The Star (27 page)

‘For some reason, it seems to surprise many people that an interest in astronomy is compatible with business acumen or even with common sense. This is a complete delusion,’ said Harry with much feeling; ‘I was once practically skinned alive at a poker game by a professor of astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology. But in Edgar’s case, shrewdness seemed to have been combined with a vague impracticality in one and the same person; once he had made his money, he took no further interest in it, or indeed in anything else except the construction of progressively larger reflecting telescopes.

‘On his retirement, Edgar had purchased a fine old house high up on the Yorkshire moors. It was not as bleak and Wuthering-Heightsish as it may sound; there was a splendid view, and the Bentley would get you into town in fifteen minutes. Even so, the change did not altogether suit Mary, and it is hard not to feel rather sorry for her. There was no work for her to do, since the servants ran the house, and she had few intellectual resources to fall back on. She took up riding, joined all the book clubs, read the
Tatler
and
Country Life
from cover to cover, but still felt that there was something missing.

‘It took her about four months to find what she wanted; and then she met it at an otherwise dismal village fete. It was six foot three, ex-Coldstream Guards, with a family that looked on the Norman Conquest as a recent and regrettable piece of impertinence. It was called Rupert de Vere Courtenay (we’ll forget about the other six Christian names) and it was generally regarded as the most eligible bachelor in the district.

‘Two full weeks passed before Rupert, who was a high-principled English gentleman, brought up in the best traditions of the aristocracy, succumbed to Mary’s blandishments. His downfall was accelerated by the fact that his family was trying to arrange a match for him with the Honourable Felicity Fauntleroy, who was generally admitted to be no great beauty. Indeed, she looked so much like a horse that it was risky for her to go near her father’s famous stables when the stallions were exercising.

‘Mary’s boredom, and Rupert’s determination to have a last desperate fling, had the inevitable result. Edgar saw less and less of his wife, who found an amazing number of reasons for driving into town during the week. At first he was quite glad that the circle of her acquaintances was widening so rapidly, and it was several months before he realised that it was doing nothing of the sort.

‘It is quite impossible to keep any liaison secret for long in a small country town like Stocksborough, though this is a fact that every generation has to learn afresh, usually the hard way. Edgar discovered the truth by accident, but some kind friend would have told him sooner or later. He had driven into town for a meeting of the local astronomical society—taking the Rolls, since his wife had already gone with the Bentley—and was momentarily held up on the way home by the crowds emerging from the last performance at the local cinema. In the heart of the crowd was Mary, accompanied by a handsome young man whom Edgar had seen before but couldn’t identify at the moment. He would have thought no more of the matter had not Mary gone out of her way the next morning to mention that she’d been unable to get a seat in the cinema and had spent a quiet evening with one of her women friends.

‘Even Edgar, engrossed though he now was in the study of variable stars, began to put two and two together when he realised that his wife was gratuitously lying. He gave no hint of his vague suspicions, which ceased to be vague after the local Hunt Ball. Though he hated such functions (and this one, by bad luck, occurred just when U Orionis was going through its minimum and he had to miss some vital observations), he realised that this would give him a chance of identifying his wife’s companion, since everyone in the district would be there.

‘It proved absurdly easy to locate Rupert and to get into conversation with him. Although the young man seemed a little ill at ease, he was pleasant company, and Edgar was surprised to find himself taking quite a fancy to him. If his wife had to have a lover, on the whole he approved her choice.

‘And there matters rested for some months, largely because Edgar was too busy grinding and figuring a fifteen-inch mirror to do anything about it. Twice a week Mary drove into town, ostensibly to meet her friends or to go to the cinema, and arrived back at the lodge just before midnight. Edgar could see the lights of the car for miles away across the moor, the beams twisting and turning as his wife drove homeward with what always seemed to him excessive speed. That had been one of the reasons why they seldom went out together; Edgar was a sound but cautious driver, and his comfortable cruising speed was ten miles an hour below Mary’s.

‘About three miles from the house the lights of the car would disappear for several minutes as the road was hidden by a hill. There was a dangerous hairpin bend here; in a piece of highway construction more reminiscent of the Alps than of rural England, the road hugged the edge of a cliff and skirted an unpleasant hundred-foot drop before it straightened out on the homeward stretch. As the car rounded this bend, its headlights would shine full on the house, and there were many evenings when Edgar was dazzled by the sudden glare as he sat at the eyepiece of his telescope. Luckily, this stretch of road was very little used at night; if it had been, observations would have been well-nigh impossible, since it took Edgar’s eyes ten or twenty minutes to recover fully from the direct blast of the headlights. This was no more than a minor annoyance, but when Mary started to stay out four or five evenings a week it became a confounded nuisance. Something, Edgar decided, Would Have To Be Done.

‘It will not have escaped your notice,’ continued Harry Purvis, ‘that throughout all this affair Edgar Burton’s behaviour was hardly that of a normal person. Indeed, anyone who could have switched his mode of life so completely from that of a busy London stockbroker to that of a near-recluse on the Yorkshire moors must have been a little odd in the first place. I would hesitate, however, to say that he was more than eccentric until the time when Mary’s midnight arrivals started to interfere with the serious business of observation. And even thereafter, one must admit that there was a certain crazy logic in his actions.

‘He had ceased to love his wife some years earlier, but he did object to her making a fool of him. And Rupert de Vere Courtenay seemed a pleasant young chap; it would be an act of kindness to rescue him. Well, there was a beautifully simple solution, which had come to Edgar in a literally blinding flash. And I literally mean literally, for it was while he was blinking in the glare of Mary’s headlights that Edgar conceived the only really perfect murder I’ve ever encountered. It is strange how apparently irrelevant factors can determine a man’s life; though I hate to say anything against the oldest and noblest of the sciences, it cannot be denied that if Edgar had never become an astronomer, he would never have become a murderer. For his hobby provided part of the motive, and a good deal of the means…

‘He could have made the mirror he needed—he was quite an expert by this time—but astronomical accuracy was unnecessary in this case, and it was simpler to pick up a secondhand searchlight reflector at one of those war-surplus shops off Leicester Square. The mirror was about three feet across, and it was only a few hours’ work to fix up a mounting for it and to arrange a crude but effective arc light at its focus. Getting the beam lined up was equally straightforward, and no one took the slightest notice of his activities, since his experimenting was now taken for granted by wife and servants alike.

‘He made the final brief test on a clear, dark night and settled down to await Mary’s return. He did not waste the time, of course, but continued his routine observations of a group of selected stars. By midnight, there was still no sign of Mary, but Edgar did not mind, because he was getting a nicely consistent series of stellar magnitudes which were lying smoothly on his curves. Everything was going well, though he did stop to wonder just why Mary was so unusually late.

‘At last he saw the headlights of the car flickering on the horizon, and rather reluctantly broke off his observations. When the car had disappeared behind the hill, he was waiting with his hand on the switch. His timing was perfect; the instant the car came round the curve and the headlights shone on him he closed the arc.

‘Meeting another car at night can be unpleasant enough even when you are prepared for it and are driving on a straight road. But if you are rounding a hairpin bend, and
know
that there is no other car coming, yet suddenly find yourself staring directly into a beam fifty times as powerful as any headlight—well, the results are more than unpleasant.

‘They were exactly what Edgar had calculated. He switched off his beam almost at once, but the car’s own lights showed him all that he wanted to see. He watched them swing out over the valley and then curve down, ever more and more swiftly, until they disappeared below the crest of the hill. A red glow flared for a few seconds, but the explosion was barely audible, which was just as well, since Edgar did not want to disturb the servants.

‘He dismantled his little searchlight and returned to the telescope; he had not quite completed his observations. Then, satisfied that he had done a good night’s work, he went to bed.

‘His sleep was sound but short, for about an hour later the telephone started to ring. No doubt someone had found the wreckage, but Edgar wished they could have left it until morning, for an astronomer needed all the sleep he could get. With some irritation he picked up the phone, and it was several seconds before he realised that his wife was at the other end of the line. She was calling from Courtenay Place, and wanted to know what had happened to Rupert.

‘It seemed that they had decided to make a clean breast of the whole affair, and Rupert (not unfortified by strong liquor) had agreed to be a man and break the news to Edgar. He was going to call back as soon as he had done this, and tell Mary how her husband had received it. She had waited with mounting impatience and alarm as long as she could, until at last anxiety had got the better of discretion.

‘I need hardly say that the shock to Edgar’s already somewhat unbalanced nervous system was considerable. After Mary had been talking to her husband for several minutes, she realised that he had gone completely round the bend. It was not until the next morning that she discovered that this was precisely what Rupert had failed to do, unfortunately for him.

‘In the long run, I think Mary came out of it rather well. Rupert wasn’t really very bright, and it would never have been a satisfactory match. As it was, when Edgar was duly certified, Mary received power of attorney for the estate and promptly moved to Dartmouth, where she took a charming flat near the Royal Naval College and seldom had to drive the new Bentley for herself.

‘But all that is by the way,’ concluded Harry, ‘and before some of you sceptics ask me how I know all this, I got it from the dealer who purchased Edgar’s telescopes when they locked him up. It’s a sad fact that no one would believe his confession; the general opinion was that Rupert had had too much to drink and had been driving too fast on a dangerous road. That may be true, but I prefer to think it isn’t. After all, that is such a humdrum way to die. To be killed by a death ray would be a fate much more fitting for a de Vere Courtenay—and in the circumstances I don’t see how anyone can deny that it
was
a death ray that Edgar had used. It was a ray, and it killed someone. What more do you want?’

Out of the Sun

First published in
If
, February 1958

Collected in
The Other Side of the Sky

If you have only lived on Earth, you have never seen the sun. Of course, we could not look at it directly, but only through dense filters that cut its rays down to endurable brilliance. It hung there forever above the low, jagged hills to the west of the Observatory, neither rising nor setting, yet moving around a small circle in the sky during the eighty-eight-day year of our little world. For it is not quite true to say that Mercury keeps the same face always turned toward the sun; it wobbles slightly on its axis, and there is a narrow twilight belt which knows such terrestrial commonplaces as dawn and sunset.

We were on the edge of the twilight zone, so that we could take advantage of the cool shadows yet could keep the sun under continuous surveillance as it hovered there above the hills. It was a full-time job for fifty astronomers and other assorted scientists; when we’ve kept it up for a hundred years or so, we may know something about the small star that brought life to Earth.

There wasn’t a single band of solar radiation that someone at the Observatory had not made a life’s study and was watching like a hawk. From the far X rays to the longest of radio waves, we had set our traps and snares; as soon as the sun thought of something new, we were ready for it. So we imagined…

The sun’s flaming heart beats in a slow, eleven-year rhythm, and we were near the peak of the cycle. Two of the greatest spots ever recorded—each of them large enough to swallow a hundred Earths—had drifted across the disc like great black funnels piercing deeply into the turbulent outer layers of the sun. They were black, of course, only by contrast with the brilliance all around them; even their dark, cool cores were hotter and brighter than an electric arc. We had just watched the second of them disappear around the edge of the disc, wondering if it would survive to reappear two weeks later, when something blew up on the equator.

It was not too spectacular at first, partly because it was almost exactly beneath us—at the precise centre of the sun’s disc—and so was merged into all the activity around it. If it had been near the edge of the sun, and thus projected against the background of space, it would have been truly awe-inspiring.

Imagine the simultaneous explosion of a million H-bombs. You can’t? Nor can anyone else—but that was the sort of thing we were watching climb up toward us at hundreds of miles a second, straight out of the sun’s spinning equator. At first it formed a narrow jet, but it was quickly frayed around the edges by the magnetic and gravitational forces that were fighting against it. The central core kept right on, and it was soon obvious that it had escaped from the sun completely and was headed out into space—with us as its first target.