Perception of Death: Collected Stories by Howard V. Hendrix

Author:Howard V. Hendrix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

STAGES OF NIGHT AND TWILIGHT

Momentarily disoriented, Martin stared at the holes in the metal plate for Lalande 21185, tonight’s target star. Had he come back too soon? Believing that work would take his mind off what had happened, Martin Merrill had eagerly returned to his research at the Allegheny Observatory. Now, however, he wondered if he hadn’t been too eager.

All day long he had felt out of phase and out of focus. From the moment his alarm clock went off that morning, the world had played on him like two radio stations of widely different formats interfering with each other on the same broadcasting frequency and switching unpredictably back and forth between them.

Shaking his head and smiling crookedly, Martin tried to think only of well-behaved quanta as he plugged the last of the fiber-optic leads into the pre-drilled holes of the Lalande plate. Finished, he let his gaze drift upward, along the barrel of the Thaw Memorial Telescope. The Thaw’s thirty-inch lens and its focal length of 561 inches gave it an overall f-number of about nineteen—ample enough for gathering the photons which the fiber-optic leads piped to MAPS, the Multichannel Astrometric Photometer and Spectrometer.

As his gaze continued upward, Martin’s crooked smile broadened. An awful lot of equipment, just to discern a tiny wobble in one of innumerable stars. Wobbles, phases, and shifts—proofs of the invisible tugging at the visible—were what it was all about in the search for extra-solar planets, or ESPs, as some of his less sympathetic colleagues called them. Lalande 21185 apparently wobbled in tune to not one but two invisible objects of near-Jovian mass. At only eight light years out, tonight’s target was right in the neighborhood, too.

Above him, beyond the end of the telescope, the bent blue monolith of twilight sky shone down through the open-shuttered observatory dome. Soon, the Earth would spin the observatory down the stages of twilight and that bright-dark rectangle above him would fill with stars. Tonight, however, the tall rectangular slit seemed at once two, three, and n-dimensional—as if, in the bend of that plank of twilight, he saw the curvature of spacetime itself. Rationally he knew that bend to be merely the product of the observatory dome’s own curvature, but twilight was always a good time for illusions.

Another of his favorite romanticisms (as he preferred to call such twilight illusions) was that the Thaw telescope, which had gathered first light in August of 1914, partook somehow of the character of those other guns of that August, those whose voices had signalled the start of the First World War. The Thaw resembled, for him, a cannon of particularly large bore and length—a howitzer pointed at the heavens, trained upon its celestial target. Sometimes he mused that, just as the sound of the cannonball or shell, moving as a coherent wave, always paradoxically arrives at the target zone in reverse order, before the order to “Fire!”, so too at twilight it seemed to him that the role of the big telescope

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