Doc chuckled and led us to a corkscrew ladder that snaked once around the telescope mount. This left us on a short ledge, above which was a metal-runged ladder locked at chest height, which we mounted one by one.
As I was helped up into the cage I looked down and gasped. At the bottom of the telescope tube I saw my own face, and those of my companions, reflected in the mirror to gargantuan, carnival size.
I staggered, but a strong arm took hold of me.
“Hold on there,” Wyatt drawled mildly, as he settled me into a sitting position at the bottom of the observer’s cage we occupied. “Can’t have you falling thirty feet and hurting my mirror. Had a student down at the university a few years ago decided he didn’t like the look of his face in that mirror. He climbed down and took an ax to it. Put four nice chips in it before me and the security man got him out.” He smiled—a lazy, friendly gesture in his bearded face. “Hit him myself with this.” He held up a long dented metal flashlight for my inspection, then switched its red filtered light on and turned away from me.
“Not gonna have long tonight, Doc,” he said. He turned off the white light bulb clamped to the top of the cage, leaving us in red glow. “Not that it matters much,” he continued wryly, bending over a chart that was unfolded at his feet, “since my night vision’s shot anyway.”
“We could have left you here alone,” Pettis said.
“Don’t think I haven’t thought how nice that would be,” Wyatt replied. “But I think you’ll find it interesting enough around here tonight to make you happy you came.”
He concentrated on his map, and I leaned over to see what the red light revealed. It was a large, finely detailed map of the full Moon. Craters were drawn and identified down to a scale I had never seen before.
The map was marked up in grease pencil. A huge, roughly triangular section covering the crater Aristarchus stood out boldly.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the marked area.
Proctor turned his slow, warm smile on me. “You’ve got a treat coming,” he said.
A few stars had risen; Orion’s hourglass torso was just beginning to thrust itself into the eastern sky.
Wyatt turned his gaze on Pettis, who was studying the shadowy grounds outside the dome through the open slit. “Don’t worry, Cowboy.”
Pettis grunted and resumed his vigil. Amy sat curled in one corner, half asleep.
“Got a little occultation work done last night,” Wyatt said to Doc. “The computers got smashed up the first night, and then I lost power, so I had to do everything by hand. Hell,” he smiled, “it’s like being back in high school with my first six-inch reflector. Got a couple of photos in before the Moon came up last night.” His face partially clouded. “I left the plates downstairs and they got smashed up, though.”
“Wyatt,” Doc said slowly, a smile spreading across his normally solemn face, “don’t you know what’s been happening?”
Proctor looked hurt. “I know what happened. You bozos said you’d get me when you needed me. What the hell else was I going to do? You know what it’s like trying to get any time on this telescope?” He grinned. “I’ve had four nights alone with it!”
“Anybody up here with you the first night?” Pettis inquired.
“Young kid from Tucson, along with the security guard. The guard ran when the meteorites started coming down. The kid decided to try to make it home in his Fiat. I tried to talk him out of it, but…” His gaze wandered to the slit.
In the red glare of his flashlight, his face brightened. “There.”
We followed his level finger.
Outside, the first curved fringe of the Moon pushed up over the low desert horizon. It resembled a white scythe cutting the night, killing the stars above it with its light. Even proud Orion was dimmed by its brilliance.
Proctor turned to work the manual controls at the front of the cage, talking as he did so. “The Moon’s beginning to wane. Tonight shouldn’t be as bad as last night.”
“What was last night like up here?” Doc asked.
Proctor smiled. “They got a little uppity.”
“Tonight could be just as bad,” Pettis offered. “That full Moon last night might have given them a jolt that lasts a couple of days. Tonight might just add to it.”
Proctor nodded thoughtfully, turning back to his levers. “Anyway, we’ll get a look before we batten down the hatches.”
He worked around the cage, climbing up and down, lowering himself halfway into the telescope, then lowering himself down the ladder. He enlisted Doc and me to help with a couple of huge ancient flywheels.
Proctor said, “I haven’t had to do any of this manually since I was a student. And even then it was just a kind of initiation rite.”
The big tube began to move. I took pleasure in the slow swing of the massive mechanism, the steady slide through right ascension and then declination that brought the tube into line with the now-risen Moon.
“Go on up,” Proctor ordered. He stayed behind.
We heard him talking to himself at the base of the tube and saw the intermittent flash of his red light. He grunted in satisfaction. The tread of his feet on the metal rungs back up to the cage was subsumed by the soothing sound of a huge clock in motion.
Tock-tock, tock-tock, it tolled, in ponderous, inevitable tones.
“The old spring mechanism still works,” Proctor remarked as he pushed past us to set up an eyepiece in the focuser. “The idiot wolves break what they know, or can reach, but so far there hasn’t been a former astronomer among them, and that baby down there’s encased in half-inch-thick iron. Percival Lowell loved this ‘scope almost as much as his own in Flagstaff.” He sighted down into the eyepiece, turned the focusing knob, then grunted in satisfaction.
“Have a look, Doc.”
Doc looked. I have described his taciturn demeanor, but now he drew in his breath. “My Lord, Proctor, I had no idea it was this vast.”
Pettis looked next, and then Amy, and while I waited my turn I looked out through the slit of the dome. Even with the naked eye I could see that something was wrong with the northwest quadrant of the Moon. From my nights at the eyepiece of my own eight-inch Newtonian, I knew where Aristarchus was. I knew its bright appearance in the midst of the Moon’s largest “sea,” Oceanus Procellarum. But now there was a large area, darker than the surrounding mare, roughly triangular, where the famous crater had been prominent.
“Hurry,” Proctor said, giving the telescope over to me. I looked into the eyepiece of an instrument I had dreamed of using on my many tourist trips up to the observatory, and I gasped. Aristarchus was gone. A huge area in Oceanus Procellarum where it had been was gouged, as if a cosmic spade had dug down into it. All surface features had been blasted aside by a volcanic eruption from within the Moon. Even now, the eruption continued. Tiny flares of red flame dotted the pitted ruins, which reached nearly to the lip of the massive crater Copernicus. An area comprising nearly one quarter of the Moon’s face had been blown out into space.
“My God,” I said. “My God.”
It was only when Wyatt took hold of my arm and turned me away that my eyes broke contact with the horrible sight I had witnessed.
“We have things to do here,” Wyatt said.
Pettis was already pulling up the metal ladder and locking it into position. Doc helped Amy down into the telescope tube. I watched her descend the metal rungs clamped to the inside of the tube, avoiding my own distorted visage in the mirror.
Pettis returned, crouching in a corner of the cage. Wyatt had put another eyepiece in the tube and was cursing the fact that we had not had time to slew the telescope away from the Moon and that he would be burdened with study of only its ravaged face for the rest of the night.