The Perseids and Other Stories (13 page)

And at the helm of that telescope (encased, most nights, high up the barrel of the device like a dove in a dovecote, in heated clothing) was Edwin Hubble, the aging astronomer who had scaled the expansion of the universe, who had peered into the most ancient history of the sky.

I met Edwin Hubble at my uncle’s party.

Palomar drew celebrities, and there were celebrities at the house that night, though I didn’t recognize them. I spent most of the evening in the kitchen with Evangeline, helping her spread sturgeon roe over crackers for the guests. We held our noses and shared our amazement that intelligent adults would eat such trash. And while Evangeline served the guests, I peered at the action through the crack of the kitchen door.

She caught me looking.

“That’s a funny bunch,” she said when the door was safely closed and we were alone again. “That half-blind Englishmen with the big glasses and pretty little mouth, that’s Mr. Huxley. A book writer.”

Aldous Huxley! I said I knew the name. Secretly, I was thrilled—authors!—but I let Evangeline think I was unimpressed. (Perhaps she wasn’t altogether fooled.)

“The mannish-looking woman is his wife. That old man with the foreign accent? Name of Stravinsky. Writes music. The little bitty lady in the easy chair? Anita Loos. And the gray-haired gentleman, that’s Mr. Edwin Hubble himself. Just back from England.”

I knew about Hubble, too.

I had done the kind of reading my teachers called “precocious.” This was the Hubble who was charting the universe, calculating the volume of infinity; the Hubble of the red shift, the expanding-universe Hubble.

He didn’t look at all like a scientist. He looked like an aging athlete—which he also happened to be. (He played basketball and football in school and won letters. He still liked to fish and hike, though he had suffered a debilitating heart attack in 1949.) He smoked a plain black pipe, which rode in his solid jaw like a prosthetic device, and he looked as stern and unforgiving as a high school vice-principal.

I opened the kitchen door wider.

Evangeline’s eyes widened with it. “Best not go in there, honey.”

“It’ll be okay, Evangeline.”

I appeared in the midst of this mixed-drink-driven crowd like, I suppose, the unwelcome ghost of vulgar America, in my Capri pants, my gull-wing glasses, my hideous braces. Conversation stopped.

Carter rushed to introduce me, but I saw the indignation in his eyes. “This is Sandra,” he said, “my niece. She’s staying with me for the summer. If you’re looking for food, Sandra, there’s plenty in the kitchen.”

“Nonsense,” announced a strong, high-pitched voice. Here was Anita Loos, author of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, posed in an easy chair like a cynical munchkin. “Sandra—it
is
Sandra, isn’t it?—don’t let Carter chase you away so soon. My God, a niece. Of all things.”

I thanked Miss Loos but walked directly to Hubble, who was at the window gazing down into the Hollywood lights, pipe in hand.

“Dr. Hubble,” I said.

He turned and looked at me, glanced unhappily at Carter, then offered his huge hand.

I took it eagerly. “You discovered the expanding universe,” I said.

“Well, not quite.”

“But you know more about it than anyone else.”

“Did your uncle tell you that?”

“No.”

“No? Are you interested in astronomy?”

“Kind of.”

Wrong answer. He nodded dismissively and turned away. The window opened on a constellation of city lights. Los Angeles, a city Huxley had once called “the great Metrollopis of the West.”

“The universe is expanding,” I said, “but there’s no center. Wherever you are, that’s the center. Here or a million light-years away, wherever there’s an observer, he’s at the center of the universe.”

Hubble turned back. I had his attention again. He frowned at me. “Yes?”

“Is that right?”

“More or less.”

“Well, I don’t understand. Everything I’ve read talks about an observer. The observer is at the center of the universe. But what’s an
observer
, exactly? Why is an
observer
at the center of the universe?”

He exhaled a great blue cloud of smoke into the jasmine-scented air.

“Bring a chair,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

We talked, solemnly, intently, until Hubble’s wife, Grace, came to drag him back to the party. Carter looked daggers at me from across the room.

But then Hubble turned back and said the words that left me breathless:

“You must visit Palomar,” he said. “You must see the telescope.”

That night they came again.

The party was over. The house was silent and quite dark. I woke and was motionless, not only paralyzed but suspended—it seemed to me—between the tickings of the clock. The sense of helplessness, of vulnerability, was absolute. Moonlight shone through the window, and I remember dust motes hovering in that pearly light like weightless diamonds.

They were all around me—maybe a dozen of them, gathered around the bed.

Huge, their eyes. Black, and unblinking, and sad.

A great part of the terror resides in those eyes. Powerful, these creatures, to come through walls, to move so silently, to immobilize their victims, float them perhaps into shining spaces, probe their bodies with the casual indifference of a woman rummaging in her purse for a lost key….

But their eyes are so sad!

To all the obvious questions—what are they, what do they want, why me?—there was no answer but that ferocious and hungry nostalgia, the sadness of their eyes.

By daylight I might wonder: Are they sad for themselves? Or are they, somehow, sorry for
me?
But at night the questions are wordless, moot. That night in California they took me nowhere, only gazed at me, their huge heads bobbing, their eyes, all pupil, sad and frank as a child’s eyes.

I could only lie motionless in bed and draw weak, stertorous breaths. I was afraid they would take me away with them, to the place that clouds memory, to the palace of unbearable light.

But they only peered at me until suddenly they were gone, and I could draw my breath at last and scream, scream until Carter burst into the room, scream until he put his hand against my cheek and said in wide-eyed wonder, “Sandra! My God! Sandra!”

In modern quantum physics, as well as in astronomy, there is an entity called “the observer.” Seldom defined, “the observer” hovers over the textbooks like a restless ghost. An electron is a particle or a wave, depending on “the observer.” “The observer” collapses the wave function. “The observer” turns future into past, makes history of possibility.

But what’s an observer? It was the question I had posed to Hubble, the question that still nags, even now, so many years later. What is an observer? Where do observers come from?

A week later Carter drove me to Palomar, up the breathless heights of the mountain.

Hubble had made the arrangements. Carter’s own feelings about the visit were mixed. He didn’t have enough seniority at the Hale to bring in a tourist—an adolescent girl, of all things—and he was still afraid I would embarrass him or, worse, annoy Edwin Hubble himself. At the same time, I had already attracted positive attention: not a bad thing.

He had been treating me with a little more respect since the party, though my occasional night terrors continued to frighten him.

(Join the club, I thought.)

We drove up the steepening slope along black asphalt switchbacks, even stopped for lunch at the Palomar Gardens, a restaurant halfway to the Hale Observatory. It was owned, I later learned, by George Adamski, an amateur astronomer and publicity-seeker who would later author a flock of books about “flying saucers” and his implausible adventures therein. Watch the skies.

“He doesn’t like children, you know,” Carter said, talking about Hubble over cheeseburgers at the Gardens. “Keeps to himself. Likes to fly-fish, for Christ’s sake. You know he was hit by lightning?”

“Really?”

“He was out in the woods somewhere, probably with his boots in the water and a fishing rod over his head. They say his heart nearly stopped. Some say he hasn’t been the same since.”

I think this was meant to intimidate me, but it only succeeded in making Hubble seem more vulnerable, more like myself. Maybe I’d been struck by lightning too; maybe that’s what was wrong with me.

We drove on to the observatory. The staff treated me like visiting royalty, gave me the tour. Palomar was about as romantic as an industrial plant, with the exception of the telescope itself, a heroic act of engineering, a five-hundred-ton machine floating on a skin of pressurized oil. The horseshoe mount was so immense it had been shipped to California from Westinghouse by way of the Panama Canal. The mirror, hidden in a steel iris like the bud of a night-blooming flower, had been the subject of bomb threats—it had been trucked up the mountain under police guard, to protect it from lunatics who believed the sky would open and rain fiery vengeance if stripped of all its secrets.

I looked a long time at the elevator that lifted an astronomer up to the observation perch, imagined Hubble disappearing into the throat of this grand and terrifying creation.

Of Hubble himself there was no sign, until I was escorted to a long trestle table in a concrete chamber where the staff took meals. He was there, alone, all furrowed brows, sketching on a paper napkin. I learned later that his presence was something of a novelty. The altitude was supposed to be bad for his heart. He hadn’t been up the mountain for months, and his first telescope run in nearly a year was scheduled for September.

I sat down and drank Coke from a chilled bottle while he showed me what he’d drawn: a single dense much-penciled O at the center of the paper.

“O for Observer,” he said.

“And the napkin is the universe?”

“The observable universe. Here at the edge, farthest from the observer, the red shift becomes infinite.” He peppered the napkin with dots. “These are stars. But here is the observer’s dilemma, Miss Lansing. He occupies the center of the observable universe, which is bounded by its own primordial past.” He tapped the napkin. “From the observer’s point of view, what part of the universe is the oldest?”

The speed of light is finite. Most of the stars the observer sees are younger than his own sun, younger still the more distant they are. A star ten thousand light-years distant is ten thousand years closer to the beginning of the universe, ten thousand years less old than the observer’s own space. So I tapped the dot in the middle.

“Precisely! Here at the edge is the youngest universe, perhaps the universe moments after its birth. The past. While here at the very center is … the present. So where on this map, Miss Lansing, do we find the future?”

I shrugged.

“Not shown,” he said. “Very good. And yet, time passes. The universe expands. It
emanates.
The future, not yet existent, emerges from this point, this absolute spaceless point….”

“From the observer?”

“From the observer as a spaceless point in his own subjective universe.”

“From me?”

“From any observer.”

I thought about it. “From my eyes? From my brain?”

He smiled quizzically and shrugged.

I was dazed by the idea of time radiating from my skull like the lightning bolts from the RKO radio tower at the beginning of certain movies. The future was deep inside me. But I could only see the past: my eyes looked out, not in.

I thought about it while Hubble ate his lunch, taking delicate spoonfuls of soup.

“Does the universe expand,” I asked, “or does the observer shrink?”

He smiled again. “The statements are commutable. It amounts to the same thing.”

We shrink into the future, collapse into it. Nowadays people talk about black holes, singularities. The observer collapses into his own singularity, shrinking away from the universe at large.

I said, “If there was such a thing as a time machine—”

“If there was such a thing as a time machine, you would be able to pop out of your own skull and look at yourself.”

I didn’t want to imagine it. Too frightening.

“You’re a very bright girl,” the famous astronomer told me.

“Thank you.”

“A very astute observer.”

He lit his pipe. I blushed.

The night terrors abated but didn’t stop. What did ebb, and quite quickly, was my uncle’s patience.

I don’t blame him. He had surrendered enough to me that summer: his privacy, his social life. But I stopped calling him at night, smothered my screams, clammed up at the breakfast table, because I couldn’t bear the weight of his impatience. His impatience was obvious and caustic; it erased the glow of Hubble’s approval and cast me back on my own troubled past.

He left me alone more often. Usually Evangeline was in the house, and on rare occasions we were allowed to borrow the car. We saw Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, the pier at Santa Monica. Mostly, though, I wandered through the house while Evangeline worked in the kitchen. I watched KTLA from Mt. Wilson on my uncle’s TV set, played Sinatra on his hi-fi rig, raided his library. (I read Huxley’s
The Perennial Philosophy
and
Beyond the Mexique Bay
and understood neither.) At lunch I assembled mile-high sandwiches and took them into the backyard, sequestered myself under an acacia tree with a magazine or just let the California sunshine make me drowsy.