The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies Read online

  There is nothing surprising in the fact that so many people liked Henry, in spite of the fact that he seemed unable to like them. Despite all that cynics say, it is quite usual for people who can do it to feel fond of other people. A surprisingly high proportion of the human race actually yearn—at least some of the time—to feel fond of other people, and only become embittered if they feel that the opportunity is being unfairly denied them. Some few of the remainder succeed in finding targets for their wayward affections routinely, but become disillusioned by the effects that fondness tends to have, and gradually lose the incentive. Henry McCanles was one of the rare people who not only provided useful raw material for the sympathies of others by remaining available, but was also so totally unaffected by such sympathies that the risk of their getting out of hand, or being perverted into something more powerful, was remote. However, as every gambler knows, unlikely events do sometimes happen, and it happened that among the many fond feelings that Henry attracted to himself were the particular fond feelings of Stella Joyce, which did indeed become gradually exaggerated into something more like obsession than mere camaraderie.

  Henry was then working at one of the better universities in the American South, where he enjoyed convenient access to one of the world’s largest radio telescopes, good computation facilities and an excellent library. Everything he required was at his disposal, including abundant assistance in many of the more tedious aspects of evidential collation. Stella Joyce was one of his post-graduate students. He never noticed her at all during working hours, where she was simply an instrument to be used according to the rules of the game. Had there been no opportunity for the two of them to meet outside working hours, there would have been little possibility of his ever becoming aware of her existence as an independent human being. Some such opportunities did arise, however. Henry, like other mortals, had to eat, and he took his meals in the most convenient refectory, along with several hundred students and those members of staff whose own domestic situations made such measures necessary. This rendered him available for anyone wishing to cultivate his acquaintance outside the professional context.

  Stella began to follow the simple strategy of waiting for him to collect his meal and sit down to eat it, and then going to sit beside him. Stella’s interest in astronomy was actually fairly slight, although she was sufficiently intelligent and capable in her studies to have qualified for postgraduate study. She had been encouraged into the field by unfortunate and misguided pressure applied by her mother, who was a devoted follower of horoscopes and thought that a bright future must await any girl with an intimate knowledge of the stars and their ways. As with so many simple believers, Stella’s mother could not comprehend the difference between astronomy and astrology, but Stella was nevertheless content with her ill-chosen vocation. Knowledge of any sort was of little importance to her; she depended far more on her emotions to determine the quality of her life. It was her emotions—which were no more directed by reason than her choice of career—that guided her to Henry McCanles. She fell in love with him, honestly and sincerely, and as deeply as she could.

  Such fancies are not uncommon, but they often remain dormant when they receive no encouragement and generally fizzle out eventually even if they do. In all probability, other female students had toyed with the idea of seducing Professor McCanles, but few such whims had ever generated more than tokenistic exploratory action; Stella was the only one who persisted, even after realizing that the mission seemed virtually impossible. Had she been willing to sidetrack her infatuation, to sublimate it into part of the fantasy component of her private imaginative existence, the course of history might have been subtly altered—but she did not.

  Perhaps, like her mother, Stella Joyce had some latent but unassailable faith in the notion that the future is predetermined, and considered that Henry and she were indeed star-crossed. It was more likely, though, that other causal factors were more significant in determining her persistence. She was twenty-three, and her infatuation with Henry was by no means the first time she had been “in love”. It was, however, the first time that such love had not rebounded on her with unexpected promptitude in an ugly and painful manner. She was a virgin who had suffered considerable social deprivation in her childhood by virtue of chronic myopia. Forced to wear spectacles from the age of five, she had never liked them, and had often removed them once she was out of her mother’s protective sight, with the inevitable result that her interaction with the world around her had been dogged by the difficulty of an inability to perceive much of it. This difficulty had only been overcome, in the usual manner, a few months before she fell in love with Henry.

  Henry, of course, remained unaware of the infatuation. It did not seem to him to be significant that Stella materialized at his elbow with startling regularity while he primed his organism with fuel. Her attempts at flirtation—the shy fluttering of unpracticed sexual wings—passed him by. He was always polite and pleasant, never, even by the slightest word or gesture, either reciprocating or explicitly rejecting her tentative emotional advances. She therefore persisted, not only in attempting to build a more intimate relationship, but also in believing that she was succeeding.

  Henry accepted her company gracefully. He made no attempt to disassociate himself. Stella’s company at meals, her conversation, and, ultimately, her evening visits to his room, slowly became a habit. Stella was, wisely, physically undemanding. She never attempted even a kiss, but was simply content to be with him, to be a part of his life. She was careful not to be a nuisance, taking from him only such time as could be easily surrendered by his work.

  In effect, Stella Joyce married Henry McCanles by degrees. Inch by inch, she crept into his routine, co-opting one by one the supportive tasks that Henry found so cumbersome, which could so conveniently be translated into wifely duties. She began cooking for him, shopping for him, and planning his quotidian schedules for him. She took him over. Even so, the relationship might never have come to full fruition had it not been for one singular fact. Stella might never have eased Henry out of his deep rut to the extent of attaining the climax of an actual wedding had it not been for the fact that, in a most curious manner, Henry eventually fell in love with her.

  Actually, it would be more correct to say that Henry fell in love with a twinkle in Stella’s eye. He first saw the twinkle when they were sitting at supper one night in his apartment, facing one another, with the table between them and the electric light overhead and slightly to the side. He saw a gleam in her right eye that looked exactly like a star. It winked, and then disappeared as she turned her head.

  As time went by, Henry caught glimpses of the star again, always brief and strangely frustrating. Sometimes it appeared in one eye, sometimes the other, but never in both simultaneously. He found, over a period of weeks, that the light inevitably appeared for a brief moment or two when the position of her head made a certain angle with the sun or some artificial light-source. The angle had to be exact, and the merest turn of the head would destroy it; he soon calculated its value in degrees of arc, but regarded the result as a mere datum, never interrogating its potential significance. The star fascinated him.

  This was not a revelation, to be compared with his first discovery of the stars in the sky, but it was a discovery. It was something new, something attractive, something that had to be followed up. It was, after all, a star of some sort, more fugitive than any in the night sky, its hold on existence apparently so much more precarious. It seemed to Henry to be quite lovely.

  Henry did not have the force of personality that would have been required to take positive steps every day or every night in order to conjure up the tremulous silver gleam. He was, instead, content to wait and watch, to study Stella as she talked and moved in her carefully tentative fashion through their relationship, always alert and ready to catch the glimmer as it shimmered into existence and just as rapidly shivered out. Because of that single star, Henry was ready to accept when Stella finally plucked
up enough courage to propose marriage. He had, by then, an adequate motive for taking such a step. He would probably never have proposed it himself, but he was ready when the proposal came, and he accepted it with a good grace.

  Stella never knew anything about the trick of light that had offered her the captivity of Henry’s heart and soul. She was not so slow-witted as to imagine that Henry lusted after her body with any particular fervor, or that he had any considerable admiration for her brain, but she thought that she could be everything he could ever want or need in a wife, and she foolishly imagined that her own love could outlast any trial or tribulation.

  Stella made all the arrangements for the wedding, with due discretion and taste. Henry patiently waited out the formal engagement and the preparations for their union, up to and including the ceremony. Every now and then, he caught a glimpse of the tantalizing star; the sight always reassured him that, not only was he playing the game honestly and fairly, but also that he was going to win his prize and keep his trophy. The star in Stella’s eyes beguiled him almost as much as the mysterious radio signals from the edge of the universe, even though he found his analytical methods inadequate to its comprehension. He could never hope to measure either its right ascension or its red shift, and could not properly track its variability. His observational means were scientifically incompetent, for the moment, but he could at least maintain the star within the orbit of his observation—or so he thought.

  There was no sexual component to the pre-marital relationship, and it was with mildly anxious feelings of anticipation and trepidation that Henry realized, on his wedding night, that Stella intended him to make love to her. He had, of course, considered this particular aspect of husbandly duty previously, but had always decided to cross the bridge when he came to it. As he actually approached it, though, he felt an entirely natural twinge of fear.

  He got into bed first and lay there, waiting for Stella to join him. Only by recalling books that he had read many years before could he plan what was required of him, and, as he recalled them, the sense of strangeness and vague disgust that had attended that particular aspect of his early reading returned to him with some force. Nevertheless, because it was part of the game he had consented to play, he composed himself with care and deliberation. He had every intention of going through with the performance, even though his vulnerability to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune was, at that particular moment, greater than it had been in the previous forty years.

  Stella eventually emerged from the bathroom and came to kiss him on the mouth before getting into bed beside him. He was rewarded, then, by a glimpse of the mysterious star, and it seemed that all might be well.

  Then tragedy struck.

  If only Stella had used the privacy of the bathroom to perform all the rituals of preparing for bed, the dangerous moment might have passed safely—but she, like Henry, was very much a creature of habit, and there was one small operation that she always performed while sitting in bed—the last action of each and every day. She knew of no reason why she might need to alter this particular aspect of her routine.

  And so, while Henry watched, she carefully removed the contact lenses from her short-sighted eyes.

  Henry realized, in a blinding flash of sickening inspiration, what the star in Stella’s eyes really was.

  The star was not a part of Stella at all. It was only an optical illusion—a reflection in the tiny slivers of glass or plastic whose existence he had never suspected. Had he ever really looked closely at Stella’s eyes, he surely would have realized, but he never had. He had only looked at and for the star…the faint, superficial ghost of a remote source of radiance. Only now did he discover that it was, in fact, an item of deception, like a seeming specter that turned out to be a flapping sheet.

  He said nothing. His face did not betray by the slightest shift of expression that his spirit had received, in this most sensitive of matters, at a moment of unprecedentedly high tension, a shattering blow. His body, alas, being far less subject to conscious control, could not help but testify to his distress. He was impotent, and so he was to remain throughout his marriage.

  The marriage staggered on for two years, while Stella tried hard—but all in vain—to maintain her own affections in the face of such cruel adversity. She gave the marriage everything she had to give, but, after that one crucial setback, it seemed that she less and less to offer. In the meantime, what Henry had to offer her came to seem like nothing at all. There was no hope for the relationship, in the long run. It was no one’s fault. It simply happened that way.

  In the end, Stella carefully unmade all the arrangements that she had so carefully made, engineered an amicable divorce with the same patience she had put into engineering the amicable marriage, took back her maiden name, and went her own way in life. She gave up astronomy for good, without a pang of regret. It would not be fair to say that she was no worse for the experience, but it did not take her long to recover.

  During those two years Henry descended gently into one of his shallow depressions, but this time he never came out of it. He worked on with the same calm efficiency, and the same seeming indifference to his surroundings. The instruments and methods of his inquiry did not change at all, so it was not obvious to anyone around him that he was now working form a slightly different observational standpoint. He looked at the stars, now, with slightly different eyes. He brought to their study a subtly different kind of imagination—and during those two years, in the wake of the wedding-night disaster and its long aftermath, he formulated the theory that was to make him famous and change the course of human destiny.

  Henry gathered all his evidence with the utmost care. He weighed it, analyzed it precisely, and built it into an impressive edifice of unmistakable implication. Then, using predictions generated by his theoretical equations, he went on to check every item of data, and every step of his logic, using observations made by a host of others as well as his own. By the time he published his results, the case he made was quite perfect.

  Henry’s thesis was that the cosmos contained no matter whatsoever outside the solar system—that the shell of the universe itself was only a short distance beyond the Oort Cloud, and that all the stars and galaxies—every point of light, every single source of electromagnetic signals—were the products of optical illusion. The vast expanding universe, according to Henry, was nothing but a pattern of reflected gleams of sunlight, hideously distorted into all kinds of lying implications by a spherical “lens” of stressed and convoluted space that englobed the heliocentric system.

  According to Henry McCanles, all was illusion.

  Had the notion come from a crank, it would never have reached cold print, but it did not come from a crank. It came from a man known to be the most careful, able and dedicated astronomer in the world. It came supported with a multitude of data and an elaborate web of impeccable calculations. Henry’s theory not only explained all the anomalies of classical theory—the nature of the quasars, the question of the origin of the universe, the ambiguous relationship between red shift and distance—by means of a mathematical model of the stressed shell, but it made a whole series of predictions which, if the theory were false, could be falsified.

  Other cosmologists were quick to respond, if only because they wanted to dispose of the absurd new model in the briefest possible time. There was not a single theorist anywhere in the world who gave the least credit to the model, in the beginning, but there was not a single one who could find a scrap of evidence to refute it. Many still refused to believe it, even in the absence of evidence, claiming that such a thing simply could not be, but a growing number were impressed by the self-consistency of Henry’s theory, by the man himself, and by the way in which all their tentative objections were met with mathematical grace and perfection.

  Gradually, other astronomers, physicists and cosmologists began to admit the possibility of distorted spatial fabric that refracted and tangled light rays in exactly the way Henry said
it did. Laboratory experiments were set up, sometimes at great expense, to investigate whether space really could be distorted and the basic constants of the universe altered in concert. Some of the experiments demonstrated the existence of such potential, and the failure of those that did not was rapidly explained by the growing party of Henry’s supporters. Henry’s thesis also began to gather popular credence and approval.

  Many people, it turned out, had never been comfortable with the size of the universe as calculated by twentieth century astronomers. It was too vast, too intimidating, too challenging. A compact universe seemed somehow more human: a more appropriate womb for matter, life and emotion.

  While he was going through the laborious motions of his divorce, Henry McCanles first became the most notorious scientist who had ever lived, and then the most famous and feted. He was the ultimate iconoclast—the man who had proved that the whole vast universe discovered by twentieth century science was a hollow myth—and his reputation followed a familiar trajectory. At first resented and reviled, he was then lauded and declared a hero. Unlike many iconoclasts unlucky enough to be born into a world where things moved more slowly, though, he made the transition in a matter of months. He did not have to die before being taken seriously.