"We live in an ice age-—" began Gregory Lutenist. When he got to the words "ice age" three people had joined him, speaking in unison with him. Then came a voice from the crowd: "No ****!"
"-—and we always have," he continued, imperturbably adjusting his glasses. "During the last seven hundred thousand years there have been eight cycles of cooling and warming. The glaciers retreat, but always they come back; and the warm, interglacial interludes last for only about ten thousand years. Since Ice Age Thirty-Five ended fourteen thousand years ago, the next one must have started four thousand years ago. Most of human history has been lived in an ice age. So why did no one notice?"
"It was too warm!" someone suggested.
Lutenist beamed at him. "Just so. It's hard to convince a man in Bermuda shorts that he's living in an ice age. But consider the halcyon, interglacial world of 4500 BC!" He waved a forefinger in the air.
"In Scandinavia the tree line was above 8000 feet." Three voices again joined him, speaking in unison, as Lutenist continued. "And deciduous trees grew all the way to the Arctic circle. The Sahara was a rain-watered, grassy savannah crossed by mighty rivers and even mightier hunters. We remember that age dimly as a Garden in Eden." Lutenist paused and removed his glasses. He polished the lenses and set them back upon his nose. He paused, sighed, and said, slowly, so that everyone in the room could join in, "But then the sun went out."
Gordon looked to Alex. "Shto govorit"? The man is mad, the sun has not gone out."
Lutenist beamed at Gordon. "Ah-—"
"Fresh meat!" someone yelled.
"Tell me, my young friend," Lutenist said. "What lights up the sun?"
"Is trick? Fusion. Hydrogen to helium."
"And when the fusion ends, what then?" Lutenist asked.
"Uh-—but how can fusion end? There is plenty of hydrogen."
"But it did end," Lutenist said. "And no one noticed." Bob Needleton stuck his head in between Alex and Gordon. "Where have all the neutrinos gone? Long time passing . . ." He gave Sherrine a quick kiss on the neck.
"Hi, Pins," Alex said. "Welcome back."
"I didn't want to miss Greg's spiel." Bob cupped his hands around his mouth. "There'll be a neutrino scavenger hunt tonight after the program," he announced. "Bring your snipe bags and your Chlorine-37 tanks." The audience responded with boos and catcalls. Lutenist waved to him and Bob waved back. "Hi, Greg. Still thumping the same old drum, I see."
"Excuse me," Gordon said, "but what means spiel about neutrinos?"
Bob pulled a chair up and set it beside Sherrine between the two wheelchairs. He straddled it backwards. "It's simple really."
Alex braced himself. When a physicist says, "it's simple," it usually meant it was time to duck.
"You see, when two protons fuse into a deuterium nucleus they yield a neutrino. There are two ways that can happen, but. . . Well, the details don't matter. Sometimes the deuterium hip-hops through beryllium into lithium and spits out another neutrino, and there are a couple of other reactions that also produce neutrinos; but that's about the gist of it. Fusion spits neutrinos. Get it?"
Gordon looked puzzled. "I get. So?"
Bob held his hands out palms up. "The problem is we never found the neutrinos. A Chlorine-37 detector should register a neutrino flux of eight snew, but all they ever get is two snew."
Gordon's frown deepened. "What's 'snew'?"
Sherrine hid her face in her hands. Bob said, "I dunno, not much. What's snew with you?"
"Thank you for sharing that with us-—"
"Sorry, I've never been able to resist that one. Snew is SNU, Solar Neutrino Units. One snew is one neutrino event per 1036 atoms per second."
There was a commotion at the other end of the room. A dozen fans, maybe more, came in. "Is this the pro party?"
Lutenist said. "I'm not through."
A 1arge man in a bush jacket waved a salute with a bottle beer. "Go right ahead, Greg. Don't mind us."
"What's up?" Lutenist demanded.
The man shruged "Con Committee said to come here, this will be the 'Meet the Pros' party."
"Aw crap," Lutenist said. "This is my lecture!"
"What's to lecture?" Needleton demanded. "It was all simple, and known before 1980. The sun is not producing enough neutrinos. Ergo, it is not fusing. Yet, according to the technetium levels in deep molybdenum mines there were plenty of neutrinos passing through the Earth during interglacial and preglacial periods."
"Excuse me, Bob," said Gregory Lutenist, "are you leading this discussion or am I?"
Bob waved a hand. "Sorry, Greg. Go ahead." In a near-whisper, "Gordon, it's a cycle. Fusion stops, the sun cools a bit, shrinks a bit, the core gets denser and hotter, fusion starts again, the new warmth inflates the sun. See? Is that a relief, or what?"
"Maunder Minimum!" someone shouted.
Lutenist beamed. "The sun goes through sunspot cycles. Lots of sunspots, it gets warm here. Few sunspots, colder weather. An astronomer named Maunder recorded sunspots and found that the last time there weren't any the planet went through what was known as the Little Ice Age, the Maunder Minimum." He paused dramatically. "And in the 1980s it became certain that the planet was going into a new Maunder Minimum period."
"Yes, yes, we know this," Gordon said. "Sunspots are important to us. But if so important to Earth, why do they not know cold is coming?"
"Bastards did," the man in the bush jacket growled. "But they said Global Warming."
"Grants," Bob said. "There's money in climate studies. All the Ph.D. theses. All that would go if things were so simple-—"
A short blond woman, slender by local standards, came in with a large tray. She carried it up to the piano as if thinking to set it down there, looked at the clutter, turned helplessly-— "Ah. You're Gabe?"
He smiled and nodded. She said, "Laurie. Hold this while we get a table." She set the tray across the arms of his wheelchair and was gone.
It was covered with small dishes, each with a couple of slices of vegetables. Cucumber, carrot, a bit of lettuce, some cabbage. A stalk of broccoli. Alex felt his mouth begin to water. Fresh vegetables! Of course the people here would be used to them-—
Bob Needleton stopped talking about neutrinos and stared at the tray. He gave a long, low whistle. "Dibs on a carrot stick!"
Gregory Lutenist said, "Broccoli for me. Now. It is important to realize that the sun has always burned hotter or cooler during different eras of our planet's history. Greenhouse or Icehouse."
A fan spoke up. "Carrot for me, too. The dinosaurs lived during a greenhouse era, didn't they?"
A voice spoke from the doorway. "Pros get first choice. This is the Meet the Readers Party, right?"
Lutenist nodded as if there had been no interruption. "Dinosaurs, and the Great Mammals, too. In fact, prior to the Pleistocene the world was quite warm. Hippopotami wallowed in the Thames."
He paused a moment. When he continued, half a dozen voices spoke in unison with him. "Then, in the blink of a geological eye, they were replaced by polar bears."
Lutenist beamed.
Alex looked to Sherrine. "What-—"
She laughed. "Some of us have heard Gregory before."
Cucumbers, celery, carrots, luxuries beyond his wildest dreams were cradled in Alex's arms. He couldn't eat; he had to share this with the whole room; and he couldn't get his hands on any of it without dropping the tray. Little dark red spheres, little bright red spheres with white inside, were displayed on big green leaves. Where were they with that damn table?
Badges were showing on various chests. Here were tiny oil paintings of alien creatures and landscapes and starscapes, or wheel-shaped and band-shaped artificial habitats infinitely more sophisticated than Mir and Freedom. A few badges bore angular cartoon faces and elegant calligraphy: CLOSET MUNDANE. KNOWS HARLAN ELLISON (evil smirk. HAS READ MUCH OF DHALGREN (bewilderment).
Lutenist continued. "Human history is so short that, living between the hippopotamus and the polar bear, we thought those conditions were 'normal.'
"After the sun went out, the interglacial ended and the world grew colder and drier. The Saraha rivers dried up, one by one, until only the Nile was left. By 1500 BC, the Scandinavian tree line had dropped to six thousand feet, and broad-leaf trees had disappeared from the Arctic.
"The weather changed. The North African coast was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. It began to dry up. Great migrations began, Huns, Arabs, Navajos, Mongols. There were Viking colonies on Greenland, but the Greenland Glacier began to move south, until it covered them all."
"Tell you another one," the man in the bush jacket said.
"Go ahead, Wade," Lutenist said.
Sherrine looked around. "Wade Curtis. A pro."
"Writer?" Gordon asked. She nodded.
Curtis's voice boomed even in the large room. "In the American Revolutionary War, Colonel Alexander Hamilton brought cannon captured by Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga down to assist General Washington in Haarlem Heights. He brought them across the ice on the frozen Hudson River. By the twentieth century, the Hudson didn't freeze at all, let alone hard enough to carry cannon on!"
Lutenist smiled agreement. "Right! The Little Ice Age was coming to an end! In fact, a warming trend had started around 1200, and lasted for eight centuries. Anyone know why?"
"Hey, let's eat!" someone called.
"Let him finish," Curtis growled. He drained his beer. A bearded man behind him silently handed him another.
Lutenist stabbed a hand into the air. "Why?"
Someone in the audience responded. "Because a farmer doesn't give up his land."
"That's right, Beth. Farmers! Hunters run, which is what our ancestors did during the Thirty-Fifth Ice Age. But the five hundred million settled and civilized humans of the thirteenth century were not going to pull up stakes and move elsewhere. London, Copenhagen, even Moscow were too valuable to abandon. So what did they do?" He used and stared around the audience.
Several responded in unison. "They threw another log on the fire!"
Lutenist beamed. "Exactly! They fought the cold with heat, soot and CO2. Air pollution!"
"Smudge pots," Curtis growled.
Right, Lutenist shouted. "Smudge pots! Greenhouse effect!"
"Pollution, poll-ooo-tion," someone sang.
