The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott (8 page)

His brother chortled. "There's a rare understatement for you."

"
Qadir
is the one who keeps regular business hours,"
Aazad
explained, "which is why I meet him here on occasion for lunch. That, and to burp my baby, of course."

They all pivoted to look toward the hundred foot yacht David had suspected. . . the awesomely decadent cruiser idling at the end of the dock. As they watched, a man in a white uniform appeared on deck, carrying binoculars that were briefly turned in their direction.

"I thought Friday was the start of the weekend," David said to
Qadir
.

"Thursday for native citizens. But unfortunately no, not for us government employees,"
Qadir
replied. "I may be in charge, but, as my brother will tell you, I'm just a glorified telephone operator. And, in any event, it's time for me to be off. Thank you for reminding me."

Qadir
bowed warmly at each of them, in turn, then departed. When he was gone,
Aazad
waved a hand for them to be seated in
Qadir's
place, then lifted it toward an attentive waiter.

"My brother and I both attended Harvard Business School, in case you're wondering,"
Aazad
confided to David. "We were not involved in radical politics, as you may have already guessed."

"Interesting," David said.

"By that, of course, you mean you find it unusual for the heir to a Middle Eastern shipping fortune to be a graduate of Harvard, I presume?" The straight face hardened, then mellowed as indication of jest. Finally,
Aazad
laughed, and lowered his voice. "Actually, it
is
unusual, and something our father insisted upon. Unlike some of the brats who live in the Hamptons." He paused as coffee was served. "Tell me, David, where did
you
go to school?"

"University of Arizona. My master's was in optical engineering, my bachelor of science in astronomy."

"David is a gifted man," Etherton interjected. "He's done a lot of design work on his own, too, and with an impressive aptitude for abstract thought, I should say."

"Interesting,"
Aazad
mimicked, with a deftly directed focus of fancy. "I know a man who might like to discuss the future of glass with you. Electronically tinted glass, I mean."

"What do you mean?" Etherton asked.

"Glass which can change reflectivity when a static electric charge is applied," David responded. "I read that it's under development for use in skyscrapers. Could help Dubai with its air conditioning energy problems. . . is that what you're thinking, sir?"

Aazad
smiled. "Very perceptive. We do have immense energy needs, going forward. But what are you gentlemen planning to do until we meet again? Besides dodging aerial attacks, that is."

"Not sure," said Doug. "
Nasheed
is out of town, and with all the tension building, we haven't really discussed where to go next."

Aazad
rubbed at his chin, studying first Doug, then David. "Well, then," he said, finally, "you should let me take you two for a spin down the coast and back."

Etherton lifted a hand. "Really,
Aazad
, you don't have to--"

"No, no,"
Aazad
insisted. "What good is owning the thing if I can't show it off? Besides, being astronomers, you should know about Trump's motto, too. Think big, and live large?"

"I believe you might be larger," Doug said, then raised a correcting finger, adding, "I mean, in the, ah, area to which Trump referred, obviously."

"Yes, well, be careful saying things like that around here,"
Aazad
responded, with a wink, "or your table might be in the kitchen next time."

~ * ~

Stepping onto the deck of the yacht christened BIG DIPPER, David felt an immediate yet odd sense of complicity in being there, as though it had just been discovered that he deserved some exclusive privilege, the kind of which he'd previously been unaware. Now that he shared this secret favor, and its implicit responsibility, even the most lavish accommodations seemed somehow appropriate, if not familiar. He was not surprised, then, by all the polished brass and lacquered teak, nor was he as eager as Doug to explore the control room above or the staterooms below decks. The jade Jacuzzi, however, finally broke the trance, and drew him back from his singularly subjective experience of the tour. Still, it was not envy he felt. He wasn't sure what it was, but not that.

"There is a Little Dipper too, in case you're wondering,"
Aazad
informed them, his tone matter-of-fact. "A
Frers
-designed
Hylas
sixty-one sailboat, with hand laid fiberglass,
divinycell
cored topsides, and a seventy-five horse
Yanmar
diesel. But only three small cabins. So Bill Gates was
not
aboard that one." He stuck his tongue into his cheek for a moment, then added, as a remembered aside to David, "Oh, and it pays to be a big
tipper
here, too, if you expect to be treated well. No cell phone tip calculator at restaurants, please. If the meal is a hundred, you leave two. Simple hundred percent success rate at being remembered next time around."

Etherton chuckled. David smiled, dutifully. "What do you leave," he asked, "at a wake or a funeral?"

Aazad
laughed. "Welcome aboard, gentlemen," he said. "May I interest you in some fine cigars for our little excursion?"

The Big Dipper was ordered to depart at half throttle, out and around the Palm, past the Atlantis resort, the
Jumeirah
coastal belt, and then Business Bay, where the
Burj
Khalifa
and Dynamic Tower appeared to have been untouched, since their minor damage did not face the ocean. The skyline was magnificent in the early afternoon, and before long, as they stood on deck smoking Havana Royals, David was able to grasp something of the nature of his new mindset. His new faculty. He looked at
Aazad
, standing over there, talking to Etherton. He picked up their conversation on the breeze. Looking out at the ocean, as he listened, the shallow waves roiled from a prow that angled the swells out into a V shaped pattern that quietly fell behind and were dissolved into the ship's aft turbulence.

"Any exciting research on the mountain these days?"
Aazad
asked.

"Certainly," Etherton replied. "We've imaged the shock wave of an old nova outburst in
Ophiuchi
. A white dwarf there is still ejecting a hundred million degree plasma through the stellar wind of a red giant companion star. Velocity is three thousand kilometers a second."

"Interesting,"
Aazad
responded. "I'd love to see those photos."

"Absolutely. I'll have them emailed to you. By the way, did you know that
Nasheed
has a special interest in stellar evolution and demise?"

"No, I didn't."

"He's a great supporter of solar research on the mountain, and our new solar telescope. Our sun, as the nearest star, is the only one whose hiccups might directly affect our fate, but of course if a
hypernova
were to occur with a thousand light years of Earth, and the polar jets of the blast were aligned with us, that could fry us too."

"And do you see that happening anytime soon?"

Etherton laughed. “Oceans will boil and freeze a few times before that. And there's few stars of sufficient mass close enough to cause it. But there
are
a few O or B class blue-white
supergiants
within range to blow in the next couple million years. The bigger the star, of course, the hotter and faster it burns, and the shorter its lifespan. Stars like ours aren't hot or massive enough, although they do reach sixteen million Kelvin at the core."

"Sixteen million Kelvin,"
Aazad
repeated in amazement. "That's our own sun?"

"Well, you don't have to worry about the sun referenced by the
Jumeirah
Universe development
yet
, of course." Chuckles. "At the very core of Sol, yes. The core burns about, say, the equivalent mass of a million limousines per second in a PP chain or proton-proton reaction. High energy gamma rays created by fusion there then get jostled around for about two hundred thousand years in the
radiative
zone surrounding the core while being degraded into photon energy, which then enters the convective zone before reaching the surface, where it's only about ten thousand Kelvin. If there were no
radiative
or convective zones around the core, you can imagine we'd all be dead in around eight minutes, as soon as the gamma radiation reached us."

"Nice,"
Aazad
said.

"And bear in mind our sun is only an average star, which wouldn't even be visible from many of the stars you can see in the sky at night. If you look toward Orion, you'll see a lot of blue or red
supergiants
, in a place where stars are still forming from giant molecular clouds of hydrogen twenty light years across."

"Indeed," said
Aazad
, "Orion is quite beautiful, and I've seen it many times through my telescope. I suppose you mean
Rigel
or Betelgeuse, the variable red supergiant?"

"Exactly. Or the belt stars, which are burning fast and will all go boom in a few million years when the hydrogen at their cores is gone. No more gas, metals go up, and that's what happens. Worlds end, kinda like this one." Etherton laughed.

"What is the largest star in our galaxy, then?"

"We think it's what we call the Pistol Star, near the center of the Milky Way, not far from the central black hole. But the dust is so heavy along our line of sight that it's hard to tell for sure. Another candidate is closer. Eta
Carinae
actually exploded part of its outer shell not long ago, now visible as two monster lobes of expanding gas moving around eight hundred kilometers a second out from the poles. But that was just a hiccup. The big explosion is yet to come. The star is just unbelievably huge. Our sun would be dwarfed by it. Its mass is a hundred fifty times greater, and it's four million times brighter. When it pops it'll probably create a black hole, and at its peak the visible radiation will rival the sun from our perspective."

"Are you serious?"

"Deadly. You know, in ten fifty-four, when the neutron star now at the heart of the Crab nebula blew, the Chinese reported seeing it in broad daylight, shining brighter than the moon. Eta
Carinae
would dwarf that star."

Listening, David envisioned one of the tiny rooms where he'd slept during those days before his observations and calibrations on various telescopes during endless quiet nights. He tried to resurrect the singular loneliness that had been as deep as the sky, whose stars numbered the grains of sand on the beach.
Was it why he'd quit, using the economic downturn on projects as an excuse?
He flashed on walking the high desert paths between various telescopes across mountain tops. . . the bitter cold, the often windy nights. The reason didn't seem right, though. Something was missing. Something eclipsed, blotted out.

He let that go, for the moment, and thought instead about the people he'd met during his mostly solitary career. The rare gregarious astronomer he'd avoided, even in their cafeteria cliques. The others, who had mostly looked at him, if at all, as an outsider. As someone who came and went on short term assignment, and never opened up much, just did his work and moved on. Etherton had been his most recurrent contact, of course, as director of Kitt Peak. Still, he had to admit, he really didn't know the man well, either. He'd felt more in common with the native Americans who lived in small villages to the north of the mountain---those who, in turn, looked up at the sky and imagined their ancestors looking down at them.

Now what remained seemed a mystery, like his own personal Chandrasekhar limit--a baffling inner near implosion due to the gravity and pressure of certain observations. How exactly had he come so close to that point of no return, that event horizon at the nadir of his life, to be saved only at the last by a singularity in the form of a key? Was he so blind that he should suspect his other observations as well?

~ * ~

When the circuit had been completed, and they were finally motoring back,
Aazad
came over to him, as David knew that he would. Perhaps sensing his restrained, more contemplative demeanor, the billionaire said, "Anything I can get you, Mr.
Leiter
? Fancy fulfilling some desire in the make-a-wish category, perhaps?"

"Yes, actually," David replied.

Aazad
smiled, knowingly. "Okay, what is it, then?"

He looked at this impossibly rich man with his own steady, imperturbable, but curious gaze. Here was someone who could buy anything, go anywhere. Countless people wanted to meet him, to be his friend or advisor. Their motives were
Legion
, and he knew them all. Was he hoping to be surprised for once?

"I'd like to meet two people," David said, "who I have no access to."

"Two. . . celebrities?"

"Not in the way you mean. One is a former televangelist, the other a disgraced banking executive. Both live in Dubai now."