Shortest Day (8 page)

Homer stopped and gawked at the biggest tent. It had a painted sign—

HARVARD TOWERS

COMMAND HEADQUARTERS

“My God,” said Homer, “what's this all about?”

“I'll bet I know,” said Mary. “Yesterday in Harvard Square—”

But there he was in person, Palmer Nifto, bustling out of the command tent with a sheaf of papers in his hand.

Homer recognized him at once. “Well, Palmer Nifto, hello there. We meet again. Homer Kelly here. Remember a couple of years ago in Concord, when I sprang you and your friends out of jail?”

Palmer grinned at Homer, his breath steaming in the frosty air, and handed him a couple of handbills. “Listen, friend, how'd you like to pin these up someplace? You know, any old place.” Homer stared at the handbills, which said,

HARVARD TOWERS

TENT CITY PROTEST

FOR THE HOMELESS CITIZENS OF CAMBRIDGE!

PRESSURE CITY'S BIGGEST LANDLORD,

HARVARD UNIVERSITY!

HARVARD ENDOWMENT:

SIX BILLION DOLLARS!

WE DEMAND

HARVARD REAL ESTATE!

A thickset guy in a Bruins cap approached Palmer Nifto with the end of an extension cord in his hand, yanking it out of a snarled heap of yellow cable. “Where the hell we going to plug in this one?”

Palmer took the plug and looked at Homer and Mary. “Hey, how about you guys plugging this in someplace in Mem Hall? Like we've got all kinds of requirements for electric power. I've got press releases to get out, gotta get my computer going.”

Mary was dumbfounded. “Good grief, Palmer, you haven't got a computer in that tent?”

Palmer handed the end of the extension cord to Homer. “Just plug it in anywhere. We've got a couple other outlets, and we're negotiating with the Science Center.”

“God, I don't know, Palmer,” said Homer, staring doubtfully at the rubber plug in his hand.

“Well, for Christ's sake,” said Palmer indignantly. “The students are way ahead of you. They're supplying a power source. I must say it's a sad day when the older generation is too timid for the courageous actions of the young.” Nifto pointed to a plump young man approaching from Phillips Brooks House, carrying a tray of doughnuts. “Welcome, Scottie,” he shouted. “What have you got there?”

The plump young man was at once surrounded by eager takers. Mary recognized some of them. She had seen the hugely pregnant young teenager in Porter Square. The old man who never stopped talking usually sat on the sidewalk in front of the Harvard Coop. And here was the other old man, the one who never spoke, who huddled beside the subway entrance at Church Street and turned up sometimes on the steps to their own classroom. Some of the others were familiar too, people who sold newspapers on the street, and the guy on Rollerblades who swooped like a dancer in and out among the cars on Massachusetts Avenue. They were homeless, all these people. Until now they must have been spending the night in local shelters.

“But, Palmer,” said Mary, “it's wintertime. You people aren't sleeping here, are you? Not overnight?”

“The Peasants' Revolt,” proclaimed a loud voice at Mary's elbow. It was Dr. Box in her purple hat, surveying the scene, casting it into historical perspective. “Wat Tyler defying the king. A chancy business,” she said, scowling at Palmer Nifto. “Do you know what happened to Wat Tyler?”

Palmer Nifto reached out to grab the last two doughnuts from Scottie's tray, but Mary adroitly snatched one of them, while Dr. Box cried, “Murder! That's what happened to Wat Tyler!”

“Won't you take it?” said Mary, holding out the doughnut to the old man in the blanket.

For a moment she thought the old black man was asleep, but then his hand crept out and took the morsel from her fingers, and snaked back out of sight.

“Well, okay, Palmer,” said Homer, “I'll see what I can do.” With Mary's help he dragged a length of sixteen connected extension cords across the brick and asphalt and grass of the overpass into the lecture hall, and found an outlet at the back. Guiltily, taking leave of his senses, he plugged it into the wall.

Mary put down her briefcase and hugged her coat around her. “He forgot again. It's cold as ice in here.”

Homer had taught his last class in overcoat and mittens, while the students huddled in their seats, their fingers too cold to take notes. They had scuttled out before his favorite joke. “Damnit, I talked to the manager. He promised it wouldn't happen again.”

“If we lived in the Congo with the Musurongo,” said Mary, thinking of Dr. Box, “we'd be basking in jungle heat right now.”

Homer shuffled his papers, trying to find his part of the morning lecture. He couldn't concentrate. He was remembering what Mary had said yesterday:
I sometimes wonder how our ancestors survived the winter. How did they keep themselves alive?

“Are you ready, Homer? It's your turn first.”

Homer wasn't ready, and kids were beginning to come in and take off their jackets and settle down and open their notebooks. In his head he saw a bonfire, somewhere in the cold northland, some time in prehistory. People were dancing around the fire in the polar dusk, with the sun barely skimming the horizon and beginning to sink. They were howling, tonking on kettles, ringing wild bells, and the combined racket, the crashing rattle of the pots, the crazed vibration of the hollow bells, mounted to the sky to summon back the sun. And the sun heard it, and condescended to obey. Slowly and reluctantly at first, but then with increasing power and strength, it shone longer every day, until at last it warmed and loosened the frozen ground.

“Come on, Homer,” whispered Mary, “shape up. Everybody's waiting.”

On that December morning, thirteen days before the shortest day of the year, there were fifteen tents and one shack on the grassy islands of the overpass. And more shelters were popping up, antic constructions with flimsy supports and drooping canvas walls. The tent city was catching on.

CHAPTER 9

We bring you love, the faithful light

Of dawn that comes to end the night;

Sing we Noël, Noël, Noël!

Carol, “Sing We Noël”

A
rlo's work was like a thicket into which he could burrow, a private place of his own. Unlocking the door of Room 804 in the Science Center was like entering the hollow place in the middle of the thicket. This morning he was glad to find himself alone. His colleague Harley Finch was elsewhere. Of course Harley was clever enough at his own line of expertise, but in Arlo's opinion he was an ambitious bastard, and too nosy into the bargain. He always seemed less interested in his own stuff than in whatever Arlo was up to.

The day was bright and sunny. Arlo inspected his silent camera. It was an ordinary-looking big box camera with a plateholder, a ninety-millimeter wide-angle lens, a digital alarm clock, and an electronic shutter attachment. This morning everything looked the same as usual.

In four days, if all went well, the shutter would open at eight-thirty in the morning for the next-to-last exposure of the sun. Then, on the twenty-second of December, it would click open once again to record the lowest point in the sun's annual journey.

But that wasn't all. There would still be another exposure, different from the rest. After the last shot of the sun on the twenty-second, Arlo would remove the filter and set the clock to take a picture of Memorial Hall on the same afternoon. The result would be an extraordinary multiple-image picture of the tower of Mem Hall in the afternoon sunlight, and behind it the great figure eight of the sun's changing position in the sky throughout an entire year, forty-four bright suns in a double loop.

From beginning to end the lens must be aimed in precisely the same direction. Arlo squinted through the rifle-sight scope. It still showed him the northeastern finial on the top of the tower, and the feet of the tripod were still firmly taped to the floor. It was important that they stay that way. If anything happened to joggle them, the last solar images would be out of line.

Then he turned to the spectrohelioscope. The heliostat on the terrace was a clock-driven sun-tracking mirror that sent back an image through the big window to another mirror, on the rear wall, which flashed it to a third mirror, which sent it to the spectrohelioscope, which sorted out its light and dropped a solar image on the observing table below.

This morning the image was full of detail, boiling slowly like a bowl of oatmeal in the light of the alpha line of hydrogen. Like the minute hand of a clock, the movement of the granules was almost fast enough to be perceived by the eye, but not quite.

Here on this sheet of paper was the object of all Arlo's studies—oh, not this big blank photosphere with the blotch of sunspots on its face, but the deeper levels below the surface, with their mysteriously reversing pulsations. Arlo had studied solar oscillations at the Big Bear solar observatory in California, and last winter he had joined an expedition to the Antarctic to observe the sun in uninterrupted daylight.

The analemma project and the spectrohelioscope were simple matters, unrelated to Arlo's pulsation researches. They were teaching tools for his students. The real attraction that drew him to the eighth floor of the Science Center every day was the computer with which he was analyzing data from his own Antarctic observations of periodic solar oscillations.

Of course, it was mostly number-crunching, but Arlo didn't care. Ninety-nine percent of one's working life was mechanical routine. It was the remaining 1 percent that made it all worthwhile, the precious 1 percent that formed the drifting visions of his mind in sleep, the undercurrent of his thoughts as he pushed his tray along the line in the cafeteria downstairs or sat around in Sanders Theatre waiting for his turn to take the part of Saint George.

Arlo zipped up his parka and left the lab, leaving the door unlocked for Chickie Pickett. He had an appointment with the chairman of the astronomy department, over there on Garden Street, in one of the old observatory buildings.

He left the Science Center by the west door. Looking back at the mall over Cambridge Street, he was surprised to see a cluster of tents. Last night there had been only one or two.

What was going on? It must be some kind of homeless protest. For a moment Arlo stopped to watch. He was amused to see a figure he recognized as Guthrie grabbing at a passerby. No, it wasn't just a passerby, it was an officer of the Harvard Police Department. What the hell would they do about Guthrie and his homeless friends and all those shacks and tents?

Then Arlo forgot Guthrie in the tricky business of crossing Massachusetts Avenue to Cambridge Common and negotiating Garden Street. On the corner where First Congregational Church reared its stone steeple, a few homeless men were leaving the church shelter. A procession of church women streamed past Arlo, carrying trays of hot food in the direction of Palmer Nifto's tent city. In their flapping coats they were an argosy in full sail.