Vernier in “The End of Outward”
| Main scale alone | |
|---|---|
| Coincident vernier line | |
| Reading | |
| Vernier zero at | |
| Direction by readings | |
| Travel from the stop |
Drag the slide, or step it by tenths. The slide travels outward as far as the stop.
Readings
The sheet is palindromic paper. Readings taken on the way back are written left-handed and backwards, and read forwards when the sheet is turned over.
Counterparts
Bannock objects that our thoughts and the cosmos are “on entirely different scales.” Dorner answers that a picture of the moon is on a different scale from the moon, “and yet they are counterparts.” A vernier is a counterpart of this kind. Its divisions are the main scale’s divisions drawn at nine-tenths size, and because of that small difference a motion of the slide moves the point of coincidence ten times as far. In Dorner’s account the contraction of the cosmos is “hardly felt” physically, while our world signals it in large changes such as beards, horse-cars, and breeds “coming unbred.”
Signs
The stop corresponds to the moon landing. Dorner says it “may have been the turning point” and that it “was as far outward as our cosmos went” (section 2).
| Sign | Going out | Coming back | Reported by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vehicles | the “Gasoline Century” | riding horses, and horse-drawn carriages still called Ford Phaetons and Nobility Surreys | narrator, sections 1 and 2; Dorner, section 2 |
| Beards | a beardless interval after the 1890s | beards again after “only about sixty years,” the old cycle cut in half by a larger one | Dorner, section 2 |
| Domestic breeds | goldfish of “full gold marking,” Herefords of “square beefiness” | breeds “coming unbred”; goldfish “uncolored and speckled,” Herefords “tall and lean and wild-looking” | Oast, section 1; Dorner, section 2 |
| Corn | productive, uniform, symmetrical (implied) | “less productive, less uniform, less symmetrical,” with colored kernels again | Casad, section 1 |
| Complexion | “almost uniform neutral dark” | “more ruddy, rosy and red, yellow-flame, blonde, and shouting orange” | Casad, section 1 |
| Illusion | “the age of smooth illusion” | “the time of coarse trickery” | Barra, section 1 |
| Projects | a Mars landing, created life, new animals, and “over-think,” each on the verge | the Mars landing “one year more distant every year”; created life “recedes” | Cogsworth, Pontifex, Oast, and McGuire; Dorner, section 1 |
| Taste | a gazebo “dated and overdone” a year ago, now “only slightly in advance of the popular taste” | narrator, section 1 | |
| Historians | first drafts written “left-handed and backwards” for a dozen years | Arutinov, epigraph to section 2 | |
| Humankind | biological and cultural evolution up to its limit | merging, by Dorner’s forecast, with “slightly previous people,” simians, proto-mammals, and archaic life | Dorner, section 2 |
Dorner’s claim in the story
- The company regards Dorner as “a sham, a spinner of false cobwebs,” and tries to crowd him out of his speech (section 1).
- Bannock replies that of “maybe one hundred million civilizations there are always about forty-nine million receding and fifty-one million advancing,” and that this nexus of civilizations “will have nothing to do with any expansion or contraction of the cosmos” (section 2).
- The company rides off “in high amusement at the idea of Dorner that their civilization had begun to regress,” on riding horses and in horse-drawn carriages still called Ford Phaetons and Nobility Surreys (section 2).
- Arutinov asks why so few people have noticed that history has been running backwards (epigraph to section 2).
From the story
- Bannock holds that our thoughts and the cosmos are “on entirely different scales.” Dorner answers that lives, civilization, and society “form a very small vernier scale that is counterpart of the cosmic scale,” and that “we signal that the contraction is under way” (section 2).
- Dorner takes the moon landing, thirty years past, as the limit. It “may have been the turning point,” and it “was as far outward as our cosmos went” (section 2).
- Dorner says the expansion was fastest at the beginning and “has been slowing down from that very first instant” (section 2).
- Dorner says the reversal was “hardly felt” physically (section 2).
- Astronomers cannot yet observe the contraction. Dorner says a violet shift in the nearer galaxies will be verifiable “within three million years” (section 2).
- Near the turn the company’s projects stall, some of them announced as imminent for fourteen years. In scientific advance “they all had really hit ‘The Great Doldrum Reef’” (section 1).
- Casad says an arrow “should hang at its high point for at least a moment before it falls back.” He asks whether its “turn-around flop” counts in cosmic time, and Barra answers that “we’re in such a flop-over time now” (section 1).
- After Barra breaks the real arrow, its image hangs in the sky for a moment and then fades. “The image of the arrow faded out and was one” (narrator, section 1).
- Barra means to stay at the limit with “a small group of others,” “as unfalling arrows in the sky,” and Karns finds Barra and Dorner “slightly transparent” (section 1). Half a dozen stay behind when the others ride off (section 2).
- Arutinov writes his first drafts “left-handed and backwards” on palindromic paper. Turned over, the sheets read “as if written right-handed and forwards” (epigraph to section 2).
- The narrator reports an elite still at “The End of Outward,” hard to know because “a mini-event-horizon has pulled back from it,” and says “they are as far out as anybody ever went” (section 3).
From the instrument
- Ten vernier divisions span nine divisions of the main scale. The least count is one tenth of a division.
- The reading is the last main line passed by the vernier zero, plus one tenth for each vernier line up to the one that coincides.
- A single reading gives the position of the slide. Its direction of travel requires at least two readings in sequence.
- Between 9 and 10 the main scale alone reads 9 in both directions. With the vernier the readings differ by tenths, and their sequence shows whether the slide is moving outward or back.
- For each tenth the slide moves, the point of coincidence moves one whole division of the main scale.
- A run from 9.0 to the stop and back logs eleven readings outward and ten on the return. The return readings repeat the outward readings in reverse order.
Supplied
- The numerals and the count of ten. No units are named in the story.
- The stop on a whole division, where the first and last vernier lines both coincide.
- Main-scale divisions above 10. The vernier spans nine divisions above its zero, so the rule must run to at least 19. The cosmos in the story goes no farther than 10.
- The assignment of the slide’s travel to the motion of the cosmos, and of the coincidence’s travel to the changes in our world. Dorner names the vernier but not its parts.
- The speed of the run. It slows into the stop, following Dorner’s account of the expansion, and the return mirrors the rise.
- The length of the hang at the stop.
- The arrow on the slide as the indicator of direction. It turns over on a horizontal axle at the first reading after the turn. In the story the indicator of direction is Dorner’s “one small weather vane that swerves” (section 2).
- The image of the arrow left hanging at the stop once the slide has reached it. It still points outward, and it fades as the slide falls without disappearing.
- Mirror writing for readings taken on the way back. In the story Arutinov writes his histories this way.
- The absence of year marks. The intervals named are thirty years since the moon landing, “a decade or two” of contraction by Dorner’s calculation, fourteen years of stalled projects, and “at least a dozen” of history run backwards (Arutinov). No rate is named.
- The case and finish: ebonized wood, silvered plates, brass, blued steel.