N-Space

by Larry Niven

  By the time we had piled all that into a dinky store cart, it was raining. Big fat drops spattered in flurries across the acre of plate glass that fronted the store. Wind howled around the corners.

  The salesman was in a fey mood, bursting with energy. He’d been watching the moon all night. “And now this!” he exclaimed as he packed our loot into bags. He was a small, muscular old man with thick arms and shoulders. “It never rains like this in California. It comes down straight and heavy, when it comes at all. Takes days to build up.”

  “I know.” I wrote him a check, feeling guilty about it. He’d known me long enough to trust me. But the check was good. There were funds to cover it. Before opening hours the check would be ash, and all the banks in the world would be bubbling in the heat of the sun. But that was hardly my fault.

  He piled our bags in the cart, set himself at the door. “Now when the rain lets up, we’ll run these out. Ready?” I got ready to open the door. The rain came like someone had thrown a bucket of water at the window. In a moment it had stopped, though water still streamed down the glass. “Now!” cried the salesman, and I threw the door open and we were off. We reached the car laughing like maniacs. The wind howled around us, sweeping up spray and hurling it at us.

  “We picked a good break. You know what this weather reminds me of? Kansas,” said the salesman. “During a tornado.”

  Then suddenly the sky was full of gravel! We yelped and ducked, and the car rang to a million tiny concussions, and I got the car door unlocked and pulled Leslie and the salesman in after me. We rubbed our bruised heads and looked out at white gravel bouncing everywhere.

  The salesman picked a small white pebble out of his collar. He put it in Leslie’s hand, and she gave a startled squeak and handed it to me, and it was cold.

  “Hail,” said the salesman. “Now I really don’t get it.”

  Neither did I. I could only think that it had something to do with the nova. But what? How?

  “I’ve got to get back,” said the salesman. The hail had expended itself in one brief flurry. He braced himself, then went out of the car like a marine taking a hill. We never saw him again.

  The clouds were churning up there, forming and disappearing, sliding past each other faster than I’d ever seen clouds move; their bellies glowing by city light.

  “It must be the nova,” Leslie said shivering.

  “But how? If the shock wave were here already, we’d be dead—or at least deaf. Hail?”

  “Who cares? Stan, we don’t have time!”

  I shook myself. “All right. What would you like to do most, right now?”

  “Watch a baseball game.”

  “It’s two in the morning,” I pointed out.

  “That lets out a lot of things, doesn’t it?”

  “Right. We’ve hopped our last bar. We’ve seen our last play, and our last clean movie. What’s left?”

  “Looking in jewelry store windows.”

  “Seriously? Your last night on Earth?”

  She considered, then answered. “Yes.”

  By damn, she meant it. I couldn’t think of anything duller. “Westwood or Beverly Hills?”

  “Both.”

  “Now, look—”

  “Beverly Hills, then.”

  We drove through another spatter of rain and hail—a capsule tempest. We parked half a block from the Tiffany salesroom.

  The sidewalk was one continuous puddle. Second-hand rain dripped on us from various levels of the buildings overhead. Leslie said, “This is great. There must be half a dozen jewelry stores in walking distance.”

  “I was thinking of driving.”

  “No no no, you don’t have the proper attitude. One must window shop on foot. It’s in the rules.”

  “But the rain!”

  “You won’t die of pneumonia. You won’t have time,” she said, too grimly.

  Tiffany’s had a small branch office in Beverly Hills, but they didn’t put expensive things in the windows at night. There were a few fascinating toys, that was all.

  We turned up Rodeo Drive—and struck it rich. Tibor showed an infinite selection of rings, ornate and modern, large and small, in all kinds of precious and semiprecious stones. Across the street, Van Cleef & Arpels showed brooches, men’s wristwatches of elegant design, bracelets with tiny watches in them, and one window that was all diamonds.

  “Oh, lovely,” Leslie breathed, caught by the flashing diamonds. “What they must look like in daylight!…Wups—”

  “No, that’s a good thought. Imagine them at dawn, flaming with nova light, while the windows shatter to let raw daylight in. Want one? The necklace?”

  “Oh, may I? Hey, hey, I was kidding! Put that down, you idiot, there must be alarms in the glass.”

  “Look, nobody’s going to be wearing any of that stuff between now and morning. Why shouldn’t we get some good out of it?”

  “We’d be caught!”

  “Well, you said you wanted to window shop…”

  “I don’t want to spend my last hour in a cell. If you’d brought the car we’d have some chance—”

  “—Of getting away. Right. I wanted to bring the car—” But at that point we both cracked up entirely, and had to stagger away holding onto each other for balance.

  There were a good half dozen jewelry stores on Rodeo. But there was more. Toys, books, shirts and ties in odd and advanced styling. In Francis Orr, a huge plastic cube full of new pennies. A couple of damn strange clocks further on. There was an extra kick in window shopping, knowing that we could break a window and take anything we wanted badly enough.

  We walked hand in hand, swinging our arms. The sidewalks were ours alone; all others had fled the mad weather. The clouds still churned overhead.

  “I wish I’d known it was coming,” Leslie said suddenly. “I spent the whole day fixing a mistake in a program. Now we’ll never run it.”

  “What would you have done with the time? A baseball game?”

  “Maybe. No. The standings don’t matter now.” She frowned at dresses in a store window. “What would you have done?”

  “Gone to the Blue Sphere for cocktails,” I said promptly. “It’s a topless place. I used to go there all the time. I hear they’ve gone full nude now.”

  “I’ve never been to one of those. How late are they open?”

  “Forget it. It’s almost two-thirty.”

  Leslie mused, looking at giant stuffed animals in a toy store window. “Isn’t there someone you would have murdered, if you’d had the time?”

  “Now, you know my agent lives in New York.”

  “Why him?”

  “My child, why would any writer want to murder his agent? For the manuscripts he loses under other manuscripts. For his ill-gotten ten percent, and the remaining ninety percent that he sends me grudgingly and late. For—”

  Suddenly the wind roared and rose up against us. Leslie pointed, and we ran for a deep doorway that turned out to be Gucci’s. We huddled against the glass.

  The wind was suddenly choked with hail the size of marbles. Glass broke somewhere, and alarms lifted thin, frail voices into the wind. There was more than hail in the wind! There were rocks!

  I caught the smell and taste of seawater.

  We clung together in the expensively wasted space in front of Gucci’s. I coined a short-lived phrase and screamed, “Nova weather! How the blazes did it—” But I couldn’t hear myself, and Leslie didn’t even know I was shouting.

  Nova weather. How did it get here so fast? Coming over the pole, the nova shock wave would have to travel about four thousand miles—at least a five-hour trip.

  No. The shock wave would travel in the stratosphere, where the speed of sound was higher, then propagate down. Three hours was plenty of time. Still, I thought, it should not have come as a rising wind. On the other side of the world, the exploding sun was tearing our atmosphere away and hurling it at the stars. The shock should have come as a single vast thunderclap.

 
For an instant the wind gentled, and I ran down the sidewalk pulling Leslie after me. We found another doorway as the wind picked up again. I thought I heard a siren coming to answer the alarm.

  At the next break we splashed across Wilshire and reached the car. We sat there panting, waiting for the heater to warm up. My shoes felt squishy. The wet clothes stuck to my skin.

  Leslie shouted, “How much longer?”

  “I don’t know! We ought to have some time.”

  “We’ll have to spend our picnic indoors!”

  “Your place or mine? Yours,” I decided, and pulled away from the curb.

  V

  Wilshire Boulevard was flooded to the hubcaps in spots. The spurt of hail and sleet had become a steady, pounding rain. Fog lay flat and waist-deep ahead of us, broke swirling over our hood, churned in a wake behind us. Weird weather.

  Nova weather. The shock wave of scalding superheated steam hadn’t happened. Instead, a mere hot wind roaring through the stratosphere, the turbulence eddying down to form strange storms at ground level.

  We parked illegally on the upper parking level. My one glimpse of the lower level showed it to be flooded. I opened the trunk and lifted two heavy paper bags.

  “We must have been crazy,” Leslie said, shaking her head. “We’ll never use all this.”

  “Let’s take it up anyway.”

  She laughed at me. “But why?”

  “Just a whim. Will you help me carry it?”

  We took double armfuls up to the fourteenth floor. That still left a couple of bags in the trunk. “Never mind them,” Leslie said. “We’ve got the rumaki and the bottles and the nuts. What more do we need?”

  “The cheeses. The crackers. The foie gras.”

  “Forget ’em.”

  “No.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” she explained to me, slowly so that I would understand. “You could be steamed dead on the way down! We might not have more than a few minutes left, and you want food for a week! Why?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Go then!” She slammed the door with terrible force.

  The elevator was an ordeal. I kept wondering if Leslie was right. The shrilling of the wind was muffled, here at the core of the building. Perhaps it was about to rip electrical cables somewhere, leave me stranded in a darkened box. But I made it down.

  The upper level was knee-deep in water.

  My second surprise was that it was lukewarm, like old bathwater, unpleasant to wade through. Steam curdled on the surface, then blew away on a wind that howled through the concrete echo chamber like the screaming of the damned.

  Going up was another ordeal. If what I was thinking was wish fulfillment, if a roaring wind of live steam caught me now…I’d feel like such an idiot…But the doors opened, and the lights hadn’t even flickered.

  Leslie wouldn’t let me in.

  “Go away!” She shouted through the locked door. “Go eat your cheese and crackers somewhere else!”

  “You got another date?”

  That was a mistake. I got no answer at all.

  I could almost see her viewpoint. The extra trip for the extra bags was no big thing to fight about; but why did it have to be? How long was our love affair going to last, anyway? An hour, with luck. Why back down on a perfectly good argument, to preserve so ephemeral a thing?

  “I wasn’t going to bring this up,” I shouted, hoping she could hear me through the door. The wind must be three times as loud on the other side. “We may need food for a week! And a place to hide!”

  Silence. I began to wonder if I could kick the door down. Would I be better off waiting in the hall? Eventually she’d have to—

  The door opened. Leslie was pale. “That was cruel,” she said quietly.

  “I can’t promise anything. I wanted to wait, but you forced it. I’ve been wondering if the sun really has exploded.”

  “That’s cruel. I was just getting used to the idea.” She turned her face to the door jamb. Tired, she was tired. I’d kept her up too late…

  “Listen to me. It was all wrong,” I said. “There should have been an aurora borealis to light up the night sky from pole to pole. A shock wave of particles exploding out of the sun, traveling at an inch short of the speed of light, would rip into the atmosphere like—why, we’d have seen blue fire over every building!

  “Then, the storm came too slow,” I screamed, to be heard above the thunder. “A nova would rip away the sky over half the planet. The shock wave would move around the night side with a sound to break all the glass in the world, all at once! And crack concrete and marble—and, Leslie love, it just hasn’t happened. So I started wondering.”

  She said it in a mumble. “Then what is it?”

  “A flare. The worst—”

  She shouted it at me like an accusation. “A flare! A solar flare! You think the sun could light up like that—”

  “Easy, now—”

  “—could turn the moon and planets into so many torches, then fade out as if nothing had happened! Oh, you idiot—”

  “May I come in?”

  She looked surprised. She stepped aside, and I bent and picked up the bags and walked in.

  The glass doors rattled as if giants were trying to beat their way in. Rain had squeezed through cracks to make dark puddles on the rug.

  I set the bags on the kitchen counter. I found bread in the refrigerator, dropped two slices in the toaster. While they were toasting I opened the foie gras.

  “My telescope’s gone,” she said. Sure enough, it was. The tripod was all by itself on the balcony, on its side.

  I untwisted the wire on a champagne bottle. The toast popped up, and Leslie found a knife and spread both slices with foie gras. I held the bottle near her ear, figuring to trip conditioned reflexes.

  She did smile fleetingly as the cork popped. She said, “We should set up our picnic grounds here. Behind the counter. Sooner or later the wind is going to break those doors and shower glass all over everything.”

  That was a good thought. I slid around the partition, swept all the pillows off the floor and the couch and came back with them. We set up a nest for ourselves.

  It was kind of cozy. The kitchen counter was three and a half feet high, just over our heads, and the kitchen alcove itself was just wide enough to swing our elbows comfortably. Now the floor was all pillows. Leslie poured the champagne into brandy snifters, all the way to the lip.

  I searched for a toast, but there were just too many possibilities, all depressing. We drank without toasting. And then carefully set the snifters down and slid forward into each other’s arms. We could sit that way, face to face, leaning sideways against each other.

  “We’re going to die,” she said.

  “Maybe not.”

  “Get used to the idea, I have,” she said. “Look at you, you’re all nervous now. Afraid of dying. Hasn’t it been a lovely night?”

  “Unique. I wish I’d known in time to take you to dinner.”

  Thunder came in a string of six explosions. Like bombs in an air raid. “Me too,” she said when we could hear again.

  “I wish I’d known this afternoon.”

  “Pecan pralines!”

  “Farmer’s Market. Double-roasted peanuts. Who would you have murdered, if you’d had the time?”

  “There was a girl in my sorority—”

  —and she was guilty of sibling rivalry, so Leslie claimed. I named an editor who kept changing his mind. Leslie named one of my old girl friends, I named her only old boy friend that I knew about, and it got to be kind of fun before we ran out. My brother Mike had forgotten my birthday once. The fiend.

  The lights flickered, then came on again.

  Too casually, Leslie asked, “Do you really think the sun might go back to normal?”

  “It better be back to normal. Otherwise we’re dead anyway. I wish we could see Jupiter.”

  “Dammit, answer me! Do you think it was a flare?”

  “Ye
s.”

  “Why?”

  “Yellow dwarf stars don’t go nova.”

  “What if ours did?”

  “The astronomers know a lot about novas,” I said. “More than you’d guess. They can see them coming months ahead. Sol is a gee-naught yellow dwarf. They don’t go nova at all. They have to wander off the main sequence first, and that takes millions of years.”

  She pounded a fist softly on my back. We were cheek to cheek; I couldn’t see her face. “I don’t want to believe it. I don’t dare. Stan, nothing like this has ever happened before. How can you know?”

  “Something did.”

  “What? I don’t believe it. We’d remember.”

  “Do you remember the first moon landing? Aldrin and Armstrong?”

  “Of course. We watched it at Earl’s Lunar Landing Party.”

  “They landed on the biggest, flattest place they could find on the moon. They sent back several hours of jumpy home movies, took a lot of very clear pictures, left corrugated footprints all over the place. And they came home with a bunch of rocks.

  “Remember? People said it was a long way to go for rocks. But the first thing anyone noticed about those rocks was that they were half melted.

  “Sometime in the past, oh, say the past hundred thousand years; there’s no way of marking it closer than that—the sun flared up. It didn’t stay hot enough long enough to leave any marks on the Earth. But the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to protect it. All the rocks melted on one side.”

  The air was warm and damp. I took off my coat, which was heavy with rainwater. I fished the cigarettes and matches out, lit a cigarette and exhaled past Leslie’s ear.

  “We’d remember. It couldn’t have been this bad.”

  “I’m not so sure. Suppose it happened over the Pacific? It wouldn’t do that much damage. Or over the American continents. It would have sterilized some plants and animals and burned down a lot of forests, and who’d know? The sun is a four percent variable star. Maybe it gets a touch more variable than that, every so often.”