• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 217 0

of sky. The nights were carefully choreographed so that I could spend the most time looking at the expected locations of the twenty-seven maybes. Because a full year had passed, they had moved quite a ways, and it was impossible to know precisely where they might be, so I would spend hours scouring large parts of the sky, taking a picture, and coming back to the same spot an hour later and taking another picture. I didn’t even bother writing a computer program for these; I would just look at the blinking images on my computer screen the second that they came down from the computer. All night, every night there, I would take a picture, move the telescope over, immediately start another picture, stare at the last picture while taking the current picture, and continue on until dawn. Then I would slowly and wearily walk the winding road the half mile back to the Monastery, often startling foxes or bobcats out for a dawn hunt. Around noon, I would wake up, have breakfast, and begin the day again.

During those first few months tracking down maybes, I felt excited when the sun went down.

Tonight is the night! I would think.

As the fall progressed, though, I was slowly becoming dejected.

I spent so much of my time at Palomar Observatory that fall that I didn’t have to think twice when I got a request to give a talk at the observatory to a group associated with Caltech. I was going to be there the night before anyway, so I figured I might as well stay one more night to give the talk. On my calendar I just wrote “talk to some group.” The group was to arrive by bus in the late afternoon, take a tour of the massive Hale Telescope, and eat dinner and hear my talk on the floor of the dome with the telescope perched overhead. It sounded fun. I like giving talks to groups like this.

The afternoon the group was to arrive, I waited on the dark ground floor of the observatory until I heard a knock on the door. As I opened it, I was blinded by the afternoon sun. When my eyes adjusted again, I finally saw the organizer of the tour walk in.

“Hi, I’m Diane Binney,” she said.

She was well dressed, poised, glamorous, outgoing, radiant. She was everything that you don’t stereotypically expect to find in someone from Caltech (including, in particular, me). I quickly introduced myself, and I thought: Who is this person?

Diane Binney was the well-loved director of a group whose members attended tours and special talks and traveled to exotic locations, all associated with Caltech and its research. Diane had arranged this trip to Palomar Observatory and had invited me to speak, and, as I learned much later, everyone except for me on the Caltech campus seemed to know precisely who she was and had known for years. I had perhaps been staring into my computer screen too much to have ever looked up and noticed.

I admit that I did not give the people on the tour the full attention that they deserved. I admit to spending more time telling Diane about the telescope and the dome and astronomy than I did everyone else. But I must have given an all-right tour—at least to her—because at some point while walking on a catwalk high above the ground on the outside of the observatory, she said, “Hey, do you ever use the telescopes in Hawaii?”

I do.

“Would you be interested in coming next spring on a travel program where we take people to the volcanoes and then up to the telescopes? Would you be able to talk about the telescopes and give tours?”

Not checking my calendar, I simply said, “Absolutely.”

Dinner soon began. I spoke for an hour and showed pictures of the sky, pictures of telescopes, and graphs of what was to be found out at the edge of the solar system. But mostly I talked about planets. I told the group that there had to be planets out there and that I was going to find them. Even as I said it, though, all I could think of was that I was halfway through my “maybe” list, and still I had found nothing. I could do the song and the dance and put on the excited face, but it was becoming possible that all of my searching would come to nothing.

When the