After the dinner dishes were washed, Arno’s dad asked if he still planned on doing some astro-drawing.
“Looks like clear skies,” his dad said, peering out the kitchen window at Venus, the evening star making its early appearance.
Arno didn’t have anything better to do, and besides, it was a great way to practice his observation skills and forget about his troubles.
He gathered the things he would need.
His Moonscope was propped on its tripod by the back door. His astronomy notebook was in a drawer of his desk, along with his pencils and smudging tools. His pocket star atlas was in the same drawer. He had left the flashlight on the table by the front hall closet. He wrapped red cellophane over the end of it. That was held in place with an elastic band.
Then he took everything outside and dragged a lawn chair to the middle of the backyard. He set up the telescope and pointed it to the Moon.
Arno sat back and waited for it to get darker. Venus was now very bright, and there was Mars with its red hue. One by one the stars came out, the brightest summer ones making a beautiful triangle. Vega. Altair. Deneb.
As the sky grew its darkest, he could see the galaxy. He could even make out its dust lanes when looking straight up, the dark cloudy areas with even more densely packed stars behind them, their light blending together like spilled milk.
Arno adjusted his telescope and scanned the Moon’s terminator — the line between the lit part and the shadowed part. He stopped when he spotted an interesting X shape made from the ridges of a cluster of craters that were still lit by the Sun.
It was so striking, he decided to sketch the scene.
He got out his B pencil and drew a circle in his notebook. Within that, he started to outline the peaks, the borders and the internal walls of the craters. He drew in the shadows with a softer, darker 8B pencil and erased where the sunlight hit the tops of the craters to bring out the whitest of whites.
The X shape was starting to pop off the page and then —
“Whatcha doing?” a voice called out from Arno’s back door.
It was Buddy. He swept his bright, unfiltered flashlight beam across the yard and locked in on Arno.
“Turn that thing off!” Arno barked while covering his eyes. “You’re ruining my night vision!”
“Oops.” Buddy fumbled with his flashlight to turn it off, then dragged another lawn chair over to where Arno was positioned.
“Are you drawing?” Buddy asked.
Obviously, Arno was drawing. He had a pencil in his hand and his notebook on his lap!
“In this light?” Buddy asked.
Obviously, he was drawing in the dim red light he had created with his covered flashlight to protect his night vision.
“Why?” Buddy asked.
“I’m practicing my observation skills.”
“Can I see?”
Arno sighed. He moved away from the eyepiece to make room for Buddy, but in his haste, Buddy knocked the telescope so that it was now pointing somewhere else in the universe.
“Whoa!” Buddy said, looking through the eyepiece. “I never knew there were so many stars. You can’t draw that!”
Arno nudged him aside to see what Buddy was looking at. It was the constellation Hercules, near the bright star Vega.
“Yes, I can,” Arno said. “I use something called triangulation. I draw the locations of the brightest stars that I spot within my eyepiece, then use their locations to see where I should add the next brightest stars. Then I use those to draw the next brightest ones until I work my way down to the dimmest ones, the ones I can barely see. I have to use averted vision for those last ones.”
“What’s averted vision?”
“It’s where you don’t look directly at something because it disappears if you do. You can only see it if you look slightly away. It works for things in the night sky that are very faint.”
“So, you have to have good eyesight to be an astronomer,” Buddy said.
“Yeah,” Arno said, looking at his sketch. “Of course.”
“Like an astronaut,” Buddy said.
“I guess.”
Arno paused. He stared at Buddy.
Buddy stared back. He gulped. It looked as if he was fighting back tears.
“What?” Arno asked.
“I can’t see the color red,” Buddy said so softly, Arno could barely make out his words.
“You can’t see red?” Arno repeated. “Like on apples or Stop signs?”
Buddy sat down, his head in his hands, staring glumly at the grass that was black between his feet.
“So that’s why you didn’t recognize Mars,” Arno said.
Buddy did not even look up.
“You’re color blind.”
Buddy gave a small nod.
Arno realized that Buddy was having trouble speaking. But why? Color blindness wasn’t so bad, was it?
Then he understood the awful truth. Astronauts could not be color blind. They would need perfect vision for all those instrument panels in their space capsules. Any confusion about which button to push, which warning light to read, which lever to pull could mean explosive disaster.
“And you didn’t know until today?” Arno asked.
Buddy glanced at Arno. He wiped at his eyes.
Arno had no words for Buddy. Buddy’s career as an astronaut was over just as surely as Arno’s astronomy career.
There they sat, the telescope between them, silently staring up at the glorious heavens where both their dreams exploded like supernovas.
A lonely dog barked in the distance, bringing Arno back to Earth.
“Oh, look. There’s Jupiter,” Arno said, always glad to spot that familiar friend.
“Where?” Buddy asked half-heartedly.
Arno pointed to it. “The bright one that’s not twinkling. Planets don’t twinkle.”
“I knew that. Only stars twinkle.”
“Stars don’t really twinkle either,” Arno said. “It’s just that they’re so far away, they look like pinpoints of light. And because all that light is coming from a single point, when it goes through our thick, wavy atmosphere it looks as if the star twinkles. But planets are much closer. They look like tiny discs, not pinpoints of light. So our atmosphere doesn’t get in the way as much.”
Arno repositioned his telescope. “If Jupiter had been eight times bigger, it would have used its hydrogen to explode and become another burning star. But it stayed a planet. Right now I can see all four of its largest moons. One of them is as big as Mercury.”
“Really? Let me see!” Buddy said.
Arno moved aside.
“I can’t find Jupiter,” Buddy said, bumping the telescope again, then aiming it all over the northern hemisphere.
“Move away,” Arno said. He repositioned the telescope once more. “Now look again, this time with your hands behind your back. Don’t touch anything.”
Buddy did as he was told.
“I see it!” he exclaimed. “And I can see pinpricks of light in a line beside Jupiter. Are those moons?”
“Yes,” Arno said, happy that Buddy was interested for once. “Galileo was the first to see them with a telescope back in 1610. He proved that not everything orbits around Earth, which was what everyone thought. That’s why the telescope is the most important invention of all time.”
“Far out,” Buddy said.
“Galileo also discovered that our moon isn’t smooth. It has mountains and craters. And that the Milky Way wasn’t just a smear of light but is made up of billions of individual stars densely packed together. And that the Sun has sunspots.”
“It’d be cool to see sunspots.”
“Don’t ever look directly at the Sun, Buddy.”
Buddy moved away from the telescope.
“I’m color blind, Arno. I’m not an idiot.”
“Right. Neither was Galileo. He made more discoveries that changed the world than anyone has ever made before or since.”
“And now we have the Space Race,” Buddy said gloomily.
Arno solemnly nodded.
“And now we have the Space Race.”
They wallowed in the silence that followed, knowing that they wouldn’t be a part of it.
Still.
It was hard to ignore the glory right before their eyes.
“Want to see the biggest object in the night sky?” Arno asked.
“Why not,” Buddy said.
“Okay. See the constellation that looks like a big W on its side up there, opposite the Big Dipper?” he said, pointing.
Buddy followed with his gaze.
“That’s called Cassiopeia. The right side of the W makes a deeper V and it can be used as an arrow that points in the direction of the Andromeda Galaxy. Now hold your arm straight out.”
Buddy did.
“Move a fist and a half below that arrow. See the galaxy? Like a small pale puff of smoke?”
“That faint fuzzy thing?” Buddy exclaimed.
Arno repositioned the telescope.
“Hands behind your back. Have a look.”
Buddy peered into the eyepiece. His jaw dropped.
“Look near the center of that galaxy,” Arno instructed. “See how it’s brighter? That’s where there are the most stars. Now use averted vision to look at the outer regions that are less bright. It gives you a good idea about its size.”
Buddy stared at the galaxy.
“It’s spiral-shaped like our own Milky Way Galaxy,” Arno continued. “And it’s spinning, just like ours.”
“How far away is it?” Buddy asked, still hogging the eyepiece.
“About two and a half million light years,” Arno said. “So, it takes two and a half million years for light from that galaxy to reach our eyes. You know what that means?”
“What?”
“You’re now looking two and a half million years back in time. When that light started out, Earth was entering into the last ice age. Some stars you see right now probably no longer exist.”
“How does that even work? Buddy asked.
“It’s like an echo of someone shouting. Even though they’re not shouting anymore, you can still hear the sound of their voice.”
Buddy slowly pulled away from the telescope but continued to stare up at the universe.
“I never thought of astronomers as time travelers. You’re lucky. Tomorrow night in the observatory, you’ll see stars even farther away.”
Buddy’s words caught Arno off guard. He looked down at his unfinished sketch.
“I’m not going,” he said quietly.
Buddy whipped his head around to face Arno.
“Have you lost your marbles? Astronomy is all you ever talk about.”
“I have claustrophobia.”
“Claustro … what?”
“A fear of being trapped in small spaces.”
“That’s a thing?” Buddy asked.
“That’s a thing,” Arno said.
“Okay. But what does that have to do with the observatory?” Buddy asked.
“I’d worry that the giant telescope might crush me or that the dome might collapse or that people would crowd the exit and I’d be trapped and couldn’t breathe. I’d panic.”
“But those things won’t happen,” Buddy said.
“It doesn’t matter. The fear’s real,” Arno said. “So, I can’t go.”
Buddy thought for a minute.
“Astronauts have fear,” he said.
“Come on, Buddy. Get real.”
“No, listen. They do. My dad told me that many things can go wrong inside a rocket ship, and the astronauts know that. But they still complete their missions. Know how?”
“No. How?” Arno asked.
“They learn tricks about how to get the job done even though they’re afraid.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like focusing on something that’s not threatening. Like breathing slowly and deeply and counting to three on each breath. Like picturing something happy, maybe their home or their kids. And they tell themselves over and over that the bad thing they’re afraid of is not going to happen. That way, they don’t bolt. They stay put and keep working until the panic passes.”
Arno blinked.
Maybe he’d been on to something with his experiment in the front hall closet. Maybe he quit too soon.
The boys stared up at the night sky.
“Oh, look,” Buddy said. “A shooting star.”
Arno was about to say, “You know it’s not a star, right?”
But he stopped himself.
Instead, both boys said nothing for a long time. The Earth continued to orbit the Sun. But when Arno stared up, slowly tracing the universe’s constellations with his eyes, he thought he caught a glimmer of hope.
The weather broke in the middle of the night, cracking the air in half.
Arno woke to a loud clap of thunder, followed by lightning that filled his bedroom with a jagged flash. He sat up on his elbows in bed, enjoying the cooler air that rushed in through his open window. The curtains billowed. He looked at the time on his sun-shaped alarm clock.
It was 2:15 in the morning.
Another clap of thunder roared so deeply across his neighborhood, Arno could feel it in his chest. Then came the first sounds of rain spattering against the roof, waves of tiny pings.
Arno turned on his lamp. The instruction booklet he had long memorized for his Moonscope lay dog-eared on his night table.
Oh, no!
He had left his telescope outside!
What would happen if it got soaked in the rain? Arno did not want to find out.
Blast it!
He kicked off the covers and hit the cold floor with his bare feet. He didn’t stop for slippers. He bolted from his room and headed to the back door as fast as the speed of light. The rain was starting to come down hard.
Arno tramped across the spongy grass to where two lawn chairs were still positioned in the middle of the yard for nighttime viewing of the heavens. The telescope stood dripping on its tripod between the chairs.
Arno scooped up the works and turned back just as Comet streaked past him. Comet, who slept on his bed in the kitchen at night, must have followed Arno out the door.
“Here, Comet!” Arno called while patting his thigh, a hand signal that Comet knew well.
Another bolt of lightning blinded the sky, followed by a round of thunder even deeper than before. Arno knew it was dangerous to be standing out in the open. He could be struck at any second.
Comet yelped. Wild-eyed, he tore around and around the yard, as if he was looking for an escape hole in the wood fence. He seemed too scared to see Arno, let alone listen to him.
Arno was getting soaked. Rain streamed down his neck. His pajamas stuck to his shoulders, back and thighs. His telescope wasn’t getting much protection tucked under his arm.
“Comet! Comet!” he called, but it was no use.
Terrified, Comet kept orbiting Arno in wide circles, yelping and yelping and paying no attention to anything other than his own cosmic-sized fear.
Arno didn’t know what to do. Comet was bolting way too fast to catch.
Then Comet spotted his doghouse, a homemade shed with a pitched roof and painted siding that matched Arno’s own house.
Comet scampered inside.
Arno did not want to leave him there. His little dog was clearly terrified, and the storm had only just begun.
He needed to rescue Comet. But how?