Heartlight (3 page)

“So did I,” Kate replied. “More than you know.”

Although something about Grandfather still troubled Kate—something she couldn’t quite put her finger on—his promise made her happier than she had felt in weeks. She glanced at the spot on her forearm where the morpho had rested, then turned back to Grandfather. “You’d better get going. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll finish! Cumberland and I will clean things up.”

The old man winked at her. “At least you don’t have any plates to wash.”

II: Almighty Wings

By ten o’clock, Grandfather still had not emerged from behind the locked door of the lab. Kate finally gave up waiting and prepared dinner for Cumberland and a ham and cheese sandwich for herself. Just in case, she made an extra one for Grandfather.

She had barely taken her first bite when the telephone on the kitchen counter rang. She put down the sandwich and lifted the receiver.

“Hi, Mom,” she said through a mouthful of ham and cheese. “I was going to call you, really I was.”

“I know, dear. Sometimes you’re just as absent-minded as your grandfather, that’s all. It’s a Prancer family trait. Are you coming home?”

“It’s a weekend, so I was hoping to stay over here tonight. Is that all right?”

“Well . . .”

“Please?”

“Grandfather certainly needs the company these days. I’m worried he’s working too hard—especially the past few weeks. All this pressure isn’t good for him.”

Kate knew well the edge in her mother’s voice. Grandfather’s health was something the family understood was a problem, but never discussed openly. She volunteered: “We had a great picnic out in the garden this afternoon.” She didn’t add that Grandfather had promptly locked himself in the lab again.

“All right, Kate. You can stay.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Goodnight, dear. Don’t stay up too late.”

Taking her sandwich with her, Kate stepped over to the rocker and opened
Pennington’s Exotic Butterflies,
which had been her afternoon reading, to the page about morphos. A pair of lustrous wings, poised to lift off from the page, greeted her as before. Next to the picture, written in Grandfather’s nearly illegible scrawl, were the words
light and soul.

Just then she heard a loud sizzling and crackling, like frying bacon but much louder, coming from behind the locked door to the lab. A strange burning smell floated down the long hallway from the lab to the kitchen.
If only I had X-ray vision
, thought Kate.

Hearing no further sound, she scanned the bulging shelves of Grandfather’s book collection, which lined both sides of the hallway and one entire wall of the kitchen. She particularly loved this part of the rambling old house. The oaken shelves of Grandfather’s library held at least fifty books on the nature of light, and twice that number on the evolution of stars. A particular star named Trethoniel was the subject of so many volumes that it required a special shelf all its own. Kate’s favorite books were about the weather, its many patterns and causes; the little ladder was still resting in front of that particular section. She smiled at seeing the large number of works bearing the name
Miles Prancer, D. Phil.
She knew from experience that these were beyond her comprehension, except for the dedications, which were always to Grandmother and always loving without being sentimental.

Then she spied a small gray pamphlet leaning against the most recent edition of Grandfather’s text,
The Life Cycle of Stars.
It looked innocuous, even uninteresting, except for its title:
Beyond Starships: Is It Possible to Travel Faster Than Light?
Protruding from the pamphlet was a badly crumpled piece of paper. It looked like a letter that had been thrown away and later retrieved.

She hesitated for an instant, then removed the letter and read it to herself.

THE ROYAL SOCIETY

London

Founded 1662

My Dear Prancer:

It is with considerable regret that I must report that the Royal Society has elected to withdraw its invitation to you to present your most recent speculations about traveling faster than light. Given our increasingly crowded calendar, we are simply unable to schedule a time to consider your ideas, intriguing though they may be to some of our members.

Please rest assured that this decision was taken only after the most thorough deliberation. Should you choose to present a paper at some time in the future, presumably on a subject rising to traditional standards of documentation and proof, we would of course be pleased to consider your application.

Yours Cordially,

Rt. Hon. M. L. Hunter

Chairman, Committee on Peer Review

Suddenly, Kate felt something move behind her.

She spun around, dropping the letter. But there was nothing unusual to be seen. Cumberland had gone outside after his meal, so she was completely alone.

Yet, it was almost as if she could feel the presence of something else in the kitchen. Something shadowy . . . and cold . . . and watching.

Cautiously, she crept closer to the stone fireplace. “It’s nothing, I’m sure,” she told herself. “Probably just a draft from the chimney.” She knew the kitchen fireplace was so old it was like an open window.

As she bent over to look up the chimney, the ceiling light flickered noisily. She froze, as the light sputtered and wavered on the edge of going out.

Again she sensed something behind her and she whirled around. Her heart was pounding. Where is Cumberland? What had Grandfather once said about hearing ghosts in this house, moaning and creaking with the wind in these old timbers? The light flickered again, like a candle in a cold breeze.

Slowly, Kate backed up until she was pressed against the wall of books. She stood there, too afraid to scream.

*  *  *

“Almost . . . almost there,” Grandfather muttered as he pored over a gleaming green metal box, surrounded by a gnarled nest of wires and silicon chips. “I’m so close now I can taste it.”

As if he were gathering his strength for the final moment, he lifted his eyes from the green box and surveyed the familiar surroundings of his lab. In addition to the thirty-centimeter telescope poised beneath the sky-hatch, the room contained a powerful microscope, an ultraviolet spectrograph, a radiometer specially designed to measure stellar luminosity, and several homemade lasers. One solid-state laser, only as large as a lemon, sat on a small freezer capable of chilling microchips nearly to absolute zero. A stack of homemade holograms rested on his cyclic interferometer, still showing the measurements of its last light wave.

The walls were cluttered with star maps and computer-enhanced images of various celestial bodies, as well as Grandfather’s Oxford University diploma, now so faded with age that most of its Latin script was indecipherable. Next to it was posted a piece of yellow paper with the words, written in crayon several years ago: “Dear Grandfather, Thank You For The Pretty Butterfly. Love, Kate.”

In the far corner stood a new invention: a large device designed to measure the health and longevity of stars. Right now, it was clattering relentlessly as it analyzed some recent data on the Sun.

The lone bookshelf in the lab was tilting dangerously; it contained mostly notebooks of many colors and thicknesses. The only exceptions were tattered copies of the
Old
and
New Testaments
(King James Version),
The Once and Future King,
and
The Wind in the Willows.
(Aristotle’s collected writings, sometimes also found there, were currently being employed as a lamp stand.)

Next to the bookshelf, directly beneath the lab’s open window, stood his bureau of butterflies, holding thirty-five specimens in each of its eighteen slim drawers. Against one side were piled several nets, jars, and other trappings of lepidopterology; on its top, an unfinished chess game waited patiently for someone to make the next move. Carefully placed on the windowsill were a plaster cast of a polar bear paw print and a fossil of a trilobite. Next to them rested a small stack of dinner plates, permanently bound together with the glue of petrified cheese sandwiches.

Leaning precariously against the wall, a large wooden table sagged beneath the weight of hundreds of specialized tools, prisms, cannisters, and components—so many that not even Grandfather could remember what all of them were meant for. His portraits of Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Robert H. Goddard, once in clear view, were now totally obscured by the rising tide of clutter on the table.

Grandfather’s gaze returned to his desk, and to the green metal box resting atop his minicomputer. The surface of the box shone with an electric luster and it vibrated, humming faintly, like the voice of a Tibetan monk chanting a mantra. Behind the minicomputer, a crowded rack of beakers and flasks, filled with brightly colored liquids, rattled continuously from the vibration of the green box.

“Almost,” he whispered, perspiration gathering in the wild eyebrows on his forehead. “Steady now. Steady . . .”

Concentrating intently, he adjusted several of the wires and silicon chips protruding from the box, using a slender pair of tweezers. But for the occasional pause to check a formula on his clipboard or punch a few keys on the minicomputer, Grandfather worked without interruption until, at last, he heaved a sigh that had been building for more than fifty years.

“Ah, yes,” he whispered, placing the tweezers on a stack of computer printouts next to his desk.

His hands trembling, Grandfather removed several wires and closed the lid of the green box. Then, with an excited gleam in his eye, he pushed the key on the minicomputer marked
Enter.

He sank back in his chair, feeling strangely drained, at a moment when he had always imagined he would feel triumphant. Wearily, he raised his wrinkled hands before his face and regarded them ruefully. How quickly the time had flown since those hands had first thrown a baseball or toyed with a telescope . . .

Then he turned again to the green box, and his energy started to return. “It’s here,” he said softly. “My moment in the Sun is finally here.”

“Grandfather!”

At first he thought he had just imagined the cry. Then it came again, this time louder than before.

“Grandfather!”

Someone began battering on the door to the lab.

“Kaitlyn!” he exclaimed. “What on Earth are you yelling about?”

He swiftly covered the green box with a ragged cloth, then walked over to the door. He turned the latch and started to open it—when suddenly a violent push shoved both him and the door aside.

“Oh, Grandfather!” she cried, running to him and hugging him tightly. “Grandfather, I’m scared!”

The old man knelt down and peered into her frightened eyes. She was quivering with fear. “What is it, Kaitlyn? What happened?”

“There’s—there’s something here in the house, Grandfather! Something like—like a ghost. I’m sure of it. I felt it.”

Grandfather drew her close and stroked her long braid. “I’m sure you did, my child. This is an old house, and sometimes it does strange things.”

Kate pushed herself away. “No, but this was real! I’m sure! I’m not just imagining things.” She glanced behind herself at the open door to the hallway. Nothing looked at all unusual; the hallway now seemed quiet, even inviting.

Kate swallowed hard and started to continue—when suddenly she noticed the strangely contented look on the old astronomer’s face. “Grandfather, what is it?”

The lab was dim, lit only by the shaded table lamp next to the desk, but the sparkle in Grandfather’s eyes was unmistakable. “If there are any ghosts in this house tonight, dear child, they must be good ones.”

“What do you mean?”

Pushing back a handful of white hair, he answered: “I mean that I have just made a breakthrough that has taken me more than fifty years to accomplish.”

“Is this the project you told me about after the picnic?”

“Yes, Kaitlyn.” A sudden recollection clouded Grandfather’s face and he added: “Oh, I missed our date for supper, didn’t I? Sorry about that.”

“That’s all right.” Slowly, Kate’s concerns about ghosts were being overcome by curiosity. “Go on, Grandfather. Tell me about this breakthrough.”

Stiffly, Grandfather stepped across the floor to his desk. “Ever since I was a student at Oxford, I have suspected that deep in the core of every star there is a special substance—a substance that holds the key to explaining how stars really function.”

“Isn’t that the stuff you’ve written so much about? The stuff you call PLC?”

“PCL,” corrected Grandfather. “It stands for
Pure Condensed Light
.”

Kate nodded, but her attention had focused on the ragged cloth covering something on the minicomputer. A mysterious humming sound, accompanied by the constant rattling of beakers, seemed to come from beneath the cloth.

“Of course,” continued Grandfather, “that was only a theory. There was no way I could prove that PCL actually exists—let alone that it might also have some rather peculiar properties.”

“Like traveling faster than light?”

“Yes, Kaitlyn.” The old man’s eyes shone like beacons. “It won’t be long before I will unveil a discovery that will one day make spacecraft obsolete. At last, PCL’s existence will finally be treated as a fact, and my own maligned reputation will be restored.” His eyes darkened. “Most people allow themselves to be herded around like sheep, I’m afraid, in science just as much as in religion or politics. They prefer a daily dose of predictable rules—with a touch of self-righteousness—to the often unpredictable truth. So the general opinion that I’ve been wrong about PCL hasn’t really bothered me. But, in recent years, even my closest colleagues have started to doubt my sanity, and that’s hurt a bit.”

“Is that why they wouldn’t let you speak to their meeting?” asked Kate, taking her eyes from the cloth and studying Grandfather sympathetically. “That’s the rudest thing I ever heard of.”

A half-smile creased the astronomer’s face. “You read the Royal Society letter, didn’t you?”

Kate nodded guiltily.