First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (31 page)

The San Antonio winos were the slickest-looking bums in Texas. They populated the back chairs at Lewis Barber College. Juan and the other beginners began the treatment on a wino by giving the wino a shampoo. When you tilted the guy back in the chair, you could often hear a bottle of muscatel gurgle in his pocket. After the shampoo Juan would cut his hair. He would shave him with a straight razor. He would give the wino a mud pack on the face. He would rinse the mud off the wino’s face, and then he would vibrate the wino’s cheeks and neck with an electric machine that broke up fat deposits under the skin and enhanced the complexion. He would oil the wino’s hair with Wildroot Cream and give him a splash of rum aftershave. Then the wino would look in the mirror and say, “Damn! I didn’t know I was such a good-looking guy.”

The college’s head professor of razors was a ferocious, seized-up old Texan named Patterson, who had either a wooden leg or a bad live leg—nobody was sure which and nobody dared ask him, since they said he had been in the Texas Rangers before he had wrecked his leg, and he carried a razor and knew how to use it. Patterson would limp around the back of the room, on the prowl for a student botching a job on a wino. “You be careful with those guys,” he said to Juan. “You keep the rum lotion locked up, you hear? Now, your customer might want to cough or jerk around or something while you’re shaving him. You could cut him real bad. You could infect his face.” He watched Juan prepare a wino for shaving. “What do you think you are doing?” he screamed at Juan. “Get that towel off his face! You’re smothering the customer!”
Patterson opened his razor and fixed an eye on the wino, who fixed an eye on Patterson’s razor. Patterson stooped over and took up a leather belt and stropped his razor on it so rapidly that his hand went into a blur, while he stared at the customer.

The customer began to look alarmed.

“Watch,” Patterson said to Juan. The blade went high and stopped for an instant, glinted, and flashed downward toward the customer’s face. Patterson
slashed
the customer fourteen times on the face with blinding speed, while the customer’s eyes darted all around, trying to track the blade. It was the world’s fastest shave. If Patterson had miscalculated, the customer would have hosed the ceiling with spurting arterial blood. Patterson wiped his razor and snapped it shut. He said, “The face has fourteen parts. You can shave each part with one stroke.”

The customer fearfully and slowly put his hand to his face, and his eyes went wide; his face was smooth and hairless.

As Juan progressed, he moved to the front of the room, where the lawyers of San Antonio sat in a row of chairs in front of big windows. The lawyers liked to gather in the front chairs, to talk with each other and to be seen in the windows. By the time Juan advanced to the lawyers, he had learned how to do flat-top crew cuts, known as flats. A flat required a heavy lubricant—butch wax. “One needed a good machine and a lot of grease to make the customer’s hair stand up straight,” he recalled. One also needed high artistry. The hair was greased with butch wax and pulled up vertically with a comb and buzzed back and forth with a pair of clippers until it was bristly, as smooth as a golf green, and stiff enough to rest a brick on. The wax was always jamming the clippers. Furthermore, if you lost control of the clippers, you could easily gouge a hole in the customer’s flat, the way a golfer knocks a divot out of a driving green. Patterson would come over to see how Juan was doing. He would take Juan aside and say to him in a low voice, “These guys are lawyers. They want to look sharp, and so you have to get the blackheads out of their noses.” After giving a lawyer a shampoo, a butch wax and a flat, a shave, and a mud pack, Juan would squeeze the lawyer’s nose with both his thumbs to extract the blackheads, and then he’d proceed with the rest of the treatment: a jiggle with the electric machine to break up fat in the cheeks, a
splash of rum aftershave. The lawyers said, “Thanks,” and gave him thirty-five cents plus a tip. He graduated with a class-A barber’s license in 1954.

In the Davis Mountains south of Pecos and Balmorhea, there is a cluster of white domes—the McDonald Observatory. A girl named Lily Dominguez worked there as a bookkeeper. Juan had known her since junior high school, and when he felt that he had a prospect of a career before him, he proposed marriage to her. She accepted, and Father Girán married them, but Apolonio did not fire his revolver at the wedding because the practice of
vivas
had run out of style with the modern times. Lily quit her work at the observatory in order to marry Juan. They moved to the city of Pecos, where Juan got a job in Angel’s Barber Shop, on the edge of the barrio. In the barrio they called Angel “El Maestro.” He came from Mexico, where the barbers have extremely refined manners. Angel could do anything—flats, ducktails, he could wax a mustache into points, he could make all the shapes and styles of sideburns, from Rudolph Valentino to Prince Albert, and he could shave heads. He had a row of showers in the back of his shop, for the use of which he charged twenty-five cents, and he bought a new car every year.

In the end, Pecos did not suit either Lily or Juan. Juan was not buying a new car every year. “I was very ambitious,” Juan recalled. “I said to myself, ‘How can a man get rich cutting hair?’ ” Meanwhile the observatory missed Lily. They urged her to return to the mountain and to bring her husband. They offered to train him as a night assistant. “I was pretty scared,” Juan said. “What did I know about telescopes?” He and Lily moved to the McDonald Observatory, where the astronomers appointed him the night assistant on the eighty-two-inch McDonald reflector, then the largest telescope on the mountain, while Lily worked as the observatory’s cook, housekeeper, and bookkeeper. The large McDonald reflector was a tricky telescope, and to operate it one needed the touch of a maestro. That was not all. The astronomers wore electrically heated flight suits (similar to the ones on Palomar) that were supplied with electricity by a wire that ran from a wall socket into the suit’s rump. When the astronomers became overexcited, they would run around the dome shouting, unplugging themselves, dragging their
wires all over the place. Juan learned that a part of a night assistant’s job is to prevent astronomers from electrocuting themselves.

The same year he married Juan and Lily, Father Girán went to live in a retirement home for priests in New Mexico. Juan and Lily went up there to visit him. “He was very old then,” Juan recalled, “but still very, very strong.”

He was also delighted to hear that Juan had gone into astronomy. “My mind,” Father Girán said, “doesn’t remember things anymore. I would like to discuss astronomy with you, Juanito, but I find I have forgotten it. Yet I remember those nights … those nights when I told you about the stars. All those nights … You sit there with those astronomers. You listen to what they say. Now, you know, astronomers never get rich. But if you stay with them, you will learn, Juanito. Because astronomers are the chosen. They are the chosen.” This was Father Girán’s last conversation with Juan; he died shortly afterward.

After working at the McDonald Observatory for eight years, Juan and Lily turned their thoughts to southern California. In 1964, they moved to San Diego, where Juan found work in a physics laboratory, measuring the tracks of subatomic particles in a bubble chamber. By this time he had finished a correspondence course and had received a high-school diploma, and he had also begun to study computers. (“I am not totally ignorant of ‘and/or’ gates.”) After several years at the physics laboratory he realized that he was about to be replaced by a computer, and so he decided to look for a job that would never be taken away by a machine. Night assistantship came appropriately to mind. One day he drove up Palomar Mountain and asked the mountain superintendent for a job. He reported to work on September 9, 1969, cutting underbrush and dusting the Hale Telescope with a mop. That was when he discovered his respect for heights, because he had to walk out onto the I-beams of the main tube, several stories above the mirror, pushing a dust mop in front of him. The mirror was covered, but if he had fallen on it, he still might have broken it, and he did not want to break that mirror, because while man is dispensable, telescopes are not.

By Christmas he had been promoted to relief night assistant. He learned how to slew the Hale Telescope—move it fast across
the sky. Gary Tuton, who was then the senior night assistant, trained Juan. Juan was terrified that he might crash the Hale during a high-speed slew. What would it be like, he asked himself, to go down in history as the guy who had wrecked the largest telescope on earth? He reminded himself that he had never cut a customer.

The Hale had tendencies. It tended to pop its clutches. During heavy slews, one could smell burning rubber. The dome tended to lose track of where the telescope was pointing. Juan’s notebooks tended to multiply. During cold weather, the film of oil under the horseshoe bearing might thicken, and the Hale would stop tracking the stars. That would trip an alarm buzzer, and the astronomer would open his mouth and prepare to scream. Juan would dash to a ladder resting against the telescope’s north pier. He would climb three stories up the ladder until he came to a set of screws. He would take a little screwdriver out of his pocket and give one particular screw a quarter of a turn. One-point-one million pounds of telescope would resume tracking the stars, while the buzzer would shut off and the astronomer would return to normal.

Occasionally the telescope refused to slew. Juan would dive into the elevator and descend one level, then hurry along a walkway until he came to a bank of circuit breakers. Using both hands, he would hit every breaker switch as fast as he could, working his way down a wall of switches. If the Big Eye still would not move, he wrote down at least a dozen other things to remember. These included:

Sometimes the dome would get confused and start turning around and around, and the whole building would shake, and nothing could stop it. “Juan! This is crazy!” the astronomer would say.

“It’s the phantom,” Juan would say. Juan would dash into a room at the south end of the telescope. The phantom was in there. The phantom was a mechanical computer built by Bruce Rule. It caused the dome to follow—to phantom—the movements of the telescope. Juan would wiggle and snap moving parts in the computer. He would inspect and remove two vacuum tubes and wipe the tubes with a rag. Usually the dome would stop spinning.

The engineers seemed to be superstitious about oils. Cans and bottles had piled up on shelves next to Juan’s locker. Some of the oils Juan learned the use of, and some he did not. There was Lubriguard Anti-Seize, Mobil Extreme Pressure oil, Graham transmission oil, Way Lube chain oil, Marvel Mystery oil, Gargoyle Grease. Bob Thicksten was trying to switch to a few simple oils, but Juan wondered if things like Gargoyle Grease and Marvel Mystery oil were not still ending up inside the Hale Telescope, either because those oils worked or because the engineers had bought them on special somewhere. Mobil had recently quit making Flying Horse telescope oil, which had caused observatories all over the United States to go into a panic. Thicksten had snapped up ten drums of Flying Horse, which he stored as if they were cases of ’59 Margaux, in dark recesses of the dome. Thicksten believed that the use of Flying Horse oil was another of those black arts: perhaps unnecessary but foolproof.

After a nine-year apprenticeship Juan became the senior night assistant. Soon after his promotion the observatory installed computers to monitor and control some of the motions of the Hale Telescope. These digital systems had partly replaced Bruce Rule’s clockwork computers. Juan now had a computer terminal at his control panel, through which he orchestrated many of the motions of the Hale. But the observatory had decided that no computer could ever be allowed to slew the Big Eye, because a computer would sooner or later crash the telescope during a high-speed slew. Man was not entirely dispensable. Especially this man, who could
shave a wino with a straight razor and do a perfect flat. He had spent more time looking at the Hale’s video screens than anybody, including Maarten Schmidt, which had forever changed his feelings about the earth’s place in the creation. “Now when I look into the blue sky,” he said, “I wonder where it all ends.”

T
he Trojan planets were slow-moving, predictable bodies. Once you had sighted one, you could usually find it later. Carolyn Shoemaker felt no compulsion to quickly search the films that resulted from her and Gene’s Trojan runs on Palomar Mountain. She did go over the films lightly, looking for fast-moving objects, and she found an asteroid called 1985 WA. 1985 WA could hit Jupiter, which was a pleasant surprise—it was a Jupiter-crosser. In any case, after New Year’s of 1986, she and Gene returned to Palomar Mountain for a week, to survey the sky for earth-approaching asteroids, while the Trojan films remained in their glassine envelopes in Flagstaff, Arizona, unsearched for Trojan planets.

On Palomar Mountain, Carolyn found the first new comet of 1986. It turned out to be a regular visitor to the inner solar system—Periodic Comet Shoemaker 3. Then she found the second comet of 1986. This one, designated 1986b, was a long-period comet. It took a hairpin turn around the sun and left the inner solar system; it will be back in the spring of A.D. 2509. “I am now tied with Caroline Herschel,” Carolyn said. “Of course, I am going to beat her.” But the Trojan films remained in their envelopes, unsearched for Trojan planets. “As usual,” she said, “I am sinking under a pile of films.”

During March of that year, Periodic Comet Halley made an appearance in the sky. Maarten Schmidt’s quasar team happened to be
scanning on Palomar Mountain at the same time, and they were anxious to see Halley’s comet, since none of them had seen it before. Maarten Schmidt brought his binoculars to the mountain. At four-thirty one morning, he and Gunn climbed to the catwalk. A cloudless wind came out of the west, hissing around the dome and snapping the tops of the cedars, warning of a storm coming from the Pacific Ocean.

Maarten held up his binoculars. “This is marvelous,” he said.

“I had expected worse,” said Jim.

“The comet looks fairly bright,” Maarten said.

“This is quite spectacular.”

Halley’s comet had a white nucleus. It looked like a fuzzy star. The tail was cloudy and faint. The comet resembled a dust ball, a piece of celestial trash.

Maarten said, “Gad, these binoculars are
terrible
. I paid only fifty dollars for them. My apologies, James.” He handed them to Gunn.

Gunn plugged the terrible binoculars into his eyes and turned the focus knob. His hair strayed in various directions.

In a philosophical sort of way, Maarten continued. “I think we are overdue, James, for a really bright comet.”

“I absolutely agree.”

“Like the great comet of 1843,” Maarten said. “With a tail that goes halfway across the sky. It would be interesting to see what effect that would have on the popular mind, as it were. Whether we would hear talk of the end of the world and so forth.” (Schmidt had studied comets with Jan Oort at the University of Leiden, where he had become interested in the effect of comets on the mind. He once remarked to me—we were talking about the Shoemakers and their comets—“I believe it was a comet in the seventeenth century that touched off a riot of shoemakers in Germany. There must have been more shoemakers then. And I bet you they were well organized.”)

“The tail is developing nicely,” Jim said. Then the binoculars strayed away from Halley’s comet. He pivoted slowly on his feet, moving from point to point along the Milky Way. “The Trifid nebula is up,” he said. “And there’s M22—that’s a fantastic globular cluster. And there’s the Omega nebula.” He handed the binoculars to
me. He said, “You can see the Omega. It’s right above the Lagoon nebula. What you can see with a pair of binoculars is actually quite mind-boggling.”

The central bulge of the Milky Way fattened toward San Diego. The galactic core was rising over San Diego. Seen through a pair of binoculars, the central region of the galaxy is speckled with dots of glowing gas and cut with black streamers of entrained dust. Halley’s comet hung immediately below the Milky Way—obviously near the earth. Halley’s comet is a lump of black, dusty ice the size of Manhattan, shaped like a potato—and it travels on a chaotic earth-crossing orbit. It used to live out in the Oort cloud, until it felt the gravity of a passing star and fell toward the sun. Now it steams every time it approaches the sun. Someday it may break up and dissolve into dust, or it may become an extinct comet nucleus. If some kind of dark nodule remains, then one day Halley’s comet may hit the earth as an asteroid, causing mass extinctions, although that is not likely. More likely, Halley’s comet will have a close encounter with Jupiter during the next million years, and Jupiter will fling it off into the stars, to travel forever through the Milky Way.

Just three weeks before that, Carolyn Shoemaker had found an asteroid that she and Gene named Amun. Amun is the kind of earth-crosser that creeps up alongside the earth. Amun is a mile and a half across and is made of metal. “When Amun hits,” Gene said, with a good deal of satisfaction, “it will make a
real
crater.” Carolyn also spotted an object slanting through the plane of the solar system, moving fast—an object now designated 1986 EC. She measured its motion in two films taken as the moon was beginning to wax, washing out the night sky. Then she lost it. 1986 EC drowned in moonlight and has not been seen since.

“I hate to lose one of those things,” Gene said.

Carolyn was chagrined, if not embarrassed. “I just hope it will be picked up someday,” she said. Meanwhile the Trojan films remained untouched. “I’m not worried about those Trojans,” she said. “Those planets are not going anywhere. They can wait.”

On May 5, 1986, on Palomar Mountain, Carolyn found a strange minor planet in a pair of films that she and Gene had taken a few days before—a slow-moving asteroid, and going the wrong way,
against the flow of the Main Belt. Carolyn telephoned Brian Marsden, the director of the Minor Planet Center, and gave him a set of rough coordinates. He gave the asteroid a temporary label: 1986 JK. The Shoemakers took more photographs of 1986 JK on following nights, while continuing to report the object’s changing positions to the Minor Planet Center. Brian Marsden shortly informed the Shoemakers and the rest of the world (via international astronomical telegram): “1986 JK appears to be an Apollo object approaching the earth.” Astronomers rushed for their telescopes. The asteroid’s slow motion was an illusion: the Shoemakers were watching it head straight at the earth. JK reversed its apparent motion, accelerated wildly, and boomed past the earth on June 1, 1986, at a distance of 2.6 million miles, one of the closest asteroidal misses on record. By the standards of normal planetary motions in the solar system, the apparition of 1986 JK was somewhat akin to having the hair on one’s head parted by a bullet. JK was traveling on a long ellipse, like the orbit of a comet. Radio astronomers using an antenna at the Goldstone station of NASA’s Deep-Space Network bounced a radar signal off the asteroid as it went by and received a clear echo, which suggested that JK is a big object. Its orbit takes it out as far as Jupiter. It is an earth-crossing Apollo object, and a Mars-crosser, and a Jupiter-crosser. 1986 JK could hit the earth, Mars, or Jupiter. At intervals of fourteen years, marking time like a metronome, it whips past the earth. Around Independence Day in the year 2000, it will be back in our skies on a close pass.

During the autumn of 1986, one year after the Shoemakers had taken the Trojan photographs, Carolyn decided that she would try to find some Trojan asteroids. She selected thirty-three stereo pairs of films to search. The photographs looked through the plane of the solar system, into the Greek cloud of asteroids that traveled ahead of Jupiter. Accustomed to looking for fast-moving asteroids near the earth, Carolyn had to train herself to see slow-moving specks hanging in space out near Jupiter. She set up her microscope in a windowless storage room at the back of the library of the United States Geological Survey’s headquarters in Flagstaff, where she could look at the sky all day without interruption. She fastened pairs of negatives into the microscope.

She looked through binocular eyepieces and saw a white sky, as it is called. The photographs were negatives, in which the sky appears white and the stars black. (The human eye can more easily discriminate a black dot against a white background than the other way around.) She moved the films back and forth while stars passed through her field of view; this felt to her like flying through space. Each stereo pair of films contained about ten thousand dots—stars, galaxies, quasars, and asteroids. The stereo pairs had been photographed at time intervals of forty minutes. During forty minutes a Trojan planet would move against the background of fixed stars.

The stereo microscope was a clever tool for finding objects in motion—it made them pop into stereo. Trojan planets hung in the distance, barely in front of the stars. She could see the depth of the Trojan cloud; the Trojans were distant objects, well beyond the Main Belt asteroids that sprinkled the foreground of her films. An asteroid approaching the earth, on the other hand, could seem to hang in front of Main Belt asteroids. These earth-crossers moved aggressively, at odd angles. Traveling at perhaps thirty-four thousand miles per hour, an earth-crosser could go a long distance in forty minutes. “The asteroid is moving so fast,” she said, “that you see a displacement in the image. You can’t fuse it with your eyes—it seems to blur out. It hops.”

She saw moving objects dotted all over her films; there is an almost unbelievable quantity of natural material floating around the solar system. Most of what she saw were Main Belt asteroids, many of them, no doubt, unknown objects. Comets were fuzz balls—a fog of gases flowed off them. Comets gave her a thrill. There was something about that misty haze that made her heart leap in her throat whenever she thought she might be looking at an undiscovered comet.

She kept her eyes moving, eight hours a day. “I try to move the film steadily across my field of view, without stopping,” she said. “If you start paying too much attention to things, you start questioning everything: Is this an asteroid? Finding asteroids gets to be instinctive.” When she saw what looked like a Trojan planet—a dot floating just in front of the stars—she marked it with a red pen. “These Trojans are fainties, kind of crummy-looking,” she said. They resembled
dust particles stuck to the surface of the film. She got into a habit of running her finger lightly over anything that looked like a Trojan planet, and sometimes a “Trojan planet” went away. She did not want to report the changing locations of a piece of dust to the Minor Planet Center. The stars formed trapezoids, rings, letters—her private alphabets. She would become intrigued with a galaxy. She would imagine herself as a traveler in space, approaching that galaxy. She explored globular star clusters. A globular cluster is a spherical cloud of several hundred thousand stars that orbits independently through the Milky Way. The sight of a globular cluster could cause a sharp detour through the Trojan cloud. At times she would forget what she was doing. She would come to her senses, realizing that she had become lost in a film and had no idea where in the film she was traveling. At other times she would wake up suddenly at home in bed—because if she spent enough time with the microscope, she began to find asteroids in her sleep.

After she had scanned and marked a set of films for likely Trojan asteroids, she made rough measurements of their positions, and then looked them up in a book that astronomers call the Russian Ephemeris. (The Russians keep track of asteroids for everyone else.) “I picked off most of the known Trojans that way,” she said. She found plenty of Trojan planets, and they already had names.

The job consumed weeks of tedious effort. “I wouldn’t work this hard if it wasn’t so much fun,” she said. In late November 1986, she found a speck that was not listed in any catalog, and it did not go away when she ran her finger over it. That same day she found another speck. She measured their coordinates using a machine called a measuring engine, and typed her measurements into a computer linked to the Minor Planet Center.

The next morning she received on her computer a message from Brian Marsden:
CAROLYN: EXCELLENT
! He informed her that she had sighted two unknown Trojan planets. He gave them the temporary designations 1985 TE3 and 1985 TF3. These planets had never been seen before. They were huge minor planets, each about fifty miles across—“elephants,” as Gene called them. They were bigger than many of the moons of Jupiter, and, as Carolyn put it, “They
are ours.” Like all Trojan planets, they were at least as black as charcoal and probably blacker.

A week later she found another unknown Trojan, 1985 TG3. Then another, 1985 TL3. She also picked up a Trojan that a team of astronomers in Denmark had recently sighted, and she helped the Danish astronomers get a better fix on its orbit. She also recovered a Trojan—a Trojan that had been sighted by the Dutch astronomer E. J. van Houten in his original survey of the Trojan clouds but had been lost. In the end, she found four new Trojan planets and helped to secure identifications of two others. She said, “It’s been an education for the eyeball.”

Gene was pleased. He said, “The implication is that there is just a huge number of Trojans out there. We are only finding the elephants.”