Phantom of the Seven Stars

Chapter 5

8

STARTLING STORIES

room and settled down by the other notable feature of the Old Earth Pub, which I should have mentioned earlier.

In addition to all the fake Ye Olde Earthe interiors and the moose head and the pink flamingos or whatever, there is also a very large, very good viewing window. We were at the brink of a plateau, and the view was breathtaking, even if you are not drunk: miles and miles of frozen nitrogen plains and gleaming ice mountains in the distance, with Charon hanging in the sky in its half phase, and a couple of the lesser moons (I wasn’t sure which) also visible.

I turned a chair around, my back is to the bar, and I seemed to be no longer inside at all, but out there.

I continued to nurse my drink slowly, and when it finally ran out I placed the glass on an adjoining table. It was now very late, by whatever time-schedule they’re using on Pluto Station – think of it as 4 AM – and the apparently tireless Mr. X came over, refilled my drink, and then joined me.

Now we were making progress.

For a while we both stared out at the ice mountains and the moons and infinity.

“You said there was an expedition,” I be-gan.

“Yes. To the Black Planet.”

“Do you think they’ll find it this time?”

“There’s a good chance.”

The Black Planet is a semi-myth in these parts. It is supposed to be utterly dark, and huge, big enough to account for all the per-turbations in the orbits of the other planets which have been driving astronomers nuts for centuries. The latest theory is that it’s made of Dark Matter, which is why we can’t see it. I doubt there will ever be a bar there.

“Even if they do find it and land on it, it won’t make much difference, will it?”

“How do you mean?” said Mr. X.

Now it felt like something odd was hap-pening. My tongue was the one loosening up, as if he were interviewing me. This might have been unprofessional, but I didn’t stop myself.

“Well, think about it,” I said. “We might get to the Black Planet. We might even go out to the Oort Cloud and carve our initials on some of the ice and rock out there, but still we’re like microbes crawling around on a single grain of sand when there’s an infinite beach. This is as far as we will ever go. The stars are too far away. There are no handy wormholes. Yes, with infinite patience and a lot of engineering we don’t presently have, we might undertake voyages of centuries, and we might just reach Proxima or a couple of the others if we were sufficiently moti-vated to do so, and I don’t think we are, but that’s just the adjoining grain of sand, and we can see the whole beach, or enough of it to know that there are billions of stars and billions of planets that we can never reach, ever.”

At this point you may begin to suspect that maybe I am in the wrong line of work and should writing something other than the Snooze and Booze column.

I continued my little tirade: “I’d think most people wouldn’t want to stare out into that. All it does is remind us how small we are. Why don’t you just cover up this win-dow with more fake wood and make the place enclosed and cozy?”

I was not really sure what was happen-ing to me. Maybe so many bars and so many bangs on the head with bricks after so many billions of miles had left me a bit – a bit less than my usual sparkling self.

But Mr. X seemed interested, and strangely attentive, to me, and to the view. His eyes gleamed.

“Of course I could close the shutters if you’d like,” he said, “But a lot of people en-joy sitting here and looking out.”

“And what do they think while they’re doing it? Can you tell me that? What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking that we are not alone in the universe.”

“What?” That startled me to something close to clear-headedness. After a moment’s reflection I said, “Oh it’s statistically inevi-