But his feeling of restlessness came back as soon as he had left her. At first, he didn’t remember why. He knew merely that he didn’t feel quite like going home yet.
The corner tavern was still open, and he dropped in for a drink. He was having his second one when he remembered. He ordered a third.
«Hank,» he said to the bartender. «You know Pollux?»
«Pollux who?» asked Hank.
«Skip it,» said Roger. He had another drink, and thought it over. Yes, he’d made a mistake somewhere. Pollux couldn’t have moved.
He went outside and started to walk home. He was almost there when it occurred to him to look up at Pollux. Not that, with the naked eye, he could detect a displacement of a tenth of a second, but he felt curious.
He looked up, oriented himself by the sickle of Leo, and then found Gemini — Castor and Pollux were the only stars in Gemini visible, for it wasn’t a particularly good night for seeing. They were there, all right, but he thought they looked a little farther apart than usual. Absurd, because that would be a matter of degrees, not minutes or seconds.
He stared at them for a while, and then looked across to the dipper. Then he stopped walking and stood there. He closed his eyes and opened them again, carefully.
The dipper just didn’t look right. It was distorted. There seemed to be more space between Alioth and Mizar, in the handle, than between Mizar and Alkaid. Phecda and Merak, in the bottom of the dipper, were closer together, making the angle between the bottom and the lip steeper. Quite a bit steeper.
Unbelievingly, he ran an imaginary line from the pointers, Merak and Dubhe, to the North Star. The line curved. It had to. If he ran it straight, it missed Polaris by maybe five degrees.
Breathing a bit hard, Roger took off his glasses and polished them very carefully with his handkerchief. He put them back on again and the dipper was still crooked.
So was Leo, when he looked back to it. At any rate, Regulus wasn’t where it should be by a degree or two.
A degree or two! At the distance of Regulus! Was it sixty-five light years? Something like that.
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 couldn’t sleep.
He didn’t feel drunk. He grew more excited, wide awake.
He wondered if he dared phone the observatory. Would he sound drunk over the phone? The devil with whether he sounded that way 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 on 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 loud-speaker 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 all showed considerable proper motion — all, generally speaking, northward. Triangulum Australe and the Magellanic Clouds were undisturbed. Sigma Octanis, the weak pole star, had not moved.
Disturbance in 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.
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 ranover that was long or short, depending upon the editor’s luck in obtaining 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 Tischauer Tinney, Burgoyne Observatory, Albuquerque.