Fire Watch

by Connie Willis

  And now here they were in Montana, and the men had gone God knows where, probably back to the Chamber of Commerce to ask more obscure questions about f-stops and mylar filters. They had already been there once. Meg had stood in the slushy snow outside the crowded office while Laynie ran around and around the towns resident Air Force missile, screaming like a wild Indian. No one had paid any attention to her. People had clustered in little groups, reading over the free brochures and arguing about a line of minuscule clouds in the southwest.

  They were clustered together on the streets, too. The locals were easy to spot. They were the only ones who weren’t anxiously watching the sky They were also the only ones not wearing T-shirts that said “Eclipse ’79” in psychedelic orange and yellow.

  The four men walking down the other side of the street were definitely not locals. They were all talking at once and gesturing wildly at the sky Scientists, thought Meg. You can always tell scientists. Their pants are too short. These four all looked alike: short black pants, short-sleeved shirts with the pocket crammed with pencils and metal clips and a flat calculator. Short sandy hair and black-rimmed glasses. Heads of four science departments somewhere, Meg thought. Scientificus Americanos in the flesh. They were obviously talking about the weather, even threatening it, from the look of some of those gestures, although the sky was perfectly clear as far as Meg could see. And yet oblivious to the weather, too, standing there in the twenty-degree cold in their shirt sleeves. One looked dressed for an eclipse in Hawaii in a flower-splashed orange shirt. She would have thought they were in the wrong place altogether if Rich’s coat hadn’t still been slung over the back of the booth.

  The men came back. Rich had bought a T-shirt for Laynie. She refused to put it on. “I think I’d better take her back to the motel so she can have some kind of nap,” Meg said. “She’s about done in.”

  Rich nodded. “You didn’t bring any masking tape, did you? Some guys over at the Chamber of Commerce said an eye patch makes it easier to see the corona at totality.”

  “Maybe one of the drugstores is open,” Paulos said. “The seminars start at two-thirty. Surely we can find a drugstore open.”

  “What if we meet you at the seminar?” Rich said. He gave Meg the key to the motel room and took off again, remembering his coat this time. Meg struggled Laynie into her snowsuit, paid the bill, and carried her back to the motel.

  Two redheaded teenage boys were setting up an expensive-looking telescope in the parking lot of the motel. The No Vacancy sign flashed on and off in the sunny afternoon. Laynie was already asleep against Meg’s shoulder. She stopped to admire the telescope. The boys were from Arizona. “Do you know how lucky we are?” one of them said. “I mean, how lucky?”

  “It does look like we’re going to have good weather,” Meg said, shielding her eyes against the sun to look at the clouds in the southwest. They seemed to be dwindling.

  “I don’t mean the weather,” the boy said, with an air of contempt Meg was sure he didn’t feel, not when he’d come all the way from Arizona. “If we lived on Jupiter we wouldn’t have this at all.”

  “No,” Meg said, smiling, “I suppose we wouldn’t.”

  “See, the sun is exactly four hundred times bigger than the moon and exactly four hundred times farther away. So they just fit. It doesn’t happen like that anyplace else in the whole universe probably!”

  He was talking very loudly. Laynie shifted uneasily against Meg’s shoulder. Her cheeks were flushed, a sure sign that she was worn out. Meg smiled at the boys and took Laynie into the room. She turned back the red chenille bedspread and laid Laynie on the blankets, then kicked off her shoes and lay down beside her.

  The boys were still outside when she woke up, loudly telling the landlady how lucky she was not to be living on Venus. The landlady probably already knew how lucky she was. Meg was relatively sure she didn’t usually get to use her No Vacancy sign in February. She was positive she didn’t usually get thirty-five dollars a room.

  Meg had a long chenille-nubbled crease down her cheek from where she’d slept on the folded bedspread. She combed her hair, pulled on a sweater, and sat down on the bed beside Laynie. It was only a little after two. The seminar was supposed to last two and a half hours, with a film at three O’clock. There was no way Laynie could last through the whole thing. She might as well let her sleep.

  Laynie was staring at her wide-eyed from the bed. “Tana?” she asked sleepily

  “Yes,” Meg said. “Go back to sleep.”

  Laynie sat up. “Clips?” she said, and crawled off the bed.

  “Not yet. Would you like to go swing? Let’s get your boots on.”

  The redheaded boys were gone from the parking lot. They had probably gone to the seminar. The landlady directed Meg and Laynie to a park two blocks off the main street. Meg walked slowly, letting Laynie dawdle over a puddle and poke at the piles of dirty snow with a stick she found. On the way, Meg saw the four scientists again. She was relieved to see they were no longer running around without coats. They were all in parkas now and had an assortment of hats, among them an enormous Stetson and a red wool deerstalker with ear flaps. Protective coloration, Meg thought. Now they looked like everybody else. It didn’t really matter what they wore, though. They could be wearing clown suits for all anybody would notice. The locals only looked at your money; and everybody else was watching the sky.

  They were still arguing fiercely about the weather, almost frantically although Meg couldn’t make out what they were saying. It sounded a little like a foreign language, though Meg couldn’t be sure. Scientists talking to each other always sounded a little like a foreign language.

  There was no one in the park. Meg wiped a swing dry with the tail of her coat and set Laynie gently going back and forth. She made a circuit of the park, avoiding puddles and forth. She made a circuit of the park, avoiding puddles and thinking it was an awfully small town to have two missiles. This one was not anything like the needle-shaped red, white, and blue one the Chamber of Commerce had. It was short and squat and a painfully nondescript pale khaki color. Army surplus. It had no markings to identify it, but along one side were long, scraggly marks that looked as if they had been scrawled in charcoal. Local graffiti, Meg thought, and moved closer.

  It wasn’t graffiti unless it had been put on with a blowtorch. The long row of hash marks had been burned onto the side of the missile. They were slightly uneven in length: Laynie’s idea of writing. At the end of the line was a circle with more hash marks radiating from it. The circle reminded her of something, but she couldn’t think what.

  “Rocket,” Laynie said.

  “No, honey it’s a missile.” Actually, it did look a little like a rocket.

  “Rocket,” Laynie repeated. She was standing behind Meg, in a puddle. Meg couldn’t see the tops of her boots.

  “Oh, Laynie,” Meg said. “Your good boots!” She helped her out of the puddle.

  “Boots!” Laynie wailed. “Wet!”

  “Oh, honey,” Meg said, and picked her up. “Let’s go change into your sneakers, okay? Your pretty red sneakers, okay?”

  Laynie sniffed. “Wet.”

  “I know.” It seemed like a long way back to the motel. “Let’s pretend we’re in a rocket,” Meg said to distract Laynie. “Where shall we go?”

  “Tana,” Laynie said.

  “Montana? Meg laughed. “Why?”

  “See clips,” Laynie said solemnly.

  Meg stopped in the middle of the street and looked back at the park.

  By the time Meg got Laynie into dry socks and the red sneakers, it was nearly three-thirty, which meant the questions should be over and the scheduled movie started. Laynie was very good in movies, no matter what they were about, so Meg decided to risk meeting Rich. Thank goodness it was a little town. The high school was only two blocks farther than the park, perched on the top of a hill. The Chamber of Commerce had recommended it as the best viewing site for tomorrow.

  Meg had guessed
wrong about the movie. They were still asking questions. Rich and Paulos were halfway down the auditorium and in the middle of a row. Meg decided against trying to get to them and sat down in an empty seat almost at the back. She helped Laynie out of her snowsuit and handed her a package of gum.

  “Clips?” Laynie asked.

  “Not yet,” Meg said, “but there’ll be a movie soon.” I hope. She tried to tell from the questions being asked how near they were to being finished, but it was impossible to tell anything. The questions were a jumble about shadow bands, welder’s glass, mylar film, Bailey’s beads. Meg had the feeling from the look on the face of the man leading the discussion that some of the questions had been asked before. He was probably a teacher, because he didn’t know how to hold the microphone right. He was certainly a scientist. He had a calculator and five pencils in his shirt pocket. His pants came almost to the top of his socks.

  Meg wondered idly where her four scientists were. She didn’t see them in the crowd, though there were several Stetsons and one fluorescent orange deerstalker. And a million parkas. If Holubar were sponsoring the eclipse, Meg thought, this is what it would look like. Laynie stood on her seat and offered gum to the elderly couple behind her.

  The science teacher finally stopped one of the redheaded boys in mid-question and started the movie. It was a National Geographic film of an eclipse out in the ocean somewhere. The scientist who did the narration was the spitting image of Meg’s four. He even had on an orange-flowered Hawaiian shirt. He talked for fifteen minutes about the mechanics of eclipses while Laynie stared raptly at the screen, not even chewing her gum.

  “The fact that solar eclipses occur at all is due to a coincidence unique in the solar system, as far as we know, unique in our whole celestial neighborhood. It’s all due to the diameter of the moon, which is three thousand four hundred eighty kilometers, being point oh oh two five times the diameter of the sun, which is …” He was off again, working out chalky equations. Laynie loved it. The gist of it, Meg gathered, was not that there were eclipses, since everything in the universe must sooner or later manage to get in the way of everything else and ruin the view. The amazing coincidence part was that the sun and the moon were an exact geometric fit, so that instead of just darkness there were the corona, the prominences, all the show that people came from miles around to see.

  Laynie had to go to the bathroom. Meg trekked her down a locker-lined hall and nearly collided with her scientists. They brushed past her and out a side door onto the schools tennis courts. The courts were heaped with black snow, but they commanded an unbroken view of the sky.

  Meg could see now what they had been arguing about. The sky was still clear, with only a few delicate cirrus clouds above the dipping sun, and that threatening line of clouds had disappeared. But there was a faint haze to the west that Meg recognized now as weather coming. A big front, too. It might be overcast by as early as tonight. So why weren’t the four worried?

  They did not look worried at all. The argument was coming near to being resolved, Meg thought, watching them through the door, because their expressions were nearly in agreement and their gesturing was on a smaller and more soothing scale. In fact, Meg thought, they looked a little smug, like Rich and Paulos when they had found the mistake in the program and could now go full speed ahead without interference. She wondered what the weather report for tomorrow would be. I don’t need to hear, she thought irrationally, I already know. She, watched them through the door for a few more minutes and then took Laynie to the bathroom.

  The questioning in the auditorium went on for almost another hour after the movie, during which time Laynie went through two more packs of gum and a roll of Lifesavers the old couple behind gave her. Meg decided they were saints sent down from heaven to help young mother’s through the eclipse. If heaven wasn’t too far to come, Meg thought idly while the man with the microphone held forth on the construction of a pinhole viewer from a shoebox, how far was too far to come?

  * * *

  Everyone who had been in the auditorium was in the cafe and then some. The special was something called an “eclipse burger,” which turned out to be a hamburger with a fried egg and cheese on top. Laynie took the top bun off and refused to eat anything else. Rich and Paulos talked about the weather while Meg scraped egg and cheese off Laynie’s hamburger. They hadn’t noticed the haze yet.

  “Do you realize how far some of these people have come?” Rich said. “That guy that was sitting next to us was from New York. He drove out.”

  “Yeah, if it’s cloudy tomorrow, there are going to be some mighty unhappy people,” Paulos said.

  “Ick,” Laynie said, pointing to the yellow mess beside her hamburger. Meg scraped the offending goo onto her own plate.

  “It seems to me,” she said, “that if you had come far enough you would have some way of ensuring that the weather was clear.” She put the top bun on the hamburger and handed it to Laynie. Rich and Paulos were looking at her as if she had lost her mind.

  “You mean cloudseeding?” Rich said finally.

  “I just—exactly how far do you think people actually come to something like this?”

  They looked at each other. “I don’t know,” Paulos said. “There are supposed to be some astronomers here from Italy.”

  “Are there four of them?” Meg said without thinking, and then stopped. They were looking at her again. “But they don’t have to come, do they? I mean, I thought scientists could see everything they wanted to with the satellite equipment. The corona and all that, I mean,” she finished weakly.

  “Catch up,” Laynie said. Meg handed her the catsup bottle. She wouldn’t be able to get the lid off and it would keep her occupied.

  Rich was still frowning. In a minute he would ask, “What’s the matter?” and she would say, “There are four scientists here who aren’t from Italy,” and then he would really think she was crazy But he was frowning about something else.

  “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “somebody else was saying that same thing this afternoon, that with all the above-the-atmosphere equipment we’ve got now, there’s really no reason for all the elaborate setup every eclipse.”

  “Then why do they come all the way from Italy?” Meg persisted. She was not sure what she wanted him to say; perhaps that the distances were dwindling, that nobody came very far anymore just to see an eclipse.

  Rich hesitated. “They just—I don’t know.”

  “They come to see the show,” Paulos said suddenly.

  “Ick,” Laynie said.

  “They come for the same reason the pilgrims went to Canterbury, Teddy Roosevelt went to Yellowstone, the astronauts went to the moon. To see the show.”

  “Well, but surely it’s more than just that. Scientific curiosity and—” Rich said.

  Paulos shook his head. “Protective coloration,” he said.

  Meg sucked in her breath.

  “But there’s still a lot of information that can’t be gotten any other way,” Rich said. “Look at—”

  “Ick,” Laynie said again. Meg could not see Laynie’s plate under the catsup. She had apparently gotten the lid off quite easily.

  After supper they went back to the motel. The men stood outside with the redheaded boys and debated the weather. The faint haze had become a light film nearly obscuring Jupiter, although the moons could still be seen faintly through Paulos’s telescope. Meg gave Laynie her bath and put her to bed. She washed out the catsup-stained T-shirt and the mud-soaked socks and hung them over the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. Then she got ready for bed herself and flicked on the TV.

  It was a Helena station. Helena was worried about early morning fog. They were recommending Lewistown and Grassrange. Apparently Helena hadn’t noticed the haze either. There was a guest meteorologist from Denver. He explained how the Russians had used cloudseeding during the last-eclipse to obtain a perfect view through dense cloud cover. He said modem technology had not developed to the sophistication neces
sary for weather control in the northwest due to complicated arctic flow patterns, but plans were already being made for the eclipse in Hawaii so that hopefully they would be able not only to predict but to guarantee good weather to the people who had traveled so far to see this wonder of nature. Meg turned off the TV and went to bed.

  She woke up at five-thirty frozen stiff. The door of the motel room was standing open. She pulled on her coat, pulled the covers up over Laynie, and went outside. It was just starting to get light. Rich and Paulos stood with their hands in their pockets, looking miserable. The redheaded boys had the back of their orange hatchback open and were slinging sleeping bags and equipment into it. The sky was completely overcast.

  “Where are they going?” Meg asked Rich.

  “Helena.” He sounded grim, which meant he was frantic with worry.

  “But Helena’s supposed to have fog.”

  “Fog might burn off. This …” He waved a hand at the sky. It was getting lighter by the minute. The clouds looked totally impenetrable. A major front. “What do you think, Paulos?”

  “I think if we don’t make up our minds within the next few minutes it’ll be too late to make any difference. We’ve only got about two hours until it starts.”

  The redheaded boys came out with a last load. Two backpacks and the camera tripod. They threw them in the back of the car and slammed down the hatch. One of them had drawn “Eclipse Special” with his finger in the mud on the back window. Next to it he had drawn a sun. A circle with uneven lines radiating from it.

  “I say Helena,” Rich said.

  “Great,” Paulos said, and turned back to the motel.

  “No,” Meg said.

  They all looked at her, even the redheaded boys. They will never forgive me if it’s cloudy and they miss the eclipse, she thought. It’s the last one in North America in this century; and they will never forgive me. But Helena has fog and we have …