Syzygy

ARECIBO

Because Jupiter is the greatest of the planets, it is named after the greatest of the Roman gods. As a god, Jupiter is known as Fulgurator, the thrower of lightning; Imperator, the ruler; Optimus Maximus, the best and most high. As a planet, Jupiter is all of those things. Its swirling atmo­sphere is lanced with lightnings. Its huge mass, outweigh­ing all the other planets combined, rules the orbits of a thousand lesser worlds. And it is indeed Maximus. If it were any larger, it probably would not be a planet at all. It would be a star.

Wednesday, December 2d. 9:45 PM.

The party was beginning to slow down, but then it had never been a high-speed party. It was not meant to be. It was meant to mix the people who wanted money with the people who could give it to them, and the predominant mood was Cover Your Butt. The scientists had to be careful of the senators. The politicians had to be careful of the people from the news media. The news media people had no one to worry about, except perhaps each other. But they all had deadlines to make, because of the differ­ences in time between Puerto Rico and wherever their home bases were, and early sessions in the morning to wake up for. Ancient old Senator Bielowitz was the first to go, before ten, and some of the newspersons hitched a ride with him to the motel at the bottom of the hill. It was a terrible waste of a good party, Tib thought, considering that it was out of doors in the warm Caribbean night and the sky was a glory, but then he wasn't here to have fun. One more drink, he told himself, and then I too will walk over to the Visiting Scientists Quarters and read myself to sleep with the reports on the tilt rate of the Salton Sea.

As he was building himself a weak Canadian Club and ginger, the chairman of the meeting climbed on a stone bench. "Gentlemen!" he called. "Ladies. Can I interrupt the fun for just a minute?" The chairman was a Florida meteorologist and, Tib thought critically, a bit of a butt- kisser. But maybe that was because they wore always under the gun with their forecasts. He waited a second, until a majority of the faces were turned more or less his way, and said, "Miz Georgia Raines Keating, our representative from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has something to tell you. Here you go, Rainy." He offered a hand to help her up.

Space scientists and weathermen, what the hell was he doing here with them? Tib took an angry swallow of his drink. They got all the money they needed! They had everything going for them, including a rub-off from the military budgets, because everybody knew that space rock­ets and nuclear missiles were first cousins, and weather was itself a kind of weapon. But everybody was quieting down to listen—partly, and there was another unjust thing, because the scientist from JPL was a very good-looking young woman who wore her jeans very tight. "Thank you, Dr. Zinfader," she called, and then, to the audience, "I've got good news. Our course corrections were optimal! Around two PM tomorrow—that's year 81, day 337, time 1613 in Universal Mean Time—Jupiter, the sun, and Newton-8 will be in syzygy. That means that, from the Newton-8 satellite, Jupiter will appear to transit the sun. Just as promised," she added, beaming. There were a few polite handclaps. "I'll be telling you more about it during the coffee break tomorrow morning. Right now I'm going to send it a message to tell it how to deploy its instrumenta­tion to observe the transit, so if any of you would care to accompany me to the mission control . . . ?"

Most of the twenty-odd people left at the party were looking at their watches, and only about half a dozen took her up on the invitation. Tib, finishing his drink, de­cided to be one of them; it w.is on the way to the V.S.Q. in any case. What surprised him was that so few persons joined her. And none of them of any real importance. Two of the observatory scientists and their wives; one young woman who turned out to be Rainy Keating's assistant; himself. And the senators and the congressmen who were supposed to be here to learn everything they could learn about the science they were spending the taxpayers' money for? Not one!

Shocking, Tib thought to himself, though he was not really shocked. It was only what he cynically expected. He only half-watched while the young research assistant sat down at the keyboard of the mission control console and did not even half listen while Keating explained what she was doing. It was such a waste to fly three thousand miles to this place! His work interrupted, his time taken away from him, and for what? Only so that he could beg a few more dollars from the politicians, to do the things that every thinking human being knew absolutely had to be done anyway!

Still—speaking of things that had to be done—his slides were still in the car, and so was the easel for his charts. As long as he was here, he might as well set them up for his presentation, he thought, since he was speaking in the morning. As he came back into the little meeting room with the folded easel under his arm he discovered that everyone else had gone, and only Rainy Keating was stand­ing by the doorway, looking lost. "Hey," she said. "Dr.—?"

"Sonderman. Tibor Sonderman."

"Right, you're the geologist. I wonder if you could do me a favor? I missed my ride down the hill. It's only about a mile, but at night—if you wouldn't mind—"

"Mind? Why should I mind? I've got a car right out­side." But of course she knew that; she'd seen him go out to it. And of course she had no compunctions about impos­ing on him! If she had been a man, even if she had been an older woman, then there would have been quite a different thing. It would not have been a sex thing. Tib Sonderman's perception of sex things was that he was always on the losing side. The better the woman looked, the smarter, the more amiable, the more certain he was that the cards were stacked against him. "Let me help you with your things," he said, picking up her briefcase.

"Thanks." She gave him a quick, uncertain grin that faded when she saw his expression.

Outside again, in the damp, lush Puerto Rican air, she was making conversation about the stars and the radio telescope, and he was responding, but neither of them was making much of an effort. It was only a short drive, through the parking lot and down the looping road that descended the mountain to a white house with a solar roof, set back among trees at a bend in the road. Tib drove with great concentration, like someone who had never learned to drive until he was in his mid-twenties; he drove as though he were following a memorized checklist of instructions.

He drove as though he were in a hurry to get it over with and get rid of her, Rainy Keating thought. What an awkward person he was to be with! Good looking enough— not very tall, and maybe a little heavy, but he had a nice face. He even had a sense of humor, because she had been listening to him talking to one of the newsmen early in the party. But he didn't seem able to relax with her. And when they got out of the car and walked up onto the breezy porch of the house she had been allowed to stay in for the meeting, he almost blundered into the blown-glass mobile that hung near the door. "Oh, watch out," she cried, and he ducked just in time, grazing it and making it tinkle gently.

"I am sorry," he said. "I hope I haven't damaged your wind-chime."

"It's an orrery. I got it in San Juan, and I think it's all right—I'm sorry I shouted at you." And then there seemed nothing to do but to add, "Would you like to come in for a drink?"

He thought it over for a moment. "Thank you, yes," he said, but she had had time to get annoyed at his hesita­tion. And he still didn't come in, even after she had unlocked the door and held it. He said uneasily, "Do you hear voices? Your family, perhaps?"

"I don't have any family here. It isn't my house; the people who live here are on sabbatical, and they let me borrow it."

"Perhaps I was mistaken," he said, following her in and looking around the room as though he expected to have to write a report on it.

Rainy Keating felt that she, at least, had a really good sense of humor, and the way she diagnosed that was that she saw a lot of comedy in herself. For instance, it was funny that she had let what she called her "dating skills" get rusty. She had had plenty of practice, after all, and not that far in the past. And anyway, dating lore was all high-school stuff, passed from sophomores to freshmen around the time of the menarche, and all simple. Lesson One: Talk about what he is interested in. So she finished turning on the lights, set out a tray of glasses and said, "What do you think, Tibor? Does this kind of circus do any real good?"

He smiled suddenly and sat down, seeming to relax. "Good? I don't know. But I am sure that to stay away from it would bring ultimate harm."

"Meaning no money?" She brought him a whiskey and soda—not very large, because she wasn't having so much fun that she wanted to protract it indefinitely.

"Exactly no money. These senators and congressmen are important people. They would tell you that they do not want to be flattered, and that's true. But it would surprise them so if we did not, that they would be quite unable to vote our appropriations. Are you married?"

Sitting down near him, Rainy was startled enough to misjudge and bump into the arm of the chair. "What kind of question is that, right off?"

"I just like to know, since you wear no ring."

"I used to be married. What about you?"

He nodded, as though it was the answer he had expected. "I used to be married, too, but now I'm divorced. For six years—no, this is December already. For six years and two months."

"And two weeks and three days and five hours and twenty-two minutes? Oh, wow, Tibor, you know what I bet? I bet the divorce was your wife's idea." He shrugged. "And you didn't want it to happen, right? And you're still not happy about it."

He said stiffly, "If I said something that upset you, I'm sorry."

"Why should you upset me? I'm used to it. My ex-husband knows exactly how long it is, too. "

"And he didn't want the divorce either?"

She laughed, relenting. "No, he didn't. Let's start over, okay? I'm not divorced—yet. I've been separated four months, and as soon as it's a year I'll get the papers, and, yes, my ex-husband didn't want it and he still hassles me about it . . . and I'm not usually so touchy." He had gulped his drink; penitently, she freshened it and tried again. "Are you worried about losing your funding?"

"Not me personally, no." He hesitated, then let her add ice to the glass. "There is a great need for more observa­tion stations all over the United States—particularly in California. There are thousands of square miles that we cannot monitor at all. We had the funds for expansion, but NSF has cut back—I have been asked to testify about the importance before these politicians, hoping they will re­store the money. I do not, honestly, have much hope. I suppose it is the same with you?"

"Well, not really," she said with a touch of pride. "I'm JPL's pet exhibit of economy, because my own project is pretty nearly all pure profit. They sent me here to tell the committee that, so they can see what a good investment space missions are. There are some big ones that need funding—a Venus radar orbiter, a cometary mission. Some really nice ones."

"They will get the funding, of course."

There was an edge to his tone that made her look at him curiously. "Why do you say that?"

"Oh, space, you know. It is the glamor department of science, after all—and very close to rockets and missiles."

"I don't have anything to do with missiles!"

"Not directly," he conceded, and then spoiled it by adding, "perhaps. But it is all much the same thing."

"The hell it is, buster."

He looked at her in astonishment,, then scowled. "Well, Miz Keating," he said with heavy irony, "I have enjoyed this little talk. I apologize for touching so often where you are so touchy."

She stood up with him. "I am not in the least touchy about my work," she corrected him angrily.

"Oh, you feminists!" he exploded.

"What do you mean, feminists'?"

He had an infuriating smile, she realized. "After all, you play both sides against the middle, do you not? When you want a favor, all sexual and sweet. When you discuss your work, hard-nosed, all men together—"

"Hold on a bloody minute. Where did 'sexual' come into this?"

"At the very beginning, of course, are you denying this? The scenario is obvious. You ask me to drive you home, and of course there is the implied possibility that you will allow me to kiss you at the door, yes?, and then perhaps to go farther, even in the direction of your bed, all accord­ing to expectation."

"What goddamn expectations?"

"The expectations of the whole world! They are very clear. If a woman indicates to a man that she does not dislike him, the world expects him to make an advance—it is his obligation; he must spare her the embarrassment of making sexual overtures herself. Even if he does not par­ticularly wish to! And if he fails in this he has insulted her—he has indicated she is not sexually attractive; what rudeness!"

Rainy Keating was holding the heavy tumbler in her hand; to her surprise, she realized she wanted to throw it. "You've got hell's own nerve, fellow! If I wanted to go to bed with you I'd let you know!"

"You see how angry you are?" He nodded. "Because I have not picked up my cue properly. Listen to me, Missus Keating, you're right, I did not want my wife to divorce me. But I accepted her decision, because that was what was expected of me. Now what is expected is that I must accept the decision of every woman I hand a drink to at a party! How ridiculous! The unpleasant mornings I have spent, waking up after a night with some wholly unaccept­ able woman simply because I could not offend her by failing to make the overtures—"

"Get the hell out of here, Sonderman!"

He blinked. "Did I say something offensive?"

"Get out of here!"

He did, with dignity. Outside the door he said severely, "You have taken this in quite the wrong spirit."

"God," she cried, and slammed the door in his face.

In the early Eighteenth Century Charles Boyle, the fourth Earl of Orrery, was known as one of England's most enthusiastic amateur astronomers. An inventor named George Graham made, and gave to the earl, a clockwork mechanism that represented the course of the known plan­ets around the sun. The device did not show the moons of Mars, because no one knew they existed, but neither did it show Jupiter's Galilean satellites, though they had been seen by everyone with a telescope. Perhaps the mechanism was not delicate enough to deal with things so tiny and so remote. The earl enjoyed the device. He liked it so well that he permitted it to be called an "orrery ", after himself. The feelings of George Graham about this are not recorded.

Thursday, December 3d. 7:30 AM.

The house that Rainy Keating had borrowed had a back lawn enclosed in a stone fence. Two young people finished the first joint of the day and rolled up their sleeping bags; they had spent the night in the shelter of the wall. "Eat first or haul tail first, Dennis?" the young woman asked.

Dennis Siroca put his arms through the straps of his pack frame. "Let's get out of here before the people wake up. We'll eat up the hill a little." He shrugged the pack into position uncomfortably. It was warm enough, but damp. "Maybe we'll smoke a little more dope first."

"Now?"

"Up the hill, Zee." He helped her with the bedroll, and then stood waiting while she methodically snapped the harness and fastened all the ties on her quilted jacket. Siroca was a tall man of about thirty. His full beard was sulfur yellow, and so was his hair, which he wore pulled to the back through a leather thong. He inspected the little house with approval: the solar panel meant the owners had respect for the ecology (though maybe that didn't matter any more). As they started across the front yard he glanced at the porch, and something made of bright glass caught his eye. It hung like a Calder mobile, and when the crystal globes touched each other in the morning breeze they tinkled. "Hey, that's pretty," he said, pleased. "You go ahead, Zee. I want to take a look."

He climbed the steps and reached out to touch the bright-colored spheres, smiling. Then he heard a sound from inside the house, and turned quickly to look in the picture window.

Inside the house Rainy Keating heard the phone ring, jumped out of the shower, grabbed a towel and ran for it. Too late. The ringing stopped just as she reached for the phone. She glowered mistily at the thing, fuzzy because she hadn't put her glasses on; Rainy was a telephone addict, and a missed call was more than an irritation, it was enough to spoil a day. She swore softly, and turned around just as something crashed with a terminal sound on the porch.

She snatched the towel around her and raced for the bathroom and her glasses. By the time she was peering through them around the bathroom door, what she saw was the ruin of her orrery dancing crazily from its hook, and the shape of a man disappearing down the steps— there were Peeping Toms in Puerto Rico, too! Really, it was too much. That insufferable grubby Cossack last night, and this interloper this morning. She had not been en­tirely pleased to come to Arecibo anyway, because its research in communication with extra-terrestrials was a little too close to the indiscretions of her youth. That gut feeling was now validated.

She dressed quickly, the bloom off her morning. In the shower she had been singing, but she didn't want to sing any more. Her mood had turned sour, quite unusual for a healthy young woman who knew she was good-looking and, usually, knew she was the luckiest person in the world. How many women in their mid-twenties—well, their latter twenties—had their own careers, and even their own spaceships? But Rainy had hers. Old, second­hand, lingering on by chance and the luck of the draw, but her own special project. It was what she had wanted since she was a little girl. Even if she hadn't known she wanted it, exactly, at first.

When Rainy was ten years old an aunt told her she was a Pisces. Little Rainy immediately perceived that a Pisces was about the best thing you could be. And all you had to do to be it was to be born at the right time of year! Her aunt had gone on to explain the influences of the planets to the alert little girl, and how important it was to under­stand them—not to change them, because you could not do that, but to guard against the baleful portents and enhance the good. For a whole year Rainy studied the astrology columns of the Los Angeles newspapers. She spent long hours calculating when she would allow herself to become pregnant with her first child, assuming she got married as planned at twenty-one, in order to bear the baby at the most favorable possible moment. It was of no small help to her grades in arithmetic.

Then, one day when she was eleven, the television was full of shocking news.

A spacecraft called Mariner had flown by Mars and photographed it at close range. It had transmitted pictures of a dry, empty landscape pocked with craters.

That was a moment of wrenching disillusionment for Rainy. The planets were not mystic flashlight bulbs in the sky, set there for the purpose of bathing the Earth with occult rays that seeped through clouds and storms, through the roofs of hospitals—even through the bulk of the whole Earth itself—to reach into each delivery room and mold the minds and destinies of squalling newborns. Mariner showed they were nothing of the sort. And as mission followed mission, the story grew always more grim. Mars was a rusty rock, airless and cold. Venus was hot poison gases smothering stone, Jupiter a dense swirl of refrigerat­ing fluid, Mercury a cinder.

At first Rainy was furious. Then the sense of betrayal began to dissolve in wonder, then fascination. Astrology dropped out of her mind without a trace. But the planets themselves! The stars! Before she was fifteen she could pick out Orion's three-jeweled belt, the Pole Star, the great Summer Triangle and a dozen other asterisms. The Christmas of her sixteenth year was a great disappoint­ment. The presents under the tree were well enough, but in the skies the comet Kohoutek was a washout. In her senior high-school year she dated the ugliest boy in class. He was the only one who owned a telescope, eight-inch mirror, hand-ground. When she lost her virginity it was in the hills of Griffith Park, to the only boy she knew who shared her every-week addiction to the planetarium.

At no time after twelve did Rainy doubt what her career would be—at least, not after discovering that she would have to wear glasses for most things, most of her life. NASA had this terrible bigotry which said that astronauts had to be able to pass pilot's vision tests. So that was out. Astronomy remained. If she couldn't go to the stars, at least she could devote her life to looking at them.

She got her B.Sc. at UCLA and her master's at Cal- tech in Pasadena. Her doctorate, or most of it, was also at Caltech just before she got her job, right up the hill at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Of course, her job had noth­ing to do with jets. Neither did JPL itself. What it had to do with was space. Deep space. The kind of space that the Mariners and Vikings and Explorers went out to touch, and smell, and listen to. The information they sent back came to Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and JPL monitored it and translated it and passed it on to the world.

Then the week Rainy was supposed to start her disserta­tion, one of JPL's principal scientists totaled himself on the Golden State Freeway. Her dissertation advisor sent her up the hill as soon as he got the news, to see about a part-time job as the scientist's replacement's assistant, and when she came dazedly down to say that she herself was the replacement her advisor was as astonished as she, and almost as thrilled.

But she had her own spaceship!

Its name was Newton-8, and it was a veteran of a highly successful mission. True, it was pretty well used up by now. It had done its basic program long since, flying by Jupiter and the asteroid belt and faithfully tattling what it saw. Now it was old. Parts of it were worn out, and it would never again, not in the billions of years of time before the Sun burned out, come close enough to a planet to use most of the instrumentation it still possessed.

But it would not die! It was still sending back reports. The one-millimeter radio transmitter still fed telemetry into the Deep Space Network. The meteoroid detector still picked up an impact every day or so. The helium- vector magnetometer, the flux gate magnetometer, and the imaging photopolarimeter had long since stopped re­cording, but where Newton-8 was there was not much for them to record.

And yet its fading vision continued to see radiation and dust clouds and it continued to report them to Earth— long after its life was supposed to be over. Its solar array still collected the dwindling, distant sunlight and trans­formed it into electricity to supplement the output of its aging nuclear power pack. Newton-8 was about the least of all possible spaceships to own. But it was hers, and that was what made her the luckiest person in the world—hers, at any rate, provided this joint committee of Congress allowed her to keep it.

But of course they would—she was JPL's prize exhibit, after all. Her mood improving, she picked lint off the lapel of her three-piece gray suit, squirted a dash of cologne on the white shirt under her tie and reached for the handle of the door, just as the phone rang again.

This time she didn't take a chance on missing it. She clutched it before the second ring, trying to see her watch at the same time because she was running close to critical for getting up the hill. "Oh, hell," she said, "it's only you, Tinker."

Her husband's—her ex-husband's!—distant voice was honeyed. "I'm sorry to bother you, love. I just wanted to know how you are."

"I'm fine," she said crossly. "I'm the same as I was yesterday afternoon when you called, and yesterday morn­ing, and that's not what you called about. You called to tell me how important the family is and why we should get back together again and, Tink, I'm not going to do it."

Pause. Then his soft, troubled voice, trying to patch things over one more time. "I know how you feel, Rainy—"

"Hey!" She looked at her watch again. "It's four in the morning in L.A. What are you trying to do, Tinker?"

"I can't sleep," he said sadly.

"Oh, God," she said, as he began the same old thing again. The cat had got out and the car wouldn't start, and he was losing weight; and she was never more glad to hear her ride honking outside the door. "Got to run, Tink—you hear the horn blowing?" She hoped he had. But she didn't wait to find out. In the Jeep, winding up the narrow road, she wished with all her heart that Alvin Keating would find himself a new girl.

Just as they turned into the parking lot she saw an unkempt man and woman sitting up on the side of the hill, passing a suspicious-looking cigarette back and forth as they gazed over the vast radio-telescope dish and the blue- gray hills around it. Rainy glared at them. She was sure that the man was the Peeping Tom who had broken her orrery.

Yugoslavia is one of the world's most seismically active areas, because it lies where two giant tectonic plates crunch together. The continent of Africa tries to close the Medi­terranean Sea like a door, with its hinge at Gibraltar. Yugoslavia is where the edge of the door slams. It shares its distinction as an earthquake center with Iceland, Japan, and nearly all the western coast of North America.

Thursday, December 3d. 9:20 AM.

Rainy slipped into the auditorium as inconspicuously as she could. The meeting did not seem to be going very well, at least not from the viewpoint of a scientist getting ready to hold out her own begging bowl; the particle physicist before her was sweating as he tried to explain why two hundred million dollars was not much to pay for a new accessory that would smash a handful of tiny bits of matter at very high speed into a handful of others. A freshman senator from one of the industrial eastern states was giving him a hard time; this same Senator Marcellico, along with two or three others, had already savaged the first presenter of the day, from Arecibo itself. The animals smell blood, Rainy thought to herself, trying to look both alertly attentive and impartial.

But they were taking a long time about it! She looked furtively at her watch. Did they understand that her next appearance had to be no later than 10:40 AM, no matter what?

The elderly blonde congresswoman from the farm belt took up the attack on the physicist. "Dr. Vorwaerts," she called from the back of the room. "I understand the Rus­sians have an even bigger machine. Can you tell us why you want to spend all that money to build a second-best?"

The scientist nodded excitedly. "Ah, theirs is quite a different thing! It is the kind of particle here that is most important; ours will be at least five years in advance of anything they have!" The congresswoman sank back in her chair, satisfied, and Rainy filed that in her mind. The economy-minded legislator had not blinked an eye at two hundred million, as long as it looked like it was going to outdo the Russians.

Just as the physicist was finishing explaining why parti­cle accelerators always seemed to be built in New York, Illinois or California—to a congressman from South Dakota— and Rainy was beginning to steal looks at her watch again, the chairman stood up. "If you don't mind," he said, "we're due for a coffee break in just a minute— and first, Miz Georgia Keating has thirty seconds for something that just won't wait."

"Thank you," she called, walking up to the command console on the side of the platform. "As you may remem­ber, last night I sent an instruction to the Newton-8 space­craft. It was rather a long one—eight hundred and twenty- five words. Now I am going to send the enabling command. " She turned and pressed the glowing red button at the corner of the keyboard. "That's all there is to it," she said. "The message has now been transmitted to the Deep Space Network, and relayed from Canberra, Australia, out to the spacecraft. At a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, it will take about an hour and fifty-two minutes to reach the spacecraft. At that point Newton-8 will deploy its instruments and cameras in the direction of the planet Jupiter—or the sun, which will be essentially the same thing at that time. A few minutes later it will observe the transit of Jupiter and relay the pictures and telemetry to us. And we will, of course, begin to receive them an hour and fifty-two minutes after that—at which time I will be here for my presentation. Are there any questions?"

Senator Marcellico called, "Just one, young lady. Are we going to see any little green men?" He was grinning, but the question left a bad taste in her mouth.

During the coffee break the senator was huddled with one of his aides, but as soon as the last morning session started again he was right there. It was Tibor Sonderman's turn, and Rainy observed that the geologist was as tactless with the legislators as he had been with her. He started out by saying that the really basic need was for fundamen­tal research, and immediately Marcellico interrupted. "Is that going to find us any oil?" he called.

"Oil? No. Of course not. Our greatest need is to ob­serve what is happening under the crust—way down, thirty or forty kilometers down—"

"Excuse me, Dr. Sonderman." It was Senator Townseqd Pedigrue, from California, with his brother and chief aide whispering in his ear. "Dr. Sonderman! You're not trying to revive the Mohole program, are you?"

Sonderman said stubbornly, "I do not think you will support drilling to the Mohorovicic layer, no, but it should have been done. Down there is basic knowledge, which we need, to understand what is going on in plate tecton­ics. It is too bad that former President Johnson involved it in Texas politics, so that we missed that chance. But the layer is still there. However, in more immediate terms—"

It looked rather doubtful that he was going to get a chance to tell what the immediate terms were, because Marcellico was upon him again like a ferret. Rainy slipped out of the room. She wasn't fond of Tib Sonderman, but she didn't want to see his blood spilled.

She walked over to the little garden where a buffet table was being set up for lunch, hoping to get a cup of coffee out of the kitchen without the necessity of talking to any senator, congressman, aide, or newsman. She failed on two counts. The coffee wasn't made yet, and one of the TV newscasters was sitting on a stone fence, having failed in the same errand. "You're Dr. Keating, right?" he asked, beckoning her over.

"Ms. Keating—A.B.D., not Ph.D. That means 'All But Dissertation'," she explained. "The dissertation is going to be based on the results from Newton-8."

"So you have a personal interest in your spacecraft?"

A little alarm went off in her brain, and she said, "Every good scientist does, Mr.—" she peered at his name tag— "Altonburg. By the way, did you know you were missing some excitement in the meeting?" She told him about Sonderman and the hard questions that were being thrown at him. The newsman looked concerned, then relaxed.

"My cameraman's getting the whole thing," he said. "Is this your first trip to Puerto Rico, Miz Keating?"

"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!

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.

She was as much sorry for him as angry, though; the poor man simply did not know how to protect himself.

"Overkill" indeed! The Department of Defense was repre­sented there too, and the DoD had a long memory. Some congressman somewhere, with a couple of airfields and an electronics plant fattening payrolls in his district, was going to pay off his IOUs by pulling a few feathers out of one of Sonderman's projects some day. Whatever the project was. It was too bad, but that was the way the game was played.

The other way the game was played was that you took advantage of any breaks you could get. Tommy Pedigrue's squeezes on her forearm were definite pluses. Rainy had no objection in the world to taking advantage of the fact that she interested men; it was the little extra vigorish God had given her. If she had been born male, no doubt she could have had a different kind of edge, like the kind you got from mingling with the mighty in saunas and whorehouses. God had denied her that, but given her sexual attractiveness instead. Rainy did not feel it demeaned her status as a scientist to accept Her gift. It was not her fault that Sonderman didn't use his assets—whatever they were. Good heavens, he had an easy job! All he had to fund was geology! Geology was how you found uranium ore and oil domes and all those good things that every­body not only wanted but knew they wanted. Not like astronomy!

They were at the meeting building now, and she had not really heard a word the man had said. A quick look at her watch showed that she had five minutes leeway; she excused herself by pointing to the ladies' room and es­caped to freshen up and get her act together.

She left Tommy Pedigrue looking a little surprised, because he had just been telling her about the current international crisis. But the nerve endings in her crisis centers had long since been anesthetized. Not just in hers. In her whole generation's. To the young people born in the 1950s, the world had cried wolf one time too many; they no longer heard the alarms.

Rainy Keating had been born in the year when Eisen­hower was re-elected and John Foster Dulles began easing troops into Vietnam. She lived through fallout-shelter drills in nursery school. She reached menarche the day of the riots at the Chicago Democratic convention. That night she saw a face she recognized on television: it was her cousin Ron, clubbed bloody in Grant Park. She was eigh­teen when the Palestinians shot up the Munich Olympics and twenty when, every day in the newspaper, she stud­ied pictures of starved babies in the Sahel. The father of her best high-school friend was hijacked to Cuba, and the Iranian mobs swarmed over the U.S. Embassy while she was on her honeymoon. It had all been like that. It was too much. Ayatollahs and Nixons and Idi Amins came and went, and after a while Rainy—and her generation—simply looked away.

Or looked into the mirror, to make sure she was ready for the big event. The hair was all right. The eye makeup still fine, in spite of the muggy heat. The three-piece suit, though—no. It was a little too much, even for a pretty young female astronomer who wanted to be taken seriously. She took the necktie off, opened the top two buttons of the shirt and then, satisfied, entered the meeting room to check her equipment.

She still had a few minutes. She spent them worrying.

The messages from Newton-8 should be coming in right now. They were the most distant messages ever received on Earth; every second they grew a few thousand yards more distant still, as, far away, that half-ton chunk of metal called Newton-8 was taking its slow departure from the Sun.

It had come a long way. It had left the east coast of Florida, just over the horizon from where they were now, on a plume of thundering fire a few years earlier. It had slipped through the dust storm of the asteroid belt, taken aim at the planet Jupiter, and sailed among its brood of moons. The powerful tug of that giant planet whipped it into a new orbit that grazed Saturn; then Saturn, too, contributed some of its own immense momentum to speed the spacecraft outward. At each point it had done all of its jobs. It had returned thousands of pictures from each, taken in blue light and in red, narrow angle and broad, along with temperature readings, charged-particle counts, mag­netic field intensity measurements, and scores of other data.

Then its assignment was complete.

Newton-8 had added a fraction of a percentage point to the growing store of human wisdom, at a cost about equal to one week's production of nuclear missiles. The space­craft was through—but it didn't die. With most of its instruments powered down forever, since there would be nothing near enough for them to observe for a good many millions of years, it climbed toward the wide, empty spaces between the stars. In another decade or two it would pass the orbit of Pluto, the outer limit of the solar system.

But Newton-8 had had an unusually lucky flight. Its first course approximations were almost dead on the money; mid-course corrections were infrequent and small. It came to the end of its planned life with a substantial store of propellant still unspent. It was still receiving inputs from its radio and optical eyes, and so the engineers at JPL coaxed it tenderly, and it lived on. Its targeting systems could still find the planet Earth, and its attitude jets could still point its transmitter right on target. It continued to trickle information back to the great listening ears of the Deep Space Network, three posts on three continents that among them girdled the world. Then they became the pro­perty of a doctoral candidate named Georgia Raines Keating.

And the telemetry on her control equipment showed that they were doing it faultlessly still. Supremely confi­dent, Rainy turned from her assistant and faced the audience.

She had a full house—every one of the senators and congressmen, most of their aides, nearly all of the news- people. Tommy Pedigrue, sitting between his brother and fat, moonfaced young Senator Marcellico, winked at her from the front row. Rainy took a deep breath—partly for air, partly to give those top two buttons a chance to do their work—and nodded to her assistant. As Marguerite pulled back the drapes from the old model of the Newton-8 spacecraft, Rainy began.

"That's my baby. Its name is Newton-8, and it is right now—mark—" she raised her hand and leaned forward to read the counter over the keyboard—"one billion three hundred sixteen million sixty-four thousand and about two hundred miles from us—now." She dropped her hand. "We have about eight minutes before it observes Jupiter transiting the sun, so I'd like to tell you a little about it. What you see is a quarter-scale model. That long thing sticking out is the magnetometer—the important one, that is still working; with that one we expect to be able to measure the sun's magnetopause, which is to say to find out just how far the sun's magnetic influence extends into space. The round thing sticking out on this side, that looks like a wok—that's the little brother to the big dish outside here, the parabolic radio transmitter. On the real space­craft it's about eight feet across, which gives you an idea of size. The whole thing weighs about as much as a motorcycle, say five hundred pounds plus, and it is the farthest outpost of the human mind right now." She thought for a moment and added, "The Russians have nothing like it. All the data they have on transmartian space they get from us, and a lot of the best of it is what we get from Newton-8."

They were quiet, and seemed attentive. She paused for a moment, to let the people absorb the faint trills and clicks and peeps from the instruments and to see the wave forms displayed on the CRTs. "Over here at the console," she went on, "that big screen at the top is going to show us the first pictures ever of the planet Jupiter as it crosses in front of the sun. No human being has ever seen that before. We in this room will be the very first—yes, Sena­tor Marcellico?"

The plump little man stood up good-humoredly. "What about those little green men?" he asked.

Rainy almost dropped the pointer she was holding. "I beg your pardon?"

"I'm sorry. I guess I'd better speak up," he grinned. "The thing is, all this morning we were listening to Dr. Sonderman over there telling us how lucky we were we didn't have Mount Saint Helens blowing up in our laps every other day, and then those young people came and entertained us with some other stuff about how the world was coming to an end, and, well, I just wondered if you were going to cheer us up some more. "

There were a few smiles in the audience, but more scowls—unfortunately the scowls all came from scientists. Rainy managed a smile of her own. "Not at all, Senator," she declared. "Newton-8 is purely a science experiment. We are simply now in a position to see the planet Jupiter—" "Yes, I know about Jupiter," he said courteously. "But aren't you the young lady who said that little men from space were coming to call on us any minute?" "Certainly not, Senator! I—"

He persisted, "But I have right here—" he fished a paper out of his briefcase—"a copy of a document that reports to be your thesis for your master's degree." He put on his spectacles and studied it. 'Uh-huh, your name's right on it—of course, it was just 'Georgia Raines' then, but that's you, isn't it? Let's see, here. The title says, A Numerical Estimate of Intervention Events from Extra- Terrestrial Sources. Seems to have a whole lot of trouble­some things in it, Miz Keating," he added, flipping slowly through the pages.

Rainy laughed shakily. "Oh, that," she said. "Yes, that's mine, Senator. Of course, I had to write something to get my degree, and I was more or less limited by what my degree advisor would accept. But there certainly aren't any little green men in it. The paper is an attempt to quantify the probabilities of some event outside the earth that will affect humanity deeply. There have been many such in the past, as I'm sure you're aware. For example, there was the Lower Cretaceous episode, when appar­ently almost all higher life forms on Earth became extinct at once and—"

"Lower what was that, Miz Keating?" "Lower Cretaceous, Senator. That's a geological term. It refers to a time about sixty-five million years ago, when apparently some great disaster—"

"Miz Keating," the senator said good-humoredly, "it's that word apparently' that does me in every time, not to mention that other word sixty-five million years ago'. You ever hear of the Golden Fleece award, Miz Keating?"

She saw Tommy Pedigrue nudge his brother, who took pity on her. "Bert," he said, reaching over to touch the other senator's shoulder, "that's all very interesting, but as I understand it there's a very important event coming up in just a few minutes—"

"That's all right, Towny," said Marcellico, chuckling, and sank back into his seat. "I don't want to miss that. Please accept my apologies and go on, Miz Keating. I was only trying to clarify something in my own ihind."

Rainy glanced at her watch, biting her lip to regain control. She smiled politely. "Just above the monitor," she said, "you'll see a drawing of the position of the sun, Jupiter, and Newton-8 as they are right now. It's not to scale, of course. As you can see, our spacecraft is rapidly approaching its rendezvous point, the position from which it will observe the planet cross the disk of the sun. Please give us the pictures as they are received now, Margue­rite." The technician nodded. The screen went to black, with a very bright spot the only thing visible in the center of it. Rainy went into her pitch.

"What I'd specially like to emphasize," she said, smiling warmly at Senator Marcellico, "is that this is like being given a whole new spacecraft free. Newton-8 finished paying for itself when it exited the Saturn system. Every bit we get now is pure profit—Senator?"

Townsend Pedigrue was leaning forward for attention. His expression was amiable enough as he said, "Please feel free to interrupt me whenever you need to for this dem­onstration. Like Senator Marcellico, I always worry when I hear certain words, and one of them is that word 'free', Miz Keating. Isn't it so that we still have to pay for the radio receivers, and all this fascinating looking hardware, not to mention a salary for your own good self?"

Rainy maintained her smile. "That's right, Senator, the ground support still has to be maintained. But the spacecraft itself is worth three hundred million dollars. That's paid off. We're getting information from a volume of space never before explored, and it's on the house. Let me show you some of it."

She nodded to Marguerite, who turned up the audio gain. A soothing hiss came from the loudspeakers. Rainy listened for a moment and said, "That's the sound of neutral hydrogen. Newton-8 is programmed to scan a whole band of frequencies, something like those radios that zip through the police and fire frequencies and only stop when there's an actual transmission. Newton listens to each signal until it can match it against its data store. If it is something already on record, like this neutral hydro­gen emission, it will drop it and go looking for something else. Give it a second—"

On track, the sound changed.

"There it goes," she said, satisfied. "Let's see what it finds next."

There was a staccato teep-teep-teep from the audio speak­ers, the hunting cry of the frequency scanner as it sought a new source. Then it locked and delivered a warbling hiss which Rainy quickly identified as the song of the hydroxyl radical; then another, then another. Rainy watched the audience carefully. She had made her main points already, and it was only necessary to let them sink in. Maybe to reinforce them from time to time? She focused her atten­tion on the row of other committee aides and said, "I think you'll be interested in the way Newton-8 deals with emer­gencies. For instance, we had a failure in the radioisotope thermoelectric generator, so we're limited to solar power. At Newton's distance from the sun, there isn't much of that. But we managed to command an extension of the solar electric panels—the things that look like wings on the model. We get about twenty-two watts, which is enough to run the important instruments full-time and the rest when they are needed."

"That doesn't sound like enough for a radio broadcast from, what did you say? Two and a half billion miles away?" It was one of the women whom Rainy had not met, an aide to the minority leader of the committee. At the last moment Rainy came up with the name.

"We don't need much, Miz Landro," she said. "The data transmission only takes eight watts of radiated power on the one-millimeter wavelength. At that rate, we expect to continue data acquisition and tracking capability for an indefinite period—maybe another twenty years. "

Eve Landro said frostily, "Does that mean you want to spend the next twenty years on the public payroll?"

It had been a mistake to open those top two buttons after all, Rainy realized. "Well," she said warmly, "there's the information, Ms. Landro. We can take it, or we can let it go to waste— What is it, Marguerite?"

The radio technician was signaling distress, and Rainy could hear why. There was a new sound coming from the speakers. Rainy frowned, trying to identify it. It was at the threshold of hearing, and quite unlike anything her space­ship had ever produced for her before. "Turn up the gain, Marguerite!" she ordered. But even at maximum amplifi­cation there was more background noise than signal.

Once Rainy had heard a Moog synthesizer concert in which the human voice had been superimposed on the frequencies of a rock band. What she heard now reminded her of that—though what she heard could not be human language, or even any language at all, considering where it came from. It was as though an animal's cry had been blended with the whines and rumbles of a machine on the verge of breaking down. "Check the telemetry!" she cried to Marguerite; and then, collecting herself for the sake of her audience, "Either we're getting a new kind of signal that's right outside of my experience ... or there's a malfunction of some sort. "

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.