"See you," Thor said. He seemed in a hurry to leave.
The speaker was in no hurry at all. He struck a pose, as if waiting for something.
Ritual? Alex wondered. Whatever. Pavana mukthvsan could be practiced as easily in a wheelchair as elsewhere. Alex used both hands to bend his right leg and tuck it into his crotch against the pubic bone. Then he folded his left leg and laid it atop the right. He made circles of his thumbs and index fingers and rested his hands on his knees. He breathed in slowly through his left nostril, repeating the syllable yam six times. He wondered when Steve would graduate him to siddhasan, or even padmasan. Anything was better than the savasam "corpse position" he had practiced in the van during the ride across Minnesota. He hadn't known that relaxing was such hard work; but according to Steve, the first order of business was to make his muscles stop fighting the gravity.
Gregor Lutenist cleared his throat. "The Thirty-Sixth Ice Age," he said formally. His voice was strong, easily heard throughout the room.
Alex breathed in. Yam, he thought to himself. Yammm.
"We live in an ice age--" began Gregory Lutenist. When he got to the words "ice age" three people had joined him, speaking in unison with him. Then came a voice from the crowd: "No shit!"
"--and we always have," he continued, imperturbably adjusting his glasses. "During the last seven hundred thousand years there have been eight cycles of cooling and warming. The glaciers retreat, but always they come back; and the warm, interglacial interludes last for only about ten thousand years. Since Ice Age Thirty-Five ended fourteen thousand years ago, the next one must have started four thousand years ago. Most of human history has been lived in an ice age. So why did no one notice?"
"It was too warm!" someone suggested.
Lutenist beamed at him. "Just so. It's hard to convince a man in Bermuda shorts that he's living in an ice age. But consider the halcyon, interglacial world of 4500 BC!" He waved a forefinger in the air.
"In Scandinavia the tree line was above 8000 feet." Three voices again joined him, speaking in unison, as Lutenist continued. "And deciduous trees grew all the way to the Arctic circle. The Sahara was a rain-watered, grassy savannah crossed by mighty rivers and even mightier hunters. We remember that age dimly as a Garden in Eden." Lutenist paused and removed his glasses. He polished the lenses and set them back upon his nose. He paused, sighed, and said, slowly, so that everyone in the room could join in, "But then the sun went out."
Gordon looked to Alex. "Shto govorit"? The man is mad, the sun has not gone out."
Lutenist beamed at Gordon. "Ah--"
"Fresh meat!" someone yelled.
"Tell me, my young friend," Lutenist said. "What lights up the sun?"
"Is trick? Fusion. Hydrogen to helium."
"And when the fusion ends, what then?" Lutenist asked.
"Uh--but how can fusion end? There is plenty of hydrogen."
"But it did end," Lutenist said. "And no one noticed." Bob Needleton stuck his head in between Alex and Gordon. "Where have all the neutrinos gone? Long time passing…" He gave Sherrine a quick kiss on the neck.
"Hi, Pins," Alex said. "Welcome back."
"I didn't want to miss Greg's spiel." Bob cupped his hands around his mouth. "There'll be a neutrino scavenger hunt tonight after the program," he announced. "Bring your snipe bags and your Chlorine-37 tanks." The audience responded with boos and catcalls. Lutenist waved to him and Bob waved back. "Hi, Greg. Still thumping the same old drum, I see."
"Excuse me," Gordon said, "but what means spiel about neutrinos?"
Bob pulled a chair up and set it beside Sherrine between the two wheelchairs. He straddled it backwards. "It's simple really."
Alex braced himself. When a physicist says, "it's simple," it usually meant it was time to duck.
"You see, when two protons fuse into a deuterium nucleus they yield a neutrino. There are two ways that can happen, but… Well, the details don't matter. Sometimes the deuterium hip-hops through beryllium into lithium and spits out another neutrino, and there are a couple of other reactions that also produce neutrinos; but that's about the gist of it. Fusion spits neutrinos. Get it?"
Gordon looked puzzled. "I get. So?"
Bob held his hands out palms up. "The problem is we never found the neutrinos. A Chlorine-37 detector should register a neutrino flux of eight snew, but all they ever get is two snew."
Gordon's frown deepened. "What's 'snew'?"
Sherrine hid her face in her hands. Bob said, "I dunno, not much. What's snew with you?"
"Thank you for sharing that with us--"
"Sorry, I've never been able to resist that one. Snew is SNU, Solar Neutrino Units. One snew is one neutrino event per 1036 atoms per second."
There was a commotion at the other end of the room. A dozen fans, maybe more, came in. "Is this the pro party?"
Lutenist said. "I'm not through."
A large man in a bush jacket waved a salute with a bottle beer. "Go right ahead, Greg. Don't mind us."
"What's up?" Lutenist demanded.
The man shruged "Con Committee said to come here, this will be the 'Meet the Pros' party."
"Aw crap," Lutenist said. "This is my lecture!"
"What's to lecture?" Needleton demanded. "It was all simple, and known before 1980. The sun is not producing enough neutrinos. Ergo, it is not fusing. Yet, according to the technetium levels in deep molybdenum mines there were plenty of neutrinos passing through the Earth during interglacial and preglacial periods."
"Excuse me, Bob," said Gregory Lutenist, "are you leading this discussion or am I?"
Bob waved a hand. "Sorry, Greg. Go ahead." In a near-whisper, "Gordon, it's a cycle. Fusion stops, the sun cools a bit, shrinks a bit, the core gets denser and hotter, fusion starts again, the new warmth inflates the sun. See? Is that a relief, or what?"
"Maunder Minimum!" someone shouted.
Lutenist beamed. "The sun goes through sunspot cycles. Lots of sunspots, it gets warm here. Few sunspots, colder weather. An astronomer named Maunder recorded sunspots and found that the last time there weren't any the planet went through what was known as the Little Ice Age, the Maunder Minimum." He paused dramatically. "And in the 1980s it became certain that the planet was going into a new Maunder Minimum period."
"Yes, yes, we know this," Gordon said. "Sunspots are important to us. But if so important to Earth, why do they not know cold is coming?"
"Bastards did," the man in the bush jacket growled. "But they said Global Warming."
"Grants," Bob said. "There's money in climate studies. All the Ph.D. theses. All that would go if things were so simple--"
A short blond woman, slender by local standards, came in with a large tray. She carried it up to the piano as if thinking to set it down there, looked at the clutter, turned helplessly-- "Ah. You're Gabe?"
He smiled and nodded. She said, "Laurie. Hold this while we get a table." She set the tray across the arms of his wheelchair and was gone.
It was covered with small dishes, each with a couple of slices of vegetables. Cucumber, carrot, a bit of lettuce, some cabbage. A stalk of broccoli. Alex felt his mouth begin to water. Fresh vegetables! Of course the people here would be used to them--
Bob Needleton stopped talking about neutrinos and stared at the tray. He gave a long, low whistle. "Dibs on a carrot stick!"
Gregory Lutenist said, "Broccoli for me. Now. It is important to realize that the sun has always burned hotter or cooler during different eras of our planet's history. Greenhouse or Icehouse."