Young Writers Society

Chapter 1: My Night Suddenly Gets a Whole Lot More Interesting

Addy Barlow

“Okay,” I said, clapping my hands together. “Are we ready to go?”

“Yup,” Brandon said from the control panel. “Just finishing the white wall. We still have to take an arc lamp and a empty sky, but we should be good after that.”

“Great,” Gabi said. “I have all the info for the galaxies in here.” She shook her little journal.

“Addy,” John said. “Emmy and I have a quasar we’d like to look at first, if you don’t mind…”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” I replied. “We don’t have too many early objects, do we?”

“Nope,” Gabi said. “Just three in the thirteen hour range. We’ve got a good ninety minutes before those set.”

“Okay, Brandon,” Emmy said. “Same one as yesterday. You still have the coordinates, right?”

“Yup,” Brandon answered, preoccupied. “Slewing…” He pressed a few buttons, and outside, the giant telescope whirred to life.

“We’ve got this covered, girls,” Emmy said, addressing us. “You two can go get some air if you want.”

Gabi and I looked at each other. “Bok Walk,” we said simultaneously. We jumped out of our spinny chairs and jogged outside, being careful to close the control room door before walking into the telescope room. The temperature out here had to be constant, or our images could come out distorted. The telescope was giant, a great black mass looming up in front of us, illuminated only by the blinking lights of the spectrograph and the glow of the night sky. Gabi and I stood still for a few minutes until our eyes had adapted to the dark, and then stepped lightly through a small door out onto the Bok Walk.

The Bok Walk was our personal hangout spot. It was basically just a concrete slab sticking off the side of the Bok Telescope, encircled by a wall to keep people from falling off. The floor was scuffed and the paint was chipped, but this was the best spot for stargazing, short of the roof of the Mayall Telescope. We didn’t get to use the Mayall very often; it used too much power. But the Bok Telescope was perfect—it was small enough for our generators to handle, but big enough for almost all our scientific needs. Plus it had the Bok Walk.

From the Bok Walk, one could see about two thirds of the horizon, and a good three fourths of the sky. There were the two WIYN Telescopes to the south, and the McMath-Pierce Solar Observatory to the southeast. And to the east was Tucson—no, wait. Tucson was there before World War Three. Maybe it was still there—no one up here knew. Everything below six thousand feet was covered in a permanent layer of smog. It wasn’t pretty, but it kept it dark up here.

We were a little community of astronomers, the twenty of us that lived up here. We weren’t self-sufficient, not by a long shot, seeing as we had supplies airlifted by our buddies at the Air National Guard base every month; but we were isolated. After World War Three started, a couple astronomers were smart enough to hide up here, and apparently, they never came down. The population up here stayed pretty constant. Occasionally we’d get refugees from below the smog layer, like Emmy, but not often. I had been born on Mount Graham, another science hotspot, before the big fire there. I didn’t remember my parents (I had been four at the time). Don, our previous director, had managed to save a bunch of kids before the fire spread. Gabi and I, and our friends Nick and Jhoonil, were all Mount Graham kids. That didn’t matter much, though; as far as we were concerned, Kitt Peak was our home.

“The stars are very scintillating tonight,” I observed.

“Definitely,” Gabi agreed. “John and Emmy aren’t going to like that.” John and Emmy were Kitt Peak’s current directors, taking over after Don’s plane had disappeared. They were a cute couple—shy guy, exuberant girl, both very good scientists, with the sweetest little four-year-old on the planet. Their quasar project required a steady atmosphere, but the seeing wasn’t that great tonight.

“See anything unusual on your shift?” I asked. I was referring to our sentry schedule. We’d had a few scares with the people we called the underworlders—the cult that controlled things below the smog layer. They had taken over during the aftermath of World War Three, over sixty years ago. From what Emmy had told us, things were just awful down there—apparently the underworlders were archaic, and very discriminatory. “And they call themselves servants of God,” Emmy would complain. “Does it get any more backward?!” Hence their other nickname, “the God Squad.”

“Nope, everything’s on the up-and-up,” Gabi reported. “It’s quiet during the day. …And too bright.”

“Yeah, the sun’s up, remember?” I chuckled. We would usually get up at around four in the afternoon, and go to bed at sunrise. Sometimes people would switch their schedules around for solar observing, but all the good stuff was out at night.

“Hey, what’s that?” Gabi asked.

“What’s what?” I said. She was pointing up at the sky. I crouched behind her, leveling my eyes with her arm. A bright satellite was crossing the sky. I tilted my head in confusion. We never saw satellites that bright.

“What do you think it is?” Gabi asked, sounding just as confused as I was.

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I suppose someone could have launched it from somewhere else, but someone would’ve told us, wouldn’t they?”

“Yeah,” Gabi agreed. “And who would have that kind of technology, anyway?”

“What are you looking at?” John and Emmy had appeared on the Bok Walk behind us. “The sky’s no good,” John explained. “Too jumpy to get a clear image. Find something interesting?”

“Yeah, look at that satellite,” I said, pointing at the bright dot. “Isn’t that weird?”

“Yeah, that is weird,” Emmy repeated, sounding considerably more concerned than Gabi had. “John, what do you think that could be?”

John shook his head. “I don’t know. We need to get a telescope on that thing.”

Gabi and I followed John and Emmy back inside the telescope chamber and down three flights of rickety spiral stairs. Once we were on the ground level, we tiptoed to the door, being careful not to trip over any wires that might be sticking out, and ran outside on the pavement.

Out on the road, Teresa, another senior astronomer at Kitt Peak, was monitoring a small imaging telescope with at least half the mountain’s population. She was incessantly recruiting people for her light pollution experiment. I had thought about hopping on board with that at first, but when she wasn’t satisfied with a team of eight, I decided not to. I didn’t like working in large groups. That was two months ago—since then, her team had grown to twelve.

“Okay, Teresa,” Emmy said, striding purposefully toward the group. “We’re commandeering your telescope.”

“Excuse me,” Teresa said indignantly. “I was taking an image!”

“We’re sorry about that,” John said firmly, “but we may have a crisis on our hands here.” Teresa scowled, but stepped back.

Emmy slewed the telescope around, probably quicker than she should have, and pointed it at the bright satellite. The telescope was short, so she had to bend over quite a ways to look in the eyepiece. I watched as her determined expression faded to confusion, and then to dull awe. “John, you’d better look at this,” she murmured.

John walked over and looked into the telescope. His left eye was on the eyepiece, but I saw his right eye widen. “Emmy, did you see this, too?” he asked, his hands shaking.

“Let me see,” I said, moving John out of the way. I bent over the little telescope and looked through the eyepiece. I blinked. That was ridiculous. And impossible. And—way, way cool.

“It looks like,” I began, trailing off as I stared through the eyepiece in disbelief. “It looks like a starship!”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Emmy agreed.

“Well, there’s only one way to find out, right?” John said. “Let’s head down to the radio telescope and try to contact it.”