First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe by Richard Preston Read Free Book Online Page B

motors, clamp the bearings, and let stars drift past the mouth of the telescope as the earth turns. Instead of scanning the telescope across the sky, Maarten thought that he would let the earth do the work.
    The telephone rang in the data room.
    Don Schneider picked up the receiver. “Big Eye,” he said, and then, after a pause, “It’s going to be just unbelievable. Amateur night at the Big Eye—”
    “Don’t say that, Donz!” Gunn barked.
    Don stretched the cord to get out of Gunn’s hearing. He lowered his voice and said, “We’ve been working for three days and we still haven’t been able to get the experiment to work. We were just lucky it snowed last night—we couldn’t have started, anyway.”
    Maarten Schmidt, the Principal Investigator, crossed the room and looked over Jim Gunn’s shoulder while Jim clacked at the keyboard of the computer.
    Jim muttered, “I don’t know what will happen tonight, Maarten.”
    “That’s an exciting way to start,” Maarten said pleasantly.
    “Juan, we need to slew,” Jim said. He wanted to move the telescope rapidly (slew it), to point it at a bright star in order to calibrate the sensors.
    The night assistant hit a switch. Nothing happened.
    Maarten said, “Is there a problem, Juan?”
    “No,” Juan said, running out of the room.
    Maarten laughed. “The telescope has rusted!”
    Juan returned. Somebody had left the stairs under the telescope—the telescope always refused to move until the stairs were rolled away. Hitting toggle switches, Juan slewed the telescope across the sky and centered it on a bright star. Jim Gunn typed a command to 4-shooter on his computer keyboard: EXPOSE .
    4-shooter responded on the computer screen: OK . But nothing happened.
    Gunn peered into the main video screen, which displayed whatever the camera saw. “Black!” he said. “I don’t see any stars!” Everyone talked at once.
    “4-shooter is real unhappy.”
    “Something’s getting in the way.”
    “Maybe we’re pointed at the ceiling.”
    There was a pause, and then, “Naw, that’s not the problem!”
    “Well, where is the dome pointed?”
    “We’re looking east.”
    “Is the mirror open?”
    “The mirror is open.”
    “Yeah, but I don’t see any stars!” Gunn groaned. “Where’s my calculator?” He tore through a pile of papers.
    Maarten paced back and forth. He began to whistle “The March of the Wooden Soldiers,” from
The Nutcracker
—whistling in the dark, so to speak.
    Juan said, “The mirror is open. The dome is open. The stars are out—”
    “We’re getting no light!” complained Jim Gunn.
    “No evidence of light?” Maarten asked.
    “Absolutely none at all.”
    By now they understood that 4-shooter had gone dead.

    An hour later, the telephone rang in the data room. It was Jim Gunn’s wife, Jill Knapp, calling from New Jersey. She is a radio astronomer.
    “Hello, love,” Jim said, and after a pause, “We’re getting light, anyway.”
    Maarten Schmidt laughed, and to the others he said, “It’s like Galileo all over again. First you have to get light down the tube.”
    Jim and Jill talked quietly. She asked him how he was feeling. He said he felt all right. She asked him if he was getting any sleep. Of course not, he said. Jill Knapp, who is Scottish, once described the frantic hours before an observing run this way: “There is a feeling amongst us astronomers that time on a telescope is extremely precious. One feels the privilege. What a peculiar idea it is for a species to be looking at those …” She paused, seeking a word. “At those
things
out there.”
    The team settled into more tinkering. Jim Gunn kept sending Don Schneider on errands up to the telescope, to flip the switch on the kludge one way or the other. Meanwhile Barbara Zimmerman finished writing her jazz program and left for Pasadena—she had done all she could. Examining a few white blobs on the television screen—stars—Gunn said, “Let’s get this pig