First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (4 page)

“Take it easy,” Gunn said.

“What a disaster,” Schneider said. “It looks like it’s going to fog up tonight.” He informed Gunn that the computer system had recently gone insane.

“Yeah,” Gunn said. “That’s not a problem. Tell Barbara to write some lines of code to fix it.” Gunn held out a fistful of wires. “Will you hold this?” he said. The wires trembled; Gunn had developed the shakes from lack of sleep.

“Have you had something to drink?” Schneider asked, smiling at Gunn’s shakes.

“Absolutely not. I have been trying for half a fucking hour to solder
three wires
.”

Their heads bent toward the tangle. They worked fiendishly. Plumes of breath and burning rosin smoked in the cold air. Suddenly a flashbulb went off nearby. Don Schneider glanced around. A group of schoolchildren had arrived, with their teachers, to view the progress of American science. The children stood behind a wall of glass—a viewing gallery for visitors, which runs along one side of the dome. The purpose of the glass is to prevent human bodies from flooding the dome with warm air, which would warp the mirror, throwing the stars out of focus. Warm air would also ripple out through the viewing slit of the dome at night, thereby causing the stars to twinkle. Astronomers hate twinkling stars, because twinkling throws the stars out of focus. Fortunately the glass wall also prevents visitors from hearing profanity, which is a type of noise that can be heard often enough coming from the cage at the butt of the Hale Telescope.

“Sun’s going down right on schedule,” Schneider remarked.

Gunn laughed an edgy laugh.

They finished splicing wires from the kludge into 4-shooter. Pushing his toe around the floor of the cage, Gunn found a roll of transparent packing tape, the kind that is reinforced with threads of nylon. Palomar Glue. Gunn cut a piece of tape with his knife and taped the kludge firmly to the side of his camera. “Palomar Glue,” he said, “is what holds this place together.”

In the data room next to the telescope, Maarten Schmidt sat hunched over an oak desk, in a pool of light thrown from a lamp. He was the senior astronomer on the experiment. The Principal Investigator. The boss. “You see James in a controlled panic,” he explained to me. “That is not unusual.” Schmidt was a reserved man, gangly and tall. During his lifetime he had spent around five hundred nights on the Big Eye. He described his role in this experiment as much like that of the manager of a baseball team. His star pitcher—Gunn—appeared to be in trouble. All afternoon Gunn had been rushing around, saying, “Don’t worry, Maarten, we’re almost ready.” Maarten had begun to wonder if he might have to cancel the experiment that night and use the Hale Telescope for some other purpose. That might delay the search for quasars by six months, a year, who could tell? Schmidt had become used to delays. He had been searching for quasars for twenty-two years.

Jim Gunn and Don Schneider walked into the data room. Maarten Schmidt said to them, “I think we had better get to dinner.” He added to Gunn, “Are you coming with us, James?”

“Yes, in a minute.” Gunn crossed the room and sat down at a computer terminal beside Barbara Zimmerman. She was frantically writing computer code that she hoped would operate Gunn’s kludge.

Maarten Schmidt and Don Schneider took the elevator to the ground floor and emerged from the dome into afternoon sunlight. They followed a trail among cedar trees and withered ferns dotted with old snow. They avoided mentioning quasars. Maarten said to Don, “You never saw my mark-zero flashlight, did you? It dated from 1950. It was an Eveready. Now it seems I have lost it.” A rooster crowed in the distance.

They descended into a hollow where the Monastery stands, a building where the astronomers visiting Palomar Mountain take their meals and sleep during the day. The Monastery has stucco walls and a gabled roof, and it resembles a summer resort gone a little to seed. Schmidt and Schneider sat down at the single long table in the dining room. Several other astronomers, who were working on other telescopes at the observatory, had already arrived. There was a pile of steaks on the table. Astronomers generally require a massive dinner, because the cold in the unheated domes can grow so bad at night that the only bulwark between the astronomer and hypothermia might be a couple of rib-eye steaks inside the astronomer’s belly and a bag of Oreos in his hand. The astronomers talked quietly, over a clink of china.

“We’re trying to get 4-shooter to read out at a controllable rate,” Don Schneider said.

“At what rate?” asked an astronomer.

“One hundred and forty million bytes per hour,” Schneider said.

“That’s incredible,” the astronomer said.

“We should fill twelve tapes a night with data,” Schneider added.

At the end of the table sat a woman and a man who listened but did not take much part in the conversation. Carolyn Shoemaker had gray hair, cut in bangs, and brown eyes. She wore a maroon sweatshirt and blue jeans. Her husband, Eugene Shoemaker, had a broad face, salt-and-pepper hair, and a clipped mustache. They were a handsome couple. One would imagine them to be normal grandparents, if one did not know that they spent a good deal of their time roaming the Australian outback looking for giant, eroded craters left by asteroids and comets that had smashed into the earth. Gene said, “We’re having all kinds of trouble with our telescope.” He was referring to the eighteen-inch Palomar Schmidt Telescope, which stood in a small dome three hundred yards south of the Hale Telescope.

“It’s an
old
telescope,” Carolyn said with affection.

“One of the guide motors has been stalling on us,” Gene said. “I think the motor’s brushes are shot.” He and Carolyn were on Palomar Mountain to search for asteroids and comets.

Carolyn said, “Gene has to dive under the telescope and start the motor by hand, before the photograph smears.”

“I have to move fast,” Gene said. “I have to grab it around the driveshaft and give it a spin.”

Jim Gunn and Barbara Zimmerman walked in. They sat down and nodded to everyone, and Gunn dragged a steak onto his plate with a fork.

“That’s not all of it,” Gene Shoemaker went on. “We’ve got some kind of backlash in the main gear. The telescope is jumping all over the place. We can’t hold it on a star.”

Jim Gunn said, “It sounds like the gears are worn, Gene.”

“Exactly,” Gene said.

“There’s the problem,” Jim said. “The gears need a weight on them.”

“Exactly,” Gene said.

“Get some rope and a two-by-four,” Jim said. “Lash the two-by-four to the telescope. Then hang a piece of
lead
on it.”

Everyone laughed, including Gene Shoemaker. He saw that Gunn actually had a point there, and he reminded himself to bring some pieces of lead with him the next time he and Carolyn visited Palomar Mountain.

There is a saying among astronomers that five billion people concern themselves with the surface of the earth, and ten thousand with everything else. These people are the practitioners of what is said to be the world’s oldest science. The astronomers conduct their craft from the vantage point of a droplet of iron and silicates orbiting a G2 star that is now drifting at the inner edge of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy containing approximately one hundred billion suns. If the Milky Way has other names, the astronomers do not know them yet. They have made
some
progress in the twentieth century, having learned that the Milky Way is a member of what they call the Local Group. The Local Group is a clump of several dozen galaxies, including the Andromeda galaxy and the Clouds of Magellan, that together constitute a virtually unnoticeable knot of galaxies near the outskirts of the Local Supercluster, which is a cloud of many
thousands of galaxies. If a galaxy were a leaf, then a supercluster would be the size of a tree. The Local Supercluster amounts to about one-millionth of the observable universe, which throngs with superclusters in the way that a forest is populated with trees. In the more distant parts of the astronomers’ universe—as they see it—the brilliant lights called quasars gleam with a physical power that transcends any forces the astronomers have noticed anywhere near the earth. The astronomers do not fully understand quasars—what they are or how they burn—although many quasars are bright enough to be seen with a modest amateur telescope.

Maarten Schmidt hardly touched his dinner. He seemed preoccupied. There was a smell of coffee in the air.

Barbara Zimmerman said to Maarten Schmidt, “I think we’ve gotten Jim’s little box going.”

Maarten tapped his fingers on the table and turned to Jim. “Well, James, what next?”

“Keep working, I guess,” Gunn said. He and Zimmerman suddenly stood up and walked out of the room.

Schmidt laughed. “I didn’t mean that literally!” he called after them.

At twilight, on a catwalk that encircled the Hale dome, Juan Carrasco and Don Schneider studied the rising fog, which seemed to be pooling in nearby valleys. Don craned his neck, looking up. He said, “What do you think the weather’s going to do, Juan?”

Juan pointed to the west. He said, “There’s Venus.”

“I suppose you consider that a good sign.”

“Oh, yes,” Juan said.

“This fog is definitely getting worse,” Don said, glancing around. Juan studied a gauge. “The humidity isn’t bad.”

“That’s if you believe instruments.”

Juan slapped the wall, feeling for dew. “Tricky,” he said.

“There’s definitely some structure up there in the atmosphere. Kind of scuzzy,” Don said.

“High haze can improve the seeing.”

“Have you ever thought of running for political office, Juan?”

They walked around to the north side of the dome, traveling clockwise on the catwalk. The fog had drowned the Los Angeles basin but had left the San Gabriel Mountains bare and stark on the horizon. The peeping toads had grown louder, welcoming the fog. There were three other telescopes in operation on Palomar Mountain, apart from the Hale Telescope, and as Juan and Don circled, they could see the dome of each telescope in turn: the forty-eight-inch Schmidt telescope, which was being used to make an atlas of the sky; the eighteen-inch Schmidt telescope, which these days was used mostly by the Shoemakers and other planetary astronomers to search for asteroids that could hit the earth; and the sixty-inch Oscar Mayer Telescope, a general-purpose instrument endowed by the family of the hot-dog baron, because Oscar Mayer had liked stars.