The Year of the Jackpot (7 page)

The poor geek! Well, he probably would have been atomized by now anyway, along with the goons who did him in. He wondered if the army really had gotten all the Russki paratroopers. He had killed his own quota; if he hadn’t gotten that doe within a quarter-mile of the cabin and headed right back, Meade would have had a bad time. He had shot them in the back and buried them beyond the woodpile.

He settled down to some solid pleasure. Dynkowski was a treat. Of course, it was old stuff that a G-type star, such as the Sun, was potentially unstable; a G-O star could explode, slide right off the Russell diagram, and end up as a white dwarf. But no one before Dynkowski had defined the exact conditions for such a catastrophe, nor had anyone else devised mathematical means of diagnosing the instability and describing its progress.

He looked up to rest his eyes from the fine print and saw that the Sun was obscured by a thin low cloud—one of those unusual conditions where the filtering effect is just right to permit a man to view the Sun clearly with the naked eye. Probably volcanic dust in the air, he decided, acting almost like smoked glass.

He looked again. Either he had spots before his eyes or that was one fancy big Sun spot. He had heard of being able to see them with the naked eye, but it had never happened to him.

He longed for a telescope.

He blinked. Yep, it was still there, about three o’clock. A
big
spot—no wonder the car radio sounded like a Hitler speech.

H
e turned back and continued on to the end of the article, being anxious to finish before the light failed.

At first his mood was sheerest intellectual pleasure at the man’s tight mathematical reasoning. A three per cent imbalance in the solar constant—yes, that was standard stuff; the Sun would nova with that much change. But Dynkowski went further. By means of a novel mathematical operator which he had dubbed “yokes,” he bracketed the period in a star’s history when this could happen and tied it down with secondary, tertiary, and quaternary yokes, showing exactly the time of highest probability.

Beautiful! Dynkowski even assigned dates to the extreme limit of his primary yoke, as a good statistician should.

But, as Breen went back and reviewed the equations, his mood changed from intellectual to personal. Dynkowski was not talking about just any G-O star. In the latter part, he meant old Sol himself, Breen’s personal Sun—the big boy out there with the oversize freckle on his face.

That was one hell of a big freckle! It was a hole you could chuck Jupiter into and not make a splash. He could see it very clearly now.

Everybody talks about “when the stars grow old and the Sun grows cold,” but it’s an impersonal concept, like one’s own death.

Breen started thinking about it very personally. How long would it take, from the instant the imbalance was triggered until the expanding wave front engulfed Earth? The mechanics couldn’t be solved without a calculation, even though they were implicit in the equations in front of him. Half an hour, for a horseback guess, from incitement until the Earth went
phutt!

It hit him with gentle melancholy. No more? Never again? Colorado on a cool morning… the Boston Post Road with autumn wood smoke tanging the air… Bucks County bursting with color in the spring. The wet smells of the Fulton Fish Market—no, that was gone already. Coffee at the
Morning Call
. No more wild strawberries on a hillside in Jersey, hot and sweet as lips. Dawn in the South Pacific with the light airs cool velvet under your shirt and never a sound but the chuckling of the water against the sides of the old rust bucket—what was her name? That was a long time ago—the S. S.
Mary Brewster
.

No more Moon if the Earth was gone. Stars, but no one to gaze at them.

He looked back at the dates bracketing Dynkowski’s probability yoke.

“Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by—”

He suddenly felt the need for Meade and stood up.

S
he was coming out to meet him. “Hello, Potty! Safe to come in now—I’ve finished the dishes.”

“I should help.”

“You do the man’s work; I’ll do the woman’s work. That’s fair.” She shaded her eyes. “What a sunset! We ought to have volcanoes blowing their tops every year.”

“Sit down and we’ll watch it.”

She sat beside him.

“Notice the Sun spot? You can see it with your naked eye.”

She stared. “Is that a Sun spot? It looks as if somebody had taken a bite out of it.”

He squinted his eyes at it again. Damned if it didn’t look bigger!

Meade shivered. “I’m chilly. Put your arm around me.”

He did so with his free arm, continuing to hold hands with the other.

It
was
bigger. The spot was growing.

What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a touch of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style.

She snuggled to him. “Keep me warm.”

“It will be warmer soon—I mean I’ll keep you warm.”

“Dear Potty.” She looked up. “Potty, something funny is happening to the sunset.”

“No, darling—to the Sun.”

He glanced down at the journal, still open beside him. 1739 A. D. and 2165. He did not need to add up the two figures and divide by two to reach the answer. Instead he clutched fiercely at her hand, knowing with an unexpected and overpowering burst of sorrow that 1952 was…

The End.