Space On My Hands Read online

  Roger sat upright 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 quite moving a hundred and fifty years ago and you’re getting all excited about something that doesn’t matter any more 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 overhead, 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 Cole. 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 checkups 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 happen.

  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 turned tomtoms. Between each number and the next a phrenetic announcer extolled the virtues of a product.

  Munching a sandwich, Roger listened appreciatively to the dissarythm and managed not to hear the commercials. Most intelligent people of the eighties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not to hear a human voice coming from a loud-speaker, 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 dissarythm program went, as it were, into one of Roger’s ears and out of 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 indeterminacy 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 every-day 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 toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,” thought Roger Phlutter.

  “— upon the parallelism of the netropy-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 have, 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, but 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 any more 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 see the sticky end of one of the three feature pictures. Several advertisements followed 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 its
elf, 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 super-induced 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 intelligently designed to accomplish a maximum of damage with a minimum 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 Toasties, the world’s greatest breakfast food, still represents the pseudo-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. The police left him there because they had realized he needed to sleep …

  Among other minor tragedies of that night can he 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 four engines and an untrustworthy compass. During the two days of the storm, her outdated radio receiver — vintage of 1955 — 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 astrolable, stood on the deck 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 glearing rabidly.”

  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 Helmstadt, 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.

  Gross was standing there staring upward with his mouth open. The mists were gone.

  “Mister Gross,” said Captain Randall.

  The second mate didn’t answer. The captain saw that his second mate was revolving slowly where he stood.

  “Hans!” said Captain Randall. “What the devil’s wrong with you?” Then he, too, looked up.

  Superficially the sky looked perfectly normal. No angels flying around nor sound of airplane motors. The dipper — Captain Randall turned around slowly, but more rapidly than Hans Gross. Where was the Big Dipper?

  For that matter, where was anything? There wasn’t a constellation anywhere that he could recognize. No sickle of Leo. No belt of Orion. No horns of Taurus.

  Worse, there was a group of eight bright stars that ought to have been a constellation, for they were shaped roughly like an octagon. Yet if such a constellation had ever existed, he’d never seen it, for he’d been around the Horn and Good Hope. Maybe at that — But no, there wasn’t any Southern Cross!

  Dazedly, Captain Randall walked to the companion-way.

  “Mister Weisskopf,” he called. “Mister Helmstadt. Come on deck.”

  They came and looked. Nobody said anything for quite a while.

  “Shut off the engines, Mister Helmstadt,” said the captain. Helmstadt saluted — the first time he ever had — and went below.

  “Captain, shall I vake opp Veiss?” asked Weisskopf.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The captain considered. “Wake him up,” he said.

  “I think ve are on der blanet Mars,” said Gross.

  But the captain had thought of that and rejected it.

  “No,” he said firmly. “From any planet in the solar system the constellation would look approximately the same.”

  “You mean ve are oudt of der cosmos?”

  The throb of the engines suddenly ceased and there was only the soft familiar lapping of the waves against the hull and the gentle familiar rocking of the boat.

  Weisskopf returned with Weiss, and Helmstadt came on deck and saluted again.

  “Vell, Captain?”

  Captain Randall waved a hand to the after deck, piled high with cases of liquor under a canvas tarpaulin. “Break out the cargo,” he ordered.

  The blackjack game was not resumed. At dawn, under a sun they had never expected to see again — and, for that matter, certainly were not seeing at the moment — the five unconscious men were moved from the ship to the Port of San Francisco Jail by members of the coast patrol. During the night the Ransagansett had drifted through the Golden Gate and bumped gently into the dock of the Berkeley ferry.

  In tow at the stern of the schooner was a big canvas tarpaulin. It was transfixed by a harpoon whose rope was firmly tied to the after-mast. Its presence there was never explained officially, although days later Captain Randall had vague recollection of having harpooned a sperm whale during the night. But the elderly able-bodied seaman named Weiss never did find out what happened to his wooden leg, which is perhaps just as well.

  Milton Hale, Ph.D., eminent physicist, had finished broadcasting and the program was off the air.

  “Thank you very much, Dr. Hale,” said the radio announcer. The yellow light went on and stayed. The mike was dead. “Uh — your check will be waiting for you at the window. You — uh — know where.”

  “I know where,” said the physicist. He was a rotund, jolly-looking man. With his bushy white beard, he resembled a pocket edition of Santa Claus. His eyes twinkled and he smoked a short stubby pipe.

  He left the sound-proof studio and walked briskly down the hall to the cashier’s window. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said to the girl on duty there. “I think you have two checks for Dr. Hale.”

  “You are Dr. Hale?”

  “I sometimes wonder,” said the little man. “But I carry identification that seems to prove it.”

  “Two checks?”

  “Two checks. Both for the same broadcast, by special arrangement. By the way, there is an excellent revue at the Mabry Theater this evening.”

  “Is there? Yes, here are your checks, Dr. Hale. One for seventy-five and one for twenty-five. Is that correct?”

  “Gratifyingly correct. Now about the revue at the Mabry?”

  “If you wish I’ll call my husband and ask him about it,” said the girl. “He’s the doorman over there.”

  Dr. Hale sighed deeply, but his eyes still twinkled. “I think he’ll agree,” he said. “Here are the tickets, my dear, and you can take him. I find that I have work to do this evening.”

  The girl’s eyes widened, but she took the tickets.

  Dr. Hale went into the phone booth and called his home. His home, and Dr. H
ale were both run by his elder sister. “Agatha, I must remain at the office this evening,” he said.

  “Milton, you know you can work just as well in your study here at home. I heard your broadcast, Milton. It was wonderful.”

  “It was sheer balderdash, Agatha. Utter rot. What did I say?”

  “Why, you said that — uh — that the stars were — I mean, you were not — ”

  “Exactly, Agatha. My idea was to avert panic on the part of the populace. If I’d told them the truth, they’d have worried. But by being smug and scientific, I let them get the idea that everything was — uh — under control. Do you know, Agatha, what I meant by the parallelism of an entropy-gradient?”

  “Why — not exactly.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Milton, have you been drinking?”

  “Not y — No, I haven’t. I really can’t come home to work this evening, Agatha. I’m using my study at the university, because I must have access to the library there, for reference. And the star-charts.”

  “But, Milton, how about that money for your broadcast? You know it isn’t safe for you to have money in your pocket when you’re feeling — like this.”

  “It isn’t money, Agatha. It’s a check, and I’ll mail it to you before I go to the office. I won’t cash it myself. How’s that?”

  “Well — if you must have access to the library, I suppose you must. Good-by, Milton.”

  Dr. Hale went across the street to the drug store. There he bought a stamp and envelope and cashed the twenty-five dollar check. The seventy-five dollar one he put into the envelope and mailed.

  Standing beside the mailbox he glanced up at the early evening sky — shuddered, and hastily lowered his eyes. He took the straightest possible line for the nearest tavern and ordered a double Scotch.

  “Y’ain’t been in for a long time, Dr. Hale,” said Mike, the bartender.

  “That I haven’t, Mike. Pour me another.”

  “Sure. On the house, this time. We had your broadcast tuned in on the radio just now. It was swell.”

  “Yes.”

  “It sure was. I was kind of worried what was happening up there, with my son an aviator and all. But as long as you scientific guys know what it’s all about, I guess it’s all right. That was sure a good speech, Doc. But there’s one question I’d like to ask you.”