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.And as February cycled through, and as a huge warm windstorm filled the air with a continental roar, and as the windows of the automat grew wet with everyone’s breath, he felt he was cultivating this sadness, keeping it warm and quiet, sensing that it was related in some fashion to his notions about the duffers in the rooming houses and to the new mood in the country; he felt suddenly and for the first time entirely in tune with things, with the country itself, where a vast melancholy had settled down on all forty-eight states all at once.Even the wits on the radio were strained and played to an audience whose laughter was quieter, more qualified, so that when he did visit a stinking rooming house or fleabag hotel to ask his rote questions he felt ever more certainly that he was trespassing into some tender, secret part of things, that everyone had dropped their fancy acts and good lines and was looking, at last, to one another for the thing they had always been afraid to ask for before, some sort of hand up.Because now everyone needed a hand somehow.And it is early March of 1930 when, visiting one of these houses—not too lousy a one—he glances up and sees, in a far corner of the kitchen, a painting of a man behind a desk, glowering.It looks strangely familiar, and he feels a funny instant sympathy for the man in the painting, a big blockheaded fellow staring up at you because you were bugging him, all right, and then he recognizes his own bronze swan lamp and his zinc cigarette lighter, and then himself: his own broad squat aggrieved body and his heavy black head.He grabs the landlady’s arm.“Say, who painted that?”“A tenant of mine.”“Name of what?”“MacAllister was the name he gave.”“MacAllister!”“He left that for me because he knew I liked it.” She looks at him levelly, and he releases her.“It does look like you a little, doesn’t it?”“When’d he leave?”“Oh, months ago.”“You got an address for him?”“I think so.” She gives him a long curious look.“You know what he is, don’t you?”“Yes, ma’am, I do.”“He kept it out of my house, though.And he didn’t drink.He liked to paint, but I made him take it in the yard, because of the smell.He wasn’t here very long.” She eyes him suspiciously.“You want to have your portrait done or something?”“Something like that,” he says.She sniffs disbelieving, but she gets him the address: 451 Dunbar.He knows Dunbar, all right.He draws his collar up around his throat and turns to take his aching carcass back down the icy porch steps.And despite himself, his soft old heart—oh, he can hardly stand it—is poised for one last hopeful lunge.31Clyde finds it is nice to have Alan as company across the hall; it is almost like having Roy there if he doesn’t open his eyes and ruin it.Back in October and November Clyde watched Alan pick away at the bandage, then swab it free of crusted stuff.It was gory but seemed to Clyde it was also somehow his own wound; it was meant for him, after all.And it allowed him to think of Patsy, who had dressed his wounds so nicely and said, “You’ve got nice hands, Mr.Tombaugh,” and presented them back to him all fixed up.All this has added up to a hunkering intensity, a continued concentration.The crate of Lowell’s champagne sits in the corner of Clyde’s bedroom, often draped with his stray undershirts or stacked with his half-read magazines.He has been at it nonstop, on behalf of Alan and Mary, since October; and he has kept it up through November, December, January, now February.Getting through the Taurus plates at the galactic center has taken him forever; they are so dense as to be nearly unblinkable.Great freckled swarms, uncountable tens of thousands on every single plate.It is terribly slow going, and you have to count all the variables and asteroids besides.The Taurus plates have taken him six weeks on their own going twelve hours a day.And still if the planet is there at the moment, he fears he’ll miss it, that it’s going to stay hidden forever.He would have jumped ahead to the Alpha Gemini plates had Alan insisted, but he had not.And it is just as well, for when he reaches them, easier going now, there are no suspects anywhere in view.Methodically he goes through Alpha Gemini and Beta Gem and Gamma Gem, nearly all the way around again to where they began photographing so many months ago, when the constellation was out of opposition; it is the afternoon of February 18—a Tuesday—when he finally reaches Delta Gem.He sits on the stool, his eye at the eyepiece, the rhythmic clack-clack-clack of the comparator filling the room.Three hours into the day’s work, something flickers.Following procedure he reaches down and turns off the automatic blinker.Then he puts his eye to the objective again and blinks the machine manually.There is a tiny black fleck, no bigger than a grain of salt, much too small to be a planet.He flicks the plates manually.The speck dances back and forth a few millimeters.Well—it’s small, anyway.With a dawning excitement he reaches into the desk drawer and pulls out a ruler and swings the viewing mechanism up and out of the way.The two plates stand at their canted angle, side by side, illuminated from the back.He lays the ruler on first one plate, then the other.“Three point five millimeters,” he says aloud.He checks the dates again.January 23.January 29.He makes sure which is which.This one on the left is the first exposure.This one on the right is the second.So yes, whatever this thing is, it’s moving.And not only moving, but retrograding.And nothing retrogrades unless it’s also orbiting the sun and you’re going past it on an inside track.And it is in Gemini.“Also I took that disaster on the twenty-first,” he says, to no one.He stands, lays his hand on his forehead.“It would have to be that one.”In the file drawer.Now don’t drop it, you dumb hick.January 21, a cloudy night, off and on, he had to close the shutter more than once when the clouds came ragging in, keeping a watch all night, and the exposure came out lousy, a little blurred with atmospheric haze and overexposed, lousy enough that he decided to start over and do two more plates of the same location.Lucky now, it turns out, because it means he has a third check-plate already to hand.No good but better than nothing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]