Eye Contact
Marshall Conley clicked a key on his mouse and stood. After a deep yawning stretch, he checked the time and grabbed his empty thermos, one of the heavy metal ones. He needed more coffee. A lot more.
His “Space Shed”, a term his late-wife, Amber, had enjoyed teasing him with, was at the edge of his long yard. The observatory, as Marshall referred to it, looked like an oversized car garage that had been knocked over in a high wind. The metal door that would typically roll up and out of the way was facing up to the sky. While he walked across the cut grass, his mind was still in the shed, hard at work.
His computer and telescope combo had cost a decent chunk of his savings and the idea that it was on the fritz made Marshal’s stomach turn. He considered the variables. He installed the system himself three years ago, and it never acted up before. His equipment was solid. What he was seeing and imaging was real.
Marshall started another pot of coffee and went upstairs. Buried in the closet behind his clothes and under a stack of guitar cases, he found what he was looking for. The telescope was an early anniversary present and had served him for years. It was old and dusty, but it would have to do.
Back outside, with a full thermos and an empty bladder, Marshall extended the telescoping legs of the tripod and set up his old telescope. It could confirm whether what he was seeing was real or some processing error.
Marshal stared into the glass of the telescope with one eye, unbelieving and unable to process what he was seeing. His eye burned, but he felt paralyzed and unable to blink. As the yellow light flickered in and out through the lens and into Marshall’s bloodshot eye, his heart jumped in his chest. A lifetime of looking up and watching the milky way drift across the night sky had done nothing to prepare Marshal for what he was seeing. It just couldn’t be.
“Holy shit,” Marshall croaked the words out. His throat hurt. All of a sudden, he felt like he was coming down with a cold, or even the flu. His legs threatened to give out, and he sat down in the grass, sweaty and out of breath.
Not only had he just discovered a new asteroid, the asteroid was apparently heading directly towards earth. The faint and occasionally blinking light of this comet was getting brighter as it huddled through space, getting ever closer with each passing minute. Marshall strained himself to reach for a notebook on a shelf above his head. Finding a blank page, he started doing the math.
After a few phone calls and a plane ride across the country, Marshall was on the grounds of his old college. Not only was he a student, class of ‘87, he taught astronomy for nearly twenty years before taking an early retirement in the mountains. Being back here normally felt great. He had been a respected professor and always taken pride in his work. Coming back here today, though, he felt like a ghost floating behind his body, as if he had changed some setting and shifted his life into the third person perspective as if he was in some game.
Marshall still couldn’t wrap his head around what he had seen the night before. Something was wrong. He had to have been hallucinating. How was it possible that he would be the first to identify a new comet? With his semi-professional gear, he had done what thousands of astronomers strive to do each day and night.
It took three hours once Marshall arrived on campus to when he could finally get behind the controls of the four million dollar telescope he had spent half his career working with. He locked himself away, dialed in the coordinates, and waited for the massive machine to position itself and focus.
He had at least thirty minutes before the image would render to the three screens he sat behind. Marshall tried to catch a moment of rest and laid down on the stiff couch in the corner. When Marshall had worked here, the couch had been much better suited for napping, but he was exhausted and drifted quickly.
He dreamed of Amber. He always dreamed of Amber. He dreamed of her beautiful face and long curly hair. He dreamed of their wedding and of their vacation to the mountains, when it snowed them in and forced them to stay for an extra four days.
When he finally awoke, the telescope was ready and the image on the screen at first made him think someone was playing a joke on him, but once he checked all the cables and confirmed the signal, his chest began to pound.
Marshall could taste metal in his dry mouth and he could hear the blood surging into his head over and over. Something hit Marshall in the chest that felt like a burning baseball thrown by a division one pitcher. Marshall grabbed at the impact site and fell to the ground, never taking his eyes off the screen.
As he lay on the ground dying from a massive heart attack, he watched as an eyeball the size of Pluto stared back at him. The eye was green with slivers of golden yellow. Thick veins pulsed with blood across the sclerosis. The eye blinks or winks. Without two of them, it’s impossible to tell.