Syzygy Read online

  He climbed the steps and reached out to touch the bright-colored spheres, smiling. Then he heard a sound from inside the house, and turned quickly to look in the picture window.

  Inside the house Rainy Keating heard the phone ring, jumped out of the shower, grabbed a towel and ran for it. Too late. The ringing stopped just as she reached for the phone. She glowered mistily at the thing, fuzzy because she hadn’t put her glasses on; Rainy was a telephone addict, and a missed call was more than an irritation, it was enough to spoil a day. She swore softly, and turned around just as something crashed with a terminal sound on the porch.

  She snatched the towel around her and raced for the bathroom and her glasses. By the time she was peering through them around the bathroom door, what she saw was the ruin of her orrery dancing crazily from its hook, and the shape of a man disappearing down the steps—there were Peeping Toms in Puerto Rico, too! Really, it was too much. That insufferable grubby Cossack last night, and this interloper this morning. She had not been entirely pleased to come to Arecibo anyway, because its research in communication with extra-terrestrials was a little too close to the indiscretions of her youth. That gut feeling was now validated.

  She dressed quickly, the bloom off her morning. In the shower she had been singing, but she didn’t want to sing any more. Her mood had turned sour, quite unusual for a healthy young woman who knew she was good-looking and, usually, knew she was the luckiest person in the world. How many women in their mid-twenties—well, their latter twenties—had their own careers, and even their own spaceships? But Rainy had hers. Old, secondhand, lingering on by chance and the luck of the draw, but her own special project. It was what she had wanted since she was a little girl. Even if she hadn’t known she wanted it, exactly, at first.

  When Rainy was ten years old an aunt told her she was a Pisces. Little Rainy immediately perceived that a Pisces was about the best thing you could be. And all you had to do to be it was to be born at the right time of year! Her aunt had gone on to explain the influences of the planets to the alert little girl, and how important it was to understand them—not to change them, because you could not do that, but to guard against the baleful portents and enhance the good. For a whole year Rainy studied the astrology columns of the Los Angeles newspapers. She spent long hours calculating when she would allow herself to become pregnant with her first child, assuming she got married as planned at twenty-one, in order to bear the baby at the most favorable possible moment. It was of no small help to her grades in arithmetic.

  Then, one day when she was eleven, the television was full of shocking news.

  A spacecraft called Mariner had flown by Mars and photographed it at close range. It had transmitted pictures of a dry, empty landscape pocked with craters.

  That was a moment of wrenching disillusionment for Rainy. The planets were not mystic flashlight bulbs in the sky, set there for the purpose of bathing the Earth with occult rays that seeped through clouds and storms, through the roofs of hospitals—even through the bulk of the whole Earth itself—to reach into each delivery room and mold the minds and destinies of squalling newborns. Mariner showed they were nothing of the sort. And as mission followed mission, the story grew always more grim. Mars was a rusty rock, airless and cold. Venus was hot poison gases smothering stone, Jupiter a dense swirl of refrigerating fluid, Mercury a cinder.

  At first Rainy was furious. Then the sense of betrayal began to dissolve in wonder, then fascination. Astrology dropped out of her mind without a trace. But the planets themselves! The stars! Before she was fifteen she could pick out Orion’s three-jeweled belt, the Pole Star, the great Summer Triangle and a dozen other asterisms. The Christmas of her sixteenth year was a great disappointment. The presents under the tree were well enough, but in the skies the comet Kohoutek was a washout. In her senior high-school year she dated the ugliest boy in class. He was the only one who owned a telescope, eight-inch mirror, hand-ground. When she lost her virginity it was in the hills of Griffith Park, to the only boy she knew who shared her every-week addiction to the planetarium.

  At no time after twelve did Rainy doubt what her career would be—at least, not after discovering that she would have to wear glasses for most things, most of her life. NASA had this terrible bigotry which said that astronauts had to be able to pass pilot’s vision tests. So that was out. Astronomy remained. If she couldn’t go to the stars, at least she could devote her life to looking at them.

  She got her B.Sc. at UCLA and her master’s at Cal-tech in Pasadena. Her doctorate, or most of it, was also at Caltech just before she got her job, right up the hill at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Of course, her job had nothing to do with jets. Neither did JPL itself. What it had to do with was space. Deep space. The kind of space that the Mariners and Vikings and Explorers went out to touch, and smell, and listen to. The information they sent back came to Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and JPL monitored it and translated it and passed it on to the world.

  Then the week Rainy was supposed to start her dissertation, one of JPL’s principal scientists totaled himself on the Golden State Freeway. Her dissertation advisor sent her up the hill as soon as he got the news, to see about a part-time job as the scientist’s replacement’s assistant, and when she came dazedly down to say that she herself was the replacement her advisor was as astonished as she, and almost as thrilled.

  But she had her own spaceship!

  Its name was Newton-8, and it was a veteran of a highly successful mission. True, it was pretty well used up by now. It had done its basic program long since, flying by Jupiter and the asteroid belt and faithfully tattling what it saw. Now it was old. Parts of it were worn out, and it would never again, not in the billions of years of time before the Sun burned out, come close enough to a planet to use most of the instrumentation it still possessed.

  But it would not die! It was still sending back reports. The one-millimeter radio transmitter still fed telemetry into the Deep Space Network. The meteoroid detector still picked up an impact every day or so. The helium-vector magnetometer, the flux gate magnetometer, and the imaging photopolarimeter had long since stopped recording, but where Newton-8 was there was not much for them to record.

  And yet its fading vision continued to see radiation and dust clouds and it continued to report them to Earth—long after its life was supposed to be over. Its solar array still collected the dwindling, distant sunlight and transformed it into electricity to supplement the output of its aging nuclear power pack. Newton-8 was about the least of all possible spaceships to own. But it was hers, and that was what made her the luckiest person in the world—hers, at any rate, provided this joint committee of Congress allowed her to keep it.

  But of course they would—she was JPL’s prize exhibit, after all. Her mood improving, she picked lint olf the lapel of her three-piece gray suit, squirted a dash of cologne on the white shirt under her tie and reached for the handle of the door, just as the phone rang again.

  This time she didn’t take a chance on missing it. She clutched it before the second ring, trying to see her watch at the same time because she was running close to critical for getting up the hill. “Oh, hell,” she said, “it’s only you, Tinker.”

  Her husband’s—her ex-husband’s!—distant voice was honeyed. “I’m sorry to bother you, love. I just wanted to know how you are.”

  “I’m fine,” she said crossly. “I’m the same as I was yesterday afternoon when you called, and yesterday morning, and that’s not what you called about. You called to tell me how important the family is and why we should get back together again and, Tink, I’m not going to do it.”

  Pause. Then his soft, troubled voice, trying to patch things over one more time. “I know how you feel, Rainy—”

  “Hey!” She looked at her watch again. “It’s four in the morning in L.A. What are you trying to do, Tinker?”

  “I can’t sleep,” he said sadly.

  “Oh, God,” she said, as he began the same old thing again.
The cat had got out and the car wouldn’t start, and he was losing weight; and she was never more glad to hear her ride honking outside the door. “Got to run, Tink—you hear the horn blowing?” She hoped he had. But she didn’t wait to find out. In the Jeep, winding up the narrow road, she wished with all her heart that Alvin Keating would find himself a new girl.

  Just as they turned into the parking lot she saw an unkempt man and woman sitting up on the side of the hill, passing a suspicious-looking cigarette back and forth as they gazed over the vast radio-telescope dish and the blue-gray hills around it. Rainy glared at them. She was sure that the man was the Peeping Tom who had broken her orrery.

  Thursday, December 3d. 9:20 AM.

  Yugoslavia is one of the world’s most seismically active areas, because it lies where two giant tectonic plates crunch together. The continent of Africa tries to close the Mediterranean Sea like a door, with its hinge at Gibraltar. Yugoslavia is where the edge of the door slams. It shares its distinction as an earthquake center with Iceland, Japan, and nearly all the western coast of North America.

  Rainy slipped into the auditorium as inconspicuously as she could. The meeting did not seem to be going very well, at least not from the viewpoint of a scientist getting ready to hold out her own begging bowl; the particle physicist before her was sweating as he tried to explain why two hundred million dollars was not much to pay for a new accessory that would smash a handful of tiny bits of matter at very high speed into a handful of others. A freshman senator from one of the industrial eastern states was giving him a hard time; this same Senator Marcellico, along with two or three others, had already savaged the first presenter of the day, from Arecibo itself. The animals smell blood, Rainy thought to herself, trying to look both alertly attentive and impartial.

  But they were taking a long time about it! She looked furtively at her watch. Did they understand that her next appearance had to be no later than 10:40 AM, no matter what?

  The elderly blonde congresswoman from the farm belt took up the attack on the physicist. “Dr. Vorwaerts,” she called from the back of the room. “I understand the Russians have an even bigger machine. Can you tell us why you want to spend all that money to build a second-best?”

  The scientist nodded excitedly. “Ah, theirs is quite a different thing! It is the kind of particle here that is most important; ours will be at least five years in advance of anything they have!” The congresswoman sank back in her chair, satisfied, and Rainy filed that in her mind. The economy-minded legislator had not blinked an eye at two hundred million, as long as it looked like it was going to outdo the Russians.

  Just as the physicist was finishing explaining why particle accelerators always seemed to be built in New York, Illinois or California—to a congressman from South Dakota—and Rainy was beginning to steal looks at her watch again, the chairman stood up. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “we’re due for a coffee break in just a minute—and first, Miz Georgia Keating has thirty seconds for something that just won’t wait.”

  “Thank you,” she called, walking up to the command console on the side of the platform. “As you may remember, last night I sent an instruction to the Newton-8 spacecraft. It was rather a long one—eight hundred and twenty-five words. Now I am going to send the enabling command. ” She turned and pressed the glowing red button at the corner of the keyboard. “That’s all there is to it,” she said. “The message has now been transmitted to the Deep Space Network, and relayed from Canberra, Australia, out to the spacecraft. At a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, it will take about an hour and fifty-two minutes to reach the spacecraft. At that point Newton-8 will deploy its instruments and cameras in the direction of the planet Jupiter—or the sun, which will be essentially the same thing at that time. A few minutes later it will observe the transit of Jupiter and relay the pictures and telemetry to us. And we will, of course, begin to receive them an hour and fifty-two minutes after that—at which time I will be here for my presentation. Are there any questions?”

  Senator Marcellico called, “Just one, young lady. Are we going to see any little green men?” He was grinning, but the question left a bad taste in her mouth.

  During the coffee break the senator was huddled with one of his aides, but as soon as the last morning session started again he was right there. It was Tibor Sonderman’s turn, and Rainy observed that the geologist was as tactless with the legislators as he had been with her. He started out by saying that the really basic need was for fundamental research, and immediately Marcellico interrupted. “Is that going to find us any oil?” he called.

  “Oil? No. Of course not. Our greatest need is to observe what is happening under the crust—way down, thirty or forty kilometers down—”

  “Excuse me, Dr. Sonderman.” It was Senator Townseqd Pedigrue, from California, with his brother and chief aide whispering in his ear. “Dr. Sonderman! You’re not trying to revive the Mohole program, are you?”

  Sonderman said stubbornly, “I do not think you will support drilling to the Mohorovicic layer, no, but it should have been done. Down there is basic knowledge, which we need, to understand what is going on in plate tectonics. It is too bad that former President Johnson involved it in Texas politics, so that we missed that chance. But the layer is still there. However, in more immediate terms—”

  It looked rather doubtful that he was going to get a chance to tell what the immediate terms were, because Marcellico was upon him again like a ferret. Rainy slipped out of the room. She wasn’t fond of Tib Sonderman, but she didn’t want to see his blood spilled.

  She walked over to the little garden where a buffet table was being set up for lunch, hoping to get a cup of coffee out of the kitchen without the necessity of talking to any senator, congressman, aide, or newsman. She failed on two counts. The coffee wasn’t made yet, and one of the TV newscasters was sitting on a stone fence, having failed in the same errand. “You’re Dr. Keating, right?” he asked, beckoning her over.

  “Ms. Keating—A.B.D., not Ph.D. That means ‘All But Dissertation’,” she explained. “The dissertation is going to be based on the results from Newton-8.”

  “So you have a personal interest in your spacecraft?”

  A little alarm went off in her brain, and she said, “Every good scientist does, Mr.—” she peered at his name tag—“Altonburg. By the way, did you know you were missing some excitement in the meeting?” She told him about Sonderman and the hard questions that were being thrown at him. The newsman looked concerned, then relaxed.

  “My cameraman’s getting the whole thing,” he said. “Is this your first trip to Puerto Rico, Miz Keating?”

  “Afraid so. It beats the hell out of Los Angeles right now. “

  “Don’t think the senators don’t know that—it isn’t any accident they scheduled this meeting for here. Last week it was life sciences and, just by luck, that happened to be in St. Thomas—so they could check on marine biology, of course. Will you tell me something, Miz Keating? What was Marcellico on you about?”

  “Oh, that.” She would definitely have preferred to talk about the weather, but it was a reasonable question. It deserved an answer. “It’s about my master’s thesis, I suppose. My subject was the impact of extra-terrestrial events on life on Earth. There weren’t any little green men in it. That was just the senator being nasty. It was about things like the Tunguska event, and the Barringer crater, and the hypothesis that the mass extinctions of living species in the Cretaceous were caused by some astronomical event. I was hoping no one would bring it up.” She sighed and looked around at the tropical paradise. “I was even a little sorry the conference was being held here, because Drake and Sagan and so on talk so much about communication with extra-terrestrials with this instrument.”

  The man said diffidently, “You know, that would make a more interesting story than budget figures—”

  “Oh, no! Please!”

  He changed the subject gallantly. “Are you going right back from
here?”

  Unfortunately, she was; all the same, she couldn’t help contrasting his style with Tibor Sonderman’s. Sonderman might be a hell of a fine geologist, but as far as getting along with people was concerned—“What’s the matter?” she asked, startled by the expression on his face as he looked past her.

  “What do you suppose that is?” he asked.

  She turned and heard a distant, angry yelling down by the great radio-telescope dish. At this distance, the figures were tiny, but there was no doubt of what she was seeing. Halfway out the catwalk, almost to the receiver pod, a man and a woman seemed to be taking off their clothes and throwing them out into three hundred feet of empty space.

  “Good heavens,” she said.

  The newsman glanced at her, then back at the scene in the great round valley. The strippers were not without opposition. There was not much of a security force at the Arecibo observatory, but three men in green suits like army fatigues were out on the catwalk with the struggling couple. It was unclear whether they were trying to get the rest of their clothes off, or to keep from being dragged back onto solid ground.“The skinny wire catwalk shook and plunged wildly.

  The newsman said, “Excuse me, I’d better get my cameraman!” And he was running down the hill, along with half a dozen others who had appeared from nowhere.

  Rainy knew what she ought to do, but human curiosity was overpowering. You didn’t see a suicide attempt every day—if that was what it was. She hurried after. It was a considerable distance to the base of the walkway, down hill and up again, and by the time she got there the couple were in custody, back on solid ground. They were standing by themselves, leaning against the huge cement holdfast that anchored the catwalk, with the biggest of the men who had gone after them ominously close. At their feet was a pack, its contents spilled on the ground—hash pipe, a couple of books, canned food, and a few other odds and ends. A few yards away, the director of the observatory and a few other men were trying to decide what to do with them.