He climbed the steps and reached out to touch the bright-colored spheres, smiling. Then he heard a sound from inside the house, and turned quickly to look in the picture window.
Inside the house Rainy Keating heard the phone ring, jumped out of the shower, grabbed a towel and ran for it. Too late. The ringing stopped just as she reached for the phone. She glowered mistily at the thing, fuzzy because she hadn't put her glasses on; Rainy was a telephone addict, and a missed call was more than an irritation, it was enough to spoil a day. She swore softly, and turned around just as something crashed with a terminal sound on the porch.
She snatched the towel around her and raced for the bathroom and her glasses. By the time she was peering through them around the bathroom door, what she saw was the ruin of her orrery dancing crazily from its hook, and the shape of a man disappearing down the steps— there were Peeping Toms in Puerto Rico, too! Really, it was too much. That insufferable grubby Cossack last night, and this interloper this morning. She had not been entirely pleased to come to Arecibo anyway, because its research in communication with extra-terrestrials was a little too close to the indiscretions of her youth. That gut feeling was now validated.
She dressed quickly, the bloom off her morning. In the shower she had been singing, but she didn't want to sing any more. Her mood had turned sour, quite unusual for a healthy young woman who knew she was good-looking and, usually, knew she was the luckiest person in the world. How many women in their mid-twenties—well, their latter twenties—had their own careers, and even their own spaceships? But Rainy had hers. Old, secondhand, lingering on by chance and the luck of the draw, but her own special project. It was what she had wanted since she was a little girl. Even if she hadn't known she wanted it, exactly, at first.
When Rainy was ten years old an aunt told her she was a Pisces. Little Rainy immediately perceived that a Pisces was about the best thing you could be. And all you had to do to be it was to be born at the right time of year! Her aunt had gone on to explain the influences of the planets to the alert little girl, and how important it was to understand them—not to change them, because you could not do that, but to guard against the baleful portents and enhance the good. For a whole year Rainy studied the astrology columns of the Los Angeles newspapers. She spent long hours calculating when she would allow herself to become pregnant with her first child, assuming she got married as planned at twenty-one, in order to bear the baby at the most favorable possible moment. It was of no small help to her grades in arithmetic.
Then, one day when she was eleven, the television was full of shocking news.
A spacecraft called Mariner had flown by Mars and photographed it at close range. It had transmitted pictures of a dry, empty landscape pocked with craters.
That was a moment of wrenching disillusionment for Rainy. The planets were not mystic flashlight bulbs in the sky, set there for the purpose of bathing the Earth with occult rays that seeped through clouds and storms, through the roofs of hospitals—even through the bulk of the whole Earth itself—to reach into each delivery room and mold the minds and destinies of squalling newborns. Mariner showed they were nothing of the sort. And as mission followed mission, the story grew always more grim. Mars was a rusty rock, airless and cold. Venus was hot poison gases smothering stone, Jupiter a dense swirl of refrigerating fluid, Mercury a cinder.
At first Rainy was furious. Then the sense of betrayal began to dissolve in wonder, then fascination. Astrology dropped out of her mind without a trace. But the planets themselves! The stars! Before she was fifteen she could pick out Orion's three-jeweled belt, the Pole Star, the great Summer Triangle and a dozen other asterisms. The Christmas of her sixteenth year was a great disappointment. The presents under the tree were well enough, but in the skies the comet Kohoutek was a washout. In her senior high-school year she dated the ugliest boy in class. He was the only one who owned a telescope, eight-inch mirror, hand-ground. When she lost her virginity it was in the hills of Griffith Park, to the only boy she knew who shared her every-week addiction to the planetarium.
At no time after twelve did Rainy doubt what her career would be—at least, not after discovering that she would have to wear glasses for most things, most of her life. NASA had this terrible bigotry which said that astronauts had to be able to pass pilot's vision tests. So that was out. Astronomy remained. If she couldn't go to the stars, at least she could devote her life to looking at them.
She got her B.Sc. at UCLA and her master's at Cal- tech in Pasadena. Her doctorate, or most of it, was also at Caltech just before she got her job, right up the hill at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Of course, her job had nothing to do with jets. Neither did JPL itself. What it had to do with was space. Deep space. The kind of space that the Mariners and Vikings and Explorers went out to touch, and smell, and listen to. The information they sent back came to Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and JPL monitored it and translated it and passed it on to the world.
Then the week Rainy was supposed to start her dissertation, one of JPL's principal scientists totaled himself on the Golden State Freeway. Her dissertation advisor sent her up the hill as soon as he got the news, to see about a part-time job as the scientist's replacement's assistant, and when she came dazedly down to say that she herself was the replacement her advisor was as astonished as she, and almost as thrilled.
But she had her own spaceship!
Its name was Newton-8, and it was a veteran of a highly successful mission. True, it was pretty well used up by now. It had done its basic program long since, flying by Jupiter and the asteroid belt and faithfully tattling what it saw. Now it was old. Parts of it were worn out, and it would never again, not in the billions of years of time before the Sun burned out, come close enough to a planet to use most of the instrumentation it still possessed.
But it would not die! It was still sending back reports. The one-millimeter radio transmitter still fed telemetry into the Deep Space Network. The meteoroid detector still picked up an impact every day or so. The helium- vector magnetometer, the flux gate magnetometer, and the imaging photopolarimeter had long since stopped recording, but where Newton-8 was there was not much for them to record.
And yet its fading vision continued to see radiation and dust clouds and it continued to report them to Earth— long after its life was supposed to be over. Its solar array still collected the dwindling, distant sunlight and transformed it into electricity to supplement the output of its aging nuclear power pack. Newton-8 was about the least of all possible spaceships to own. But it was hers, and that was what made her the luckiest person in the world—hers, at any rate, provided this joint committee of Congress allowed her to keep it.
But of course they would—she was JPL's prize exhibit, after all. Her mood improving, she picked lint off the lapel of her three-piece gray suit, squirted a dash of cologne on the white shirt under her tie and reached for the handle of the door, just as the phone rang again.