He lunged forward as Joel slammed on the brakes. "Oh, ! my God, Danny, look!"
And Danny looked, down at the muddy lake that had been his estate, where the slide into the freeway had blocked the runoff, where the old avocado trees rose out of three feet of water, where his house itself was awash to i the middle of the first floor and the basement completely submerged, where all the chalks and canvases and pigments of all the paintings and sketches and playthings that i were his treasure were now sodden trash, not much different in appearance from the mud along the roadside, and not much more valuable.
The storm outside was coming to an end, and so was the storm within. Nothing had really happened. Certainly nothing to compare to the people you heard about on the radio, trapped in cars, pinned against their own bedroom walls by avalanches of mud, carried away in storm drains. Nothing like Rainy, who now had some fascinating data to play with, or even like Sam Bradison, who at least had a new crusade. And yet he felt a sense of release. He moved over to the kitchen table, admiring Rainy's blind concentration as she worked with calculator and pencil, scribbling notes to herself on lined yellow pads. He brushed against the orrery on the windowsill, sending the planets clashing against each other, and Rainy looked up, eyes unfocused behind the huge glasses. "Give me the pages you are not using," he said, "and I will make an abstract for you in English."
She nodded, and pushed most of the sheets toward him. He put them in order, captured one of the yellow pads and studied the handwritten notations at the top of the first page. "This is interesting," he said. "This paper was withdrawn from publication by the author, on instructions from someone who signs only initials."
Rainy nodded absently.
"I suppose that was why Mihailovitch smuggled it to you, then. I think he took some risk."
She looked up. "Could we hold that down for now, Tib? I'll just be a little while."
He pursed his lips and shrugged. It took him only a few minutes to make a quick synopsis of what the paper had to say, mathematics aside, and occupied only a small part of his mind. When he was finished he amused himself by spinning the orrery with one finger, while the greater part of his mind continued its slow circling toward some sort of decision, until Rainy sat up, her eyes glowing. "Oh, Tib," she said, "this is great. Here, look at this."
She sketched quickly on a lined yellow pad. "Remember the drawing of the sun as a lens? That was right—up to a point. But what this person Kerfloozilim, or whatever his name is, says is that Jupiter too did some focusing. Here!"
She pointed to the sketch:
"On the left we have the star that was the source of the radiation, then comes the sun, gravitationally focusing the radiation, then old Jupiter! Remember? We know Jupiter and the sun and the spacecraft were in an exact straight line, because we were about to observe a transit! So the focusing effect became a real telescope, not just a magnifying glass, with a second lens!"
"I see, " Tib said, watching her face instead of the diagram.
"I wonder if you do," she said, but she was smiling. "The focusing was really tight! Not just the radio and light but everything, X rays, infra-red, ultra-violet. My poor old Newton-8 got clobbered with a heat ray!"
Tib tried some focusing of his own. "Ah, yes. I do see," he said, "but I don't understand all of it. If this works, why doesn't it happen more often? For instance, why don't we see flares on Saturn and Uranus every time they go by Jupiter and happened to get in line with some star?"
Rainy shrugged. "I don't know. Because they're; too big? They're very large heat sinks, and if a couple dozen square miles at the top of the atmosphere got hot. we'd never notice it. Mostly because they're never in a line! All the planets go around the sun in the same general plane, the ecliptic, but each one's orbit is tilted a little compared to the others—and a little' means anything up to millions of miles. . . . Tib? Are you listening to me?"
He said heavily, "They thought I made a fool of myself, didn't they?"
"You mean the governor and all? Certainly not!"
He shook his head. "I think I did. I forgot KISS."
She looked puzzled, but offered her lips. "Yes, thank you," he said, kissing her and then smiling for the first time in some while, "but that is not what I meant, I meant K-I-S-S, the acronym: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Put simply, I should just have said I will sell my house."
Rainy took off her glasses and sat back to look at him better. "Tib, dear," she said, "—KISS? Even KISS-er?"
"Yes, I realize I am obscure. All right, I will spell out the steps. The slope behind my house has always been a danger, either of fire or of mud. It is not surprising that no one will listen to what I say when I myself live without regard to risk. I see that I have been deceiving myself. I have tried to set an example in, for example, limiting energy consumption, but it is not enough."
Rainy was staring at him, shaking her head—not a negative; it was wonder. "Are you planning to set yourself up as a model for the human race?"
Tib considered. "Yes," he said at last. "Exactly, although I know it sounds vain. But it is also Kant's categorical imperative."
"And you think people will listen to you?"
"No," he confessed, "I do not. Let me admit to you how much vanity I have: I was thinking, while we were driving here, that I might retain a publicity agent, so that I could appear on more radio and television shows. Or write a book, or in some way find an amplifier for my own voice. . . . But those are fantasies, of course. So I will settle for less. I will sell my house. To be quite consistent," he said, looking suddenly troubled, "I should sell my car, too, and that means I should not live in Los Angeles, should I?"
"Oh, now wait a minute, Tib," said Rainy, feeling suddenly threatened. "Your job's here."
"There are other jobs. "
Rainy pushed the papers together thoughtfully. "I'll miss you if you leave Los Angeles," she said.
For a moment they sat silent, and then Tib said, "I think I've made a fool of myself again. Please excuse me, Rainy. I think I will go to my own home now."
The moon shows about 30,000 meteorite craters; the earth, which has about 50 times the cross-section capture area of the moon, presumably would have nearly a million and a half visible signs of something large striking it from space if it were not for the fact that air and water erase the traces. Even so, some traces remain quite visible, like the Barringer Crater in Arizona, and others are suspected. A few astronomers think Canada's Hudson Bay is a drowned meteorite crater. Even fewer suspect that the entire Indian Ocean may be. North America would not survive another impact like that which may have created Hudson Bay; the earth would not survive another Indian Ocean. An impact like either of those is quite unlikely in any given million-year period; but it is not impossible; and it is not the only impact from space that could greatly affect human activities.
Tuesday, December 29th. 5:10 AM.
When the telephone rang, Tib was not in his bed, and was not at first sure just where he was. There was no light, he was fully dressed, he was alone. As he fumbled for the phone he realized that he had fallen asleep in his workroom. Since there were no windows he had no idea of the | time.
He said hello, and the voice that answered was Rainy's, queerly strained, almost jubilant. "Did I wake you? That's a silly question, of course I did. I haven't been to bed yet myself. I'm at the Lab."
Tib found the reading light and snapped it on, and the familiar tiny room appeared around him. He was not yet fully awake. "The Lab?" he repeated.