The workshop did not look like a workshop. For that matter, the door didn't look like a door. It looked like a bookshelf, and was, except that the rows of books just next to the wet bar were not books. Sonderman reached up to the top shelf and hooked a finger to the top of the binding of the fattest of the fakes. It gave under the pressure of his fingers, unlatching the door, and he pulled the whole thing open.
The hidden entrance wasn't Sonderman's idea, but it had appealed to him. He was away nearly half the time, and there was no one to watch the house when he was gone. Although there was not a great deal of crime in Studio City, there were neighbors who had come home to find their TV sets and stereos gone. Sonderman didn't worry about that. There was always insurance. But insurance did not cover his papers, his instruments, his little computer; so, when the woman he was dating for a while, an interior decorator, had offered to put the secret door in, he was delighted. The woman was long gone, like all the others he had gone with after the divorce. But the door remained.
The room behind it, as always, looked like a mess. The every-Thursday cleaning service never entered this room. They didn't even know it existed. Every flat surface was covered with books and papers, and folded lengths of computer printouts were on the floor next to his desk and behind his chair, convenient to reach when he wanted them. His small seismograph was slowly turning its paper roll beside one wall; his file cabinets stood against another, half the drawers partly open and papers protruding from cocked folders. Sonderman sat down before his terminal, picked up the dedicated phone, dialed a number, heard the computer squeal that said he had a connection, and placed the handset in its acoustic coupler. A green light went on next to the keyboard, and he typed:
LOGON
330105056
ARCHIMANDRITE
Having given the machine the information that he was ready to receive mail, his numerical address, and the code word that said he was really himself, he got up and began to unpack his briefcase.
At this time of night there was seldom much competition for the shared-time services of the net. The terminal began to deliver his messages at once. Sonderman let them accumulate on the cathode screen until it was full, then decided to get them all at once afld punched out a set of instructions. The machine responded immediately by printing out hard copy on a long roll of paper.
Sonderman thumbed through his mail. His pay check. A handful of bills. A postcard from his ex-wife—this time she was in Nogales, Mexico, doing heaven knew what and with heaven knew whom. A set of admission badges and speakers' instructions for the forthcoming American Scientific Federation meeting. (Did that mean his paper had been accepted? Or was it just that one hand of any bureaucracy never knows what the other is doing?) Four journals, six offprints of papers, and, of course, the usual dozen or two advertising pieces.
He sorted it out while he waited for the printer to finish his electronic mail. The junk mail he simply tipped into the brown-paper supermarket bag he used for a wastebasket, except for one that bore the return address of Danny Deere, Ltd., a real-estate agency. The little house that he had paid thirty-eight thousand dollars for nine years before had been going up in value ever since, and one of the amusements of Tib Sonderman's life was to look at the blind offers from realtors that came every week or so— fifty thousand, sixty thousand, eighty-five thousand; the last one he had seen had offered a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. Almost, he had been tempted to sell, but in this mad Los Angeles real-estate market what could he buy? But there was a limit to resisting temptation.
As he started to open the envelope the printer announced it was finished, and Sonderman ran through the paper printout.
The thing that had taken the most time was a lengthy report from the U.S. Geological Survey on earth movements along some of the northern branches of the San Andreas; nothing important, but he clipped it and carefully folded it for the pile behind his chair. There was not much else except for chatter—people on the teletype net calling him for transient errands, none of them seeming important—until he came to the last item. Wes Grierson must have got right to it, and his computers must have been hunting all the time Tib was en route from Los Angeles International. There was a list of twenty-six citations for The Jupiter Effect. Sonderman clipped the paper roll and was about to throw it in the wastebasket; he had lost interest in the subject when Grierson told him the principal author had changed his mind. Then he caught sight of a postscript from Grierson:
DID YOU EVER FIGURE OUT WHAT WENT WRONG WITH YOUR GIRL FRIEND'S SPACESHIP? SEE SCIENCE V 84 P 506.
Sonderman hesitated. He probably had that issue somewhere in the house—volume 84 was probably only three or four years ago, and he kept nearly all of them. But Rainy Whatever-her-name-was was certainly not his girl friend, and he had relatively little interest in what had gone wrong with her ship. Sonderman dropped the whole wad into the waste bag and stood over it, with the ad from the real-estate company, ready to do the same with that as soon as he had satisfied his curiosity about the offer.
It wasn't an offer, however. It was a little note, and all it said was,
Dear Mr. Sonderman:
Because of the softening of the home market due to apprehension over the possibility of a major earthquake within the next few months, we regret that we must withdraw the offer we made recently for your property.
Very sincerely yours, DANNY DEERE LTD.
How very strange! Didn't these people know that the whole thing was some sort of mistake? Was it possible they were still taking it seriously? Sonderman shook his head, and tossed the realtor's letter after the citation list.
Then, thoughtfully, he bent down and took them both out of the trash again.
In a grassy river valley in southern Washington State, a young woman heard her husband calling. She ran to join him at the end of a long trench, with Mount Saint Helens looming above them. They had dug every inch of it themselves, over a period of nearly a hundred weekends and two summer vacations. He had just uncovered the license plate of a car. It was the one her parents had been in when they disappeared after the eruption.
Saturday, December 5th. 2:20 PM.
The airport was hung with wreaths and Yule bells; the stores along Century Boulevard had their Christmas decorations up; even La Canada High School had a Christmas tree. Rainy could not make herself feel Christmasy. She drove straight through to the laboratory, flashed her badge at the guard, parked at the far end of the employees' lot, and slipped in to her office. Nobody saw her come in but department secretary doing some overtime word-processing. That was the way she wanted it. She was feeling threatened and harried.
There was a thick sheaf of pink telephone messages clipped to her desk blotter. It was a measure of Rainy's mood that she didn't want to look at them. She knew what they would be. The pressure had started right after Newton-8 had gone silent. Every newsperson in Arecibo crowded around, the whole afternoon session interrupted; it had been pure hell. The most she could say was that she had managed not to cry. Apart from that, total loss, and it didn't get better. The next morning, when everyone else was getting ready to leave, more reporters arrived and she had to hold a news conference. When she finally tore loose from the observatory, it was too late to make her plane. So she got a ride into San Juan and checked into a motel. She spent the whole afternoon in the pool, gloriously; nobody knew where she was. Then she sneaked onto the first flight the next morning—