Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

Almost nobody listened to any messages from home, though those, since they

came in by radio, would be cut off much more quickly~as soon as the Javelin

passed the speed of light, as she would by the end of her first year in

space. But the new mood was too fragile to test with the corrosions of

whatever was being broadcast at home, even with that large majority of

messages which were not intended for the fleet at all.

Kamblin, however, listened; he had to. Eventually, he was forced to ask

Ertak to call together the officers for a report.

“I won’t burden you with any specifies about content, since I’m pretty sure

you don’t want them,” he said. “But the changes in the Sun are going rather

faster than I had anticipated, and I couldn’t account for them by any solar

process; so I had to have recourse to the radio to see if they were real,

or just an artifact of the time-velocity relationship.”

‘And are they?” Ertak said, startled. “I certainly would have predicted

that they wouldn’t be.”

“But they are, Director. It’s lop-sided and I think I can show you why;

there is no accompanying mass effect, and having found that out from theory

in advance, you must have assumed that the contraction equation was

meaningless under the conditions of your drive-field. I made that

assumption too, but with the evidence now in hand, I can see where the

error hes.”

“What does it mean for us?” Ailiss asked.

“Right now, all it means is that the radio broadcasts from home are

beginning to sound a little tinny, despite the fact that they should sound