As he walked, he thought over Elsie’s comments and decided that they were as intelligent as anything he’d heard at the Cole Observatory. In one way, they’d brought out one angle he’d never thought of before, and that made it more incomprehensible.
All these movements had started the same evening—yet they hadn’t. Centauri must have started moving four years or so ago, and Rigel five hundred and forty years ago when Christopher Columbus was still in short pants, if any, and Vega must have started acting up the year he—Roger, not Vega—was born, twenty-six years ago. Each star out of the hundreds must have started on a date in exact relation to its distance from Earth. Exact relation, to a light-second, for check-ups of all the photographic plates taken night before last indicated that all the new stellar movements had started at four-ten a.m., Greenwich time. What a mess!
Unless this meant that light, after all, had infinite velocity.
If it didn’t have—and it is symptomatic of Roger’s perplexity that he could postulate that incredible “if “—then -then what? Things were just as puzzling as before.
Mostly he felt outraged that such events should be happening.
He went into a restaurant and sat down. A radio was blaring out the latest composition in dissarythm, the new quarter-tone dance music in which chorded woodwinds provided background patterns for the mad melodies pounded on tuned tomtoms. Between each number and the next a frenetic announcer extolled the virtues of a product.
Munching a sandwich, Roger listened appreciatively to the dissarhythm and managed not to hear the commercials. Most intelligent people of the nineties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not to hear a human voice coming from a loudspeaker, although they could hear and enjoy the then infrequent intervals of music between announcements. In an age when advertising competition was so keen that there was scarcely a bare wall or an unbillboarded lot within miles of a population center, discriminating people could retain normal outlooks on life only by carefully-cultivated partial blindness and partial deafness which enabled them to ignore the bulk of that concerted assault upon their senses.
For that reason a good part of the newscast which followed the dissarhythm program went, as it were, into one of Roger’s ears and out the other before it occurred to him that he was not listening to a panegyric on patent breakfast foods.
He thought he recognized the voice, and after a sentence or two he was sure that it was that of Milton Hale, the eminent physicist whose new theory on the principle of indeterminancy had recently occasioned so much scientific controversy. Apparently, Dr. Hale was being interviewed by a radio announcer.
“…a heavenly body, therefore, may have position or velocity, but it may not be said to have both at the same time, with relation to any given space-time frame.”