Unanimous

I have run the big dish for thirty-one years. The dish has run since 1958, which makes the two of us the longest marriage in the observatory. We watch the sky together, and for sixty years the sky did the only thing it knew how to do: it got faster.

The curve went up. The universe expanding, expanding, picking up speed, and the books said it would. The books are always wrong, but they’re usually wrong about the past. This time they were wrong about the future, which is worse.

The line bent.

I checked the calibration three times. I checked a fourth time, for myself. The calibration was fine. The dish was fine. The sky was fine, and that was the worst part. The sky was exactly where it was supposed to be. It was just getting there slower.

Everything was getting there slower.

We checked the candles too, the supernovae we use for distance. I checked the candles. They were burning dimmer. I checked them again. They were fine. The whole rig was fine. The sky was slowing down anyway.

I took the numbers to the Thursday briefing myself, by hand, in a folder with a coffee ring on it. I wanted to see their faces. I had a speech ready. It started: “Gentlemen, the universe is decelerating.”

Hodge read my numbers the way a man checks a form he has already filled out, and he handed the sheet back.

“We know,” he said.

“You know,” I said. “It’s been in the works six weeks. I checked the calibration.”

“Four times,” he said. “We know.”

“How long have you known?”

He had to count. A man should not have to count when he is telling you the sky is falling.

“Three years,” he said. “Four. Around then.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone. You didn’t tell me. I brought you the news like a cat bringing in a bird, and you say we know.”

“We didn’t keep it from you,” he said. “Nobody kept anything from anybody. Nobody said anything because there was nothing to say. It wasn’t a fact yet. It was a decision.”

“Whose decision?”

He looked at me the way a man taps a gauge before he trusts it. “When did you first notice the trains?”

“I don’t take the trains.”

“Exactly,” he said.

I didn’t know what that meant, so I went home the long way. The trains ran every ten minutes. They always had. They ran every twelve now, and then every fifteen. Nobody said anything, because a schedule is the kind of thing you don’t mention until you’re sure, and by the time you’re sure everyone already knows, so what’s the point.

It was all like that.

The wars ended. Not with treaties. Treaties are a form of mention. They just ended, one at a time, and nobody started a new one. The news got shorter. The inventions got smaller. Babies came slower, and nobody mentioned it, because each of us thought it was personal. Our own age. Our own tiredness.

It wasn’t personal. It was unanimous.

I went back to Hodge the next morning. I said, “Was there a vote?”

“There was never a meeting,” he said.

“Then how do you know it’s a decision?”

“That’s what the reading is,” he said. “That’s what a reading is for. Ours got confirmed yesterday. It was the longest vote in history. Everybody cast a ballot. Nobody told anybody. The ballots were the days.”

“The universe is slowing down because we decided to?”

“The universe doesn’t decide anything,” he said. “It matches. Sixty years of expansion was sixty years of us. The dish wasn’t measuring the sky, Hartley. It was measuring us. It’s the only honest instrument we’ve got, and it says we’ve been slowing for years.”

“Why didn’t anyone mention it?”

“You don’t mention a decision while it’s still being made,” he said. “You’d look silly if it didn’t pass. It passed.”

“Unanimous,” I said.

“Unanimous,” he said. “All of us. Every day. Nobody told anyone. We just slowed.”

I went back to the dish that night and ran the numbers a fifth time, for no reason. They were the same. The dish still runs. The sky is still getting there, slower every year. I didn’t tell anyone. There was nobody to tell. We all knew.