“Must be nice to be able to do your own thing,” Craymer agreed. “You steer clear of all the sordid political stuff then, huh?”
“Yes, I suppose we do . . . but it has not always been so. I have held a number of government scientific positions, over several years . . . in Germany you understand, before the formation of U.S. Europe. However . . .” Zimmermann sighed, “when it became apparent that official support would be progressively restricted to activities of the kind in which neither my conscience nor my interests made me wish to participate, I resigned and joined the International Scientific Foundation. It is completely autonomous, you see, being funded entirely from private and voluntary sources.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m surprised the USE government didn’t try and make things difficult . . . or maybe you don’t push around easy?”
Zimmermann smiled and scratched an eyebrow.
“I think it was more a question of persuading them that neither I nor my particular kind of knowledge would have been of very much use to them,” he said.
Craymer reflected that the more he saw of life, the more he became convinced that the quality of modesty was the preserve solely of the truly great men that he happened to meet. The amplified voice of the floor director boomed around the room, curtailing their conversation.
“All right, everybody. In your places for the sequence 5 retake now. This will be the last one today. Let’s make it good.” The murmuring died away and the arc lights came on to flood a backdrop set up against one wall. To the right of the backdrop, banks of instrument panels and consoles carried a colorful array of blinking lights and display screens. Zimmermann moved forward from the jumble of cameras, microphone booms, chairs, and figures, to stand in the semicircle of light in front of the consoles. A short distance to his right, Martin Borel, compere of the documentary, took his position in front of the backdrop.
The floor director’s voice came again. “Mart—this time, start moving to your left as soon as you say ‘. . . the most perplexing phenomena known to man.’ Take it at the same speed as last time—that way the professor will appear on camera just as you introduce him. Okay?”
“Sure thing,” Borel acknowledged.
“Professor?”
“Yes?”
“When you refer to the equipment behind you for the first time, do you think you could move back for about five seconds so that we can pan in on it, please? Then close back in with Mart and resume the dialogue.”
“Certainly.”
“Thank you. Okay—roll it.” Borel straightened up and assumed a posture with his hands high, near his shoulders. The clapperboard echoed. “Action.”
“The black hole,” Borel began, speaking in the firm, resonant tones of the professional. “Strange regions of space where matter and energy are lost forever without trace, and time itself stands still. We have traced the history of black holes through from early speculations all the way to the confirmed realities of the present day. Scientists can now draw for us an incredible picture of the bewildering laws of an unfamiliar physics, that dominate these mysterious bodies. But despite all this new knowledge, unexpected riddles continue to emerge. The black hole is still, and will continue for a long time to be, one of the most perplexing phenomena known to man.”
Borel began walking slowly across the front of the backdrop toward Zimmermann.
“To give you an idea of the kinds of riddle that investigators into black-hole physics are meeting today, let me introduce Professor Heinrich Zimmermann of ISF, Director of Joliot-Curie and perhaps one of the most distinguished physical astronomers of our time.
“Professor, the receiver that we saw outside is collecting radiation from the vicinity of a black hole in space. Down here you are analyzing the information that the computers have extracted from that radiation. Could you summarize for us, please, what you are finding and what new questions you are being forced to ask?”
By now Zimmermann had been through this routine three times.
“The receiver is at this moment trained on a binary system known as Cygnus X-1,” he replied. “A binary system is one in which two stars are formed very close to one another and orbit about a common center of mass under their mutual gravitational coupling. Most binary systems comprise two ordinary stars, each of which conforms to one of the standard classifications. Some binaries, however, contain only one normal, visible star, the second body being invisible. The so-called dark companion emits no light but can be detected by its gravitational influence on the visible star. In many cases, they are known to be neutron stars as described earlier in the program. In a number of confirmed instances, however, collapse of the companion body has continued beyond the point at which a neutron star is formed, which results in the condition of ultimate degeneracy of matter—a black hole. Cygnus X-1 is an example of precisely this.”