Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  For someone whose mother had been a Jew, Lev Mihailovitch had done well. Even his internal passport had “Russian” stamped on it, not “Jew”, and he was welcomed at the best “clubs in Moscow. A cosmonaut had all sorts of privileges…but not, Mihailovitch thought with some concern, the privilege of failing to show up when he was supposed to. It could lead to unpleasant consequences. It would surely lead to the asking of questions he did not want to answer.

  Perhaps, after all, he would regret the impulse toward chivalry that had brought him here. Mihailovitch craned to see his watch, failed, muttered to himself and turned on the radio to see just how late he was.

  Of course, now none of the stations chose to give a time hack. He divided his attention between the radio and the road, not quite able to deal with either. How fast the radio announcers spoke, in this shorthand idiom that was so hard to understand! He made out that two house trailers had been swept away, and several cars, but could not make out where. (Along the ocean, surely? Surely not here!) Flood control channels were filling with silt; yes, fine, what did he care? And then he made out that something bad had happened, or was about to happen, to the Pacific Missile Test Range. Dikes had broken, but whether that meant that the range was washed out he could not tell. That touched him more nearly. At least it might put his companion in a good mood! Mihailovitch himself, not so good. After all, the astronauts were comrades in the space experience. He wished them no harm. He had had many a good drink with the moonwalkers and the veterans of EVA experiences so like his own. Although the Pacific Range was not at all like the Cape, was a part of the space program with which he had no more to do than his astronaut buddies—spy satellites and even worse!—still the people in California, too, were in some sense his family. They would understand his chivalry.

  He reached irritably to switch off” the radio, could not find the unfamiliar knob, took his eyes off the roadway for a moment.

  Mihailovitch did not see the van that skeetered across the freeway in front of him until it was broadside to his lane. His reflexes were instant. He swerved the wheel and missed the van.

  At the last minute he knew that he could not, however, miss the divider that kept southbound traffic from north. He struck it and caromed off, winding up clear back across all four lanes, with two wheels up against the retaining embankment and the steering wheel in his lap.

  When he realized that, though the car would not move again, he was hardly even bruised he was extremely grateful; on second thought, grateful twice. Grateful that he had formed the habit of fastening seat belts whenever he drove. Ten times more grateful that now there was a clear and unarguable reason to be as late as he liked. No questions would be asked of a simple car accident in a storm!

  Monday, December 28th. 6:20 AM

  At a hearing on offshore oil leases an environmental scientist testified that carbon dioxide in the air trapped heat, and that the more fossil fuel was burned the more carbon dioxide would be in the air. He cited studies showing that in the century from 1850 to 1950, atmospheric CO2 increased from 268 to 312 parts per million, an increase of 16%; and he quoted from a study by Siegenthaler and Oeschger to show that burning as much as ten per cent of known fossil fuel reserves, even if spread out over several centuries, would raise the C02 by 50% or more, a highly probable danger level. The commission listened patiently, and then,voted to approve the leases anyhow. All those empty gas tanks wanted filling.

  When Joel de Lawrence was a contract producer he owned a stucco California ranch house, a sports car, a mistress, and a drug habit. The habit was sleeping pills. The reason he needed them was the insomnia of fear, the fear everybody on the studio lots always had that the front office would rise up one morning and pass a whim, and all that would melt away. As indeed it had.

  That time in his life was decades past. Now he slept like an angel. There was no nagging late-night fear of loss to keep him thrashing about. He had very little to lose. Each night he drank two mild Scotch-and-waters while he watched the late news, and as soon as the last map of the weather report was off the screen he went to sleep, and dreamed better than he ever had in his life. The dreams alone were almost worth the loss of the hacienda and the starlet. It was Norman Mailer in the dream this time, scuttling into de Lawrence’s elegant office with a cigarette hanging from his lip and a thick bundle of manuscript under his arm. “It’s yours, Mr. de Lawrence,” he said. “I’ve already talked to Redford, and he’ll do the male lead. Bo Derek’s eager to do Cynthia. And I won’t let anyone but you . produce it.”

  “Why me?” asked the dreaming Joel—not out of modesty, simply to understand the facts before deciding whether to grant the petition.

  “Well, Mr. de Lawrence, you won’t remember me, but I’ve always admired your work. When I was here back in 1946, writing The Deer Park, you let me come on the set one day. My mind’s made up. If you won’t take it I’ll withdraw the script….”

  There was the faintest hint of muddy light at the window. De Lawrence squeezed his eyes tighter and turned over. “I like your style, Mailer,” he told his pillow, “but I’ll have to think about it.…”

  But the dream was over. Mailer disappeared, and Joel de Lawrence opened his eyes to peer at the orange digits on his bedside clock. It was time to get up.

  By the time he had finished showering and shaving the dream had vanished completely; he did not remember Mailer or the studio or any of the conversation. But his body remembered. He felt pleasantly relaxed, as though he had been making love. The coffee had brewed itself, and he had a cup while he dressed, peering out of his window. The pleasant lassitude began to slip away. The weather was really bad, the worst of the year anyway. From his window there was little to see except for the gardening shed and a corner of the four-car garage, but what he could see was wet and worrying. The earth could not absorb the rain as it fell. Rivulets were streaking the expensively laid turf. He worried about the driveway, which needed grading every month anyway, and was particularly vulnerable to rainstorms; the shock absorbers on the limo were his responsibility. He wondered if the Mexicans’ repairs had fixed those annoying little roof leaks; should he take a look before Danny got up?

  But Danny was already up. The phone from his bedroom rang peremptorily, and kept on ringing until Joel got to it. It was very unlike Danny to get up before seven-thirty; what was stranger, he was apparently dressed and ready to go. “Note, Joel, you know what I mean ‘now’? So get your clothes on—”

  “Oh, I’m ready, Danny. But have you been listening to the radio? A lot of roads are closed. ”

  “So we’ll take the ones that’re open!” What Joel had not been able to appreciate from the window was the wind. It was blowing hard; between his door and the garage he was soaked, in spite of poncho and boots. The driving was going to be even worse than he had thought. So, no matter how much of a hurry Danny was in, Joel took time to make sure he was ready for it. The tires were all at pressure. The gas gauge said three-quarters full. When he opened the trunk the jack, the emergency flashlight, the flares, and the spare tire were all in good shape. He thought for a moment, and then shuffled around in the back of the garage where he kept things that he could see no immediate use for, but were too good to throw out. One of Danny’s brief loves had briefly persuaded him to keep a kitten. The animal had lasted less than a week, but there was a sack of Kitty Litter, nearly full, on top of a stack of For Sale signs. Joel lugged it to the trunk. Sometimes you could put that stuff under a wheel when there was thin, slippery mud and it would get you out.

  All this delayed him, and by the time Joel got to the front of the house Danny Deere was hopping from one foot to the other in anger. “What the fuck’s keeping you, goddam it?” he yelled through the rain. He was wearing the poncho and rain hat again, but not the boots; and he was carrying his big dispatch case with the combination lock. Joel did not know what had happened between Danny and Buster Boyma; Danny hadn’t said, and Joel hadn’t asked. It wasn’t good, that was obvious. Danny h
ad been explosively silent all the way home. This, was not a good morning to cross him.

  “You never go downtown this early,” Joel apologized, starting the car down the driveway.

  “Today I do! Move it!”

  Joel nodded without speaking, keeping his attention on the washboarded road. The driving was as bad as he had thought it would be, but Danny didn’t comment. Didn’t say anything when they passed the Mexicans, all staring out at them from the shelter of their gatehouse porch; didn’t even speak when they came to the condominium. Danny’s attention was all inside the car. He seemed to have trouble knowing what to do with the dispatch case. First he kept it on his lap. Then he put it behind him. Then he put it on the seat and put his poncho over it, and finally he put it on tbe floor and leaned forward so that he was half sheltering it with his body. Joel recognized the pattern. It was the money syndrome. Every time Danny carried large amounts of cash with him he was antsy…but never, in all the years, as antsy as this.

  According to the radio there had been seven inches of rain in the past four days, and the stagnating storm that was drenching the freeway now might dump another six inches. Might dump more. Along the sides of the freeways there were now little streams.

  Since there was no more room for water between the particles of sand and grit and clay, every drop that fell from the sky rolled down the slopes. There was a trickle down every bank along the freeways, a stream flowing down each canyon. On the steep declines the rushing water picked at the dirt and carried it along. Because the gravel multiplied the force of the running water, the Los Angeles Flood Control authorities had stretched chain-wire catchment fences along every likely spillway. They stopped the solids and let the water harmlessly through.

  But seven inches of rain was close to their design limits. Every catch-fence was now full. Rubble brought the levels behind the fences up to the fence tops. If new floods came, the water would spill over. Each catchment fence would become a six-foot cascade, and as the water struck the base of the fence it would erode the supports, and the fence would go down, and all the tons of uncompacted aggregate, mud and wood, rocks and gravel, would batter down toward the next.

  It hadn’t happened yet, but Joel de Lawrence’s face was pinched as he watched the banks and roadways. There weren’t many cars yet; that was good. There might not be very many at all this Monday morning, even after a holiday weekend, because anyone with any sense would stay home if he could. Some slopes looked safe enough—the old cemetery near the on-ramp of the freeway was heavily grassed, because no one had mowed it in years; that was good. Some were already a jelly of mud, like the landscaping around the condo construction. And there were worrisome features he had never paid attention to before, the great rock that as long as he could remember had been embedded in a hillside a mile from Danny’s home. Only now it was no longer exactly embedded, because the water had carved much of the dirt away from its base. As they inched past, Joel de Lawrence could see an emergency crew toiling up the hillside toward it.

  Even worse, the whole Southland was beginning to stink. Joel could smell someone’s ruptured drains even with the windows closed, and according to the radio there was worse. Down in Orange County nine million gallons of raw sewage were pouring out of San Juan Creek every day. Another quarter of a million gallons sluiced through Loma Alta Creek to the sea, after a mud slide had ripped a hundred-foot gap in a main. When Joel tried to talk to his boss about all of this the little man ripped his head off, so he concentrated on his driving and his thoughts.

  In a way, it was very exciting—almost even pleasurable.

  It gave a special focus to Joel’s thinking. The inside thinking. The part that was as private as his dreams. He had trained himself to drive and respond to Danny with the outer layers of his mind, while inside he was busy with the skills he had tried to keep alive within himself for twenty years. Camera angles, special effects, casting, lights: not of films that he was going to produce, because he did not really believe he was ever going to produce any. But the films that he might produce, if the impossible occurred; even the films that he might have produced a quarter of a century past, back in the days before the studios had all gone into the hotel business and Joel de Lawrence had had a steady job. He could have done more! He could have gone just a little farther! He could have been the one to innovate that special saturating Francis Ford Coppola sound, or that Kubrick wash of color; he could have—He could have done many things, but he did not. He had shot pages of script and gone home at five o’clock, and it was no wonder he had wound up no better than this.

  Yet—one picture could put it all back for him. And pictures were everywhere. What a film this storm would make! Not expensive, either; a simple story, with all this for background. Maybe a cop story? Maybe a bank rob-‘ bery? The crooks getting away with the money, but somehow trapped in the mud—that could be a great car chase, the fleeing felons and the L.A.P.D. black and whites struggling after each other at fifteen miles an hour, because the roads were so bad? He didn’t need much. A script. A couple of bankable actors. A camera crew; not much else, because if he had a crew right now he could get all the background footage he could use, and there was the 61m! It was all so simple.

  It was also fantasy. Twenty years of fantasies had taught Joel de Lawrence to know them. It could happen; but it wouldn’t, and the reality of his life was this limousine, and this little man yammering at him from the back seat, and this miserable, blowing, soaking rain. When they finally got onto Sunset Boulevard it had taken them an hour to go a twenty-five-minute drive, and it took them another half hour on the Strip itself. Traffic barely crawled along, as half the motorists paused at every southbound intersection, peered worriedly at the steep inclines leading down toward Santa Monica and Wilshire, and then drove along to seek a gentler slope. In spite of the early start, it was past nine when Joel finally let Danny Deere out at the back entrance of his building, and went to park the car.

  Joel trudged back through the rain, rather content with his life. The fantasies were still there to be tapped when he wanted them. Listening to the horns of the cars on Sunset Strip he heard them as a musical score for the film he would (he knew) never make—not a score, but background—maybe linked with some of those electric tonalities, by somebody like the Barrens (were they still alive?). And perhaps you could get a theme out of it, and the theme could be a hit single, and…

  The sound of Danny yelling dispelled the reverie.

  Joel got rid of his sopping coat and tracked the sound to the telephone room. Danny had been in a bad mood ever since he came away from that mobster, Buster Boyma; so mad that sometimes he was even silent, nose pinched white with suppressed fury; not a time to cross him. Now he was not silent, simply inarticulate with rage. He stood in the phone room with that dispatch case cradled in his arms, yelling at his secretary and at the one telephone seller who had managed to get there that morning. All the desks should have been filled by now! But that was not the worst. The electricity was flickering worrisomely, and the one telephone seller was holding a phone pleadingly toward Danny Deere. There would be no soliciting from the office of Danny Deere Enterprises that morning. All the phones were out.

  Monday, December 28th. 8:20 m.

  Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on dams, levees and other projects to reduce damage from flooding over the past few decades. Nevertheless, the losses from flood damage increase at a higher rate each year in the countries which have implemented flood-control measures than in the countries which have not.

  The fifth or sixth time Tib woke it was daylight. If you could call it daylight; the light was a greasy gray, and he could hear the rain still falling. He slept poorly with another person in the bed, that had been a truth for all of his life, but there was more to it than that. He could not sleep because his churning mind would not allow it.

  Slowly and quietly Tib turned the covers back and let his feet down to the floor. It was a pity really that they had spent this night
in her home rather than his. His own home was certainly not large, but at least there was a place to go—a very good place; he could have gone down to his workroom. He could even have worked…assuming, of course, his fluttering mind had settled on a course of work to do. But at least he could have thought, without the distraction of another person in the room.

  He risked turning the light on in the bathroom, with the door almost closed so that only a sort of artificial moonlight came into the bedroom/living room/dining room that was all there was of Rainy’s apartment. Moving slowly, barefoot and noiseless, he eased a chair around so that he could watch the rain splashes on the window and, at the same time, see the outline of Rainy under the covers less than ten feet away.

  He had set himself for thinking. But the thoughts were stale. What kept coming back into his mind was geology, because geology was what he knew. But the problems were not scientific! They were moral. Tibor Sonderman had never been a religious man, but he had always had a great consciousness of sin. Sin was all around him. If it was not his own—not all his own—he shared the communal guilt, because he did nothing to prevent it.

  The sins that troubled Tib Sonderman had nothing to do with theology, and not even much to do with sex. They were social sins, and this city he lived in was Sodom itself by those lights. Los Angeles was a city of three million in a place where there was no reason for it to exist at all except for climate, and it was destroying that. It did not have water, but needed to steal it from the north. It did not have good communications, and so had to pave itself over with noxious freeways. It did not even have land to build on! It had only the valleys—which were not enough, and in any case should not be built on because they were capable of growing food—and the hills, which certainly should not be built on because inevitably, sometime, something would shake down what you built. Especially in California! Viewed in the long time-scale of geology, California thrashed about like a frightened snake. Its string of volcanos popped one after another, like fireflies; the whole state twitched like a horse’s hide in fly season with earthquakes. It was not merely that it was certain that a vast earthquake would occur. What was certain was that there would be an endless series of them! forever! or at least for the next ten million years or so, until some great new cycle of fire began in some other part of the world. But by then Los Angeles, and everyone in it, and no doubt the race that had built it would long since have disappeared!