The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [33]
DR. YANOGUCHI INTRODUCED her to George Edwards on her first day at the dish. "Mr. Edwards is our most knowledgeable volunteer," Yanoguchi told her, as she shook the hand of a lean, silver-haired man the age her father would have been, had he lived. "We get quite a few tourists and school groups. He’ll give you the standard tour, but don’t hesitate to ask questions. George knows everything! And when you’re finished, you can get started with Jimmy Quinn."
She was startled by the size of the Arecibo dish—three hundred meters in diameter, a vast aluminum bowl set into a natural depression in the mountains. Above the bowl, hundreds of tons of steerable antennae hung from cables connected to support towers anchored in the surrounding hills.
"It works just like an old-fashioned TV satellite dish," George said, wondering for a moment if she was too young to remember TV. It was hard to tell; the girl might have been twenty-four or thirty-four. "A radio telescope focuses every radio wave that hits it down toward a central collection point. The signals bounce off the dish to a system of amplifiers and frequency converters suspended above the bowl." He pointed things out as they walked along the edge of the dish. "From there, the signals travel down to the building that houses the processing equipment." The wind made it hard to hear, and George had to shout. "The astronomers use what’s essentially a very fancy spectrometer to analyze the polarization, intensity and duration of the radio waves. Jimmy Quinn can explain how all that works, or you can ask me if you like."
George turned to her before they went inside. "Have you ever done anything like this system before?"
"No," she admitted, shivering. She should have realized it would be chilly in the highlands. And one had a sense of being overwhelmed at the beginning of a project. She was always starting from scratch and there was always the chance that, this time, she wouldn’t be able to understand, that something would simply be beyond her. Sofia straightened her back. I am Mendes, she thought. Nothing is beyond me. "I’ll manage," she said aloud.
George looked at her sideways for a moment and then reached past her to open the door to the main building. "I’m sure you will. Listen, if you don’t have any plans next weekend, why not come down to San Juan for dinner ..." And they went indoors.
UPON MEETING MR. Quinn for the first time, Sofia Mendes noted privately that it was evidently her day for being startled by the size of things. She was accustomed to being the smallest adult in nearly any gathering but she had never stood next to anyone as tall as Jimmy Quinn before. She had to reach up to shake his hand and momentarily felt herself to be ten years old, meeting a friend of her father’s.
She followed him to his work space, Quinn ducking under doorways and pipes as they passed through aisles flanked by cubicles constructed from old-fashioned movable panels. As they walked, he pointed out the locations of the coffee machine and the WC, not seeming to notice that she could not see over the half-walls that rose only chest-high for him. When they arrived at his cubicle, Sofia noticed that he’d removed the middle drawer of his desk, probably to keep his knees from being bruised, she decided.
For his part, Jimmy was half in love with Sofia Mendes before they sat down. For one thing, she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, in real life. And she’d made the first cut in his mind already by not saying anything about his height. If she managed to go one more minute without asking any stupid basketball questions or the odious "How’s the weather up there?" he swore he’d marry her, but before he could propose, Sofia opened her notebook and asked him for an overview of his job.
Emilio had warned him that she was not much for small talk, so Jimmy began