Meanwhile, nearly eight thousand feet above sea level in the mountains of northern Chile, a technician at La Silla Observatory was running his hand through what remained of his hair.
It was a habit his wife had advised him to abandon. On nights like this, he felt she underestimated the provocation.
The telescope had developed a fault.
More precisely, it had developed a fault while insisting that it was working perfectly.
He had checked the instructions, checked the connections and repeated a procedure he had performed hundreds of times. Everything appeared to be in order, apart from the substantial piece of machinery pointing at the wrong part of the sky.
Behind him, Isobel Rojas looked at her watch.
He could see her doing it in the reflection on his screen.
“Checking the time won’t make it move,” he said.
“Neither has anything you’ve tried.”
He turned towards her. She offered him the coffee she had brought. He accepted it. There was no point arguing with an accurate assessment.
“It was working perfectly yesterday,” he said.
Isobel set her own coffee beside the observing log.
“You’ve mentioned that.”
“Because it’s relevant.”
The fault had persisted all night. Each time he thought he had cleared it, the telescope would accept its next instruction, move smoothly and stop somewhere it had not been asked to go.
Then it would report that it had arrived.
Yesterday, the same equipment had followed the same procedures without complaint. Nothing had been replaced. No settings had been deliberately changed.
He had checked those twice.
Isobel had spent six months preparing for these three nights. Securing telescope time had required a proposal, two revisions and more patience than she had left this evening.
Her father had introduced her to astronomy from a chair in their garden in La Serena, where she had grown up. He still imagined her work involved looking through an eyepiece and finding something interesting.
Tonight, she would have welcomed that simplicity.
She looked at the latest image on the screen.
“Well,” she said, “what have we been looking at instead?”
The technician brought up the exposures they had managed to save.
“Mostly this field.”
“Mostly?”
“Occasionally it found somewhere else to be wrong.”
Isobel pulled a chair beside him.
The images were clear. Whatever trouble the telescope was having with its instructions, it could still hold a position long enough to produce useful observations.
She compared the first two exposures, noting their times and the patch of sky they covered. A faint point appeared in both, slightly displaced against the surrounding stars.
She marked it in her notebook.
It might be a known object. She would check. For now, there was too little to say anything useful about it.
Her own observing programme lay open beside the keyboard. Several carefully planned entries remained untouched.
She looked from those to the images.
“Can it hold this position?”
“It seems very attached to it.”
“Then leave it there.”
He turned towards her.
“You want to keep observing?”
“I want something to show for tonight.”
He nodded and set up another exposure.
Isobel drew a line beneath her notes and began recording what they could actually observe. It wasn’t the work she had come to do, but the images were usable and the sky was clear.
She could be angry with the telescope in the morning.