and over again, with random computer variations of timbre and ornamentation, and there was some kind of raga, also computer generated, weaving in and out of it. He’d punched in three basic beats that slid through one another with hypnotic insistence, and over the whole framework he was improvising a primitive but energetic melange of chords and runs that contained fragments of some of the more popular recent hits.
“Want to spell me, old chum?” Berry asked Jameson.
“No thanks,” Jameson said. “I’d rather enjoy my drink. I’ll suffer along with you.”
Maggie, leaning over the console, her hand on Berry’s shoulder, looked up and said, “Why don’t you? Mike tells me you’re good.”
Jameson laughed. “I noodle around a little—old music mostly. I’m no good at party stuff. I’d kill the dancing.”
“He’s right,” Berry said. “No sense of rhythm—even with the Moog to help him. He’s better off poking around with Bach and Mozart and Farnaby and all those other ancient foot-tappers he likes.”
“I don’t like committee music,” Jameson said good-naturedly. “At least the Chinese leave out the aleatory computer input.”
“He has a hyper ear for tone, though, I’ll give him that,” Berry went on imperturbably. “Did you know that behind that standard face lurks the gift of absolute pitch?”
“Is that true?” Maggie said.
Berry answered for him. “Of course, absolute pitch has nothing to do with musical talent. It’s just a freak ability.”
“Mike, on the other hand, has talent but a tin ear,” Jameson said. “Haven’t you noticed that the Moog’s out of tune? The last person who used it must have been fooling around with an enharmonic change between F sharp and G flat. I’ve been wincing for the last half-hour. You better clear the instructions and get it back to equal temperament.”
Unabashed, Berry went on playing.
“Can you really tell?” Maggie said.
Jameson’s attention was distracted by the sight of Sue Jarowski drifting over, with the new man, Gifford, in tow like a magnetized particle. Sue was wearing an off-the-bosom chlamys with what seemed to be nothing more than a spray-on on the revealed side. “Sure,” he said absently. “Won a lot of bets with it when I was a cadet— earned my pocket money that way. Used to bet I could tell a fellow what note his boot was squeaking on, or whether somebody had just belched in B flat or B natural.”
“Maggie’s an antiquarian too,” Berry said. “Collects old things.”
“Old physicists, you mean?” Jameson said automatically.
Maggie laughed. “Nothing too really hyper,” she said. “Twentieth-century plastic bottles, mostly.”
“Expensive hobby,” Jameson said.
Sue and Gifford pushed their way through the circle surrounding the Moog. Dmitri was hovering miserably nearby. Sue gave them all a big, earthy smile. Jameson wondered if he could pry Sue away from the party before Gifford did.
Berry lit up a joint and let the Moog do the work while his hands were busy. The dancers didn’t seem to notice. With Berry no longer hammering away, the computer reached into its memory and filled in the gap with a standard contrapuntal theme that would go with the raga. It sounded fine.
“Have a gasp,” Berry said, passing the joint to Gifford. “This is all organic—no synthetic THC added.”
“Thanks,” Gifford said, taking a drag and passing it to Sue. “Too bad about Roy, but his hard luck’s my ticket to Jupiter.”
“Glad to have you aboard,” Jameson said.
“Oh, here’s our other new man,” Sue said. “Hi.”
Jameson looked around and saw Klein standing on the fringes of the group, a plastic-lidded mug in his hand, his eyes roving over the dancers across the way. He turned around and nodded—reluctantly, it seemed to Jameson.
“Hey, you were on Mars,” Gifford said. “Do you know Raul Peterson? Stocky guy. Seismologist assigned to Tharsis.”
“I was at Syrtis Major,” Klein explained. “Excuse me.”
He threaded his way through the crowd and walked in his heavy boots over to the circular bar that skirted the center of the lounge. The two barwomen were both busy, so Klein reached across to help himself. As Jameson watched, Klein thumbed his mug open and started to pour himself a cup of coffee. Just as Jameson was thinking that it was a little odd for Klein to be drinking coffee this early in the party, there was a scream and a little flurry of confusion up at the bar. Klein had managed to spill hot coffee over Beth Oliver, and himself, too. The coffee had streamed right past the rim of the mug and splashed them both. Klein hadn’t allowed for the sidewise curving effect, of the Coriolis force when he poured. It seemed an odd lapse for someone who was supposed to be used to space.
Klein, his sallow face turning livid, was apologizing to Beth, and the United German barmaid was hurrying over with a damp cloth to mop up Beth’s kaleidogown. Jameson craned his neck to see above the heads of the crowd, but then Sue, her voice raised against the din, was saying something to him, and he forgot about Klein.
By the time the intruder from Cygnus crossed the orbit of Neptune, its mass had shrunk to approximately that of the planet Earth. It could be picked up visually now by the 500-inch Sagan reflector on the Moon and the smaller mirror at L-5. With computer-enhancement of the images, its surface features—if you could call them that—could be seen quite plainly.
The Cygnus Object, as the freepie media called it now that its existence no longer could be kept a secret, turned out indeed to be an Earth-size plant, its surface masked by clouds of boiling hydrogen. It even had a moon —a seared, rocky body a couple of thousand miles in diameter—and it also had an inexplicable wobble, as if it were rotating about a common center of gravity with some massive object, one that the telescopes could not detect.
It was going to intersect the plane of the solar system at a shallow angle—about seventeen degrees from the ecliptic—and its speed was now low enough, at some fourteen miles per second, to assure that it would be captured by the Sun.
There was going to be a new planet in the solar system.
There was no hint in any of the stories that the Cygnus Object once had been a dangerous emitter of X-rays whose passage might have wiped Earth clean of life. There was no mention of the fact that it had shrunk from near-Jovian size in a matter of six months. Or that, against all natural law, it had unaccountably slowed to its present sedate speed from a velocity approaching that of light.
Fortunately for the authorities, the wandering planet had been obeying the laws of physics ever since it had come close enough to the solar system for Earthbound observatories and hundreds of amateur astronomers throughout the world to notice it, or its effects.
Independent observers were finding it remarkably difficult to get corroborating data from Farside or the Chinese observatory in the Jules Verne crater—though the Chinese claimed to have discovered the Cygnus Object first. Farside had issued a terse pressfax release just in time to prevent the Greater Japan observatory at Vladivostok from establishing a prior claim, and had said little since. Farside’s new director, Dr. Horace Mackie, was nowhere near as communicative and cooperative as Dr. Ruiz had been, and the man who had succeeded Mackie at the Sagan dome, a young former resident named Kerry, did nothing but spout officialese and academic doubletalk.
The newsies relied mostly on European and Japanese sources. There were enough compulsive talkers with Ph.D.s to give them all the copy and vids they needed about dead planets, torn from their suns, wandering through the void between the stars for millions of years. The story provided a brief circus for the public, and then it began to fade from the news.
Mizz Maybury was the first to notice anything.
She was on duty in the monitoring booth that shift.
For company she had a silent, flat-faced assistant named Sorg, who she knew worked for the NIB. There had been a lot of them ever since Dr. Mackie had become director: extra people, new arrivals from Earth or Mare Imbrium who didn’t seem to be doing anything much, or who, if they did, weren’t very good at their jobs.
“Set up the board for a visual fix on the visitor,” she said, glancing at her worksheet instructions. “I’m
