FALLEN ANGELS

"A fire in the sky," she said. "I know the song."

"And now it's a lawn ornament."

"I'm sorry," she said. "Monument! They didn't want competition for the shuttle. They even tried to burn the blueprints--"

"It wasn't your fault."

"I know that, but I'm sorry. Sorry that anyone could ever have been so stupid. And that was NASA! We gave the space program to NASA, and they, and… Damn."

"Does anyone else have an idea?" Bruce asked. "No? Then we carry on as before. The fewer who know about the Angels, the safer they'll be. Don't tell anyone without consulting me. The cover is that they're closet fans from North Dakota, people Fang and Thor have known for years. All agreed? Good. So ordered. Do I hear a motion to adjourn? Meeting is adjourned. Next meeting is in Hawkeye's room about nine. Now it's time to enjoy the convention."

The room had perhaps been a small ballroom when the house was new. Now it looked crowded despite its size. There were windows along one wall, with couches under them. The window sills were covered with brick-a-brack, photos of people in odd costumes, strangely painted coffee mugs, vases that held improbable plants. That fur rug, patterned in yellow and orange, was neither the shape nor the colors of any of Earth's life forms. A grand piano stood down at one end of the room. It was covered with photographs and paintings and drawings and plastic objects. Books lined two of the walls, and the spaces between the large archways set into the fourth wall.

A large bear of a man with a sunburst of hair encircling his face stood next to the grand piano, one hand resting on it. He was making a speech, and his free hand waved in time with his words. Other people were talking, too, which seemed impolite.

The man stopped in midsentence when Sherrine and Thor wheeled the Angels into the room. People looked around and opened a path, some of those on the floor moving aside, some standing to move chairs, until Alex and Gordon were moved right up front near the speaker. The others moved back again. It looked choreographed.

"See you," Thor said. He seemed in a hurry to leave.

The speaker was in no hurry at all. He struck a pose, as if waiting for something.

Ritual? Alex wondered. Whatever. Pavana mukthvsan could be practiced as easily in a wheelchair as elsewhere. Alex used both hands to bend his right leg and tuck it into his crotch against the pubic bone. Then he folded his left leg and laid it atop the right. He made circles of his thumbs and index fingers and rested his hands on his knees. He breathed in slowly through his left nostril, repeating the syllable yam six times. He wondered when Steve would graduate him to siddhasan, or even padmasan. Anything was better than the savasam "corpse position" he had practiced in the van during the ride across Mi

Gregor Lutenist cleared his throat. "The Thirty-Sixth Ice Age," he said formally. His voice was strong, easily heard throughout the room.

Alex breathed in. Yam, he thought to himself. Yammm.

"We live in an ice age--" began Gregory Lutenist. When he got to the words "ice age" three people had joined him, speaking in unison with him. Then came a voice from the crowd: "No shit!"

"--and we always have," he continued, imperturbably adjusting his glasses. "During the last seven hundred thousand years there have been eight cycles of cooling and warming. The glaciers retreat, but always they come back; and the warm, interglacial interludes last for only about ten thousand years. Since Ice Age Thirty-Five ended fourteen thousand years ago, the next one must have started four thousand years ago. Most of human history has been lived in an ice age. So why did no one notice?"

"It was too warm!" someone suggested.

Lutenist beamed at him. "Just so. It's hard to convince a man in Bermuda shorts that he's living in an ice age. But consider the halcyon, interglacial world of 4500 BC!" He waved a forefinger in the air.

"In Scandinavia the tree line was above 8000 feet." Three voices again joined him, speaking in unison, as Lutenist continued. "And deciduous trees grew all the way to the Arctic circle. The Sahara was a rain-watered, grassy sava

Gordon looked to Alex. "Shto govorit"? The man is mad, the sun has not gone out."

Lutenist beamed at Gordon. "Ah--"

"Fresh meat!" someone yelled.

"Tell me, my young friend," Lutenist said. "What lights up the sun?"

"Is trick? Fusion. Hydrogen to helium."

"And when the fusion ends, what then?" Lutenist asked.

"Uh--but how can fusion end? There is plenty of hydrogen."

"But it did end," Lutenist said. "And no one noticed." Bob Needleton stuck his head in between Alex and Gordon. "Where have all the neutrinos gone? Long time passing…" He gave Sherrine a quick kiss on the neck.

"Hi, Pins," Alex said. "Welcome back."

"I didn't want to miss Greg's spiel." Bob cupped his hands around his mouth. "There'll be a neutrino scavenger hunt tonight after the program," he a

"Excuse me," Gordon said, "but what means spiel about neutrinos?"

Bob pulled a chair up and set it beside Sherrine between the two wheelchairs. He straddled it backwards. "It's simple really."

Alex braced himself. When a physicist says, "it's simple," it usually meant it was time to duck.

"You see, when two protons fuse into a deuterium nucleus they yield a neutrino. There are two ways that can happen, but… Well, the details don't matter. Sometimes the deuterium hip-hops through beryllium into lithium and spits out another neutrino, and there are a couple of other reactions that also produce neutrinos; but that's about the gist of it. Fusion spits neutrinos. Get it?"

Gordon looked puzzled. "I get. So?"

Bob held his hands out palms up. "The problem is we never found the neutrinos. A Chlorine-37 detector should register a neutrino flux of eight snew, but all they ever get is two snew."

Gordon's frown deepened. "What's 'snew'?"

Sherrine hid her face in her hands. Bob said, "I du

"Thank you for sharing that with us--"

"Sorry, I've never been able to resist that one. Snew is SNU, Solar Neutrino Units. One snew is one neutrino event per 1036 atoms per second."

There was a commotion at the other end of the room. A dozen fans, maybe more, came in. "Is this the pro party?"

Lutenist said. "I'm not through."

A large man in a bush jacket waved a salute with a bottle beer. "Go right ahead, Greg. Don't mind us."

"What's up?" Lutenist demanded.

The man shruged "Con Committee said to come here, this will be the 'Meet the Pros' party."

"Aw crap," Lutenist said. "This is my lecture!"

"What's to lecture?" Needleton demanded. "It was all simple, and known before 1980. The sun is not producing enough neutrinos. Ergo, it is not fusing. Yet, according to the technetium levels in deep molybdenum mines there were plenty of neutrinos passing through the Earth during interglacial and preglacial periods."