Fred Hoyle: The Black Cloud

Ferguson lifted the phone.

“Amy, will you please see that I’m not interrupted — no, no phone calls — well, perhaps for an hour, perhaps two, I don’t know.”

Quietly and logically Herrick then explained the situation. When Ferguson had spent some time looking at the photographs, Herrick said:

“You see the predicament. If we announce the business and we turn out to be wrong, then we shall look awful fools. If we spend a month testing all the details and it turns out that we are right, then we should be blamed for procrastination and delay.”

“You certainly would, like an old hen sitting on a bad egg.”

“Well, James, I thought you have had a great deal of experience in dealing with people. I felt you were someone I could turn to for advice. What do you suggest I should do?”

Ferguson was silent for a little while. Then he said:

“I can see that this may turn out to be a grave matter. And I don’t like taking grave decisions any more than you do, Dick, certainly not on the spur of the moment. What I suggest is this. Go back to your hotel and sleep through the afternoon — I don’t expect you had much sleep last night. We can meet again for an early dinner, and by then I’ll have had an opportunity to think things over. I’ll try to reach some conclusion.”

Ferguson was as good as his word. When he and Herrick had started their evening meal, in a quiet restaurant of his choice, Ferguson began:

“I think I’ve got things sorted out fairly well. It doesn’t seem to me to make sense wasting another month in making sure of your position. The case seems to be very sound as it is, and you can never be quite certain — it would be a matter of converting a ninety-nine per cent certainty into a ninety-nine point nine per cent certainty. And that isn’t worth the loss of time. On the other hand you are ill-prepared to go to the White House just at the moment. According to your own account you and your men have spent less than a day on the job so far. Surely there are a good many other things you might get ideas about. More exactly, how long is it going to take the cloud to get here? What will its effects be when it does get here? That sort of question.

“My advice is to go straight back to Pasadena, get your team together, and aim to write a report within a week, setting out the situation as you see it. Get all your men to sign it — so that there’s no question of the tale getting around of a mad Director. And then come back to Washington.

“In the meantime I’ll get things moving at this end. It isn’t a bit of good in a case like this starting at the bottom by whispering into the ear of some Congressman. The only thing to do is to go straight to the President. I’ll try to smooth your path there.”

Four days earlier in London a remarkable meeting had been held in the rooms of the Royal Astronomical Society. The meeting had been called, not by the Royal Astronomical Society itself, but by the British Astronomical Association, an association essentially of amateur astronomers.

Chris Kingsley, Professor of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge, travelled by train in the early afternoon to London for the meeting. It was unusual for him, the most theoretical of theoreticians, to be attending a meeting of amateur observers. But there had been rumours of unaccounted discrepancies in the positions of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Kingsley didn’t believe it, but he felt that scepticism should rest on solid ground, so he ought to hear what the chaps had to say about it.

When he arrived at Burlington House in time for the four o’clock tea, he was surprised to see that quite a number of other professionals had already arrived, including the Astronomer Royal. “Never heard of anything like this before at the B.A.A. The rumours must have been put around by some new publicity agent,” he thought to himself.

When Kingsley went in to the meeting room some half hour later he saw a vacant place on the front row by the Astronomer Royal. No sooner had he sat down than a Dr Oldroyd who was in the chair began the meeting in the following terms:

“Ladies and gentlemen, we meet here today to discuss some new and exciting results. But before I call on the first speaker I would like to say how pleased we are to see so many distinguished visitors. I am confident they will find that the time they have consented to spend with us will not have been wasted, and I feel that the important role of the amateur in astronomy will be demonstrated yet once again.”

At this Kingsley grinned inwardly to himself, and several of the other professionals squirmed in their seats. Dr Oldroyd went on:

“I have great pleasure in asking Mr George Green to address us.”

Mr George Green jumped up from his seat half-way down the room. He then bustled forward to the rostrum, clutching a large pile of papers in his right hand.

For the first ten minutes Kingsley listened with polite attention as Mr Green showed slides of his private telescopic equipment. But when the ten minutes lengthened to a quarter of an hour he began to fidget, and for the next half hour he lived in torment, first crossing his legs one way, then the other, then squirming round every minute or so to look at the clock on the wall. It was all in vain, for Mr George Green went right ahead with the bit firmly between his teeth. The Astronomer Royal kept glancing at Kingsley, a quiet smile on his face. The other professionals hugged themselves with delight. Their eyes never left Kingsley. They were calculating when the outburst would come.

The outburst never came, for Mr Green suddenly seemed to remember the purpose of his talk. Quitting the description of his beloved equipment, he began to throw off his results, rather like a dog shaking itself after a bath. He had observed Jupiter and Saturn, measuring their positions with care, and he had found discrepancies from the Nautical Almanac. Running to the blackboard he wrote down the following figures, and then sat down:

Discrepancy in Longitude Discrepancy in Declination

Jupiter+1 minute 29 seconds–49 seconds Saturn+42 seconds–17 seconds

Kingsley never heard the loud applause offered to Mr Green as a reward for his address, for Kingsley was choking with rage. He had come up to the meeting expecting to be told of discrepancies amounting to no more than a few tenths of a second at most. These he could have attributed to inaccurate, incompetent measurement. Or there might have been a subtle mistake of a statistical nature. But the figures that Mr Green had written up on the board were preposterous, fantastic, so large that a blind man could have seen them, so large that Mr George Green must have made some quite outrageous blunder.

It must not be thought that Kingsley was an intellectual snob, that he objected to an amateur on principle. Less than two years previously he had listened in the very same room to a paper presented by an entirely unknown author. Kingsley had immediately perceived the quality and competence of the work and was the first person to give public praise to it. Incompetence was Kingsley’s béte noire , not incompetence performed in private but incompetence paraded in public. His irritation in this respect could be aroused in art and music as much as in science.

On this occasion he was a seething cauldron of wrath. So many ideas flashed through his head that he was unable to decide on any one particular comment, it seemed such a pity to waste the others. Before he could reach a decision, Dr Oldroyd sprang a surprise:

“I have great pleasure,” said he, “in calling on the next speaker, the Astronomer Royal.”

It had been the Astronomer Royal’s first intention to speak shortly and to the point. Now he was unable to resist the temptation to expatiate at length, just for the pleasure of watching Kingsley’s face. Nothing could have been calculated to torment Kingsley more than a repetition of Mr George Green’s performance, and this is just what the Astronomer Royal produced. He first showed slides of the equipment at the Royal Observatory, slides of observers operating the equipment, slides of the equipment taken to pieces; and he then went on to explain the detailed operation of the equipment in terms that might have been chosen for the benefit of a backward child. But all this he did in measured confident tones, unlike the rather hesitant manner of Mr Green. After some thirty-five minutes of this he began to feel that Kingsley might be in real medical danger, so he decided to cut the cackle.