“Why should they? You were quoting the astronomers.”
“Half the time,” Harvey agreed. “But we quoted the ones who said exciting things. Two interviews. One man says Kahoutek is going to be the Big Christmas Comet. Another says, well, it’s going to be a comet, but you might not see it without field glasses. Guess which tape gets shown on the six o’clock news?”
Hamner laughed. He was draining his glass when Julia Sutter came over.
“Busy, Tim?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Your cousin Barry is making a fool of himself out in the kitchen. Can you get him to go home?” She spoke low and urgently.
Harvey hated her. Was Hamner sober? Would he remember any of this in the morning? Damn.
“Be right with you, Julia,” Hamner said. He broke free and made his way back to Harvey. “Just remember, our series on Hamner-Brown is going to be honest. Even if it costs ratings. Kalva Soap can afford it. When do you want to start?”
Maybe there was some justice in the world after all. “Right away, Tim. I want some footage of you and Gavin Brown up at Mount Wilson. And his comments when you show him your setup.”
Hamner grinned. He liked that. “Right. Call you tomorrow.”
Loretta slept quietly in the other bed.
Harvey had been staring at the ceiling long enough. He knew this feeling. He would have to get up.
He got up. He made cocoa in a big mug and carried it into his study. Kipling greeted him with tail-thumping joy, and he rubbed the German shepherd’s ears absently as he opened the drapes. Los Angeles was semidark below. The Santa Ana had blown away the smog. Freeways were rivers of moving light even at this late hour. Other major streets were marked by a grid of lights whose yellow-orange brilliance Harvey noticed for the first time. Hamner had said they played hell with the seeing at Mount Wilson Observatory.
The city stretched away endlessly. High-rise apartments in shadowed darkness. Blue squares of still-lit swimming pools. Cars. Bright flashing light winking at intervals, the police helicopter on patrol. He left the window and went to the desk, picked up a book, set it down; scratched the dog’s ears once more; and very gently, because he didn’t trust himself to move rapidly, put the cocoa on the desk.
He’d never had any trouble getting to sleep in the mountains on camping trips. He’d get into his sleeping bag just after dark and sleep all night. It was only in the city that he had insomnia. For years he’d tried to fight it by lying rigid on his back. These nights he got up and stayed up until he was sleepy. Only he didn’t usually have trouble on Wednesdays.
Wednesdays, he and Loretta made love.
He’d tried to fight that habit once, but that was years ago; and yes, Loretta would come to his bed on a Monday night; but not always, and never in the afternoon when it was light; and it was never as good on a Tuesday or a Saturday because on Wednesdays they knew it was coming, they were ready. By now the habit had set like concrete.
He shook away those thoughts and concentrated on his good fortune. Hamner had meant it. The documentary would be made. He thought about problems. They’d need an expert on low-light photography; probably time-lapse for the comet itself. This would be fun. Have to thank Maureen Jellison for putting me onto Hamner, he thought. Nice girl. Vivid. More real than most of the women I meet. Too bad Loretta was standing right there…
He submerged that thought so quickly that he was barely aware of it. It was a habit he’d developed long ago. He knew too many men who talked themselves into hating their wives when they didn’t really dislike them at all. The grass wasn’t always greener on the other side of the fence; a lesson that he’d learned from his father and never forgotten. His father had been an architect and builder, always close to the Hollywood set but never quite catching the big contracts that would make him rich; but he’d gone to plenty of Hollywood parties.
He’d also had time to take Harvey up into the mountains, and on those long camping hikes he would tell Harvey about producers and stars and writers who spent more than they earned and built themselves images that could never be satisfied. “Can’t be happy,” Bert Randall would say. “Keep thinking somebody else’s wife is better in bed, or just prettier at parties, and talk to themselves enough that they believe it. This whole damn town’s got itself believing its own press agents, and nobody can live up to those dreams.”
And it was all true. Dreams could be dangerous. Better to concentrate on what you had. And, Harvey thought, I have a lot. A good job, a big house, a swimming pool…
None of it paid for, and you can’t do what you want on the job, a malicious voice said inside his head.
Harvey ignored it.
The comets were not alone in the halo.
Local eddies near the center of the maelstrom — that whirling pool of gas which finally collapsed to form the Sun — had condensed into planets. The furious heat of the newly formed star had stripped the gas envelopes from the nearest, leaving nuggets of molten rock and iron. Worlds further out had remained as great balls of gas which men would, in a billion years, name for their gods. There had also been eddies very distant from the whirlpool’s axis.
One had formed a planet the size of Saturn, and it was still gathering mass. Its rings were broad and beautiful in starlight. Its surface churned with storms, for its center was furiously hot with the energy of its collapse. Its enormous orbit was tilted almost vertically to the plane of the inner system, and its stately path through the cometary halo took hundreds of thousands of years to complete.
Sometimes a comet would stray too near the black giant and be swept into its ring, or into the thousands of miles of atmosphere. Sometimes that tremendous mass would pluck a comet from its orbit and swing it out into interstellar space, to be lost forever. And sometimes the black planet would send a comet plunging into the maelstrom and hellfire of the inner system.
They moved in slow, stable orbits, these myriads of comets that had survived the ignition of the Sun. But when the black giant passed, orbits became chaos. Comets that fell into the maelstrom might return partially vaporized, and fall back, again and again, until nothing was left but a cloud of stones. But many never returned at all.
January: Interlude
Be the First in Your Block to Help Blow Out the Electric Power Network of the Northeast
East Village Other is proud to announce the first annual blackout of the Werewolves which is fixed for 3 P.M. on Wednesday, August 19, 1970. Once more let me put the system to the test. Switch on all the electric equipment you can lay hands on. Help the companies producing and distributing electric power to improve their balance sheets by consuming as much as you can; and even then find some way of using a bit more. In particular, switch on electric heaters, toasters, air conditioning, and any other apparatus with a high consumption. Refrigerator’ turned up to the maximum, with their doors left open, can cool down a large apartment in an amusing way. After an afternoon’s consumption-spree we will meet in Central Park to bay at the moon.
TUNE IN! PLUG IN! BLOW OUT!
Hospitals and other emergency services are hereby warned, and invited to take necessary precautions.
On a clear day the view stretched out forever. From his vantage point on the top floor of the San Joaquin Nuclear Project, Site Supervisor Barry Price had an excellent view of the vast lozenge-shaped saucer that had once been an inland sea, and was now the center of California’s agricultural industry. The San Joaquin Valley ran two hundred miles to his north, fifty to the south. The uncompleted nuclear-power complex stood on a low ridge twenty feet above the totally flat valley — the highest hill in sight.