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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 139: Cooper 117
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 304
Cooper was aware up front that planets would be a challenge. Stars moved every night, each night being about four minutes ahead of where they were the night before, and crossing from one horizon toward the other in the time they had--but they were always in the same relationship to each other. Planets--the word came from the Greek for wanderers--broke the pattern, changing position relative to the other lights.
The problem was, he couldn’t find any. From time to time he would see a meteor--a shooting star streaking across the night sky briefly--and once after about five years he saw a comet, but his stars always retained the same rigid formations.
That meant one of two things: either there were no other planets in this star system, or they were too dim--too small or too distant--to be recognized in his observations. He tried putting more detail into his charts, finding the chart for a particular day and recreating it, and then adding to the soft clay more smaller objects, but he never found anything that moved.
His swimming was improving, but he had not yet decided to tackle a trip around the island. He had taken other risks, though--there were a few sheer drops to the ocean along the shoreline, and he had succeeded in climbing several of them, although one remained dauntingly sheer. Pitons, he thought, but he wasn’t really equipped for that sort of climbing.
He made time to pray every day, and to review everything he had memorized from the Bible before his laptop died. By now he suspected even the internal clock had stopped, but he wasn’t going to try to check it because any power it still had might matter at some point. He wished he could recharge it somewhere.
That made him wonder why he was here. He was still improving his use of the sword and his fast draw on the pistol (firing it unloaded), exercising and swimming, living on mostly fish and fruit and sometimes crabs and some freshwater mussels he found in some of the ponds. He had taught himself how to make dried crab jerky, and put by a stock that he rotated before it could go bad. He wasn’t sure what more he could learn, or indeed do, here, other than to climb that last cliff face and swim around the island.
Maybe one of those should be next.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
