Read the previous chapter in this series:
[Chapter 2] The Telescope
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Saturday sun sneaked in, waking Taran up. His yawning hands found the paperback under the quilt where he had been reading it with a torch, and instinctively tossed it into the narrow recess between the wall and the back of his bed. Mom better not find it.
“The gravitational force was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton in 1687. The principle follows the inverse-square law between force and distance.”
Mr Adir stopped for a dramatic second, and started scraping on the grimy blackboard in large font a complicated formula. The chalk screeched and chafed, letting go tiny bits to gravity as he completed his routine.
Taran sat inconspicuously at the corner of the second last row of the class, his eyes drooping from his late-night escapades. He had received two detentions already in Chemistry and English for incomplete homework.
Mr Adir paced lengthwise in his slim-fit white shirt, his sleeves rolled up. Taran heard him drone on with perfect voice modulation about the story of the apple falling on Newton’s head. He drew an apple falling on a bedazzled Newton, which drew loud guffaws from the class.
Taran’s head swam in circles. He rested his cheeks on his palms and planted his elbows on the desk. He closed his eyes. I will rest for just a second.
He was woken up with a loud sniggering. Mr Adir was directly looking at him with a frown on his S-shaped eyebrows. His classmates looked on with eager anticipation.
“It seems you have also been hit on the head, because you look perfectly blank my boy.” More chortling from his neighbors.
Taran opened his eyes wide. Undeterred from the hot pool of shame that was his belly, he looked fixedly at the projector screen beside the blackboard. A pearl-yellow image of Saturn with its rings accompanied exercise question six. Taran found his voice.
“Can we see these rings from here?” Taran immediately felt foolish at the ensuing chuckling.
There was a pause. The laughter subsided.
“Yes, with a telescope we can see these rings from Earth. But this was not the question,” Mr Adir looked at Taran discerningly, “Pay attention, you can sit now. The acceleration for a geostationary asteroid on the Saturn ring will not be the same as—”
The projector screen moved on to the next question. Taran’s mind lingered on the image. He imagined the pale rings of Saturn on his eyepiece.
His sleep had evaporated.
Read the next chapter in this series:
[Chapter 4] The Telescope
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January wind tugged softly at his nightshirt as Taran sampled the cloudy sky. The gibbous moon hung lonely. He swished the optical tube up.
It took him a good ten minutes of fiddling to get the moon in his view. Pupils dilated, he soaked in the brightest object of the night-sky. He put in his highest magnification eyepiece.