It was an unusual request but the chief operator obliged and got him a cab.
He found the Cole Observatory in a state resembling a madhouse.
The following morning most newspapers carried the news. Most of them gave it two or three inches on an inside page but the facts were there.
The facts were that a number of stars, in general the brightest ones, within the past forty-eight hours had developed noticeable proper motions.
“This does not imply,” quipped the New York Spotlight, “ that their motions have been in any way improper in the “past. ‘Proper motion’ to an astronomer means the movement of a star across the face of the sky with relation to other stars. Hitherto, a star named ‘Barnard’s Star’ in the constellation Ophiuchus has exhibited the greatest proper motion of any known star, moving at the rate of ten and a quarter seconds a year. ‘Barnard’s Star’ is not visible to the naked eye.”
Probably no astronomer on earth slept that day.
The observatories locked their doors, with their full staffs on the inside, and admitted no one, except occasional newspaper reporters who stayed a while and went away with puzzled faces, convinced at last that something strange was happening.
Blink-microscopes blinked, and so did astronomers. Coffee was consumed in prodigious quantities. Police riot squads were called to six United States observatories. Two of these calls were occasioned by attempts to break in on the part of frantic amateurs without. The other four were summoned to quell fist-fights developing out of arguments within the observatories themselves. The office of Lick Observatory was a shambles, and James Truwell, Astronomer Royal of England, was sent to London Hospital with a mild concussion, the result of having a heavy photographic plate smashed over his head by an irate subordinate.
But these incidents were exceptions. The observatories, in general, were well-ordered madhouses.
The center of attention in the more enterprising ones was the loudspeaker in which reports from the Eastern Hemisphere could be relayed to the inmates. Practically all observatories kept open wires to the night side of earth, where the phenomena were still under scrutiny.