How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [24]
Over time, my conversations with Kevin and Jean every night while taking the photographic plates had progressed from simple efficient talk about the sky and the weather to a more general extended chat. Jean would talk about her plans for a dream house on the river, while Kevin told stories about his teenage daughter or described how he would drive directly to the beach on the last morning before bright time started and sleep all day long. Kevin and Jean had also had inadvertent front-row seats to the demise of my long-term relationship from my days in Berkeley and my subsequent retreat from the cabin in the woods that my girlfriend and I had shared, to the death of my father, to the start and end of a new relationship or two; so, as I sat on Kevin’s sofa for the first time, our conversation naturally steered to the personal.
All Kevin wanted to talk about was Diane Binney and why she kept talking to me. I told Kevin about the Hawaii trip and that we were talking logistics. He thought that sounded like an exciting first date. I insisted that it sounded like work, because that was all it was.
Kevin wouldn’t let up. “Yeah, but she was paying you a lot of attention.”
“She runs trips for people; it’s her job to be nice. I’m sure that all of the guys at Caltech that she has to work with get the wrong impression and make idiots of themselves. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”
Six months later, I was in Hawaii with Diane and twenty or thirty people in her group. The group spent an enjoyable week on the lava, at the telescopes, at the beach, learning about geology and listening to me lecture about astronomy. The last night, when she was done with the trip and could finally relax, the two of us found ourselves down on the beach alone sometime after midnight. I pointed out the Southern Cross, just barely visible at the right time of year from Hawaii, and I showed her the paths of the planets and how she could pick out Saturn just setting into the ocean. I told her what it was really like to use the telescopes, and she talked of her nieces back in California. Saturn sank into the Pacific, and we finally walked back to our rooms. I was quite proud of myself for not having done anything stupid.
When we got back to Caltech the following week, I found myself accidentally walking past Diane’s office a few times a day and accidentally running into her and stopping to talk. Every time I did, she was very nice, and I had to remind myself that, truly, it was her job to be nice and to appear happy to see me and that being stupid was the worst thing to do. On accidentally running into her in the early afternoon one pleasant spring workday, I asked if she needed a cup of coffee. She did. We walked down the street, drank coffee, and talked for three hours. Certainly, it was part of her job to be nice to me and cultivate me as a good resource. But it occurred to me that, even accounting for all of that, there was no reason for her to spend three hours in the middle of an afternoon with me when we both had many other things to do. It suddenly occurred to me that, in fact, I had been stupid all along.
Later that summer, when Diane and I went on another trip together, I did no astronomy lecturing, and she brought no group. Instead, the two of us spent a week in a little cabin on a tiny island north of Vancouver. It was the least stupid thing I had ever done.
Sometime during this period it became clear that all of my searching for planets was going to come to nothing, that all of the maybes were turning into definitely nots. Three years of intensive effort to find a planet was leading to the conclusion that nothing was out there to be found. I don’t actually remember when I finally closed