First Light

Description

Seven years before Richard Preston wrote about horrifying viruses in The Hot Zone, he turned his attention to the cosmos. In First Light, he demonstrates his gift for creating an exciting and absorbing narrative around a complex scientific subject–in this case the efforts by astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains of California to peer to the farthest edges of space through the Hale Telescope, attempting to solve the riddle of the creation of the universe.

Richard Preston’s name became a household word with The Hot Zone, which sold nearly 800,000 copies in hardcover, was on The New York Times’s bestseller list for 42 weeks, and was the subject of countless magazine and newspaper articles. Preston has become a sought-after commentator on popular science subjects.Richard Preston received The Overseas Press Club of America’s 1995 Whitman Bassow Award for "best reporting in any medium on environmental issues" for The Hot Zone. First Light, Preston’s first book, won the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. Preston lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife and children.Part 1
Big Eye
 
When the alarm clock woke Juan Carrasco, the senior night assistant at Palomar Observatory, daylight was streaming through cracks in the black window shades of the bedroom. He got out of bed and tugged at a shade, which came up with a crackling sound. The shade had seen so much use that it had become crisscrossed with zigzag breaks, which he had patched with a type of transparent tape reinforced with nylon threads and known to the astronomers of Palomar Observatory as Palomar Glue, since it is used by them to fix almost anything that breaks. What he should do, he would say to himself, was get some new tape for these shades. Some black tape. To keep out the daylight, so he could sleep better. He found his glasses and looked over a ridge covered with manzanita to the tops of clouds popping up on the far side of the ridge, like torn cotton: a good sign. A sign of clear skies coming tonight. Juan crossed the bedroom, past a photograph of his wife, Lily, and himself taken on the day that Father Girán had married them, and took a leisurely shower.
 
Then he shaved. In the mirror, as he pulled foam from his face with a disposable razor, broad cheekbones emerged, under brown eyes. Shaving took a long time. He believed, in fact, that he had never properly gotten the hang of the throwaway razors. He was a former barber. He had learned to be very, very careful with a straight razor when working on a customer, and now he could not help being much too careful with a throwaway razor. He had never cut a customer, not even when one of those winos he used to practice on when he was in barber school slumped over in the barber’s chair or began thrashing around. To have a bloody, bellowing customer in the chair would have hurt his pride, and so he had never let his hand slip. An astronomer could groan more abnormally than a sick wino when there was trouble with the Hale Telescope, and so he tried never to let his hand slip at the controls. He rubbed 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 the coastal 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 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 where the 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 beyond Palomar 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.”
 US

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