It was past Guilford’s bedtime when the sky grew very bright, but he had been allowed to stay up as part of the general mood of indulgence, or simply because he was older now. Guilford didn’t understand what was happening when his brother called everyone to the window, and when they all rushed out the kitchen door, even his grandfather, to stand gazing at the night sky,he thought at first this excitement had something to do with his birthday. The idea was wrong, he knew, but so concise. His birthday. The sheets of rainbow light above his house. All of the eastern sky was alight. Maybe something was burning, he thought. Something far off at sea.

“It’s like the aurora,” his mother said, her voice hushed and uncertain.

It was an aurora that shimmered like a curtain in a slow wind and cast subtle shadows over the whitewashed fence and the winter-brown garden. The great wall of light, now green as bottle glass, now blue as the evening sea, made no sound. It was as soundless as Halley’s Comet had been, two years ago.

His mother must have been thinking of the Comet, too, because she said the same thing she’d said back then. “It seems like the end of the world…”

Why did she say that? Why did she twist her hands together and shield her eyes? Guilford, secretly delighted, didn’t think it was the end of the world. His heart beat like a clock, keeping secret time. Maybe it was the beginning of something. Not a world ending but a new world beginning. Like the turn of a century, he thought.

Guilford didn’t fear what was new. The sky didn’t frighten him. He believed in science, which (according to the magazines) was unveiling all the mysteries of nature, eroding mankind’s ancient ignorance with its patient and persistent questions. Guilford thought he knew what science was. It was nothing more than curiosity… tempered by humility, disciplined with patience.

Science meant looking — a special kind of looking. Looking especially hard at the things you didn’t understand. Looking at the stars, say, and not fearing them, not worshiping them, just asking questions, finding the question that would unlock the door to the next question and the question beyond that.