Starclimber Read Online Free Page A

shown me how the dome retracted, by a simple system of ropes and pulleys. Working together now, we managed to slide the roof open along its oiled tracks. Moonlight and starlight spilled down on us, silvering the room, making everything strange and magical. Overhead we saw the running lights of ornithopters and airships passing over Paris. Everything seemed amazingly bright and sharp, as though the domed portal itself was a lens, magnifying the night sky.
    I looked at Kate and saw the utter delight on her face. That look alone was all the reward I needed.
    “Are we going to look at the moon?” she asked.
    “Much better than that—you’ll see.”
    Richard and I walked over to the great wheels that moved the telescope itself. I took a piece of paper from my pocket and showed it to him. Then, under Richard’s direction, we began moving the vast cylinder into the proper position.
    “That should do it,” said Richard when the telescope was angled up, deep into the night sky.
    The eyepiece of the telescope was quite high off the ground, and a special chair had been built that slid up and down a slanted ladder fixed to a track in the floor. “Please be seated, Miss de Vries,” I said, gesturing to the chair.
    “You’re going to join me, I hope,” she said, moving over as far as she could. The seat was just wide enough for the two of us. I sat down beside her. Kate’s fragrance was most distracting; her perfume and the smell of her hair and skin intermingled, and I found it entirely intoxicating. It was all I could do to keep my hands off her. There was a lever to one side of the chair, and I pumped it up and down, jacking us up off the floor toward the eyepiece.
    “I think you two can take care of things now,” said Richard from below. “I’ll have to leave you for a bit to do my rounds. You won’t break anything, right?”
    “We’re grand, thanks.”
    “Thank you very much for your help,” said Kate. “This is awfully nice of him,” she said to me, when Richard had left the hall.
    I leaned into the eyepiece and adjusted the focus with the little knobs. I gazed at the view. Good. I was in the right place.
    “Have a look,” I said, sitting back.
    Eagerly she put her face to the eyepiece, and then went very quiet, staring.
    “I’m not sure you’ve ever been silent so long,” I said after a while.
    Her voice soft, she asked, “What is this I’m looking at?”
    “That’s the Draco constellation.”
    “It’s so beautiful!” she exclaimed. “They look so close! And it’s much more crowded up there than I thought! They’re everywhere! And they’re all quite different….” I saw her eye flicking from place to place. “Not just their size, but color too! And some seem to twinkle more than others.”
    “They don’t really twinkle, you know,” I said. “It only looks that way to us down here. It’s the atmosphere distorting the light.”
    “Is that right?” she said, looking over at me.
    I nodded. “It’s called stellar scintillation.”
    “What a wonderful phrase,” she said. “You seem to know a lot about stars.”
    “It comes from long hours in the crow’s nest,” I replied, pleased I’d impressed her. It felt good to be explaining things to her for a change. I did have a bit of a flare for celestial navigation; I seemed to have a good sense of where to find things in the night sky, given the time of year.
    Kate put her eye back to the telescope. “I wonder if there’s life out there.”
    “Who knows?” I said.
    “There’s a Bulgarian fellow, Dr. Ganev, who just last year published a pamphlet on lunar life.”
    The name sounded vaguely familiar. “Hold on—wasn’t he the fellow who spent some time in a lunatic asylum?”
    “No more than a year. They say he’s better now.”
    I laughed, and Kate looked at me severely. “You know, Matt, people talk about me this way. That poor lunatic Kate de Vries. Cloud cats, aerozoans—what will her diseased little mind think up next?