Moonfall

NEWSNET. 12:30 P.M. UPDATE.

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Beaver Meadow Observatory, North Java, New York. 12:38 P.M.

Wesley Feinberg had twice won the Nobel Prize for his work in calculating the age of the universe and for establishing the relation between gravity and quantum effects. He was also director of Harvard's AstroLab in central Massachusetts. He was respected by his peers, treated like a minor deity by the graduate students, and granted every perk by the institution, which was delighted to have him. The latest perk: temporary assignment to the Beaver Meadow Observatory in North Java, New York, which was in the path of the eclipse.

Feinberg was happy to go. And not only because of the celestial event. He was a bachelor, a man who'd devoted his life to astronomy and discovered it wasn't quite enough. The trip to Beaver Meadow got him out of the apartment he'd grown to detest, and threw him in with a new group of people. The reality of his existence puzzled him. He'd accomplished everything he'd ever wanted, had gone well beyond what he'd thought possible. Yet he sensed that something round and dark had moved across the essence of his own existence, blocking off the light.

Beaver Meadow wasn't a big facility. It had only three telescopes, the largest being a forty-five-inch Clayton-Braustein reflector, which would relay images onto an eighteen-foot wallscreen. The observatory had reserved a prime-location computer for him, overlooking the wallscreen. The director, Perry Hoxon, asked whether he required anything else.

Hoxon was a busy and innocuous little man. Feinberg explained he was not working on a specific project. In fact, he would have been content to sit quietly outside on one of the benches in the adjoining park, and simply enjoy the eclipse. But yes, he was certainly grateful for the prime location. (He would in fact have been irritated had it not been offered.)

Now, as the event unfolded, he wondered whether he shouldn't have gone outside and watched from the parking lot. Several hundred people had crowded into the facility. Kids were laughing, babies crying, and there was a minimum level of conversation that did not subside even during the final moments before totality. Feinberg had seen the phenomenon before, an utter lack of respect for what was happening, people who had dropped by the observatory on the way to a supermarket. Then the last of the light ran off the screen. Bright spikes and beads flashed into existence, haloing the dark disk. The diamond ring effect. A few people cheered, as if someone were about to score a touchdown. He sighed and concentrated on the event, shutting out the rest of the world. How unlikely, and how fortunate, that Sun and Moon were the same apparent size! No other world in the solar system could experience an event even remotely like this. If he, Wesley M. Feinberg, had been designing the system, this was exactly the sort of spectacular effect he would have wanted to create for the one intelligent species among the worlds. And he wasn't sure he'd have thought of it.

A noise in the auditorium recalled him to the present. The voice was male, filled with impatience: "I'll wait in the car." How dull and unimaginative the general population was.

"Professor Feinberg?"

He looked away from the screen. One of the observatory's interns, a very young man who seemed intimidated in his presence, held out a piece of paper. "Sorry to disturb you, Professor. This just came for you."

He took it, nodded, pushed it unread into his pocket, and went back to the eclipse. The solar corona was magnificent: Plumes and streamers a million miles long blazed out of the darkened disk. The spectacle rose and fell with mathematical precision, a cosmic symphony in light and power. He watched, hearing now only his own heartbeat, willing himself closer, trying to grasp the enormity of what he was seeing.

"Professor. I think there's some urgency." A new voice this time. Hoxon. At first Feinberg wasn't sure what the man was talking about. Then he remembered the message. He fished it out of his pocket.

It was from the Orbital Lab: