Read The Night of the Comet for Free Online Page B

untouchable. A million light-years away.
    “Watch and dream, Pete. Watch and dream.”
    The bell rang. Peter cursed, and we climbed down the bleachers to go inside.
    In the parking lot my father still stood, pointing and waving his hands at the sky like some magician of the weather. High overhead, ponderous dense clouds drifted slowly across a blue-gray sky.

CHAPTER FIVE
    MY mother liked to read her horoscope while she drank her coffee in the morning. It was the first thing she looked at in the newspaper, even before the headlines. The world could wait; more important was what the stars had in store for her that day. She was an Aries, which, she told us, explained why she sometimes forgot to iron our clothes or ruined our dinner. She was impulsive, impatient, adventurous, passionate—“just like Bette Davis.” Spreading the paper on the table, she would read her entry aloud to us while we ate our breakfast cereal before school.
    Today. Trust your instincts! Your first reaction is your best, so don’t hold back. You may end up making a family member uncomfortable, but that’s a small price to pay for doing what you know in your heart is right. Things should return to normal soon.
    My father would laugh. First of all, he’d say, leaning back against the counter in his shirt and tie, coffee cup in hand, those predictions were fluff, practically meaningless. And second, the whole premise of astrology had no basis whatsoever in reality. Logically, physically, scientifically, it was impossible that the motion of stars or planets could have any influence on human activity. It was only egotism, plain and simple, for people to believe that they were somehow personally connected to bodies in space. The stars didn’t care when you were born, or how your day would be, or whether or not you would meet a tall, dark stranger. They were here long before us and would be here long after we were gone. They had no interest in our petty little lives.
    “But still, sometimes …,” my mother would try to argue, and speak abstractly about the Moon’s gravity and ocean tides and the percentage of water in the human body.
    “Nonsense,” he’d answer, and try to set her straight, talking patiently to her like she was a confused but redeemable student. Astrology was nothing but superstition, he explained—entertaining perhaps, but in the end as silly as trying to predict the future by studying goat entrails. Like any rational person, he put his trust in the evidence of his senses. True knowledge could only begin in a clear-eyed observation of the facts. And then, “Hypothesize, experiment, analyze, repeat. Hypothesize, experiment, analyze, repeat.” This, as he liked to say, was one of the greatest gifts that modern science had given mankind: a methodological way of reasoning that helped us to understand the world in which we lived. It was this very understanding that lifted human beings out of the Dark Ages and put us in homes with lights and electricity and running water. Cars. Airplanes. Submarines. Computers.
Skylab
! Where would we be without scientific thought? We’d all still be half apes shivering in holes in the ground, trembling and screeching every time the sky thundered.
    “ ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves,’ ” he’d say, raising a finger and shaking it to finish his lecture.
    In this, I had to agree with my father. I didn’t put any faith in my mother’s horoscopes, either. It seemed unlikely that a planet millions of miles away could determine what happened to us on any given day. People did things for a reason, not because some star in the sky toldthem to. To be sure, the reasons behind our actions might be murky and difficult to understand at times, but if we only looked closely enough, all our behaviors became as clear and predictable as math: A + B = C.
    And yet … and yet, when this new comet appeared in our lives, there was no denying that it had an effect on