Syzygy

"All right," he said at last. "Now, I want you people to be seen. Move around. I want everybody to see you. I want you in the Century City mall, and I want you along the Strip, and I want you in front of the hotels so the tourists can get a look, and in the Farmer's Market, and out at the Bowl and Dodger stadium whenever anything's happening there, and I want you along the freeways in drive time."

"The cops'll chase us, Mr. Deere," Dennis objected.

"Let them chase you. You don't have to stay any one place very long, and you don't have to have too many people. Four or five's plenty. Two will do. Make sure nobody goes out until you know what they're going to do, though, and make sure they do it the way I showed you. I think the best way is single file, and keep on walking. Joel? Pick up the glasses, will you?"

Dennis and Saunders Robinson started to get to their feet again, but Danny detained them. "There's a couple more things," he said. "Don't get discouraged if nothing happens for a while. I figure two weeks just to get you seen all over, so everybody's used to having you around. Then we start the push. I'll put up the front money, but we got to raise the real scratch from other sources, not me. Am I bothering you?"

Saunders Robinson was studying the wall of signed photographs of people like Van Heflin and Audrey Hepburn, souvenirs of a quarter-century ago. He turned to Danny with complete self-possession. "No, you're not bothering me, Mr. Deere."

"Well, that's good, because I hate to think my talking interferes with you having a good time."

"I do have a suggestion, Mr. Deere," the black man said. "I think the clothes we wear should reflect hot colors— fire, flames, volcano. Red and yellow and orange, I think."

Deere looked at him silently for a moment. "Yeah," he said at last. "All right. That's good. No blue jeans, no fatigues, no O.D.s. All you people probably have something that will do, I don't care what—shorts, slacks, tank- tops, T-shirts, anything. Except the girls, anyway. You get some pretty little girls with nice builds, they can wear tight shorts, but those big fat mommas I saw at the hotel got to wear muumuus. You got that?"

"I have a suggestion too, Danny," the bearded one said. "Did I tell you about my grandmother?"

"What the hell do I want with your grandmother?"

"She's a professor at Caltech," Dennis said. "Senator Pedigrue's brother offered her a job to investigate the Jupiter Effect."

Danny scowled thoughtfully. "All by herself?"

"I don't know, Danny. I don't think so."

"Well, for God's sake, find out! And find out what she's going to say, and when she's going to say it! That could be kind of interesting, kid," he finished, more to himself than to Dennis Siroca.

He opened the door. "Let's see you do that shuffle out of here," he ordered. It was always useful to know just how far you could push a person; he expected an argument, if not outright refusal. He didn't get it. He got a quick look of anger, but from the white guy, not the nigger. Saunders Robinson did not even turn around; he just began the shuffle, whispering the chant to himself, as he moved down the hall toward the staircase. After a moment Dennis Siroca shrugged and followed him and, satisfied, Danny went into the pantry next to his office, where Joel de Lawrence was typing with two fingers. He interrupted himself to display the glasses Robinson and Siroca had used, lifting them by spreading his fingers inside. On the outside was a fine set of fingerprints, brought out by the garden-mister de Lawrence had sprayed them with. "I'm just making out the cards, Danny," he said. "You want me to run the prints through Lieutenant Pachman?"

"Nah, it isn't worth it—yet," Danny said. "Just keep them around. And don't get the labels mixed up."

In Siroca's VW beetle Robinson lit a joint and passed it to Dennis. "How much did you get?"

"Fifty dollars a day for you and me, twenty-five for the full-timers. Ten bucks each for anybody who goes out on the street."

"Shit, man, what can you do with ten bucks?"

"Well, I told him that, Saun. He told me forget it. He told me he was giving us the ashram rent-free, and he was going to go for a five-thou investment, and that was all; after that we have to support ourselves."

"Figures, man. Did he say how?"

"I think he'll come up with something, Saun. Anyway, I've got an idea. Know where we can score some good dope?"

Robinson scowled at the joint. "What's wrong with this?"

"No, I mean at least a key. We can pay the troops off in dope instead of money."

Robinson took a long hit, considering. "Yeah, that's a good idea. I thought you were the pot expert?"

"I don't want to go back to my connections, Saun, they're pretty heavy now."

"All right, I guess I know who to talk to. You coming to see Feef? She's asking about you. "

"Not today, Saun. I'm heading out for the Valley. Any place you want me to drop you?" He passed the joint back to Robinson, who took a roach clip out of the glove compartment; they finished the joint, and then Robinson got out at a shopping center and Dennis Siroca turned toward one of the ravine roads. As he stopped for a light a couple of bikers roared up behind and yelled something at him. He didn't look around, just turned enough so they could see his beard. Dennis was slim and fair, and when he wore his sulfur-yellow hair pulled back in a leather thong studs were always hitting on him from behind. So at twenty he had tried cutting that down by growing the beard, and then the situation had reduced itself to an amusement.

In his twenty-some years Dennis had had time for three years of college—well, call it two years, one semester and a couple of incompletes. When he went he did well, even stoned, even tripping through classes for a week at a time. He couldn't see a point in going, though, except to please his grandparents. At twenty-two he stopped going at all. A little bit, it was money. The scholarships stopped coming when he stopped attending regularly, and he had objections to taking money from his grandfather. Then, after the second winter up among the redwoods, he had plenty of money—more than eighty thousand dollars in twenty- and fifty-dollar bills in a safe-deposit box in Pasadena. But he couldn't see the point of that, either.

Dennis had never taken a drug arrest, much less a conviction, but they'd had him for shoplifting in Medford, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he was still on probation for resisting arrest in ibullas. He hadn't resisted. He just hadn't got out of the way fast enough when a gay-rights demonstration he was watching from the sidelines got maumaued by some up-tight citizens and the police moved in. Dennis had nothing against the police. They did their job. He didn't want the job himself, and didn't blame the people who did want it for being the kind of people who would. Dennis was religiously non-violent. That was why he'd given up the profitable, socially admirable and ecologically sound profession of marijuana farming up among the big trees in Humboldt County. The hijackers were not at all non-violent. When one of his neighbors bought an AK-47 and Dennis heard it being fired, he harvested his crop, drove it to Eureka, made a left turn and kept on going. In Los Angeles he took the first offer for the load and retired from the business.

Dennis disliked freeways, and so his trip over the mountains and through the developments to grandmother's house took nearly an hour. As he got to the intersection where the road his grandparents lived on began to wind down from the hillside, he stopped the car and closed his eyes. Twenty minutes of meditation was always useful. Dennis had done a lot of exploring in his fairly short lifetime. In between schooling and dealing and wandering, he had had a relationship with the Hare Krishnas, and a flirtation with the Moonies, two months of Scientology, and a sort of step-sister course in est—his old lady spent three hundred dollars for the weekend, and came home to give it to him second-hand for free. Of them all, the only one he still had any confidence in was Transcendental Meditation—not counting, of course, the Jupiter Terror. And that he had all too much confidence in. He had no doubt at all. No doubt that it would happen, and no doubt that it was well deserved by a human race that had forgotten how to be gentle.