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

across the sky the color of egg yolk. If the fog socked in the valleys tonight, it would cover the lights of surrounding cities while leaving the skies above the mountain transparent and inky black—perfect for seeing galaxies. The sun had dropped behind the fog, and Juan noted with approval the color of the dying light; it was bluish white—no dust in the air. He knew exactly wherethe sun was. Exactly. He saw that in about six minutes the sun would set. Palomar Mountain would roll into the terminator of earth-shadow, and a view of the universe would begin to unfold.
    The dome looked like Hollywood’s idea of a Mayan temple. Juan fitted a key into a tall coffered door, and a small service door opened inward. It closed behind him with a bang that echoed among steel piers. It was dark in there. He flicked on his flashlight and climbed a long flight of stairs. He pushed through a door onto the main floor of the dome, at the base of the two-hundred-inch Hale Telescope. Smelling paint and sweet oil, he touched the brim of his hard hat and looked up. He saw that the shutters of the dome were closed, and that the Hale Telescope was pointed straight up, in its normal resting position. It rose seven stories over his head. The Hale hardly looked like a telescope at all to most people: it was a skeleton tube made of struts and girders. Covered with battleship-gray paint, the Hale Telescope looked more like a terrible weapon than a mirror for making images of time gone by. Even after so many years, one still felt a little bit of fear looking up at that instrument; one felt a little bit of fear, always.
    Under the telescope an engineer walked back and forth, wreathed in clouds of vapor, pumping Jim Gunn’s camera full of liquid nitrogen, preparing it for the night. Juan opened his locker. His breath steamed in the cold. He pulled out a cardboard box, which filled his arms. He shut the locker and crossed the floor gingerly, mindful of the transparent puddles of oil that bled a little from the telescope most nights. His box read LA VICTORIA MARINATED JALAPEÑOS . He had found it in the trash, and although he had prolonged the box’s life by winding bands of clear tape—Palomar Glue—around and around it, the box had grown round and flabby.
    The marinated-jalapeños box held Juan’s notebooks, which contained arcane lore diagnostic of the Hale’s innumerable tics. The Hale Telescope had taken twenty-one years to build, from 1928 to 1949. It contained thousands of components—motors and relays, gears and wheels, pipes and pumps—dating from the 1930s. Parts made by companies now bankrupt or merged. Parts unobtainable. Parts no longer understood. Juan Carrasco considered himself to be a small component in an enterprise that seemed to extend beyondPalomar Mountain, beyond the United States, beyond, perhaps, the world. He doubted his importance to this enterprise. Although he had spent fifteen years climbing all over that telescope, patting it with a dust mop and crawling through hidden rooms inside the telescope, he felt that the Big Eye remained, in certain ways, a mysterious instrument. He felt that if he and the astronomers were to cease to exist, other people would find a use for the Hale Telescope. “Man is dispensable,” Juan liked to say. “Telescopes are not.” Feeling a tiny bit of nervousness, he entered a small room tucked into the wall of the dome, called the data room. There he saw Maarten Schmidt. Schmidt was a tall astronomer with curly, silvering hair. Schmidt smiled and said, “Good evening, Juan.”
    “The valleys are filled with fog, Maarten.”
    “Ah,” Maarten Schmidt said. “Good.”
    “I say it’s going to be clear tonight.” Juan crossed the room and spoke to an astronomer who had a beard and glasses. “Professor James E. Gunn,” Juan said. “Are we going to see galaxies tonight?”
    Gunn grinned and said, “I don’t know, Juanito.”
    There were two other people in the data room. One was a