Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

Back at Tech they strolled across the campus in animated argument that had nothing to do with their scholastic activities.

“And remember this wasn’t the Olympic Games,” Zinner was protesting. “It was only a lousy little dual meet.”

“There is only one explanation,” Alyson said.

“I’d like to hear it.”

“The track men today are better than we were forty years ago.”

“That I will not admit,” said Zinner. “There’s something funny going on.”

“But how can you deny it?” Alyson demanded. “Back in the twenties anybody who could break ten seconds in the hundred was a whiz. The world’s record for the mile was four-ten-four. Now every high school’s got some kid who can break ten seconds. They run the mile under four minutes every month. Might as well swallow your pride, old man. We just naturally weren’t so good.”

“Why should track athletes be any better today?” Zinner asked.

Alyson considered.

“Well, I don’t know exactly,” he said. “The human race is improving—”

“Like hell it is!”

“Vitamins.”

“You get all the vitamins you need at the dinner table.”

“Superior training methods . . . weight lifting . . .”

“You know perfectly well hoisting a barbell wouldn’t help a bit running the mile. And look at the fight game. Boxers aren’t any better.”

Alyson reviewed the dismal situation in the heavyweight division. “All right then, how do you explain that hundred today?”

“It wasn’t a hundred.”

They had halted by the lily pond where sophomores used to throw recalcitrant freshmen before the student council adopted more enlightened methods of indoctrination.

“You mean it was rigged? It wasn’t a full hundred yards?”

“Oh, it was a full hundred yards all right. Only the hundred yards of today are not the hundred yards of yesterday.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Because space is not the same. It’s shrunk.”

Zinner paused to allow time for this statement to exert its full effect.

“The solar system is passing through a region in which space has undergone a shrinkage of approximately ten per cent. The assumption of such a coefficient of contractility satisfactorily accounts for all the observed phenomena.”

“Next time why don’t you get a tape and measure the hundred?”

“Waste of time. Tape measure’s shrunk too.”

A chill wind from Los Angeles was blowing over the campus, rattling the eucalyptus leaves and bending the yellow calendulas.

“You really believe that?” Alyson asked.

Zinner did not flinch. “Such is my considered opinion.” “This is much too big a subject for discussion here by the lily pond,” Alyson said. “Only in front of my fireplace over a long drink can we do it proper justice.”

“A very long drink,” Zinner added. “To make up for the shrinkage over the last forty years.”

The close friendship between the two was remarkable, for aside from their mutual interest in track, they had little in common. (Although there were some on the faculty who maintained that the less you had to do with the members of your own department, the better you got along with them.) Zinner had once held the school record in the hundred of 9.8 seconds, an achievement which he cherished in the same way that a child clings to an old doll. Some years ago with the approach of his fiftieth birthday, he had seriously considered having himself timed in a hundred. He even went so far as to come home one evening with a new pair of sprint shoes under his arm, raising strong doubts in his wife's mind concerning his sanity. Only when the family physician, after listening to his heart and taking his blood pressure, had shaken his head and reached for his prescription pad, did he reluctantly give it up. And so the sprint shoes had gone to join Those Things That Are Definitely In the Past, another melancholy reminder of man’s transitory existence on this planet.

Why Zinner looked back with such nostalgia on his track career was puzzling, when he had so many other things going for him. He was the world’s undisputed authority on the planet Pluto. His value for the size of that distant object,

Diameter Pluto = 0.518 X Earth

= 6610 km

= 4110 mi

had been officially accepted by the International Astronomical Union as the best available. There was no second choice.

This figure was the result of pouncing upon Pluto whenever its path chanced to fall across some star. Considering the millions of faint stars revealed by a large telescope, it might seem that the planet would have difficulty missing them. On the contrary, observable occultations of a star behind the disk of Pluto were exceedingly rare events. Most years there were none at all. One occultation was really good. And if there were two, it was like hitting the jackpot. Much of Zinner’s success could be attributed to the photometric technique he had developed for measuring the light intensity of star and planet during such close encounters.

Alyson had come to Tech from Michigan where he had run a respectable mile. Unlike Zinner, however, his chief concern had been to get under the wire on the thesis for his Ph.D. degree— John Donne: His Middle Period. Once through with John Donne he could take this job at Tech and get married. He accomplished both. It was an arrangement that had proven perhaps more satisfactory than stimulating.

The following week the track team went to San Diego, so there was nothing doing in the Rose Bowl that Saturday. It had been agreed that Alyson was to pick Zinner up at five sharp, drive home for cocktails and dinner with their wives, leaving them ample time to make the curtain at the Music Center by 8:30. But on this occasion Alyson, a stickler for punctuality, was late by half an hour. He arrived at Zinner’s office badly out of breath from hurrying up the stairs, only to find the astronomer in his shirtsleeves, completely oblivious of the clock.

“Got pinched on the way over,” Alyson explained. “Cops followed me. Had to take it easy.”

Zinner was all sympathy. “Too bad.”

“Wasn’t my fault. Claimed I was doing fifty in a thirty-mile zone.”

“Why don’t you come clean and admit you’re guilty as heh?”

“I’ll swear I wasn’t doing over forty.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“Said they checked my speed by radar.”

“That’s the trouble with science today. Always finding some damn practical use for it.”

Having disposed of that subject, Zinner returned to the books and papers scattered over his desk.

“Spent the afternoon collecting data on the velocity of light. Turned out to be quite a job.”

“Look, Zin, this is no time to be fooling with the velocity of light,” Alyson said. “The girls’ll be worried—”

“Let ’em worry. Probably haven’t got their faces on yet.”

He picked up one of the sheets, holding it so Alyson could see.

“Fizeau made the first modem determination of the velocity of light in 1849, 315,300 kilometers per second. Then everybody took a shot at it. I’ve rounded up all the principal measures to date except Barker’s at Johns Hopkins, which hasn’t come out yet. Cast your eye down this column of figures and tell me how they strike you.”

“How would I know? When my field is the English metaphysical poets—”

“I don’t care whether your field is metaphysical poetry or ancient Etruscan pornography. Just tell me how they hit you.”

Alyson dutifully examined the figures.

“Well, I’d say the velocity of fight takes a slump every now and then.”

“Right! Notice they follow a well-defined pattern. The velocity drops, levels out, then drops again.” He rubbed his hands. “Now I’m convinced we’re due for an increase. ”