wrinkles about his eyes and on his forehead. As though he had become aware of Charlene’s gaze, he also smiled. Any pleasure that Charlene might have felt was taken away by the sight of the woman standing next to Wolfgang. She was a tall, slender brunette, and although she was not touching him, there was something in the way she stood that proclaimed a more-than-casual interest.
Peron spoke. “I don’t quite know how to say this. We’ve been away for a long time so far as we are concerned, and although we’ve worked as hard as we know how it doesn’t seem we’ve done very much. Most of the first few years went into breaking ground and starting the settlements, which took longer than we expected. On the other hand, we realize that as far as you are concerned we left just a little while ago.”
Judith Niles muttered, “Get on with it! What’s wrong with Peron?” “Give him time.” Sy was nodding to himself. “He’s feeling uneasy. I know Peron, and I know Elissa. If there’s any way they can do a thing for themselves, they will. He’s working himself up to say something that comes hard to him. He’s going to make a request.”
Peron was continuing. “We’ve been picking sites for our new settlements, with good logic for each, and we’re steadily expanding. If you’ve been reading our progress reports — I’m sure you have — then you already know about the karnoos. They have special diet requirements, and they prefer a certain kind of terrain. Until recently we’ve had little interaction with them — or thought we did. But it turned out, without our knowing it, the selection criteria that we use to pick out settlement sites choose exactly the places where the karnoos like to live. Our clearings destroy their main food sources. If the karnoos were smart enough — and maybe they are — they’d decide that we were out to get them, by deliberately destroying their habitats.”
Sy muttered, “Preferred habitats: G-2 V dwarf stars. Preferred habitat for others? Maybe, around red dwarfs?”
“The karnoos are peaceful,” Peron went on, “but we learned the hard way that they can be dangerous when they feel threatened. If they were smarter, they might not just run away from the places where we are clearing the ground. They might try to find out the source of their trouble, the place where all the new land clearing and settlement first began. And then they’d either attack us and try to wipe us out, or they’d come and try to talk to us.
“You’ve got people at your end smarter than anyone here, so you’re probably way ahead of me and know what we’ve been trying to do here for the past few years. Stars all over the local spiral arm have been changing stellar type for millions of years, we know that from the records we’ve picked up from the Kermel Objects. When we were at Gulf City no one could ever spot any kind of pattern that would let us predict which particular stars were likely to change next. We’ve done no better here. But we decided we have been proposing the wrong question. Rather than asking which star is likely to be the next to change, we should ask which star was the first to change. Just the way the karnoos ought to seek our first settlement on Kallen’s World.
“Well” — Peron glanced first at Elissa, and then at Wolfgang for encouragement — “we tried. We took every scrap of data that had come in from the Kermel Objects, and we analyzed it every way we know how. We hoped we’d be able to send you stellar coordinates for the first changed star and ask you to go there and take a look. Obviously, it would mean a long trip in S-space, maybe even need the use of T-state or cold sleep. But it turned out to mean neither one, because we failed. Either the data just aren’t there, or we don’t know the right way to process it. So now you can see why we are calling. We’ll keep on trying here, but we’re passing the buck. Maybe the Kermel Object data that’s needed won’t come in for another ten thousand years, or maybe it arrived since we left. Either way, we know we won’t live long enough, ourselves, to see the end of this.” “But no regrets,” Elissa added. “We were here for the beginning, and that should be enough for anyone.”
The three-year-old was tugging urgently at her hand, and she made a wry face. “We have to go now, or at least I do. Some things won’t wait. I’ll talk to you again — from your point of view, it will probably be before you’ve eaten your next meal.”
She turned and hurried away toward one of the buildings.
“That just about says it all. We work our butts off for a whole year, while you’re eating dinner.” Peron’s grin took any bite away from the remark. “Sy, if you’re listening, you always said you were interested in long-range projects. This one should be enough even for you. We don’t know where the stellar changes started, but the average distance of stellarformed stars from Gulf City is eighteen hundred light-years. Goodbye, and good luck.”
The others in the image nodded, and the display faded.
The years had made little difference, and Judith Niles had lost none of her impatience. As Peron and the others vanished slowly from the display, she turned to her companions.
“That was clear enough. Conclusions?”
Sy said, “First conclusion is one I’ve suspected for a while. People aren’t as smart in S-space.”
As the others bristled, he went on, “Oh, it’s not a big difference, and it won’t affect the average person. I doubt if you could measure a change in memory or logical ability. What goes is a tiny creative edge.”
Judith Niles was frowning. “You have no evidence at all for that statement.” “Only the evidence that the first new idea for what to do about the stellarforming didn’t come from here. It came from a group working in N-space. I’ll admit that Peron and Elissa are far from being your average person, but I’ll not agree they’re brighter than we are.” Sy shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t want to start an argument. I’ll give you another conclusion, and this one we can back up from our own analysis of distant galaxies. Red dwarf stars occur naturally, and they are fairly common. So the idea of looking for a ‘first red dwarf’ in our local galactic arm is hopeless.”
Libby Trask, who had found her way to Gulf City not long before Sy and his friends, said, “Isn’t that exactly what their message was proposing?” “Not quite. They are telling us we have to identify the first star that changed — changed in a rather short period of time, say a few thousand years — from some other spectral type into a red dwarf. If we can find that one, we’ll know where the stellarforming started. Then it’s a good working assumption that whatever did it was and is still near that star.”
“And we are supposed to discover that star — how?” Judith Niles had called the meeting, but Charlene sensed that she was no longer running it. Somehow Sy had taken over.
“I don’t know, but if Peron and Elissa say they’ve combed the existing data base received from Kermel Objects, I believe them. That’s the bad news. The good news is that new data are received here all the time, and we never know until it arrives and we’ve analyzed the geometry of stellar positions whether it portrays this galaxy as it was last week, or ten million years ago.” He turned to Emil Garville. “You have the most experience time- ordering the Kermel Object image data. What do you think?”
Garville was a huge man, slow-moving and slow-talking. He was one of the Gulf City residents who didn’t bother to wear a wig, and at some time — almost certainly in a Planetfest accident — something had fractured his skull with a frightful blow just above the forehead. He rubbed at the scar-tissued fissure while he took his time answering Sy’s question.
“I’ve tried the obvious tricks,” he said at last. “I have all the images we’ve ever received, and the stellar geometry allows me to assign an age to each one. The times themselves seem random. I’ve used the images and their ages to plot out the number of red dwarfs in the whole affected area of the spiral arm as a function of time, and it’s monotonically increasing. The numbers go up, and once a star has changed to a red dwarf it never changes back.
“I’ve analyzed the plots, number of red dwarfs against time, but they don’t follow any smooth function. The most you can say is that the rate of increase with time is somewhere between linear and quadratic, which is bad news for the future. I’ve done my best to extrapolate backwards, and I can make rough estimates of the time when the fraction of red dwarf stars to total stellar population in our local spiral arm is the same as in other arms of our galaxy. What we don’t have are pairs of Kermel Object images corresponding to those times, which might show the first stellarforming change taking place and allow us to pinpoint the star involved. We have a couple of images showing the situation from long ago — thirty million years and more — and the star counts from those give me confidence that at one time this galactic arm had the same stellar type distribution as everywhere else. But that’s all. I’ve never seen a way to use the results.”
Sy was nodding. “You’re not alone in that. I believe you’ve squeezed out of the data all there is to be squeezed. We could all take another look, but I doubt we’ll add to what you have.”
