Star took an absent sip of wine.
I saw the glass trembling in his frail hand.
Settling carefully back into the chair, as if he had suffered more injuries than he reported to the medics, he spoke to Lilith, almost ignoring old Habibula and me.
“I’m tired,” His voice was weak, but steady and clear.
“Shaken up.
But I’ll try to give you the facts you’re going to need, in some intelligible order.
You know I’ve spent my life digging into the riddle of this anomaly.
I led the first survey and helped set up this station.
Most of the time since I’ve been at the big cosmological observatory on Contra-Saturn.
That’s where I worked out the theory.”
He paused as if to rest.
“What’s so mortal alarming in a theory?” old Habibula croaked.
“Why did you have to send for us?”
“The theory led me to expect something like that enemy machine —some further display of an alien technology advanced far beyond our own.
I was prepared for hostility—but I wasn’t expecting it quite so soon.”
Star’s bandaged head shook painfully.
“Our purpose on this first flight of the Quasar Quest was only to make a preliminary test.
I was not expecting you to follow me here, though now it’s fortunate you did.
I was intending to return to sector base to pick you up—if we found that your singular skills were needed.”
I sat staring at old Habibula’s rosy, hairless baby-head and Lilith’s lean and desperate loveliness, wondering blankly what possible skills they might possess that would be of any use against the monstrous threat of Nowhere.
“To test the theory,” Star went on, “we measured the age of those rocks in the anomaly—”
“How’s that?”
Old Habibula gave him a fishy stare.
“How can you measure the age of a mortal rock?”
“In this case, by spectrographic analysis.”
Star’s worn voice was carefully precise.
“Because matter does age.
New planetary matter— its elements created perhaps in an exploding supernova—does have a pretty specific atomic composition.
It contains a rather definite proportion of the radioactive elements which decay with time.”
“A dismal universe,” muttered old Habibula. “Where matter itself grows old!”
“For the initial tests,” Star went on, “we used the thorium series.
The element thorium has a half-life somewhat more than thirteen billion years—which means that in thirteen billion years about half of any given sample of Thorium-232 will decay into the isotope, Lead-208.”
Star paused, as if to recover voice and strength.
“Take wine, Ken!” old Habibula urged him.
“It’s like precious new blood in your veins.”
With a rare hospitality, he overflowed Star’s scarcely tasted glass.
“How old are the rocks?”
“Old…” Star’s voice faded to a papery whisper.
He waved away the wine, with a grateful nod at old Habibula.
His haggard eyes darted a sharp glance at me.
As if we didn’t matter, he spoke again to Lilith. “Unbelievably old…”
Nervously, old Habibula gulped his own wine.
Star straightened his bandaged head.
He drew a long uneven breath, as if struggling to recover himself. Lilith reached quickly across the table to grasp his hand.
For a few seconds he sat silent, smiling at her fondly. Then he spoke again more vigorously.
“Our known universe has an age that we can ascertain,” he said.
“Our native sun and its planets are about four billion years old.
The oldest stars in our galaxy are only a billion years older.
Computations show that the expansion of our universe began no more than six billion years ago.
Nothing older exists anywhere—except these anomalous rocks!”