It was not all bad, however, because he didn’t have much interference to worry about. The observatory where he was employed, last and least of the string of eleven that had given him a position since his final doctoral degree, didn’t seem to mind what he did, as long as he did it without bothering them. On the other hand, they didn’t give him much support, either.
Probably they just didn’t know how. The observatory was owned by something called the Lesser Antilles Vending Machine Entertainment Co., Ltd., and, so Shaffery had been told by the one old classmate who still kept up a sort of friendship with him, was actually some sort of tax-evasion scheme maintained by a Las Vegas gambling syndicate. Shaffery didn’t mind this, particularly, although from time to time he got tired of being told that the only two astronomers who mattered were Giovanni Schiaparelli and Galileo Galilei. That was only a minor annoyance. The big cancerous agony was that every year he got a year older and fame would not come.
At his periodic low spots of despondency (he had even tried linking them with the oppositions of Jupiter, meteor showers, and his wife’s periods, but those didn’t come to anything either) he toyed with the notion of dropping it all and going into some easier profession. Banking. Business. Law. “President Shaffery” had the right kind of sound, if he entered politics. But then he would drag his raft to the water, prop two six-packs of Danish beer on his abdomen and float away, and by the end of the first pack his courage would come flowing back, and on the second he would be well into a scheme for detecting gravity waves by statistical analysis of 40,000 acute gout sufferers, telephoning the state of their twinges into a central computer facility.
On such a night he carried his little rubber raft to the shore of the cove, slipped off his sandals, rolled up his bell-bottoms and launched himself. It was the beginning of the year, as close to winter as it ever got on the island, which meant mostly that the dark came earlier. It was a bad time of the year for him, because it was the night before the annual Board Meeting. The first year or two he had looked forward to the meetings as opportunities. He was no longer so hopeful. His objective for the present meeting was only to survive it, and there was some question of a nephew by marriage, an astronomy major at U.C.L.A., to darken even that hope.
Shaffery’s vessel wasn’t really a proper raft, only the sort of kid’s toy that drowns a dozen or so nine-year-olds at the world’s bathing beaches every year. It was less than five feet long. When he got himself twisted and wriggled into it, his back against the ribbed bottom, his head pillowed against one inflated end, and his feet dangling into the water at the other, it was quite like floating in a still sea without the annoyance of getting wet. He opened the first beer and began to relax. The little waves rocked and turned him; the faint breeze competed with the tiny island tide, and the two of them combined to take him erratically away from the beach at the rate of maybe ten feet a minute. It didn’t matter. He was still inside the cove, with islets, or low sandbanks, beaded across the mouth of it. If by any sudden meteorological miracle a storm should spring from that bright-lamped sky, the wind could take him nowhere but back to shore or near an island. And of course there would be no storm. He could paddle back whenever he chose, as easily as he could push his soap dish around his bathtub, as he routinely did while bathing, which in turn he did at least once a day, and when his wife was particularly difficult as often as six times. The bathroom was his other refuge. His wife never followed him there, being too well brought up to run the chance of inadvertently seeing him doing something filthy.
Up on the low hills he could see the corroded copper dome of the observatory. A crescent of light showed that his assistant had opened the dome, but the light showed that he was not using it for any astronomical purpose. That was easy to unriddle. Cyril had turned the lights on so that the cleaning woman could get the place spotless for the Board Meeting and had opened the dome because that proved the telescope was being used. Shaffery bent the empty beer can into a V, tucked it neatly beside him in the raft, and opened another. He was not yet tranquil, but he was not actively hurting anywhere. At least Cyril would not be using the telescope to study the windows of the Bon Repos Hotel across the cove, since the last time he’d done it he had jammed the elevating gears and it could no longer traverse anywhere near the horizon. Shaffery put aside an unwanted, fugitive vision of Idris, the senior and smartest cleaning lady, polishing the telescope mirror with Bon Ami, sipped his beer, thought nostalgically of Relevance Theory and how close he had come with the epicycles, and freed his mind for constructive thought.
The sun was wholly gone, except for a faint luminous purpling of the sky in the general direction of Venezuela. Almost directly overhead hung the three bright stars of Orion’s Belt, slowly turning like the traffic signals on a railroad line, with Sirius and Procyon orbiting headlight bright around them. As his eyes dark-adapted he could make out the stars in Orion’s sword, even the faint patch of light that was the great gas cloud. He was far enough from the shore so that sound could not carry, and he softly called out the great four-pointed pattern of first-magnitude stars that surrounded the constellation: “Hey there, Betelguese. Hi, Bellatrix. What’s new, Rigel? Nice to see you again, Saiph.” He glanced past red Aldebaran to the close-knit stars of the Pleiades, returned to Orion and, showing off now, called off the stars of the Belt: “Hey, Alnitak! Yo, Alnilam! How goes it, Mintaka?”
The problem with drinking beer in the rubber raft was that your head was bent down toward your chest and it was difficult to burp; but Shaffery arched his body up a little, getting in some water in the process but not caring, got rid of the burp, opened another beer, and gazed complacently at Orion. It was a satisfying constellation. It was satisfying that he knew so much about it. He thought briefly of the fact that the Arabs had called the Belt Stars by the name Jauzah, meaning the Golden Nuts; that the Chinese thought they looked like a weighing beam, and that Greenlanders called them Siktut, The Seal Hunters Lost at Sea. As he was going on to remember what the Australian aborigines had thought of them (they thought they resembled three young men dancing a corroboree), his mind flickered back to the lost seal hunters. Um, he thought. He raised his head and looked toward the shore.
It was now more than a hundred yards away. That was farther than he really wanted to be, and so he kicked the raft around, oriented himself by the stars and began to paddle back. It was easy and pleasant to do. He used a sort of splashy upside-down breast stroke of the old-fashioned angel’s wing kind, but as all his weight was supported by the raft, he moved quickly across the water. He was rather enjoying the exercises, toes and fingers moving comfortably in the tepid sea, little ghosts of luminescence glowing where he splashed, until quite without warning the fingertips of one hand struck sharply and definitely against something that was resistantly massive and solid where there should have been only water, something that moved stubbornly, something that rasped them like a file. Oh, my God, thought Shaffery. What a lousy thing to happen. They so seldom came in this close to shore. He didn’t even think about them. What a shame for a man who might have been Einstein to wind up, incomplete and unfulfilled, as shark shit.