The Wrong Star at the Shallow End

The poster in the lobby of the Eastfield Community Pool had been hanging for three weeks. It promised something that Vik was no longer sure he could deliver. STAR VOYAGE, it said in curly letters across a painted ship. FLOAT ON YOUR BACK AND MEET VEGA. SEE A REAL STAR THROUGH A REAL TELESCOPE.

Children from the whole district came to the pool for lessons. On the first night of the month it was supposed to turn into a ship. The lights would go out. The roof panels would slide back. Twenty children in life jackets would lie on foam mats in the shallow end. Each would take a turn at the eyepiece on the deck. A neighbour had lent them the telescope. Vik had spent two evenings learning how it worked.

At seven o'clock, with the first children already shivering happily on the tiles, he bent to the eyepiece to check the aim one last time. Then he straightened, and bent again.

"Wyn," he said quietly.

Wyn was untangling a bundle of glowing wristbands on the other side of the deck. "Mm?"

"That is not Vega."

"It must be. We set it up this afternoon."

"We set up the wrong knob." Vik stepped aside. "Look."

Wyn looked for a long time. When he lifted his head, he was frowning, but not in the way Vik had expected. "It is a double star," he said. "Two of them, very close together. One is gold, and the other is blue."

"They are lovely."

"They are lovely and they are not Vega." Wyn wiped his hands on his shirt. "The base must have shifted when we carried it through the doorway. We are about forty degrees off."

For a minute neither of them said anything. Behind them, the children were giggling, and the water slapped softly against the gutters. Someone was singing a song about a whale.

"We can re-aim it," Vik said at last. "There is a finder scope. I could use the bright stars as markers and walk it back. It might take twenty minutes."

"With twenty children getting cold."

"They are in their life jackets. We could give them extra towels and a game while we work."

"A game." Wyn considered it. "The promise on the poster is Vega, though. People brought them here for Vega. Some of the parents stayed to watch."

"I know," said Vik. "That is why I would fix it."

He knew he was right, in a way. A promise was a promise. A child who had been told about a famous blue-white star would feel cheated if she were shown something else, however pretty. But he also knew that twenty minutes of towels and games would feel very long to a child in wet clothes. The finder scope was stiff. He had never before walked a telescope across forty degrees of sky in the dark.

"Or," Wyn said, and then stopped.

"Or what?"

"Or we show them what is actually there." Wyn glanced again at the eyepiece. "A double star is better than a single one, Vik. Anybody can see one point of light. Hardly anyone ever sees two colours in the same place."

"We would have to tell them we made a mistake."

"We would. I think that is the interesting part."

Vik looked at the poster, then at the children. He pictured himself explaining the delay, the towels, the game, and the shaking hands on the dial. Then he pictured the opposite: twenty small faces turned toward the eyepiece, one after another, each finding the gold and the blue. He realised that he already knew which one he wanted to see.

But he was not the kind of person who made a choice only because it was easy. He weighed it once more, and found the answer unchanged. A good ship's captain, he thought, did not pretend that the current had carried them to the planned harbour. A good captain said, we are here, and here is what we can see.

"We keep it," he said. "We keep the wrong star."

Wyn let out a long breath. "Good. I did not want to spend my evening turning a knob."

"You are a lazy man."

"I am a practical man. It is a different thing."

Vik stood up, cleared his throat, and called for attention. The splashing stopped. Twenty round faces turned toward him in the dim light, and he felt his stomach tighten.

"Crew," he said. "I have to confess something. The poster says Vega, and we aimed the telescope at the wrong star."

A small boy in the front sat up. "Is it broken?"

"No. It is working perfectly. We were the ones who made the mistake." Vik pointed at the eyepiece. "But look what it found. Whoever goes first gets to tell everyone else what they see."

The boy rushed forward. He climbed onto the step stool, pressed his eye to the eyepiece, and went completely still.

"There are two," he said. "One is yellow like a lemon. The other is blue like the water."

"Two?" A girl splashed over to the side of the pool. "That is not allowed. A star is supposed to be one."

"Come and see," said the boy.

They lined up in the dark, quiet now, passing the stool along. Each of them made a small sound of surprise when it was their turn. Wyn stood beside the telescope and answered questions in a low voice. Why were the stars different colours? Because they were different temperatures. Were they friends? Probably they were neighbours. Could you swim there? Not even in the deep end.

When everyone had looked, Vik turned off the deck light, and the children lay back on their mats. The pool was dark except for the glow of the wristbands. High above, through the open roof, the two stars hung close together, a tiny gold spark and a tiny blue one. The whole ship seemed to rock very gently.

"Which star is it, anyway?" a voice asked from the water. "What is its name?"

Wyn opened the chart on his tablet and ran a finger across the page. Then he ran it back. He tried another chart, enlarged the map, and checked the compass. Vik watched him pause over a patch of sky with nothing written on it.

"I do not know," Wyn admitted. He tilted the tablet so that Vik could see. "Do you?"

Vik looked up. Just beside the pair, a third light was moving slowly, steadily, in a straight line across the dark. It was too faint to be a plane and too slow to be a falling star, and neither of them had a name for it.

"Not yet," Vik said, and he picked up a pen to write it in the logbook.