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shining. What kind of optical illusion lets the sunshine through but hides the stars and the moon?”
    “Again, how should I know? But what’s the alternative, Tyler? Somebody put the moon and the stars in a sack and ran away with them?”
    No, I thought. It was the Earth that was in the sack, for some reason not even Jason could divine.
    “Good point, though,” he said, “about the sun. Not an optical barrier but an optical
filter
. Interesting…”
    “So who put it there?”
    “How should I—?” He shook his head irritably. “You’re inferring too much. Who says
anybody
put it there? It could be a once-in-a-billion-years natural event, like the magnetic poles reversing. It’s a big jump to assume there’s some controlling intelligence behind it.”
    “But it could be true.”
    “Lots of things could be true.”
    I had taken enough gentle ribbing about my science-fiction reading that I was reluctant to say the word “aliens.” But of course it was the first thing that occurred to me. Me, and plenty of other people. And even Jason had to admit that the idea of intervening extraterrestrials had become infinitely more plausible over the course of the last twenty-four hours.
    “But even so,” I said, “you have to wonder why they’d do it.”
    “There are only two plausible reasons. To
hide
something from us. Or to hide
us
from
something”
    “What does your father think?”
    “I haven’t asked him. He’s been on the phone all day. Probably trying to put in an early sell order on his GTE stock.” This was a joke, and I wasn’t sure what he meant by it, but it was also my first hint of what the loss of orbital access might mean for the aerospace industry in general and the Lawton family in particular. “I didn’t sleep last night,” Jase admitted. “Afraid I might miss something. Sometimes I envy my sister. You know,
wake me when somebody figures it out
.”
    I bristled at this perceived slight of Diane. “She didn’t sleep either,” I said.
    “Oh? Really? And how would
you
know?”
    Trapped. “We talked on the phone a little bit…”
    “She called you?”
    “Yeah, around dawn.”
    “Jesus, Tyler, you’re blushing.”
    “No I’m not.”
    “Yes you are.”
    I was saved by a brusque knock at the door: E. D. Lawton, who looked like he hadn’t slept much either.
    Jason’s father was an intimidating presence. He was big, broad shouldered, hard to please, easily angered; on weekends he moved through the house like a storm front, all lightning and thunder. My mother had once said, “E.D.‘s not the kind of person you really want attention from. I never did understand why Carol married him.”
    He wasn’t exactly the classic self-made businessman—his grandfather, retired founder of a spectacularly successful San Francisco law firm, had bankrolled most of E.D.‘s early ventures—but he had built himself a lucrative business in high-altitude instrumentation and lighter-than-air technology, and he had done it the hard way, without any real industry connections, at least when he started out.
    He entered Jason’s room scowling. His eyes lit on me and flashed away. “Sorry, Tyler, but you’ll have to go home now. I need to discuss a few things with Jason.”
    Jase didn’t object and I wasn’t especially eager to stay. So I shrugged into my cloth jacket and left by the back door. I spent the rest of the afternoon by the creek, skipping stones and watching squirrels forage against the coming winter.
     
     
    The sun, the moon, and the stars.
    In the years that followed, children were raised who had never seen the moon with their own eyes; people only five or six years younger than myself passed into maturity knowing the stars mainly from old movies and a handful of increasingly inapt cliches. Once, in my thirties, I played the twentieth-century Antonio Carlos Jobin song
Corcovado
— “Quiet nights of quiet stars”—for a younger woman, who asked me, eyes earnestly wide, “Were the