The Eternal Flame Read Free Page B

another speck of light or a dark silhouette against a star’s band of colors. Field after field was unblemished, as usual, but whenever the tedium of the search reached the point where her thoughts began to stray to the emptiness in her gut, she turned her mind back to the Object itself and savored again the thrill of discovery.
    When she’d done her duty—with no further revelations—Tamara slipped out of the harness and pushed herself through the hatch at the base of the observatory. She drifted across the gap that separated the telescope’s stabilized mount from the imperceptibly spinning rock below, and her momentum carried her into the entrance tunnel, returning her to the Peerless proper. She grabbed a guide rope and dragged herself along to the office. Roberto was there, ready to start his own shift, while Ada was studying for an assessment, poring over a tattered set of notes on the art of navigational astrometry.
    “I do believe we should expect company!” Tamara announced. She gave her fellow observers the three data points and waited while they made their own calculations.
    “It does look close,” Roberto confirmed.
    “How bright is it?” Ada asked.
    “Five,” Tamara said.
    “And you’ve only just seen it?”
    “You know what it’s like, trying to spot things close to the horizon.”
    To Tamara, they both sounded a shade resentful. She knew there’d been no special skill in what she’d done, and her luck would attract no great esteem. But what lay ahead now was open to everyone: the chance to observe a body of orthogonal matter in unprecedented detail.
    “I wish we had some way to pin down the distance,” Roberto lamented.
    “Do I detect a hint of parallax envy?” Tamara joked. On the home world, astronomers had had it easy: wait half a day and your viewpoint moved by the planet’s width; wait half a year and that became the width of the orbit. Once those baselines had been measured, the shifting angles they created had been revelatory. But whether you imagined it was the Peerless itself that was moving day by day, or the Object, without knowing the relative velocity to fix the baseline between successive views the most you could glean from the angles alone was the timing of the encounter, not the distance.
    Roberto hummed with frustration. “This thing might come close enough for us to resolve its shape—and maybe even structural features, impact craters… who knows? Think how much more valuable all that would be if we knew their scale!”
    Ada said, “It sounds like the perfect job for an infrared color trail.”
    “What kind of gratitude is this?” Tamara demanded. “I bring my two friends the find of a lifetime, and all I get are fantasies about how things could be better!”
    Ada was indignant. “What fantasy? I’m serious! The chemists have never made infrared a priority before, because they’ve never had a good enough reason.”
    Chemicals sensitive to ultraviolet light had been known since before the launch, but no one had managed to achieve the same feat at the infrared end of the spectrum. Imaging a slow-moving object’s color trail in ultraviolet wasn’t all that helpful; even infinitely fast UV would lie closer to violet in the trail than violet was to red. But an infrared trail could stretch out to many times the length of the visible portion.
    “And this will count as a good reason?” Roberto was amused. “The last time I asked for a favor from the chemists, I was told to wait until they’d solved the fuel problem.”
    Ada said, “Maybe we can find a chemist who’s itching for a break. If you’ve spent half your life bashing your head against the same old problem, why not try something easier?”
    “No, they all want the glory too badly for that,” Roberto declared. “Who’s going to waste their time inventing infrared-sensitive paper when they might be on the verge of inventing a way home?”
    Tamara tried to put herself inside a chemist’s skin. The