Page 33 of See the Stars

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

‘ T his changes everything.’ Alice and Berti sat next to each other at the kitchen table, the relevant logbooks laid out in front of them.

Alice picked up their recent find, stroking it gently.

The leather cover was flaky, succumbing to years of damp conditions at the back of that cupboard.

She held it to her face and breathed in its scent, musty and sacred like an old church; redolent of history.

‘I don’t think you can smell a comet,’ said Berti, bringing her firmly back into the kitchen.

‘Of course you can,’ said Alice, putting the book down. ‘It would be pretty pungent. Rotten eggs, because of the hydrogen sulphide, urine from the ammonia, and almonds from the hydrogen cyanide.’

‘You can’t smell it on the page of that logbook, though,’ he said.

‘No,’ conceded Alice. ‘Good thing too. It would be toxic. One whiff could kill you.’

‘You’d never get close enough to an actual comet to smell it,’ said Berti thoughtfully. ‘You’d already be dead if you were outside the earth’s atmosphere without a space suit. And you can’t smell anything through the suit because you’d have your own air supply.’

‘True,’ said Alice.

‘So I was right. Even though a comet has a scent, you couldn’t smell it.’ He smiled, looking pleased with himself. ‘Then let’s get back to the data, please. Can I see again?’

‘Of course,’ said Alice, deciding to concede the point.

She opened to the page where her grandfather had seen the comet that final time.

That vital time. She’d done almost nothing but study it since she’d said goodbye to a disgruntled Hugo and sent him back to London.

If only she’d taken the time to look at it when her grandfather had wanted to show her.

They could have found the comet, fulfilled his dream while he was alive.

But she’d been impatient and rude. That was probably what had sparked his behaviour the following day.

He was gone. Nothing would bring him back. But if she could do this, it would be something.

‘His Bs and Ds are the wrong way round,’ said Berti, who didn’t seem as impressed as Alice had hoped. ‘And the handwriting is quite hard to read. That bit looks like two spiders dancing across the page.’

‘Alzheimer’s isn’t known for improving handwriting,’ said Alice. ‘But look. He’s given us all the information we need. His mind was still sharp.’

‘His mind was the opposite of sharp,’ interjected her mum, who was noisily chopping vegetables and occasionally tutting to herself. ‘He didn’t know his own name half the time.’

‘Blunt,’ said Berti.

‘I’m not being blunt, just honest,’ said Sheila, turning around still wielding the knife. ‘You didn’t even know him. You’ve no idea what it was like.’ She was in an uncustomary bad mood at Alice’s decision to send Hugo home alone.

‘No,’ said Berti, flinching a little at the sight of the blade. ‘I was just saying that the opposite of sharp is blunt.’

Sheila tutted audibly this time and turned back to her carrots. ‘This book is certainly not worth losing a job over. You do know what’s happening with the economy?’

‘I’ll work something out,’ said Alice. She’d been worrying about this herself but didn’t want to admit it to her mother. ‘And anyway, it doesn’t look like I’ll need much more time.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Berti. ‘You can’t have worked it out already?’

‘No,’ said Alice. ‘But . . . ’ She grabbed a notebook of her own and started sketching.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Berti. ‘Don’t we need to calculate the orbit?’

‘I find it easier to draw it first,’ said Alice.

‘So I can visualise the maths.’ She drew some dots at the edge of her page.

‘Long-period comets originate from the Oort Cloud, we think,’ she said, pointing with her pencil to the dots.

‘There are lots of icy objects out there. Well, we think there are. No one has managed to see them, but it’s a decent guess .

. . ’ She trailed off, imagining Zelda’s eye-roll at the vagaries of astrophysics.

‘And comets are icy objects,’ prompted Berti. ‘So that’s where it comes from.’

‘Well, yes and no,’ said Alice, drawing herself back into the present.

‘By definition, it takes at least two hundred years for a long-period comet from the Oort Cloud to complete an orbit. Some we believe take hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions. Although that’s hard to verify as well, what with people having relatively short life spans, in the grand scheme of the universe. ’

‘But our comet has been reappearing every nine years,’ said Berti. ‘If the logs are correct. That’s not long enough.’

‘Yes,’ said Alice. ‘It must be a short-period comet.’

‘It’s super-fast?’

‘No. It just doesn’t have as far to travel.

’ She picked up her pencil again, and drew a doughnut-shaped ring just inside her previous drawing, adding more dots and a few slightly larger circles.

The action calmed her. ‘The Kuiper Belt,’ she said.

‘Just beyond Neptune. That’s where our guy would be from.

It’s much closer and full of the kinds of icy objects that can break away and become comets.

’ She drew quick sketches of the planets.

‘Long-period comets take a haphazard path, but short-period ones are a bit more predictable, because they tend to be on the ecliptic.’ She looked at Berti, who was frowning at her.

‘On the same plane as the planets,’ she explained.

‘I knew that,’ he replied. ‘I was just thinking that you’ve not drawn Jupiter’s red storm spot.’

Alice leaned in and added the spot. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Happy?’

‘Much better,’ said Berti. ‘It looked naked without it.’

Sheila made a funny humphing noise and Alice wondered if she was swallowing a laugh.

‘Anyway,’ said Alice, ‘some of the icy objects in the Kuiper Belt get pulled by the gravity of the largest celestial objects into an orbit, of sorts. They’ll head towards the gas giants and eventually get drawn towards the sun, and when they get close enough, the heat will make some of the ice vaporise and then the solar winds create the gassy tails that you see in the pictures.

’ She drew the comets’ tails, always pointing away from the direction of the sun.

‘Then they head back to the Kuiper Belt?’

Alice looked at her sketch. ‘Sometimes. But our one has a particularly short orbit period, so it’s probably influenced by Jupiter’s gravity and won’t get back out to the belt.

’ She added a little more embellishment to Jupiter’s spot.

‘So instead, it travels between the two largest objects in our solar system: Jupiter and the sun.’

‘Getting batted around like a tennis ball,’ contributed Sheila.

‘Not really,’ said Alice. ‘It’s pulled, rather than batted.’ She thought a moment. ‘More like magnets. One of those executive toys with the balls that swing for ever.’ Angus had one of those on his desk.

‘So what does that mean for us?’ asked Berti.

‘Let’s see.’ Alice started scribbling down numbers. ‘I need to write some code for the calculations really,’ she said. ‘But for the moment, I’ll just try to approximate.’

‘Please can I watch?’ asked Berti. Alice scooted over so that he could see what she was doing. ‘You need to carry the one,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Alice. ‘Don’t fret.’ She continued, trying not to be distracted by Berti’s corrections or her mother’s rhythmic chopping. She was feeling good now – as if an area of her brain that she’d thought had died had suddenly come to life again, the synapses reconnecting.

‘There,’ she said, writing her results down with a flourish.

‘I don’t understand,’ confessed Berti, looking at the book.

‘By my calculations, the comet’s path has been getting slightly further away from earth every time it appears,’ said Alice. ‘Of course, we don’t know what happened in 2016 – Grandpa had already passed away and I missed it entirely.’

‘So . . . ’

‘So if the pattern continues, which is what we expect patterns to do, it will be around here next time it appears.’ She pointed to a spot on her sketch.

‘Which will be . . . ?’

‘It’s currently passing by Venus, I believe,’ she said. ‘And that means it could be visible in our skies . . . ’ She paused a moment, enjoying Berti’s excitement. Even her mother had stopped chopping and was staring at her. ‘It’s hard to calculate exactly, but we should be looking tonight.’

‘Tonight?’ Berti’s eyes were wide.

‘Now and every night for a fortnight. If we’re going to see it, it will be in the next two weeks.’

Sheila put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. ‘Alice,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve always loved this stuff. But two weeks? You’re meant to be back at work tomorrow. It’s a good job,’ she went on. ‘Security. So many people are on the breadline, and now a piece of space rock comes along and—’

‘It’s not space rock!’ scoffed Berti. ‘It’s—’

Alice held up her hand to stop him. ‘I’ll work something out, Mum,’ she said. ‘I won’t lose my job. I promise. But there is absolutely no way I’m going to miss Grandpa’s comet. I’m not going to let him down. Not again.’

*

Alice shifted in her chair at the kitchen table, her laptop open in front of her as she waited for Angus to dial in. She wasn’t sure if her mother’s Wi-Fi was up to a Zoom call. To be honest, she wasn’t sure if she was either.

‘Alice!’ There he was. Either the calibration on her screen was off or Angus had been on a sunbed. ‘Imagine my surprise when I went to your desk this morning, looking forward to welcoming you back, and I was met with an empty chair and a Zoom invitation!’

‘I know,’ said Alice. Her hands were sweaty. ‘I’m sorry, I wanted to give you more notice, but . . . I need more time,’ she said, honestly.

‘Another incident?’ To be fair to him, Angus looked genuinely concerned.