Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

“Well, how about it? Coming?”

Alyson hesitated.

“Only thing ... I was planning to run over to L.A. . . . pay that traffic fine.”

“Thought you intended fighting that all the way to the supreme court?”

Alyson threw up his hands.

“What can you do? It’s your word against the police. They’ve got their radar—”

“RADAR!”

It is doubtful if the word radar has ever been uttered with such vehemence since the U.S. Navy invented the acronym in 1942. Zinner seized Alyson by the hand and began pumping it up and down.

“My boy, that was no mere traffic violation. That was Fate in the form of a Los Angeles police officer intervening in behalf of Science. Is it possible that you fail to realize the enormous significance of that pinch? If radar can measure the velocity of that old car of yours, radar can also measure the velocity of a runner on the cinder path.”

He began pacing up and down the narrow office.

“What’s more, the radar set we want is here on the campus right now. Graduate student I know working on muscular reactions under extreme physical exertion for his thesis. Lactic acid in your body builds up. Fascinating subject.”

He grabbed the telephone and dialed a number, but without response. “Probably left now. Catch him on the way home.”

He resumed his pacing. “Trouble with our track data is we’ve been measuring the wrong thing. We’ve been measuring time instead of velocity. It’s like trying to find which is the richest man in town by measuring how long they’ve been in business, instead of how fast they’ve been making money.

“Let’s say a fellow runs the hundred in ten flat. That means his average velocity for the race was thirty feet per second. Now suppose he runs it in nine flat. Then his average velocity was . . . thirty-three point three feet per second.

“I maintain they don’t run the hundred any faster today than in our time. Reason the time is nine seconds is because they’re only running ninety yards.”

“But can you prove that?”

“That’s where science comes to the rescue. *If radar shows the velocity of a nine-second hundred was thirty-three point three feet per second, then there’s no getting around it—it was a full honest old-time hundred yards. But if radar shows the velocity for a nine-second hundred was thirty feet per second, it was a ‘diminished’ or ‘spurious’ present-day hundred.”

“May I ask just one more question?” said Alyson.

“Go ahead.”

“When do I leave for the mountain?”

Saturday evening.

Alyson wondered if he could ever get used to working on the Newtonian platform of the big reflector. The trouble with the Newtonian platform was that every time he moved, the platform moved. The sight of the concrete floor fifty feet below was not reassuring. Also, he wished Zinner wouldn’t sit quite so close to the edge of the platform. You had no fail-safe guarantee. You just failed . . .

Zinner had come up the day before to attach his photometer to the telescope and make sure it was in readiness for the big event tonight. He was doing something at the guiding eyepiece now.

“Here’s Pluto,” he called over his shoulder. “Want to take a look?”

Alyson joined him at his precarious perch by the telescope.

“Here is a print of the star field,” the astronomer said, showing him a photographic negative. “These dark spots are stars. This line I’ve drawn represents the path of Pluto. I’ve marked the planet’s position at intervals of ten minutes. You’ll find it right about here now.”

Alyson found that identifying Pluto wasn’t so easy even when the planet was staring him in the face.

“Pluto looks no different from the stars,” he complained, feeling a little let down at his first sight of the distant world.

“It’s not big enough to show a measurable disk,” Zinner explained. “But it’s got one all right. The stars haven’t. They’re just points.”

Alyson didn’t know the zero hour except that it was still quite a way off yet. He wandered around the platform while Zinner was checking some connections he had already checked a dozen times.

“When are we supposed to hear from your radar man?” Alyson inquired.

“Don’t know,” the astronomer said, frowning. “Thought I’d hear before this.”

As if on cue the telephone rang at the control desk below.

“Bet that’s him now!”

They stood tense, straining to catch any words from below. After a minute the night assistant hung up.

“That wasn’t for me, was it?” Zinner called down.

The night assistant returned to his mail-order catalogue. “Nope. Just another crossword-puzzle addict wants to know the name of an asteroid with four letters meaning ‘god of love.’ ”

Zinner used several four-letter words. Alyson wandered over to the eyepiece again for another look at Pluto. He studied the star chart for a while, glanced at his wristwatch, then returned to the eyepiece.

“Looks to me as if Pluto’s quite a ways ahead of your position on the chart.”

Zinner made a quick check.

“It sure is— way ahead!” He looked troubled; checked again. “Battle stations, everybody!” he yelled. “Bill, get downstairs on that recorder. Al, we’re going in.”

There was a clatter from below as the night assistant headed for the lower depths. Alyson took up his position by the small auxiliary recorder on the platform. Zinner centered the image and touched the fine motion control. Now the telescope would track without further attention, held rigorously on target by the automatic guiding mechanism. With the touch of another button hours, minutes, and seconds of Universal Time began leaving their imprint on the record.

Aivson was intent on the wiggles in the tracing as the sensitive instrumentation responded to the signals from the photometer. There were so many irregularities due to atmospheric effects, it was not easy to determine the intensity of the light beam from the star and Pluto.

“Planet’s awfully close,” Alyson called from the telescope. “Getting anything over there yet?”

“Not yet,” Alyson told him.

Now an unmistakable change was setting in. The trend of the curve was definitely downward.

“We’re reading!” Alyson cried.

The tracing dropped rather sharply to approximately twenty-five per cent of its former value, after which it remained fairly constant. In about five minutes the curve began to rise and soon regained its pre-occultation value. Zinner continued operating for several minutes more before cutting out the photometer. Suddenly the dome lights came on, revealing two bedraggled but happy men grinning at each other.

“What I want to see is that time record,” Zinner said, already on his way down the ladder.

Although Alyson followed as fast as he could, the astronomer already had several yards of Pluto spread around him by the time he reached the main recorder.

“Not much doubt immersion was here,” Zinner said. “I’d put it at five hours fifteen minutes U.T. We can get the seconds later. Now when was immersion supposed to occur according to my very accurate calculations?”

He compared the times in his notebook with those imprinted on the record. For such a simple operation it required an extraordinarily long while.

“Immersion was an hour early,” Zinner said.

Alyson gasped. “An hour! You’re sure?”

“Can’t be any doubt. I’d planned to start checking on Pluto at minus forty. Figured that was plenty. But one hour!”

The astonomer seemed dazed. He picked up the tracing and began running it through his fingers.

The dome was very still except for the ticking of some device connected with the telescope. Alyson had had no scientific training. Before tonight he had never given the stars more than casual attention. It would not have struck him as remarkable if the stars had gotten off schedule. They might as well be one place as another. Now, for the first time, he was becoming aware of the awful majesty with which the heavenly bodies went through their motions, enacting a drama the minutest detail of which was inevitable from the beginning. Could there have been some slip in the performance? he asked himself. A line dropped or some cue missed?