"Afraid so. It beats the hell out of Los Angeles right now. "
"Don't think the senators don't know that—it isn't any accident they scheduled this meeting for here. Last week it was life sciences and, just by luck, that happened to be in St. Thomas—so they could check on marine biology, of course. Will you tell me something, Miz Keating? What was Marcellico on you about?"
"Oh, that." She would definitely have preferred to talk about the weather, but it was a reasonable question. It deserved an answer. "It's about my master's thesis, I suppose. My subject was the impact of extra-terrestrial events on life on Earth. There weren't any little green men in it. That was just the senator being nasty. It was about things like the Tunguska event, and the Barringer crater, and the hypothesis that the mass extinctions of living species in the Cretaceous were caused by some astronomical event. I was hoping no one would bring it up." She sighed and looked around at the tropical paradise. "I was even a little sorry the conference was being held here, because Drake and Sagan and so on talk so much about communication with extra-terrestrials with this instrument."
The man said diffidently, "You know, that would make a more interesting story than budget figures—"
"Oh, no! Please!"
He changed the subject gallantly. "Are you going right back from here?"
Unfortunately, she was; all the same, she couldn't help contrasting his style with Tibor Sonderman's. Sonderman might be a hell of a fine geologist, but as far as getting along with people was concerned— "What's the matter?" she asked, startled by the expression on his face as he looked past her.
"What do you suppose that is?" he asked.
She turned and heard a distant, angry yelling down by the great radio-telescope dish. At this distance, the figures were tiny, but there was no doubt of what she was seeing. Halfway out the catwalk, almost to the receiver pod, a man and a woman seemed to be taking off their clothes and throwing them out into three hundred feet of empty space.
"Good heavens," she said.
The newsman glanced at her, then back at the scene in the great round valley. The strippers were not without opposition. There was not much of a security force at the Arecibo observatory, but three men in green suits like army fatigues were out on the catwalk with the struggling couple. It was unclear whether they were trying to get the rest of their clothes off, or to keep from being dragged back onto solid ground."The skinny wire catwalk shook and plunged wildly.
The newsman said, "Excuse me, I'd better get my cameraman!" And he was running down the hill, along with half a dozen others who had appeared from nowhere.
Rainy knew what she ought to do, but human curiosity was overpowering. You didn't see a suicide attempt every day—if that was what it was. She hurried after. It was a considerable distance to the base of the walkway, down hill and up again, and by the time she got there the couple were in custody, back on solid ground. They were standing by themselves, leaning against the huge cement holdfast that anchored the catwalk, with the biggest of the men who had gone after them ominously close. At their feet was a pack, its contents spilled on the ground—hash pipe, a couple of books, canned food, and a few other odds and ends. A few yards away, the director of the observatory and a few other men were trying to decide what to do with them.
The couple seemed serene enough, gazing contentedly at the excitement around them. The woman had been made to put a sweater over her bare upper body. She still wore her jeans, perhaps because they were too tight to get off while holding onto the gyrating rail. The man had got all the way down to swim trunks, and was still that way. He was shivering—not with cold, surely, in the muggy Puerto Rican heat. He looked up at Rainy as though she were a friend. "Tell them to let us go back and soak up the vibrations, please," he said politely.
"It isn't up to me," she said. "Why were you out there?"
"Why?" he repeated, as though it were some foreign word he could not be expected to understand. Tardily Rainy realized that both of them were stoned blind.
"Well, why anything, lady? Are they going to put us in jail?"
"I don't know that either," Rainy began, and then realized who she was talking to. It was the creep who had broken her orrery! "I wish they would," she said angrily. "Peeping in windows and smashing things up!"
"Did I break something? Hey, I'm real sorry. But I hope they don't put us in jail, because my old lady's got a job to do, and she needs the bread."
The woman giggled. "No, we don't, Dennis."
His expression clouded. Then he nodded, enlightened. "Oh, sure. What would we need it for, right? We're all about to be aced by the Great Conjunction, and what's money going to be good for then?"
Rainy looked puzzled. "The Great Conjunction?"
"When old Jupiter pulls hell and crap out of the sun and dumps it on the planets," the young man explained. "What's a few bucks going to do for you then, lady? So please, can't we go back out there and soak up some rays while we still got time?"
Because the earth is spinning, it is thicker through the equator than through the poles. It is as though the planet had a spare tire of fat around its waist. Calculations show how great the difference in diameters should be and, curiously, it is substantially greater than the facts permit. Perhaps the earth's crust "froze" at an earlier time, when it was spinning more rapidly. All that heaped-up mass around the equator represents stored energy. If, through some immense crustal movement, it relaxed to its proper dimensions, it would liberate enough heat to raise the earth's temperature by hundreds of degrees and boil away the seas.
The planet Venus, whose rotation has been slowed by the sun's tidal forces, is almost a perfect sphere. It has almost no equatorial hump. Its surface temperature is hundreds of degrees hotter than Earth's, and if it ever had liquid water it has long since been boiled away.
Thursday, December 3d. 12:15 PM.
Almost, the buffet tables revived Tib's spirit. Sliced ham, fried chicken, salad materials and—what?—yes, some sort of fried bananas, and of course large trays of fresh fruits.
Tib Sonderman was a man who appreciated food, having missed a lot of it as a child. But he couldn't take full pleasure in it. Bits of dialogue kept coming back to him—
"You mean, Doctor Sonderman, you want to dig this damn hole when you don't even know what you're gonna find?"
"If we knew what we were going to find, Senator Marcellico, we wouldn't have to dig the hole; that is what basic research is all about. In any case, I am not asking for funds for the Mohole at this time—"
-All he wanted was funds for an expanded network of stations to report crustal movements. Who could be against that? The very survival of southern California, to name but one area, might depend on it! And even so, that other congressperson had affected to misunderstand: "You want, < what is it, twenty-six million dollars a year so you can carry out your figures a couple more decimal places?"
"Mr. Congressman, that is only a drop in the bucket, compared to, say, the cost overrides on one new overkill weapons system."
Well, that had been a mistake. Gloomily, he knew it had been a mistake, but what was one to say? Gloomily, he carried his plate to the very end of the long table and tried to take pleasure in the food. As the table filled beside him, he responded politely to observations about the beauty of the view and the warmth of the day, but he was still replaying his presentation in his mind. They spoke so glibly of saving the taxpayers' money! But what were there here? Perhaps forty persons, coming from twenty states—how many thousand gallons of jet fuel so that the senators might conduct their business in a nice warm place? Assume each came in a 727. Assume a load factor of 80%. Assume an average flight of, be conservative, eight hundred miles to get here. What did a 727 get, three or four gallons to the mile? One hundred people divided into eight hundred miles, times 3.5, times the forty persons here—yes, perhaps a rough-cuff ballpark estimate, doubling for the round trip and adding in the extra energy cost of climbing to 30,000 feet or so for cruising altitude . . . not less than three thousand gallons of jet fuel. For this one meeting! Which was meant to save money, i.e., energy for everyone!