I'd only waste my time trying to cajole her. 'Tell Mr. Ashkenazi I want to interview him. If I can't, I'll have to interview his twin. Tell him that. If you cut me off, he's going to be madder than hell at you.'
Her look almost melted my set. I wished I'd looked up his twin's name, if he actually had a twin. I shouldn't have overlooked that. Using a name would have been more convincing. After glaring for a couple of seconds, she put me on hold. A minute later, Ashkenazi's face appeared on my screen. He looked mildly annoyed, nothing worse.
'What's this about?' he said.
'I've read and screened your address to the Astronomical Society, and some of the things written about you. I'm preparing an article for
'I don't give interviews.'
'I appreciate that, Mr. Ashkenazi, and I respect your feelings on it. But I still plan to write the article. The direction it takes, and what I feature in it, depends on the information I have.'
For a moment he just sat looking at me via our connection. 'An interview,' he said. Sounding resigned. 'All right. Where are you calling from?'
'L.A.'
He grunted. 'This evening then. I'll give you thirty minutes, beginning at seven. Do you know how to find me?'
'You're at 4231 East Encino Road. I assume that rental cars in Santa Barbara have the Montecito grid in their computers.'
'They may, but I'm three miles outside Montecito, in the Rhubarb Canyon development. I don't know if they've extended the grid this far out yet. If you have any trouble, call. I'll tell Mrs. Bowser to put you through to me. My place is fenced, with a remote control gate. The call box will get the house, and someone will let you in. That's this evening at seven.'
'Thank you, Mr. Ashkenazi,' I told him.
Then I got Sacramento again. I needed to get all the available information on his family, something I should have already done.
4
Since geogravitic power, air transport has gotten cheaper and a lot more convenient, with virtually no risk of crash, short of collision. Floaters are AG, stable in flight, easy to operate, quiet, and don't pollute. From the office, if I want to fly somewhere, I drive a mile and a half to the Larchmont Station, where shuttles fly to LAX, Long Beach, Hollywood-Burbank, Ventura, or Santa Barbara at half-hour intervals.
I caught the 5:15 airbus to Santa Barbara and got there at 5:40. The air was clear as polished crystal. With the mountains behind her, L.A. looked beautiful, the Pacific magnificent, and the Sierra Madre rugged and wild. At the Santa Barbara Station I caught a turkey salad sandwich and at 6:23 was in a rental car headed for Montecito. The Montecito grid did cover the Rhubarb Canyon development, so all I had to do to find Ashkenazi's place was follow the route on the computer. It took me 16 minutes: I was 20 minutes early. Instead of using the call box, I voiced his number on the phone in the rental car and told him I was there already—that if he wanted I could drive around awhile. He said to come on up to the house, and a few seconds later the security gate opened.
His place was on two or three acres of land. You couldn't see the house from the gate because of the tall hedge along the road. Behind it was a concrete wall a yard high, eight feet of chain link with the waxy luster of new HardSteel above that, and razor wire on top.
Pretty mild, actually, for a development like Rhubarb Canyon in these days of trashers. Nothing at all like Ojibwa County, Michigan, where I grew up. His driveway started in through a stand of scrub live oak, but the house itself was surrounded by lawn, shaded thin by big encina oaks. The house was fairly large, partly one story and partly two, with big windows and glass doors. There were five paved parking places, one occupied by what had to be his car, another by a middle-aged pickup that probably belonged to household staff. Apparently Ashkenazi wasn't big on entertaining. I pulled into one of the other spaces, stepped up onto the porch and knocked. A man answered, wearing a sort of semi-uniform. He let me into an entryway and pressed a button.
Half a minute later, Ashkenazi was there, shaking my hand, cordial as you could hope for. Making the best of a regrettable situation, probably. He looked heavier than on the video, but healthy. I suppose he exercised. We went into a room lit by the yellow rays of a setting sun, and sat down. He looked at a wall clock. 'Six-forty,' he said. 'We might as well start. Let me ask the first question: How did you know about Eldon?'
Eldon was his twin brother. Their parents' names were in the data on Ashkenazi, and I'd called up information on them that afternoon. There wasn't much of it, of course. But their children's names and birth dates were there. 'Mr. Ashkenazi,' I answered, 'a writer learns research techniques, just as an astronomer does. I haven't taken the trouble to learn much about your family though. I haven't decided just what form the article will take, so I don't know what's relevant to it. I am, of course, interested in your research and yourself.'
'You've read my paper.'
'And watched you read it to the Astronomy Society.'
'Then you saw how it was received by my professional brethren.'
'Right. I also saw interviews with a few of them. They said what you talked about was astrology, not astronomy.'
Ashkenazi smiled. 'Astrology without astrological terminology. I followed basic astrological principles but abandoned the traditional framework and analyzed large volumes of data.' The smile became a grin. 'I call it 'predictive astronomy,' to irritate the astronomical fraternity.'
'But apparently you don't know why it works. If you could have described the mechanism, you would have. Wouldn't you? You must have some kind of theory.'
He shook his head. 'If Ali Hasad's
One of the advantages of reading 800 to 1200 words per minute is, you can read a lot of books and magazines. So I knew a little of what he was talking about. 'Isn't Ali Hasad's theory rejected by scientists?'
