An experiment
What follows is a short piece of fiction inspired by a recent New York Times story about an almost-abandoned cosmic ray observatory and the handful of people who still work there. I haven’t written fiction in a long time, and it’s been even longer since I showed it to anyone, but when I sat down to work on the newsletter this week, this is what I wanted to write. I am as surprised as anyone, and please be advised that I will be accepting only encouragement in response. Thank you for your understanding at this sensitive time.
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The scientist trudged down the path to the observatory, leaving a line of footprints in the dusting of snow that had fallen during the day. He still could see the cook’s footprints leading from the dormitory to the cafeteria, but they were already fading as the light snow continued to fall. When the scientist emerged from the observatory around dawn, both sets of prints would be gone, like they usually were on winter days. It would look like no one had been at the station for days, years, decades, except for the occasional mouse or fox that ran across the empty space between the buildings and towers when no one was looking. These days, there was hardly anyone left to look.
It was getting harder to push the observatory’s metal door open each night, the scientist noticed. The hinges must be getting rusty. He wondered if the cook would know what to do about that. It had been years since the last visit by a maintenance crew, and in their absence the cook had learned many new skills. He had learned how to gently wipe dust off the telescope’s lenses, how to repair leaky roofs, how to start a fire without matches, and how to prepare meals over that fire. He had learned how to crank a generator, and how to keep their lives running smoothly enough without it so that he hardly ever needed to do it anymore. After the food deliveries stopped, the cook had learned how to forage for plants and trap rabbits in the forests on the slopes of the mountain below. He had learned how to not go any further down than he needed to.
The scientist hadn’t learned any of those things. He hadn’t had time. His work took up every night, and much of his days too. Back when he arrived on the mountain, the scientist had let a computer look at the sky for him. He studied what the computer told him in its language and translated it into words and images his colleagues around the world would be able to understand. Looking through the computer’s eyes, the scientist saw more stars and galaxies than he imagined could exist. He saw visiting comets and distant planets, or sometimes just their shadows floating across their faraway stars. Once he even saw a supernova. Or at least he thought he saw those things. Now he knew that the computer’s eyes had been no substitute for his own.
It was cold in the observatory. Soon the cook would come by with a bowl of soup and kindle a fire in the hearth he had built from metal scavenged from the station’s other buildings. They had once housed other experiments, ones more dependent on steady electricity and a computer’s eyes. The cook and the scientist hadn’t talked about it, but they both knew no one would need that equipment anymore. While he waited for his dinner—or was it breakfast? he still didn’t know—the scientist wrapped a thick blanket around his shoulders and wished the cook would walk through the door with a steaming mug of coffee like he used to. They had run out years ago. They had made a toast with their final cups, one of the few times they had talked about anything other than the station itself.
The scientist bundled himself into the chair positioned in front of the telescope’s eyepiece and peered in. Still too light out. The telescope was several times as tall as he was, and its eye peeked out of a window in the observatory’s domed roof. By turning wheels connected to pulleys, the scientist could move its eye, and the window along with it, to track interesting phenomena across the sky. The telescope wasn’t as powerful as the computer had been, of course. All it had were glass lenses. But unlike the computer, the telescope still worked. It had worked since the day it was built, and it would continue working long after the scientist was gone, he knew. He was grateful for its steadfastness, which had quietly carried it through a few decades of seeming obsolescence until he had needed it again.
When he had first turned to the telescope, the scientist hadn’t been sure how to use it. Unlike when he worked with the computer and reported to the director of the station, he hadn’t known what he supposed to look for. Luckily he had found the observation notebooks of a scientist who worked at the station a few generations before him, when the telescope had first been built. For many months, the scientist spent the daylight hours poring over those notebooks and his nights trying to see what his predecessor had seen. Eventually he learned where to point the telescope’s eye at different times of the year, and how fast to move it across the sky. He saw everything the older scientist had seen, and then he started to see more. He kept track of everything. The station’s supply closet had been stocked with enough blank notebooks and pencils to last a lifetime, so the scientist never worried about paring down his reports. He recorded it all.
His work had taught him patience. It was the seeds of this patience, planted during his studies, that had kept him on the mountain when everybody else had left. They had been increasingly panicked about the station’s lack of electricity and the disappearance of the pinpricks of artificial light from the towns around the mountain. They had wondered what had happened down below, and what would happen next. The scientist had been curious too. He was still curious. How could he not be? But he had always been more curious about what was going to happen up above. So he stayed and kept looking.
Even after all these years, the scientist didn’t really know what to expect when he peered through the telescope’s eye piece on any given night. Certain patterns repeated each night and each year, of course, but the sky also held a surprising amount of novelty. Sometimes he would see a storm churning across Jupiter, or an asteroid that had spun out of its old orbit and into a new place in the sky. Sometimes he would see the old constellations, and sometimes he would trace new ones, writing down their stories in his notebooks. All these possibilities and more thrilled him equally, because the scientist wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He was just looking. He peered through the eyepiece again. The last trace of sunlight had disappeared. It was time to get started.
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My writing
My feature on the archaeology of slavery in the Caribbean won the Gene Stuart Award from the Society for American Archaeology, which recognizes “the most interesting and responsible” story about archaeology published in a newspaper or magazine. I’m very honored!