“I think you can relax a little,” remarked Ledermann. “All the general run of disturbances should have had their licks by now; A has been cooking for over half an hour. Unless Hoey or Luisi has a fit, their ships can hardly move enough to make trouble.”
“They both had EEG checks before they were hired.” Toner was not joining in any levity, yet. “I'm not worried about that possibility.”
“Then why not take it easy? Surely you're not worrying about a meteor.”
“Well — comet nuclei are found pretty far from suns, but I really wasn't thinking of anything specific. It's just that so little need go wrong to wreck the whole works. Program A isn't so bad, in spite of the precision we need; but when B gets going it will really mean something. I can't keep my mind off that.”
Ledermann nodded. Program B was the experiment itself — the check on the Toner hypothesis. In assuming that non-statistical forces existed which tended to start interstellar matter drawing together into protostars, the astronomer had not fallen back on mysticism. He had computed many combinations of electric and magnetic fields which should have such an effect, and which might reasonably — or at least conceivably — exist along the arms of the Milky Way. The wave patterns of Program B had been designed from these computations. Naturally, phenomena as complex as, say, the human nervous system or even the circuitry of a television set or the measuring patterns of Program A would be no improvement on pure chance as an explanation for star formation; such things were too improbable by any standards. Toner's fields were simple enough so that, in his opinion, they were more probable than random gas and dust concentrations. They were also complex and extensive enough so that looking around for examples of them already in existence seemed impractical — so far. Of course, if Program B showed that such fields would, or could, produce the results Toner expected, he would have little trouble financing such a search.
If the program failed to give the results Toner hoped for, Ledermann was both unsure and uneasy about what to expect. Few men can abandon a favorite hypothesis abruptly and completely, and the need to do so can have painful effects.
Actually, Toner would not be forced to such an extreme at first; many more variations on the original theme would have to fail before the whole idea would have to be abandoned. What bothered Ledermann was the doubt that the foundation would go along with any such extension of the project and how Toner would react if it refused.
Actually he needn't have worried. The director was philosophical enough to take such a problem in his stride. Since the younger man had no way of knowing this, he watched his console with even more anxiety than his director — in spite of what they had both been saying.
But the green lights stared unwinkingly back at them, as the waves spread across space. No news, with the proverbial implication. The clock was the only instrument which showed change; the clock, that is, and two human nervous systems.
“Stuff coming in from Hoey's receivers,” Ledermann reported abruptly. Toner nodded.
“On time,” was his only answer. Neither bothered to ask, or to say, what sort of stuff was coming in; the data was no more meaningful to human senses than were the photons which carried the first Mariner pictures from Mars. The main thing was that news was coming in; it was being recorded; it could, in due time, be decoded; and — Program B was due to start.
Both men sat up a little straighter and stared more tensely at their consoles as the light patterns began to change.
Simultaneously — the word was as nearly truthful as it had ever been in human history — sets of electromagnetic fields began to grow around both the Ymyrgar and the Anffordclus.
Neither set was complete by itself, but this interference would produce something which Ledermann thought of as a huge lens. The analogy was a poor one geometrically, but has some excuse from a functional viewpoint. Drifting slowly with respect to the surrounding gases, many of whose atoms were ionized, it should — if Toner was right — tend to deflect their relative motions toward its own “optical axis.” To that extent, Toner's idea was a. simple one. The precise pattern of fields which should have the desired effect was somewhat less so, as any engineer who has been involved with an electron microscope would expect.
Each lens” of the series making up the program was to be followed by a set of reading patterns similar to those of Program A, so that its individual effect on the motion of the nebular particles could be measured. In principle, the whole thing was easy…
“Intervals seem to be right.” Ledermann dredged a little good news out of his light pattern. “Four seconds, plus or minus ten to the minus tenth. Interlens distances are within tolerance, I'd say.”
“If we haven't been too grossly off in computing the refractive index of the nebula…"
“Which is handled automatically by the original A measures, as I understood the plan. Calm down, boss.”
“All right. You're talking a little louder than usual yourself. I still wish you'd invent a method for using the communicator medium for direct viewing; we could see whether these things are building right, instead of having to infer from generator behavior…"
“Maybe we could. I'm a conservative; I still buy the Uncertainty Principle. Even if we could do anything with the medium which would make it react to something besides a communicator crystal, I bet it would affect the thing we were trying to measure.”
“It doesn't affect the crystals — just the space around them.”
“Not measurably. Has anyone tried to check on them, to within fifteen figures of what we're doing now?”
“Not as far as I know. I — Dick! What happened then?”
Ledermann didn't know either. At least, he didn't know in the sense that Toner wanted to. Like the director, he had seen every light on his console except the one indicating tender separation turn a solemn red for a full second, and then switch back to green. If they had been looking away for that second, the men would not have known that anything had ever been wrong; after the event, the lights stared back at them, apparently unchanged.
The first thought to occur to both men was that something had happened to the console circuits; the second, that something had happened to their own nervous systems. Three seconds of checking with test switches seemed to dispose of the first possibility; and since they had both seen the same thing, the second was very low on the probability list.
Toner frowned, and spoke very slowly.
“If that is to be taken at face value, everything in both tenders which was putting out program radiation stopped for about a second and then started up again — all together. That would cause a gap of about three hundred thousand kilometers in the wave pattern — at each end — with the gaps due to meet in half an hour; let's see — what would that do to the lenses?”
“If you can work that out in your head, especially with only estimated time data, you didn't need to set up this experiment at all. You must have put the universe together in the first place,” retorted Ledermann. “There's no more chance of telling that than of telling which of my next half million coin tosses is going to be heads.”