A Wreath of Stars
Bob Shaw
Chapter One
Gilbert Snook sometimes thought of himself as being the exact social equivalent of a neutrino.
He was an aircraft engineer, and therefore not formally schooled in nuclear physics, but he knew the neutrino to be an elusive particle, one which interacted so faintly with the normal hadronic matter of the universe that it could flit straight through the Earth without hitting or disturbing one other particle. Snook was determined to do much the same thing on his linear course from birth towards death, and—at the age of forty—was well on the way to achieving his aim.
His parents were faded and friendless individuals, with insular tendencies, who had died when he was a child, leaving him little money and no family bonds of any kind. The only type of education made available to Snook by the local authority was of a technical nature, presumably because it was a quick and well-proven way of converting community liabilities into assets, but it had matched his aptitudes quite well. He had worked hard, easily holding his place in the classroom, always leading his group in benchwork. After collecting an adequate sheaf of certificates he had chosen to be an aircraft engineer, mainly because it was a trade which involved extensive foreign travel. He had inherited his parents’ liking for solitude and had made full use of his professional mobility to avoid concentrations of people. For almost two decades he had shuttled through the Near and Middle East, impartially selling his skills to anyone—oil company, airline or military organisation—who was straining aircraft to the limits and was prepared to pay well to keep them flying.
Those years had seen the painful splintering of Africa and Arabia into smaller and smaller statelets, and there had been times when he had found himself in danger of becoming associated or identified with one upflung political entity or another. The involvement might have resulted in anything from having to accept a permanent job to facing an executioner’s machine gun while it counted its lethal rosary of brass and lead. But in each case—neutrino-like—he had slipped away, unscathed, before the trap of circumstance could close on him. When necessary, he had changed his name for short periods or had accepted different types of work. He had kept moving, and nothing had touched him.
In the microcosms of nuclear physics, the only particle which could threaten the existence of a neutrino would be an antineutrino; and it was ironic, therefore, that it was a cloud of those very particles which—in the summer of 1993—interacted so violently with the life of the human neutrino, Gil Snook.
The cloud of antineutrinos was first observed crossing the orbit of Jupiter on the third day of January, 1993—and, because of the extreme difficulty of detecting its existence at all, the astronomers were quite content to use the term ‘cloud’ in their early reports. It was not until a month had passed that they dropped the word and inserted in its place the more accurate, though highly emotive, phrase ‘rogue planet’.
This closer definition of the phenomenon was made possible by improvements in the newly invented magniluct viewing equipment, which—as so often has happened in the history of scientific discovery—had come along at the precise moment it was required.
Magniluct was a material which looked like ordinary blue glass, but in fact it was a sophisticated form of quantum amplifier which acted like a low-light camera, without the latter’s complex electronics. Goggles or glasses with magniluct lenses made it possible to see clearly at night, giving the wearer the impression that his surroundings were illuminated by blue floodlights. Military applications, such as the use of magniluct spectacles in night-fighting, had come first—providing the inventor/manufacturers with handsome dividends—but an astute marketing team had promoted the new material in many other fields. Miners, photographic darkroom staff, speleologists, night watchmen and police, theatre ushers, taxi and train drivers—anybody who had to work in darkness was a prospective customer. Staff in astronomical observatones found magniluct spectacles particularly useful because, thus equipped, they could work efficiently without splashing unwanted light over colleagues and instruments.
Also in the classic tradition of scientific discovery was the circumstance that it was an amateur astronomer, working in a home-made dome in North Carolina, who became the first man to see the rogue planet as it drew nearer to the sun.
Clyde Thornton was a good astronomer, not in the modern usage of the word—which might have implied that he was a competent mathematician or stellar physicist—but good in the sense that he loved looking at the heavens and knew his way around them belter than he knew the district of Asheville in which he had grown up. He also could locate every item in his small observation dome in pitch darkness, and therefore had bought his pair of magniluct glasses a week previously as much out of curiosity as for any practical reason. Thornton liked and appreciated technical novelties, and the idea of an inert transparency which turned night into day intrigued him.
He had set up his telescope to record the nebula on a thirty-minute exposure and was contentedly pottering about, wearing his new glasses, while the photographic plate absorbed light which had begun its journey to Earth before man’s ancestors had discovered the use of the club. A stray impulse caused him to glance into the auxiliary sighting scope to check that the main instrument was exactly following its target, and momentarily forgetful—he did so without removing his low-light spectacles.
Thornton was a modest man in his early sixties, soft-spoken and free of commercial ambition, yet like all other quiet watchers of the skies he had a hankering for the discreet immortality which is granted to the discoverers of new stars and planets. He experienced a moment of heart-lurching giddiness as he saw the first-magnitude object perched on the horizontal cross-hair of his scope, like a diamond where no diamond had any right to be. Thornton stared at the bright speck for a long time, assuring himself it was not a man-made satellite, then became aware of an annoying blue fuzziness in his vision. He tried to rub his eye and his knuckles encountered the frame of the magniluct spectacles. Clucking with impatience, he threw the glasses aside and looked into the sighting scope again.
The bright object was gone.
An insupportable weight of disappointment bore down on Thornton as he checked the luminous settings of the telescope to make sure he had not accidentally jarred the mounting. It was just as he had positioned it except for the minute creeping of the clockwork slow-motion drive. Unable to relinquish hope, he detached the camera from the main telescope, slipped in a low-power eyepiece and looked through it. The nebula he had been photographing was centred in his field of view—further proof that the telescope had not been jolted—and there was no sign of Thornton’s Star, as the object might later have been listed in the catalogues.
Thornton’s shoulders drooped as he sat in the darkness and deliberated on his own foolishness. He had allowed himself to get worked up, as other astronomers had done before, over an errant reflection in his equipment. The night air whispering through the open sector of the dome suddenly seemed colder, and he recalled that it was past two in the morning. It was an hour at which a man of his age should have been warmly bedded down for the night. He looked around for his magniluct glasses, put them on and—in the blue radiance they seemed to create—began gathering up his notebooks and pens.
It was a whim, a brief refusal to accept the dictates of common sense, which caused him to turn back to the telescope. Still wearing the glasses, he put his eye to the sighting scope. The new star glittered on the cross-hair as before.
Thornton crouched at the sighting scope for a full minute, alternately viewing with the glasses and without them, before fully accepting the phenomenon of a star which could be seen only through a magniluct screen. He took the glasses off and held them in unsteady fingers, feeling the embossed lettering of the trade name—AMPLITE—on the plastic frame, then came the urge to have a fresh, and clearer, look at his discovery. He manoeuvred himself on to the low stool and looked through the eyepiece of the big refractor. There was the