The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat by Harry Turtledove

chewed, which made it differentfrom the rest of the moon’s outline. It still wasn’t very exciting, or even interesting. Again, Willi didn’t hesitate to say so.
    Pfaff handed him the field glasses. “Have a look through these. You know how to adjust them for your eyes?”
    “Oh, sure. I’ve used ’em before.” Willi aimed at the moon. It wasn’t very far out of focus even before he carefully twisted each eyepiece in turn to sharpenthings up. His buddy’s vision couldn’t have been too different from his own. But once he got the image as clear as he could … “Wow,” he breathed, hardly even realizing he was making a noise.
    “It’s something, isn’t it?” Pfaff spoke with quiet pride, as if, instead of Galileo, he were the first one ever to see the heavens close up.
    That pride was wasted on Willi, who didn’t even hear him. Themoon hung there, seeming close enough to reach out and touch if he took one hand away from the field glasses. It wasn’t just a light in the sky any more. It was a
world
, a world out there in space. The faint gray patches you could make out with the naked eye (and Willi didn’t so much as think of naked women, the truest proof of how fascinated he was) swelled into plains that had to be hundredsof kilometers across. Craters pocked them and filled the brighter, whiter areas of the moon.
    Shadows stretched across the craters closest to the straight line. The others, under higher sunlight, showed less contrast. “What made them?” Willi asked. “Volcanoes?”
    Adam Pfaff understood what he was talking about right away. “Nobody knows for sure. We’ve never been there, after all,” he answered.“But that’s one of the best guesses.”
    “Wow,” Willi said again, staring and staring.
    “You see the three craters, one above the next, near the sunrise line—the terminator, they call it?” Pfaff said.
    Willi peered again, then nodded. “I see ’em.”
    “They’re called Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus, and Azrachel.”
    “All the shit on the moon has
names
?” That had never occurred to Willi before. You could makemaps of what was up there, the same as you could down here. It really
was
another world.
    “You think they look impressive through these, you should see ’em through a telescope,” Pfaff said. “Back home, I’ve got an eight-centimeter refractor. It’s little and pretty cheap, but it’ll let you magnify a hundred times, not just seven. Then you can really start to get an idea of how much there is tosee.”
    Willi tried to imagine the moon appearing that much bigger and closer than it did even through binoculars. He felt himself failing. After you’d started playing with yourself, you could try to imagine what a girl would be like, but you wouldn’t know what counted till one let you get lucky.
    “What else can you show me here?” he asked.
    “Well, you see those two bright stars close together,a little west of the moon?” Pfaff asked. Willi nodded once more. One of them was the brightest star in the sky; the other, the more easterly one, was fainter and more yellow. His friend went on, “You can take a look at them if you want. The bright one is Jupiter. Maybe you’ll see a couple of its moons if you hold the binoculars real steady. The other one’s Saturn.”
    “Rings!” Willi exclaimed, rememberingfrom school.
    “Rings,” Adam agreed, “only the binoculars won’t show them. Through a telescope, they’ve got to be the most beautiful thing in the sky. You think they can’t possibly be real.”
    If they were more beautiful than the magnified moon, Willi wished he had a telescope. Through the field glasses … The stars stayed stars. They looked brighter and you could see more of them, but they didn’tget bigger. Jupiter and Saturn did. Jupiter especially showed a tiny disk. It probably wasn’t even a quarter as wide as the moon through the naked eye, but it was there.
    And, sure as hell, it had two little stars dancing attendance on it.That