BLASPHEMY

By Shane Mullins

Illustration by Susie Hawkins

Ethan Voorhees had always loved his job. He was director of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Observatory, a beautiful Classic Revival-style building that would be 100 years old in 2012 but whose history reached back into the early 19^th century.

He had received his degree in Astro-Physics from the University of Pittsburgh and moved right into a research assistant slot at the observatory in 1976 while he got his PhD. Except for two sabbaticals, one spent in Puerto Rico at the Arecibo Observatory; and twelve months in Hawaii that had more to do with lounging on the beach than serious research, he’d been at Allegheny his whole career.

His specialty was astrometry, which is a fancy name for measuring the position of stars. Ethan was considered the world’s greatest expert on astrometry and he enjoyed that position and the perks it brought. He’d published widely and written a popular science book that had outsold Carl Sagan’s Cosmos but had never been turned into a PBS series.  He wasn’t as charismatic as Neil Tyson they had told him.

For the last few years, Ethan’s research had been focused on finding extra-solar planets. He had several full-time research assistants, one of whom was keen to make his mark in the field of stellar parallax work.

The summer he turned 56, things began to change for Ethan. First, his 81-year-old mother died in June, a lingering terrible death from stomach cancer. His mother had been a sweet, sad woman who read romance novels and baked cakes when she was depressed.  Ethan had adored her and so had his friends who were only too happy to come around for slices of warm cake and doses of uncomplicated maternal affection even as they reached middle age.

His father had been a gentle, dreamy drunk who trained the family’s dachshunds to do elaborate tricks they performed (as Oscar and the Weiners) at VA hospitals, children’s wards and nursing homes. The trio had died together in a car accident on the way home from a gig at St. Mary’s where 20 kids stricken with cancer had been delighted by the show. Oscar Voorhees always made sure there was time at the end for the kids or seniors or vets to pet the dogs, who loved everybody and were total sluts for anyone who’d rub their bellies and tell them they were good dogs.

Ethan was only 15 when his father died; his mother only 41. It sometimes amazed him when he thought that she’d been a widow twice as long as she’d been married. It was Ethan’s father who’d introduced him to the stars. On summer nights, his dad would bring a six pack out onto the deck behind their house and look up into the sky with wonder and delight. He’d point out constellations and tell Ethan the stories behind the pictures and patterns. He’d taught Ethan to focus until he could see that stars had colors and weren’t just points of sparkling radiant white. Ethan would lean back against his father’s knees, with the doxies lying on either side of him, and listen to his father retell Greek myths and Native American legends. His favorite constellation was Orion because the red star Betelgeuse on the hunter’s shoulder was so easily identifiable.  Oscar had told his son that the Persian name for Betelgeuse translated as “Orion’s armpit,” which made Ethan laugh.

Ethan had loved his father so much that his death left a hollow in him that was never really filled. He began to distance himself—from his friends, from his mother, even from pretty Kristy Farmer who liked him enough to give him a hand job under the bleachers during a school pep rally. He never married, and as he’d gotten older, he’d grown more and more withdrawn. His mother’s death untethered him.

He began to get mystical, insisting that no one enter the dome when he was working lest they interrupt his communion with God.  He would stare into the stars with a feverish, burning intensity that morphed into fugue states that lasted for hours.

His behavior started to creep the grad students out. When he began to refer to the 30-inch Thaw Refractor telescope as “the eye of God,” the assistant director of the observatory was alarmed enough to mention Ethan’s behavior to the dean of the physics department. Unfortunately, the assistant director was an ambitious woman who had never hidden her dislike of Ethan, which had more to do with an ill-considered pass he’d turned down during a Christmas party than it did with astronomy. The dean, who’d been at the same Christmas party, told her to leave Ethan alone to deal with his personal problems and suggested she might find it useful to mind her own business in the future.

Instead, she instructed the night security guards to keep an eye on Ethan and report any … unusual behavior. When they told her about the one-sided conversations he conducted with empty air and showed her cell phone photos of arcane symbols he chalked on the floor at night and wiped away in the morning, she began documenting the situation with an eye toward getting Ethan some help and leaving her on the inner track for the position of director.

Ethan regularly emerged from his late-nights babbling about signs and portents he’d seen in the stars. He talked of being alone in the sky, gazing into the face of God and feeling unworthy. And finally, he began buttonholing his research assistants and raving to them about the blasphemy of what they were doing—how humans were trespassing, looking upon sights that were not meant for mortal eyes. Before long, the research assistants made sure they were never alone with him.

On the morning the assistant director was going to confront Ethan about his behavior, she got a text from campus security just as she was biting into a chocolate croissant at the Starbucks two blocks from the campus. She polished off the pastry in two bites and arrived at the observatory just as the real cops from PPD arrived.

Dr. Leonora Garza, who was on loan from Fabra Observatory in Barcelona, was having extravagant Latin hysterics without actually managing to smear her eye makeup. Dr. Garza looked like Penelope Cruz’ slightly older sister, with her sloe eyes and her rich dark hair and the cops were buzzing around her, bringing her cups of water and vying to light the cigarette she held in her shaking hand.

The assistant director walked right past the cops, ducked under the yellow tape and walked into a scene of utter chaos.  The big dome that housed the 30-inch telescope was a shambles. The multi-million dollar machine was in pieces. Dr. Voorhees was dead on the floor, his eyes plucked from their sockets by his own hands. (In fact, his right hand was clenched around the jellied remains of his right eye when he was found. One of the paramedics, who’d only been on the job a week, vomited when he saw that.)

The assistant director, whose undergraduate degree was in philosophy, found a quote from Nietzsche floating in her head. When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. She leaned against a pillar to watch the cops do their work. Her eyes drifted to the remnants of the telescope.

No one had challenged the premise that it had been Ethan who destroyed the machine. The cops and EMTs had all seen what people could do under the influence of PCP and other drugs. If Ethan’s frenzy had been fueled by some kind of psychotic break, then he would have been capable of almost anything.

They hadn’t questioned the physics of the thing. The Thaw Memorial Refractor had a telescope tube that was 47 feet long and a moving mass of almost 8000 pounds.   Ethan was not quite six feet tall and weighed a lean 170 pounds. And if he had torn the telescope apart with his hands, why was the lens scorched and melted and the metal around it deformed? The assistant director was not a fanciful woman, but it looked like the telescope had been struck by lightning, the electricity carried down the various photo-multiplier tubes of the Multi-channel Astrometric Photometer and grounded in the marble floor.

A stricken-looking grad student caught her attention. He was holding a notebook aainst his chest like it was a stuffed animal. He saw her looking and held the book out to her like an offering.

“What’s this?” she asked, her voice somewhat gruffer than she’d intended.

“The logbook,” he said and his voice trembled. She took it from him impatiently and  ran her finger down the log.

“He was looking at the Helix Nebula located in the constellation of Aquarius,” the boy said. “NGC 7293.”

A shudder ran through her. She recognized the tag instantly but she still made the grad student print out the picture.

It was the photograph that NASA called “the eye of God.” As she looked at the photograph…the eye blinked.

Shane Mullins is not that guy who reviews kids’ books on amazon.com. He lives in Virginia where he works as a “geek squad” consultant (yeah, that philosophy degree really paid off) and studies Tae Kwon Do. His sensei is almost 80 years old and can kick his ass. His fiction previously appeared in Astonishing Adventures Magazine.

Susie Hawkins has been a freelance Artist, Sculptor and Digital Designer for 28 years, living in Bristol in the West of England. Susie has three daughters. The youngest models for her digital character in the book she is in the process of creating, in collaboration with another artist and published author. Her work has been shown all over the country in various Galleries and shows. Many of her Sculptures and Artworks can be found in public places across Bristol and Wales.  http://www.little-heaven-workshop.com/