The next step in their paper chase of logical sequences was less certain. According to them, there was some sort of connection between the position of the planets and the activity of that boiling, burning hurricane of hot gases that was the sun. They conceded the effect was not large, and that it wasn't very obvious, and that there was not any good theoretical basis for understanding' why it should be ! there at all. But they claimed it existed. Sonderman was willing to suspend disbelief—at least until he checked it out.
The third step in the chain was much firmer. There was i a definite cause-and-effect relationship between solar ac- j tivity and the Earth's weather. That Tib accepted; it was j close enough to his own specialization that, as a matter of course, he had more or less kept up. He knew that changes in activity on the sun were followed by changes that could be measured on the earth—in the aurora, and even in the j intensity and distribution of highs and lows. Among these weather effects, the book said, was an increase in ionization and heating of the air, which appeared to have the result of causing the ocean of air to expand a tiny bit.
He frowned. That seemed reasonable enough, although he had never thought of it in those terms. But yes. That was why Skylab had come crashing down early, because of atmospheric expansion and—
"Is that a good book?" the little girl asked him.
He saw with dismay that she was leaning over, staring at the pages. Tib was fairly sure she couldn't read, because her father had been dutifully reading to her the words on the cover of the airline magazine and the descriptions of ditching procedures from the safety instruction card. But I now the man was asleep and the girl was bored.
"Yes, thank you," he said heavily.
"I didn't think it was," she said, "b'cause you were making such faces."
He smiled. As detached and discouraging a smile as he could manufacture. "It's a very good book," he said, "and I really want to go on reading it."
"Do you want to read it out loud?"
"I don't think so," he said. She nodded without surprise, peering at the cover.
" Trig-gers of dev- dev- devastating? earth- earthcakes?' "
"Earthquakes, " he said. " Triggers of devastating earthquakes.' " She was older than she looked, he saw, and much, much smarter.
Sonderman was saved from continuing the conversation, as the father woke up enough to sit up, nod neutrally at Sonderman, pick up the little girl, and turn her toward the window before he fell asleep again.
Sonderman returned to the book. The next step: The earth's rotation is not perfectly smooth. Every now and then it slows down or speeds up unexpectedly—the changes are called "glitches"—not much, to be sure. (Sonderman nodded.) And there was some reason to suspect that changes in the atmosphere caused the glitches. (He scowled at that. What reason?) The basis behind the suspicion lay in the conservation of angular momentum—in, in lay terms, the same effect that made an ice skater whirl more slowly when she extended her arms. (Sonderman made another mental note to check further.)
Next to the last step: Plate tectonics.
Sonderman frowned thoughtfully. These people seemed to have quite a reasonable layman's understanding of the basis for crustal geology. The theory of plate tectonics was not yet twenty years of age, at least in any form except an amusing speculation. Not everyone understood it. For him, of course, it was the core of his specialty. But Plagemann and Gribbin, he saw by skimming, were pointing out that the surface of the Earth was made up of "plates"—hardened rock "skin"—which float on the molten rock inside the globe. The plates move. They rub up against each other, like floating slabs of ice on a freezing stream. And where two plates rub together there is a break, called a "fault line" . . . and all of that, Sonderman saw, was as close as anyone needed to get to the basics of the theory. But the part that came next—
"My name is Afeefah."
Sonderman jerked his head to the right. "What?" The girl was looking at him again, and, studying her narrow face under the tight corn-rowed scalp, Tib was sure she was not two years old or less, as she was meant to be to ride free on a parent's lap.
She said quite clearly, "Afeefah means chaste ." Did children talk that well at two? Not bloody likely.
"I need to read my book, Afeefah," he said. It did not turn her gaze away. He thought of the snack untouched before him and broke open the cardboard box. "Do you like cookies?" he asked.
She neither answered nor took them from him. He sat there, half turned toward her, the plastic package of Oreos extended.
"Don't do that," her father said without changing position. His eyes were half open, looking at Sonderman.
"I was just—"
"Don't do it." This time he didn't move the girl on his knee, he just continued to watch Sonderman, face impassive, eyes still not wholly open.
Tib shrugged, dropped the cookies back in the box and turned again to his book. The next part he did not need to read at all, since it was all his own domain and he knew it better than the authors. California's great fault line was the San Andreas. The huge North American plate, the one they had been flying over for two hours without covering half its breadth, was trying to move one way. The even huger Pacific plate was trying to move a slightly different way. The edges rubbed together. Friction made them stick for a while—perhaps for fifty years at a time, or a hundred. Then they would slip. And that slip was, for instance, the great San Francisco earthquake of the 18th of April in 1906. The rubbing movement was very slow, but it was very strong and it never stopped. And between slips the shearing force was building up all the time. When it got big enough, even some quite small force could trigger it and release all that energy. And then you had your earthquake.
And all that was very true, but what Plagemann and Gribbin added was that the Jupiter Effect—the unbalance in the solar system, tugging at the core of the sun, increasing its activity, warming up the earth's atmosphere, slowing it down by a microsecond—would be the small force that could trigger it. They didn't mince words or pull back from the conclusion of their train of logic. They said it loud and clear: "A remarkable chain of evidence . . . points to 1982 as the year in which the Los Angeles region of the San Andreas fault will be subjected to the most massive earthquake known in the populated regions of the earth in this century. ... in 1982 when the Moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars' and with the other seven planets of the Solar System, Los Angeles will be destroyed. ''
Sonderman slipped the paperback book into his pocket and leaned back.
Was there any truth to all of this?
There was some. He had to agree there was some. The San Andreas fault was surely an earthquake waiting to happen. One of the sources of energy that drove the slowly boiling mass of anger that was always inside Tib Sonderman, waiting to erupt, was that not one in ten thousand of his fellow human beings seemed willing to look that fact in the face. Gribbin and Plagemann had at least done that much.
But what about the rest of it?
As far as his own knowledge was concerned, he could only grant that their statements might be true. The position of the planets might affect the core of the sun. The enhanced radiation might cause changes in the volume of the earth's atmosphere. The extra moment of inertia might trigger crustal events.
But they were all mights; did three mights make a right? At this point Tib reached for his pocket calculator. He set minus 179 as a constant, since the authors had said that this position of the planets recurred every 179 years, and punched in the date 1982. As fast as he could copy them down he had a series of dates: 1803, 1624, 1445, 1266 ... at that point he stopped, because the records were not likely to be very complete that far back. If they were even in 1624. As soon as he got back to his computer he would start a search to find out if those dates were associated with abnormal earthquake years. If they were, the theory deserved investigation. If they were not—well, that was just one more example of the sort of thing Tib hated most.