The Rape of The Sun Page 7

  I stared; and abruptly I felt an inward chill, and I put one arm around him. Reluctantly I answered: “I guess so.”

  “In fact,” said Wel, “I’ve done a bit of checking; and I am almost sure that their apparent magnitude has grown by half or more since January.”

  Our mutual grip tightened; I began to rub on his ribs, feeling comfort in their boniness. “So much the better for romance,” I said.

  “There’s another thing,” Wel murmured. “Scent the air, Hel. Scent it most delicately.”

  I hadn’t thought lately to smell the air. Now I did so, dilating nostrils and inhaling ever so lightly. The atmospheric odor was sweet indeed: sweet like the smell of new-mown alfalfa, just as it had been for a long time lately, only I had stopped noticing. But, my God, this was in a suburb close to the great city of Sylvanopolis! and at any rate, early April was not alfalfa-mowing time. . ..

  Reluctantly I nailed it down: “Hey, that—weather phenomenon last January?” I looked at Wei; he was nodding slowly.

  I demanded: “Look—is it scientific to marry brightening stars with the perfume of alfalfa?”

  His shoulders went up and down, he was frowning gravely. “Science is present science only for what it knows about; it is future science for what it doesn’t know about yet. I have this funny premonition—” He cut it-off. He turned to me: “Hel, this can be a team effort. I’ll hit up some people about the stars. Do you think you could get Bob Mullett or somebody to look into the aroma?”

  I felt enormously heavy. ‘Team effort, right,” I said hesitantly; then: “Wel-should we maybe go to bed now?”

  Wel nodded abstractedly; I reentered our apartment; he followed me, closing the door; I went on into our bedroom, our beds were twins; he cut the lights in the living room and came on in. Silently we undressed, it was an old-spouse undressing. I went into the bathroom, came out, got into my bed; he went into the bathroom, came out, got into his.

  I said: “Night, honey.”

  He said: “Night, sweets.”

  I doused the light and lay agonizing.

  Abruptly I pleaded: “Please, honey—come over here and make me.”

  He came over and slid in and made me very well.

  We lay on our backs, quieting.

  I spoke to the ceiling: “This I have to tell you. It’s beginning to look bad—about me and Sven.” Pause, then: “So now you know, I’ve gone and said it.”

  He spoke to the same ceiling, as though we were communicating by satellite: “Is he pushing you?”

  “Not at all, bless him. But—I’m awful close to the verge of alluring him. And he’d respond.”

  - Wel, with difficulty: “Is—are we threatened?”

  I, straining it: “I don’t think so. No, I know we aren’t. Unless you—” I sat .up and bent over him: “Wel, I don’t want us to be threatened, I don’t—”

  Reaching up, he began to massage the back of my neck; I subsided upon him to make it easier. He whispered: “If we aren’t threatened, Ym not threatened. Go on and get it out of your system.”

  I nuzzled his neck, and a few tears came.

  “In fact,” he ruminated,-“I’m thinking of inviting Sven to be my co-host at our housewarming. What do you think, sweets? Design for celebrating? Kaplan and McGuire?” '

  fitting up again, I thumped his chest. “You’re Kaplan, my friend. Always.”

  Wel sat up; we embraced with profound affection; then he departed my bed and went back to his. I lay on my side looking at him, blessing him; he lay on his back doing ceiling-inspection in the dark.

  He murmured: “I sure would hate to lose either of you. But if I have to lose one, let it be Sven. Pray God I don’t lose both.

  He turned to me: “But anyhow, I love you, Hel.”

  Fervently I whispered, “I love you, Well”

  8

  Monday morning I headed for work by my usual transport, a coal-fired commuter train. As always, I hid myself behind a newspaper while my three compartment-mates played some damned card game; but today I was not reading the paper, merely screening myself with it while I badgered my problems. The line terminated underground in the Sylvanopolis Golden Triangle at the confluence of the Seminole and Cherokee Rivers where they spawn the Sylvania River; surfacing, briskly I walked to the sixty-story mirror-glassed headquarters of Southeastern Power.

  My offices and labs occupied all of four floors near the top. Walking through my outer office, I nodded and smiled at employees who looked up at me with friendship; and I entered my inner office, closing the door. My coffee was just

  ready, hot on the grid: my secretaries knew my arrival schedule and habits. Having poured myself a full tot, black and unsweetened, the way God made it, in an ample mug of plain terra cotta with an inside glaze, I sat in the cushioned leatheroid swivel chair at my mahoganyesque desque, unseeingly staring at three neatly stacked sets of in-papers (left urgent, middle for prompt attention, right routine) and restlessly swiveled while I continued to cat-worry my problem-mice. Several times I stood and paced, pausing at each of my six windows (two end ones opening onto the Cherokee, four side ones displaying the confluence), but staring out of them only as I had stared at my desk: as a field for confused thought-projection.

  At one window, coming to focus on the solar reflecting property of the glass, I grinned tight, snorted “Wrong direction,” and paced on.

  After half an hour of this, I buzzed my private secretary, young Carter, and told him to summon Dr. Mullett at the doctor’s earliest convenience. Then, with a divided mind (which was not unusual), I began to work on my urgent heap. After twenty minutes of that, Carter interrupted me by visicom: “Excuse me, Doctor Cavell—Doctor Mullett is here.”

  Now is when we hit the funny smell....

  Bob Mullett entered, shut the door, and said, “Hi.” (You met him at our Friday (he thirteenth sun-conference.) I arose languidly, shook hands, and seated my chemist at my conference table, taking a seat across from him; my office furniture was a suite of status-perks, the table mirror-polished and liquid-repellent, the chairs luxuriant. I went into my careless pose, leaning back in my chair; but my hands gripped the front arm-rounds and my fingers nervously caressed them. I opened with friendly cordiality: “Bob, how’s everything?”

  Mullett knew that I wouldn’t bite him unless he’d done something bad; he hadn’t lately, so I must simply have a bug in my ear, and he found that invariably a challenge. Smiling, he responded: “If you mean profesionally, we’re on schedule with progress; if you mean personally, my wife is pregnant, and that will make three.”

  “That’s good,” I said absently. I frowned. “That’s very good,” I added, pondering. Bob waited alert: it was going to be a challenge.

  I looked up, my fingers denting the chair-arms. “Bob, you’re an electrochemist, but that includes chemistry, doesn’t it? Well. Bob—have you noticed an odor in the air?”

  He grinned broadly. “If so, it must be my fault.”

  “Not a social error,” I snapped. “A pervasive subtle odor in the air that I simply can’t describe. I thought it might be in my mind, but others have noticed it.”

  Bob went sober. “I guess I’ve noticed it, too, but I hadn’t given it much thought, we’re in Sylvanopolis.”

  “That’s a legend, Bob, and you know it. Sylvanopolis hasn’t smelled funnier than any other city for half a century. What’s it like, Bob?”

  “You mean, how does the odor smell to me?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I said I hadn’t noticed it much, but—let me think,” It was Mullett’s turn to frown; impatiently I waited. Hesitantly Bob told his lap: “You have to understand that I’m a Kansas farm boy; What I am making of it is just a hint—a mere soup-son, you understand—of new-mown alfalfa.”

  “Okay. Do you smoke, Bob?”

  ‘Temperately, Helen. Lately they taste lousy.”

  “My husband, Wel, said the same thing. He definitely thought it was from the smell in the air.”
r />   “Could be, maybe.”

  “I used to smoke, Bob, and I like the smell of tobacco. But lately I haven’t liked it anymore.”

  Mullett was not smiling, he was quiveringly alert. “I see what you mean about chemistry. You want me to analyze the odor.”

  “Right. What else do you have going right now?”

  “Jacobite production, of course—”

  “Stay with that, by all means. But in between, get at the funny smell. And keep it confidential.”

  “Why confidential?”

  “You want someday to be promoted?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “Well, then, keep it as confidential as you can—and whomever you have to bring into it, warn them to clam it.”

  I went alone to a Wednesday night lecture sponsored by my Female Exchange Club; most of us were work-for-pay women, but we tolerated voluntary domestic engineers. The lecturer we got that night was a dreamy-eyed little mystic named Collins. His lecture was marvelously disconnected; he browsed without notes from mystery to mystery; he broke off in the middle of one and sat down. Applause.

  Hey, ideal I was among those who saw him afterward. . . .

  When we were together, which now was about three evenings weekly, Wel and I kept each other informed. Wel was on the track of the star-brightness mystery. Obviously it was a mere phenomenon; the stars themselves would have no reason to start growing all at once in the same degree. Something was enhancing their brightness, that was all, and incidentally purpling the sky—but he felt duty-bound to develop something about it for the Herald-Trib.

  On a hypothesis about atmospheric conditions, he interviewed three top meteorologists: the weather bureau chiefs in Sylvanopolis, in Houston’s NASA, and in the national capital. All had noticed the phenomenon, had studied it from an atmospheric viewpoint, and had come up zilch. “We’re staying on it,” said Houston, “but there’s a lot we don’t know yet about a lot of things. Like you say, somehow it has got to be Earth-local, but it doesn’t seem to be atmosphere even as high as Kenelley-Heaviside E-2.”

  Having struck out on atmosphere, Wel was itching to interview his buddy at Sylvania U., our crew astronomer Bill Haley. Unhappily, Wel’s and Bill’s schedules couldn’t find any kind of a mesh, not even in Houston. Wel did succeed one night in getting Haley into a drinking session, and he pumped the astronomer deftly; perhaps my husband should have been violent, because deftness had elicited nothing; Bill’s intoxication had progressed more rapidly than usual, and Bill had excused himself and gone home. But Wel planned to corner Bill at our housewarming.

  Something was telling Wel that he shouldn’t yet hit-up any other astronomer. The ice might somehow be precariously thin.

  I flew to Houston on Friday evening, April 21, for more training; and there I settled into quarters near Sven’s apartment in the small plush Astronaut Hotel which is a govern-? ment concession in the NASA complex.

  A phone call came for me early Saturday morning: a space crew was about .to load a spent Southeastern Power communications satellite onto a shuttle to bring it down for overhaul. I might want to witness the operation; they were sending over a limousine. I roused Sven by phone; and at 0900 we were in Control Room Six, watching live visuals and listening to back-and-forth talk.

  On video, four spacesuited operators with compressed-air propulsion shoulder-belts were slow-motion handling the satellite into the capacious hold of the shuttle. All the appendages on the satellite had been folded in: the body was now; a mere thickened pancake some four meters across by two high. The only audio was a monitoring of the routine radio communications among the four visible spaceborne men and the command aboard the shuttle. Since the satellite and its handlers were slowly moving directly toward camera, growing as they came, one assumed that the camera was located below the gaping dorsal entrance to the shuttle hold. Now satellite and crew had grown gigantic; one heard occasional grunts and remarks like, “Easy there—down a little—just a bit to your left—” So close now were the satellite and crew that they overflowed the picture boundaries, and a couple of bad gouges from meteorite hits were visible on the satellite.

  The picture shifted; this new camera was mounted just behind the control cabin, and it revealed the whole hold-interior which was brightly illuminated. The satellite and its handlers were entering from above; they seemed smaller now, the hold could have accommodated five such satellites. So far, all routine. I particularly, and Sven also, watched with expert interest the process of lashing the satellite to ringbolts. Still the upper access was open; having secured the satellite, the crew was about to close hatch covers....

  Shock: into the hold had swift-swum a savage-energetic dragon many times larger than a man. Audio was drowned in a static of cross-expletives. The monster viciously attacked the satellite, biting it with a chewing jaw-motion; it backed away, peered around, and started for one of the crewmen. Activating their jets, the four men went into evasive action while the wide-winged dragon tried to savage them; it ripped open one man’s boot, we could hear via his radio the hiss of escaping oxygen that would have been silent in space, the man went for the port into the control cabin, the port slammed shut behind him just as the monster’s head crashed into it. The crash had at least temporarily done the monster in; heavy breathing from the other three men was audible.

  Commander’s voice: “Lash him down while he’s out!”

  Going into action fast for freefall space, the men swarmed over the beast, belting it around the base of the long automatically thrashing tail and around the neck, which was so thick that there was no chin under which to hook the strap; they solved this by snagging it behind the fox-ears and , around two long helical forehead-horns and, for good measure, around the bat-snout. By the time they had secured the lashings to ringbolts, the creature was beginning to flounder; this writhing increased in violence.

  Commander’s voice: “Get a reading of the strain on the lashings.” One of the men produced a meter and laid it successively against several points of maximum strain, being careful to avoid floggings from the formidable tail and wings. He said then: “Commander, the thing appears to be secure; stress is well below tolerance.”

  “For the straps, maybe,” said the commander, “but I don’t know yet about the ship. What the hell. . . . Okay, get back in here, let’s bring them in.” The image of the three men enlarged, swimming toward camera, then vanished beneath it.

  Commander’s voice: “Ah, Houston, this is Shuttle C-9. We have the satellite secure, we are coming in. We also have some sort of space-monster, I am serious, you have seen it if our video is working; it seems secure for the moment, but it is agitating and creating bad vehicle-vibes. We are on our way in. Over.”

  The mission director turned to me. “Any questions for him?”

  White-faced, I answered, “Not for now. Just tell him to bring it in intact if he can, we will want to look into it But if it threatens his ship, he should waste it—if he can.”

  It was after ten a.m., and the mission director suggested that we might want to leave the control room and train; he would intercom us if anything remarkable came up during the hours of reentry from 36,000-kilometer orbit. Sven and I departed the control room with our special co-instructor, black Lieutenant-Colonel Voorhees, an Air Force officer whom both of us knew; in his fifties, and after plenty of

  spacing, Voorhees had replaced Sven as chief of astronautical instruction. What could procure Sven and me the private services of so valuable a NASA staffman? Not exactly money,* but Southeastern Power was currently funding a large chunk of NASA’s non-governmental missions; and there was also the consideration that our mission was going to be a world first.

  This morning’s session was theory: a computerized critique of learnings during our prior booster sessions; followed by a personalized critique of the critique, during which Sven and Voorhees and I argued with animation over responses to the computer, many of which had been judgmental.

  Break
for noon chow. Phone call to control room: reentry proceeding on schedule, but still a long way from the top of the atmosphere; the monster in the hold had quieted entirely, perhaps it had died. Control room couldn’t verify death because no monitors had been attached to the creature. Over lunch, Sven and I conversed only sporadically; both of us were preoccupied, not only with the monster, but with a strange psychological double take which its advent had caused: when it had swum into the hold, it was shock enough, but only moments later it had dawned on us that we had taken it at the level of ocean swimmers being surprised by a water-swimming dragon—but this devil was swimming in outer space!

  After light lunch, we rested for an hour in preparation for demanding physical exertions which shouldn’t be undertaken with much food in the stomach. Most of this rest-time we spent in die control room listening to progress reports from the descending shuttle. At one point, the shuttle commander told us: “Ah, we have a man in the hold watching the space creature, it is still secure and still somewhat active, I think it would like to eat our man. He is spacesuited, we didn’t dare put atmosphere or heat into the hold since the creature’s habitat seems to be, ah, open space, and we would like to bring it back alive. Out for now.”

  “Calisthenics for now!” boomed Voorhees; and Sven and I giddied and near-nosebled for an hour of high g in the centrifuge, during which we had to * simulate team action in a spacecraft which was being subjected to a large number of terrifying catastrophes, including a threatened crash to sun-surface, an iron-boiling eventuality which could be avoided only by our prompt and accurate tandem action.. ..

  “Time!” bawled Voorhees, and our centrifuge idled to a halt As we stepped gingerly out cheerily he told us: “We’ll postpone critique of that, we’ll do it tomorrow, just now you’ll want to be in on the last stages of your satellite recovery, uh, monster and all.”