"I will," Paula said and went back into the sanctuary. "Stacey–"
"Your dress looks beautiful!" Stacey cried and dragged her over to the windows. "Look how it goes with the snow!"
When the bell rang at a quarter to four, Luke thought, Finally! Mom! and literally ran to answer the door. It was Aunt Lulla. He looked hopefully past her, but there was no one else pulling into the driveway or coming up the snow-packed street. "You don’t know anything about cooking a goose, do you?" he asked.
She looked at him a long, silent moment and then handed him the plate of olives she’d brought and took off her hat, scarf, gloves, plastic boots, and old-lady coat. "Your mother and Madge were always the domestic ones," she said, "I was the theatrical one," and while he was digesting that odd piece of information, "Why did you ask? Is your goose cooked?"
"Yes," he said and led her into the kitchen and showed her the goose, which was now swimming in a sea of fat.
"Good God!" Aunt Lulla said, "where did all that grease come from?"
"I don’t know," he said.
"Well, the first thing to do is pour some of it off before the poor thing drowns."
"I already did," Luke said. He took the lid off the saucepan he’d poured the drippings into earlier.
"Well you need to pour off some more," she said practically, "and you’ll need a larger pan. Or maybe we should just pour it down the sink and get rid of the evidence."
"It’s for the gravy," he said, rummaging in the cupboard under the sink for the big pot his mother had given him to cook spaghetti in.
"Oh, of course," she said, and then thoughtfully, "I do know how to make gravy. Alec Guinness taught me."
Luke stuck his head out of the cupboard. "Alec Guinness taught you to make gravy?"
"It’s not really all that difficult," she said, opening the oven door and looking speculatively at the goose. "You wouldn’t happen to have any wine on hand, would you?"
"Yes." He emerged with the pot. "Why? Will wine counteract the grease?"
"I have no idea," she said, "but one of the things I learned when I was playing off-Broadway was that when you’re facing a flop or an opening night curtain, it helps to be a little sloshed."
"You played off-Broadway?" Luke said. "Mom never told me you were an actress."
"I wasn’t," she said, opening cupboard doors. She pulled out two wine glasses. "You should have seen my reviews."
By 4:00 p.m., all the networks and cable newschannels had changed their logos to reflect the worsening situation. ABC had MegaBlizzard, NBC had MacroBlizzard, and CNN had Perfect Storm, with a graphic of a boat being swamped by a gigantic wave. CBS and MSNBC had both gone with Ice Age, CBS’s with a question mark, MSNBC’s with an exclamation point and a drawing of the Abominable Snowman. And Fox, ever the "fair and balanced" news network, was proclaiming, End of the World!
"Now can I freak out?" Chin asked.
"No," Nathan said, feeding in snowfall rates. "In the first place, it’s Fox. In the second place, a discontinuity does not necessarily mean the end of the wo–"
The lights flickered. They both stopped and stared at the overhead fluorescents. They flickered again.
"Backup!" Nathan shouted, and they both dived for their terminals, shoved in zip drives, and began frantically typing, looking anxiously up at the lights now and then.
Chin popped the zip disk out of the hard drive. "You were saying that a discontinuity isn’t necessarily the end of the world?"
"Yes, but losing this data would be. From now on we back up every fifteen minutes."
The lights flickered again, went out for an endless ten seconds, and came back on again to Peter Jennings saying, "–Huntsville, Alabama, where thousands are without power. I’m here at Byrd Middle School, which is serving as a temporary shelter." He stuck the microphone under the nose of a woman holding a candle. "When did the power go off?" he asked.
"About noon," she said. "The lights flickered a couple of times before that, but both times the lights came back on, and I thought we were okay, and then I went to fix lunch, and they went off, like that–" she snapped her fingers, "without any warning."
"We back up every five minutes," Nathan said, and to Chin, who was pulling on his parka, "Where are you going?"
"Out to my car to get a flashlight."
He came back in ten minutes later, caked in snow, his ears and cheeks bright red. "It’s four feet deep out there. Tell me again why I shouldn’t freak out," he said, handing the flashlight to Nathan.
"Because I don’t think this is a discontinuity," Nathan said. "I think it’s just a snowstorm."
"Just a snowstorm?" Chin said, pointing at the TVs, where red-eared, red-cheeked reporters were standing in front of, respectively, a phalanx of snowplows on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, a derailed train in Casper, and a collapsed Wal-Mart in Biloxi, "–from the weight of a record fifty-eight inches of snow," Brit Hume was saying. "Luckily, there were no injuries here. In Cincinnati, however–"
"Fifty-eight inches," Chin said. "In Mississippi. What if it keeps on snowing and snowing forever till the whole world–?"
"It can’t," Nathan said. "There isn’t enough moisture in the atmosphere, and no low pressure system over the Gulf to keep pumping moisture up across the lower United States. There’s no low pressure system at all, and no ridge of high pressure to push against it, no colliding air masses, nothing. Look at this. It started in four different places hundreds of miles from each other, in different latitudes, different altitudes, none of them along a ridge of high pressure. This storm isn’t following any of the rules."
"But doesn’t that prove it’s a discontinuity?" Chin asked nervously. "Isn’t that one of the signs, that it’s completely different from what came before?"
"The climate would be completely different, the weather would be completely different, not the laws of physics." He pointed to the world map on the mid-right-hand screen. "If this were a discontinuity, you’d see a change in ocean current temps, a shift in the jet stream, changes in wind patterns. There’s none of that. The jet stream hasn’t moved, the rate of melting in the Antarctic is unchanged, the Gulf Stream’s still there. El Nińo’s still there. Venice is still there."
"Yeah, but it’s snowing on the Grand Canal," Chin said. "So what’s causing the mega-storm?"
"That’s just it. It’s not a mega-storm. If it were, there’d be accompanying ice-storms, hurricane-force winds, microbursts, tornadoes, none of which has shown up on the data. As near as I can tell, all it’s doing is snowing." He shook his head. "No, something else is going on."
"What?"
"I have no idea." He stared glumly at the screens. "Weather’s a remarkably complex system. Hundreds, thousands of factors we haven’t figured in could be having an effect: cloud dynamics, localized temperature variations, pollution. Or it could be something we haven’t even considered: the effects of de-icers on highway albedo, beach erosion, sunspot activity. Or the effect on electromagnetic fields of playing ‘White Christmas’ hundreds of times on the radio this week."
"Four thousand nine hundred and thirty-three," Chin said.
"What?"
"That’s how many times Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ is played the two weeks before Christmas, with an additional nine thousand and sixty-two times by other artists. Including Otis Redding, U2, Peggy Lee, the Three Tenors, and the Flaming Lips. I read it on the internet."
"Nine thousand and sixty-two," Nathan said. "That’s certainly enough to affect something, all right."