“Have you been here since they finished the roadway?” Estelle shook her head. “I don’t know if Miles is right or not in this, but folks who tour the big dish site are going to use company golf cart type thingies. No car traffic. Cars with parasols, and the whole works. Max speed about eight miles an hour.”
“Swank. Company drivers?”
“Yep. And this road on top? It’s all one-way, even with the contractors still on site. I’m not sure they like it, especially since the trip back to the restaurant and lodge is along the south edge of the mesa. And that edge is why Miles is requiring company drivers for the carts when things open to the public. I’ve done the loop, and it’s phenomenal.” He grinned at Estelle. “Gold pass, you know.”
The dish loomed ahead, dwarfing the various vehicles parked near its base. It was tipped nearly vertical, and if the taggers had thought that their artwork would dominate the dish, they’d gotten it all wrong. The panel of graffiti was a flyspeck, a small nuisance, high up on the rim.
Gastner parked beside a white Dodge dually pickup with NZ plates. Miles Waddell saw them, and excused himself from the group with whom he’d been talking. He carried a rolled up set of plans, letting it ride on his shoulder as he walked.
“He’s got you working these damn odd hours now,” Waddell said as he tucked the rolled plans under his arm and shook hands with Estelle, both of his enveloping hers. “And what a mess this day has been, from one end to another.” He flashed a smile. “Good PR, though. Lots of exposure.” He turned to face the dish, neck craned. “You know, I don’t have anything to do with this part of the project, but they tell me things are moving right along for them. Lots of computer issues, all that kind of stuff. But the dish looks good, doesn’t it?” He put his hands on his hips approvingly, as if watching a favorite child play. “Best darn billboard that I have. I get goose bumps every time I stand under it. I mean, just look at that. Sixty meters across that thing.”
He turned back to them and his expression lost its bonhomie. “I heard about the homicide downtown, at the school? Damnedest thing. I just don’t get it. And now you have to waste your time with this crap. You know, Bobby was up earlier, looked at the graffiti and just shrugged.”
“I hope that’s what I can do,” Estelle said.
“We’re damn lucky we didn’t find a body lying under the dish. Kids have no sense of mortality. Come on, let me show you.” He didn’t mention Efrin Garcia’s name in connection with the tagging.
He strode past the workmen, who regarded Gastner and Estelle with interest.
“Gentlemen,” Gastner said affably. “Didn’t Miles warn you about midnight tours?” That earned tentative smiles.
“We need hardhats,” Waddell prompted, and led them into a small equipment room, an entryway into what must have been one of the main control rooms in the base of the dish. It was difficult to tell exactly, since the room looked as if a madman had stored a mile or two of computer cable there, with every flat surface covered.
“Ah, Arnie,” he added as a tall, gangly man with wisps of carrot-colored hair entered behind them. “Folks, this is Arnie Sewell, the stud duck for the mechanics of this project. Arnie, you know Bill already. This is Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman, who has my personal warrant to visit anything on this mesa any time that she wants. They’re interested in our new art up top.”
“Ah.” Sewell’s face carried no expression. “The paint isn’t much of an issue for us, but the little son of a bitch stepped in a couple of places he shouldn’t have. What exactly did you want to do, Officer?”
“If it’s possible, I’d like a photo that shows detail,” Estelle said.
“That’s a tough call, unless you have a damn good telephoto lens? If we stow the dish so you can access through the hatch,” and he held his hand palm-up, “taking a photo of anything all the way across on the rim is going to be a challenge. If you have a decent telephoto, we can stand it up all the way, and you’ll be able to focus in on the vandalism while you stand on the ground down in front. That’s what I’d suggest. Standing on the dish itself is possible, but…” He paused and shook his head dubiously. “There are some problems with that.”
“That’s what I need, though,” Estelle said. “I need to know how he got up there in the first place.”
Sewell puffed out his cheeks. “That part’s easy.” He looked down at Estelle’s stout leather shoes as he handed them bright yellow hard hats. “What kind of soles?”
She cocked a foot up, showing the finely ridged crepe.
“That’ll do nicely.” He drew out a small phone, tapped a key, and waited for a moment. “Rick, we need the dish parked for visitors topside.” He nodded at her. “Let’s wait outside. More fun that way.” He grinned.
Even as they stepped out, motion was obvious—slow, majestic, just a giant moving shadow against the heavens. “Look, I need to finish up what I was doing,” Waddell said, and he shook hands with Sewell. “If you need me, holler. Bill and Estelle, when you’re done here, stop by the theater. I’ll be over there. More show and tell.”
As Waddell walked off, Sewell said, “So…how did he get up on the dish? I have to admit, that’s not hard. For one thing, a lot of this system is automatic. It really has to be, since we’re talking really fine adjustments when control aims the dish. That’s the work of the computer links. To make it simple, when the operator wants to find some coordinate set, he types the coordinates into the computers and they do the rest.”
“I would think some of our winds would be a problem,” Estelle observed.
“Oh, that’s right. They can be.” He rocked his hand back and forth. “Wind touches thirty-five knots, and the system automatically calls for the dish to stow. That’s a pretty big sail we’ve got up there. When we ask it to park, all the walkways line up so you don’t step into thin air.”
“That would be nice. Where would the kid have to access the walkways?”
Sewell beckoned, and they walked around the base, sidestepping hardware. With no more than a steady hum, the giant dish blanked out the sky, continuing to tilt so that it lay on its back, a dark shadow nearly two hundred feet in diameter. Sewell drew out a flashlight. “Here is the best place.” He illuminated the girders above them. “The normal access to the first ladderway is inside the core…just down where we were a bit ago with Miles. But the kid didn’t get in there. He could have gone right up these girders here. It’s not much of a climb to the first ladderway. The lowest one.”
“And all the ladderways would have lined up then?”
“Yes. Open pathway.” His hand drew a zigzag. “When it’s parked.”
“We think this might have happened this week sometime,” Estelle said. “When did you first discover the vandalism?”
“Could be. The dish has been parked for the past couple of weeks. So anytime in that window. We saw it—actually one of the men working fence saw it—when we rotated up. That would have been yesterday morning.” The shadow moving across the sky paused. “You want to go up?”
“I do.”
He pulled his phone out again. “Can we have all the lights, Rick?”
A circuit snapped somewhere deep in the bowels of the structure, and the walkways were bathed in light. “Every time we turn on the lights, our landlord flinches,” Sewell laughed. “They’re hooded, and automatically dim, but still. Most of the time when we’re in actual operation, they’re all switched off.” He laughed. “The dish doesn’t care. It’s listening, not looking. But Miles cares.”
“I’ll watch from here,” Gastner said as Estelle followed Sewell up the narrow ladderway. “Been there, done that.”
Seven ladderways later, with just enough breeze to accentuate the height of their perch, Sewell stopped. Just above them, the vast white underbelly of the dish now rested horizontal with the ground, so huge that in no direction could they see the rim. Up another short passageway, this one enclosed inside a center core that was surprisingly spacious, Sewell nodded at the hatc
h in front of them. The fit of metal to metal was flawless, with two large knurled thumbscrews the only indication that they’d reached the hatch.
“These dogs are routinely torqued down just about finger-tight…snug but not enough to misshape the panel, although the door is actually pretty heavy. Our little vandal would have had to know that all this was here, and that he could access it.”
“No locks?”
“No.” He spun out the retaining screws and let them hang from short tethers of light-gauge stainless steel cable. The panel hinged silently straight up and then out to one side, the complex hinge mechanism itself a thing of engineering beauty. “If the hatch wasn’t actually attached to the framework of the dish, it would be only a matter of time before somebody slipped with it, and the thing would go sliding down the dish face like a toboggan.”
Estelle could feel the change of air as the core room opened to the void. “Let’s see what we have.” Sewell reached over, moved a switch guard, and snapped the toggle up. Instantly, the dish was bathed in light from a dozen directions. He moved to one side. “Step up waist-high to the rim. You’ll get a view.”
In every direction, the sea of white stretched away from the hatch. When viewed from the ground, the actual superstructure that supported the dish suggested that the dish’s curve created a deep bowl, but that wasn’t the case. The dish was actually surprisingly shallow, perhaps twenty feet deep from belly to rim. The night air whispered, and Estelle found that both hands automatically clenched the rim of the hatch until her knuckles turned white.
The graffiti was a panel approximately six feet long and three feet high, a little postage stamp against the flawless background.
“What do you think?”
“I think the kid was nuts,” Estelle said. “This would be quite the challenge. Not the walking out there so much, but carrying his bag of spray paint cans along, and then working on a slope?”
“And that’s what appeals, I suppose. My theory is that the little bugger didn’t realize how big the dish actually is…how big he’d have to make his mark before it really showed up.” Sewell laughed. “And we’ll just paint over the thing anyway. No big deal. But it’d be interesting to know how fast his pulse was when he climbed out through this hatch.”
“About like mine,” Estelle whispered. “But we’re at the bottom of the bowl, so there’s nowhere to fall.” Supported by its complex of three large box beams, the radio telescope’s apex rose above the dish. Estelle noticed the ladderway that actually led up one of the supports to the central basket-like apex. “I’m surprised he didn’t go up there.”
“Lots of safety gear required for that climb,” Sewell said. “Not that he would care about that. But there’s no panel up there, either. Let’s ease it some.” He turned away from the ladder and palmed the radio. He conferred for a moment, and Estelle worked at loosening her grip on the rim of the hatch. A slight jolt, and then she had the disconcerting feeling that the heavens were sliding by, so slowly she couldn’t be sure of motion. But sure enough, the giant dish tilted, the rim dropping against the backdrop of stars. In a moment she could look straight across from the hatch toward the graffiti across a valley of white.
“It’s easy footing,” Sewell said. “In dry weather like this, it’s not slippery in the least, and you have good shoes.” He thumped the grab handle that he had hinged out of its recess. “Hold on here until you have your bearings. Then we’ll just walk kind of a great circle over to the graffiti. And we’ll stick to the seams between panels. There’s more support that way.”
Estelle made sure the camera was secure in her pocket, and watched the ease with which Sewell stepped up and out onto the dish’s surface…as if he were a foot above the ground, rather than one hundred-twenty feet up. He held out his hand. “With the dish like this, there isn’t much suggestion of height,” he said, accurately reading her concern. “About the only view is straight up at the stars…especially if we’d turn off all the damn lights.”
He kept a light hand on her elbow as she stepped out through the trap door. “Basically I need a shot of the graffiti panel that fills the frame. There’s enough light here that I won’t need the flash. What’s important to me are the exact design shapes and colors. They’re as characteristic as a signature.”
“Okay.” He regarded the little camera. “Just follow me.”
As if walking across high on the slope of a valley, they crossed the expanse. Estelle stepped gingerly, following a pace behind Sewell, stepping on the seams as if the surface were thin and fragile. There was nothing to suggest that it was, though, and in a moment she relaxed. She imagined Efrin Garcia trudging across on his way to work, lugging a knapsack like a school kid, spray cans clanking.
They stood immediately below the graffiti, and Estelle could see the faint scuff marks of the tagger’s shoes.
As she prepared her camera, Sewell remarked, “Don’t ask me to translate this stuff. Just designs, I guess.”
“The stylized ‘P’ and ‘F’ are representative.” Estelle drew close to the design. “And the colors.”
“You have an idea who did this?”
“Yes,” Estelle said, and let it go at that. She couldn’t imagine that Sewell hadn’t heard about Efrin Garcia’s escapade. She spent the next twenty minutes photographing the design, and the camera’s images were spectacular, with even lighting and no shadows. Efrin would be proud.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The curve of the planetarium theater’s giant screen reminded Estelle of the dish surface she had just left behind, gleaming, almost flawless white, impossible to view the whole at a glance. At the border of the screen, the walls of the theater appeared to fade into the night sky, an inky black from floor to the crown of the planetarium’s domed ceiling.
“The neat thing is,” Miles Waddell explained, “this is designed as a three-way purpose kind of facility. We have this wide screen for traditional viewing…hell, we could sit here and watch Star Trek reruns off cable if we wanted to. But the three-hundred-sixty-inch reflector telescopes just to the west of this building have either single feed or coordinated feed to here, so the audience can sit back and have a view of Saturn’s rings that’ll knock their socks off. Or a super nova somewhere. Or what the Martians are building right now.”
He grinned and turned in a circle, head back and arms raised as if directing the Hallelujah Chorus. “Or all three at once. Then, we can use the entire ceiling as just about the neatest skyscape planetarium projection you ever saw. The programs are endless. That housing over there?” He pointed both hands at the mound in the center of the room. “That’s where the projector lives.” He grimaced. “It’s not there yet, but it’s coming. It’s coming from Switzerland, in fact. When all is up and running, there will be a show every hour, on the hour. No tickets required. Just slip in the dark alley entrance at any time. Glow worms on the floor keep you from breaking your neck.”
“I hate to interrupt, Miles, but…” The man’s excitement was contagious. She walked across the silent carpeting to the far wall, where the giant mural of the universe spread across the bottom fifteen feet of wall space, capped by the black ceiling. So perfectly done was the fit and finish that the mural appeared to be a free-standing wall suspended against the depth of deep space.
Drawing near to the mural, she stretched out a hand. “This wasn’t done with spray cans of enamel from the hardware store.”
“Oh, Christ, no,” Waddell said. “I hired this kid, Efrin Garcia? You know him, I’m sure. You should see the rig he uses. Three different sizes of airbrushes, the neatest little compressor you ever saw, all kinds of replaceable nozzles and stuff? Wow. You got to wonder how he affords it…on my dollar, I suspect. See how perfect these lines are?” He touched the subtle outline around Jupiter’s great red spot. “That’s all airbrush. And look at this.” He strode up the side aisle a dozen feet, stopping near the tower of scaffolding. “This is the space dust and unknowable crap in the Horsehead Nebula, the c
osmic stuff. The shading that he accomplished just blows me away.”
“The dust and unknowable crap,” Gastner repeated with a grin. “Your astronomy background is bleeding through with all this technical jargon, Miles.”
“Yeah, I know. But Efrin is doing such a great job.” He turned and pointed toward the rear of the theater. “It’ll reach all the way to the back of the theater.” His eyes closed, and he stepped sideways to the first row of seats, falling into one of the padded, reclining rests. “So tell me. What the hell happened? He didn’t come to work today, and one of the guys tells me that he crashed his truck into a damn line pole near his house. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Christ. You can see the work we have ahead of us. I don’t even want to think about him getting into trouble, or hurt. You know,” he continued before Estelle had a chance to slip a word in, “what amazes me is that he’s a local talent. I didn’t have to hire some famous artiste from Chicago or someplace like that. This is home brew, and let me tell you…” He nodded at the wall. “He’s as good as they come. He’s going to be all right?”
“Maybe.” Estelle sat down beside Waddell. “His injuries are life-threatening, Miles. A badly lacerated spleen. Broken ribs. Smashed left elbow. Bruises from head to toe. One ear nearly ripped off his head.” She turned on her camera, found the remarkable portrait of the dish graffiti and held it out to Waddell. “He did this, didn’t he?”
The rancher turned the camera so that it was pointing at the mural, comparing images. “You can see that he did. I mean, crude as this one is, done with just the damn spray cans…it’s his work. The colors, the design. The guys found it, and told me about it. You know,” and he pounded his fist against his own thigh, “this is about like shitting in his own nest. I mean, when he’s up here working, I can see the pride he takes. I can see that it means something to him to be working here. So he turns around and tags my goddamn railcar? And then squirrels up the dish and shoots his mark there? What, he thinks we’re not going to find out? He wants to throw all this away? What’s with these damn kids, anyway?”
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