Page:Astounding Science Fiction (1950-01).djvu/15

 isn't some perfectly natural commonplace explanation. It's a depressing fact that most of the exciting results a scientist gets can eventually be traced to errors of observation. Think of all the times Mira Ceti at maximum has been mistaken for a nova."

"Everybody knows that," Arnold objected. "But where's the chance for error in this observation? It's so simple."

"Maybe not so simple as you think. Remember the seeing was terrible. That time I gave you might have been off by a couple of minutes—maybe more."

"That still leaves thirty minutes to explain."

"All right. Now the question is how much faith can we put in the Ephemeris? It wouldn't surprise me if the predicted time itself was way off."

"As much as that?"

"Well, I know the predictions for Jupiter's four great satellites are based on Sampson's tables of 1910, and they certainly must require some kind of correction by this time. I don't know how often the Naval Observatory checks up on things like that. But until we do know—and have a lot more observations—we really don't know a thing."

"O.K., O.K.," said Arnold impatiently. "All the same, I still think it's a whale of an error."

"It's a king size one, I'll admit," said Stoddard, relighting his pipe. "And now there's something I wish you'd explain to me. After all that palaver this afternoon I still don't understand how this so-called Xi effect ties in with our infrared observations."

Arnold reached for the pencil and a pad of yellow scratch paper. "Assume that this line represents the boundary of our local universe or ‘clot'," he said, drawing an irregular closed figure with a dot near the center. "According to Friedmann, occasionally some disturbance in the outer super-cosmos or Xi space becomes sufficiently violent to affect a particular clot. Now there are several things that can happen as a result, but by far the most probable is that the clot will begin to shrink, very slowly at first and then more rapidly. But for a long time nobody would be aware of the shrinkage because everything within the clot shrinks in proportion, with one exception. That exception is the wave length of electromagnetic radiation.

"Suppose the boundary has shrunk until it has an average radius of a thousand kilometers." He drew a line from the central dot to a point on the boundary. "Obviously nothing can exist within the boundary bigger than the boundary itself. Therefore, this means that all electromagnetic radiation exceeding a thousand kilometers is eliminated. That accounts for the fadeout in radio transmission. As the boundary continues to shrink shorter wave lengths keep being cut out all the time."

"I think I'm beginning to get it," 15