Saturn Run Read Free Page A

hands as they passed, and the janitor said, “Tomorrow at dawn.”
    “If I can,” Sandy said.
    The janitor was a semipro surfer. Semipro surfing paid mostly in free burgers and beer.
    Sandy was popular enough with janitors and maintenance men. His problem was with the academics. His status hadn’t been helped by the fact that his father had purchased the job for him. The senior Darlington had hinted to Caltech’s president that he would be extremely grateful if one of the working group professors would take his son under his wing. His son, he said delicately, was troubled: but not in some fractious, embarrassing way. He simply . . . didn’t do much.
    Dr. Edward Fletcher, respected and thoroughly tenured astrophysicist, had been happy to fall on that sword. Darlington Senior had already given Caltech not one, but two research buildings, and was a major financial backer of Chuck, the congressman who got the money for Chuck’s Eye.
    Fletcher could use a new building. Hungered for one. Preferably one called Fletcher Hall.
    And it wasn’t as though Sandy was an idiot. He had a perfectly good degree, his father pointed out. In American Arts, from Harvard. He’d even taken the non-required science elective, called Calculus and Physicsfor Poets, by those who took it, and had gotten a B. That didn’t score any points among the astrophysicists.
    “American Arts” was also known informally as the “College of Dilettantery,” and those who left with degrees could reliably identify both a Masaccio and a Picasso, manually expose a photograph, make a short film, discuss both Italian and Scandinavian furniture, dance, make him/herself understood in French, Italian, and Spanish, and play the guitar and piano. Orbital calculations, not so much.
    As one of the Real Scientists put it, “He couldn’t change a fuckin’ tire,” which, in Caltech terms, didn’t literally mean he couldn’t change a tire, it simply meant he couldn’t reliably explain the difference between a Schwarzschild radius and Schrödinger’s cat.
    There had been a stir of interest when the Astro group realized how much money was about to arrive in the shape of an intern, but a few minutes of research on the Internet revealed that Sandy had been through a number of career changes since leaving Harvard, and none of the jobs would have interested anyone in Astro.
    He’d worked for Federal Mail for a while, but had apparently been unable to deliver, and had been fired. He’d been a vid-reporter with a marginally respectable independent news-and-porn blog, but that had ended badly, when Sandy threw an unclothed producer off the Santa Monica Pier, at low tide.
    Lately, he’d been a surf bum and rhythm guitarist with a mostly girl-group called the LA Dicks. When asked by a leading Young Astro Star what he was going to do when he grew up, Sandy told him after he got Grandpa’s money, he planned to become a philanthropist, or a philatelist, or a philanderer, or perhaps a flautist?
    “It’s one of those things,” he said, with a toothy grin. “I’ve never been, you know, a big vocabulary head.” The Young Star left with the feeling that Sandy had been pulling his weenie, which wasn’t supposed to happen to Stars; he’d had to look up “philatelist.”
    Six months into the job, Sandy’s insouciance had begun to seriously wear on Fletcher, just as Fletcher’s pomposity wore on Sandy. Sandycouldn’t be fired—there was all that Darlington money out there. Fletcher did the next best thing: gave him make-work.
    Sandy recognized the job for what it was, and so went surfing.
    When he wasn’t surfing, and partly in revenge for the treatment he got from the Real Scientists, he was screwing his way through the department. So far, he’d had hasty relationships with seven of the seventeen single women in the research group. (One of the Young Astro Stars, holding court in the cafeteria, pointed out that both seven and seventeen were prime numbers, and if