Fredric Brown - Pi in the Sky

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 some day 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 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 himself. “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.”