The telescope sits on a pier of concrete that goes down to bedrock so that nothing shakes it, and a seismometer on the pier records what does. It records footsteps every night on the iron stairs up to the dome. One person, climbing, slowly, at about one in the morning. The stairs are empty. The footsteps reach the top and stop, and the seismometer has never once recorded them coming down.
I am the instrument scientist at an observatory and the seismometer on the pier is the most sensitive thing in the building, and what it is most sensitive to is the stairs.
The pier.
A concrete column from bedrock to the telescope, isolated from the building, so that the floor can shake and the telescope does not. A seismometer on the pier records what gets through, which is lorries on the road two miles away, and the sea, and the building's own doors if somebody slams one.
And footsteps on the dome stairs. Fourteen of them. Every night.
The footsteps.
The dome is reached by an iron spiral stair, fourteen steps, bolted to the building and not to the pier, and a person climbing it puts a signal on the seismometer, a small one, a tap per step. At about one in the morning the seismometer records fourteen taps. Slow. A pause between each, the pause of somebody who finds stairs hard. And then nothing. The taps reach the fourteenth step and there is no fifteenth, which would be the dome floor, and there is no coming down.
I have the records back to when the seismometer was installed, which is sixty years. The footsteps are on every night of them. Fourteen up. Never down.
What has been checked.
The stairs, at one, by me, at the bottom, looking up. The seismometer on my laptop showed the first tap. The stair above me was empty. The second. The third. I watched the empty iron treads, each one in turn, and the trace on the laptop recorded a foot on each one, slow, with the pause, and the stair did not move and nobody was on it, and at the fourteenth the trace stopped and I went up.
The dome was empty. The telescope was parked. The chair by the eyepiece, an old wooden one, was warm.
I sat in it. I am not sure why. The seismometer recorded my weight on the chair, through the floor, through the building, faintly, and then, beside my weight, another, on the floor next to the chair, the weight of a person standing, and it stayed there while I sat, and when I got up and went down the stairs the seismometer recorded my fourteen steps down, and only mine.
Who.
The stair was put in when the dome was built, and the dome was built for a telescope that was bought with a bequest, and the bequest was from a man in the town who had wanted, the records say, to look through a proper telescope before he died, and had not been able to, because the observatory was a university one and did not admit the public, and had left them the money for a dome on the condition that the public be admitted, and had died before it was built.
He had been, the records note, in poor health, and unable to manage stairs.
He is climbing them. Every night. Fourteen steps, slowly, to the dome that his money built, to the telescope he paid for, and he reaches the top, and he does not come down, because he never did, because he never got there.
What is done about it.
The footsteps are on the seismometer record as a nightly cultural noise event, which is the category for things people do, and the record is published, because seismometer records are, and a student in another country wrote to ask what happens on our stairs at one in the morning, and I told him, and he wrote back to say that he had checked and it was on every night of the archive, and that he had not expected to be moved by a seismometer.
What I do.
I look after the instruments.
He paid for the dome so that the public could look through the telescope, and he was the public, and he never looked.
So the telescope is not parked at one. I leave it on something. A planet if there is one, a cluster, the moon, whatever is good and easy and the kind of thing a man who wanted to look through a proper telescope once before he died would want to see, and I leave the eyepiece in and the chair pulled up and the dome open a crack, and I go down.
The seismometer records the fourteen steps. It records the chair taking a weight. It records the weight staying for about twenty minutes, which is about the time you look at a thing you have waited your whole life to see. And then it records something it never did before, which is fourteen steps down. Slow. With the pauses. To the bottom. And the dome in the morning has the chair pushed back and the eyepiece cap put on, neatly, by somebody who was taught to leave things as he found them, and I have stopped putting the cap on myself, because he likes to.