The Ceres Solution

Chapter Thirteen

The bet was not all that sizeable—six bottles of a good malt were involved—but it had been placed with great solemnity, and Hector Mellish was genuinely excited over the outcome. His fingers had a distinct tendency to tremble as he worked to align his twenty-centimetre refracting telescope in accordance with the given coordinates, and he suspected the unsteadiness had nothing to do with the cold inside his small observatory. He paused to check the time and to take a sip of neat whisky from a shot glass.

“Better go easy on that stuff,” Parker Smith advised, stirring slightly in the companionable darkness. “Don’t forget I’ll be taking most of your supply home with me.”

“We’ll see, we’ll see,” Mellish said, smiling at his friend’s presumption. Their lives in Asheville, North Carolina, seemed to have been spared the degradations that were so common throughout the world, and sometimes Mellish felt that he was not sufficiently appreciative. The two men had shared an interest in amateur astronomy for more than ten years, with Mellish doing most of the practical observation and Smith largely concerning himself with stellar physics. Smith was a computer expert, but he prided himself on his classical mathematical skills, and that had been the origin of the bet.

They had been sitting indoors one cloudy night, drinking and smoking and chewing the fat. Mellish had expressed admiration for the work carried out more than two centuries earlier by the German mathematician Karl Gauss, whose techniques for orbit computation had enabled astronomers to relocate the newly-discovered minor planet of Ceres after it had been lost for weeks behind the sun. Smith, belly and mind suffused by alcoholic warmth, had claimed the ability to perform a similar computation without modern aids, and had promptly been challenged. The resultant argument had ended with Mellish undertaking to provide a two-month record of Ceres’ movements, from which Smith was to predict the planetoid’s position for a month later.

Zero hour for resolving the wager was ten o’clock at night—a time which was less than five minutes away. It would, of course, have been easy to make a forward adjustment in Smith’s figures and check his accuracy at any convenient time, but such a course had no appeal to Mellish’s sense of the dramatic. It had to be a make-or-break affair at the predestined moment, with ceremonial triumph for the winner and ignominy for the loser. To that end, Mellish had even gone as far as sketching and memorising the positions of the few background stars that would be in his field of view, and he knew he would be able to identify the wandering asteroid within seconds of looking through the eyepiece—provided it was there to be seen.

“Sure you don’t want to cancel the bet?” he said, playing the game to the hilt. “Whisky is a hell of a price these days.”

“Not when you get it the way I’m going to get it,” Smith replied comfortably.

“Your funeral. Want to check these settings?”

“No—I guess I can trust you that far.”

“Damn right.” Mellish stared at the glowing figures displayed by his watch, and on the instant of their changing to the new hour he switched on the electric drive of his telescope, counteracting the Earth’s rotation and freezing one tiny section of the heavens in the instrument’s field of view. “Who’s going to have first look?”

“It’s a mere formality—you go ahead.”

“Too kind.” Mellish stooped, put his eye to the telescope and adjusted the focus screw. The circular blurs of radiance he had seen shrank to points which wavered slightly because of atmospheric turbulence, and there—almost perfectly centred in the image—was Ceres.

Mellish accepted at once that he had lost the bet, but he decided to prolong the suspense Smith was pretending not to feel. He continued peering into the eyepiece, making satisfied grunting sounds while he examined the speck of light that was Ceres. He was deeply impressed by the ability Smith had demonstrated, to pinpoint—using nothing but a pencil and jotting pad—the location of an errant ball of rock in the vast tract of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Ceres was some 700 kilometres in diameter, registering as only a glowing mote despite the great power of the telescope, and to a non-mathematician like Mellish its presence at the predicted spot was almost magical.

“What’s the hold-up?” Smith said at last. “Have you gone to sleep?”

“I hate to tell you this, but…” Mellish paused, tantalising his friend, and was taking a final look at the asteroid when something very odd occurred.

The remote point of light ceased to exist.

Mellish gazed at the place where it had been, fully expecting it to reappear, and his mind grappled with the problem of what had happened. His first thought was that Ceres had been occulted by a dark body—possibly one of the cargo-carrying airships which were experiencing a minor resurgence—but as the seconds slowly went by the evidence against that theory mounted higher. To block off the light for such a long period the occulting object would have to subtend a considerable angle, and nothing in Mellish’s experience had the necessary dimensions. It was as though Ceres itself had simply disappeared.

“Something pretty weird has just happened,” Mellish said. “Ceres has vanished.”

“My God, I’ve heard of welshers,” Smith replied scornfully, “but this is the…”

“You don’t get it!” Mellish straightened up and grasped the other man’s arm. “It was there—right where you said—but now it’s gone. I was looking straight at it when it went.”

“Behind a cloud?”

“No. Take a look outside, Parker—the sky’s clear.”

“This is one of your jokes, right?”

“I’m not joking,” Mellish snapped, suddenly aware of how difficult it was going to be to convince Smith. He returned to the telescope, checked that the asteroid was still not visible, then set about the daunting task of persuading his friend that he had witnessed something momentous taking place in the heavens. The argument went on for many minutes, with Parker Smith slowly reaching the conclusion that his computations had been wrong and that Ceres would be found in another part of the sky. It was only then that Mellish got the idea of bringing in an outside authority.

“There’s an easy way to settle this,” he said, trying to sound calm. “I’m going to call the Hartmann Observatory.”

Smith snorted with amusement. “Good idea! Please can I have my asteroid back.”

“You’ll see.” Mellish led the way out of the hand-built dome that covered his telescope, stamped up the back garden path and went into the house. He turned on lights, ushered Smith into his library with exaggerated courtesy and picked up the telephone. The local observatory’s number was well known to him and he was able to key it in without consulting a directory. He was greeted by the steady bleeping of the engaged tone. Irritated by the delay, he was on the point of setting the instrument down when he noticed that, according to the phone’s information display, eight other callers were waiting to get through to the same number—an indication that the observatory was exceptionally busy for that time of night.

Without speaking, Mellish pointed at the glowing digit and was amply rewarded when—for the first time in the course of their disagreement—Smith met his gaze with eyes which had begun to show doubt.