Year of the Jackpot 29

rich.
He settled down to some solid pleasure. Dynkowski was
a treat. Of course, it was old stuff that a G-type star, such
as the sun, was potentially unstable; a G-O star could ex-
plode, slide right off the Russell diagram, and end up as a
white dwarf. But no one before Dynkowski had defined
the exact conditions for such a catastrophe, nor had any-
one else devised mathematical means of diagnosing the in-
stability and describing its progress.
He looked up to rest his eyes from the fine print and saw
that the sun was obscured by a thin low cloudone of those
unusual conditions where the filtering effect is just right to
permit a man to view the sun clearly with the naked eye.
Probably volcanic dust in the air, he decided, acting al-
most like smoked glass.
He looked again. Either he had spots before his eyes or
that was one fancy big sun spot. He had heard of being
able to see them with the naked eye, but it had never hap-
pened to him. He longed for a telescope.
He biinked. Yep, it was still there, upper right. A big
spotno wonder the car radio sounded like a Hitler speech.
He turned back and continued on to the end of the
article, being anxious to finish before the light failed. At
first his mood was sheerest intellectual pleasure at the man's
tight mathematical reasoning. A 3% imbalance in the solar
constantyes, that was standard stuff; the sun would nova
with that much change. But Dynkowski went further; by
means of a novel mathematical operator which he had
dubbed "yokes" he bracketed the period in a star's history
when this could happen and tied it down further with sec-
ondary, tertiary, and quaternary yokes, showing exactly the
time of highest probability. Beautiful) Dynkowski even as-
signed dates to the extreme limit of his primary yoke, as a
good statistician should.
But, as he went back and reviewed the equations, his
mood changed from intellectual to personal. Dynkowski
was not talking about just any G-O star; in the latter part
he meant old Sol himself, Breen's personal sun, the big boy
out there with the oversized freckle on his face.
That was one hell of a big freckle! It was a hole you could
chuck Jupiter into and not make a splash. He could see it
very clearly now.
Everybody talks about "when the stars grow old and the
sun grows cold"but it's an impersonal concept, like one's
own death. Breen started thinking about it very personally.
How long would it take, from the instant the imbalance was