Eve Landro looked almost pleased. "Twenty years went very quickly, Miss Keating," she observed.
No one laughed. Rainy said honestly, "I have to think you're right. Something has gone wrong. But that's happened before, and the chances are we can clear it up."
"Rainy?" It was Marguerite, from behind her; but Rainy went on.
"The difficulty is distance. Newton is nearly two light- hours away. That means what just happened happened two hours ago, and any commands we transmit won't get to it until two hours from now—and we won't know the response until two hours after that. Then—"
"Rainy."
Marguerite could no longer be ignored. Her face showed dismal news. "We're getting very strong inputs in the solar electrical generating systems, Rainy. Close to maximum tolerance, and still climbing."
"Solar energy? That can't be, Marguerite! If there were a solar flare or anything we would have known!"
Wordlessly, Marguerite pointed to the oscilloscope trace above the instruments. It was surging higher, so high that the top of each new wave was off scale entirely.
Everybody's face was turned toward her. Rainy caught at the buttons on her shirt, twisting them while she tried to think. The Newton-8 electrical system had automatic surge controls, to limit damaging inputs—but they had been programmed out of circuit more than two years earlier to save power. But there was no need for them! There was absolutely nothing anywhere near the spacecraft that could provide damaging radiation! And yet—
The gabble of noise, fading in and out of the background static, was getting on her nerves; but when it stopped it was worse.
The signal cut off as though a switch had been thrown. Rainy waited, afraid to ask, while Marguerite checked the parallel control circuits; and then she looked up and shook her head.
"Telemetry's gone too, Rainy. Nothing's coming in to the DSN. The system's crashed."
Rainy stared emptily at her audience. After a moment Tommy Pedigrue cleared his throat. "Would you say the free ride is now over, Miz Keating?"
"Not necessarily," she said quickly, out of instinct. "We'll certainly try to re-establish contact. We've had temporary interruptions before and cleared them up—"
But not like this. Whatever she told the senatorial committee, inside herself Rainy had no doubt. Her spacecraft was dead.
LOS ANGELES
In California, half a dozen earthquake engineers were playing a board game. The board was a motorized table twenty feet square, with a model of an office building in the middle of it. The table team u)ere trying to shake the building down. The building team, by tightening and slackening steel cables inside the model, were trying to save it. So far the building team had won three times in a row, all the way up to a scale equivalent of a 7.0 Richter shock. But the table team had timed the building's sway. On the next trial they reduced the shock to Richter 5.5, but slowed the shaking to match the toy building's natural frequency.
They won that game. The structure collapsed in upon itself. It wasn't a surprise. Sooner or later, the destruction team had won every other game, too.
Friday, December 4th. 8:20 PM.
The plane was two hours late out of O'Hare, because there had been a bomb scare. No one believed the bomb was real, but no one would take the chance, either. So they all marched out of the plane into one of the already overcrowded passenger lounges, their belongings on their backs and in their hands. Then they all marched into another plane, but as it was a DC-10 instead of an L-1011 the seat configuration was all different, and Tib lost his place by the window. That was taken by a black man with a face like Eldridge Cleaver, with a little black girl on his lap. On the aisle was an elderly woman who began calling for Bloody Marys before the plane had reached the runway. As soon as they took off Tib, despairing of getting back to his strain- gauge reports, pushed his seat back and closed his eyes.
"Are you sleeping?" the little girl said. Tib opened one eye enough to glare at her as she added, "Because that man wants to talk to you." Her father glared at Tib and began whispering in the little girl's ear, and from the aisle, holding on to the seat back, Tommy Pedigrue said, "Dr. Sonderman? Thought I saw you aboard. Have you read this?"
He was holding out a paperback book. Tib reached carefully over the woman's tray of two glasses of tomato juice, two tiny bottles of vodka, and a bag of peanuts to take it from him. It was called The Jupiter Effect. "Ah, yes," he said. "That crazy hippie."
"Well, I don't know if it's all crazy," Tommy Pedigrue said uncertainly. "I was sort of hoping you could tell me. I picked it up at the airport, but it's kind of out of my line—I had a double major, biology and pre-law. Want to give it a quick look?"
Tib turned a few pages, glanced at the introduction, shrugged. "Yes, why not?"
Pedigrue nodded, started to turn away and checked himself. "Uh, there's a seat open next to me in first class," he said. "My brother decided to stay over in Chicago. So if you'd like to—?"
Tib frowned. "Surely there is a regulation against that?"
Tommy Pedigrue grinned. "Not if you're a senator's brother," he said.
"Well—thank you. But no." Certainly not! It was bad enough he should have to read what this man gave him. It would be far worse to have to talk to him for two thousand miles. "But perhaps this little girl would be more comfortable—" he suggested, dead-pan.
Her father, who had not appeared to be listening, jerked around and said, "No way!" Pedigrue retreated, his face scarlet, and Tib Sonderman, feeling more cheerful, opened the book.
He read it straight through, all across the continent, and then he closed it and sat back.
It was not hogwash. Forget about Edgar Cayce, forget about that stoned young man. This was not astrology, it was science.
Wrong-headed science? Maybe. That didn't mean much.
A lot of theoretical science was false. That was what science was all about: forming theories, many of which were bound to be wrong, and then attacking them as hard as possible. A theory was no good unless it was falsifiable. If it could not be subjected to an experiment that could show it to be wrong, then it was merely a speculation, not a theory.
The book, to be sure, was speculative science. Much of what it suggested rested on presumptions and inferences. There was much in it that was unproved. But nothing that struck him as wrong.
The argument came in a number of steps. The first was that the sun and all of its planets, and every atom of each one of them, were a single system, and that each part affected every other.
In strict theoretical terms, there was no argument there. In strict theoretical terms you could go a lot farther. Every atom in the universe was tied to every other, by a sea of photons and a network of gravitational force. The practical fact that the ties between a hydrogen atom in the center of the star Betelgeuse and one in the melting ice cube in the plastic cup before him were terribly tiny in comparison with those that linked nearer particles did not make the statement untrue.
According to the book's authors—their names were not wholly unfamiliar to Sonderman; Gribbin he had heard of, of Plagemann he was less sure—in the spring of 1982 a somewhat unusual event would take place in the solar system. All of the major planets would be on the same side of the sun. Not for long. Just for six or seven weeks, but for that little while the solar system would be asymmetrical, as happened from time to time but not very often—once every 179 years, the authors said, and Sonderman could see no reason to doubt them.