Viktor said, not quite understanding, “Are all the stars screwed up?”
“No! Look at this nearby bunch—stars within five or six light-years. They haven’t changed. But these more distant ones— But that’s impossible!” he cried angrily.
“What’s impossible?”
“Look, damn it! Here, everything in this direction is red-shifted—all these others are blued. And that couldn’t happen, Viktor, not possibly. Unless—”
“Come on, Dad! Unless what?” Viktor demanded, angry and uneasy.
Pal Sorricaine shook his head. “Let’s find Billy,” he growled, and Viktor heard with alarm the worry in his father’s voice.
They didn’t find Billy Stockbridge. Billy found them. He was coming up the hill, very fast, when he saw them coming down. When Pal Sorricaine started his angry questioning, Billy just shook his head. “Come into the observatory,” he said. “Let me show you.”
And inside the little observers’ room he sat down at the keypad without another word. “This is an old star photograph,” he explained over his shoulder as a sky view appeared on the screen, a negative, black dots on a white background. “Now I’m superimposing one I just took.” The number of stars suddenly doubled and then began to move about as Billy worked over the keypad. “Just a moment till I get them registered . . .” The stars abruptly coalesced, as far as Viktor could see, but Billy was busy setting up another program.
Then he leaned back as the image began to pulse, like a fast heartbeat, twice a second. “Now look,” he ordered.
Viktor glanced at his father, silently staring at the screen with his brows screwed together in perplexity—or worry? “I am looking,” Viktor said, annoyed. “I don’t see anything, but— hey! Isn’t that one jumping back and forth? And that one, too—and that over there . . .”
“My God,” Pal Sorricaine said softly.
Billy nodded grimly. “In this segment of the sky I’ve found twenty-three stars that show movement on the blink comparator. As soon as I made those Doppler measurements I had to make an optical observation. The Dopplers were right. Look again, Viktor. Look at the ones on the edges of the screen. This one—” He put a finger on a large dot near the left edge. “—and this little one over here on the right. Wait a minute, I’ll slow the blinks down.”
And when he did, Viktor saw that as the dot on the left jumped left, the dot on the right jumped right. “They’re all moving away from the middle!” he cried. And then, on second thought, “Or toward it?”
“Away is right,” Billy told him soberly. “That’s why I picked this frame to show you. The ones we see moving are the nearest stars—some of them, anyway—the ones with the largest parallax. They’re all in motion.”
Viktor stared at him in silent consternation. “But they can’t be!”
And from behind him his father said, “You’re right, Viktor. They’re not moving. But somehow or other—and goddam rapidly, too—all of a sudden we are!”
CHAPTER 7
It was a pity that Pal Sorricaine never had any possible chance of meeting Wan-To, because of course Wan-To could have explained it all to him. Wan-To might even have been happy to discuss it, because he was pleased with his work.
After Wan-To, observing through his Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair, saw the first batch of stars begin to pick up speed, he paused to enjoy the spectacle. It was good work, he thought contentedly. It was also a very smart ruse de guerre. He was sure that if he had seen this happening, without warning, his first reaction would have been to zap every one of those stars. Immediately, without second thought. They were definitely unnatural.
His sibs were bound to do the same. They might try to figure out just what was causing it, but they were very unlikely to have any ERP setups near enough for quick study, and they wouldn’t find his matter doppel. It would make little difference if they did. They would assume one of those stars held a fleeing Wan-To—or somebody—and they would zap them.
It was such a good ploy that he did it again. If it was a good strategy to set up one false target it would be even better to set up several.
That was no problem for him, but it was a somewhat boring prospect. However, he didn’t have to do it himself. Anything that Wan-To had ever done once he never had to do a second time, unless he wanted to for the fun of it—not when he could so easily make a copy of enough of himself to do the job. So he duplicated those parts of himself that were needed for that task, as a small “doppel” inside his own star, and instructed it to repeat the process with a few other groups of stars. The more the better, when it came to confusing his opponents; let them have a lot of things to worry about. Anyway, it was very little trouble. Making such copies of parts of himself was no harder for Wan-To than copying a computer file was for a human being. He didn’t even bother to oversee his copy’s work, so he didn’t notice that one of the groups of stars included the star that held the planets that included the world humans had come to call Newmanhome.
Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered to Wan-To if he had.
Then, for the first time in quite a while, Wan-To felt sufficiently at ease to think about relaxing for a bit. He wondered what was happening with his neighbors, and he was beginning to feel a little lonesome.
Not much had changed in his immediate vicinity. If a human astronomer had been sitting on the surface of Wan-To’s G-3 star and gazing at the heavens—assuming the human could somehow have avoided flashing into a wisp of ions long enough to gaze at anything at all—he would have seen little change. He would have observed that most of the stars in Wan-To’s sky were not perceptibly moving or changing color. For that matter, to the human observer it would have appeared that hardly any of them had flared into “Sorricaine-Mtiga objects,” as so many had in fact been doing for the past few dozen Earth years; the human observer would have been woefully behind the news.
The reason that was so was that the human eye doesn’t see anything but light. And light is bound by its limiting velocity of 186,000 miles a second. That’s pretty slow—far too dreadfully slow for Wan-To’s kind. Things were happening, all right, but a human observer would have had to wait a long time to find out what they were.
Wan-To, with his ERP pairs and his tachyons, was a lot better off, observationally speaking. He knew almost instantly what was happening many hundreds of light-years away. For example, he knew that nearly eighty stars had in fact been zapped by someone. He still didn’t know who the someone was—well, the someones. He knew that more than one someone was involved, if only because he had zapped six of the stars himself, laying down a little probing fire of his own. He also knew that one or two of those random shots had come uncomfortably close to his own G-3, though he was pretty sure that was just an accident. He didn’t guess at that. It was too important; he worked it out carefully. Wan-To had his own equivalent of chi-squared analysis, and the most rigorous interpretation of the positions of the flared stars he could make showed a highly random distribution.
The other thing Wan-To didn’t know was whether anybody had been hit.
Wan-To did care about that, after his fashion. True, at least some of his neighbors seemed to be trying to kill him. But they were the only neighbors he had—not to mention that, in fact, they were in some sense his own flesh and blood.
Then he heard a signal he hadn’t heard in some time. Someone was calling him.
When one of Wan-To’s kind wanted to talk to another he simply activated the appropriate Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky cluster and announced his name—that is, he made the sound that passed for a name, among the plasma minds like Wan-To. They didn’t make real sounds, of course. “Sound” is a matter of vibrations in the air, and certainly there was no gaseous atmosphere where any of them lived. But even in the interior of a star there are what are called acoustic phenomena—you might as well call them sounds, though no human ear could have heard them—and each one of Wan-To’s siblings made a characteristic sound. There was Haigh-tik, who was actually (in a sense) Wan-To’s first-born, and took after Wan-To a lot—friendly, deceitful, and very, very smart. There was Gorrrk (it was a sound rather like the cooing of a basso-profundo pigeon), and Hghumm (guttural white noise, like a cold engine finally starting), and poor, defective Wan-Wan-Wan, the dumbest of the lot, whose “name” was a little like the sound of a motorcyclist gunning his motor at a red light. Nobody paid much attention to Wan-Wan-Wan. Wan-To had made him late in his “parenthood,” when he had become very cautious about how much of his own powers he passed on to his progeny, and poor Wan-Wan-Wan was pretty close to an idiot. There were eleven of them, all told, Wan-To himself included, and seven of them had tried to call him while he was busy setting his stars in motion.