The old refractor's clock drive is a weight on a cable, like a grandfather clock, that turns the telescope to follow the stars, and it has to be wound by hand, and it runs down in eight hours. It is never wound now. Every night at eleven the weight is at the top. The drive runs. At seven in the morning the weight is at the bottom and the drive has stopped, at the minute the maintenance log says it stopped in 1974, and nobody has touched the crank, and the crank is warm.
I am the curator of instruments at an observatory, and the old refractor's clock is the instrument I love most and the one that does not need me.
The drive.
A Victorian telescope on a mount that turns at the speed of the sky, driven by a weight on a cable that falls through a column, governed by a clock mechanism, and the weight is wound to the top by a crank, by hand, and it falls for eight hours, and the telescope tracks for eight hours, and then it stops. It is beautiful and it is obsolete and the telescope has not been used for real work since the seventies.
It is wound every night at eleven.
The winding.
I have heard it. The crank turning, the ratchet, the weight rising in the column with the small sounds a weight makes on a cable. About forty turns. At eleven. From an empty dome with the door locked. And the drive starts, the slow tick of it, and the telescope begins to turn, and it tracks, all night, and at seven the weight reaches the bottom and the drive stops, and the telescope stops with it, and the position it stops in is the position written in the maintenance log for a night in 1974, and the minute it stops is the minute in the log.
The crank, at seven, when I unlock, is warm. The brass of the handle, warm, the way brass is when a hand has been on it.
The log.
The maintenance log for the refractor is a ledger and the 1974 entry is a page on its own. The drive stopped, at a time, with the telescope at a position. The observer who had been using it was found at the eyepiece when the morning staff came in. The log, being a maintenance log, records the state of the instrument and not of the man, and the state of the instrument was, drive run down, telescope at rest, eyepiece in place, and then there is a note in a different hand that says, instrument to be left as found until further notice, and the next entry is a year later.
He wound it at eleven. He observed. The drive ran down at seven and he was not able to wind it again, because he had died at the eyepiece in the small hours, and the telescope had stopped tracking and the stars had drifted out of the field and he had not seen them go.
He winds it. Every night. And every morning it stops where it stopped, because the night is the night.
What has been checked.
The drive, stripped and rebuilt by me, which took a month, and on the first night it was back together the weight was at the top at eleven.
The dome, at eleven, by me, beside the crank, with my hand an inch from it. The handle turned. I felt the air it moved. Forty turns, at the pace a man winds who has done it a thousand times, and on the last turn the handle stopped against the stop, and I put my hand on it then, and it was warm, and there was a smell of pipe tobacco, which the old staff, when I asked, said was his, and the drive ticked, and the telescope began to turn.
What is done about it.
The nightly winding is on nobody's log, because the refractor is not on the schedule and nobody checks it but me, and the director knows, because I told her, and she asked me whether the instrument was being damaged, and I said no, it was being used, and she said that was fine then.
What I do.
I look after the instruments.
A weight drive runs down. You wind it again. That is the whole of what there is to know about a weight drive, and it is the thing that did not happen in 1974, because the man who would have wound it was not able to, and the drive stopped, and the stars went out of his field.
So I wind it. At seven, when I unlock, and the weight is at the bottom, and the telescope has stopped at his position, I take the crank and I wind. Forty turns. The weight goes up. The drive starts again, in daylight, with the shutter shut, tracking a sky it cannot see, because the drive does not know about daylight, and I let it run down again at three in the afternoon, and I do not wind it then, and at eleven he does.
The position it stops in has changed. It is not his position any more. The telescope, at seven, is a little further round, the way it would be if the night had gone on, if the drive had been wound at the bottom of its eight hours and run on, and each morning it is a little further, and I have worked out where it is going. It is going to the place in the sky his last notebook says he was going to look at next, which he did not get to, and which it is a few weeks from reaching, and when it reaches it I am going to open the shutter at seven, whatever the weather, and let the daylight in, and say, there, and I am aware of how that sounds.