Probability Sun Read Free Page A

did all of Kristen’s furniture look so austere? His sister used to have a healthy sense of excess, back when they were kids. But now look: books lined up neatly, flowers sedate in a severe vase. Somehow excess had vanished when she’d married Martin, that most sensible of men. Patient Martin, putting up with his crazy brother-in-law. Although probably it was for the sake of the girls. Give them a sense of family , Kristen probably said to Martin, poor things . Well, that was all right, Capelo himself would put up with anything for Amanda and Sudie, even Kristen’s ugly furniture. Even Mars, with its too-close horizon and grossly inadequate gravity. Even Raymond Pellier. Even—
    “Dr. Capelo,” the image of his department chair said, “I have just received a message from the Solar Alliance Defense Council. A representative is currently on her way to see you in person, and will probably arrive shortly after this message does. I’m calling you first to let you know this representative is on her way so you may prepare yourself. Also, to tell you that I’m arranging indefinite leave of absence for you from the university so you can accept the mission the council is sending you on.”
    “ What ?” Capelo said, although of course the image wouldn’t hear him for six minutes. “Mission? What mission, Ray? I’m not a fucking soldier!”
    “I know you’re always interested in your graduate seminar, so I want to reassure you that Dr. Gerdes will be covering both that and your thesis advisees.”
    “Gerdes? Gerdes ? He can’t advise the way across campus!”
    “Let me just add, Dr. Capelo, the department and the university’s congratulations on your being tapped for an assignment vital to the war effort. Transmission finished.”
    “House, turn off the system,” Capelo said.
    He poured himself another drink. “ Assignment vital to the war effort .” What crap. The council had probably concocted another of those exploratory committees of scientists they were always putting together to forecast what the Fallers would do next and what protocols should be designed to meet it … as if anyone knew what the bastards would do next. But undoubtedly the council had requested “a top Harvard physicist,” good window dressing for PR purposes, see if you can dig up a Nobel winner or at least a short-list candidate, and just look, citizens of the Solar System, at the efforts we’re making to protect you! And Ray, that pompous bureaucrat, had jumped at the chance to unload difficult touchy Capelo somewhere beyond a distant space tunnel so the physics department could have some peace.
    Well, forget it. Capelo wasn’t going. Let someone else enact the farce that there was any way to protect citizens from Fallers. If anybody had reason to know better, he did.
    The door opened and Martin stuck his head in. “Tom … you have a visitor, from the Solar Alliance Defense Council. Do you want to see her in here or—”
    “I don’t want to see her at all.”
    “I’m afraid that’s not a choice, Dr. Capelo,” another voice said, and a woman pushed past Martin into the living room. Tall, outwardly sixty-ish (always hard to tell with genemods), with short gray hair, she wore a crisp Alliance Army uniform. “Thank you, Mr. Blumberg. Please leave us.”
    And Martin meekly went, ordered out of his own living room, quietly closing the door behind him.
    Capelo said, “Hello, and good-bye. You’re here to request my inclusion on a scientific war committee; my department chair just called to tell me. But I’m not interested. Sorry.”
    “Yes, you are interested,” the woman said. “I’m Colonel Byars, Dr. Capelo. I’m here on the direct authority of General Stefanak.”
    “Very impressive,” Capelo said. “And so are you, Colonel. You positively exude authority, your own and the general’s. Unfortunately, I’m not intrigued by authority. And the last time I looked, the military was not drafting civilians for its