eye to the eyepiece and made minute adjustments to the vernier dials. He thumbed a red switch with a grimace of satisfaction.
He said, “An internal computer will track the path of the moon as it rises, and send out periodic pulses. We want to gather a number of samples, to correct for the different cords of atmosphere the signal passes through. The return signal is received by the large dish on the tripod over there, whose motors are slaved to these wheels here. And voila!”
A numerical readout lit up. It was two point something something. 2.8955. Almost three seconds.
I said, “What now?”
He said, “And now we wait four hours.”
“Did you bring anything to read?”
He just looked at me oddly.
“Or smoke?” I said.
“You are too young to smoke. Besides, it’s bad for you.”
“Quentin said you tried it. You experimented with it.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t me. Trying things common sense abundantly demonstrates are bad for you is not an experiment; such things show you nothing but what your own tastes are. That does not constitute knowledge.
“Then who was it?”
“Who was what?”
“Quentin said he smelled smoke in the boys’ bathroom. Cigarette smoke.”
He looked at me with scathing condescension, but said nothing.
“What?” I said.
“Logic. If it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Quentin, and it wasn’t a girl, who was it?”
“Oh,” I said, feeling sheepish.
Hours passed. I fidgeted. I paced. I complained about the cold. I sat on the ground, which made me colder. I asked him for his down jacket, which he doffed without a word and tossed to me. I rolled it up and used it as a pillow.
I must have slept.
I dreamed that I was on a boat. A man held me roughly in one arm, dangling me over the side. The boat pitched and tossed terribly; rain pelted my face and ran in icy ribbons down my flesh. The man held some sharp, horrible thing near my face: a knife, or something larger than a knife.
In the dream, the water, which had been black and rolling, webbed with white foam and spray, suddenly grew clear as crystal. A figure that was so large as to make our ship seem the size of a lifeboat was gliding beneath the waves, parallel to our course. The figure had his hands back along his sides and his head down; he did not kick his feet. Instead, the water streamed past him, like wind streaming past a man falling effortlessly through the air.
“
The figure turned its head and regarded us both. Its eyes were lamps, eerie with a greenish light, and it had a third eye, made of metal, embedded in its forehead.
Instead of being terrified that I was going to be pitched overboard or stabbed, I was overcome with a painful embarrassment to realize that the gigantic figure was utterly nude and that, as he kept turning, I would soon see a penis larger than the member of an elephant, rippling through the water like a periscope. What made it more embarrassing was that the figure had Victor’s features.
The third eye, the metal one, seemed to be the only one with a soul in it. In the senseless way things are known in dreams, I knew that the mere fact that it could see me with this eye meant he could speak to me, despite all the water between us, and the noise and wrack of the storm. “
“
“What?”
“I said, I hope the clouds move. We need to get a clear reading when the moon reaches zenith.”
I was awake again, with Victor, on the cold hillside. A knotted texture of charcoal-black and gleaming silver hung like a ship out of fairyland high above us. The cloud covered the moon, and limned the edges with swirls of argent.
Victor was still standing.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Two hours, fourteen minutes.”
“Oh.”
Silence.
Then I said, “Why are you doing this? We could get caught. It’s not as if Michelson and Morley hadn’t done this experiment one hundred years ago.”
He said, “One hundred eight. They’ve been saying untrue things to us. The teachers. The readings we got from the interferometer in lab class had been meddled with. When I did the experiment under controlled conditions, I got results consistent with the theory that light is conveyed via luminiferous aether.”
I sat up. “Are you saying there’s no Einsteinian relativity? But there have been other experiments. The procession of the axis of Mercury. Cesium clocks in a fast-flying airplane. Light was seen to bend around the sun during an eclipse.”
“We have only hearsay for that.”
I was astonished. The sheer magnitude of his skepticism was beyond words. It was like an elephant I had seen once during a rare field trip to Swansea Zoo. As soon as you think you understand how big it is, you look again, and it is bigger.
He said, “Picture this. According to relativity, objects compress in the direction of motion, right? And yet it also says that the same objects and events appear from each other’s ‘frames of reference’ to be symmetrical, right?”
“Right.”
“Take a cup with a tight-fitting lid. The cup and lid fit together, correct? Now move the lid and cup away at right angles, the lid horizontally, the cup vertically. Got the picture?”
“Got it.”
“What happened when you bring the lid and cup back together at near light speed?”
“Um… I am sure you are about to tell me…”
“From the point of view of the lid, the cup is compressed in its direction of motion, horizontally. The cup is shorter, but still a cylinder. The lid, to itself, suffers no distortion, of course. When the two meet, the lid will fit on the cup. But from the point of view of the cup, the lid is foreshortened in its direction of motion, vertically. Which means the lid is now an oval. The cup still appears round to itself. When the two meet, the lid cannot fit on the cup. The same event has two different results from two different points of view.”
I looked at him sidelong, wondering if he were kidding. For the first time, I wondered whether other people have more trouble visually picturing things in their imagination than I did. I mean, it is not as if I could look into their heads to see.
I opened my mouth to say that both observers would see the motion vector as a diagonal, but then I closed it again. I did not like arguing with Victor.
“What in particular happened?” I said.
For a moment I thought he was going to ask me what I meant, but then he said, “You know Mrs. Lilac from the village, whom Mrs. Wren uses to carry burdens and packages when she has done too much shopping?”
“Sort of the way you do me,” I said archly. I had carried the equipment up the slope from the hedges behind the lab shed.
“I don’t see the analogy.”
“Go on with your story.”
“Mrs. Lilac passed me in the hall. She said her daughter Lily was going to graduate from upper school soon and, seeing as how I had helped Lily learn her letters when she was in grammar school, would I care to attend the