‘I’ll be in soon, Mom.’ He walked Penny home, again through the back streets, with the binoculars banging at his side, and as they moved through the silent town she did a very unwise thing, or perhaps the wisest thing she would ever do. She revealed her strategy: ‘John, you must understand this night.’
‘I could never forget.’
‘I didn’t say remember. I said understand.’ For just a moment she wondered if she should speak her thoughts, but it was her nature to do so: ‘I can see the future, John. You’ll go away. Annapolis. The war will still be on. Normally, I’d never see you again. But you’re far more important to me than wars or colleges or anything at all. I wanted you to know that. Indelibly. I wanted to bind you to me, because I know you’re a young man who’s not afraid to be bound.’
‘I was ready,’ he said.
‘You’re the finest thing I’ll know in life. I’m the best girl you’ll ever know. I live up there among the stars. I wanted you to know.’
At her door they lingered, both aware that something very special had happened under the stars. They had looked far into the future, past the wars and the alarums that they read about in Shakespeare, and they knew that in the whirling space of which they were a part, they shared now and would always share a special relationship. They kissed goodnight.
On his way back home, John followed the more open streets, and this allowed him to see that in the university observatory someone was working with pale night lights, so on the chance that it might be Professor Anderssen, he turned away from the street that would have taken him home and hurried to the door of the observatory. It was open, so he entered. Hearing sound from the second floor, he ascended the rickety stairs and found to his delight that the man at the telescope was indeed the professor.
‘I’m the one who bought the star atlas,’ he explained.
‘Yes! Yes, it’s you. I see you’ve been working with your binoculars, as I advised.’
‘They’re not mine. A friend of Pop’s. He’s making tanks at Detroit.’
‘Have you been following the heavens as they drift by?’
‘Yes, sir,’ John said, hoping to give the impression that he had used the glasses night after night.
‘And what have you seen?’
‘Well, I haven’t bothered with the Moon very much.’
‘The Moon can always wait. It’s of little consequence, really. What about the stars?’
‘I was thrown off my rocker by Altair. So many little stars I never knew existed.’
‘What power are your glasses?’
‘7-X-50.’
‘You can see a lot with that.’
There was an awkward pause that betrayed the professor’s desire to get back to his own work, and John knew that he ought to leave, but this night had been so extraordinary, so unbelievable, that he longed to extend it. ‘Is there any chance that I …’
‘Might look through the telescope?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve never done so before?’
‘These are the best I’ve done,’ he said, tapping the binoculars in a familiar way.
‘It can be quite startling.’ He looked at the big machine, then at John. ‘But are you ready?’
‘I think I am,’ John said. Last night he would not have had the courage to say this.
‘Let me ask you a few questions. What time zone are we in?’
‘Greenwich minus six.’
‘What time is it in London now?’
‘Seven o’clock in the morning.’
‘What’s our longitude as we stand here?’
‘Ninety-seven degrees West.’
‘Our latitude?’
‘Forty degrees North.’
‘In orienting a telescope like this one, which of these two measurements is the more significant?’
‘The latitude.’
‘And why?’
‘Because to build an equatorial mount—’
‘You know what an equatorial mount is?’
‘Yes. It allows you to point your telescope at a particular star and then have the whole telescope move with the exact motion of the earth, so that the star always remains in the center of the scope.’
‘You’re ready,’ the professor said. Not many of his university students could have answered so precisely. ‘But what should you see first, young man? What’s your name again?’
‘John Pope, my father’s the druggist.’
‘Of course, you’re the famous football player my son talks about.’
‘I Play.’
‘And you know this much about the stars?’
‘I can scarcely credit the things I’ve seen.’
‘What have you seen?’
‘M-13.’
Professor Anderssen raised his chin as if he had been struck. ‘You know the Messier numbers?’
‘Some of them.’
‘Would you like to see something rather extraordinary in Perseus?’
‘You mean 869-884?’
Professor Anderssen clasped his hands and said, ‘Son, how would you like to test yourself in real astronomy? Register as a special student for my course in January?’
‘Could I? I’m only a junior in high school, you know.’
‘When men like me grow old, we search for lads like you. Register.’ He coughed, then said brightly, ‘And now you shall see your first real treasure in the heavens. The double cluster.’ Slowly he swung the telescope away from the area he had been studying, and John assumed that he was supposed to step forward and look through the eyepiece, but as he started to do so, Professor Anderssen cried, almost harshly, ‘Stand back. This is an instrument of dignity, worthy of respect.’
He came to stand beside John, pointing in the dim light to the extraordinary beauty of the telescope, its polished wooden segments, its burnished brass fittings. ‘The telescope was made by Alvan Clark of Massachusetts. In 1886. He was the best America ever produced, a profound astronomer and a better mechanic.’
‘If it’s so important,’ John asked, ‘how did it get here?’
‘Son, this is the leading observatory in this part of the world. If it were not, I wouldn’t be here.’ He touched the telescope lovingly. ‘Back in those years the university graduated a truly stupid man. I’ve seen his letter of application to study astronomy. Every word misspelled. Astronnimy. He was refused admission, so he went out and earned four million dollars bartering railroad stocks. First thing he did with his money was buy this Alvan Clark, and the building to house it. Used to come here night after night to look at the stars, and couldn’t name one of them.’
Professor Anderssen pressed his hands against the gleaming woodwork and said, ‘Before you look through a great telescope, you must look with your eyes. What do you see up there in a line between Perseus and Andromeda?’
Through an aperture in the ceiling John studied the cluttered heavens and came slowly to see a slight but fixed haziness. ‘Is that it?’ he asked.
The professor said, ‘Now look at it with your binoculars,’ and when John did, he saw to his satisfaction that it was a distinct aggregation of something, but precisely what, he could not determine.
‘Now you’re ready to see the famous double cluster through an Alvan Clark,’ the professor said, and with some difficulty he searched for the pair, uttering pleased grunts when he finally focused upon it.
Stepping back, he invited John to look, and when the boy had adjusted the controls to accommodate his eye, he saw that what had seemed a confused haze was really a balanced pair of magnificent clusters, teeming with stars and vitality and nocturnal beauty. They seemed to be in competition, west against east, a staggering collection of great stars engaged in some kind of combat. Some were grouped tightly, as if locked in struggle, others were far-flung, but all were enchantingly interrelated, as if the torment of the heavens kept them associated against their will. It was the complexity and implied movement that made these clusters so appealing.
‘How many stars i
n each cluster?’ Anderssen asked.
‘Do all the stars we see belong to the clusters?’ John asked.
‘An admirable question. No. Some stand between us and the clusters. Some form a distant background. In the left, three hundred individual stars. In the right, four hundred.’
‘It seems impossible.’
‘And now for the gem. Messier 31. Can you find it without the glasses?’
‘Oh yes. I look for the Great Square of Pegasus, project the diagonal toward Cassiopeia, and halfway there, a bit to the west … I see it now.’
‘What do you see in your binoculars?’
‘A faint, hazy mass. Very stable. Very big.’
‘It’s the most remote object in the heavens that ancient man could see with his unaided eye. Do you know how far away it is?’
‘No.’
‘About two and a quarter million light-years. That means that if you and I send a message to Andromeda tonight, at the speed of light, and if they understand it and want to reply, we can’t possibly receive their answer for four and a half million years. How far away is that in your calculations?’
‘I’d need a pencil.’
‘Here’s one.’ So John sat at the wooden desk used by the university astronomers, and by a darkened light put down his figures, reciting to the professor as he did: ‘Two and a quarter million light-years multiplied by about six trillion miles per year.’ He did the multiplying and adding of zeros, then reported: ‘I get something like one followed by nineteen zeroes.’
Professor Anderssen was conducting his own calculations, using precise values, and he said, ‘Remarkably close. The actual distance seems to be thirteen billion billion miles away from us.’
The two sat silent in contemplation of this stupendous distance, and John looked at the shadowy form with new reverence. ‘Now see it in the telescope,’ Anderssen said, and John moved to the eyepiece, staring across that immense distance to where M-31 glowed majestically in the night.
‘See its magnitude,’ Anderssen whispered. ‘Note its shape, exactly like that of our galaxy. See the glowing core at the center, the immense radius of the fiery gases. Can you detect the swirling arms, the wild violence? Can you guess what mysterious control holds it all together?’
For eleven minutes, while the telescope subtly followed the movement of the distant galaxy through the heavens, John Pope stared at its multiple wonders. And then he heard again the quiet voice of the Norwegian professor: ‘Tonight you’ve been introduced to two wonders. The beautiful and the stupendous. There are, we judge, one hundred billion other galaxies out there. And if we ever lift a telescope above our atmospheric interruption, I’m sure it will reveal an additional hundred billion. For space is limitless. It goes on forever. Always remember, John, that you and I live on a minor planet attached to a minor star, at the far edge of a minor galaxy. We live here briefly, and when we’re gone, we’re forgotten. And one day the galaxies will be gone, too. The only morality that makes sense is to do something useful with the brief time we’re allotted. I would be most pleased if you would report to my class in January.’
Slowly, through the starry night, with much more visible than when he started after supper—for the sky was now dark, allowing the weaker stars to shine through—he walked homeward, his binoculars hanging at his side. In Leyte Gulf it was four in the afternoon of the first day, and Norman Grant was baking in fierce sunlight on his raft, while at Peenemünde the German rocket experts were spending the early daylight hours endeavoring to assess the damage done by the tremendous American bombing.
John Pope knew he had experienced something rare and precious—his first journey into the heavens, the glimpse of perfect beauty in the star Altair, the awakening of love with Penny, and the vision of that galaxy infinitely remote: There can never be another night like this. My job is to make all nights good within their own limits.
‘Damn it all!’ his father shouted as he came in the door. ‘Two-thirty! Just who in hell do you think you are?’
John was startled. He had never before heard his conservative father swear. ‘I was at the observatory,’ he apologized. ‘They let me use …’
‘John,’ his mother called from the foot of the stairs. She was in her nightgown and it was evident that she had been crying. ‘You should have telephoned.’
‘I just stopped at the observatory.’
‘You are not to roam the streets like rabble, John Pope,’ his father said, jealous of the good reputation that name carried. ‘And if you do go somewhere like the observatory, have the decency to telephone us. We care deeply what happens to you, son.’
‘The professor invited me to attend his college classes. Starting in January.’
‘That’s gratifying,’ his mother said.
In his bedroom he could not sleep, for the majestic universe seemed to be exploding about him, shattering and illuminating.
An hour before dawn the elder Popes heard their son’s alarm clock, and they stepped into the hallway in time to see him disappearing down the stairs. ‘Where in hell are you going now?’ Dr. Pope swore for a second time.
‘I want to see how the night ends.’
‘John,’ his mother said quietly, ‘you must put on something more.’ When her son hesitated, she added, ‘We watch your health. Put on a jacket.’
When he reached the yard he saw above him the unequaled panoply of winter constellations: Taurus, Orion, the Twins, the group with great Sirius, and in the east the Lion and the outriders of the Virgin. He stood enraptured, using his glasses on one after another of their splendid stars, but it was not until just after dawn that he saw what he had left his bed to view. It was the spot where red Arcturus would have been seen had not the risen Sun obscured it. Visualizing the star as it would have appeared, he accepted the fact that his Earth actually did revolve in a twisted path around the Sun. At dusk he had seen Arcturus slip away; at dawn he was seeing it return.
‘We do revolve in space,’ he whispered to himself. Again he longed to capture this great red star in his binoculars, but again it lay too low for sensible viewing, so he waited, but by the time Arcturus had risen enough to clear the atmosphere, day had come and there were no stars.
At three o’clock on the afternoon of 24 October 1944, when Professor Stanley Mott was investigating the damage done by the rocket that landed in the heart of the financial district of London, and when Admiral Nishimura was placing in his private safe the Sho-Go instructions which required him to take his small fleet on a suicidal foray into Leyte Gulf, Dieter Kolff, a rocket technician of indeterminate rank, was pushing his bicycle onto a small ferry that would carry him from the top-secret town of Peenemünde in the Baltic to the mainland of Germany a short distance to the west.
He was thirty-seven years old, a small, thin, shy man with an ineffectual mustache. He wore heavy glasses which he took off when trying to impress people but replaced rapidly if a document or piece of equipment was handed him. He spoke softly but revealed a fierce willingness to defend his judgments; his inner convictions he shared with absolutely no one, not even Liesl, whom he was leaving the island to visit.
Developments in Nazi Germany had taught him this distrust. As a boy from an impoverished mountain area south of Munich, he had encountered scorn, for he was not from some hereditary warrior family in Prussia, or clever in business like a Ruhr German, or intellectually gifted like a Berliner. He had only one gift: he could look at a piece of machinery and see what was wrong with it. He had been able to do this on his family’s farm and later when he worked in the factory in Munich. But because he was not university educated, or able to express himself well, he gained small profit from his gift.
When drafted into the army he remained a mute private, first on the French front, then on the Russian, and officers with infinitely less ability in keeping their machines of war functioning walked past him a score of times without ever asking for his assistance. But he was clever enough to see, in the spring of 1942, that any German
armies which went deeper into Russia were apt to encounter tragedy, and he devoted all his energies to escaping from those gray, forbidding steppes.
His chance came in early 1943 when he was serving with the unlucky General Paul von Kleist in the Caucasus. During a vast retreat Von Kleist’s tanks started to break down, and when the general hastened among his men, goading them to make repairs that were impossible, he spotted one taciturn mechanic who doggedly mended anything that was brought before him, and on the muddy repair field Dieter Kolff was commissioned a lieutenant and placed in charge of overhauling the great tanks.
Two weeks later Hitler dispatched an urgent request to the Wehrmacht, asking it to send him responsible young men with impeccable records to work at a demanding task. That was all that the order said, but discreet inquiries established that men with mechanical ability were needed, preferably not from large cities. Von Kleist pondered this cryptic statement and concluded that what Hitler sought were strong farm boys who had not been contaminated with city radicalism.
His quota was eleven, and after he had nominated nine promising lads his eye fell upon Lieutenant Kolff, the most reliable officer in the headquarters company, and a wily tactic evolved: I’ll send the Fuehrer my best man and maybe … Just perhaps Hitler would overlook the disasters on the Caucasus front.
‘Where were you born?’ Von Kleist asked, and when Dieter gave the name of his rural village, the general said, ‘Your papers say Munich. We don’t want anyone from that trouble spot.’
‘I’m from a farm,’ Dieter replied, and that evening he was on his way out of Russia, rejoicing with every clackety turn of the train wheels.
He had not worked with the heavy installations at Peenemünde for two weeks before his extraordinary native ability was recognized, and late one afternoon he was brought before a tall, silent man with deep-lined face and funereal voice. ‘This is General Eugen Breutzl,’ an orderly said. ‘Don’t you salute generals?’
Kolff saluted awkwardly. ‘They tell me you are very good with machines,’ the general said. He was fifty-three that year and obviously harassed by the urgent demands constantly pressed upon him.
Space: A Novel Page 8