'Okay,' Jason said, 'can you point at Polaris?'
Polaris, the North Star. I had been reading about slavery and the civil war. There had been a fugitive slave song:
When the sun comes back and the first quail calls,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
The old man is waiting to carry you to freedom
When you follow the Drinking Gourd.
'When the sun comes back' meant after the winter solstice. Quail winter in the south. The gourd was the Big Dipper, wide end of the bowl pointed at Polaris, due north, the direction of freedom: I found the Dipper and waved my hand hopefully in that direction.
'See?' Diane said to Jason, as if I had proved a point in some argument they hadn't bothered to share with me.
'Not bad,' Jason allowed. 'You know what a comet is?'
'Yes.'
'Want to see one?'
I nodded and stretched out next to him, still tasting and regretting the acrid tang of Diane's cigarette. Jason showed me how to brace my elbows on the ground, then let me hold the binoculars to my eyes and adjust the focus until the stars became blurred ovals and then pinpricks, many more than I could see with the naked eye. I panned around until I found, or guessed I had found, the spot to which Jason had directed me: a tiny node of phosphorescence against the merciless black sky.
'A comet—' Jason began.
'I know. A comet is a sort of dusty snowball falling toward the sun.'
'You could say that.' He was scornful. 'Do you know where comets come from, Tyler? They come from the outer solar system—from a kind of icy halo around the sun that reaches from the orbit of Pluto halfway to the nearest star. Out where it's colder than you can possibly imagine.'
I nodded, a little uncomfortably. I had read enough science fiction to grasp the sheer, unspeakable largeness of the night sky. It was something I sometimes liked to think about, though it could be—at the wrong time of night, when the house was quiet—a little intimidating.
'Diane?' Jason said. 'You want to look?'
'Do I have to?'
'No, of course you don't have to. You can sit there fumigating your lungs and drooling, if you prefer.'
'Smartass.' She stubbed the cigarette into the grass and held out her hand. I passed over the binoculars.
'Just be careful with those.' Jase was deeply in love with his binoculars. They still smelled of shrinkwrap and Styro-foam packing.
She adjusted the focus and looked up. She was silent for a time. Then she said, 'You know what I see when I use these things to look at the stars?'
'What?'
'Same old stars.'
'Use your imagination.' He sounded genuinely annoyed.
'If I can use my imagination why do I need binoculars?'
'I mean, think about what you're looking at.'
'Oh,' she said. Then: 'Oh. Oh! Jason, I see—'
'What?'
'I think… yes… it's God! And he has a long white beard! And he's holding up a sign! And the sign says… JASON SUCKS!'
'Very funny. Give them back if you don't know how to use them.'
He held out his hand; she ignored him. She sat upright and aimed the binoculars at the windows of the Big House.
The party had been going on since late that afternoon. My mother had told me the Lawtons' parties were 'expensive bull sessions for corporate bigshots,' but she had a finely honed sense of hyperbole, so you had to take that down a notch or two. Most of the guests, Jason had said, were aerospace up-and-comers or political staffers. Not old Washington society, but well-heeled newcomers with western roots and defense-industry connections. E. D. Lawton, Jason and Diane's father, hosted one of these events every three or four months.
'Business as usual,' Diane said from behind the twin ovals of the binoculars. 'First floor, dancing and drinking. More drinking than dancing at this point. It looks like the kitchen's closing up, though. I think the caterers are getting ready to go home. Curtains pulled in the den. E.D.'s in the library with a couple of suits. Ew! One of them is smoking a cigar.'
'Your disgust is unconvincing,' Jason said. 'Ms. Marlboro.'
She went on cataloguing the visible windows while Jason scooted over next to me. 'Show her the universe,' he whispered, 'and she'd rather spy on a dinner party.'
I didn't know how to respond to that. Like so much of what Jason said, it sounded witty and more clever than anything I could come up with.
'My bedroom,' Diane said. 'Empty, thank God. Jason's bedroom, empty except for the copy of Penthouse under the mattress—'
'They're good binoculars, but not that good.'
'Carol and E.D.'s bedroom, empty; the spare bedroom…'
'Well?'
But Diane said nothing. She sat very still with the binoculars against her eyes.
'Diane?' I said.
She was silent for a few seconds more. Then she shuddered, turned, and tossed—threw—the binoculars back at Jason, who protested but didn't seem to grasp that Diane had seen something disturbing. I was about to ask her if she was all right—
When the stars disappeared.
* * * * *
It wasn't much.
People often say that, people who saw it happen. It wasn't much. It really wasn't, and I speak as a witness: I had been watching the sky while Diane and Jason bickered. There was nothing but a moment of odd glare that left an afterimage of the stars imprinted on my eyes in cool green phosphorescence. I blinked. Jason said, 'What was that? Lightning?' And Diane said nothing at all.
'Jason,' I said, still blinking.
'What? Diane, I swear to God, if you cracked a lens on these things—'
'Shut up,' Diane said.
And I said, 'Stop it. Look. What happened to the stars?' They both turned their heads to the sky.
* * * * *
Of the three of us, only Diane was prepared to believe that the stars had actually 'gone out'—that they had been extinguished like candles in a wind. That was impossible, Jason insisted: the light from those stars had traveled fifty or a hundred or a hundred million light-years, depending on the source; surely they had not all stopped shining in some infinitely elaborate sequence designed to appear simultaneous to Earthlings. Anyway, I pointed out, the sun was a star, too, and it was still shining, at least on the other side of the planet—wasn't it?
Of course it was. And if not, Jason said, we would all be frozen to death by morning.
So, logically, the stars were still shining but we couldn't see them. They were not gone but obscured: eclipsed. Yes, the sky had suddenly become an ebony blankness, but it was a mystery, not a catastrophe.
But another aspect of Jason's comment had lodged in my imagination. What if the sun actually had vanished? I pictured snow sifting down in perpetual darkness, and then, I guessed, the air itself freezing out in a different kind of snow, until all human civilization was buried under the stuff we breathe. Better, therefore, oh definitely better, to assume the stars had been 'eclipsed.' But by what?
'Well, obviously, something big. Something fast. You saw it happen, Tyler. Was it all at once or did something kind of move across the sky?'
