Troubled Star

by George O. Smith

  Dusty stood up slowly. "Come on, Barbara, let's go home. At least we can be among friends. I'd hate to be marooned here while Terra was smothered in the barytrine field."

  Barbara stood up and leaned against his side. "Yes, Dusty," she said in a throaty contralto.

  Gant smiled wanly. "I'll see that you get home," he said. "Forgive us, Dusty. You'll really lose little and gain much. I—"

  Dusty looked at Gant. Then he looked down at Barbara. Then up at Gant again.

  "So I've failed," he said in a low voice. "I've tried and failed. And I am aware of the fact that Terra will not lose much. That isn't the point. It's just that I, Dusty Britton, am a personal failure. I should like to be able to say that I don't give a damn what other people think, but I can't. I care a lot what other people think, because for the next forty or fifty years or more I've got a living to make, and making a living is a lot easier if the entire world is not convinced that I am a no-goodnik. But then, who am I to stand in the way of galactic progress."

  "Dusty, I regret that the rest of your people will not be able to see the thing I am going to show you. Maybe you can describe it when you return. Come with me."

  Gant led them from the hall, then to a moving walk that hurled them out and across one of the flambuoyant arches between buildings. Here Gant stopped to display his credentials to a man in uniform, and to sign a register that also listed Dusty and Barbara and their home planet Terra.

  They went along a corridor that curved gently: through a heavy metal door that opened on response to a signal sequence delivered against a button.

  The room inside was vast, truly vast. It was a vertical cylinder and it must have been more than a thousand feet in diameter and three or four hundred feet tall. They stood inside of the door on a narrow metal catwalk that ran completely around the circle, its far side lost in the distance and the dimness, for the room was not lighted from above, but from below.

  It was a pleasant glow, a flat hazy, wispy glow from a gas-like cloud that floated in the room a hundred feet below the catwalk ... a scale model of the galaxy.

  – – –

  It looked like any photographs of one of the galaxies taken through a telescope except that this model was dotted here and there with winking pinpoints and stringed through and through with thin lines that glowed in many colors, some solid colors and some in a two-color spirals, like coded wire cable. Here and there were faintly glowing spherical volumes containing many stars, or rectangular volumes confined by planes of faint color-glow. Certain of these clusters were linked with other clusters by the zigzag lines that wound and interwove around and through in a tangled skein.

  Gant Nerley picked up a small cylinder from a rack on the railing of the catwalk. A narrow pencil of light pointed out, and he aimed it towards the center, some five hundred feet out to the middle of the hall. "Marandis," he said. Then he brought the pointer-light across towards them slowly, to stop a hundred feet from their position. "Sol," he said. "The lines are courses surveyed and registered by the various companies, you can gather that the colored stars are our inhabited systems and the volumes register certain clusters. That faint greenish-yellow course that ends out there by Sol is the Transgalactic course set up to reach from Marandis to the Spiral Cluster which lies almost at our feet."

  The magnificence of the spectacle was enhanced by the silence in the room. The galaxy, it seemed, lay at their feet and with no irreverence, and only awe, the viewer felt as though he were standing by the side of God, looking down at his Work.

  In a hushed voice, Dusty asked, "Is this where they survey the courses? Couldn't figure out a way around Sol?"

  Gant laughed sympathetically, breaking the hushed awe. "Look at it and think, Dusty Britton."

  Dusty looked, and Barbara looked, both in awed silence as Gant Nerley went on:

  "In that model, which looks like a wisp of gas, there are fifteen billion individual pinpoints. Think, Dusty. One-five, comma, zero-zero-zero, comma, zero-zero-zero, comma, zero-zero-zero stars in one galaxy. Across the breadth of this room it lies, scaled down to represent the hundred thousand light years of its diameter at the rate of a hundred light years to the foot. Eight and one third light years per inch, Dusty Britton, so your Sol and your Sirius lie about an inch apart. Now, Dusty, in order to make the stars visible, they must be above a certain intrinsic size, and in the size of the stars the scale of the model is violated. Each tiny glowing point is about one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter. That makes the scalar size of the stars about a half light year in diameter. The diameter of the colored lines that represent courses is of the same magnitude, so as we go into the model—as we may—we will find that the courses touch, intersect, and lie tangent to stars that are actually far from the flight in real space.

  "What I am saying, of course, is only a new concept of something that you already know, but pertaining to another subject with which you have every right to be more familiar. Take a globe of your Terra. It is excellent for locating areas, finding cities, lakes, oceans, mountain, ranges; anything gross enough to find physical size upon the map. But you cannot use it for a road map to direct you to the home of a friend, because the details of such a trip are much too fine. So we use it for large-scale mapping, but could not possibly use it for the delicate business of course mapping."

  "But if you enlarged a section?"

  Gant Nerley nodded. "It has been tried. No good. You see, Dusty, this was made by going deep into space and making stereograms from all angles. The transparencies are used in projectors all around the hall. But as you may know, the finest photogram loses definition when it is enlarged too much. As for delicate operations, Dusty, just to prove our point we are going to enter the model.

  Gant led them to a control panel in the railing and from a sheet of paper in his hand he set the dials.

  – – –

  The vast circular runway lowered all around the hall and the galaxy-model rose, giving the appearance of turning upward past them. "We are coming down toward and below the plane of our galaxy at the scalar rate of about a hundred thousand light years per minute," said Gant. Then a segment of the catwalk detached from the wall and went forward on a long girder.

  The bright pinpoints leaped out at them, giving Dusty the same feeling as he had had in the space flight, except that the model lacked the waves of heat as the little pinpoints passed. He looked at Barbara and watched the tiny points plunge into her skin to disappear, then reappear behind her, as if they passed through her body harmlessly. He looked at his hand as the points streamed through, and he waggled his fingers around a cluster and watched them twinkle. They penetrated clusters and dark-cloud areas, placed where fifty stars occupied a volume of less than a couple of cubic inches, spots where dusky, shapeless masses represented globs of fifty light-years in diameter. Rusty caught on. Thoughtfully he looked at Barbara and made a rough computation that he and she were a couple of hundred light-years apart. His eyes, he thought, must be about thirty light-years apart, and the diameter of his head, at eight and a third light-years per inch—

  Dusty began to feel light-headed.

  Through and through the model ran the colored lines, tangled and skeined and then they were facing the point where the greenish-yellow course-line ended.

  Above the control panel was a faintly glowing sphere about two inches in diameter.

  "Sol?" asked Gant.

  Dusty shrugged. "Sol? How can we—"

  He leaned forward and set his right eye close to the pinpoint of light and looked outward. Was it—could it be—familiar. He changed his angle of sight. Was Galactic North aligned with Terrestrial North? Dusty could not remember. The center of the Galaxy? Somewhere in or near Sagittarius, he believed, but Dusty was not familiar with the constellation. There! Was that the Belt of Orion? It looked strange, distorted. The constellation as he remembered it of old, was not like that. Pinpoints, of course, could not begin to look like these tiny discs, or vice versa. Was it this that made them seem unf
amiliar or was it that he was displaced in scalar space by enough light-years to distort the constellation? Was that—there—Polaris and the Dippers, large and small and Andromeda? Or, thought Dusty with wry self-disgust creeping into his mind, was that W-shaped thing Cassiopeia? He wished that he had paid more attention to astronomy.

  Pleiades? He shook his head. That was a cluster and unless one remembered very carefully the configuration as it looked from Sol, the conglomeration of stars would probably look about the same from the same number of light years from the opposite side.

  Sol—if that sprinkle of glow were Sol—must be near bright Sirius. An inch away and a double star. And Alpha Centauri should lie about a half inch from Sol and it should be a fine trinary; two bright ones in a binary and a less bright one making the triple. And Procyon—or was that only a single like Sol? He ran through his sorry list of stars remembered as being within fifteen or sixteen light-years of Sol, and was appalled to see the number of pinpoints that were surrounded by that tiny sphere that represented the sixteen light-year diameter. His mental catalogue had holes in the listings—more hole than listing, he considered truthfully.

  – – –

  Confused thoughts and vague remembrances plagued him. Wearily Dusty shook his head. For here, up close to the sprinkles themselves, he knew that they were not scaled. How could the scale show a binary when the size of the stars was scaled at a half light-year in diameter? I£ that bright one were Sirius as he supposed, it was a single blob because Sirius and its companion were quite lost in the half light-year diameter of the glowing spot that represented the system. And so, of course, was Centauri. No, one could not scale a hundred-thousand light-years down to a thousand feet and hope to retain enough detail to calculate a course.

  He nodded unhappily and looked along the green-yellow line that ended at Sol and realized that at least at one place in the course there was a change of direction that was so shallow that the diameter of the line representing the course was so wide that the ship, in actuality, only traversed space from one side of the line to the other, changed course, and returned to the first side.

  Dusty leaned forward again, looking along the yellow-greenish line that marked the Transgalactic course. At the far end he noted the wink ... wink ... wink of the star beacon, not much different than it had appeared in Scyth Radnor's spacecraft. "Where," he asked, "does their course lead from Sol?"

  "The prospectus, of course, is not shown as finished," said Gant. "But we can show it momentarily." He pressed a button and a dotted line of yellow-green flashed into view, extending from the end of the solid line out and out until it was lost to their view through the star field toward the outward Spiral Cluster.

  Dusty looked at the line. "I suppose it isn't to scale or anything," he said. "But I can't help hoping—Gant, look, suppose this model were truly to scale, couldn't they save themselves a beacon here?"

  "Save a beacon?"

  Dusty nodded and the little spreckles blinked at his eyes. Gant shook his head. "This model was built in the hope that we could play gods standing in our galaxy with a measuring stick. We failed because we are no nearer to the stature of gods than this model is to the stature of the galaxy itself. We cannot play gods, Dusty Britton."

  "I'm not trying to play God," said Dusty solemnly. "I'm just thinking that if you can move a planet away from a star you want to convert into a three-day variable, you might be able to take your barytrine field and slap it around this star here," Dusty pointed to one with a forefinger, "Then you move it aside and that gives you a long run from this beacon to that beacon—missing Sol by a full inch, or—eight-and-a-third light-years."

  Gant blinked. Slowly, he said, "Move the star—" and let his voice trail away into a mutter. "Move the interfering star—" he repeated again. "Then—my Lord!"

  "What's the matter?" asked Dusty.

  "Yours is the glimmer of an idea that makes for the birth of a new concept!" breathed Gant. "Take it from there, Dusty. Don't you see? Move a star and straighten out one dogleg, move two and iron out the course even more. Maybe we could drill a free channel completely through from Marandis to the Spiral Cluster. Maybe from Marandis to Star's End, to Vannevarre, to Rescrustes—perhaps from Laranonne to Ultimane across the whole galaxy, a hundred thousand light years of free flight without a change in course. I—"

  A tiny spot of light came crawling along the yellow-green course to disappear into the tiny pinpoint of light that represented Sol.

  Gant said, "That must have been Transgalactic, returning to Sol to—" then Gant jumped. "Dusty! Come on! There's no time to waste!"

  He hit the buttons on the control panel viciously and the little flying catwalk swung noiselessly back across thousands of light-years of scaled distance to fit into its niche once more. The circular catwalk rose high above the wispy model to its former position.

  Chapter XII

  Of course Dusty had expected there would be quite a difference between his handling of Marandanian spacecraft and the professional. But he did not realize how great this difference was. In a larger ship than Scyth Radnor's, spearheading a conical flight of twelve more ships, he rode behind the pilot and admired the smoothness of the man's operation.

  The color of the plate was high in the blue-violet and the stars leaped out of their background to whip past with hardly a flick. Beacons fairly buzzed and they grew into flaming balls and were gone behind as the pilot moved the 'Tee' bar with a deft motion of one hand and used the other hand to flick back and forth across the controls, changing the viewpanel co-ordinates and adjusting the various factors for flight. He skirted gas-fields dangerously close and zipped between the cluster by the double zigzag with a swaying motion, then humped the spacer down tight and made a dead run for it.

  And behind him in a cone came the rest, in tight formation, conically arranged below the leader in tiers, three, four, five.

  They soared around another beacon, its flashing fire bright blue and the coronal glow reaching out for them, and then the pilot was calling out numbers and a man at the computer was punching keys. On the viewpanel before them lay another beacon, winking ... winking ... winking.

  Behind them, a continuous tape was running through the recording machine, playing its words on the phanoband communication channels: "Calling Transgalactic. Government Priority and Emergency! Calling Transgalactic! You are to disable your barytrine generator, you are to discontinue all operations at once! By Order of the Bureau Of Galactic Affairs!"

  A man sat tense in his chair peering at a greenish screen that had a halo-spot in the middle. The halo was growing larger, but so slow as to be almost steady. The man held a micrometer thimble between his thumb and forefinger and was turning it slowly, keeping a pair of dark lines tangent to the bright edge of the halo. From time to time he would call out a figure which another man would pluck out on a keyboard.

  "Why don't they answer?" breathed Barbara.

  Gant smiled sourly. "Because they are going to go through with it if they can."

  "But—?"

  "They have every legal right to maintain communication silence, even though at the present time there is small point in maintaining secrecy about this rift. Their legal position is one of fair safety; one cannot be convicted of disobeying orders that one does not hear."

  Dusty eyed Gant angrily. "You mean to say they can't hear that signal?"

  "Of course they hear it. But can you prove that they hear it?"

  "On Terra we have a maxim that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is to keep people from shooting people and then claiming that they didn't know that shooting people was forbidden by law."

  "Very sensible. We have the same laws and the same interpretation," smiled Gant. "But in this case we have a different situation. As of the last acknowledged contact with Transgalactic, and specifically that part which is dealing with Sol and Terra, they had every right to proceed. The law has been changed. Now it is up to the law to see that the change in law has been properly d
elivered to the interested parties and that the change is acknowledged. Follow?"

  – – –

  Dusty nodded. "Ex post facto sort of thing. If you pass a law forbidding neckties on Tuesday, you cannot arrest a man for having appeared on Monday without one."

  "Right."

  "But this is already Tuesday."

  "But to be effective, newly-passed laws must be properly posted. Then must be acknowledged from the farthest point in space. And Transgalactic is playing communication-silence."

  Dusty grunted angrily. "And that was the character tint yelped about our vengeful nature? Isn't he guilty of the same?"

  Gant Nerlev nodded. "Of course! Aren't we all of the same cut of human?" The phanoband signal went on:

  "Calling Transgalactic! Discontinue all operations by Order of—" and so forth.

  The squawk box on the wall said, "Calling Gant Nerley with report."

  "Report!"

  "Report slight increase in phanoradiation high in the subnuclear region. Cross semi-collateral traces indicating an increase in lower-level nuclear activity."

  The squawk box clicked off and Dusty looked with puzzlement at Gant Nerley. "What was all that?" he pleaded.

  "He means that Transgalactic is hard at work. The lower level of nuclear reactions has increased in intensity, meaning in simple prediction that the business of making a variable star out of Sol is under way."

  The Marandanian with the filar micrometer on the barytrine detector grumbled. "It's going to be a bit rough."

  "Why?" asked the pilot. "If it weren't for that barytrine we'd never find Sol out of that mess dead ahead. We'd be canvassing the stellar region around there for weeks if we didn't have a focal point—"

  "I know," grunted the detector operator. "First you need a barytrine field large enough to make a homing run on, but then once you're home you'll want a tiny one so you can locate the generator precisely. Well, you can't have 'em both, Jann."