Inconstant Moon Read online

So that was where all the happiness was coming from. Free drinks! I looked over, wondering what the guy celebrating.

  A thick-necked, wide-shouldered man in a turtleneck he sat hunched over into himself, with a wide bar glass clutched tight in one hand. The pianist offered him the mike, and he waved it by, the gesture giving me a good look at his face. A square, strong face, now drunk and miserable and scared. He was ready to cry from fear.

  So I knew what he was celebrating.

  Leslie made a face. “They didn’t make the Pink Lady right.”

  There’s one bar in the world that makes a Pink Lady the way Leslie likes it, and it isn’t in Los Angeles. I passed her the other Irish coffee, grinning an I-told-you-so grin. Forcing it: The other man’s fear was contagious. She smiled back lifted her glass and said, “To the blue moonlight.”

  I lifted my glass to her, and drank. But it wasn’t the toast I would have chosen.

  The man in the turtleneck slid down from his stool. He moved carefully toward the door, his course slow and straight as an ocean liner cruising into dock. He pulled the door wide, and turned around, holding it open, so that the weird blue-white light streamed past his broad black silhouette.

  Bastard. He was waiting for someone to figure it out, to shout out the truth to the rest. Fire and doom—

  “Shut the door!” someone bellowed.

  “Time to go,” I said softly.

  “What’s the hurry?”

  The hurry? He might speak! But I couldn’t say that…

  Leslie put her hand over mine. “I know. I know. But we can’t run away from it, can we?”

  A fist closed hard on my heart. She’d known, and I hadn’t noticed?

  The door closed, leaving the Red Barn in reddish dusk. The man who had been buying drinks was gone.

  “Oh, God. When did you figure it out?”

  “Before you came over,” she said. “But when I tried to check it out, it didn’t work.”

  “Check it out?”

  “I went out on the balcony and turned the telescope on Jupiter. Mars is below the horizon these nights. If the sun’s gone nova, all the planets ought to be lit up like the moon, right?”

  “Right. Damn.” I should have thought of that myself. But Leslie was the stargazer. I knew some astrophysics, but I couldn’t have found Jupiter to save my life.

  “But Jupiter wasn’t any brighter than usual. So then I didn’t know what to think.”

  “But then—” I felt hope dawning fiery hot. Then I remembered. “That star, just overhead. The one you stared at.”

  “Jupiter.”

  “All lit up like a fucking neon sign. Well, that tears it.”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  I had been keeping my voice down. But for a wild moment I wanted to stand up on a table and scream! Fire and doom—What right had they to be ignorant?

  Leslie’s hand closed tight on mine. The urge passed. It left me shuddering. “Let’s get out of here. Let ’em think there’s going to be a dawn.”

  “There is.” Leslie laughed a bitter, barking laugh like nothing I’d ever heard from her. She walked out while I was reaching for my wallet—and remembering that there was no need.

  Poor Leslie. Finding Jupiter its normal self must have looked like a reprieve—until the white spark flared to shining glory an hour and a half late. An hour and a half, for sunlight to reach Earth by way of Jupiter.

  When I reached the door Leslie was half-running down Westwood toward Santa Monica. I cursed and ran to catch up, wondering if she’d suddenly gone crazy.

  Then I noticed the shadows ahead of us. All along the other side of Santa Monica Boulevard : moon shadows, in horizontal patterns of dark and blue-white bands.

  I caught her at the corner.

  The moon was setting.

  A setting moon always looks tremendous. Tonight it glared at us through the gap of sky beneath the freeway, terribly bright, casting an incredible complexity of lines and shadows. Even the unlighted crescent glowed pearly bright with earthshine.

  Which told me all I wanted to know about what was happening on the lighted side of Earth.

  And on the moon? The men of Apollo Nineteen must have died in the first few minutes of nova sunlight. Trapped out on a lunar plain, hiding perhaps behind a melting boulder… Or were they on the night side? I couldn’t remember. Hell, they could outlive us all. I felt a stab of envy and hatred.

  And pride. We’d put them there. We reached the moon before the nova came. A little longer, we’d have reached the stars.

  The disc changed oddly as it set. A dome, a flying saucer, a lens, a line…

  Gone.

  Gone. Well, that was that. Now we could forget it; now we could walk around outside without being constantly reminded that something was wrong. Moonset had taken all the queer shadows out of the city.

  But the clouds had an odd glow to them. As clouds glow after sunset, tonight the clouds shone livid white at their; western edges. And they streamed too quickly across the sky. As if they tried to run…

  When I turned to Leslie, there were big tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “Oh, damn.” I took her arm. “Now stop it. Stop it.”

  “I can’t. You know I can’t stop crying once I get started.”

  “This wasn’t what I had in mind. I thought we’d do things we’ve been putting off, things we like. It’s our last chance. Is this the way you want to die, crying on a street corner?”

  “I don’t want to die at all!”

  “Tough shit!”

  “Thanks a lot.” Her face was all red and twisted. Leslie was crying as a baby cries, without regard for dignity or appearance. I felt awful. I felt guilty, and I knew the nova wasn’t my fault, and it made me angry.

  “I don’t want to die either!” I snarled at her. “You show me a way out and I’ll take it. Where would we go? The South Pole? It’d just take longer. The moon must be molten all across its day side. Mars? When this is over Mars will be part of the sun, like the Earth. Alpha Centauri? The acceleration we’d need, we’d be spread across a wall like peanut butter and jelly—”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Right.”

  “Hawaii. Stan, we could get to the airport in twenty minutes. We’d get two hours extra, going west! Two hours more before sunrise!”

  She had something there. Two hours was worth any price! But I’d worked this out before, staring at the moon from my balcony. “No. We’d die sooner. Listen, love, we saw the moon go bright about midnight. That means California was at the back of the Earth when the sun went nova.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Then we must be furthest from the shock wave.”

  She blinked. “I don’t understand.”

  “Look at it this way. First the sun explodes. That heats the air and the oceans, all in a flash, all across the day side. The steam and superheated air expand fast. A flaming shock wave comes roaring over into the night side. It’s closing on us right now. Like a noose. But it’ll reach Hawaii first. Hawaii is two hours closer to the sunset line.”

  “Then we won’t see the dawn. We won’t live even that long.”

  “No.”

  “You explain things so well,” she said bitterly. “A flaming shock wave. So graphic.”

  “Sorry. I’ve been thinking about it too much. Wondering what it will be like.”

  “Well, stop it.” She came to me her face in my shoulder. She cried quietly. I held her with one arm and used the other to rub her neck, and I watched the streaming clouds, and I didn’t think about what it would be like.

  Didn’t think about the ring of fire closing on us.

  It was the wrong picture anyway.

  I thought of how the oceans had boiled on the day side, so that the shock wave had been mostly steam to start with. I thought of the millions of square miles of ocean it had to cross. It would be cooler and wetter when it reached us. And the Earth’s rotation would spin it like the whirlpool in a bathtub.
/>   Two counterrotating hurricanes of live steam, one north, one south. That was how it would come. We were lucky. California would be near the eye of the northern one.

  A hurricane wind of live steam. It would pick a man up and cook him in the air, strip the steamed flesh from him and cast him aside. It was going to hurt like hell.

  We would never see the sunrise. In a way that was a pity. It would be spectacular.

  Thick parallel streamers of clouds were drifting across the stars, too fast, their bellies white by city light. Jupiter dimmed, then went out. Could it be starting already? Heat lightning jumped—

  “Aurora,” I said.

  “What?”

  “There’s a shock wave from the sun, too. There should be an aurora like nothing anybody’s ever seen before.”

  Leslie laughed suddenly, jarringly. “It seems so strange, standing on a street corner talking like this! Stan, are we dreaming it?”

  “We could pretend—”

  “No. Most of the human race must be dead already.”

  “Yah.”

  “And there’s nowhere to go.”

  “Damn it, you figured that out long ago, all by yourself. Why bring it up now?”

  “You could have let me sleep,” she said bitterly. “I was dropping off to sleep when you whispered in my ear.”

  I didn’t answer. It was true.

  “ ‘Hot fudge sundae,’ ” she quoted. Then, “It wasn’t a bad idea, actually. Breaking my diet.”

  I started to giggle.

  “Stop that.”

  “We could go back to your place now. Or my place. To sleep.”

  “I suppose. But we couldn’t sleep, could we? No, don’t say it. We take sleeping pills, and five hours from now we wake up screaming. I’d rather stay awake. At least we’ll know what’s happening.”

  But if we took all the pills… but I didn’t say it. I said, “Then how about a picnic?”

  “Where?”

  “The beach, maybe. Who cares? We can decide later.”

  IV

  All the markets were closed. But the liquor store next to the Red Barn was one I’d been using for years. They sold us foie gras, crackers, a couple of bottles of chilled champagne, six kinds of cheese and a hell of a lot of nuts—I took one of everything—more crackers, a bag of ice, frozen rumaki hors d’oeuvres, a fifth of an ancient brandy that cost twenty-five bucks, a matching fifth of Cherry Heering for Leslie, six packs of beer and Bitter Orange…

  By the time we had piled all that into a dinky store cart it was raining. Big fat drops spattered in flurries across the acre of plate glass that fronted the store. Wind howled around the corners.

  The salesman was in a fey mood, bursting with energy. He’d been watching the moon all night. “And now this!” he exclaimed as he packed our loot into bags. He was a small, muscular old man with thick arms and shoulders. “It never rains like this in California. It comes down straight and heavy when it comes at all. Takes days to build up.”

  “I know.” I wrote him a check, feeling guilty about it. He’d known me long enough to trust me. But the check was good. There were funds to cover it. Before opening hours the check would be ash, and all the banks in the world would be bubbling inthe heat of the sun. But that was hardly my fault.

  He piled our bags in the cart, set himself at the door. “Now when the rain lets up, we’ll run these out. Ready?” I got ready to open the door. The rain came like someone had thrown a bucket of water at the window. In a moment it had stopped, though water still streamed down the glass. “Now!” cried the salesman, and I threw the door open and we were off. We reached the car laughing like maniacs. The wind howled around us, sweeping up spray and hurling it at us.

  “We picked a good break. You know what this weather reminds me of? Kansas,” said the salesman. “During a tornado.”

  Then suddenly the sky was full of gravel! We yelped and ducked, and the car rang to a million tiny concussions, and I got the car door unlocked and pulled Leslie and the salesman in after me. We rubbed our bruised heads and looked out at white gravel bouncing everywhere.

  The salesman picked a small white pebble out of his collar. He put it in Leslie’s hand, and she gave a startled squeak and handed it to me, and it was cold.

  “Hail,” said the salesman. “Now I really don’t get it.”

  Neither did I. I could only think that it had something to do with the nova. But what? How?

  “I’ve gotto get back,” said the salesman. The hail had expended itself in one brief flurry. He braced himself, then went out of the car like a marine taking a hill. We never saw him again.

  The clouds were churning up there, forming and disappearing, sliding past each other faster than I’d ever seen clouds move; their bellies glowing by city light.

  “It must be the nova,” Leslie said shivering.

  “But how? If the shock wave were here already, dead—or at least deaf. Hail?”

  “Who cares? Stan, we don’t have time!”

  I shook myself. “All right. What would you like to do most, right now?”

  “Watch a baseball game.”

  “It’s two in the morning,” I pointed out.

  “That lets out a lot of things, doesn’t it?”

  “Right. We’ve hopped our last bar. We’ve seen our last play, and our last clean movie. What’s left?”

  “Looking in jewelry store windows.”

  “Seriously? Your last night on Earth?”

  She considered, then answered. “Yes.”

  By damn, she meant it. I couldn’t think of anything duller. “Westwood or Beverly Hills ?”

  “Both.”

  “Now, look—”

  “Beverly Hills, then.”

  * * *

  We drove through another spatter of rain and hail—a capsule tempest. We parked half a block from the Tiffany salesroom.

  The sidewalk was one continuous puddle. Second-hand rain dripped on us from various levels of the buildings overhead. Leslie said, “This is great. There must be half a dozen jewelry stores in walking distance.”

  “I was thinking of driving.”

  “No no no, you don’t have the proper attitude. One must window shop on foot. It’s in the rules.”

  “But the rain!”

  “You won’t die of pneumonia. You won’t have time,” she said, too grimly.

  Tiffany’s had a small branch office in Beverly Hills, but they didn’t put expensive things in the windows at night. There were a few fascinating toys, that was all.

  We turned up Rodeo Drive—and struck it rich. Tibor showed an infinite selection of rings, ornate and modern, large and small, in all kinds of precious and semiprecious stones. Across the street, Van Cleef Arpels showed brooches, men’s wristwatches of elegant design, bracelets with tiny watches in them, and one window that was all diamonds.

  “Oh, lovely,” Leslie breathed, caught by the flashing diamonds. “What they must look like in daylight!… Wups—”

  “No, that’s a good thought. Imagine them at dawn, flaming with nova light, while the windows shatter to let raw daylight in. Want one? The necklace?”

  “Oh, may I? Hey, hey, I was kidding! Put that down you idiot, there must be alarms in the glass.”

  “Look, nobody’sgoing to be wearing any of that stuff between now and morning. Why shouldn’t we get some good out of it?”

  “We’d be caught!”

  “Well, you said you wanted to window shop…”

  “I don’t want to spend my last hour in a cell. If you’d brought the car we’d have some chance—”

  “—Of getting away. Right. I wanted to bring the car—” But at that point we both cracked up entirely, and had to stagger away holding onto each other for balance.

  There were a good half dozen jewelry stores on Rodeo, But there was more. Toys, books, shirts and ties in odd and advanced styling. In Francis Orr, a huge plastic cube full of new pennies. A couple of damn strange clocks further on. There was an extra kick in wi
ndow shopping, knowing that we could break a window and take anything we wanted badly enough.

  We walked hand in hand, swinging our arms. The sidewalks were ours alone; all others had fled the mad weather. The clouds still churned overhead.

  “I wish I’d known it was coming,” Leslie said suddenly. “I spent the whole day fixing a mistake in a program. Now we’1l never run it.”

  “What would you have done with the time? A baseball game?”

  “Maybe. No. The standings don’t matter now.” She frowned at dresses in a store window. “What would you have done?”

  “Gone to the Blue Sphere for cocktails,” I said promptly. “It’s a topless place. I used to go there all the time. I hear they’ve gone full nude now.”

  “I’ve never been to one of those. How late are they open?”

  “Forget it. It’s almost two-thirty.”

  Leslie mused, looking at giant stuffed animals in a toy store window. “Isn’t there someone you would have murdered, if you’d had the time?”

  “Now, you know my agent lives in New York.”

  “Why him?”

  “My child, why would any writer want to murder his agent? For the manuscripts he loses under other manuscripts. For his ill-gotten ten percent, and the remaining ninety percent that he sends me grudgingly and late. For—”

  Suddenly the wind roared and rose up against us. Leslie pointed, and we ran for a deep doorway that turned out to be Gucci’s. We huddled against the glass.

  The wind was suddenly choked with hail the size of marbles. Glass broke somewhere, and alarms lifted thin, frail voices into the wind. There was more than hail in the wind! There were rocks!

  I caught the smell and taste of seawater.

  We clung together in the expensively wasted space in front of Gucci’s. I coined a short-lived phrase and screamed, “Nova weather! How the blazes did it—” But I couldn’t hear myself, and Leslie didn’t even know I was shouting.

  Nova weather. How did it get here so fast? Coming over the pole, the nova shock wave would have to travel about four thousand miles—at least a five-hour trip.

  No. The shock wave would travel in the stratosphere, where the speed of sound was higher, then propagate down. Three hours was plenty of time. Still, I thought, it should not have come as a rising wind. On the other side of the world, the exploding sun was tearing our atmosphere away and hurling it at the stars. The shock should have come as a single vast thunderclap.