Страница 15 из 163
“It felt like opening night in a bad play,” Tim said.
“In Boston with an allegory and the Shriners are in town,” Joyce teased.
He laughed. “Hah. Haven’t seen Light Up the Sky since… by golly, since you were in that summer drama thing. And you’re right. That’s what it was like.”
`’Poo.”
“Poo?”
“Poo. You always did think like that, and there never was any reason to, and there isn’t one now. You can be proud Tim. What’s next? Another comet?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He squeezed lime into her gin and tonic and handed it to her. “I don’t know. I’m not strong enough on theory to do what I really want.”
“So learn the theory.”
“Maybe.” He came around and sat next to her. “But anyway, I made the history books. Skoal.”
She lifted her drink in salute. She wasn’t mocking him. “Skoal.”
He sipped at his drink. “I’ll follow it as far as it goes, whatever else I do. Randall wants another documentary, and we’ll do it, if the ratings aren’t too bad.”
“Ratings? You worry about ratings?”
“You’re teasing me again.”
“Not this time.”
“Hmm. All right. I’ll back another documentary. Because I want it. We’ll go heavy on the space probe. With enough publicity we might get the probe up, and somebody like Sharps really will understand comets. Thanks.”
She put a hand on his arm. “You’re welcome. Run with it, Tim. Nobody else here tonight has done half of what they want to do. You’ve already got three-quarters, and a shot at the rest.”
He looked at her and thought, If I married her, Mom would heave a great sigh of relief. She was in that limited class of women. They all seemed to know his sister Jill; they’d gone east to college, and to New York during vacations; they’d broken the same rules; they were not afraid of their mothers; they were beautiful and frightening. The sex urge in a teen-age boy was too powerful, too easily twisted and repressed. It made the beauty of a young woman into a flame, and when that flame was coupled to total self-confidence… a girl like any of Jill’s friends could be a fearsome thing, to a boy who had never believed in himself.
Joyce wasn’t fearsome. She wasn’t pretty enough.
She frowned. “What are you thinking?”
God, no! He couldn’t answer that one! “I was remembering a lot.” Had he been deliberately left alone with Joyce? Certainly she had stayed after the others had left. If he made a pass now…
But he didn’t have the courage. Or, he told himself, the kindness. She was elegant, yes, but you don’t go to bed with a Steuben crystal vase. He got up and went to the video recorder. “Want to watch some of the other clips?”
For a moment she hesitated. She looked at him carefully, then just as carefully drained her glass and set it on the coffee table. “Thanks, Tim, but I’d better get some sleep. There’s a buyer coming in tomorrow.”
She was still smiling when she left. Tim thought it a bit forced. Or, he wondered, am I just flattering myself?
The maelstrom was intolerably crowded. Masses of all sizes whirled past each other, warping space into a complex topology that changed endlessly. The i
Here was even the chance of escape. The gravity fields around Saturn and Jupiter could fling a comet hack out into the cold and the dark. But Saturn and Jupiter were wrongly placed, and the comet continued to fall, accelerating, boiling.
Boiling! Pockets of volatile chemicals burst and spurted away in puffs of dust and ice crystals. Now the comet moved in a cloud of glowing fog that might have shielded it from the heat, but didn’t. Instead the fog caught the sunlight across thousands of cubic miles and reflected it back to the comet head from every direction.
Heat at the surface of the nucleus seeped inward. More pockets of gas ruptured and fired like attitude jets on a spacecraft, tossing the comet head this way and that. Masses tugged at it as it passed. Lost and blind and falling. The dying comet dropped past Mars, invisible within a cloud of dust and ice crystals the size of Mars itself.
A telescope on Earth found it as a blurred point near Neptune.
March: Interludes
None of the astronauts ever walked on solid lunar rock, because everywhere they have gone there was “soil” underfoot. This powdery layer is present because the Moon has been bombarded by meteorites throughout geologic time. The unceasing barrage has so pulverized the surface that it has created a residual layer of rocky debris several meters thick.
Fred Lauren made delicate adjustments to the telescope. It was a big instrument, a four-inch refractor on a heavy tripod. The apartment cost him too much money, but he had to have it for the location. His only furniture was a cheap couch, a few cushions on the floor, and the big telescope.
Fred watched a darkened window a quarter-mile away. She had to come home soon. She always did. What could she be doing? She’d left alone. No one had come for her. The thought frightened him, then made him sick. Suppose she had met a man somewhere? Had they gone for di
No! She wasn’t that kind. She wouldn’t let anyone do that to her. She wouldn’t.
But all women did. Even his mother. Fred Lauren shuddered. Unwanted, the memory came back, when he was just nine, when he’d gone in to ask his mother to say his prayers, and she’d been lying on the bed with the man he called Uncle Jack on top of her. She was moaning and writhing, and Uncle Jack had leaped from the bed.
“You little bastard, I’ll cut your goddamn balls off! You want to watch? You’ll sure to God watch? Stand there and if you say one word, I’ll cut your prick off!”
He’d watched. And his mother had let that man—
The window came alight. She was home! Fred held his breath. Was she alone? Was she?
She was carrying a big bag of groceries, which she took to the kitchen. Now she’ll have her drink, Fred thought. I wish she wouldn’t drink so much. She looks tired. He watched as the girl mixed a martini. She carried the pitcher with her to the kitchen. Fred didn’t follow with the telescope, although he could have. Instead he teased himself, waiting.
Her face was triangular, with high cheekbones and a small mouth and big dark eyes. Her long, flowing blond hair was tinted; her pubic hair was very dark. Fred had forgiven her that small deception, but he’d been shocked.
She came back with the pitcher and a glass spoon. There was a silver-handled martini spoon in the gift shop down the street, and Fred had often stared at it, trying to get up the nerve to buy it for her. Maybe she’d invite him to her apartment. Only she wouldn’t until he’d given her gifts, and he couldn’t do that because he knew what she liked and she’d want to know how he knew that. Fred Lauren reached out to touch her through the magic mirror of his telescope… but only in his mind, only in his hopeless yearning.
Now. Now she’d do it. She didn’t have many dresses good enough to wear to work. She worked in a bank, and although the banks let the girls wear trousers and all the ugly things girls were wearing lately, she didn’t. Not Colleen. He knew her name. He wanted to keep his money in her bank, but he didn’t dare. She dressed well to win promotions, and she’d been promoted to New Accounts, and Fred couldn’t talk to her there. He was proud of her promotion, but he wished she’d stayed a teller, because then he could come in and go to her window and…