White Noise - Don Delillo [99]
“How can there be nothing?” Denise said. “There has to be something.”
“There is something,” Heinrich said in exasperation. “There’s heavy molecules.”
“Do-I-need-a-sweater kind of day,” Babette said.
There was another pause. We waited to learn if the dialogue was over. Then we set to eating again. We traded unwanted parts in silence, stuck our hands in cartoons of rippled fries. Wilder liked the soft white fries and people picked these out and gave them to him. Denise distributed ketchup in little watery pouches. The interior of the car smelled of grease and licked flesh. We traded parts and gnawed.
Steffie said in a small voice, “How cold is space?”
We all waited once more. Then Heinrich said, “It depends on how high you go. The higher you go, the colder it gets.”
“Wait a minute,” Babette said. “The higher you go, the closer you get to the sun. So the warmer it gets.”
“What makes you think the sun is high?”
“How can the sun be low? You have to look up to see the sun.”
“What about at night?” he said.
“It’s on the other side of the earth. But people still look up.”
“The whole point of Sir Albert Einstein,” he said, “is how can the sun be up if you’re standing on the sun?”
“The sun is a great molten ball,” she said. “It’s impossible to stand on the sun.”
“He was just saying ‘if.’ Basically there is no up or down, hot or cold, day or night.”
“What is there?”
“Heavy molecules. The whole point of space is to give molecules a chance to cool down after they come shooting off the surface of giant stars.”
“If there’s no hot or cold, how can molecules cool down?”
“Hot and cold are words. Think of them as words. We have to use words. We can’t just grunt.”
“It’s called the sun’s corolla,” Denise said to Steffie in a separate discussion. “We saw it the other night on the weather network.”
“I thought Corolla was a car,” Steffie said.
“Everything’s a car,” Heinrich said. “The thing you have to understand about giant stars is that they have actual nuclear explosions deep inside the core. Totally forget these Russian IBMs that are supposed to be so awesome. We’re talking about a hundred million times bigger explosions.”
There was a long pause. No one spoke. We went back to eating for as long as it took to bite off and chew a single mouthful of food.
“It’s supposed to be Russian psychics who are causing this crazy weather,” Babette said.
“What crazy weather?” I said.
Heinrich said, “We have psychics, they have psychics, supposedly. They want to disrupt our crops by influencing the weather.”
“The weather’s been normal.”
“For this time of year,” Denise put in smartly.
This was the week a policeman saw a body thrown from a UFO. It happened while he was on routine patrol on the outskirts of Glassboro. The rain-soaked corpse of an unidentified male was found later that night, fully clothed. An autopsy disclosed that death was due to multiple fractures and heart failure—the result, perhaps, of a ghastly shock. Under hypnosis, the policeman, Jerry Tee Walker, relived in detail the baffling sight of the neon-bright object that resembled an enormous spinning top as it hovered eighty feet above a field. Officer Walker, a Vietnam vet, said the bizarre scene reminded him of helicopter crews throwing Vietcong suspects out the door. Incredibly, as he watched a hatch come open and the body plummet to the ground, Walker sensed an eerie message being psychically transmitted to his brain. Police hypnotists plan to intensify their sessions in an attempt to uncover the message.
There were sightings all over the area. An energizing mental current, a snaky glow, seemed to pass from town to town. It didn’t matter whether you believed in these things or not. They were an excitement, a wave, a tremor. Some voice or noise would crack across the sky and we would be lifted out of death. People drove speculatively to the edges of towns, where some would turn back, some decide to venture toward remoter areas which