The Fitz Projector
by Christy
Diulus
The blackboards in Mr. Buzby’s
fifth-grade classroom were green instead of black, and dust lay thick on
the ledge beneath them. It
was the only room spared the yellowed and water-stained ceiling panels
that hung throughout the rest of the school. Warren, the same kid that
scratched his head vigorously then gathered the results into a snowdrift
of dander on his desk, found that the panels would hold a pencil suspended
if it were thrown straight at the ceiling. The hall ceilings were dotted with
his dangling pencils.
But Mr. Buzby’s room was designed
to hold a planetarium. The
ceiling arched up and away—a plaster dome covered with dark, pleated
cloth. The cloth hung from
tracks that circled the crest and base of the dome, providing better
acoustics when the planetarium wasn’t in use. I saw it unveiled only once,
in ’86, the year the first teacher was selected for a shuttle mission. The
whole school was Christa-crazy.
All the teachers were celebrating the imminent departure of one of
their own into what they called “that great big unknown, that vast
darkness, the infinity of space.”
The day before the shuttle launch,
we came back from lunch to find a strange apparatus sitting on top of the
cabinet in the center of the room.
Mr. Buzby told us to put our heads down and close our eyes. Whispers sprung up around the room
when we heard the zip and chatter of the lowering blinds and the snick as
he flipped each light switch. Usually this meant that we would watch a
movie, but he hadn’t sent anyone to retrieve the audio-visual cart from
the library. The whispers
stilled, though, as we sat in the dark.
Of course I peeked, but I could
see little until my eyes adjusted.
The cabinet in the center of the room—the one that was always
locked—swung open, and Mr. Buzby knelt in front of it flipping
switches. Above, the whine of
a motor and, slowly, the dark cloth opened, showering us with a fine mist
of chalk dust.
“This,” Mr. Buzby said resting his
hand on the base of the strange apparatus, “is a Fitz projector.” He turned it on, and the dome above
us was filled with a thousand stars slipping across a night sky.
He let the stars revolve until we
were almost dizzy with the wonder of it. Then he stopped the rotation on a
fixed point of sky. He
pointed out the stars of the Big Dipper. The dome swallowed his voice and
bounced it back with just a hint of an echo.
“See those two that make up the
right side of the dipper.
Follow that line and you’ll find the North Star. Polaris. Look, the brighter one right
there. Ancient mariners
navigated by that star. Archimedes and Columbus saw that star. Even today, if you know where
North is you can find your way back home.”
Slowly, the constellations
unfolded before us. The Little Dipper, Ursa Major, Orion’s belt, then
Orion and the bull he was hunting.
Canis Major and Canis Minor, his hunting
dogs.
He set the stars spinning again,
revolving through their yearly cycle. “The heavens,” he said, “are always
moving.”
***
The next day, school was
delayed. It had snowed
overnight, a thick, wet snow that was almost as heavy as water. But the sun was shining, and the
ploughs were out, clearing the way.
Two hours later, we stripped off hats and coats and boots and
tromped into class. In the
coatroom, the snow melted from our boots and puddled on the floor.
The Fitz projector was locked back
up, and the black drape covered the dome. Mr. Buzby had already plugged in
the audio-visual cart and was fiddling with the rabbit ears. He told us to work quietly at our
desks, but we were all anxious and fidgeting.
“Today,” he said, “weather
willing, you’ll witness history in the making. The first civilian in space. By the time you’re grown, it might be
as easy as a flight toHawaii. How many of you would like to
vacation on the moon?”
Hands flew up around the
room. Warren shook his hand
so vigorously that his desk jumped off the floor.
Finally, the countdown. The
roaring engines. We watched the
shuttle vibrate on the pad, squirming like I did in my seat. It broke free, up in a trail of
vapor, then a massive cloud.
It stuck in that blue sky like Warren’s pencils in the
ceiling. Hung there in the
still air. There was no boom,
just silence. Then the announcer’s voice said “obviously a major
malfunction.”
Mr. Buzby removed his glasses,
folded the stems with two sharp clicks and held them cupped in his left
hand. In my mind, the dome
above me swirled with stars. The Big Dipper still pointing to the North
Star. Families in
Hawaiian-patterned moon suits carried suitcases and tumbled, tumbled into
the darkness.
On the TV screen, it looked like a
lone cloud in a vast blue sky.
