The website ticks just out of time with the clock in the room. The pair keep pace, more or less. They’re just out of sync enough to notice.
The clock clicked 20 minutes to 11 roughly the same moment the website went from the 200,000s to the 199,999s. Each click of the clock brings another second on earth, another seven or eight miles tearing through space.
It’s going 79,032 miles per hour through the void, 198,381 or so miles from its target. I’m motionless, lit by a lamp behind, some streetlights outside and a gleaming laptop screen 934,000,000 miles away watching the spacecraft Cassini dive toward Saturn.
The clock ticks away another heartbeat, another seven or eight miles. » Read the rest of this entry «
