Margo, her hair streaming, sat half switched around with her knees on the seat between her and Paul, so she could watch the smokingly bronzed moon. She had her jacket spread on her lap. On it was Miaow, curled up in a gray doughnut and fast asleep, or giving a good imitation.
“We’re getting near Vandenberg Two,” Paul said. “We could look at the moon through one of the Project ’scopes.”
“Will Morton Opperly be there?” Margo asked.
“No,” Paul replied, smiling faintly. “He’s over in the Valley these days, at Vandenberg Three, playing master sorceror to all the other theory boys.”
Margo shrugged and looked sideways up. “Doesn’t the moon ever black out?” she wondered. “It’s still sooty copper.”
Paul explained to her about the ring-glow.
“How long does the eclipse last, anyway?” she asked, and when he said, “Two hours,” she objected: “I thought eclipses were over in seconds, with everybody getting excited and dropping their cameras.”
“Those are the eclipses of the sun — the totality part.”
Margo smiled and leaned back. “Now tell me about the star photographs,” she said. “You can’t possibly be overheard in a moving car. And I’m not so worked up about them now. I’ve stopped worrying about Don — the eclipse is just a bronze blanket for him.”
Paul hesitated.
She smiled again. “I promise not to rev my mind at all. I’d just like to understand them.”
Paul said: “I can’t promise you any understanding. Even the astro big-wigs only made profound noises. Including Opperly.”
“Well?”
Paul wove the tires around a tiny scatter of gravel. Then he began. “Well, ordinarily, star photos don’t get seen around for years, if ever, but the astro boys on the Project have a standing request out with their pals at the observatories to be shown anything unusual. We’ve even had star pix the day after they were taken.”
Margo laughed. “Late Sports Final of the Stellar Atlas?”
“Exactly! Well, the first photo came in a week ago. It showed a starfield with the planet Pluto in it. But something had happened during the exposure so that the stars around Pluto had blanked out or shifted position. I got to look at it myself — there were three very faint squiggles where the brightest stars near Pluto had shifted. Black-on-white squiggles — in real astronomy you just look at the negatives.”
“Inside stuff,” Margo said solemnly. Then, “Paul!” she cried. “There was a newspaper story this morning about a man who claimed to have seen some stars twirl! I remember the headline: STARS MOVED, SAYS WRONG-WAY DRIVER.”
“I saw it too,” Paul said a bit sourly. “He was driving an open-top car at the time, and had an accident — because he was so fascinated by the stars, he said. Turned out he’d been drinking.”
“Yes, but the people with him in the car backed him up. And later there were phone calls to the planetarium, reporting the same thing.”
“I know, we had some at the Moon Project,” Paul said. “Just the usual business of mass suggestion. Look, Margo, the photo I was telling you about was taken a week ago, and it was of something only a powerful telescope could see. Let’s not get it mixed up with flying saucer-type nonsense. I’m saying, we got a photo of Pluto showing three faint star-squiggles. But get this — Pluto hadn’t shifted at all! Its image was a black dot”
“What’s so astonishing about that?”
“Ordinarily you don’t get startled at starlight or even star images wavering. Earth’s atmosphere does it, same as it makes hills waver on a hot day — in fact, that’s what makes the stars twinkle. But in this case, whatever was twisting the starlight had to be out beyond Pluto. This side of the stars, but beyond Pluto.”
“How far away is Pluto?”
“Almost forty times as far as the sun.”
“What would twist starlight way out in space?”
“That’s what puzzles the big boys. Some special sort of electric or magnetic field, maybe, though it would have to be very strong.”
“How about the other photos?” Margo prompted.
Paul paused while he pulled around a deep-growling truck. “The second, taken four nights ago by our astro satellite and TV’ed down, was the same story, except that the planet involved was Jupiter, and the area of the twist was larger.”
“So that whatever made the twist must have been nearer?” Margo suggested.
“Perhaps. Incidentally, Jupiter’s moons hadn’t wavered either. The third photo, which I saw day before yesterday, showed a still larger area of twist with Venus in it Only this time Venus had made a squiggle too — a big one.”
“As if the light had been twisted this side of Venus?”
“Yes, between Venus and Earth. Of course it could have been atmosphere-waver this time, but the boys didn’t think so.”
Then Paul grew silent.
“Well?” Margo prodded him. “You said there were four photos.”
“I saw the fourth today,” he told her guardedly. “Taken last night. Still larger areas of twist. This time the edge of the moon was in it. The moon’s image hadn’t wavered.”
“Paul! That must have been what the man who was driving saw. The same night.”
“I don’t think so,” he told her. “You can hardly see any stars near the moon with the naked eye. Besides, these reports by laymen just don’t mean anything.”
“Well,” she countered, “it certainly does sound as if something were creeping up on the moon. First Pluto, then Jupiter, then Venus, getting closer each time.”
The road curved south and the darkly bronzed moon came swinging out over the Pacific as it rode along with them.
“Now, wait a minute, Margo,” Paul protested, lifting his left hand for a moment from the wheel. “I got the same idea myself, so I asked Van Bruster about it He says it’s completely unlikely that one single field, traveling through space, was responsible for the four twists. He thinks there were four different twist fields involved, not connected in any way — so there can’t be any question of something creeping up on the moon. What’s more, he says he’s not too surprised at the photos. He says astronomers have known the theoretical possibility of such fields for years, and that evidence for them is beginning to show up now, not by chance, but because of the electronically amplified ’scopes and superfast photographic emulsions that have just gone into use this year. The twists show up in star snapshots where they wouldn’t in long exposures.”
“What did Morton Opperly think of the photos?” Margo asked.
“He didn’t…No, wait, he was the one who insisted on plotting the course of the twist fields from Pluto to the moon. Say, we just passed Monica Mountainway! That’s the fancy new road across the mountains to Vandenberg Three where Opperly is right now.”
“Was the Pluto-moon course a straight one?” Margo asked, refusing to be deflected.
“No, the darndest zig-zag imaginable.”
“But did Opperly say anything?” Margo insisted.
Paul hesitated, then said, “Oh, he chuckled, and said something like, ‘Well, if Earth or Moon is their target, they’re getting closer with each shot.’ ”
“You see?” Margo said with satisfaction. “You see? Whatever it is, it’s aiming at planets!”
Barbara Katz, self-styled Girl Adventurer and long-time science-fiction fan, faded back across the lawn, away from the street-globes and the Palm Beach policeman’s flashlight, and slipped behind the thick jagged bole of a cabbage palmetto before the cold bright beam swung her way. She thanked Mentor, her science-fiction god, that the long-hoarded, thirty-inch nylon foot-gloves she was wearing below her black playsuit were black, too — one of the popular pastel shades would have shown up even without the flash. The bag dangling from her shoulder was a black one, of the Black Ball Jetline. She didn’t worry about her face and arms, they were dark enough to melt with the night — and get her mistaken for colored by day. Barbara was willing to do her bit for integration, but just the same she sometimes resented it that she tanned so dark so fast.