by Dan Opdyke

The observatory had been built in 1967, when men were still learning how to leave the Earth.

It stood on a wooded ridge at the end of a road that no longer appeared on most maps. Once there had been farms here, and telephone wires, and houses whose foundations could still be found beneath the undergrowth. The forest had reclaimed almost everything.

It had not reclaimed the observatory.

Each evening when the weather permitted, Elias Morgan climbed the hill and opened the dome.

He was seventy-three years old and had been doing this for nearly half his life.

The telescope was not a remarkable instrument. Its mirror was only half a meter across. There were amateur astronomers now who owned better equipment in their gardens.

But Morgan had never considered this important.

A telescope was a machine for collecting photons.

And photons did not care who collected them.

On a cold October night, shortly after midnight, someone knocked on the observatory door.

Morgan opened it.

A man of perhaps fifty stood outside.

“Are you still open?”

Morgan glanced at the clock.

“Apparently.”

The stranger entered.

He gave his name as Daniel and offered no explanation for being there.

Morgan asked for none.

“Have you ever seen Jupiter?”

“Pictures.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

Morgan entered the coordinates.

The telescope moved.

Its motors made the quiet, purposeful sounds of a machine performing a task that human beings had once believed impossible.

Morgan adjusted the focus.

“Look.”

Daniel bent over the eyepiece.

For a long time he said nothing.

Jupiter floated there.

Not a photograph.

Not pixels on a screen.

A world.

Two dark equatorial bands crossed its pale disk. Four points of light were arranged beside it.

“What are those?”

“The Galilean satellites.”

“Those dots are moons?”

“Yes.”

Daniel looked again.

“How far away?”

“Tonight? Approximately six hundred million kilometres.”

Daniel raised his head.

“And I’m seeing it now?”

Morgan smiled.

“No.”

Daniel waited.

“You’re seeing Jupiter as it was about thirty-five minutes ago. That’s how long the light required to reach us.”

Daniel returned to the eyepiece.

“So I’m looking into the past.”

“Of course.”

Morgan walked toward the open slit of the dome.

“The Moon you see is a little more than a second old. The Sun is eight minutes old. Sirius is nearly nine years old.”

He pointed toward a faint patch of sky.

“And the light from the Andromeda Galaxy began its journey before there were human beings.”

Daniel stared upward.

For several moments neither man spoke.

“It makes everything down here seem insignificant.”

Morgan had heard this observation many times.

He had never agreed with it.

“On the contrary.”

Daniel looked at him.

Morgan sat beside the telescope.

“The hydrogen in your body was made during the first few minutes after the beginning of the universe. The carbon, oxygen and calcium came later. Stars manufactured them.”

Daniel listened.

“Those stars died. Their material entered other stars, planets, oceans and eventually living things. After several billion years, some of that matter became capable of asking where it came from.”

Morgan touched the telescope.

“And then it built instruments to find out.”

Daniel smiled.

“That’s a dramatic way of putting it.”

“It is also essentially correct.”

They observed until dawn.

Morgan showed him Saturn, whose rings seemed so geometrically perfect that they might have been engineered.

They examined the Pleiades.

They looked into Orion, where stars were being assembled from collapsing clouds of gas while, elsewhere in the Galaxy, other stars were dying.

At 5:17 the first light appeared in the east.

Morgan closed the dome.

Daniel stood by the door.

“Can I come back?”

“Whenever the sky is clear.”

He did.

At first occasionally.

Then often.

Morgan taught him the constellations, celestial coordinates, optics and the peculiar patience required by astronomy.

Years passed.

Daniel learned the telescope.

Then he learned the sky.

Eventually he began opening the observatory himself.

There came, inevitably, an evening when Elias Morgan did not climb the hill.

The telescope continued without him.

So did Jupiter.

So did Saturn.

So did the Galaxy.

Twenty-one years after Daniel had first knocked upon the observatory door, another visitor arrived shortly after midnight.

She was young, though she looked tired.

“Are you still open?”

Daniel glanced at the clock.

He remembered an October night from another lifetime.

“Apparently.”

He opened the door.

“Have you ever seen Jupiter?”

“Pictures.”

Daniel smiled.

“That isn’t what I asked.”

The telescope turned toward the giant planet.

Far above them, photons that had departed Jupiter thirty-five minutes earlier completed their journey.

Others were arriving from Sirius.

Others from Andromeda.

And still others, so ancient that Earth itself had not existed when they began crossing the darkness, passed unnoticed through the observatory walls and continued into space.

For four billion years, life on Earth had looked outward without understanding what it saw.

Then, for the briefest instant in cosmic history, matter had learned to understand itself.

Perhaps that was all intelligence was.

Perhaps it was enough.

And beneath the turning dome, on one small world circling an ordinary star, someone leaned toward an eyepiece and looked outward once again.