The Rape of The Sun Page 10

  With a superior smile, Collins replied: “My dear Professor Haley, obviously you know the answer, you are testing my logic. You have not noticed the shrinkage because, in the inter-relativity of our world and its measuring instruments, everything is still the same relative to everything else. But I declare to you, sir, that we are shrinking.”

  “If that is true,” Bill observed, “we could detect our shrinkage by observations of the sun and the planets which would seem to be growing larger. Only, sir, they do not seem to be growing larger.”

  “Of course not. Our entire solar system is shrinking.”

  “Then of course, Mister Collins, we need not trouble ourselves to observe the other stars; because you will now be telling us that the entire galaxy and indeed the whole universe is shrinking, all at the same rate. And of course, outside the universe, there is nothing for comparison.”

  Astonishingly, Collins did not instantly reply; he stared at Haley, and slowly his mouth came open. Discovering that he clutched a drink, he took a swallow of that. He then went slowly to Bill, stood on tiptoe, and whispered something to 'him. Bill nodded slowly; then, frowning, Bill went away.

  Afterward we learned that Collins had whispered this to Bill: “Sir, intuitively I know about our world and our solar system. Beyond Pluto, however, I have no vision at all— about shrinkage, at least. Sir, I do suggest that you watch the stars.”

  Abruptly Collins seemed overwhelmed by crowd pressure; he glared about him like a cornered wild thing, panicked, brushed bumptious through all the company, barged outdoors. Sven and Wel and I gaped at each other. The room was talk-humming. Wel jerked his head toward the door, and I rushed out after Collins.

  I returned carrying an empty highball glass, my face must have been radiant. I came over and stood, gay-triumphant, squarely in front of my two men. “He’s gone!” I announced in a private communication which the room was meant to hear and did hear. “The poor honest dear left his empty highball glass just outside the door.”

  “Also,” said Wel, “he left his billfold behind. He’ll be back.”

  But Wel was wrong. And so were all our bets: none of us had foreseen anything like this.

  Complications, centering particularly on the secret soul of Welland Carr, progressed as the party mood reasserted itself and gyrated to conclusion just in time to prevent all but one of the guests from passing out.

  But so much was to follow the party that the rest of that evening ought to be, and will be, deferred until it confers more immediate meaning.

  10

  Wel, having absorbed the least alcohol, next morning recovered before I did: soon after ten a.m., in the master bedroom of our new house. Something told him that he should get up and be at something; nevertheless he cheated for a while, enjoying his pillow and drowsing and semi-awakening and drowsing. Ultimately it came to him what he really wanted to be thinking about. I was dead asleep, beside him but apart from him in my own bed and snoring in pleasant little muted snorts. Wel arose, bathroomed, activated the instant coffeemaker in the kitchen, and a minute later sat sipping % and reflecting in the parlor—which was a mess, but he wasn’t noticing.

  First of all, there was the soul-gratifying response of Sven to Wel’s indirect late-party self-revelation (that’s what I’m deferring). Never mind that now, he warned himself, it was ego-stuff. Concentrate on the wild diminution theory of Collins. It might be worth looking into, but....

  Bill Haley! Last night Wel hadn’t gotten a thing out of him about stars. But at one point Collins had whispered to Bill, and Bill had subsided, looking troubled....

  Wel dressed quickly, quietly packed, scribbled a note to me: “I'm off for the office and maybe elsewhere, there’s work to do, I’ll phone you soon but not today or tonight. Sorry to blow the weekend. Kisses and stuff. Wel.”

  I read Wel's note, frowned, tapped fingers with it, went to the phone, called Sven, told him about it. “Probably,” I mused, “he is stewed about Collins and diminution.”

  “Can we just call it shrinkage?”

  “A skunk cabbage by any other name—”

  “Dinner tonight, Hel? Drinks at my place at six?”

  “Mind making it five?”

  It took Haley longer; suffering, he rolled himself out at three p.m. By five, he was oriented enough to consult his watch and decide that it must be Saturday. Hell of a day to phone colleagues; nevertheless, phone them he must

  What concerned him was, at this time, not at all connected with the Southeastern solar project. >

  Who might be around his office on Saturday was Peter Vandevelt at Palomar. Bill rang and got him. “Haley here,” he said. “Pete, there’s a mystic here who is on to the shrinkage thing.”

  “A—mystic?”

  “That,” Bill snapped, “is neither here nor there. The point is, his epistemology was good enough to suggest that our top-secret thing is leaking. I think we have to get together and plan out something responsible.”

  “You sound serious, Bill, but also you are talking very slowly and carefully, and some of your words don’t come through clearly. That isn’t like you. Are you maybe hung over?”

  “Not badly enough to be kidding myself. Pete, this is my nickle. I thought you ought to convene our people, chop chop.”

  “Bill, is it urgent enough to make you fly out here?”

  “My next call will be to make a flight reservation.”

  “Good enough. I’ll phone all of them. See you here in a hurry.”

  Wel felt that he had his hands on the tails of three electric eels which were somehow interrelated yet kept slithering away divergently. The Perfume of Diminution: in the air, and out of the dragon’s vents. And shrinkage. And the expanding stars.

  In the Herald-Trib offices, he scribbled a desk memo for his assistant editor to find Monday morning: “Don’t count on me this week, do it yourself; dig a few Soon stories out of our morgue, rewrite and file as needed.” Then he phoned Bill Haley at home and at the university; no answer. Bothered indeed, he felt an urgency to talk with me; but he had said he wouldn’t, and it might interfere with me and Sven. So he checked in at a downtown hotel and passed Saturday and Sunday browsing purposefully but almost uselessly in the university science library and pondering variously.

  Bill would be the best one to help him. After talking with Bill, Wel might venture hitting up other astronomers. (Hello, Dr. X, I’m science editor of the Herald-Trib and I want to know if you think the world and the solar system are shrinking in a hell of a hurry—Christ, it was too embarrassing even to contemplate.)

  On Monday morning, crouched over the phone in his hotel room, Wel called Bill at Sylvania University. Bill’s secretary was friendly; she knew Wel in person as a faculty colleague. “Why, Doctor Carr,” she said, “I’m afraid Doctor Haley isn’t in town, he went unexpectedly to Palomar Saturday, he’s with Doctor Vandevelt there and I think some others; if it’s urgent, I’ll give you the phone number.” Wel took it, but he wanted Haley to himself face-to-face in private; so he asked when the astronomer was expected back. “Not this week, I’m afraid,” the secretary told Wel. “Maybe next week.” Then, chattily: “By the way, have you noticed how perfectly marvelous the stars have been lately?”

  Strikeout. He didn’t want to call Palomar. But why would Bill be away all week? why his abrupt departure? Houston after Palomar was a possibility. He phoned Col. Voorhees; no, Dr. Haley wasn’t expected this week,

  Hm. . . .

  Suddenly he wanted very much to talk with me. I would be at my office; he visiphoned me there. When I came on—full of open pleasure, not languid at all—he queried: “Can you talk?”

  “Sure can, sweets, I’m all alone at the moment. What’s on your mind?”

  “You.”

  “Lonesome?”

  “Lonesome indeed. Okay if I come home tonight?”

  “My God, yes Wel, I need to talk with you, there’s a new angle. Just now I had a talk with Bob Mullett.”

  “About perfume?
”

  “Precisely.” Wel says that my face and voice took on a disagreeable quality, as though I had just spied a rat in a corner of my office.

  Wel swallowed. “Then Sven ought to hear it too.”

  “Damn Sven, he’s gone to Houston, and besides, I want you to hear it first. I’ll tape what I tell you and get it to him later. Edited tape, of course, with suitable erasures. Look, what say we both break at five, and meet at home between five-thirty and six, I’ll pop dinner into our dandy computerized microwave which I haven’t tried yet, and we can drink until it’s ready. . . . Or, wait: that’s a pretty fast microwave there. ... I’ll inject the food without starting the works, and that way we can drink until we think we want dinner ten minutes later if ever—”

  Bob Mullett had been waiting in my office when I entered Monday morning. He handed me a bulky ten-by-thirteen envelope (the paper people are still on inches) provocatively marked: “Dr. Helen Cavell—Her Eyes Only.” He said it was his report on the funny smell. Having gotten him seated in a beside-the-desk chair, I leaned back and closed eyes. All I could see was the space-dragon.

  I asked: “Care to summarize verbally?”

  “How soundproof is your office?”

  “Soundproof and unbugged. I have it checked daily.”

  “I tested eleventy-seven samples and nosed through several technical libraries besides ours and my own. All samples were absolutely normal, except that I finally detected a positive ion which is> nowhere reported in the literature for atmosphere at earth-surface or above it. The concentration of this ion is significant; but its life is very short, a matter of microseconds, and it may well have been overlooked previously. It took our big computer to find it.”

  “If you found it although its life is short, Bob, it must keep coming into the samples.”

  “Exactly, Helen.”

  “Did you try isolating the ion, or filtering it out?”

  “I tried, but I couldn’t. It vanishes too fast.”

  “How about comparisons with old samples of air?”

  “I did them. Same ion, same concentration, same evanishment.”

  “Evanishment?”

  “I picked up the word from a sometimes ornate science-fiction writer.”

  “What sort of ion, Bob?”

  “Positive charge of one-half. Something wrong there, but it was consistent. As though part of a proton had been extracted from an atom—or a full proton and part of an electron.”

  “A K-meson, maybe?”

  “Doesn’t fit. The clinical impression is that the ion was a leftover from some reactions with other atoms in the atmosphere; but I drew a blank there too, because all other atmospheric components appear normal. Apparently there are no unusual atoms or molecules and no unusual concentrations of any atoms or molecules in any of the samples I tested, current or old. I don’t really have justification for going into expensive institutional stuff to analyze atoms exhaustively one-by-one, but the atomic behavior in the samples is statistically normal.”

  I ruminated. I said then: “What does your summary say, in summary?”

  “Single stray ions in such diffuse concentration would not stimulate impressions of perceptible odor. Yet an unusual odor has been existing, according to many subjective reports, including yours and mine. None of us has been noticing the odor recently, but it may still be around—continuing experience could raise our thresholds of perceiving it. My report is inconclusive: I cannot account for the odor, but something tells me that I should not abandon the project.”

  A faint chill pervaded me. I was remembering that I had suspected habituation and so had Collins—who had dubbed the aroma the Perfume of Diminution. I suggested low: “You said the free ions might be a by-product. Let me hit you with a wild hypothesis which is at grotesque variance with the principle of unit charges. Removal of particles from an atomic nucleus would produce free ions. Given a compensating increment of nuclear charge together with some other factors—that might shrink the nucleus and the atom.”

  Silence.

  “I see where you’re going,” said Bob, “and it’s mentioned in my report. I thought I was nuts; and I still think I am, but I’m not sure of it any more. I spent considerable time with Carrie Cummings on this, and we even tried a few experiments on the animals she uses to test effects of line-leakage. Nothing experimentally. But. Carrie reports that the behavior of some animals has been mildly erratic during the past three months. Also, Carrie runs growth curves on a number of the infant rats and guinea pigs and rhesus monkeys; and on the curves during February into April, there are growth-rate aberrations in unusually high number.”

  Aberrations in growth curves along with aberrant behavior during February through April—and perhaps continuing. Astounding weather phenomenon just before, in January. The same ions in old air samples as well as new—and Collins had said that the Perfume would permeate everything, which would include containers. Abruptly I remembered a night when Sven had appeared somehow taller than usual: a most , subtle impression. Omigod: that was the night when....

  Arising, I blurted: “Stand against that wall, Bob, like a good little growing kid; I’m going to mark your height and measure it. Then you do it to me.” The promptness of Bob’s obedience indicated that his mind was running on an associated track. At the end of it, both of us had to report that our heights, as measured, were normal. (But measuring instruments would shrink along with everything else ...)

  I murmured: “Do we dare measure some others in my office?”

  Having heard my account, Wel pondered in silence. Respecting his wisdom equally with the best of all fallible human wisdoms, I waited.

  He said, “Indirect confirmation of the relative star-swelling?’* “Maybe.”

  “I’m shivering, a little.’*

  ' “If I look languidly calm, that means Fm shivering a little. Wel, have you contacted Haley?”

  He told me in detail about that. He added: “I am still monkeying with the question, whither Bill and his colleagues might so suddenly have gone.”

  “I think you’d better find out.”

  “I think the same. And I have a silly little hunch.”

  He waited. I mused. I chilled. I ventured: “Washington?” “D.C.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “I think we’re right. It figures.”

  “Now Sven has to know, it may affect our mission. Wel, why don’t you phone him—right now?”

  “Hel—no.”

  “Why not, f godsakes?”

  “Because we may be wrong. I have to know. Please don’t

  tip Sven until I have the answer, no point in setting him off half-cocked.”

  The remark brought me up short. Small, I asked, “Since you know him better than I do—is he prone to half-cocked set-offs?”

  Wel demurred: “I didn’t say that.’*

  “But I think you were feeling it.”

  “I—hope you won’t get mad if I remind you that when Sven first hit us with his sun-proposal in January, you warned him not to over-emote with J.C.”

  That hit home. Choosing words with care, I queried: “Does that reminder contain an indirect reference to our current affair?”

  With fervor Wel protested: “Not at all, Hel! Your friendship with Sven has a long history. If impulse was in the recent redirection picture, it could only have expressed something long deep. No; I was only thinking about Sven’s overwhelming tendency to attack.”

  “Is that bad, Wel?”

  “Put it this way. If you thoroughly size up a situation and conclude that attack is the best approach, then probably attack procedure is good. But if you merely feel the possibility of a developing threat, and you immediately bring off a preventive attack, that is not necessarily immoral, but it can be bad business.”

  Certainly it made executive sense, and in my heart I knew that Wel was right: Sven was capable of going off half-cocked. But my God, even so, what a hell of an explosion it would be! And what a world-dangero
us business such an explosion could be! I said solidly, “See Bill Haley before you talk to Sven—and I won’t blurt to Sven until you say so. Can I play him the edited tape about Mullett, though?”

  “By all means, that he should hear. Hel—”

  “Husband?”

  “Nice word, wife, and you say it better than anybody. One would hardly know you were a Miz.”

  “I am only a career Miz. Home is different. What were you going to say?”

  “I really hate to ask it—”

  “Ask it.”

  “You were with Sven last night?”

  “In a large but not-quite-complete sense, yes.”

  “What was wrong?”

  “He feels guilty about you.”

  “Oboy. Does he know I know?”

  “Even before I told him you knew, he felt guilty as hell, he was talking about it. When I told him not to worry, you knew and you semi-blessed, he damn near went to pieces.” “Sven?”

  “Not all the way to pieces, of course; not he. But after that—there wasn’t anything.”

  “And you feel frustrated.”

  “Right. And disturbed.”

  “Still, wife, we must sleep apart.”

  “Right.”

  “Would it help if I were to—”

  “Speak to Sven? No! He would immediately canonize you, and even / don’t do that!” I think I had never loved Wel more than then.

  “Let’s go to bed—apart,” he said, arising. “And while we are stripping, let’s both reflect that above all 'else I want you and Sven to be totally satisfied. I want it for you two—but also, quite selfishly, I want it for you and me.”

  Part Four

  REALISTIC MYSTIC SHOWDOWN

  11

  Tuesday morning, May 2, Wel got really going on the most arousing week of his career so far by phoning Washington and talking to his friend the deputy director of the six-year-old Bureau of Interscientific Research and Coordination. The deputy was no PR man; and his defensive manner of insisting that he knew nothing about a visit by a committee of astronomers, simply nothing, convinced Wel that there was such a visit.