Harry Wesson, who worked the evening shift, had just come into the office and was hanging up his topcoat. “Hey, Harry!” Roger said. “There’s something wrong with this blinking blinker.”
“Yeah?” said I Harry.
“Yeah. Pollux moved a tenth of a second.”
“Yeah?” said harry. “Well, that’s about right for parallax. Thirty-two light years—parallax of Pollux is point one o one. Little over a tenth of a second, so if your comparison plate was taken about six months ago, when the earth was on the other side of her orbit, that’s about right.”
“But, Harry, the comparison plate was taken night before last. They’re twenty-four hours apart.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Look for yourself.”
It wasn’t quite five o’clock yet, but Harry Wesson magnanimously overlooked that and sat down in front of the blink-mike. He manipulated the shutter, and Pollux obligingly jumped.
There wasn’t any doubt about its being Pollux, for it was far and away the brightest dot on the plate. Pollux is a star of 1.2 magnitude, one of the twelve brightest in the sky and by far the brightest in Gemini. And none of the faint stars around it had moved at all.
“Um,” said Harry Wesson. He frowned and looked again. “One of those plates is misdated, that’s all. I’ll check into it first thing.”