The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer Read Free Book Online

children sleeping against their sides. They thought of a scene on the overlook, or another scene from their lives which now seemed different. An accident had happened. Not all of them had seen it, but none could forget the brief cry from the wall. None could forget they had witnessed a death.
    Any group but this one would have blamed it on the comet; that’s what the locals did. They had stood near the body on the beach, then pointed east to where Comet Swift still shone its chill arrow in the sky, and the shadow doctors proclaimed that the comet had scattered misfortune on the island, left it behind for them to breathe like dust from an ox-drawn cart. This was not ignorance; the shadow doctors belonged to a centuries-old tradition of comets and their ill augers, from the ancient Chinese and their dying emperors to the latest return of Halley’s Comet in 1910, when Americans panicked in the streets, afraid that the comet’s tail would poison the earth with cyanide. Any group but this one would have believed it: that comets were vile stars.
    But, worse for them, the scientists blamed themselves. They had come to the island to draw a net across the sky and trawl it for meteors, and, like fishermen, they planned with care each part of the project, where each person sat and how they looked at the sky. They were scientists, and could turn life into a laboratory setting, control every aspect so that it pointed toward an answer. They could bend even nature to their bidding. Yet they had failed. Something had gone undone, and they had lost a life. A crowd of artists, of dancers, of poets could never have blamed themselves for terrible chance, but these scientists thought they held chance firmly in their grip. Like trainers, they bent their heads happily between its open jaws. But it was as Eli had always feared: They had been wrong about themselves all along. Someone had died. A child, no less.
    Some of the wives and children had gone home days earlier, unwilling to sit for more nights under the comet’s watchful eye. Kathy had been among them, her eyes darkly circled, waving from the boat at sunset, as the ones who stayed behind, the young astronomers, pretended to be stronger than those leaving. None of them doubted this was a lie. The remaining days were spent sleeping and reporting back to California; the wide-awake nights of meteor-watching became silent now except for the hesitant cries of “Time!” and it was hard for anyone not to glance over to where a piece of wood lay propped against the wall, covering the part that had crumbled.
    The plane flew on silently. Professor Swift, three seats behind Manday, was wide awake as well. He sat in an empty row, smoking a pipe, turning the pages of journals under his crisp reading light. The light caught the gray in his beard and turned it tinsel. He was not known to sleep well, and students heard rumors that he had, in fact, become nocturnal in order to function under the telescope, forcing the department to schedule his classes to coincide with dawn or sunset. The professor seemed to be working, jotting notes; but in fact he turned the pages only to signal time passing. He was not reading them, and the notes were part of a letter to his wife. He would see her the moment he walked across the tarmac, only hours from now, but he wrote her a letter nonetheless. There was no way to express this out loud.
    A woman woke and moaned. Her husband whispered to her, patted her arm, and she fell asleep again, her brow creased in worry. Manday sat by his open window, growing golden from the dawn over Hawaii. A stewardess in a cap and miniskirt came down the aisle, touching a seat in every row as if she could heal them by her passage. She showed a little girl to the bathroom, then returned the way she had come until someone asked for water. She left briskly and did not return. Passengers lit cigarettes, smoke trailing into the cabin, giving the air a thin blue haze. A man stumbled from another