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 any one else devised mathematical means of diagnosing the in stability 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 al most 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, upper right. A big spot no wonder the car radio sounded like a Hitler speech
He 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 3% 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 further with secondary, tertiary, and quaternary yokes, showing exactly the time of highest probability. Beautiful) Dynkowski even as signed dates to the extreme limit of his primary yoke, as a good statistician should
But, as he 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 oversized 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 calculator 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 phutti 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 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 look 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
She 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 and he took her hand. “Notice the sun spot? You can see it with your naked eye.