Nemesis (22 page)

“I’d be in danger there, with him. What might he do next—if he really wants to destroy me? If he thinks I’m going to be destroyed here, then he’ll forget about me. He’ll leave me alone, won’t he? At least for as long as I’m here?”

“But the Plague, Marlene. The
Plague
.” She reached out to hug her.

Marlene evaded the embrace. “I’m not worried about the Plague.”

“But we explained—”

“It doesn’t matter what you explained. I’m not in danger here. Not at all. I know my mind. I’ve lived with it all my life. I understand it. It’s not in danger.”

Genarr said, “Be reasonable, Marlene. However stable you feel your mind to be, it’s subject to disease and deterioration. You might get meningitis, epileptic symptoms, a brain tumor, or, eventually, senescence. Can you hold any of those things at bay just by being sure none of it will happen to you?”

“I’m not talking about any of those things. I’m talking about the Plague. That won’t happen to me.”

“You can’t possibly be sure, dear. We don’t even know what the Plague is.”

“Whatever it is, it won’t happen to me.”

“How can you tell, Marlene?” asked Genarr.

“I just know.”

Insigna felt her patience break. She caught Marlene by both elbows. “Marlene, you
must
do as you’re told.”

“No, Mother. You don’t understand. On Rotor, I’ve felt a pull toward Erythro. It pulls me more strongly than ever, now that I’m on it. I want to stay on it. I’ll be safe here. I don’t want to go back to Rotor. I’ll be less safe there.”

Genarr raised his hand, stopping whatever it was that Insigna was about to say. “I suggest a compromise, Marlene. Your mother is here to make certain astronomical observations. It will take her some time. Promise that, while she is busy at it, you will be content to stay inside the Dome and take such precautions as I think will make sense, and that you submit to periodic tests. If we detect no change in your mental functioning, you can wait here in the Dome till your mother is done and then we can discuss it again. Agreed?”

Marlene bent her head in thought. Then she said, “All right. But, Mother, don’t think of pretending to be finished when you’re not finished. I will know. And don’t think of doing a quick job instead of a good one. I will know that, too.”

Insigna frowned and said, “I won’t play games. Marlene,
and don’t think I will ever deliberately do bad science—even for your sake.”

Marlene said, “I’m sorry, Mother. I know that you find me irritating.”

Insigna sighed heavily. “I don’t deny that, but, irritating or not, Marlene, you are my daughter. I love you, and I want to keep you safe. As far as that goes, am I lying?”

“No, Mother, you are not lying, but please believe me when I say I
am
safe. Since I’ve been on Erythro, I’ve been happy. I never was happy on Rotor.”

Genarr said, “And why are you happy?”

“I don’t know, Uncle Siever. But being happy is enough, even when you don’t know why, isn’t it?”

“You look tired, Eugenia,” said Genarr.

“Not physically, Siever. Just tired inside after two months of calculations. I don’t know how it was possible for astronomers in prespatial times to do what they did with nothing more than primitive computers. For that matter, Kepler worked out the laws of planetary motion with nothing more than logarithms, and had to consider himself fortunate that they had just been invented.”

“Pardon a nonastronomer, but I thought that these days, astronomers simply gave their instruments their directions, then went to sleep and, after a few hours, woke up and found everything printed up neatly and waiting at the desk.”

“I wish. But this job was different. Do you know how precisely I had to calculate the actual velocity of Nemesis and the Sun relative to each other, so that I could know exactly where and when the two made their closest approach? Do you know how tiny an error would be sufficient to make it seem that Nemesis would do Earth no harm when it would really destroy it—and vice versa?

“It would be bad enough,” Insigna went on intensely, “if Nemesis and the Sun were the only two bodies in the Universe, but there are nearby stars, all of them moving. At least a dozen of them are massive enough to have a tiny effect on Nemesis or the Sun or both. Tiny, but large enough to mount up to an error of millions of kilometers one way or another, if ignored. And in order to get it
right, you have to know the mass of each star with considerable precision, and its position, and its velocity.

“It’s a fifteen-body problem, Siever, enormously complicated. Nemesis will go right through the Solar System and have a perceptible effect on several of the planets. A lot depends on the actual position of each planet in its orbit as Nemesis passes through, of course, and by how much it will shift under the influence of Nemesis’ gravity, and how this shift will affect its pull on the other planets. And, by the way, the effect of Megas also has to be calculated.”

Genarr listened gravely. “And what’s the bottom line, Eugenia?”

“As it happens, I believe the effect will be to make Earth’s orbit a trifle more eccentric than it is now and the semimajor axis a bit smaller than it is now.”

“Which means?”

“Which means that Earth will become too hot to be habitable.”

“And what will happen to Megas and Erythro?”

“Nothing measurable. The Nemetic System is much smaller than the Solar System and therefore is held together more tightly. Nothing here will budge significantly, but Earth will.”

“When will this happen?”

“In five thousand and twenty-four years, plus or minus fifteen, Nemesis will reach the point of closest approach. The effect will spread itself out over twenty or thirty years as Nemesis and the Sun approach and separate.”

“Are there going to be any collisions or anything like that?”

“Almost zero chance of anything significant. No collisions between any major bodies. Of course, a solar asteroid might strike Erythro, or a Nemetic asteroid might strike the Earth. There would be a very small chance of that, though it would be catastrophic for Earth if it happened. There’s no chance of calculating that, however, until the stars are very close to each other.”

“But, in any case, Earth will have to be evacuated. Is that it?”

“Oh yes.”

“But they’ve got five thousand years to do it in.”

“Five thousand years is none too long to arrange for
the evacuation of eight billion people. They should be warned.”

“Won’t they find out for themselves, even if they aren’t warned?”

“Who knows when? And even if they find out soon, we should give them the technique of hyper-assistance. They will have to have it.”

“I’m sure they will have that on their own, too, and perhaps in not too long a time.”

“And if they don’t?”

“I’m also sure that within a century or less, communication will be established between Rotor and Earth. After all, if we have hyper-assistance for transportation, we will have it for communication eventually. Or we will send a Settlement back to Earth and there will still be time.”

“You talk like Pitt.”

Genarr chuckled. “He can’t be wrong all the time, you know.”

“He won’t want to communicate. I know it.”

“He can’t always have his way either. We have a Dome here on Erythro, though he opposed it. And even if we don’t beat him on that, he’ll be dead eventually. Really, Eugenia, don’t worry excessively about Earth at this moment. We have nearer concerns. Does Marlene know you are about done?”

“How can she fail to know? Apparently, the exact state of my progress is imprinted on the way I swish my sleeve or comb my hair.”

“She’s getting ever more perceptive, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Have you noticed that, too?”

“Indeed I have. Just in the short time I’ve known her.”

“I suppose part of it is due to her growing older. She’s growing perception, perhaps, the way she’s growing breasts. Then, too, she spent most of her life trying to hide her ability because she didn’t know what to make of it, and because it got her into trouble. Now that she’s not afraid, it’s out and expanding, so to speak.”

“Or because, for some reason, as she says, she likes being on Erythro and her pleasure extends her perceptions.”

Insigna said, “I have had a thought about this, Siever. I don’t wish to pester you with my follies. I do tend to
accumulate worries about Marlene, about Earth, about everything— Do you suppose that Erythro
is
affecting her? I mean, adversely? Do you suppose that a touch of the Plague is taking the form of making her even more perceptive?”

“I don’t know that that question can be answered, Eugenia, but if her heightened perception is the effect of the Plague, it doesn’t seem to bother her mental balance at all. And I can tell you this—none of those who suffered from the Plague in all our stay here showed any symptoms remotely like Eugenia’s gift.”

Insigna heaved a sigh. “Thank you. You’re comforting. And thank you, too, for being so gentle and friendly with Marlene.”

Genarr’s mouth quirked in a small lopsided smile. “It’s easy. I’m very fond of her.”

“You make that sound so natural. She’s not a likable girl. I know that, even if I’m her mother.”

“I find her likable. I’ve always preferred brains to beauty in women—unless I could get both, as in your case, Eugenia—”

“Twenty years ago, maybe,” said Eugenia with another sigh.

“My eyes have aged with your body, Eugenia. They see no change. But it doesn’t matter to me that Marlene is not beautiful. She’s fearfully intelligent, even apart from her perception.”

“Yes, there is that. It consoles me even when she is most burdensome.”

“Well, as to that, I’m afraid Marlene will continue to be a burden, Eugenia.”

Insigna looked up sharply. “In what way?”

“She has made it plain to me that being in the Dome is not enough. She wants to be out there, out on the soil of the world itself just as soon as you are done with your work. She insists!”

And Insigna stared at him in horror.

Three years on Earth had aged Tessa Wendel. Her complexion had coarsened a bit. She had put on some weight. There was the beginning of jowls and dark patches under her eyes. Her breasts had grown a shade pendulous and her waist had thickened.

Crile Fisher knew that Tessa was in her late forties now, that she was five years older than he was. But she did not look older than her years. She was still a fine mature figure of a woman (as he had heard someone refer to her), but she would no longer pass for a woman in her thirties, as she might easily have done when he had first met her at Adelia.

Tessa was aware of it, too, and had spoken of it bitterly to him only the week before.

“It’s you, Crile,” she had said one night when they were in bed together (a time when, apparently, she was most conscious of aging). “The fault is yours. You sold me on Earth. ‘Magnificent,’ you said. ‘Enormous,’ you said. ‘Variety. Always something new. Inexhaustible.’ ”

“And isn’t it?” he said, knowing what she found objectionable, but willing to let her vent her feelings once again.

“Not where gravity is concerned. All over this entire bloated, impossible planet, you have the same gravitational pull. Up in the air, down in a mine, here, there, everywhere, one G—one G—one G. It should kill you all out of sheer boredom.”

“We know no better, Tessa.”

“
You
know better. You’ve been on Settlements. There you can pick your gravitational pull to suit yourself. You can exercise at low gravity. You can lighten the strain on
your tissues now and then. How can you
live
without that?”

“We exercise here on Earth, too.”

“Oh please—you do it with that pull, that eternal pull, yanking down on you. You spend all your time fighting it instead of letting your muscles interplay. You can’t leap, you can’t fly, you can’t soar. You can’t let yourself drop into the greater pull or rise into the lesser one. And that pull, pull, pull drags every bit of you down, so that you sag and wrinkle and age. Look at me!
Look
at me!”

“I look at you as often as I can,” said Fisher solemnly.

“Don’t look at me, then. If you do, you’ll throw me over. And if you do
that
, I’ll go back to Adelia.”

“No, you won’t. What will you do there after you’ve exercised at low gravity? Your research work, your laboratories, your team are all here.”

“I’ll start over and build a new team.”

“And will Adelia support you in the style to which you are now accustomed? Of course not. You’ll have to admit that Earth is not stinting you, that you are getting all you want. Wasn’t I right?”

“Weren’t you right? Traitor! You didn’t tell me that Earth had hyper-assistance. You also didn’t tell me that they had discovered the Neighbor Star. In fact, you let me pontificate on the uselessness of Rotor’s Far Probe and never once told me that it had discovered anything more than a few parallaxes. You sat there and laughed at me, like the heartless wretch you are.”

“I would have told you, Tessa, but what if you had decided not to come to Earth? It was not my secret to give you.”

“But after I came to Earth?”

“As soon as you got to work, actually to work, we told you.”

“
They
told me, and left me feeling stunned and foolish. You might have given me just a hint so that I wouldn’t come off like such an idiot. I should have killed you, but what could I do? You’re addictive. You knew you were when you heartlessly seduced me into coming to Earth.”

That was a game she insisted on playing, and Fisher knew his role. He said, “Seduced you? You insisted. You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“You liar. You forced yourself on me. It was rape—
impure and complex. And you’re going to do it again. I can see it in those dreadful lust-filled eyes.”

It had been months since she had played that particular game and Fisher knew it came when she was satisfied with herself professionally. He said afterward, “Have you made progress?”

“Progress? I think you can call it that.” She was panting. “I have a demonstration that I’ve set up for tomorrow for your decaying and ancient Earthman, Tanayama. He’s been pushing for it mercilessly.”