Free The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] by J. Michael Orenduff

of my income, there’s no way I can do it. All my copies have been smashed, and I’m paying rent on an empty store.”
    “But doesn’t the insurance pay most of the cost? The deductible and co-pay can’t be that high.”
    I took a sip of my margarita, and slouched down in my chair.
    Susannah looked me in the eyes. Hers are big and light brown and clear as a perfect agate held up to the desert sun. “There isn’t any insurance, is there, Hubie?”
    I shook my head.
    “You tell Emilio and Consuela there is insurance, but—”
    “Let’s not talk about it, Suze.”

 
    16
     
    The walled-in patio on the east side of my living area is accessible from either of two French doors, one from the living/dining area and one from my bedroom. The wall is eight feet high with no openings except a few small ones at ground level to allow rainwater to drain away.
    Chamisa sprang up against the wall some years ago, and I let it grow. I like the tallow flowers in the spring and the strawlike look of the plant in the fall. Two cottonwood trees support a hammock, and the final horticultural touch is some sort of grass growing between the rust-colored flagstones.
    The patio also contains some man-made objects. One is a kiva oven my enthusiasm for clay made me build. I thought I would learn how to make bread. After fifty or sixty attempts, I abandoned all hope, but I sometimes light a wood fire in it for warmth. I also have a kiln for firing my pots and two telescopes. Actually, I don’t fire the telescopes; I just look through them.
    The two scopes serve different purposes. My refractor scope is what you probably think of when you picture a telescope. It’s a long thin tube with a lens at one end and an eyepiece at the other. It’s good for observing close objects like the moon, the planets, asteroids, and the moons of other planets. It was also great to have when the Hale-Bopp comet passed over in 1996.
    The problem with refractor scopes is they don’t gather enough faint light to provide a good view of distant galaxies. For that job, I have a Newtonian reflector, a squat looking thing that uses a concave parabolic primary mirror to collect and focus incoming light onto a flat secondary mirror that reflects the image to an eyepiece that sticks out from the side of the tube.
    Stargazing is a great hobby for many reasons, but what I like best is how peering out to the fathomless night sky calms the nerves and soothes the soul. No matter how great your earthy troubles, they fade into insignificance as you lose yourself in the immensity of space. No wonder our myths of paradise always locate it in the heavens. Perhaps Ptolemy captured the wonder of it all when he said, “When I follow the multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth.”
    The Centauri stars – A, B, and Proxima – are the nearest ones to us not counting our own sun. They’re four and a half light years away. That’s 25,000,000,000,000 miles, or in words, twenty-five-thousand-billion miles. Does that mean anything to you?
    Me neither. I know intimately how far a mile is. I walk so much that I can tell you within fifty yards when I’ve covered a mile. I can also do the math to convert light years to miles, but the number of miles is so large that I can’t really get my mind around it.
    The Centauri stars are best seen if you’re south of about 29 degrees. New Mexico’s southern border is around 30 degrees, so we’re a bit too far north. A and B are about the size of our sun. Proxima is much smaller and dimmer and can be seen only through a telescope. My refractor wouldn’t do the job, but my reflector would. Chile would be a great place to view the Centauri threesome because it’s at a good latitude, has clear skies, and also has some great observatories.
    So far as I know, it has no pot smashers.
    I try to restrict my travel to places I can reach and return from in a day, so I’ll never see our closest stellar neighbors.