Night Train полностью

Bubble, bubble, Hoyle and Hubble. Allan Sandage needs a bandage. Ah, the cage at midnight, with your flask, your parka, your leather ass and your iron bladder. The see­ing! Detective—

Excuse me. The what?

The seeing. The seeing? Actually it’s a word we still use. The quality of the image. Having to do with the clarity of the sky. The truth is, Detective, we don’t do much “see­ing” anymore. It’s all pixels and fiber optics and CCDs. We’re down at the business end of it, with the computers.

I asked him the simple question. I asked him if Jennifer was happy in her work.

I’ll say! Jennifer Rockwell was an inspi­ration to us all. She had terrific esprit. Per­sistent, tough, fair. Above all tough. In every respect her intellect was tough. Women...Let me rephrase this. Maybe not at the Nobel level, but cosmology is a field where women have made lasting contributions. Jennifer had a reasonable shot at adding to that.

I asked if she had an unorthodox side, a mystical side. I said, You guys are scientists, but some of you end up getting religion, right?

There’s something in that. Knowing the mind of God, and so on. You’re certainly affected by the incredible grandeur and complexity of revealed creation. But don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s reality we’re investigating here. These things we’re study­ing are very strange and very distant, but they’re as real as the ground beneath your feet. The universe is everything religions are supposed to be, and then some, weird, beau­tiful, terrifying, but the universe is the case. Now, there are people around here who pride themselves on saying, “All this is just a physics problem. That’s all.” But Jennifer was more romantic than that. She was grander than that.

Romantic how?

She didn’t feel marginalized, as some of us can do. She felt that this was a central human activity. And that her work was... pro bono. She felt that very strongly.

Excuse me? The study of stars is pro bono?

Now I’m going to speak with some freedom and optimism here. All set? In broad terms it makes sense to argue that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were partly powered by the discoveries of Coper­nicus and Galileo. And Brahe and Kepler and others. You’d think that it would be des­olating to learn that the earth was merely a satellite of the sun and that you’d lost your place at the center of the universe. But it wasn’t. On the contrary. It was energizing, inspiring, liberating. It felt great to be in pos­session of a truth denied to each and every one of your ancestors. We don’t act like we know it, but we’re now on the edge of an equivalent paradigm shift. Or a whole series of them. The universe was still the size of your living room until the big telescopes came along. Now we have an idea of just how fragile and isolated our situation really is. And I believe, as Jennifer did, that when all this kicks in, this information that’s only sixty or seventy years old, we’ll have a very different view of our place and purpose here. And all this rat-race, turf-war, dog-eat-dog stuff we do all day will be revealed for what it is. The revolution is coming, Detective. And it’s a revolution of consciousness. That’s what Jennifer believed.

But you were fucking her, weren’t you, Professor. And you wouldn’t leave Betty-Jean.

I didn’t actually say that last part. Though I kind of wanted to, by then. One of the things I knew about Bax Denziger: He’s a twelve-kids-and-one-wife kind of guy. Still, for all his TV ease and brightness, and his high-saliva enthusiasm, I sensed uneasiness in him, reluctance—qualms. There was something he did and didn’t want to reveal. And I too was in difficulty. I was having to relate his universe to mine. Having to, because Jennifer had linked them. And how about my universe, also real, also there, also the case, and with all its primitive passions. To him, my average day must look like psychotic soap opera—crazed surface activ­ity. Jennifer Rockwell had moved from one world to the other, from revealed creation to the darkness of her bedroom. I pressed on, hoping that he and I, both, would find the necessary words.

Professor, were you surprised when you heard?

Consternated. We all were. Are. Conster­nated and devastated. Ask anybody here. The cleaning ladies. The Deans. That some­one so...that someone of such radiance would choose to extinguish herself. I can’t get my head around it. I really can’t.

She ever get depressed that you knew of? Mood swings? Withdrawal?

No, she was unfailingly cheerful. She got frustrated sometimes. We all do. Because we—we’re permanently on the brink of cli­max. We know so much. But there are holes in our knowledge bigger than the Bootes Void.

Which is?