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give? Why will they not help us when their help is truly needed?” he asked, and many wondered. A scandal involving nearly $20 billion in Fund For Energy grants seemed to prove his point.
    When the time came to commit troops to the Middle East, Novak could point to the failure of the scientists and be confident the masses would say he was “only doin’ what the white-coats made him.”
    But by that time, Chandliss had already arranged to resume his former profession.
    Chandliss was far from the first to build his own radio telescope. American Grote Reber had assembled the prototype in his backyard in the 1930’s, and with it produced the first radio map of the sky. By the 1950’s the radio telescope was a common project in amateur electronics books, and in the 1980’s many a ham radio operator added a sky antenna to his rig as part of Delta Vee’s SETI program.
    The dish tucked between two lodgepole pines in the Idaho hills was in many ways a greater marvel than any of its predecessors. The dish itself was unremarkable; thousands like it had dotted the human landscape in the years before the collapse.
    But it stood in its little clearing, pointing out through a small opening in the forest canopy, due to the physical labor of a man who, before beginning it, had never had the need to labor. It had escaped detection for seventeen years despite the wanderings of thousands of landless. It had been put into operation by a man who had started out notably ignorant of the arcane art of electron-pushing. And it was, potentially, the arbiter of Chandliss’s life or death.
    Though a fall while pruning one of the trees during construction had lamed him, the real risk was what the antenna represented. He faced both official and informal death penalties: from the authorities for diverting precious metals and energy resources to the specious cause of astronomy, and from the common people, for wasn’t it true that the scientists were to blame for the current state of the world? Be it so or not, that was what was said.
    The observatory was an odd jumble of seemingly unrelated parts, gathered with ruthless zeal during the period between President Novak’s first Energy Edict and the arrival of the National Guard to enforce it. The dish had once stood behind a suburban house pulling in movie reruns and endless athletic contests from a direct-broadcast television satellite. The TEF had served as an audio engineering testbed; the chart recorder, as a hospital labor monitor.
    Only the receiver was doing the job for which it had been originally intended. It was also the only item he had been able to save from the first truckload of supplies he had brought into the Salmon National Forest. The rest, including the truck and the parts of the larger, steerable earth station, had been taken by the survivalists.
    But sometimes it all worked, and when it did, the TEF would patiently record the march of the numbers. For particularly interesting sources he would allow the precious paper to curl through the recorder, displaying a jumbled landscape of peaks and valleys. Little by little, the sky rolled over Chandliss’s valley, and he listened as it did.
    Chandliss labored under no pretensions. He knew that beside virtually any of the equipment he had once commanded, his rig was a laughable toy. The superb hundred-metre dish at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn had been cleverly designed to deform from one perfect curve to another as gravity tugged at its moving mass. The finely finished Kitt Peak dish had been sensitive enough to hear an electron drop an energy level in a hydrogen atom fifty light-years away.
    The masterpiece had been the blandly named Very Large Array, twenty-five computer-driven dishes spread across a vast expanse of New Mexico sand. There had been so little time to use it…
    Regrettably, the tasks that were left to Chandliss and his creation were vanishingly few. Radio astronomy had passed out of the backyard stage a half century