Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

a flower in a medieval field of uncut grass, of about the eighth magnitude.

Through the telescope it was a spreading, crawling cloud of incandescent

gas something under two light years in diameter, vaguely crablike in shape,

still expanding in the sky at the rate of about four angular seconds per

year. Its apparent diameter was already so great that a half-credit coin

held at arm’s length would not quite cover it, although of course the

nebula itself was quite invisible to the naked eye.

And all the Stars a Stage 11

There was still a star in its heart, but it was a shrunken corpse now, well

on its way toward becoming a white dwarf.

But the naked eye had not been the only observer even then. By an amazing

stroke of luck-bad luck, in Jorn~s soured view–one of history’s greatest

astronomical theorists had been watching it, through one of history’s first

really efficient large electronically amplified telescopes, at the instant

it had exploded. Since it proved to be located in a thin dust cloud,

undetected until then, the expanding globe of light racing outward from its

first brightening afforded a direct visual check of the speed of light, in

the vastest laboratory imaginable; while successive spectrographs of the

entire cataclysm unveiled the secrets of not just one, but a whole series

of nuclear reactions, several of which proved to be duplicatible- with

considerable effort–on a controllable scale. The Age of Power had arrived,

borne upon-starlight.

A head poked around the door into Jorn’s ruminations.