Nevertheless she was feeling this sense of loss, and it was not the loss of Myrna, it was the loss of a kind of innocence. And not just her own. Los Angeles was an itchy sort of city at best, too big to be a community, too sprawling to unite on any ground except the common contempt for everyone who had not had the wit to move there. It was itchier than ever now. Not terror. Not even belief, in spite of the hundreds of people you saw walking around with smudges of black on their foreheads, copying the Jupes. They were not really believing, just displaying that itchy, resentful concern. Rainy put the vacuum cleaner away and began to fill the mister for her plants, wishing Tib would get there so she could talk to him about it.
When the doorbell rang she was more astonished than pleased; how had he got past the doorman?
But it wasn't Tib. "Good evening, Mrs. Keating," said the taller of the F.B.I, men, "may we come in?"
He didn't wait for an answer, just brushed past; of course, they hadn't let any doorman deflect them from the swift completion of their appointed rounds! "Come in," she said to their backs. "You know, I was kind of hoping I was through with you guys."
"Not just yet, Mrs. Keating," the short one smiled, shaking off his raincoat on the rug she had just vacuumed.
"You could have called first."
"No, we couldn't, because your phone's out. And we do have a few questions."
"Didn't you get my message? I passed on the citations about the Einstein effect—"
"Yes, you told us that," he nodded, "but you haven't told us about your relationship with a Soviet national, one Lev Mihailovitch." He reached out without looking, and the taller one put a gray-bound folder in his hand.
Rainy sat down, feeling more baffled than ever. "The cosmonaut, sure. I met him once."
The F.B.I. man looked at her quizzically, then referred to the folder. "At least once, yes," he agreed. "You were in his company for approximately three hours here in Los Angeles, at which time you are reported to have discussed what you termed 'secret police' matters with him."
"Oh, my God, what nonsense! We had a few drinks."
The agent turned over a sheet, then nodded. "Yes, quite a few," he confirmed. "Furthermore, he has telephoned you on a number of occasions within the past few days."
"Absolutely not! No, that's all wrong, believe me."
"I'm afraid we have information that it is so, Mrs. Keating." The agent took out a Kleenex and wiped his nose before reading from the list. "Let me see. Three times on the twenty-third of December. Then at nineteen hundred hours on the twenty-fourth and several times on the twenty-fifth."
"Now, that's absolutely untrue," Rainy argued. "You've made some dumb mistake. I wasn't even home most of that time!"
The agent waited patiently, looking at her. "Oh," she said, "wait a minute." She remembered the infuriating messageless beeps on her answering machine. "I suppose it's possible that he may have tried to call my number, but I wasn't there so he hung up."
"Or alternatively," said the agent, "when he finally found you in he went to an outside phone to make his call, in order to defeat^any, ah, monitoring of his own telephone in the hotel in Mexico City."
"Is that where he was? I didn't know—well, maybe I did, but anyway I certainly didn't speak to him!" She took a breath, and then anger broke through. "And how dare you tap my telephone! That's against the law!"
The agent regarded her frostily. He glanced at his colleague, and then said, "If you feel your civil rights have been compromised you have the right to make a complaint to the supervising agent. The number of our Los Angeles office is two seven two, six one, six one. Alternatively, under the Freedom of Information Act—"
"Oh, shove your Freedom of Information Act!" She was angry at herself as much as at the F.B.I, man, even angrier at the whole grimy world. "Listen. If Mihailovitch called me, I didn't know it. I haven't seen him or spoken to him since the ASF meeting, and I don't expect to, ever. Do you have any other questions before I throw you out of my house?"
Her cheeks were flushed, and behind the huge glasses her eyes were misting with anger. The F.B.I, man studied her for a moment before he glanced at his colleague. They exchanged a little smile; they had seen this sort of display many times before.
He put his raincoat back on. "If we do," he said, "we'll certainly come back to ask them. And do have a Happy New Year."
There had been many times in Tibor Sonderman's life when he had not known what to do next. Not surprising, in someone who had become an orphan at ten in Yugoslavia, desperate for an education and a place in the world in a country that was seeking both for itself. But he had always known what to do in order to find out what to do next. You study, you ask questions, you read what other people have written on the subject. Now he had not even that knowledge. He was stuck in dead center.
He was dithering. Upstairs to fill a cup of instant coffee from the kitchen sink; into his bedroom to glower at the rain; back down behind the fake bookshelves to sit before his computer and wonder what commands to give it. It was maddening. It was maddening in the literal sense, that the thought crossed his mind that he was going mad. He did not know what he wanted.
He ordered up the latest series of reports from the center for the study of transient phenomena—aurora sightings, a red tide, an ultra-violet nova in the constellation Ursa Minor—and when he had them did not know what he wanted with them. He stared at the neat typing on the CRT, uncomfortably aware that this logged-on time was costing money. Not his money, to be sure, since he was charging it all to Pedigrue's committee. But to charge it to the taxpayer was even worse. . . . Although you could argue that, he thought, because it was simply diverting tax money to a useful scientific purpose, i.e., subsidizing the database people, at no cost to himself . . .
He swore out loud. That was exactly the sort of meandering substitute for thought he had been guilty of all day! He should have given it all up and gone off to Rainy's when she called. Or he should have told her that the weather was simply too bad for driving and there would certainly be no cabs; either one, but what he had done had been to postpone decision by telling her he would come over later.
Firmly he picked up the telephone and dialed her number, to tell her that, after all, he would not be over.
But even that definite act was denied him. There was no answer, only a weird quavering signal. Perhaps her phone was out of order because of the storm.
He groaned, turned off his computer, turned off most of the lights, struggled into his raincoat and left the house. Now he had no choice but to go, and he would be seriously late.
He would be very late, he discovered, driving along the rainswept streets toward the main avenues, because the storm was even worse than he had expected. Tib disliked driving and did it as seldom as he could; in moments of self candor he conceded that his preference for public transportation had almost as much to do with his driving skill as with his morality. With his little car skittish on the slippery streets and buffeted by the winds, Tib felt wholly inept; and not merely as a driver.
The difficulty with being a geologist was that, although a great deal was known about the structure of the Earth, not much of it seemed useful in predicting events. Plenty of instrumentation was deployed. Delicate strain gauges measured the forces between the sides of geological faults. Theodolites and lasers gauged the almost invisible tilting of the ground as it humped itself up into wide domes . . . and then, sometimes, relaxed again; and, other times, exploded in tectonic violence. That great bloat in Palmdale had been rising and falling like a sleeping man's diaphragm, and every lift and fall had been metered for decades. But what did it mean? Could he, or anyone else alive, say that there was going to be a shattering earthquake along the San Andreas fault? Of course they could!—as long as no one asked embarrassing questions about time. It would surely happen. There was simply no question about it. But you could also say that about almost any point on the surface of the earth, even where no faults existed: sooner or later Chicago and Minneapolis would feel the ground shake beneath them and their structures sway into rubble, although it might be tens of millions of years in the future. For Southern California it would surely not be millions of years, and might not even be tens; but the social clock ran so much faster than the geological that pinpointing it within a few decades was not close enough to be of any help. Even less help in estimating damage. The best federal study had guessed at a major quake within thirty years, probably, with a loss of life in the tens of thousands, most likely, and property damage in the hundreds of millions. At least.