She swallowed the last of her coffee and called for the check. "You do have a charming way of putting things," she said.
He looked at her in astonishment. "Have I offended you again?"
"I've got to get to my panel. I'm a respondent, so I'd better hear what I'm responding to."
He sat back despondently. "I have offended you," he said.
"Oh, not unbearably," she conceded. "It's just that I've been Xeroxing my vita and sending out two or three hundred copies of it—and I guess I'm a little edgy."
"Very understandable!" He steered her to the cashier. "I hope you won't mind if I come to hear your panel?"
"It's not exactly your line, is it?"
"Oh, no, but I thought—" He stopped, then paid the check and pulled her along by the elbow. "I must be truthful," he said. "I came here only because I wished to see you again. To apologize." It didn't come easy to him, Rainy saw; the expression on his face was more suited to a declaration of war than an apology. "Although," he added stubbornly, "speaking purely in general terms, I must say that I have not changed my opinion about the unequal treatment society gives men in certain sorts of relationships—"
She stopped and peered into his face. Finally she laughed. "You're a wonder, you know that? Listen, I accept your apology, so don't spoil it. Let's get to the meeting."
It was a dull panel, but a crowded one. The reason was obvious. The next program event in this room was to be a discussion of the so-called Jupiter Effect. Even though Tib and Rainy got there a minute or two before it was supposed to begin, all the good seats—the ones near the door, where you could get up and leave without any trouble if you didn't like what you were hearing—were already taken. Tib Sonderman followed Rainy down the center aisle. While she went on to the platform, he slid over to one of the few remaining empty seats, far to one side, in the second row.
According to the program, there were going to be six papers, all of them astronomical and none of them of the slightest interest to Tib Sonderman. He could not really see that they would be all that interesting to, for example, Lev Mihailovitch, the Russian cosmonaut who had apparently come to the meeting principally to be interviewed on American television. Like all cosmonauts, he was fairly short, not very young, but as polished in his public appearances as any NASA spaceman. And there were others whose specialties, he knew, were nowhere near X-ray sources in the Pleiades, or a possible new anomalous supernova. Tib knew why he was there. It was because he was enjoying the company of this attractive young woman who—at the moment, at least—appeared to enjoy his.
The longer the program went, the more crowded the room became. There was still a scattering of seats in the first row or two, but the reason was that the people coming into the room could not get to them. Capacity of the room was posted at 220 persons, but there were more than that standing at the back, sitting in the aisles, squeezed two to a chair near the doors. It was getting uncomfortably hot, and when the last speaker called for the lights to be turned out so he could show his slides, Sonderman was grateful that one heat source was extinguished.
It didn't help. Tib was sweating profusely, and wondering whether it was really worth staying in this tedious sauna. The speaker was feeling the strain too, because he was hurrying his presentation. His principal slide was a batch of black dots on a white background, and with his red laser pointer the speaker indicated one dot, tinier than the others. "This," he said, "is the anomalous object. It does not appear to be an artifact of photography—next slide—and in this other negative print, made with the multiple mirror telescope at Mount Hopkins, the same object appears. There." The laser pointed out another dot in a cloud of random dots. "We have no spectroscopy on this object. We have no other data of any kind. If it is in fact a nova, it is probably the shortest-lived ever observed. It does not appear on the plates we made the next night at UKIRT of the same section of the sky, nor in any plates made at any other reporting observatory. Except for one dubious short-exposure plate from Herstmonceux, and even electronic enhancement does not give a definite confirmation of that one. If it weren't for the Mount Hopkins confirmation I'd write it off. But there it is. Lights, please."
The projectionist turned off the slide machine and the room lights came back on. In just the five minutes of darkness the audience had added another thirty or forty people, and there was something about the look and bearing of most of them that did not say "scientist". They didn't act in the generally orderly, sometimes lethargic manner of scientists coming to a panel, either. A dozen of them were pushing determinedly along the sides of the room, and one, a bustly little man with a shock of close- cropped hair, pushed right through the row to the seat next to Tib. He was not evidently a part of the other group, who seemed younger and far worse dressed; in fact they looked like the paper-airplane pilots from the lobby. The speaker, drumming his fingers on the lectern, waited a moment for the noise to subside and then finished. "Now, what do we call it? A nova? Possibly a collision between a previously unidentified black hole and a small, dense gas cloud? A completely different event of some kind? I don't know. If anybody has a speculation to offer, I'd like to listen. And if there are any questions, I'll try to answer them."
The newcomer next to Tib Sonderman jumped to his feet, and in that moment Tib identified him. It was Danny Deere, the real-estate man, caught out of the corner of Tib's eye a dozen times a week in his TV commercials, while Tib was letting his subconscious worry at a problem as he played solitaire in front of the tube. "Sure, I have a question," Deere cried. "Is it true that the planet Jupiter is going to dump us all into the Pacific Ocean? And when does it happen?"
Alaska's Columbia glacier is the only one in North America that is not retreating, but it is about to do so. Because of its position on the shoreline it will not melt harmlessly. It will calve chunks of itself in the form of icebergs. Each berg will average about a fifth of a mile in diameter. About 100,000 of them will spill into the sea each summer, near the shipping lanes of the Alaskan oil tankers.
Tuesday, December 8th. 7 7:70 AM.
What a disaster! Tommy Pedigrue stood on tiptoes to try to see what was going on in the meeting room. He couldn't see. He could hear, though, and it sounded like a catfight instead of an orderly gathering of dispassionate scientists. Pure disaster. The worst part was that his father had told him to attend the Jupiter meeting. Well, he had tried! But there had been such a terrible crush. Tommy Pedigrue did not like being caught in masses of humanity—unless they were assembled to hear him, or his brother. He didn't like it all that much even then, but there was at least a profit to be gained from cases like that.
From this? He fidgeted back and forth, trying to make up his mind. According to the program, this panel was supposed to be on some rag-tags of astronomical stuff, of no interest at all, really; but cannily Tommy had schemed to sit in on this one to make sure of having a seat for the one that followed. That was the one on the Jupiter Effect, and that was the one that his father wanted him to cover. But he had not been the only person with that idea. The place was packed! Not just scientists, or anyway not just the kind of scientists that he was used to have coming to him and his brother with their begging bowls. The Russian cosmonaut was there, the governor's science advisor was there, there was even a young woman Tommy recognized as a talent scout for the Johnny Carson show there!