PROLOGUE
Halsey Run
West Virginia · April 2014
The tone had been on her screen for seventeen seconds before Ruth Ordway stopped believing it was the airport.
She turned down the room lights. That helped her see the line; it did nothing to explain it. Outside the window, the telescope moved too slowly for her to notice, following the patch of sky it had been assigned three days ago.
The airport beacon was where it should be. The receiver temperature was normal. She checked both again, annoyed at herself for starting with the answers she wanted.
Forty-one seconds. Her heart was doing something she disapproved of.
The line was narrow and almost straight. She had spent forty years finding ordinary reasons for things like this: a loose connection, a passing aircraft, somebody's equipment doing something its owner swore it could not do. There would be checks to make. She reached for the telephone, then left her hand beside it. There was nobody else on the mountain until morning.
At seventy-four, she was the entire night staff.
The line stopped.
Ruth saved the recording. She waited for the confirmation that the file had been written, then opened it again. There it was. She had not imagined it.
She moved the telescope away from that patch of sky and brought it back. Nothing. She waited, tried again, and got up to make coffee only when her knees began to hurt.
The closure letter was pinned above the kettle. She had read it often enough to know where the word sunset appeared. In October they would remove the receiver and leave the dish pointing straight up. Until then she was supposed to complete the survey and prepare the records for transfer.
She took her coffee back to the console. She had once thought that keeping a record was the easy part.
By six she had filled a page with things she had checked and things she could not check alone. She wrote the file address in the paper notebook as well. Then she drove home through a valley that smelled of wet rock and last year's leaves.
Her own telescope stood on the porch: brass, made in 1938, bought for six dollars the summer she got tenure. Her students had teased her about it. She liked having one instrument she could understand all the way through.
The western sky was still dark enough. She found the patch she had been watching, although the little refractor could tell her nothing about what the larger instrument had heard. She knew that. She adjusted the eyepiece anyway.
A few stars. No visible change.
She stayed until the light began to take them. In the house, the telephone rang: probably the day technician, who would want to know why she had left so many notes. She could call him back.
“Say it again,” she said. “Say it twice, and I’ll ruin what’s left of my life for you.”