It was a long, painful job. First, he made a chart of the heavens in the area between Ursa Major and Leo. Across that chart he drew four hundred and sixty-eight lines representing the projected path of each of the aberrant stars. At the border of the chart, where each line entered, he made a notation of the apparent velocity of the star—not in light years per hour—but in degrees per hour, to the fifth decimal.
Then he did some reasoning.
“Postulate that the motion which began simultaneously will end simultaneously,” he told himself. “Try a guess at the time. Let’s try ten o’clock tomorrow evening.”
He tried it and looked at the series of positions indicated upon the chart. No. Try one o’clock in the morning. It looked almost like—sense!
Try midnight.
That did it. At any rate, it was close enough. The calculation could be only a few minutes off one way or the other, and there was no point now in working out the exact time. Now that he knew the incredible fact.
He took another drink and stared at the chart grimly.
A trip into the library gave Dr. Hale the further information he needed. The address!
Thus began the saga of Dr. Hale’s journey. A useless journey, it is true, but one that should rank with the trip of the message to Garcia.
He started it with a drink. Then, knowing the combination, he rifled the safe in the office of the president of the university. The note he left in the safe was a masterpiece of brevity. It read:
TAKING MONEY. EXPLAIN LATER
Then he took another drink and put the bottle in his pocket. He went outside and hailed a taxicab. He got in. “Where to, sir?” asked the cabby.
Dr. Hale gave an address.
“Fremont Street?” said the cabby. “Sorry, sir, but I don’t know where that is.”
“In Boston,” said Dr. Hale. “I should have told you, in Boston.”
“Boston? You mean Boston, Massachusetts? That’s a long way from here.”
“Therefore, we better start right away,” said Dr. Hale reasonably. A brief financial discussion and the passing of money, borrowed from the university safe, set the driver’s mind at rest, and they started.
It was a bitter cold night for March, and the heater in the cab didn’t work any too well. But the Tartan Plaid worked superlatively for both Dr. Hale and the cabby, and by the time they reached New Haven, they were singing old-time songs lustily.
“Off we go, into the wide, wild yonder…” their voices roared.
* * * *
It is regrettably reported, but possibly untrue that, in Hartford, Dr. Hale leered out of the window at a young woman waiting for a late streetcar and asked her if she wanted to go to Boston. Apparently, however, she didn’t, for at five o’clock in the morning, when the cab drew up in front of 614 Fremont Street, Boston, only Dr. Hale and the driver were in the cab.
Dr. Hale got out and looked at the house. It was a millionaire’s mansion, and it was surrounded by a high iron fence with barbed wire on top of it. The gate in the fence was locked, and there was no bell button to push.
But the house was only a stone’s throw from the sidewalk, and Dr. Hale was not to be deterred. He threw a stone. Then another. Finally he succeeded in smashing a window.
After a brief interval, a man appeared in the window. A butler, Dr. Hale decided.
“I’m Dr. Milton Hale,” he called out. “I want to see Rutherford R. Sniveley, right away. It’s important.”
“Mr. Sniveley is not at home, sir,” said the butler. “And about that window—”
“The devil with the window,” shouted Dr. Hale. “Where is Sniveley?”
“On a fishing trip.”
“Where?”
“I have orders not to give that information.”
Dr. Hale was just a little drunk, perhaps. “You’ll give it just the same,” he roared. “By orders of the President of the United States!”
The butler laughed. “I don’t see him.”
“You will,” said Hale.
He got back in the cab. The driver had fallen asleep, but Hale shook him awake. “The White House,” said Dr. Hale.
“I—huh?”
“The White House, in Washington,” said Dr. Hale. “And hurry!” He pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket. The cabby looked at it, and groaned. Then he put the bill into his pocket and started the cab.
A light snow was beginning to fall.
As the cab drove off, Rutherford R. Sniveley, grinning, stepped back from the window. Mr. Sniveley had no butler.
If Dr. Hale had been more familiar with the peculiarities of the eccentric Mr. Sniveley, he would have known Sniveley kept no servants in the place overnight but lived alone in the big house at 614
Fremont Street. Each morning at ten o’clock, a small army of servants descended upon the house, did their work as rapidly as possible, and were required to depart before the witching hour of noon. Aside from these two hours of every day, Mr. Sniveley lived in solitary splendor. He had few, if any, social contacts.
Aside from the few hours a day he spent administering his vast interests as one of the country’s leading manufacturers, Mr. Sniveley’s time was his own, and he spent practically all of it in his workshop, making gadgets.
Sniveley had an ashtray which would hand him a lighted cigar any time he spoke sharply to it, and a radio receiver so delicately adjusted that it would cut in automatically on Sniveley-sponsored programs and shut off again when they were finished. He had a bathtub that provided a full orchestral accompaniment to his singing therein, and he had a machine which would read aloud to him from any book which he placed in its hopper.
His life may have been a lonely one, but it was not without such material comforts. Eccentric, yes, but Mr. Sniveley could afford to be eccentric with a net income of four million dollars a year. Not bad for a man who’d started life as the son of a shipping clerk.
Mr. Sniveley chuckled as he watched the taxi drive away, and then he went back to bed and to the sleep of the just.
“So somebody has figured things out nineteen hours ahead of time,” he thought. “Well, a lot of good it will do them!”
There wasn’t any law to punish him for what he’d done.
Bookstores did a land-office business that day in books on astronomy. The public, apathetic at first, was deeply interested now. Even ancient and musty volumes of Newton’s Principia sold at premium prices.
The ether blared with comment upon the new wonder of the skies. Little of the comment was professional, or even intelligent, for most astronomers were asleep that day. They’d managed to stay awake for the first forty-eight hours from the start of the phenomena, but the third day found them worn out mentally and physically and inclined to let the stars take care of themselves while they—the astronomers, not the stars—caught up on sleep.
Staggering offers from the telecast and broadcast studios enticed a few of them to attempt lectures, but their efforts were dreary things, better forgotten. Dr. Carver Blake, broadcasting from KNB, fell soundly asleep between a perigee and an apogee.
Physicists were also greatly in demand. The most eminent of them all, however, was sought in vain. The solitary clue to Dr. Milton Hale’s disappearance, the brief note, “Taking money. Explain later, Hale,” wasn’t much of a help. His sister Agatha feared the worst.
For the first time in history, astronomical news made banner headlines in the newspapers.
IV
Snow had started early that morning along the northern Atlantic seaboard and now it was growing steadily worse. Just outside Waterbury, Connecticut, the driver of Dr. Hale’s cab began to weaken.
It wasn’t human, he thought, for a man to be expected to drive to Boston and then, without stopping, from Boston to Washington. Not even for a hund
red dollars.
Not in a storm like this. Why, he could see only a dozen yards ahead through the driving snow, even when he could manage to keep his eyes open. His fare was slumbering soundly in the back seat. Maybe he could get away with stopping here along the road, for an hour, to catch some sleep. Just an hour. His fare wouldn’t ever know the difference. The guy must be loony, he thought, or why hadn’t he taken a plane or a train?
Dr. Hale would have, of course, if he’d thought of it. But he wasn’t used to traveling and besides, there’d been the Tartan Plaid. A taxi had seemed the easiest way to get anywhere—no worrying about tickets and connections and stations. Money was no object, and the plaid condition of his mind had caused him to overlook the human factor involved in an extended journey by taxi.
When he awoke, almost frozen, in the parked taxi, that human factor dawned upon him. The driver was so sound asleep that no amount of shaking could arouse him. Dr. Hale’s watch had stopped, so he had no idea where he was or what time it was.
Unfortunately, too, he didn’t know how to drive a car. He took a quick drink to keep from freezing and then got out of the cab, and as he did so, a car stopped.
It was a policeman—what is more it was a policeman in a million.
Yelling over the roar of the storm, Hale hailed him. “I’m Dr. Hale,” he shouted. “We’re lost, where am I?”
“Get in here before you freeze,” ordered the policeman. “Do you mean Dr. Milton Hale, by any chance?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve read all your books, Dr. Hale,” said the policeman. “Physics is my hobby, and I’ve always wanted to meet you. I want to ask you about the revised value of the quantum.”
“This is life or death,” said Dr. Hale. “Can you take me to the nearest airport, quick?”
“Of course, Dr. Hale.”
“And look—there’s a driver in that cab, and he’ll freeze to death unless we send aid.”
“I’ll put him in the back seat of my car and then run the cab off the road. We’ll take care of details later.”
“Hurry, please.”
The obliging policeman hurried. He got in and started the car.
“About the revised quantum value, Dr. Hale,” he began, then stopped talking.
Dr. Hale was sound asleep. The policeman drove to Waterbury Airport, one of the largest in the world since the population shift from New York City in the 1960s and ’70s had given it a central position. In front of the ticket office, he gently awakened Dr. Hale.
“This is the airport, sir,” he said.
Even as he spoke, Dr. Hale was leaping out of the car and stumbling into the building, yelling, “Thanks,” over his shoulder and nearly falling down in doing so.
The warm-up roaring of the motors of a super-stratoliner out on the field lent wings to his heels as he dashed for the ticket window.
“What plane’s that?” he yelled.
“Washington Special, due out in one minute. But I don’t think you can make it.”
Dr. Hale slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the ledge. “Ticket,” he gasped. “Keep change.”
He grabbed the ticket and ran, getting into the plane just as the doors were being closed. Panting, he fell into a seat, the ticket still clutched in his hand. He was sound asleep before the hostess strapped him in for the blind takeoff.
An hour later, the hostess awakened him. The passengers were disembarking.
Dr. Hale rushed out of the plane and ran across the field to the airport building. A big clock told him that it was nine o’clock, and he felt elated as he ran for the door marked “Taxis.” He got into the nearest one.
“White House,” he told the driver. “How long’ll it take?”
“Ten minutes.”
Dr. Hale gave a sigh of relief and sank back against the cushions. He didn’t go back to sleep this time. He was wide awake now. But he closed his eyes to think out the words he’d use in explaining matters.…
“Here you are, sir.”
Dr. Hale gave a sigh of relief and sank back against the cab into the building. It didn’t look as he had expected it to look. But there was a desk, and he ran up to it.
“I’ve got to see the President, quick. It’s vital.” The clerk frowned. “The President of what?”
Dr. Hale’s eyes went wide. “The President of wh—say, what building is this? And what town?” The clerk’s frown deepened. “This is the White House Hotel,” he said. “Seattle, Washington.”
Dr. Hale fainted. He woke up in a hospital three hours later. It was then midnight, Pacific Time, which meant it was three o’clock in the morning on the Eastern seaboard. It had, in fact, been midnight already in Washington, D.C., and in Boston, when he had been leaving the Washington Special in Seattle.
Dr. Hale rushed to the window and shook his fists, both of them, at the sky. A futile gesture.
Back in the East, however, the storm had stopped by twilight, leaving a light mist in the air. The star-conscious public had thereupon deluged the weather bureaus with telephoned requests about the persistence of the mist.
“A breeze off the ocean is expected,” they were told. “It is blowing now, in fact, and within an hour or two will have cleared off the light fog.”
By eleven-fifteen the skies of Boston were clear.
Untold thousands braved the bitter cold and stood staring upward at the unfolding pageant of the no-longer-eternal stars. It almost looked as though—an incredible development had occurred.
And then, gradually, the murmur grew. By a quarter to twelve, the thing was certain, and the murmur hushed and then grew louder than ever, waxing toward midnight. Different people reacted differently, of course, as might be expected. There was laughter as well as indignation, cynical amusement as well as shocked horror. There was even admiration.
Soon, in certain parts of the city, a concerted movement on the part of those who knew an address on Fremont Street began to take place. Movement afoot and in cars and public vehicles, converging.
At five minutes of twelve, Rutherford R. Sniveley sat waiting within his house. He was denying himself the pleasure of looking until, at the last moment, the thing was complete.
It was going well. The gathering murmur of voices, mostly angry voices, outside his house told him that. He heard his name shouted.
Just the same, he waited until the twelfth stroke of the clock before he stepped out upon the balcony. Much as he wanted to look upward, he forced himself to look down at the street first. The milling crowd was there and it was angry. But he had only contempt for the milling crowd.
Police cars were pulling up, too, and he recognized the mayor of Boston getting out of one of them, and the chief of police was with him. But so what? There wasn’t any law covering this.
Then having denied himself the supreme pleasure long enough, he turned his eyes up to the silent sky, and there it was. The four hundred and sixty-eight brightest stars, spelling out:
USE SNIVELY’S SOAP
For just a second did his satisfaction last. Then his face began to turn an apoplectic purple.
“My heavens!” said Mr. Sniveley. “It’s spelled wrong!” His face grew more purple still, and then, as a tree falls, he fell backward through the window.
An ambulance rushed the fallen magnate to the nearest hospital, but he was pronounced dead—of apoplexy—upon entrance.
But misspelled or not, the eternal stars held their positions as of that midnight. The aberrant motion had stopped, and again the stars were fixed. Fixed to spell—SNIVELY’S SOAP.
Of the many explanations offered by all and sundry who professed some physical and astronomical knowledge, none was more lucid—or closer to the actual truth—than that put forth by Wendell Mehan, president emeritus of the New York Astronomical Society.
&n
bsp; “Obviously, the phenomenon is a trick of refraction,” said Dr. Mehan. “It is manifestly impossible for any force contrived by man to move a star. The stars, therefore, still occupy their old places in the firmament.
“I suggest that Sniveley must have contrived a method of refracting the light of the stars, somewhere in or just above the atmospheric layer of the earth, so that they appear to have changed their positions. This is done, probably, by radio waves or similar waves, sent on some fixed frequency from a set—or possibly a series of four hundred and sixty-eight sets—somewhere upon the surface of the earth. Although we do not understand just how it is done, it is no more unthinkable that light rays should be bent by a field of waves than by a prism or by gravitational force.
“Since Sniveley was not a great scientist, I imagine that his discovery was empiric rather than logical—an accidental find. It is quite possible that even the discovery of his projector will not enable present-day scientists to understand its secret, any more than an aboriginal savage could understand the operation of a simple radio receiver by taking one apart.
“My principal reason for this assertion is the fact that the refraction obviously is a fourth-dimensional phenomenon, or its effect would be purely local to one portion of the globe. Only in the fourth dimension could light be so refracted.…”
There was more but it is better to skip to his final paragraph:
“This effect cannot possibly be permanent—more permanent, that is, than the wave-projector which causes it. Sooner or later, Sniveley’s machine will be found and shut off or will break down or wear out of its own volition. Undoubtedly it includes vacuum tubes which will someday blow out, as do the tubes in our radios.…”
The excellence of Dr. Mehan’s analysis was shown two months and eight days later, when the Boston Electric Co. shut off, for non-payment of bills, service to a house situated at 901 West Rogers Street, ten blocks from the Sniveley mansion. At the instant of the shut-off, excited reports from the night side of Earth brought the news that the stars had flashed back to their former positions instantaneously.
The Fredric Brown Megapack: 33 Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 15