But whatever the reason, it doesn’t give that cheap politician the right—”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, “we’re getting to the crux of this. Does Gabe support this disaster talk?”
“No—not disaster talk. But he has a sound theory about what is happening, and he isn’t going to back up a lot of wild statements by Gamberelli and the politicians. He’s been with Jack Osborne and Bob Jordan for weeks now at Mt. Hood, and he wouldn’t refuse to reassure the people unless he had a good reason.”
“That figures. Are you sure he’s coming home to dinner tonight?”
“Of course I’m sure. I just talked to him. He’s in a Jupiter one-o-eight over Cheyenne, so he’ll be here in less than a half hour. But that Gamberelli. . . !”
3
DR. GABRIEL HARROW had been my professor of Meteorology at the Academy and was acknowledged even twenty years ago to be one of the foremost weather savants in the world. Most of you must remember the wide attention he received following his discoveries in high-altitude pressure phenomena, now known as the Harrow Oscillations, which subsequently won him the Barstow Award and the Nobel Prize.
In accord with the Packman Priorities of 2138, he had been required to spend seven years with private industry and had gone with Boren in Kansas City in 2198, two years after the Second Chinese War. That accounted for my connection with Boren, for Dr. Harrow and I had remained close friends since the Academy.
It was a friendship difficult to account for, beyond the fact that we were both interested in reviving the centuries-old game of playing cards known as “Bridge.” This is a game that was played by our forefathers with a deck of fifty-two cards, numbered from one to ten and—well, I won’t bore you with our delvings into antiquity. Suffice it to say that we both found enormous pleasure in this pastime.
Elaine, who had been Gabe’s research assistant at Eastern where he had done his work on the Harrow Oscillations, had also become a Bridge addict, and I believe it was this mutual interest in the game more than anything else that led to their marriage. That, of course, is an outsider’s view, and I’m probably as wrong as a Chinese promise. However, it was our custom to play this game two or three nights a week whenever we were in the same areas, and so our friendship continued.
Elaine told me on this Saturday night that Bill Wernecke, chief engineer of the Boren Electronics Divisions, also was expected, so I assumed the summons had been for a Bridge game. Wernecke, like Gabe, was serving his time in private industry under the Packman Priorities. I asked Elaine when he’d be along, and she said he was doing some mathematics for Gabe and would be late.
Presently we heard Gabe Harrow’s Jupiter-Ring at the jetshield. In minutes he was through the front door and kissing Elaine.
Gabe was a tall, thin Grandville of a man with a head bald as a borhke ball and the most engaging voice you have ever listened to. He had as much energy as a K-11 and you seldom saw him sit still for more than a few minutes.
“Well, Vic,” he exclaimed, shaking my hand, “just the man I wanted to see. I’ve got some important questions to ask you, my boy.”
“Let’s have dinner first,” said Elaine. “You can ask your questions while we eat. The Arabs are off at 8:00 tonight, and if we don’t finish before they leave I’m going to have to clear the table and straighten out the kitchen myself.”
We went to the dining room and were served an excellent repast by fat Sarah, cooked by her spouse Ali. Gabe ate the first two courses in silence and seemed completely wrapped up in his own thoughts. Elaine had attempted several times to tell him about Gamberelli, but he wouldn’t listen. Her anger had cooled enough so that she wasn’t very insistent. Then, with the roast fowl, Gabe turned to me and said, “Osborne and Jordan have been doing some exceptional work out at Hood. They’ve got an interferometer out there so sensitive they’ve been able to get a Doppler effect thirty billion light years out. Brother!”
“That what you’ve been working on at Hood?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied. He dropped his knife and fork and got up and walked around the table. He stopped and kissed the top of Elaine’s head, then faced me. “We’re on the track of something out there,” he said. “Vic, this is something sensational! Another week of observations should do it. Then we’ll know for sure.”
“Eat your lannie-hen before it gets cold,” said Elaine. “You can talk sitting down. I’ve seen you do it.”
Gabe kissed the top of her head again and returned to his seat. He started to eat furiously, then as suddenly stopped. “We think the Solar System is just entering a great area of cosmic debris,” he said. “It is our guess that we have entered the outer boundaries of this mess of dust and gas and that the concentration grows with each passing day. What can you tell me about high-level dust, Vic?”
“Not much,” I replied. “I took my last missile up in July and had a jaunt up to Plymouth Eighteen Platform which, as you know, is now electronically manned. I didn’t notice anything unusual and I wasn’t tuned in for any reports from the Platform. On the way back all of the Bissell circuits conked out so the recordings weren’t of any value. . . . However, when I got back, two of my Paxton tubes were clogged. It must have been meteor-dust, as I reported at the time.”
“And this happened last July?”
“July twenty-first. I was out two weeks later. Why don’t you ask the Space Office? They’d know about the dust concentration if anyone would.”
“They don’t,” he said. “I’ve been asking them for months and all I get is McHenry gobbledegook. The fact is, they are no longer interested in meteor concentrations and haven’t been since they enfolded to their pink hearts the so-called Cable Law, dreamed up by that knucklehead Casper Cable. Casper had said the last word on the composition of space and they assume only an idiot would seek observational verification of the Law. Well, what happened before then? Any unusual dust?”
“Several clogged Paxton tubes, but I don’t remember the dates. I’ll check around with various pilots and see if any of them noticed anything. What period are you interested in?”
“From the first of the year up to the present. We need verification of certain specific phenomena before we can be sure where we stand, and you high-level pilots are the only ones who can give it to us. But time is getting short. I can’t give you longer than forty-eight hours.”
“I’ll start phoning first thing in the morning,” I promised.
“Let me know the information by Monday midnight at Hood,” he said. “I don’t know that we can do anything about it, but at least we’ll know the truth.”
“What truth?” asked Elaine.
“Whether or not we’re all going to freeze to death,” replied Gabe. “Now how about some dessert?”
4
BILL WERNECKE arrived at 10:30 A.M. in a new Caravell, and Gabe and I went out to look at it. The groundheaters had been turned on and the snow was melted to the jet-shield, but on the sides of the walk it was now about ten inches deep. It wasn’t snowing very hard—just steady. The Caravell was the traditional Ring design but powered with a single new Victarium burner mounted in the central
