The Wrong Season

Lukas was already in the dome when he came up.

The hatch was open an inch, the way it always was, and there was light under it, red, and warmth, and when Alexander put his head through, the stove was lit and ticking and the shutter was already half open on the north-west, and Lukas was on the crank, in his hat, winding it the last of the way with his whole weight, slowly, so that the squeal at three-quarters came out long and thin and complaining, like something being woken.

“You’re early,” said Lukas, without looking round.

“It’s ten to.”

“That’s early.” Lukas let go of the crank. The slit stood open on a sky that was black and clean and enormous, with the edge of the wood along the bottom of it, a line of bare branches drawn very fine against the last of the glow in the north-west, where the sun had gone down more than two hours before and had not quite finished going. “I’ve done the stove. I’ve done the shutter. I’ve taken the cap off. I haven’t touched the log, because the log is yours.”

Alexander came up through the hatch and stood on the boards.

The dome was small. It had always been small. It was three metres across at the floor and the mount took up most of the middle, and with the stool and the shelf and the stove and Lukas there was room for perhaps two more people, if they did not mind each other’s elbows. He had never had more than one other person in it at a time. His father, and then Lukas. That was all.

He sat on the stool. He took the log down off the shelf, and the pencil out of its spine, and the red torch out of his pocket, and wrote, in the square hand, by the red light: 6 April. Clear after rain. Seeing and stopped, and looked up at the slit, and judged it, and wrote 3, and transparency good, and the time.

Lukas sat down on the boards with his back against the pier, and took the flask out of his coat, and did not open it, and did not say anything, and looked at the hatch.

---

At ten there were feet on the gravel.

Two people. Alexander heard them come round the side of the dome from the house, not talking, and stop at the foot of the ladder, and then one of them said something low in English, and the other said, “Shh,” and then the ladder creaked under a weight, and the hatch lifted, and a head came through it with its hair standing up on one side.

“Is this the right dome?” said Theo.

“There’s only one dome,” said Lukas.

“I know. I’m being polite.” Theo came up through the hatch on his knees and stood up and looked round, at the mount and the slit and the stove and the red lamp, and said, “Huh,” which Alexander now understood was the highest thing Theo ever said about anything, and sat down on the boards beside Lukas with his back against the other side of the pier, and folded his arms, and looked at the hatch as well.

The ladder creaked again.

Frederick’s head came through the hatch, and stopped.

He was halfway through. His shoulders were in the dome and the rest of him was on the ladder, in the dark, and his face in the red light was doing nothing, the crest face, and his eyes went round the dome once, quickly, the mount, the stove, Theo and Lukas on the floor with their arms folded, the slit, and came to Alexander on the stool with the log on his knees, and stopped there.

Nobody said anything.

“Come up or go down,” said Lukas, from the floor, quite pleasantly. “The hatch is letting the heat out, and I’ve been feeding that stove since nine.”

Frederick came up.

He stood on the boards with his hands in his coat pockets, by the hatch, because there was nowhere else to stand. Theo shifted along the floor to give him room against the curve of the wall. Frederick did not sit. He looked at the slit, at the black sky, at the line of branches along the bottom of it, and Alexander watched him look, and saw him understand where he was, and that there had been a plan, and that the two people on the floor had made it, and that there was no way down the ladder now that would not be worse than staying.

“Theo,” said Frederick.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Frederick.

---

Lukas got up.

He did it without any warning, the way he did everything, and went to the mount, and put his hand on the tube, and looked along it at the slit, and then at the line of the wood, and then back at the tube, and moved it, slowly, down. Down further than Alexander had ever seen anybody put it. Down until the tube was nearly level and pointing out of the bottom of the slit at the branches, as though he were aiming it at the trees.

“Lukas, that’s the wood.”

“I know it’s the wood.”

“There’s nothing in the wood.”

“There’s something behind the wood,” said Lukas, with his eye at the finder, “if you’re patient and you don’t mind looking through a tree.” He moved the tube a centimetre. Then another. Then he stopped, and stood very still, and stayed bent at the finder for a long moment, not breathing, as far as Alexander could tell, and then straightened up and stood back from the eyepiece and looked at nobody in particular.

“There,” said Lukas.

Nobody moved.

Then Frederick took his hands out of his pockets.

He came across the boards, past Theo’s legs, and stopped at the eyepiece, beside the stool, beside Alexander, close enough to touch, and did not touch, and bent, and put his eye to it.

Alexander did not need to look. He knew what was there. He had looked at it a hundred times in the autumn, overhead, the right way up, and twice in March, going down in the north-west by nine into the trees. He knew that in April at ten in the evening it would be very low, under the line of the wood, nearly gone, a grey smudge seen through a lattice of bare branches with the last of the glow behind it, the wrong season, smaller and fainter and harder to find than at any other time of the year, and that most people who knew anything would not have bothered. He had written to Frederick in March and said so, so that Frederick would not be disappointed.

Frederick looked for a long time.

He did not say anything. He did not move. He stood bent at the eyepiece with his hands on his knees, in his coat, and the stove ticked, and Theo on the floor did not move either, and Lukas stood back by the shelf with the flask in his hand, and the four of them were so quiet in the small round room that Alexander could hear the branches moving outside, very slightly, in a wind that had not been there an hour before.

“It’s the wrong time of year for it,” said Alexander.

He said it to the log. He said it because somebody had to say something, and because it was true, and because it was the kind of thing he said.

Frederick did not take his eye from the eyepiece.

“It’s still there,” he said.

The stove ticked.

Then Frederick straightened up. He did it slowly, with one hand on the tube, as though he did not want to knock it off the thing it had found, and stood beside the stool in the red light, and looked at Alexander, and his face was not doing nothing, and it was not polite. It was simply his face.

“I’m sorry I did it,” said Frederick.

On the floor, Theo’s head came up.

Alexander saw it. He saw it out of the side of his eye, Theo’s head coming up off his folded arms, very fast, and Theo’s mouth opening, and staying open, and Theo looking at Frederick, at the back of Frederick’s head, with the expression of a person who has watched somebody do the one thing he said that person could never do, and is not going to say a word about it, ever, to anybody.

Alexander looked at the log on his knees. He had written seeing 3. It was a good night. It was the best night since February.

“I’m sorry I said the other thing,” he said.

Frederick looked at him for a moment.

“What other thing?” said Frederick.

Alexander looked up.

“Exactly,” he said.

---

Nobody said anything for a while after that.

Frederick bent to the eyepiece again, as though he had only stood up for a moment to say something about the weather, and looked at the branches, and the grey smudge behind them, and Alexander sat on the stool beside him and looked at the slit, and on the floor Theo put his head back down on his folded arms and did not lift it, and his shoulders did something, once, and were still.

Lukas uncapped the flask.

“I’ve been saving it since March,” he said, to the stove.

“Saving what?” said Theo, into his arms.

“My one thing. I didn’t spend it. I said it was a fact, that time, so it didn’t count, and I kept the real one. I’ve been carrying it round since the tenth of March, in case. In case of tonight. I had it ready. I’ve had it ready all week.” He drank from the flask. “I don’t need it.”

Theo lifted his head.

“Can I have it?”

“It’s not transferable,” said Lukas.

“What was it?”

“I’m not telling you. If I tell you, I’ve said it, and then I haven’t saved it.” Lukas screwed the cap back on the flask. “I’m keeping it. I’m going to keep it until I need it. I might be eighty. I might give it to my grandchildren.”

“That’s the most German thing I’ve ever heard,” said Theo.

“It’s the second most,” said Lukas. “Alex said a more Hohenzollern one in March, about a constellation, and you weren’t there.”

---

They stayed until the guard came.

Lukas put the tube back up out of the trees and found them other things, the way he did, one at a time, without being asked: the Plough nearly overhead, upside down, which Theo said was cheating; Arcturus coming up orange out of the east over the lake, which Lukas said was the brightest thing you could see from this dome that was not on fire; Leo in the south, which looked exactly like what it was called, and which Lukas said was the most boring constellation in the sky, and Alexander said was the best thing a constellation could do, and Frederick, at the eyepiece, said, “He’s right, it’s a lion,” and Lukas said that it was two against one and that he would be writing to the International Astronomical Union.

Theo looked through the eyepiece at Arcturus for a long time and said, “That’s just a light,” and then, “How far?” and Lukas said thirty-seven years, and Theo said, “So that left there when my dad was a kid,” and went quiet, and looked again.

At half past ten Alexander held out the pencil.

He did not decide to. He had the log open on his knees, at the night’s entry, 6 April, clear after rain, seeing 3, transparency good, and under it the space where you wrote what you had seen, and he found that he had turned the log round, and was holding it out, with the pencil, to Frederick.

Nobody else had ever written in it. His father, in the first pages, when Alexander was six and could not yet write small enough. Nobody since.

Frederick looked at the log, and at the pencil, and at Alexander.

He took the pencil. He bent over the log on Alexander’s knee, in the red light, and wrote, slowly, in the small upright hand that Alexander knew from five months of envelopes, under the seeing and the transparency:

Andromeda, very low NW, in the branches. 4 observers. F.

He gave the pencil back.

Alexander looked at the entry. Then he put the pencil in the spine of the log and closed it, and put it back on the shelf, under the eyepiece, where it lived.

---

The guard went past the foot of the ladder at eleven.

He went past again at a quarter past, which was Herr Schade’s replacement, who was less patient than Herr Schade and passed it every quarter of an hour after eleven, like a clock that had been told to hurry. Lukas stood up. Theo stood up. Frederick stood by the mount with his hand on the tube.

“Can I do the shutter?” said Frederick.

Alexander looked at him.

“It squeals,” he said. “At three-quarters.”

“I know. I heard it from the gravel.”

So Frederick did the shutter. He put both hands on the crank, the way Lukas had, and wound it, slowly, with his whole weight, and the slit narrowed over the black sky and the branches and the place under the wood where something two and a half million years away was still there, very low, the wrong season for it, and at three-quarters the iron squeal came out of the mechanism, long and thin and complaining, exactly as it had for Alexander’s father and for Alexander and for Lukas, and Frederick, for the first time since Thursday, laughed.

It was not much of a laugh. It came out of him short and surprised, the way it had come out of his mother on the landing of the flat on the fourth floor when Mrs Hartigan said Shoes. But it was a laugh, and everybody in the dome heard it, and nobody said anything about it, and Frederick went on winding until the slit was shut.

Lukas turned off the red lamp.

They went down the ladder in the dark, one at a time, Theo first, then Lukas, then Frederick, then Alexander, who pulled the hatch down behind him, all the way, and stood on the gravel with the three of them in the cold, under a sky that was clear from one side of the Neuer Garten to the other, and did not say anything, because there was nothing that would not have been less than the dome, and they all knew it.

They walked back to the house together. Frederick walked beside him. Theo and Lukas came behind, two paces back and one to the left, both of them, as they always did. It was where you walked.