or the coffee at random, taking time to be sure he got every particular exactly right. Even so the whole thing was over in fifteen minutes. The lawyer on the right came over close to him. “We’ll stay with you for the identification, of course,” he whispered, but Tommy shook his head. “You’re sure? As you wish, Thompson, but please remember you’re in shock. Please simply say nothing at all, to anyone. Certainly you should not volunteer anything about the young lady’s, ah, personal life. “

  Tommy waved him away, and then the lieutenant, too, courteously left him alone in the office—“to rest”—for no more than twenty minutes before they went over to the medical examiner’s place for the really bad part.

  But even the bad part was made as nearly painless as it could be. They had put Myrna’s body on one of those rolling trolleys. It was in a little room by itself, none of those file-drawers of corpses you see on television. None of that smell of faint decay you imagined. No smell at all, and no sound. And no movement. The sheet was pulled back below her chin and her eyes had been closed. And the identification was only a formality anyway. “That’s her,” Tommy said, and was allowed to go. The lieutenant supplied a cop and a police car to drive Tommy wherever he wanted to go.

  But there wasn’t enough gas in the tank to take him where he wanted to go. Tahiti, maybe. The Gobi desert. The South Pole. Somewhere where no one knew him, and where he didn’t have to speak to anyone.

  On the other hand, he wanted to talk. The policeman was trying to be polite, but he had a little transistor radio going besides the regular police calls. It was almost all weather. There was a flash flood watch for all coastal and mountain areas, water was pouring over the spillways of the San Gabriel dam, traffic was blocked off on Topanga Canyon. “Bad storm,” Tommy observed. “Sorry to take you out in it.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Pedigrue,” the cop said, slowing down and observing with professional interest the flares and the slickered cops waving them around a three-car pileup.

  “I guess you get used to this kind of thing,” Tommy said, staring. If there were any mutilated bodies he couldn’t see them. “It was quite a shock to me, though. And a real tragedy. She was a beautiful woman, Myrna.”

  He stopped himself then. He was being unnaturally talkative, and knew it, and knew that some of the things that were trembling in the back of his throat to be said were in bad taste. But he wasn’t embarrassed; he was rather proud of himself for taking it so well. Still, who knew who this cop might talk to? “They’ve got the man that did it, anyway,” he observed, and the policeman reluctantly switched off the transistor radio to humor this important person. Yes, the perpetrator was under arrest. He hadn’t been charged yet, but there wasn’t any doubt. He was crazy, sure. He’d been assigned a public defender at his request—he wasn’t that crazy. He was probably being interrogated right now. It was not clear whether any of the other witnesses would be charged as accomplices, but some of them were still being questioned too. Not just about the shooting. Most of them disappeared long before the police arrived, but half a dozen had hung on, and the officers had found a little of pills and joints all over the floor, among the benches. So there was the narcotics angle, too. And, oh, sure, Mr. Pedigrue, most of them had records. Nothing really heavy. The tall black one had two felony convictions and had done time. One of the women had an active parole violation, but what it looked like to the cop, it was just another nut case. Like all those other nuts, you know? Squeaky Fromm and Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald…although, if you wanted the cop’s opinion, that wasn’t just a nut. No, sir. There were some pretty high-up people involved in that, stonewalling every investigation, and we probably wouldn’t really ever get the truth on that one. You dig into those high-level politicians and you find they’re just as goddam—At that point the policeman was happy to turn into the driveway of the Pedigrue estate, because he had just remembered who he was talking to. He put the floodlight on the door, and watched Tommy Pedigrue run through the rain until he was out of sight. If he had any wondering to do about his passenger it had to be deferred, because as soon as he had signed on again he had his orders. There was a man reported in trouble in Malibu Creek. It was going to be a long night and a wet one.

  Tommy told the housekeeper he had to change out of his wet clothes and would see his father in the morning. She didn’t question the fact that he was going right to sleep. She obviously didn’t believe it, either, but that was not important. Tommy skinned out of the soggy linen jacket and realized that the dirty chocolate-bar smudge over the pocket was, actually, still Myrna’s blood. He hurled it into the bathroom hamper and found a robe to wrap around his shivering body.

  Maybe it had been a mistake to come here instead of going to his own home, but he didn’t want to face his own home that night. This room was comfortable—this suite, rather—actually, this part of the children’s suite that he had shared with his brother until Townsend went off to prep school and then into the world. His own closets were almost bare, so he wandered into Townsend’s old room to find slippers and socks. His brother’s room had been kept in strict tradition, with his Yale banner on the wall and his half-dozen Apollo blazer patches stitched to the bedspread and the one real basketball trophy be had ever won by the window. Tommy’s own room was bare; he had cleaned it all out. But what remained, because it was not only a souvenir of his own childhood but Towny’s as well, was the common playroom between, with its cupboards of rainy-day puzzles and games and its still marvelous HO model-train layout. Tommy had tried to get the train for his own kids, but Townsend would not hear of it; and then, of course, when Tommy ‘s marriage came apart there didn’t seem to be any point.

  The housekeeper knocked. “I thought you might be hungry, Mr. Tom,” she said, wheeling in—what? A gurney? No. A cart with hot plates, sandwiches under a napkin, a pot of baked beans. “Your father’s coming up to see you,” she said as she retired. But she didn’t have to. Tommy could hear the slow tiny elevator, and then the whine of his father’s chair.

  “You handled this very well, Tommy,” he said.

  Although Tommy was standing up at the dinner cart and his father sitting in the wheelchair, the old man dominated the scene. Not unusual; he always had. “Thanks, Dad,” Tommy said gratefully.

  “Has the woman got a family?”

  “Myrna. Yes, there are some people back east. She had a husband, too, but they’ve been separated for a couple of years.”

  “I don’t want trouble with her family,” his father remarked.

  “Her name is Myrna Licht, Dad. “

  The old man studied him for a moment. “You’ve had a very difficult day,” he announced, explaining to himself his son’s small resistance. “We’re going to have to clean all this up. All of it, Tommy. I’ve arranged an investigation of this Danny Deere’s connection with those crackpots—privately. And I want a full report, complete with conclusions and recommendations, from those scientists of yours Monday morning.”

  Tommy had been filling a plate with baked beans and cole slaw; he put it down to express himself better. “I don’t think that’s possible, Dad!”

  “Make it possible.”

  “You know how scientists are. They say they haven’t completed their research yet. They don’t have enough information—”

  If his father had still had a foot, he would have stamped it. “Damn it, Tommy. For a million years people have been having to make decisions without knowing all the facts. That’s the nature of the beast. That’s what politics is all about. If they can’t do it, we’ll get somebody from the foundation to whip it together.”

  Tommy hesitated a moment, then resumed filling his plate. “I guess you’re right, Dad.”

  “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” The old man spun his chair around to leave, then paused. “
It’s good to have you home for a night,” he said.

  “It was the weather, Dad. Half the canyon roads were closed because of the storm. “

  His father nodded. “Thank God. The rain’ll be making the headlines, not you and your women.”

  Tommy ate half of what was on his plate, but he wasn’t really hungry. He wasn’t sleepy, either; the adrenaline was still charging his veins. He made himself a drink and went into the playroom.

  The playroom was a godd size, twelve feet by eighteen, or almost. One loop of the model train layout climbed up the side walls and completely circumnavigated the room; other loops were on folding shelves that completed the circle of track around the engineer’s post. Tommy checked the controller to make sure everything was still connected, then let down the arms. The tracks still joined perfectly. From the marshalling yard he selected a Santa Fe hog pulling four Pullmans and a club car and sent it creeping across the bridge, then up the long grade to make the circuit of the room at molding level. Tommy had always enjoyed his toys. He had always owned a great many of them. Still did, although, as he had just discovered, some of his present toys bled on him when they were destroyed. He watched the string creep along the shelf of track absently, contemplating a thought he had been fleeing from. The bullet that broke the Myrna-toy, of course, had not been intended for her. It could have been himself, not Myrna, who was right now lying in the medical examiner’s file drawer. By rights it should have been. By rights his life at this moment should be over.

  Sunday, December 27th. 1:30 PM.

  On Mount Palomar an astronomer left the darkroom to peer out at the sky. His budget of observing time had been rained out for six consecutive nights. Now, shivering in the mile-high air, he saw Jupiter and Saturn glowing through a break in the clouds, and wondered if the cluster of galaxies he was concerned with would show up yet that night. It didn’t much matter. He wasn’t going anywhere. Down below the clouds, rain was still soaking the Pauna valley. Little creeks like Frey and Agua Tibia ran a quarter mile wide, and the roads were under water.