By the second evening, Isobel had decided not to ask whether the telescope was working.
The technician told her anyway.
“I’ve checked everything I can check.”
She set a coffee beside him.
“That sounds carefully worded.”
“It’s been a carefully worded day.”
He had spent much of it testing the controls, checking connections and comparing the telescope’s reported position with where it was actually pointing. By late afternoon, it had followed a sequence of instructions without complaint. He had been sufficiently pleased to telephone someone about it.
Now Isobel stood beside him while the telescope completed its first movement of the night.
It stopped.
On the screen, a familiar patch of sky appeared.
Neither of them spoke.
The technician reached for the coffee.
“I may have made that call too early.”
Isobel pulled out the observing log and sat down.
During the day, she had gone through the exposures from the previous night. There was useful material among them, enough to make the lost observing time less painful, but it had taken discipline to concentrate on it. Her proposed programme was still largely untouched. Tonight should have been an opportunity to recover some of that work.
Instead, she compared the new field with the printout beside her.
The same stars occupied the screen. The framing was slightly different, but she recognised the brighter pair near one edge and the loose group below them. She had spent too many hours looking at them to mistake the resemblance.
“This is where it stopped yesterday.”
“Yes.”
“Did you use those coordinates during the tests?”
“Among others. It went somewhere else when I asked it to.”
He opened the record of the evening’s instructions. The position Isobel had requested was there, followed by the instrument’s confirmation that it had reached it.
The image contradicted both.
She watched him enter another position, this time choosing a field well away from the one they had been trying to reach. The machinery responded smoothly. For a moment, she allowed herself to hope that the problem had been confined to one instruction.
The next image appeared.
Different framing. Familiar stars.
The technician leaned towards the screen.
“That isn’t even consistently wrong.”
Isobel looked from the image to the log. She could see why he was annoyed. A repeatable error would have given him something to investigate. This looked like the instrument accepting an instruction and then quietly doing something of its own.
She took a sip of coffee, which was already less warm than she wanted.
“Let’s get an exposure before we lose this too.”
The faint point was still there.
Isobel found it while comparing the new image with the last usable exposure from the previous night. It had shifted against the surrounding stars, just as it had between the earlier frames. She marked its position and checked the times written beside her notes.
There was nothing remarkable about finding a moving object in a field of stars. Her difficulty was that she had not intended to observe this field at all.
She asked for another exposure and used the interval to consult the material she had brought with her. By the time the technician called her attention back to the screen, several pages lay open around the observing log.
“Same place,” he said.
“The telescope or the object?”
“The telescope. I’m leaving the object to you.”
She compared the frames. The stars matched cleanly. The point had moved again, though only a little.
It was worth following. That was as much as she was prepared to write.
The technician turned towards her papers.
“Anything?”
“Nothing I’m confident about yet.”
He nodded and returned to the controls. Isobel liked that he did not press her for a discovery to justify the night. She had already spent enough time trying to justify it to herself.
They managed part of her programme later.
That made what happened next more irritating.
For almost half an hour, the telescope behaved as expected. Isobel returned to her planned observations, and the technician settled into his chair with the wary satisfaction of someone unwilling to announce that a fault had cleared.
They completed an exposure. She checked it, made a note and asked for the next field.
The telescope moved.
When the image appeared, she recognised the brighter pair of stars.
“Oh, come on.”
The technician looked up.
For a few seconds, he simply stared at the screen. Then he drew the keyboard towards him and began checking the sequence they had just used.
Isobel waited. The brief return to ordinary work had made her more impatient than the earlier failure. She had begun thinking about what she could salvage from the night; now she was back to negotiating with a machine.
“Did it repeat something?” she asked.
“Not in the instructions.”
He showed her the record. The last requested position was the one she had given him. There was no new entry explaining the movement back to the other field.
“Can we keep the printout?”
“I was going to.”
He sent it to the printer. While it worked, Isobel looked again at the faint point, now closer to the middle of the image.
She had not noticed that before.
She reached for the earlier frames and compared the edges. They had been recording slightly different portions of the same field throughout the evening. A pointing fault could account for that. She had no reason yet to give it another explanation.
Still, she moved the pages closer together.
The technician placed the new printout beside her.
“What?”
“I’m looking.”
He waited long enough to establish that she was not going to say more, then began another exposure.
After midnight, Isobel went outside.
The cold reached through her jacket almost at once. She stood near the building, stretching her back and letting her eyes adjust. From here, the sky gave no indication of the trouble they were having beneath it. Her father would have preferred this part: looking up, finding something familiar, staying until the cold persuaded him indoors.
She thought of telephoning him when she returned to La Serena. He would ask what she had found.
At present, she had found a moving point and a telescope with an objection to being told where to look.
Inside, the technician was studying a fresh image.
“It’s holding well,” he said as she came in.
“That’s something.”
She sat beside him and drew the log towards her. The usable observations were accumulating. Whatever its other faults, the instrument could still produce them.
He glanced at the stack of records they had kept.
“No explanation for that movement.”
Isobel looked at the last instruction, then at the field on the screen.
“A ghost in the system.”
He turned towards her.
“If you find it, ask it to finish my maintenance report.”
She smiled and began recording the latest exposure.
For now, they would leave the telescope where it wanted to be. Tomorrow she could examine the frames more carefully and decide whether the faint object deserved some of her final night.
Before starting another exposure, she checked its position once more.
It was still comfortably within the field.