continent. He felt surrounded here by a naturalness he found foreign. RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2. Yea verily.
That night, when he made love to her back at the motel, Penny seemed changed. Her hips had got harder. Angular patterns of bone spoke to him through the thin cloak of flesh. She was tough, western, a horsewoman. She knew that artichokes grew on a sort of bush, not on trees. She could cook over an open fire. He found her breasts more pointed, with pronounced nipples, rosy and soft, that puckered swiftly as he sucked on them. The east was east and the west was west.
Jack took them out Sunday in late morning to watch some walnutting he had invested in. In the walnut groves near Alamo a mechanical tree-shaker chuffed and wheezed. Its hydraulic arm yanked at the tree trunks, bringing showers of nuts bursting from the sky. Men shepherded a contraption down the lanes between the trees, coaxing its engine. It flicked rubber flippers to the side, herding the nuts into ragged rows. A picker followed after. The walnuts were still in their dappled green husks and the picker scooped them up, leaving behind the twigs and dirt and snapped branches. Jack explained that this new method would pay off in no time. A trailer carried the nuts to a gauntlet of brushes and wire nets, where the hulls were rubbed off. A natural gas oven baked off any hulls that stuck. “Going to revolutionize the industry,” Jack pronounced. Gordon watched the huffing machines and the gangs of men tending them. They worked even on Sunday; it was harvest. The walnut groves were soothing after the bleak scrub desert of Southern California. The long shadowed ranks of green reminded him of upper New York State. The clanking arm that strangled trees for their nuts was disturbing, though: a new, robot west.
“Can I borrow some of those astronomy books of yours this afternoon?” he asked Jack abruptly.
Jack nodded, surprised, covering it with a baffled grin. Penny rolled her eyes and grimaced:
The tree-shaker grunted and yanked, bringing him out of his ruminations. He had been standing with his hands behind his back, his usual lecturer pose, staring at a clod of earth. Gordon looked up at the others, who had moved off toward the car. Penny gave her father a wry, resigned look, gesturing at Gordon: family signals.
There was nothing in the indexes of Jack’s books about Hercules. Gordon paged through them, looking for something about the constellations. There were star charts, seasonal views of Ursa Major and Orion and the Southern Cross. Students who had been reared under city lights needed a simple guide to the stars. Gordon was no different. He studied the lines connecting the stellar dots, trying to understand why anybody thought these looked like hunters or swans or bulls. Then a passage caught his eye.
Our own sun is in motion, just as all stars are. We revolve about the center of our galaxy at a speed of about 150 miles per second. In addition, the sun is moving at about 12 miles per second toward a point near the star Vega, in the Hercules cluster. Many thousands of years from now, the constellations will appear different, because of such motions of stars relative to each other. In Figure 8 the constellation…
Penny drove him over to the Berkeley campus. She had liked the idea of going for a drive around the area again, even though it meant seeing a little less of her parents. Her attitude changed when she saw that he did not want to stroll around the campus at all, and instead headed directly for the Physics Department library. The library was in a building next to the campanile but Gordon refused to ride the elevator up and look at the view. He waved goodbye to her and went inside.
Solar motion, discounting the rotation about galactic center, can be adequately described as a cosine 0 distribution. We are moving away from the
Gordon blinked at the clotted sentences, doing arithmetic in his head. The musty library air carried a heavy, solemn silence. He found a worn copy of
Solar Apex
RA 18 5 (±1) DEC 30 ± 40
He plucked a pencil from his shirt pocket and scribbled beneath it, ignoring the scornful look of a librarian.
RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2
He walked out into a cooling autumn afternoon.
On the Air Cal flight to San Diego he said, “The coordinates in the message match the solar apex, that’s the point. To within the uncertainties in the present measurements, I mean.”
“That’s what the plus and minus signs on top of each other mean?” Penny said doubtfully.
“Right. Right.”
“I don’t get it.”
“That’s the direction the sun—and the earth with it—is heading toward.”
“Well,
“Huh?”
“That’s what you say. Indicates surprise.
“No, it means—well, dismay. Anyway, I don’t say that.”
“Sure you do.”
“No I don’t.”
“Okay, okay. Look, what’s this mean, Gordon?”
“I haven’t got any idea,” he lied.
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
“GORDON, THIS IS CLAUDIA ZINNES. I WANTED TO let you know we lost the anomalous effect this weekend. Did you?”
“I wasn’t running. Sorry.”
“Well, it would have been a waste, anyway. The funny stuff simply faded out.”
“It comes and goes like that a lot.”
“We will continue trying, however.”
“Good, good. So will I.”
