Roman Nights by Dorothy Dunnett Page A

soundlessly across the Dome and touch me before I have been aware of him. It is, in a sense, a form of professional oblivion. It is less welcome when there are pleasanter things to do and to think of. And if you are in neither a state of depression nor a state of euphoria, it is the best source going of simple perspective.
    Footsteps came up the marble stair and the loo fizzed, and the same footsteps went down again. The restroom door shut. I settled down to my constellation.
    Normally, as I have said, there are no lights in an observatory after dusk. The outside door is locked, and once the door into the Dome has been closed and the bench raised inside, no one can interrupt the observer. For good reason, since the incident of the wrecked camera, Jacko had had locks put on the bathroom window and any others big enough to admit an intruder. There was no reason why anyone should come near me that night except Jacko with coffee; and Jacko always took good care to clatter up the stairs and yell first, to find when the next plate would finish.
    But Jacko was in bed. I gave myself a five-minute break at the end of the first two-hour session, and, taking my torch, opened the door and walked down to the ground floor through the most profound darkness and silence. The restroom door was firmly closed and a certain rhythmical obbligato which came through it indicated that Jacko had been treating his problems to Carlsbergs. I snitched a biscuit and a tumbler of Innes’s quellingly microbe-free milk and climbed back upstairs to the Dome, leaving the top staircase door madly open.
    That was how I first heard the footsteps so clearly.
    I was in trouble just then with the cross wire. As a star begins to decline it sinks toward the thick part of the atmosphere. Mine was dancing about in the haze. I heard the steps as I centred it with the slow motions. I finished what I was doing, and then, swearing, plunged over to shut the door before Jacko’s torchlight could hit my exposure and wreck it.
    I had my hand on the door when I realized the steps weren’t Jacko’s. To begin with, there wasn’t a light showing anywhere: the whole hollow building was in darkness. Then, as I moved, the footsteps had broken off suddenly.
    The Dome floor is noisy to walk over. The sound of my movements would have caused Jacko to come up and call to me. But, on hearing them this person had halted.
    I told myself I was hallucinating. The front door of the Dome was fast locked, and so were the windows. Jacko and I were quite alone. I was hallucinating, or else it was merely Jacko suffering the results of an excess ofbirras and unwilling to attract my attention.
    I looked at the black bulk of the 50-Inch, breasting unaided the vagaries of the Roman atmosphere, and with an unvoiced apology to the Trust I took two silent steps out of the door and then closed it firmly behind me. I couldn’t fake an equally firm tramp across the Dome floor to the telescope, but if anyone was there, I hoped he’d imagine it. I breathed as slowly and lightly as my heartbeats would let me, and waited.
    Nothing happened. Behind the door, the 50-Inch motor buzzed. The central heating creaked, and a tap dripped below in the developing room. One of the electric clocks gave a whirr and a grunt and fell silent. I bent down and, sliding off first one shoe then the other, I took three steps down the metal staircase and peered over.
    This time, I could see the front door. And the front door was slightly open. I could see moonlight, in a crack, down the standpost.
    So what?
    Yell for Jacko. It may be Jacko I have heard, opening the door and stepping out of the Dome to look at something.
    Unlikely. Even Jacko wouldn’t forget to shut the door and leave me protected. Besides, he has the key.
    Yell for Jacko. He may have heard a knock on the door and let someone in, forgetting to close it.
    But he wouldn’t have forgotten. See above. And then why the stealth?
    Yell for Jacko. Someone else may have