The Collection (15 page)

Tonight Ry, the leader (as nearly as the Martian word can be
translated), and Khee, his administrative assistant and closest friend, sat and
meditated together until the time was near. Then they drank a toast to the
future -- in a beverage based on menthol, which had the same effect on Martians
as alcohol on Earthmen - and climbed to the roof of the building in which
they
had been sitting. They watched towards the
north, where the rocket
should land. The stars shone brilliantly and unwinkingly through the
atmosphere.

***

In Observatory No. I on Earth’s moon, Rog Everett, his eye
at the eyepiece of the spotter scope, said triumphantly, "Thar she blew,
Willie. And now, as soon as the films are developed, we’ll know the
score
on that old planet Mars.
^”
He straightened up - there’d be no more to
see now - and he and Willie Sanger shook hands solemnly. It was an historical
occasion.

“Hope it didn’t kill anybody. Any Martians, that is. Rog,
did it hit dead centre in Syrtis Major?”

“Near as matters. I’d say it was maybe a thousand miles off,
to the south. And that’s damn close on a fifty-million-mile shot. Willie, do
you really think there are any Martians?
^”

Willie thought a second and then said, “No.”

He was right.

“Walter , what's a Jaycee?" Mrs. Ralston asked her husband,
Dr. Ralston, across the breakfast table.

“Why—I believe it used to be a member of what they called a
Junior Chamber of Commerce. I don't know if they still have them or not. Why?
^"

"Martha said Henry was muttering something yesterday about
Jaycees, fifty million Jaycees. And swore at her when she asked what he
meant." Martha was Mrs. Graham and Henry her husband, Dr. Graham. They
lived next door and the two doctors and their wives were close friends.

"Fifty million," said Dr. Ralston musingly.
"That's how many parthies there are."

He should have known; he and Dr. Graham together were responsible
for parthies—parthenogenetic births. Twenty years ago, in 1980,
they had
together engineered the first experiment in human parthenogenesis, the
fertilization of a female cell without the help of a male one. The offspring of
that experiment, named John, was now twenty years old and lived with Dr. and
Mrs. Graham next door; he had been adopted by them after the death of his
mother in an accident some years before.

No other parthie was more than half John's age. Not until
John was ten, and obviously healthy and normal, had the authorities let down
bars and permitted any woman who wanted a child and who was either single or
married to a sterile husband to have a child parthenogenetically. Due to the
shortage of men —the disastrous testerosis epidemic of the 1970s
had
just killed off almost a third of the male population of the world—over fifty
million women had applied for parthenogenetic children and borne them. Luckily
for redressing the balance of the sexes, it had turned out that all
parthenogenetically conceived children were males.

"Martha thinks," said Mrs. Ralston, "that
Henry's worrying about John, but she can't think why. He's such a
good
boy."

Dr. Graham suddenly and without knocking burst into the
room. His face was white and his eyes wide as he stared at his colleague.
"I was right," he said.

^"
Right about what?
^"

"About John. I didn't tell anyone, but do you know what
he did when we ran out of drinks at the party last night?
^"

Dr. Ralston frowned. "Changed water into wine?"

^"
Into gin; we were having martinis. And just
now he left to go water skiing—and he isn't taking any water skis. Told me that
with faith he wouldn
^'
t need them.
^"

^"
Oh,
no,
^"
said
Dr. Ralston. He dropped his head into his hands.

Once
before in history there
^'
d been a
virgin birth. Now fifty million virgin-born boys were growing up. In ten more
years there'd be fifty million—Jaycees.

^"
No," sobbed Dr. Ralston,
"no!"

Roger Jerome Phlutter,  for whose absurd surname I offer no
defense other than it is genuine, was, at the time of the events of this story,
a hard-working clerk in the office of the Cole Observatory.

He was a young man of no particular brilliance, although he
performed his daily tasks assiduously and efficiently, studied the calculus at
home for one hour every evening, and hoped someday to become a chief astronomer
of some important observatory.

Nevertheless, our narration of the events of late March in
the year 1999 must begin with Roger Phlutter for the good and sufficient reason
that he, of all men on earth, was the first observer of the stellar aberration.

Meet Roger Phlutter.

Tall, rather pale from spending too much time indoors,
thickish, shell-rimmed glasses, dark hair close-cropped in the style of the
nineteen nineties, dressed neither particularly well nor badly, smokes
cigarettes rather excessively...

At a quarter to five that afternoon, Roger was engaged in
two simultaneous operations. One was examining, in a blink-microscope, a
photographic plate taken late the previous night of a section in Gemini. The
other was considering whether or not, on the three dollars remaining of his pay
from last week, he dared phone Elsie and ask her to go somewhere with him.

Every normal young man has undoubtedly, at some time or
other, shared with Roger Phlutter his second occupation, but not everyone has
operated or understands the operation of a blink-microscope. So let us raise
our eyes from Elsie to Gemini.

A blink-mike provides accommodation for two photographic
plates taken of the same section of sky hut at different times. These plates
are carefully juxtaposed and the operator may alternately focus his vision,
through the eyepiece, first upon one and then upon the other, by means of a
shutter. If the plates arc is identical, the operation of the shutter reveals
nothing, but if one of the dots on the second plate differs from the position
it occupied on the first, it will call attention to itself by seeming to jump
back and forth as the shutter is manipulated.

Roger manipulated the shutter, and one of the dots jumped.
So did Roger. He tried it again, forgetting—as we have—all about Elsie for the
moment, and the dot jumped again. It jumped almost a tenth of a second. Roger
straightened up and scratched his head. He lighted a cigarette, put it down on
the ash tray, and looked into the blink-mike again. The dot jumped again when
he used the shutter.

Harry Wesson, who worked the evening shift, had just come
into the office and was hanging up his topcoat.
^"
Hey, Harry!
^"
Roger said. "There
^'
s something wrong with this blinking
blinker.
^"

"Yeah?
^"
said I Harry.

^"
Yeah. Pollux moved a tenth of a second.
^"

^"
Yeah?
^"
said harry.
"Well, that's about right for parallax. Thirty-two light years—parallax of
Pollux is point one o one. Little over a tenth of a second, so if your
comparison plate was taken about six months ago, when the earth was on the
other side of her orbit, that's about right.
^"

"But, Harry, the comparison plate was taken night
before last. They're twenty-four hours apart."

^"
You
^'
re crazy.
^"

"Look for yourself."

It wasn't quite five o'clock yet, but Harry Wesson magnanimously
overlooked that and sat down in front of the blink-mike. He manipulated the
shutter, and Pollux obligingly jumped.

There wasn't any doubt about its being Pollux, for it was
far and away the brightest dot on the plate. Pollux is a star of 1.2 magnitude,
one of the twelve brightest in the sky and by far the brightest in Gemini. And
none of the faint stars around it had moved at all.

^"
Um," said Harry Wesson. He frowned and
looked again.
^"
One of those plates is misdated, that's all.
I'll check into it first thing.
^"

^"
Those plates aren
^'
t
misdated," Roger said doggedly. "I dated them myself."

^"
That proves it," Harry told him.
^"
Go
on home. It's five o'clock. If Pollux moved a tenth of a second last night,
I'll move it back for you."

So Roger left.

He felt uneasy somehow, as though he shouldn't have. He
couldn
^'
t put his finger on just what worried him, but something did.
He decided to walk home instead of taking the bus.

Pollux was a fixed star. It couldn't have moved a tenth of a
second in twenty-four hours.

"Let's see—thirty-two light years.
^"
Roger said to him-self.
^"
Tenth of a second. Why, that would be
movement several times faster than the speed of light. Which is positively
silly!"

Wasn
^'
t it?

He didn't feel much like studying or reading tonight. Was
three dollars enough to take out Elsie?

The three balls of a pawnshop loomed ahead, and Roger
succumbed to temptation. He pawned his watch and then phoned Elsie.
"Dinner and a show?"

"Why certainly, Roger."

So until he took her home at one-thirty, he managed to
forget astronomy. Nothing odd about that. It would have been strange if he had
managed to remember it.

But his feeling of restlessness came back as soon as he 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 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, allocated 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 at 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 he couldn
^'
t sleep.

He didn
^'
t feel drunk. He grew more excited, wide
awake.

Roger wondered if he dared phone the observatory. Would he sound
drunk over the phone? The devil with whether he sounded drunk 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."