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I looked further and realized that if I fiddled with the Web address I could change the table to display different nights. The object K40506A appeared again, but now with a new position. A slight panic rose in my stomach. I kept fiddling with the Web address and kept getting the object’s coordinate on different nights. K40506A kept moving. Knowing where the telescope was pointing on successive nights as it tracked K40506A was as good as knowing where K40506A was on successive nights. And with successive nights of knowing where it was, it was only a small leap to knowing everything.

I didn’t think anyone would have gone to such lengths to steal the positions of Santa, but I suddenly had a new worry. On one of those nights when David’s Chilean telescope had watched K40506A, it had also watched K50331A and K31021C. I recognized those codes, too. They were Easterbunny and Xena. This was bad. Because the name K40506A was publicly involved in an astronomical controversy, people would certainly google the name, just as I had, and they would see a May position of K40506A. Some would take it a step further and fiddle with the Web address as I had and find even more positions of K40506A. Some would even notice that other similarly named objects—K50331A and K31021C—occasionally appeared on the lists and wonder what they were. Some would track them down. And some would be aware enough about what it all meant to calculate positions in the sky. They would suddenly know exactly what and where Xena and Easterbunny were.

In the middle of the night, I sent an e-mail to Chad and David warning them about all of this and asking if they knew how to get the information off the website in Ohio. I then wrote to Brian Marsden and told him the news, too. You could use the name K40506A and a little Google sleuthing to figure out where it was. I then explained to Brian that while I was not paranoid enough to think that Ortiz had done this to find Santa—it was inconceivable that any astronomer would actually be that underhanded—I was definitely paranoid enough to think that now that Santa was out of the bag, someone would eventually find our two other objects the same way. I then told him about Xena and Easterbunny. I told him that our goal was still to wait a few months until we had scientific papers prepared on these discoveries before announcing them.

Finally I went to sleep. I slept through two successive Lilah feedings for the first time in twenty days.

When I woke up, I told Diane everything that had happened that night. I had coffee. I bounced Lilah around the house a little bit. Then I checked my e-mail again.

The press was fascinated, both by the larger-than-Pluto part of the story and by the astronomer-fisticuffs part of the story, even though neither was true. I kept pointing people to the webpage.

Ortiz wrote back, a little overwhelmed, it seemed. He pointed me to a bare-bones website he had thrown together to describe the discovery. I added a link to his webpage from mine so people could read about the initial discovery.

Brian Marsden wrote back suggesting that perhaps I should be more suspicious. Did I not find the circumstances surrounding Ortiz’s discovery and announcement of 2003 EL61 odd?

David wrote back and said there was nothing we could do about the webpage in Ohio.

At 9:18 a.m. I got a new e-mail from Brian. It contained a list of all of the telescope positions of Easterbunny and Xena. Someone had already found all of the positions on the website in Ohio and had sent them in to the place where you announce discoveries. At the same time that the coordinates were sent to Brian, they were also sent to the Internet chat group that had been angry with me about my naming of Sedna and Quaoar. All of the information was now public, and there was no possible way to contain it. We were going to have to make the announcement right then.

I wrote to Brian with the official data and told him to proceed with the announcement.