Thirty yards away, the noise from the hotel lobby was only a murmur. Nobody was following. They were both breathing heavily. Several flights of stairs, two or three bridges, a couple of laps around the circular balconies; it had been a pretty good workout for both of them. "Yeah," said Robinson, peering down the passage. "What's comin' down now, Denny? We goin' back in there?"
"Not right this minute," Dennis conceded. "I dunno." He fished a joint out of his breast pocket and lit it, passing it to Robinson while he thought. There had not been much of a plan past the distribution of the circulars, but that had been such a resounding success that he was reluctant to let it stop there. The demonstration had been as much his idea as anybody else's, but that didn't give him any particular powers of leadership. The little event in Arecibo had been wholly unplanned; he was there because his old lady dealt a little drugs on the side and was scouting out East Coast supplies so she could pay her tuition when she went back to college next year. But the papers and the TV newscasts had used the pictures. Which suggested doing something like it again. Which had gone over big at the ashram. But none of them had thought much beyond the leaflets.
Robinson had moved cautiously down the corridor to see if anyone was coming their way. Returning, he reported, "Nothin' happening. Look, man. I ought to see how Afeefah's doin . "
"She's okay at the ashram, man. "
"Yeah, well, you know, I got to get things goin', you understand what I'm saying?"
Dennis nodded and then remembered. He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket. "Hey, this old dude gave me this telephone number. He said there'd be some bread in it."
"Yeah?" Robinson peered at the number, but it told him nothing. "For what, man?"
"He didn't say," Dennis confessed. "He was wearing a chauffeur's cap. Maybe some rich guy wants us for something?"
"For what?"
"Now, how the hell would I know? I'm just saying he said there was bread in it." Robinson looked irresolute, and Dennis pressed. "Let's give it a shot, okay?" Robinson shrugged. "Tell you what. Let's take a run around the hotel and see if any of the brothers and sisters are hanging around." He led the way out to the escalator, and Robinson followed. "If we did go back in," he schemed, "we better not try using those badges any more. They could bust us for that, maybe."
"Then we'll never get in!"
"Oh, yeah, we can. We can go down through the shopping center and cut in through the garage."
"Yeah? For what, man?"
"Well, we could—hey, hold it." There was a black and white at the Flower Street entrance to the hotel, with two city cops talking seriously to four young men and women. They glanced at Dennis and Robinson as they passed and then looked away, and Dennis and Robinson detoured around them. At the corner they paused and looked back. "They're not going to do anything," Dennis decided. "If it was a bust they'd be in the car by now."
"Hey, look. " Robinson pointed to the parked cars down the block, where a couple of heads were sticking cautiously above the car hoods to keep an eye on what was going on.
"Yeah, there's at least a dozen of us that got out," Dennis agreed. "I think we ought to go in again."
"Oh, man." Robinson shook his head. "Hey, Dennis? You takin' this stuff serious?"
Dennis looked at him with astonishment. "What kind of a question is that? It's the end of the world, isn't it?"
"Well, now, man, the book say it is."
"All the books do!" Dennis shook his head. "No, it's for real, ol' buddy. We got four or five months, maybe, and then it's right down the toilet. "
Robinson looked at him wonderingly. "Hey, I got to ask you something. You really believe that, why you here? Why din t you stay a thousand miles away?"
Dennis scratched his beard. Finally he said, "What would be the use? What would there be to stay alive for?"
Out in the direction of the constellation Virgo, but much farther away than the stars that composed it, a star ten times the mass of the sun had reached the end of its helium-burning period. Its core was poisoned with the iron it had manufactured, and it had no lighter elements left to fuse. The reactions slowed. The energy output of the core dropped. Radiation pressure no longer was enough to hold the immense mass of surrounding gases away, and they plummeted in. In less than half an hour the star collapsed on itself. The release of gravitational energy that resulted blew the star apart. It was a supernova, the most violent event any star can experience. In one burst of energy all the medium-weight elements in the core were hammered into all of the heavier elements, and the fierce plasma exploded into the galaxy.
Tuesday, December 8th. 10:35 AM.
With half an hour before her panel was to begin, Rainy realized she had forgotten to eat anything. The lobby coffee shop was, thankfully, uncrowded; she got a salad and a cup of tea, and was just finishing them when she realized somebody was standing next to her. "Miz Keating, what a pleasure!" he said. "May I join you?"
"Dr. Sonderman," she said. It wasn't either yes or no, but he took it for permission. He ordered coffee from the waitress and said politely, "Another interesting demonstration of stupidity just now, don't you agree? "
Actually she did; but there was something about the man that pushed her negative-reflex buttons. "I think they have a right to express their opinions," she said. "There is no opinion involved, Miz Keating!" "Really? But I understood there was a certain amount of evidence that the Jupiter effect might be real. "
"Not in the least! As to the book, yes, perhaps; but these loonies are not scientists. ... I think," he said gloomily, "that I am coming on too strongly again. It is a bad habit of mine. Please excuse it. "
She looked at him with a little less hostility. "Are you on the program?" she asked politely.
"Oh, yes," he said vaguely, and then amplified. "It is always a good idea to be present at this sort of affair, of course." He shrugged as though the rest of the thought need not be said, and actually it needn't. Like everything in the world of practicing scientists, attending meetings like this was an investment. You interrupted your real work to fill out grant applications, and to sit in on faculty senate meetings, and to go to Arecibo to plead before a senatorial committee, and to come here to be seen. It was part of the job. Science was not just a matter of finding facts and assembling them into theories. It was big business. A single space shot cost as much as a hospital. A particle accelerator could use up as much tax money as a municipal library system. To both Tib Sonderman and Rainy Keating, as to almost all scientists, there was no question that the money for science needed to be spent. But the people who turned on the money spigots did not always agree. They always had decisions to make, this program or that, basic science or bigger welfare payments, a new astronomical observatory or a new bomber. Sonderman believed that if he could divert one major appropriation from, say, subsidizing sorghum farmers to geophysical research, he would have done as much for the systematic acquisition of knowledge as a Kepler or a Becquerel. . . . But of course, it was not for that sort of thing that you got your name in the textbooks. "And yourself?" he asked. "I have heard that your grant has been terminated?"
"The whole world's heard," she said bitterly.
"Please, don't worry. You'll connect. There must be two hundred Equal Opportunity Employers anxious to bring their statistics up to meet the guidelines. A female astronomer is a marketable commodity—of course, it would be better if you were black or Hispanic."