Short Fiction

Final Examination

I suppose it started some time back, even before the astronomers discovered it, and certainly long before I found out. How far back I have no idea; thousands of years, perhaps, or more. But the first I knew about it was one March evening, when I opened the newspaper.

Jane was in the kitchen, cleaning up, and I was settled back in the easy chair, reading through the lead articles. I skimmed through all the war talk, price controls, suicides, murders, and then glanced through the rest of the paper. One small article in the back caught my eye.

Astronomers Losing Stars, the caption read. It was a human-interest story I suppose, because it went on in that maddening coy style the newspapers use for that sort of stuff.

“Dr. Wilhelm Mentzner, at the Mount St. James Observatory, says that he has been unable, in recent weeks, to find some of the Milky Way stars. It would seem, Dr. Mentzner tells us, that they have vanished. Repeated photographs of certain portions of space do not show the presence of these dim, faraway stars. They were in place and intact in photographs made as recently as April, 1942, and …”

The article gave the names of some of the stars—they didn’t mean a thing to me—and chided the scientists on their absentmindedness. “Imagine,” it went on, “losing something as big as a star. Although,” the writer summed up, “it doesn’t really matter. They have a few hundred billion left to play around with.”

I thought it was sort of cute at the time, although in questionable taste. I don’t know a thing about science—I’m in the dress line—but I’ve always looked upon it with the greatest respect. The way I see it, you start laughing at scientists and they come up with something like the atom bomb. Better to treat them with a little respect.

I can’t remember if I showed the article to my wife. If I did, she didn’t say anything in particular.

Life went along as usual. I went to work in Manhattan and came home to Queens. In a few days there was another article. This one was written by a Ph. D., and it had dropped the kidding style.

It said that stars appeared to be disappearing from our Milky Way galaxy at a tremendous rate. Observatories in both hemispheres had estimated that a few million of the farthest stars had vanished in the past five weeks.

I stepped out the backdoor to have a look. Everything seemed in order to me. The Milky Way was still up there, smeared across the sky as thick as ever. The Big Dipper was shining away, and the North Star was still pointing toward Westchester. No difference. The ground was frozen under my feet, but the air was almost warm. Spring would be coming along soon, and Spring fashions.

In the distance I could see the red glow of Manhattan, across the 59th Street Bridge. That seemed to settle it. The only problem I had was dresses, and I went back inside to worry about them.

In a few more days the star-story had reached the front page. Stars Disappearing, the headlines read. What Next?

It seemed that millions of stars were vanishing from the Milky Way every day and night. The other galaxies seemed to be unaffected, although it was hard to tell; but they were definitely dropping out of ours. Most of them were so far away they could only be caught with a high-powered telescope, or a camera; but hundreds could still be seen disappearing by anybody with a pair of eyes. Not blowing up or fading out; just click—and they were gone.

This article—written by an astronomer and a Ph. D.—reminded everybody that only the light was stopping. The stars themselves must have been snubbed out hundreds of millions of years ago, and that the light was finally stopping, after travelling all that distance across space. I think it was hundreds of millions, although it might have been thousands.

The article didn’t even speculate on the cause of it all.

I went stargazing that night. Everyone else in the neighborhood was out in their backyards, too. And sure enough, in the gigantic spread of stars I could see little specks of light winking out. They were barely noticeable; if I hadn’t been looking for them I would never have seen anything different.

“Hey Jane,” I called in the back door. “Come on out and have a look.”

My wife came out and stood, hands on hips, looking at the sky. She was frowning, as though she resented the whole business.

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“Look carefully,” I said. “Watch one section at a time. There was one! Did you see it?”

“No.”

“Watch for little winks,” I said. But it wasn’t until the Thomas kid came from next door and loaned her his telescope that she saw it.

“Here, Mrs. Ostersen, use this,” the kid said. He had three or four telescopes in his hands, a pair of binoculars, and a handful of charts. Quite a kid.

“You too, Mr. Ostersen,” he said.

Through the telescope I could really see it. One moment a pinpoint of light would be there, and then—bing! It was gone. It was downright weird. For the first time I started getting worried.

It didn’t bother Jane, though. She went back into her kitchen.

Of course, even with the galaxy collapsing, the dress business had to go on, but I found myself buying a newspaper four or five times a day and keeping the radio on in the store to find out what was going on. Everybody else was doing the same. People were even arguing about it on street corners.

The newspapers had about a thousand different theories. There were scientific articles on the red shift, and intergalactic dust; there were articles on stellar evolution and visual hallucination; the psychologists were trying to prove that the stars hadn’t been there in the first place, or something like that.

I didn’t know what to believe. The only article that made any sense to me was one written by a social commentator, and he wasn’t even a full-fledged scientist. He said it looked as if someone was doing a big job of housecleaning in our galaxy.

The Thomas kid had his own theories. He was sure it was the work of invaders from another dimension. He told me they were sucking our galaxy into theirs, which was in another dimension, like dust into a vacuum cleaner.

“It’s perfectly clear, Mr. Ostersen,” he told me one evening after work. “They’ve started sucking in the outside stars at the other side of the Milky Way, and they’re working through the centre. They’ll reach us last, because we’re at the far end.”

“Well …” I said.