The Collection Page 11

  Then, in time to save his sanity, Roger remembered that he'd been drinking. He went home without daring to look upward again. He went to bed but he couldn't sleep.

  He didn't feel drunk. He grew more excited, wide awake.

  Roger wondered if he dared phone the observatory. Would he sound drunk over the phone? The devil with whether he sounded drunk or not, he finally decided. He went to the telephone in his pajamas.

  "Sorry," said the operator.

  "What d'ya mean, sorry?"

  "I cannot give you that number," said the operator in dulcet tones. And then, "I am sorry. We do not have that information."

  He got the chief operator and the information. Cole Observatory had been so deluged with calls from amateur astronomers that they had found it necessary to request the telephone company to discontinue all incoming calls save long distance ones from other observatories.

  "Thanks," said Roger. "Will you get me a cab?"

  It was an unusual request but the chief operator obliged and got him a cab.

  He found the Cole Observatory in a state resembling a madhouse.

  The following morning most newspapers carried the news. Most of them gave it two or three inches on an inside page but the facts were there.

  The facts were that a number of stars, in general the brightest ones, within the past forty-eight hours had developed noticeable proper motions.

  "This does not imply," quipped the New York Spotlight, "that their motions have been in any way improper in the "past. `Proper motion' to an astronomer means the movement of a star across the face of the sky with relation to other stars. Hitherto, a star named 'Barnard's Star' in the constellation Ophiuchus has exhibited the greatest proper motion of any known star, moving at the rate of ten and a quarter seconds a year. 'Barnard's Star' is not visible to the naked eye."

  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.

  II

  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?"

  "Becau
se," 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.

  "We bring you next," said the screen, "a special visicast of the night sky of London, where it is now three o'clock in the morning."

  The screen went black, with hundreds of tiny dots that were stars. Roger leaned forward to watch and listen carefully—this would be a broadcast and visicast of facts, not of verbose nothingness.

  "The arrow," said the screen, as an arrow appeared upon it, "is now pointing to Polaris, the pole star, which is now ten degrees from the celestial pole in the direction of Ursa Major. Ursa Major itself, the Big Dipper, is no longer recognizable as a dipper, but the arrow will now point to the stars that formerly composed it."

  Roger breathlessly followed the arrow and the voice.

  "Alkaid and Dubhe," said the voice. "The fixed stars are no longer fixed, but—" the picture changed abruptly to a scene in a modern kitchen—"the qualities and excellences of Stellar's Stoves do not change. Foods cooked by the superinduced vibratory method taste as good as ever. Stellar Stoves are unexcelled."

  Leisurely, Roger Phlutter stood up and made his way out into the aisle. He took his pen-knife from his pocket as he walked toward the screen. One easy jump took him up onto the low stage. His slashes into the fabric were not angry ones. They were careful, methodical cuts and intelligently designed to accomplish a maximum of damage with a minimum of expenditure of effort.

  The damage was done, and thoroughly, by the time three strong ushers gathered him in. He offered no resistance either to them or to the police to whom they gave him. In night court, an hour later, he listened quietly to the charges against him.

  "Guilty or not guilty?" asked the presiding magistrate.

  "Your Honor, that is purely a question of epistemology,
" said Roger earnestly. "The fixed stars move, but Corny Toastys, the world's greatest breakfast food, still represents the peudo-position of a Diedrich quantum-

  integer in relation to the seventh coefficient of curvature!" Ten minutes later, he was sleeping soundly. In a cell, it is true, but soundly nonetheless. Soundlessly, too, for the cell was padded. The police left him there because they realized he needed sleep... .

  Among other minor tragedies of that night can be included the case of the schooner Ransagansett, off the coast of California. Well off the coast of California! A sudden squall had blown her miles off course, how many miles the skipper could only guess.

  The Ransagansett was an American vessel, with a German crew, under Venezuelan registry, engaged in running booze from Ensenada, Baja California, up the coast to Canada, then in the throes of a prohibition experiment. The Ransagansett was an ancient craft with foul engines and an untrustworthy compass. During the two days of the storm, her outdated radio receiver—vintage of 1975—had gone haywire beyond the ability of Gross, the first mate, to repair.

  But now only a mist remained of the storm, and the remaining shreds of wind were blowing it away. Hans Gross, holding an ancient astrolabe, stood on the dock, waiting. About him was utter darkness, for the ship was running without lights to avoid the coastal patrols.

  "She clearing, Mister Gross?" called the voice of the captain from below.

  "Aye, sir. Idt iss Blearing rabbidly."

  In the cabin, Captain Randall went back to his game of blackjack with the second mate and the engineer. The crew—an elderly German named Weiss, with a wooden leg—was asleep abaft the scuttlebutt—wherever that may have been.

  A half hour went by. An hour, and the captain was losing heavily to the engineer.

  "Mister Gross!" he called out.

  There wasn't any answer, and he called again and still obtained no response.

  "Just a minute, mein fine feathered friends," he said to the second mate and engineer and went up the companionway to the deck.