Two Moons by Thomas Mallon Read Free Book Online Page B

rushing to put away her papers and slide rule in order to join him. William Harkness, a bachelor turning forty, impressed her as solid and solicitous, but he wore the dullness men put on once they’d become disappointed with themselves. This ought to be a fascinating creature, thought Cynthia: what other navy man or scientific here could claim earlier careers as a newspaper reporter and army surgeon? But now, stranded on Venus, his beard going gray, Professor Harkness was a curiously routine specimen, a gentleman preoccupied by numbers, no different from the men she’d grown used to at Interior.
    “Professor, I’m going to stay and finish two more calculations. Not the whole plate, I promise.”
    “Very well, Mrs. May. We all appreciate your zeal. But do make sure not to stay past six-thirty.”
    If it were up to her, she’d stay past nine, by which hour she’d have a chance to spot Hugh Allison, arriving for his night’s labors. In the seven weeks she’d been here, she had seen him only twice, when some daytime errand had him calling on Mr. Harrison or the Observatory’s librarian. Even then she’d merely spied him through the window of this little room they’d put her in, just beyond the one in which they kept the ships’ chronometers, hundreds of them, here for adjustment and repair, ticking madly, practically begging to get up and walk, as insome fairy tale. Spending six days a week in here, she scarcely saw the other computers or the astronomers, let alone the 9.6-inch refractor and the Great Equatorial, whose nightly grindings didn’t commence until she was asleep at Mrs. O’Toole’s. “And where does Mr. Allison focus his attention?” she’d once asked Professor Harkness. “I don’t know that he does focus” was the only response.
    Even so, she would not lose her new optimism, her belief that this job might lead not only to more money but to some imaginative perspective from which she could regard herself as the denizen of some faraway star instead of the overheated little District of Columbia. Venus, alas, was failing to prove such an alternative home, not with Professor Harkness as its sober governor and her own attentions limited to the planet’s movements on one day three years ago. Still, each evening when it came time to put away her ruler and turn down the lamp, she felt a certain pride in the accuracy of her work. She never had more than a dozen eraser shavings to sweep from her desk before walking out to the Observatory’s lobby.
    There, right now, beside the pier of the 9.6-inch, whose tube and lenses were concealed on the third floor under the dome, she ran into Mr. Harrison, who was putting on a pair of gloves.
    “How fancy we are,” she said, fingering the writer’s bump on her own bare middle finger as she watched the clerk struggle into the tight gray kid. “What might be the occasion for these?”
    “I’m going to meet our future,” he grunted, not looking up from his efforts.
    How cryptic we are, too, she thought, waving good night and stepping off into Foggy Bottom’s already thickening air. The stink hit her as forcefully as ever. The only remedy was to keep moving, exactly what the stagnant pond on E Street as well as the Potomac itself—more a lake than a river by the time it reached this basin—refused to do. As her long legs scissored east at a great clip, she again congratulated herself on not wearing any face enamel, which would only be soaking in the moisture and smells and making her carry them home. FannyChristian was all excited about some new powders she kept on her vanity table, insisting they might soon replace paint completely, but her evangelism had little chance of converting Cynthia, who had never applied a drop of the old stuff, not even during the first year of the war, when she’d been trying to catch John May’s eye.
    “My racehorse,” he used to call her, both to compliment and mock her stringy vigor. Sometimes she was like a cat with the