«I’m looking for an expert on Astrology. Know one?» — Patrick R. Whitaker, Lucas Observatory, Vermont.
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 constellation in dishabille, 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%.
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 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 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 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.