Runaway Star
RUNAWAY STAR
"Dear Sir / I read an article in the June, 1976, Scientific American that mentioned "Runaway" stars that were coursing through the universe. I wondered instantly whether any of them could be coming, at this moment, toward the earth and its solar system. I'd been fooling around with radio telescopes for some time, looking at various objects of interest visible only through these electronic ears, and I tuned it very finely to act as a sieve, to scan the skies to find a trace of blue shift. Everything, so they say, exhibits the red shift of galaxies rushing away from ours. But there was a blip on my screen that said (when proper precautions were taken to blank out the input from objects in our solar system, and various charted comets and meteors which are much too close) that there was something very far away, so something which must be of the size of a star, and it had a blue shift. But not a small one, a huge one, indicating there is an object rushing toward us at about 75% of the speed of light. Now, of course, the light that reaches us from that has been delayed, also, and my preliminary calculations show that this object will become visible as a tenth magnitude star to the most powerful telescopes in a year, but it will come very close to our sun only 3 months afterwards. Would you please check the enclosed calculations and tell me if I haven't made a terrible error somewhere? I hope I have. Sincerely, Esther Cummings." "Dear Ms. Cummings, / We've checked your calculations and find they are precisely correct. What do we do now? Sincerely, Warren Lattimere." And from then? Do they tell the government? Are they believed? Does the government tell the people? Is it believed? What happens in the financial, political, economic, religious, entertainment worlds? What do the people do them, where do they go, what happens to monetary values, what happens to Gross National Product, education, vocations, avocations, sex, savings bonds, television, est, Actualism, Krishnamurti, homosexuality, bank accounts, jet planes, research projects, think tanks, cooking schools, printing presses, newspapers, churches, amusement parks, oceans? Then how does it end? Does it hit? Does it not hit? Is it a hoax? Does it cause enlightenment and then instant annihilation? When will I ever write this story?