As Tib Sonderman had been taught in his first months of life to conceal emotions, no anger showed on the bland face he raised, from time to time, to glance around. But the anger was there. The average American expended thirteen kilowatts of energy, day in and day out—more than a hundred thousand kilowatt-hours a year. Sonderman made a serious effort to stay below that national average, and it angered him when he couldn't do it—because he worked in Los Angeles, and how could you not drive a car several hours each day? because he was required to fly to attend meetings like this, and how could you avoid it? Three thousand gallons of oil—enough to heat a whole block of homes through a winter, enough to—
"I beg your pardon?" he said, startled. The observatory man across from him had said something.
The man repeated, "I thought as a geologist you might be interested in this part of the world, Dr. Sonderman. " "Oh, yes?" Sonderman looked around. The bright hills stood sharply defined in the crystal air. Down below them, the great spider of the radio receiver hung from its three- stranded web over the big dish. "Eroded caves, that is what these valleys are, is that right?"
"Exactly. The mountains are honeycombed. And that is why this telescope was such a bargain. It's a great bubble in the rock with the top eroded off. All we had to do was line it with antenna wire and put in the instrumentation; the rest was a gift from God."
A couple of places down the table one of the newspersons laughed. "All you scientists are real budget-balancers, aren't you?" she asked good-humoredly. "What do you say, Senator? Have they convinced you?"
Senator Townsend Pedigrue was sitting, democratically, with the common people, his wavy brown hair blowing in the breeze, his jaw muscles senatorially tight. He relaxed them in a smile. "Now, you know I'm not hard to convince, Doris. I've surrounded myself with good, science- based people—there's my brother Tommy right over there; he's got a science degree himself, and that's probably what he'd be working at if we didn't need him so badly in Washington. Look at the record. You'll see I've sponsored twenty-two separate bills, just in this session, where we've recommended more funding, not less."
"You sure have, Senator," the woman called. "And, if I remember right, about forty recommending cuts."
"That's what I'm after, Doris, saving the taxpayer money. I'm not the big bad wolf, you know; I'm the woodsman with the axe, and I use it as gently as I can—"
Farther down the table, Sonderman saw Rainy Keating looking curiously toward him. When she saw that he was seeing her she smiled forgivingly. Tib did not smile back. What right did she have to forgive him? For what? For speaking candidly? Let her go on stimulating the testosterone flow of the young men who had clustered around her, the senator's brother and three or four others. She had not even stayed for his presentation! And that was a violation of the unwritten rule of academia; you sit through my dull paper and I'll help swell the audience for yours; otherwise everybody would be talking to empty rooms! Of course, she was not the only one, he acknowledged justly; a third of the audience had crept away to stare at the hippies who were making fools of themselves—
With surprise, he saw that one of the hippies was quietly eating from the remains of the buffet, at a little private table a few yards away. A security man stood guard over him, but he didn't seem to need much guarding.
Sonderman inconspicuously left the table for coffee, and when he returned others had spotted the bearded, slim young man. Rainy Keating was talking to him; he seemed to have come down enough to be intelligible.
"Oh, sure." He looked up at Rainy and grinned. "We didn't mean no trouble. Zee and I were just coming up to look, you know, and it was all so beautiful we just sat down to mellow out. Next thing you know we felt the need to get naked out in the middle of it."
"Is that why you broke my orrery?"
He looked at her in dismay. "Oh, shit, lady, was that thing yours? I'm really sorry about that: It was pretty." He accepted a glass of orange juice, originally intended for making screwdrivers, and swallowed it uncritically.
The geologist from the morning session watched him swallow the vitamin C and said,
"Do you think you can answer a few questions now? I'm interested. What did you hope to accomplish out over the dish?"
The young man selected a cold chicken leg, took a delicate bite, and shrugged. "We just wanted to feel the rays, man."
"What rays? There aren't any more 'rays' over the telescope than there are right here."
"That so? Well, what would I know? I was a music major. But I'm sorry I caused you trouble, Dr. Sonderman." He licked his fingers and grinned at the expression on the geologist's face. "You don't remember me. But we met at the San Onofre nuclear protest. My grandmother was there, too. I was playing lead guitar in the group right before you spoke. You were pretty good," he said, nodding. "All about tectonic faults and all that, so how come you're not doing anything now?"
"About what?" Sonderman demanded.
"Why, old Jupiter. It's all laid out in the book, man. Even my grandmother knows about it."
"I do not care about your grandmother," Tib said irritably. "What book are you talking about?"
"All the books! Cayce talked about it years ago, and now you scientists are just catching up, right? Mount Saint Helens. Naples. All that stuff—and now the planets are getting together, and when they're all lined up just right they're going to suck some kind of rays out of the sun and into the earth's atmosphere. No, no shit, man!" he said, looking defensive under Tib's scowl. "It's all right there in that book, The Jupiter Effect. Then the like air gets all charged up, and it swells up and rubs against the ground—and, pow, there goes the old San Andreas fault. God's sake, man! You're a geologist yourself, aren't you? How come you don't know all about it?"
One of the tiniest of the asteroids—less than forty feet across—passed between Earth and the moon. No one saw it. It was too tiny, and it did not come close to the earth. Many had come closer. On August 10, 1972, one very much like it actually entered Earth's atmosphere and became an astonishingly bright meteorite. Because it passed through only the outermost, most tenuous layers of atmosphere, its speed was not slowed enough to prevent it from passing on through and out into space again. If it had approached at a very slightly different angle and struck the surface of the Earth at, say, latitude 41.53 N and longitude 87.38 W, the city of Chicago would have ceased to exist, and Lake Michigan would have had a quite circular new bay at its southern end.
Thursday, December 3d. 1:15 PM.
Senator Pedigrue's kid brother tucked Rainy s arm in his to lead her back to the meeting room, and Rainy made no protest. Young Tommy Pedigrue wasn't all that young— his hair was a good deal thinner than his brother's, and he was known to be the senator's consigliore and, occasionally, hatchet man. He could do her a lot of good. Also she was annoyed. That graceless geologist had been positively rude.