The Collection (16 page)

Probably no astronomer on earth slept that day.

The observatories locked their doors, with their full staffs
on the inside, and admitted no one, except occasional newspaper reporters who
stayed a while and went away with puzzled faces, convinced at last that
something strange was happening.

Blink-microscopes blinked, and so did astronomers. Coffee
was consumed in prodigious quantities. Police riot squads were called to six
United States observatories. Two of these calls were occasioned by attempts to
break in on the part of frantic amateurs without. The other four were summoned
to quell fist-fights developing out of arguments within the observatories
themselves. The office of Lick Observatory was a shambles, and James Truwell,
Astronomer Royal of England, was sent to London Hospital with a mild
concussion, the result of having a heavy photographic plate smashed over his
head by an irate subordinate.

But these incidents were exceptions. The observatories, in
general, were well-ordered madhouses.

The center of attention in the more enterprising ones was
the loudspeaker in which reports from the Eastern Hemisphere could be relayed
to the inmates. Practically all observatories kept open wires to the night side
of earth, where the phenomena were still under scrutiny.

Astronomers under the night skies of Singapore, Shanghai,
and Sydney did their observing, as it were, directly into the business end of a
long-distance telephone hook-up.

Particularly of interest were reports from Sydney and Melbourne,
whence came reports on the southern skies not visible—even at night—from Europe
or the United States. The Southern Cross was, by these reports, a cross no
longer, its Alpha and Beta being shifted northward. Alpha and Beta Centauri,
Canopus and Achernar, allshowed considerable proper motion—all, generally speaking,
northward. Triangulum Amtrak and the Magellanic Clouds-were undisturbed. Sigma
Octanis, the weak pole star, had not moved.

Disturbance of the southern sky, then, was much less than in
the northern one, in point of the number of stars displaced. However, relative
proper motion of the stars which were disturbed was greater. While the general
direction of movement of the few stars which did move was northward, their
paths were not directly north, nor did they converge upon any exact point in
space.

United States and European astronomers digested these facts
and drank more coffee.

Evening papers, particularly in America, showed greater
awareness that something indeed unusual was happening in the skies. Most of
them moved the story to the front page—but not the banner headlines—giving it a
half-column with a runover that was long or short, depending upon the editor
^'
s
luck in obtaining quotable statements from astronomers.

The statements, when obtained, were invariably statements
of fact and not of opinion. The facts themselves, said these gentlemen, were
sufficiently startling, and opinions would be premature. 'Wait and see.
Whatever was happening was happening fast.

^"
How fast?" asked an editor.

^"
Faster than possible," was the reply.

Perhaps it is unfair to say that no editor procured expressions
of opinion thus early. Charles Wangren, enterprising editor of
The Chicago
Blade,
spent a small fortune in long-distance telephone calls. Out of
possibly sixty attempts, he finally reached the chief astronomers at five
observatories. He asked each of them the same question.

"What, in your opinion, is a possible cause, any possible
cause, of the stellar movements of the last night or two?
^"

He tabulated the results.

"I wish I knew.
^"
—Geo. F. Stubbs, Tripp
Observatory, Long Island.

"Somebody or something is crazy, and I hope it's me—I
mean I."—Henry Collister McAdams, Lloyd Observatory, Boston.

"What's happening is impossible. There can
^'
t
be any cause.
^"
—Letton Tischaucr Tinney, Burgoyne Observatory,
Albuquerque.

"I
^'
m looking for an expert on astrology.
Know one?"—Patrick R. Whitaker, Lucas Observatory, Vermont.

"It's all wacky!"—Giles Mahew
Frazier,
Grant
Observatory, Richmond.

Sadly studying this tabulation, which had cost him $187.35,
including tax, to obtain, Editor Wangren signed a voucher to cover the long
distance calls and then dropped his tabulation into the wastebasket. He telephoned
his regular space-rates writer on scientific subjects.

"Can you give me a series of articles—two-three
thousand words each—on all this astronomical excitement?
^"

"Sure,
^"
said the writer. "But what
excitement?
^"
It transpired that he'd just got back from a
fishing trip and had neither read a newspaper nor happened to look up at the
sky. But he wrote the articles. He even got sex appeal into them through
illustrations, by using ancient star-charts, showing the constellations in
deshabille, by reproducing certain famous paintings, such as "The Origin
of the Milky Way," and by using a photograph of a girl in a bathing suit
sighting a hand telescope, presumably at one of the errant stars. Circulation
of
The Chicago Blade
increased by 21.7 percent.

It was five o'clock again in the office of the Cole Observatory,
just twenty-four and a quarter hours after the beginning of all the commotion.
Roger Phlutter—yes, we're back to him again—woke up suddenly when a hand was
placed on his shoulder.

^"
Go on home, Roger," said Mervin
Armbruster, his boss, in a kindly tone.

Roger sat up suddenly.

^"
But, Mr. Armbruster,
^"
he
said,
^"
I
^'
m sorry I fell asleep.
^"

^"
Bosh,
^"
said Armbruster.
"You can
^'
t stay here forever, none of us can. Go on home."

Roger Phlutter went home. But when he'd taken a bath, he felt
more restless than sleepy. It was only six-fifteen. He phoned Elsie.

"I'm awfully sorry, Roger, but I have another date.
What
^'
s going on, Roger? The stars, I mean.
^"

^"
Gosh, Elsie—they
^'
re moving.
Nobody knows.
^"

"But I thought all the stars moved," Elsie
protested. "The sun
^'
s a star, isn
^'
t it? Once you
told me the sun was moving toward a point in Samson."

"Hercules.
^"

"Hercules, then. Since you said all the stars were moving,
what is everybody getting excited about?
^"

"This is different,
^"
said Roger.
"Take Canopus. It's started moving at the rate of seven light years a day.
It can't do that.
^"

"Why not?"

"Because,
^"
said Roger patiently,
^"
nothing
can move faster than light.
^"

"But if it is moving that fast, then it can," said
Elsie.
^"
Or else maybe your telescope is wrong or something.
Anyway, it's pretty far off, isn't it?"

"A hundred and sixty light years. So far away that we
see it a hundred and sixty years ago."

^"
Then maybe it isn
^'
t moving at
all,
^"
said Elsie.
^"
I mean, maybe it quit moving
a hundred and fifty years ago and you're getting all excited about something
that doesn't matter anymore because it's all over with. Still love me?"

"I sure do, honey. Can't you break that date?
^"

"'Fraid not, Roger. But I wish I could.
^"

He had to be content with that. He decided to walk uptown to
eat.

***

It was early evening, and too early to see stars over-head,
although the clear blue sky was darkening. When the stars did come out tonight,
Roger knew few of the constellations would be recognizable.

As he walked, he thought over Elsie
^'
s comments
and decided that they were as intelligent as anything he
^'
d heard at
the Cole Observatory. In one way, they'd brought out one angle he'd never
thought of before, and that made it more incomprehensible.

All these movements had started the same evening—yet they
hadn
^'
t. Centauri must have started moving four years or so ago, and
Rigel five hundred and forty years ago when Christopher Columbus was still in
short pants, if any, and Vega must have started acting up the year he —Roger,
not Vega—was born, twenty-six years ago. Each star out of the hundreds must
have started on a date in exact relation to its distance from Earth. Exact
relation, to a light-second, for check-ups of all the photographic plates taken
night before last indicated that all the new stellar movements had started at
four-ten a.m., Greenwich time. What a mess!

Unless this meant that light, after all, had infinite
velocity.

If it didn
^'
t have—and it is symptomatic of
Roger's perplexity that he could postulate that incredible
^"
if
^"
—then
then what? Things were just as puzzling as before.

Mostly he felt outraged that such events should be
happening.

He went into a restaurant and sat down. A radio was blaring
out the latest composition in dissarythm, the new quarter-tone dance music in
which chorded woodwinds provided background patterns for the mad melodies
pounded on tuned tomtoms. Between each number and the next a frenetic announcer
extolled the virtues of a product.

Munching a sandwich, Roger listened appreciatively to the
dissarhythm and managed not to hear the commercials. Most intelligent people
of the nineties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not
to hear a human voice coming from a loudspeaker, although they could hear and
enjoy the then infrequent intervals of music between announcements. In an age
when advertising competition was so keen that there was scarcely a bare wall
or an unbillboarded lot within miles of a population center, discriminating
people could retain normal outlooks on life only by carefully-cultivated
partial blindness and partial deafness which enabled them to ignore the bulk of
that concerted assault upon their senses.

For that reason a good part of the newscast which followed
the dissarhythm program went, as it were, into one of Roger's ears and out the
other before it occurred to him that he was not listening to a panegyric on
patent breakfast foods.

He thought he recognized the voice, and after a sentence or
two he was sure that it was that of Milton Hale, the eminent physicist whose
new theory on the principle of indeterminancy had recently occasioned so much
scientific controversy. Apparently, Dr. Hale was being interviewed by a radio
announcer.

". . . a heavenly body, therefore, may have position or
velocity, but it may not be said to have both at the same time, with relation
to any given space-time frame.
^"

"Dr. Hale, can you put that into common everyday
language?
^"
said the syrupy-smooth voice of the interviewer.

"That is common language, sir. Scientifically
expressed, in terms of the Heisenberg contraction principle, then n to the
seventh power in parentheses, representing the pseudo-position of a Diedrich
quantum-integer in relation to the seventh coefficient of curvature of
mass—"

^"
Thank you, Dr. Hale, but I fear you are
just a bit over the heads of our listeners."

And your own head, thought Roger Phlutter.

"I am sure, Dr. Hale, that the question of greatest
interest to our audience is whether these unprecedented stellar movements are
real or illusory."

"Both. They are real with reference to the frame of
space but not with reference to the frame of space-time."
^"
Can
you clarify that, Doctor?
^"

^"
I believe I can. The difficulty is purely
epistemological. In strict causality, the impact of the macroscopic—The slithy
roves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, thought Roger Phlutter.

"—upon the parallelism of the entropy-gradient."

"Bah!
^"
said Roger aloud.

"Did you say something, sir?" asked the waitress.
Roger noticed her for the first time. She was small and blonde and cuddly.
Roger smiled at her.

^"
That depends upon the space-time frame from
which one regards it," he said judicially.
^"
The difficulty
is epistemological."

To make up for that, he tipped her more than he should and
left.

The world's most eminent physicist, he realized, knew less
of what was happening than did the general public. The public knew that the
fixed stars were moving or that they weren't. Obviously, Dr. Hale didn't even
know that. Under a smoke-screen of qualifications, Hale had hinted that they
were doing both.

Roger looked upward but only a few stars, faint in the early
evening, were visible through the halation of the myriad neon and spiegel-light
signs. Too early yet, he decided.

He had one drink at a nearby bar, hut it didn
^'
t
taste quite right to him so he didn't finish it. He hadn
^'
t realized
what was wrong but he was punch-drunk from lack of sleep. He merely knew that
he wasn't sleepy anymore and intended to keep on walking until he felt like
going to bed. Anyone hitting him over the head with a well-padded blackjack
would have been doing him a signal service, but no one took the trouble.

He kept on walking and, after a while, turned into the
brilliantly lighted lobby of a cineplus theater. He bought a ticket and took
his seat just in time to sec the sticky end of one of the three feature
pictures. Followed several advertisements which he managed to look at without
seeing.