T'saik and Fred got out of the hovercar, while Larry began unpacking the trunk. The sky was still bluish, but the sun had gone down below the mountains and the smoky gray sky filled the valleys. Near the lookout point, a dozen people were setting up their equipment.

"I simply do not understand the point of this activity," T'saik said.

"Didn't you say you had an interest in astronomy?" Fred smiled. T'saik cringed. It was tough for her to get use to the constant childlike emotional outbursts that aliens tended to have.

"I have a great respect for the field of astrophysics," T'saik said, "but the instruments you're using are centuries out of date." T'saik went to help Larry carry the telescope tube, which she did easily.

"I'll never get used to that," Larry said, "a tiny girl like her just walking off with the 10 inch tube like that..." and he picked up the telescope mount and walked over to the lookout.

"A good dobsonian is never out of date," Fred said. "in a dark site like this, there's a whole lot you can see."

T'saik took out a black leather box with silver accents. "This tricorder is starfleet surplus from 80 years ago," she said, "it's designed for geological survey. It was a present for my 4th birthday from my father. I made use of it, studying the landscape--"

"--pretending you were a star fleet officer!" Fred said, cheekily grinning with his tongue bit between his teeth.

"--doing supplemental geological research," T'saik said, firmly. "I won an award for my paper on the distribution of volcanic rock forms in the Thalsees Valley."

"Why did you bring that thing, anyway?" Larry asked.

"She brings that thing with her everywhere, dad," Fred said.

"Observe," T'saik said, holding the tricorder's scanner up to the sky, towards a bright dot in the east. She pressed a few buttons on the tricorder controls, and then presented a crisp, clear image of the ringed Saturn on the screen to Fred and Larry. "Your people have put monitoring stations around the sixth planet and all of its moons. I could pull up a three dimensional holographic live view if I wanted to," she said.

"That's not the point," Larry said, "that's not the real thing. That's not visible light, that's false color processed imagery. There's nothing like seeing Saturn through a telescope with your eye."

"I'd seen pictures, holograms, videos, all my life of Saturn," Fred said, "but when Dad showed me Saturn through his telescope the first time, I was hooked. It really was something special."

"I'll be the first to admit it doesn't come close to visiting the Saturn system," Larry said, sitting down at the observing chair, pointing the telescope towards that bright dot in the sky. He was quiet for a few moments as he sighted down the finderscope, then came back to the eyepiece, fiddling subtly with the aiming of the telescope. "But looking through a telescope just hits different."

"Elaborate," T'saik said.

Larry looked at T'saik, then back at the eyepiece, fiddling with the focuser. "I guess it feels more real in a way. You know we're all a product of the world we came from, and we have this sort of genetic programming that tells us how to think of the world. When you're in a space bus looking at Saturn out the observing deck, you're nowhere. You don't have any context to tell you how to feel. When you just look at Saturn in the sky, you just see a dot, and you're very grounded in reality. But looking through the telescope, I guess you get this happy medium, where you're breathing crisp wilderness air, you're under a dark sky, but you've got that little kick in the genes if you like where you see Saturn looking so unnatural."

"I've been wanting to go on a grand tour vacation for a long time," Fred said.

"Come take a look," Larry said finally. "Let me know if it falls out of the view."

Fred motioned for T'saik to take a seat. She did so, reluctantly. She put her eye up to the eyepiece, and soaked in the light from Saturn as it slowly fell down the field of view. She realized the cause--the Earth's rotation, and she adjusted the telescope herself after it fell out of the view. "Fascinating," she admitted, and Fred clearing his throat let her know she'd had enough of a look for now. A small line of visitors had lined up to take a look.

T'saik walked around the lookout platform to some of the other telescopes. A Bolian man was setting up a set of small telescopes.

"Hello! So nice to see a fellow offworlder!" he said. "Come take a look through this."

"Why do you use such minuscule instruments?" T'saik said in Bolian, looking at the three inch tube, mounted on a ball, before her.

"Don't you recognize this instrument?" the Bolian said in english.

"I do not."

"It's the Tal'Keiyan Reflector! A replica of it, anyway," he said. "Take a look down the tube." T'saik complied.

"The mirror is brown. Something must have been spilled. I suggest you clean it."

"The mirror is bronze! The original telescope was made 3400 years ago by Tal'Keiyan opticians on Vulcan. According to the records I was able to recover, they were receiving shipments of some very poor glass that was unsuitable for anything but low-grade magnifying lenses. One of the opticians who was making makeup mirrors for a priest realized that the optical quality of the bronze metals they were using were much better than the glass, and so the opticians began drafting up plans to try to make eyeglasses of a sort out of bronze."

"Naturally they would have been unable to do so," T'saik said.

"Yes, but they did stumble upon a design for a telescope. It uses two spherical bronze mirrors, a primary to concentrate the light, and a secondary to diverge the light beam into a usable image."

"I can't imagine the image quality would have been very good," T'saik said.

"You don't have to imagine, here:" the Bolian said, pointing the telescope at a star cluster. T'saik looked through the back of the telescope tube. "I believe the Vulcans call it 'the Beak.' The humans call it Subaru or Pleiades. The Bolians call it 'The Local Group,' hah!"

"Fascinating. I can make out dozens of stars."

Fred walked up, "Hey, Broax, you've got your collection out! I see you've finished the Galilean telescope."

"Yes of course Mr. Fred, making the lenses was the easy part--doing the research was--"

"You hand-made these telescopes?" T'saik asked. The Bolian--Broax--stared blankly for a moment.

"Of course!" Broax said.

"Why not replicate it?" T'saik said, "It would take far less time."

"The way I see it, you can either replicate, or you can REPLICATE, if you catch my meaning, Broax said.

"I don't--"

"If you want to make a historical replica of a telescope, and you want it to be accurate, you've got to understand how it was made. You can't just look at pictures and raw specifications and model it in software, print it out, and go home. No, you've got to really make it from scratch. I replicated the mirror blanks for this but only after making a prototype by casting the mirror blank myself out of raw metals. Took me months of research to figure out all the specifics of how the vulcan scope came to be, what kinds of materials they could have used, how they might have formed the mirror. And the result? It's as close to the original thing as you can really get."

"I suppose I can understand the appeal--historical research," T'saik said.

"Not everyone goes so far as I do, but Zachary over there with the 8 inch truss tube? He made that telescope from scratch too. And it performs beautifully."

"Here, let me show you something special," Fred said, leading T'saik over to the biggest telescope on the lot.

"Anne just arrived with this beast," Larry said, looking up at it.

"Welcome, miss T'saik," Anne said, from behind the eyepiece. "I've heard a lot about you, glad to finally meet you."

"What is this?" T'saik said, looking up at the telescope.

"8 inch refractor, german equatorial mount. I'm just setting up the inertial dampers now," Anne said, hopping down from the observing chair, fiddling with a red LCARS panel on the base.

"I suppose you didn't hand-make this," T'saik said.

"Oh goodness no. I did design it myself though. These luddites like to make telescopes the old fashioned way, and I respect that. But me? I want the best telescope possible. There weren't many designs publicly available so I had to make mine from scratch."

"Starbase One Pass now! Look in the North!" a woman shouted.

"Here comes the damned flying mushroom," Larry said.

The mushroom shaped starbase rose in the Northwest, orange at first and nearly the size of the full Moon. It got brighter and larger as it rose, and quickly began to cast visible shadows.

"Look, you can see the Galaxy next to it," someone said.

"That's the Galaxy-class? I thought it'd be bigger," someone else said.

"I got it on the holoscreen!" Anne said, sighting through her holographic eyepiece.

A few people gathered around the circular holographic screen on the base of Anne's telescope. Though it was jittery through the atmospheric turbulence, the smooth curves of the starship Galaxy with its bright nacelles was visible right next to the limb of the starbase.

"So that's the next generation of starships, huh?" Larry said.

"Isn't it exciting!" Fred said.

"Anne, see if you can get the little ship on the other side of the starbase," Larry said.

"Nah, nah, I wanna see the Galaxy when she goes into the dark, in a few seconds," Anne said.

T'saik watched as the starbase dimmed down, gaining a subtle reddish tint, and then turned into a group of orderly moving stars--windows and running lights on the station--heading down to the southern horizon. She glanced back at the holoscreen to see the red and blue lights of the starship Galaxy, with a jittery dim glow from the ship's windows breaking up an otherwise dark silhouette.

After it got a little darker, T'saik would look through more of the telescopes. She was especially fond of the deep sky object views, many of them recognizable compared to the amateur astronomy she did as a child on Vulcan with her tricorder. She listened to stories from seasoned observers traveling to other planets to observe rare celestial events and eclipses, she heard of the adventure Broax had taking his equipment back from theives on the rogue planet Dakala, and how Anne set up an astronomical society on Risa.

She admitted later to Fred, that when she returned to Vulcan she would have to acquire a telescope of her own some time, and she promised Larry to send photos and a log report of what T'khut looks like through a telescope.