First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe Read Free

a little grooming cream on his hair, which had begun to silver at the temples, and parted it on the left.
    Juan dressed and went outdoors to examine the weather. He stood for a moment in his backyard, before the wild apple trees. Through their bare branches he saw last night’s snow on Mount San Jacinto, forty miles to the north, gleaming in the oblique sun. The intervening land was covered with a sheet of fog, but the sky above was creamy yet cloudless, the color of an old blue Chevrolet.
    Lily was watching the San Diego evening news in the kitchen. She turned down the volume when Juan came in. He poured himself a mug of coffee while she served dinner, and she asked him who he was working with that night.
    Juan Carrasco had a formal way of speaking about his job, the job of night assistant. He said that he was working with Dr. Maarten Schmidt, Donald Schneider, and Professor James E. Gunn. He told Lily that those astronomers had been having trouble with their instruments—a new experiment, something never tried before.
    Lily noticed Juan’s worry. “Sometimes I wonder,” she once remarked to me, “if Juan hates to make mistakes.” When Juan had been a young father, he had carried his baby daughters around on pillows—he had been that afraid of breaking them. This man had thought you could break a baby just by handling it. This man had been made for handling the controls of great telescopes.
    Juan turned up the television for the weather report. Night fog was coming, with marine winds. That was a good sign, and he began to feel that tonight could turn into a clear night for looking at galaxies. At 5:45 P.M . he fitted his hard hat on his head and picked up his flashlight. “Bueno,” he said. “Ya me voy”—“I’m going.”
    “Que te vaya bien,” she said, and kissed him. “That you may go well.”
    Juan walked along a road that crossed a shoulder of Palomar Mountain, a long hogback ridge, 5,600 feet high, situated in thecoastal ranges of southern California, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. Smelling wood smoke mixed with a tang of Pacific Ocean fog, he walked past a grove of fir trees where small stucco houses were almost hidden, belonging to other members of the mountain staff of Palomar Observatory. The road turned through a field of brown ferns and headed for an ivory dome. Deep stands of cedar, white fir, Valparaiso oak, and leafless black oak covered Palomar Mountain, and grassy meadows unfurled among the trees. On dry, sunny slopes grew chokecherry, blue buckthorn, wild lilac, wild coffee with a poisonous bean, and a type of ragged dwarf oak with spiny leaves, called carrasco—Juan’s last name.
Palomar
means “dovecote” in Spanish, and indeed, the mountain in autumn and spring fills with shoals of migrating birds. No birds sang on the mountain yet, on this night in early March, because at an altitude of more than five thousand feet, spring came slowly to southern California, but the toads had woken up from their winter’s sleep, and in the cold of evening they said
keep, keep
, in voices so halting and tentative that they sounded in pain.
    Looking west, Juan saw that the moon had already gone down to its grave. The moonless time of the month had arrived, which the astronomers called dark time. They regarded dark time in spring as the best time for seeing galaxies, because in spring, the Milky Way lay along the horizon, where it would not interfere with the view straight up into the deep. When the Milky Way was high in the sky, it blocked a telescope from seeing into the deep universe. During dark time—moonless nights—in spring, you could point a telescope straight up past the Milky Way into extragalactic space, and there was no moon to wash the blackness from the sky. As Juan rounded a bend and neared the dome, he saw a fog bank hanging over a ridge to the west. He regarded the rising fog as a good omen, as long as it did not cover the mountain. City lights smeared a stain