In the middle of their large double bed (count your blessings, he thought—that was a present from her mother; she could have taken the bed, too) was a neatly hand printed list of the items she and Don had removed, and on it the keys to the door.
And that was all that was left of Wendy Sonderman.
Tib went back to the kitchen and looked at the refrigerator without opening it. It had been his intention to take something out of the freezer for dinner, but he discovered that his appetite was gone—his appetite for eating alone, at least. It was getting late, too. He shrugged and went down to the lower level.
He did not bother to take a census of what was gone. Nearly everything in the basement was unarguably his own, anyway, and if Wendy had found a few pieces to remove their absence was not at once evident. He entered his private room and sat down in front of the computer; might as well do some work.
But that wasn't going to be easy. For some reason the nets were busy and he had to wait for computer time. Twice a minute the little golfball zipped across the page to say LOGON PROCEEDING, but after fifteen minutes of sitting there he had not yet been able to log on, much less get anything done.
And it was getting less interesting all the time.
He wondered what Rainy Keating was doing. Probably there had been some developments in their committee while he was away. He really ought to call her. He picked up the phone and dialed her number, and got a busy signal. He tried again, rehearsing the things he would say to her—"Hello, Rainy, listen, I've been thinking we ought to get together" or, "Hey, Rainy, is anything new?" Or just, "Hello," and see where the conversation led from there.
But an hour later—it was past ten o'clock and the little golfball was still zipping out a LOGON PROCEEDING every thirty seconds—her telephone at last did ring and she was on the phone; and what he said was, "I'm lonesome."
In a typical year the United States eases its balance of payment by exporting about one hundred million tons of grain, for which it receives tens of billions of dollars. It is its largest export item in dollars, though not in volume.
For each ton of grain it exports it also exports two or three tons of topsoil, through erosion, to the Gulf of Mexico.
Wednesday, December 23d. 6:05 PM.
When the door closed behind the latest pair of Feds, Rainy looked at her watch and moaned softly. Where had the day gone? For two weeks her time had been fully taken. If it wasn't interviews for jobs that she was not going to get it was interviews with these opaque-faced people from various branches of government whom she didn't want to see in the first place. And still, now and then, news reporters. Those she could shut off, sometimes, but the Feds were not under her control. What the Russian cosmonaut had said had come up close enough to true. Perhaps you could not call these men in gray suits with American-flag pins in their lapels "secret police", but they were as close as she wanted to come to the real thing. CIA, F.B.I., Military Intelligence, ONI—she had seen them all. It was getting so she hated to answer the telephone, and for Rainy Keating that was nearly a terminal condition. The questions became more sophisticated as the agents grew more practiced. Still, they always came to the same thing: What had she done wrong? And she had no answer!
And, between times, there was the work of the commission.
It had seemed simple enough when she took it on. A few meetings. The development of a protocol. A literature search, and then a simple program to map correlations: under similar conditions in the past: had the predicted events actually occurred? That was the sort of thing you could turn over to a computer, or at least to an assistant.
Well, that hadn't worked out; Tommy Pedigrue had proved surprisingly stubborn about assistants. It was a matter of budgets, he explained. Her honorarium, like Tib's and Meredith Bradison's, was paid out of the private Pedigrue Foundation's money, and there was just so much of that. Computer time, on the other hand, could be run up against the limitless credit of his brother's United States Senate committee. Computer, si; payroll, no.
No matter, the job still had seemed easy enough. But it refused to get done! Too late she realized they were up against one of the fundamental axioms of the scientific methodology. It is impossible to prove a negative. It was not hard to prove that the predicted events hadn't happened under similar conjunctions of the planets in the past. But they could find no way to prove that, this time, they wouldn't.
And, every day, the pressure was growing to provide an answer. The Jupes were everywhere, with their blacked- out faces and flame-red clothes, and even sensible people were beginning to ask questions. Especially when every crackpot in the western world seemed to be descending on Los Angeles to capitalize on the panic.
"Panic" was perhaps a little too strong a word, Rainy conceded to herself. There was still a lot of skepticism, and plenty of jokes—Johnny Carson's monologue had a dozen new ones every night. But underneath the jokes there was worry.
It was like breaking a mirror. Rational people did not believe in bad luck. But even rational people were more careful with mirrors than with other kinds of glass.
There was another consideration, and a scary one. Rainy herself was beginning to worry.
It had not occurred to her that she was becoming a convert, but that kook, Meredith Bradison's grandson, had noticed it in her before she had seen it in herself. The man seemed always to be hanging around, watching and asking questions, and when he told her he thought she was beginning to take the danger seriously Rainy snapped at him. "I do not believe in your Nostradamus, or your Jupiter Effect, or your Edgar Cayce, or the tooth fairy!" Then honesty had made her add, "But I admit I'm beginning to think about what might happen. A lot." It was true. She looked at the foundations of buildings now before she entered them. Like everyone in Los Angeles, Rainy knew perfectly well that the danger of earthquakes existed. Everyone knew that death existed, too. With practice, you learned not to remember that.
But you could not not remember earthquakes when you were spending ten and twenty hours a week with a man who knew every subterranean crack in California by name. The tectonic plates came alive in her mind. Great stiff slabs of grease, floating on cold soup. When they touched, the edges crumpled and crumbled. As she drove around the city she looked up at the hills and imagined them thrust high and toppling, the buildings shaking themselves to rubble. . . .
It was, after all, certain to happen—some day.
Part of Rainy's job was to counteract the cries of wolf from the lunatic fringe. That meant she had to talk to the news media—i.e., to seek out people she was anxious to avoid—and then to try so to steer the discussions that they did not ask her again about her satellite, while trying at the same time not to reveal her own growing disquiet. She left public relations as much as possible to Tib and Meredith Bradison—even better, to Tommy Pedigrue, who blossomed under press attention at any time. But when Tommy was in Washington, and Tib and Meredith were busy at something else, it was up to her. So she had spent all the afternoon explaining simple planetary ballistics to two feature writers. Then the gray men from the federal government had dropped in—"Just one or two questions, Mrs. Keating, to fill in the picture"—and the moment when one of them stopped at the door to wish her a Merry Christmas was the moment when it first became clear to her that the next day was Christmas Eve.