unavoidable lack of definition associated with a magniluct transparency, but the object was plainly visible, looking exactly as it had done in the low-powered finder scope. Strangely, it was no brighter.
Thornton’s brow creased as he considered the implications of what he was seeing. He had expected the object to appear much more brilliant, due to the light-gathering power of the main telescope’s twenty-centimetre lens. The fact that the object looked just the same meant…Thornton’s mind wrestled with the unfamiliar data…that it was emitting no light, that he was seeing it by means of some other type of radiation detected by his Amplite spectacles.
Anxious to make a further check, he struggled to his feet, twisting past the telescope’s mounting, and stepped out of the dome on to the pliant turf of his back lawn. The winter night stabbed through his clothing with daggers of black glass. He looked up at the sky and—aided only by the spectacles—selected the region in which he was interested. Coma Berenices was an inconspicuous constellation, but it was one which Thornton had known well since his childhood, and he saw at once the brand-new jewel tangled in the maiden’s hair. When he took the glasses off the new star vanished.
At that point Thornton did something which, for him, was very uncharacteristic—he ran towards his house at top speed, careless of the possibility of a twisted ankle, determined to reach his telephone without wasting another second. Many thousands of people throughout the world owned and wore magniluct nightglasses. Any one of them could glance upwards at any time and notice the unfamiliar new object in the heavens—and Thornton had a fierce yearning for it to bear his name.
The past few minutes had been the most exciting in his forty years of practical astronomy, but the night held one more surprise for him. In the utter darkness of the house he put the glasses on again, rather than switch on a light, and made his way to the telephone in the hall. He picked up the handset and punched in the number of an old friend, Matt Collins, who was professor of astronomy at the University of
North Carolina. While waiting for the connection to be made, Thornton glanced upwards in a reflex action which aimed his gaze in roughly the same direction as he had been pointing his telescope.
And there, glittering like a blue diamond, was his special star, as clearly visible as if the upper part of his house, with its beams and rafters and tiles, consisted of nothing more substantial than shadows. As long as he wore the magniluct glasses, the new star could be clearly seen—shining through solid matter with undiminished brilliance.
Doctor Boyce Ambrose was doing his best to salvage a bad day.
He had awakened early in the morning with, as sometimes happened, a gloomy sense of failure. One annoying aspect of these moods was that he had no way of predicting their arrival, or even of knowing what caused them. On most days he felt reasonably pleased with his post as director of the Karlsen planetarium, with its superb new equipment and constant stream of visitors, some of them VIPs, some of them attractive young females anxious to hear everything he knew about the heavens, even to the extent of encouraging his discourses to continue through to breakfast the following morning. On most days he enjoyed the leisurely administrative routine, the opportunities constantly afforded by local newsmen to pontificate on every event which took place between the limits of the stratosphere and the boundaries of the observable universe, the round of social functions and cocktail parties at which it was rare for cameras not to record his presence as he went about his business of being tall, young, handsome, learned and rich.
Occasionally, however, there came the other days, the ones on which he saw himself as that most despicable of creatures—the trendy astronomer. These were the days when he recalled that his doctorate had been awarded by a university known to be susceptible to private financial grants, that his thesis had been prepared with the aid of two needy but scientifically qualified ‘personal secretaries’ engaged by his
father, that his job at the planetarium had been up for grabs by anyone whose family was prepared to sink the greatest amount of money into buying the projection equipment. In his extreme youth he had been taken with the idea of proving he could carve out a career with no assistance from the Ambrose fortune, then had come the discovery that he lacked the necessary application. Had he been poor it would have been much easier for him to put in the long hours of solitary study, he eventually reasoned, but he was handicapped by being able to afford every possible distraction. Under the circumstances, the only logical thing to do was to use the money to counteract its effect on his academic career, to buy the things it prevented him from winning.
Ambrose was able to live happily with this piece of rationalisation implanted beneath his skin—except on the bad days when, for example, an incautious glance at one of the scientific journals would confront him with equations he should have been able to comprehend. On those occasions he often resolved to bring his work at the planetarium up to a new level of efficiency and creativity, and that was why he had made an early three-hour drive to see Matt Collins in person instead of simply contacting him by televiewer.
“I’m not an expert on this thing,” Collins told him as they sipped coffee in the professor’s comfortable tan-coloured office. “It was a pure coincidence that Thornton and I were old friends and that he rang me first. In fact, I doubt if there is such an animal as an expert on Thornton’s Planet.”
“Thornton’s Planet.” Ambrose repeated the words as he felt a pang of jealousy towards the small-town amateur whose name was going into astronomical history merely because he had nothing better to do than spend most of his nights in a tin shed on his back lawn. “We know for sure that it is a planet?”
Collins shook his massive head. “Not really—the word doesn’t have much relevance in this case. Now that it has begun to exhibit a disk we’ve been able to estimate its diameter at about 12,000 kilometres, so it’s of planetary size, all right. But, for all we know, in its own frame of reference it might be a dwarf star or a comet or…anything.”
“What about surface features?”
“Don’t know if it has any.” Collins sounded perversely happy with his lack of knowledge. He was a giant of a man who seemed impervious to worries which might beset normal-sized individuals.
“My problem is that I have to find some way to represent it at the planetarium,” Ambrose said. “What about a magniluct telescope? Can’t they make lenses with that stuff?”
“There’s no problem with making lens shapes out of magniluct material. They would serve pretty well if they were used as nothing more than light amplifiers—but they won’t work if you try to obtain a magnified image of Thornton’s Planet.”
“I don’t get it,” Ambrose said despairingly, deciding to admit his ignorance. “I’m the director of a planetarium, and I’m supposed to be an instant expert on everything that happens up there, and I don’t know what the hell this is all about. Reporters have begun to call me every day and I don’t know what to say to them.”
“Don’t worry about it—there are a lot of so-called experts in the same boat.” Collins gave a smile which softened his rough-hewn features. He took two cigars from the pocket of his white shirt and flipped one across the desk to Ambrose. “If you’ve got time, I’ll give you a quick run-down on what little I know.”