Two Moons by Thomas Mallon Read Free Book Online Page A

since it would have meant interrupting Newcomb, who was reassuring Dom Pedro and his empress, at considerable length, that from now on he would make certain they received, back in São Paulo, each and every monograph he produced.
    The paperwork before Hugh was perilously dull. If he wasn’t careful, he really would fall asleep here. He ought to start back for his rooms, but the thought of lying there alone, amidst all the Moorish furniture his mother had imported at Charleston and then sent north, made him linger in the dome, taking the one-in-a-hundred chance the skies would clear and Newcomb would give the signal to open up.
    He looked over at the Great Equatorial, its mouth closed, its long gullet denied the spoon-feeding of light they’d meant to bring it tonight. For all its hugeness, and all the clock-driven power that kept it moving with the objects of its attention, the telescope was oddly unassertive, a receptor, never sending forth any light of its own. Between his index finger and thumb, Hugh took one of the gold buttons on his vest and twisted it, until the metal disk caught a flare of gaslight; then he wiggled it, so that the reflection played, like a djinn eager for escape, against the highest metal in the dome. Newcomb, sensing something above him, but not quite sure where or what it was, looked quizzically at Hugh, who let go of the button and looked down at an item of work he had promised Davis to have done before morning.
    If you put the three examinations side by side, there was no comparison. Poor Mr. Gilworth had taken himself out of the running, and the younger of the ladies, for all the prettiness of her hand, was clearly too slow at her calculations. So that was that. He took a sheet of stationery from the table’s little drawer: “Mr. Harrison,” he wrote. “Please send a note to this Cynthia May—whatever her last name is—and have her report on Monday morning.”

“Mrs. May, you ought to be getting home now. It’s nearly six.”
    “I could go a bit further with this one, Professor Harkness.” She pointed to the photographic plate, made in Tasmania on December 8, 1874. “It’s one of yours.”
    “Ah, yes,” said William Harkness, the trace of a Scottish infancy in his voice. He regarded his three-year-old labors. “Not a very good plate, either. None of them is.” He sounded apologetic, as if the bad weather that had greeted the Transit of Venus teams that day in ’74 remained his fault, and the whole expedition had been a spendthrift act.
    “Not at all,” said Cynthia. “The image here is quite clear, almost sharp.” She pointed to a small dot of planet crossing the Sun. “And the numbers are coming fine.”
    The numbers were, in fact, not so fine. The trigonometric reductions that would yield Earth’s distance from the Sun—once the speed of Venus’s transit across the star was factored in—were, in truth, still hopelessly incomplete. Not from any flaw in Cynthia May’s mathematics—Professor Harkness had more than once marveled at her exactitude and speed—but by a cluster of coefficients beyond his control. Congressional appropriations for the work had proved as unreliable as the Pacific skies three Decembers ago. Cynthia was the only computernow assigned to the 237 pictures the astronomers had managed to shoot, and there was no telling how soon they would have to shift her to something else. Realizing that this transit would not be the lustrous career-enhancer it had once appeared, Simon Newcomb, formerly much involved, had stepped discreetly out of Venus’s shadow and back into the moonlight of his prior research, where he would stay until some other part of the sky disclosed an opportunity for his shooting star. Quiet Professor Harkness had been left holding the bag.
    “May I walk you eastward?” he asked. “I’m about ready to leave myself.”
    He lived in Lafayette Square, and if she looked at the case objectively, the way Fanny Christian would, she’d be