Disturbance of 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 runover that was long or short, depending upon the editor's luck in obtaining quotable 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 Tischaucr Tinney, Burgoyne Observatory, Albuquerque.
"I'm looking for an expert on astrology. Know one?"—Patrick R. Whitaker, Lucas Observatory, Vermont.
"It's all wacky!"—Giles Mahew Frazier, Grant Observatory, Richmond.
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 constellations in deshabille, 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 percent.
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 up 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 quit 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 over-head, 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 the Cole Observatory. 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 check-ups 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 be happening.
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 tuned tomtoms. Between each number and the next a frenetic announcer extolled the virtues of a product.
Munching a sandwich, Roger listened appreciatively to the dissarhythm and managed not to hear the commercials. Most intelligent people of the nineties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not to hear a human voice coming from a loudspeaker, 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.