"No, Tink but—damn it, it's late!"
"Well, I knew you were awake, because I've been getting a busy signal for the last hour. I just wanted to thank you for this evening—"
"You're welcome, Tinker. Good night, Tinker. Merry Christmas." Civility to an ex-mate could make excessive demands on a person, she thought, and then remembered that she had started to touch up her hair and hadn't finished. She fled to the bathroom. By the time she had dealt with the emergency it was the doorman on the house phone, announcing her guest Tib Sonderman. "Oh, God," she said, "send the son of a bitch up."
Rainy lived in an immense apartment complex, eleven hundred units altogether, perched on the side of a hill. It would have had a fine view of the valley at night if it weren't for the smog, and also if it weren't for the fact that most of the units looked directly into the windows of the units across the court. Tib parked his car in the wrong lot and took a while to find the right building, and then the doorman kept him waiting while he checked with Rainy Keating. Maybe this was a bad idea, he thought; but then the doorman waved him in and he was committed.
As Tib navigated his way to Level B, Apartment Eight, he smelled a dozen varieties of recent cooking in the halls, heard all seven audio channels of TV and a selection of pop, rock, classical and all-news radio stations and got invited to two Christmas parties. The second one, which had spilled over into the hall, was only a few doors from Rainy's apartment. For a moment Tib thought some of the guests were about to follow him in.
So did Rainy, as she opened the door and looked over his shoulder. She let him in quickly and closed the door behind him. "This wasn't such a good idea, Tib," she said, obviously making an effort to be polite. "If I'd been thinking I would have asked for a rain check."
"Have you been having a bad day?"
"Christ! You don't know. Listen, come in and sit down." She pointed to a chair and took one herself, across the room. "I've been having more trouble with the Feds," she said, and told him about the phone conversation with Margie Bewdren.
"That's partly why I wanted to see you—no," he corrected himself, "there is no reason to lie to you. I wanted to see you because, as I said, I was lonesome. But as I was leaving I remembered. " He pulled a sheaf of offprints out of his pocket and handed them to her. "My friend Wes Grierson thought you would find these interesting." He hesitated, and then shrugged. "He thought that two weeks ago. But I forgot."
She took the papers from him, glanced at them absently, and then frowned. "Did you look at these things?" she asked.
"Yes, of course. It is not my field. They seem to be about gravitational focusing of starlight by the sun."
"Did you look at the date?"
She was holding the first of the Xeroxes out to him; before the date he noticed the name signed to it—Albert Einstein! And the year was 1936!
It was not like Grierson to play practical jokes, but Tib said uncomfortably, "I apologize if I am wasting your time—"
"Oh, hell, Tib. Sit down. Make us both a drink, will you? Canadian whiskey and ginger ale for me—not too strong." She was speaking absently, her attention on the papers. Sonderman took off his coat, found ice in the freezer, made Rainy a mild highball and himself a plain ginger ale and sat down on the couch, looking around her apartment. Apartment was too strong a word. It was one room, really, and he had a conviction that the couch he was sitting on opened out to become her bed. But it was comfortable looking. Almost all new. At least she had not looted her ex-husband's home!
"Hey, Tib," she said at last, pushing her glasses up over her hair. "I think I know what your friend was talking about. Not the Einstein paper itself; that's pretty out of date, but the later papers—especially the one by this fellow named Von Eshleman at Stanford. What do you know about relativistic physics?"
"Zero," Tib said honestly. "Near enough, anyway. Say zero."
"Well—" she fished in a drawer of the desk for a pencil—"here's the thing. Einstein said that light had mass, you know that much, right? That's the famous experiment of 1919 that confirmed relativity, when the eclipse expedition found that starlight coming around the sun was bent—focused, like a lens—just as he predicted."
"That was a lot earlier than 1936," Tib objected.
"Right, and then Einstein had some afterthoughts. If you're looking past the sun at another star—assuming there's an eclipse or something so the sunlight doesn't drown it all out—then the light gets deflected all around it. The gravitational field of the sun becomes a sort of spherical lens—a telescope. This is the Eshleman formula."
Tib moved to the arm of her chair to peer down at what she was scribbling:
"I'll take your word for it," he said. "Unless you want to tell me what the Xs and Is are."
Rainy grinned. "I'm taking his word for it, or at least I am until I get back to JPL. But what it comes down to is that the sun focuses millimeter radiation to a point. Radiation from another star—wait a minute." She sketched rapidly again:
"There's your distant star, there's the sun, and there's my poor old Newton! Right at the focal point, in syzygy with the other two bodies!"
"What's 'syzygy'? And which star are you talking about?"
She put down the Flair and stared thoughtfully at the diagram. "Syzygy just means they're in line, and I don't know which star—that's easy enough to check, though. I think it would have to be a fairly bright one, maybe an A- or an F-type star at least. And not too far away. A hundred light-years or so? There aren't really bright ones much closer than that. ..." She shook her head. "Anyway, at that point in the diagram the radiation is so focused that it's like holding a piece of paper under a magnifying glass. My poor little spaceship would suddenly be right in the middle of a heat ray! Except for one thing, it fits the facts just fine. The shorter the wavelength, the better the focusing. Right under the millimeter microwave is infra-red— heat! So we got some sort of squeal on the radio receiver at the one-millimeter length, and then the heat began to build up and burned out the spaceship! It wouldn't really have to burn. It had those photovoltaic sails—the way it generated part of its energy, from sunlight. A sudden concentrated burst of heat would overload them; they weren't built for it. Only ..."
She fell silent, staring at the paper.
"Only what?" Tib prompted.
"Only it's in the wrong place! According to Eshleman, the nearest focal point is 550 A.U. out—five hundred and fifty times the distance of the earth from the sun. Way outside the orbit of Pluto. And Newton wasn't anywhere near that far." She brightened. "But, what the hell, maybe Eshleman made a mistake in his arithmetic! Or even if he didn't—"
"He didn't," Tib said. "The offprint's from Science. It's been refereed."
"I know that! But even if he didn't, it's at least something to show the Feds. Get them off my back. Maybe get the idea that the Russians did it out of their heads. Tib! This calls for another drink!"
Since Tib was not really sure of his motives in visiting Rainy, it was confusing to him that he felt somehow frustrated. She was friendly enough. But her mind was on her satellite, and she excused herself to spend some time at her desk. Tib turned on the television and browsed through her slim library. Either she was not a reader or she hadn't acquired many books since the separation from her husband. It was not clear in Tib's mind just how recent that event was. Or, for that matter, how real. Half the couples he knew spent half their lives moving out on each other; he and Wendy had been a curiosity in their social circle for having had only one definitive split.