The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  They don’t talk much to each other at this early stage. Maggie tells the telescope operator how they want to use the telescope, and gives him the list of coordinates of their galaxies.

  Then the first image of the night appears; two galaxies entwined, with their dense white centres twisted by tidal forces. It’s easy to see the dynamics of this interaction; the gravitational attraction between the galaxies making them move towards each other, and most likely merge together in the future after some unimaginably long period of time. But the image isn’t quite right, the light from the galaxy centres spills over to contaminate the fainter, outer regions which aren’t showing up well. Jeanette and Maggie adjust exposure times and try again.

  Jeanette’s worried that the set-up of the telescope is wrong, that their observations won’t work. And then she wonders why she’s worried about this. If things don’t work out, if she can’t get another job, this may be her last trip to Chile. Understanding galaxy evolution is such a small thing to worry about, compared to the rest of her life.

  But the next image is stunning. The galaxies look like underwater creatures, trailing ghostly arms through the black sea of the sky. Jeanette starts to relax. It will work. She has a future.

  She and Maggie go on several observing trips each year, and they always have the same conversations. They talk about the galaxy clusters they’re studying, and the way that the larger galaxies in those clusters seem to interact and feed off each other, cannibalising smaller ones and spewing out stars and gas. They talk about the food at the residential lodge, and complain about the endless avocado sandwiches. They remind each other of the possibly apocryphal student who lost control or lost patience, no one is ever sure which, and froze a tomato in the vat of liquid nitrogen before smashing it against the curved wall of the telescope dome. Jeanette can imagine the tomato shattering on the metal, its brilliant red shards melting and congealing. There’s no trace of red now. Everything in the dome is drab grey; the walls and floor, even the long tube of the telescope itself. The slot cut into the dome for the sky provides the only respite. If you go into the dome at night, the stars above your head seem more real than the dull telescope.

  The night’s routine is established and Jeanette is able to escape outside for a moment. As ever, after spending any time in the control room, her senses feel almost smothered in the new-found space, and the sheer weight of the starlight takes her by surprise. There are so many stars in this sky they seem like a substance, eating away at the blackness. Inside, it’s easy to forget that the sky is not actually a paper chart or a database, but a reality rich with knowledge, an ocean teeming with discoveries waiting to be caught. Standing out here, with the cool air brushing across her face, and the dust beneath her boots, it’s obvious that the control room is just a shadow-world, a bad copy of this one.

  Out here, the sky can be overwhelming. It presses down on her and there’s nowhere else to go, nothing else to look at. But it’s not the same sky as at home, where only a few stars are able to hammer through the heavy, dirty air. There, they are so distant and spread apart that it makes her feel lonely just to look at their feeble light. Here, she is in a crowd.

  She quickly gets her sea legs as she navigates her way around, from the jewels of the Southern Cross to the fragile puff of the Large Magellanic Cloud, and on to the crowded centre of the Milky Way. There is a rhythm involved in moving from star to star that she can match to her breathing, so at the peak of each breath she arrives at a star and then swings herself onto the next one, spanning the darkness.

  Then she goes back inside and back to the relentlessness of the data gathering. The telescope acquires each galaxy, spends ten minutes locked onto it and then reads out the resulting image to their screen. The rest of the night is parcelled up into these ten minute slots, and Jeanette and Maggie must spend their time staring at the screen, scrutinising pixels.

  ‘I hate this job,’ Jeanette mutters to herself at one point, aware that she is gritting her teeth.

  ‘Pardon?’ Maggie is so close to the screen, her nose is practically touching it.

  ‘I mean, it’s ridiculous. We’re not looking at the sky, we’re not even looking through the telescope.’ She waves a hand around the dusty room. ‘We’re shut in here, cut off from reality, and we’re trying to interpret it via a computer screen.’

  Maggie turns away from the screen, and gestures at all the computers, the racks of tapes, the remains of their sandwiches and the crowds of dirty mugs. ‘Looks pretty real to me.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Jeanette’s mood subsides. Right now, she just wants to go to sleep. She doesn’t want to check images for cosmic ray glitches or dust in the telescope. She doesn’t want to look at the spectrum of a galaxy and have to convert the numerical wavelengths into corresponding colours in her mind. Four thousand angstroms is blue, six thousand is green and eight thousand is red. Add them all up and you get a rainbow you’ll never see, at least not here in the control room. This place is about controlling your emotions and analysing data, so she shuts up and carries on, trying not to yawn.

  The next day she wakes up in the late afternoon and hurries outside to check for clouds in the sky. The observatory is surrounded by mountains and she finds herself disliking them for their perfection and unreality. The rocks are too jagged, the sky too uniformly blue, everything is too precise here. There are no distractions, no bushes or grass to blur the lines of the earth. No animals or birds to break the relentless silence. She wants to scuttle away and burrow under imaginary damp leaves and into forgiving earth. She longs for Edinburgh, with its uneven pavements and grubby shop fronts. She misses the unpainted windows of her flat, even the stains on the carpets. Shortcomings go unnoticed there. Here, everything stands out in sharp relief against the mountains.

  She’s vaguely aware that bad things happened in this country some time ago. The first time she came here, soldiers manned roadblocks all along the Pan-American highway. She remembers having her passport inspected by a bored teenager in an army uniform, when she was on an interminable bus journey up to the observatory from Santiago. But none of the people at the observatory, neither the European astronomers nor the Chilean telescope operators, talk about politics. They swerve around it, as if avoiding a dead animal on the road.

  That night the sky clouds over and Jeanette and Maggie can’t do anything. The telescope is set up and calibrated and the list of objects to be observed is marked in different colours according to priority, but they just have to wait for the cloud to clear. It happens occasionally even at such high altitudes, but there’s still a sense of uselessness and fatigue in the control room.

  Maggie’s supposed to be writing a paper, but Jeanette notices that she spends most of her time staring at the wall, as if it’s a proxy for the sky.

  The telescope operator is talking on the phone in Spanish, and eating biscuits at the same time. His desk is covered with layers of newspapers and biscuit wrappers, archaeological evidence of years of observing.

  ‘What happened with your last job application?’ Maggie swings round to face her.

  ‘Nothing.’ Jeanette doesn’t want to think about it.

  ‘Was it a permanent lectureship that you were applying for?’

  Jeanette just nods.

  ‘Well, did you get any feedback, at least?’ Maggie persists.

  ‘Nope. Nada.’ She may as well have flushed her application down the loo.

  Maggie goes back to studying the wall. ‘Perhaps you’re being too ambitious. Nearly everyone at our age is still a post-doc. Just wait a bit. Be patient.’

  Jeanette sighs. It’s ok for Maggie, she seems content to be a post-doc, changing jobs every two years, moving house, shifting about the world with all her belongings in her suitcase. She’s based in Heidelberg now, but before that it was Japan, and before that it was — Jeanette can’t even remember. She wonders what it’s like, being foreign all the time.

  The telescope operator has finished his lengthy phone call
and is now talking to Maggie, who can speak Spanish. Jeanette can’t tell what they’re talking about, and the meaningless words buzz irritatingly about her head. She looks at Maggie for enlightenment, but gets no response. She feels ignored.

  She decides to check her emails for the nth time, but there’s nothing interesting; just another one from the invisible woman, asking if she wants to meet up again. She contacted this woman through an advert a few months ago, after a particularly lean patch. But when they finally met, she walked past the woman three times before noticing her. Later, as they wandered along the beach at Cramond, and the wind hustled sand and rubbish around their feet, Jeanette found herself being hemmed in by the woman’s small words. When she tried to respond, her descriptions of her own life sounded equally circumscribed. She hoped the physical act might rescue them. But in bed, she tried not to shudder as the woman said, ‘That was nice,’ with a wistfulness in her voice which infuriated Jeanette. She left shortly afterwards, slamming the front door behind her, and the noise it made gave her more satisfaction than the tiny orgasm she had had buried under the sheets, the woman’s diligent hands working on her.

  Now, she deletes the email without replying. Surely, it’s better to be alone, with no limitations?

  At three in the morning she’s eaten her sandwiches and drunk a lot of coffee. They have to wait here all night, just in case the sky does clear. Now the wind is picking up, which may be a good sign; it may sweep the cloud off the mountains.

  She gets up and walks around for a bit, but then Maggie sighs and puts down her pen. They look at each other but don’t speak. Jeanette decides to leave the room.

  It’s not that dark outside; the cloud diffuses the moonlight and smears it out across the sky. Jeanette stands just outside the door and listens to the wind. It has a curiously tinny sound as it bounces off the metal domes; someone might be rattling a baking sheet in the sky.

  She sets off down the path that leads away from the telescope. She knows she shouldn’t be wandering around by herself at night without telling anyone where she is going. Those are the rules here. It’s supposed to be dangerous. But Jeanette has had enough of being stuck inside; out here is better.

  But out here is too windy. She battles against the wind like a cartoon character but she can barely stand up. She stumbles back up the narrow tarmac path, and by the time she is back at the telescope she’s out of breath. She pushes at the door to the control room, but as it opens she can hear voices; Maggie and the telescope operator. She listens for a moment; the voices are hushed, as if they’re telling each other secrets. She doesn’t want to listen any more. She shuts the door and creeps around the side until she comes to another door. When she opens this one, it takes her straight into the dome.

  Inside, she stands on the circumference of the room looking up at the rectangle of sky. When her eyes get used to the dark she sets out for the centre, where the telescope is. She has to resist an impulse to reach out and stroke it, as if it were an animal shackled to the concrete floor. The dome judders as the wind picks up and she wonders if it could be unpeeled from its base and made to sail into the sky.

  The thin amount of light in here can only glint off small pieces of things. It hints at something else, something larger buried in the darkness. A nest of wires coils out of the back of the telescope and snakes away across the floor to the door on the far side. Beyond that is the control room. Here in this mysterious space, it seems impossible to go through that door and enter a world of other people, fluorescent light, and stained coffee cups. Perhaps she can shelter here, at least for the rest of tonight.

  But suddenly there is a tearing, crashing sound above her, not safely in the sky, but right here in the dome. And as she stands, terrified, the light that she has grown used to diminishes and disappears. She is in darkness. And it’s not the velvet-soft darkness that she imagined, the darkness that would wrap itself around her and make friends with her and stroke her face. This darkness continues to be filled with a sharp noise, no longer from above her but right in front of her. She senses something fly past her face, cold air brushes her cheeks and she screams. She falls to the floor.

  Light hits her eyes.

  ‘Jeanette?’ Maggie’s voice sounds thin. More footsteps; the telescope operator is there too. ‘Are you ok?’

  She manages to get to her knees, but realises she is shaking.

  ‘For God’s sake! What are you doing in here? Why didn’t you tell us?’

  She remains kneeling on the cold floor in front of them. Perhaps she is thanking them for something.

  ‘It’s a good thing we heard you scream. Juan managed to stop the telescope.’

  So it was the telescope that almost hit her. She wants to shut her eyes again, to block it all out. People have been killed by telescopes. She’s standing now, her feet reasonably firm on the floor. She can’t see anything beyond the torchlight burning into her face. Someone grabs her elbow and she realises it is Maggie trying to steer her away. As she moves, something inside her mouth loosens and she’s finally able to speak. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Juan was parking the telescope for the night. He didn’t know you were in here.’ They’re back in the control room now. Maggie pushes her into a chair and sits down opposite her. ‘Why did you leave?’

  ‘Why not? Nothing was happening.’ She can detect a tiny shred of guilt in Maggie’s words. If this were serious, they would all be in trouble, not just her. But going into the telescope dome without telling anyone is a cardinal sin, she would be in the most trouble. Now, she’s not sure why she did it. She just wanted to be in a different place. She stares over Maggie’s head at a star chart pinned to the wall.

  ‘What were you doing in there?’

  Aldeberan, Betelgeuse… The names of the stars are comforting. And it must almost be the end of the night by now, almost time to go to the residence and sleep. She’s aware that Maggie wants her to speak. Riga, Altair, Andromeda… Maggie’s hair is twisted around one hand and her eyes look too small, as if they’ve retreated from something. Perhaps she is upset by what happened. How does Jeanette know what Maggie feels? Behind them, out of sight, she is aware of the telescope operator. He hasn’t spoken since she entered this room. His version of events is unknowable to her, and she thinks she prefers it that way.

  ‘Why did you take the risk?’

  She wishes she knew the answer to that. ‘It’s alright, Mags, I’m fine.’

  But Maggie persists. ‘You can’t do things like that. It’s not fair to me or to Juan. You’re not the only one here.’

  ‘Look, I just needed a bit of space.’ She tries to laugh. ‘You know what it’s like being cooped up in this room with the same people night after night.’

  ‘That’s our job, Jeanette. It’s what we do.’ And Jeanette realises, surprised, that Maggie’s voice is hard. Perhaps Maggie really might be fed up with her.

  Perhaps she should just throw herself into her work and not do anything else. She knows plenty of other astronomers who live like that. There’s someone at Cambridge who never goes anywhere apart from his office and the canteen. He became a professor at the age of twenty-nine. She wonders what he thinks about on cloudy nights.

  The next afternoon she sits in the canteen at a table by herself and watches the other astronomers staring out over the mountains and sky, waiting for the evening.

  There are no differences to the days here; time goes round in circles and the sky rotates overhead. That’s what makes Jeanette want to scream, to be boxed in by time as well as space.

  That night the control room is silent. Jeanette and Maggie sit at opposite ends of the room, the telescope operator in between them. Jeanette knows she should speak, should explain why she behaved the way she did. But she’s not sure if she can trace the thread of her actions from cause to effect. Why did she decide to go into the dome? She can’t think of a reason. Boredom? Curiosity? No real reason at all. But that won’t do for Maggie. So much of their work here is driven by r
outine; setting up the telescope each evening, taking the calibration images, working methodically through the list of targets. This is not a place to be impulsive, to take risks.

  There are two ways of measuring time at a telescope; two separate displays on the console tell Jeanette the ordinary earth-based time, and also sidereal time. The time of stars. The two loop round each other, one lagging behind the other and then leap-frogging it, depending on the time of year. Tonight the sidereal time is two hours behind the ordinary time and Jeanette can’t stop staring at the large red numbers ticking away, even though it reminds her of her mother compulsively watching the TV. Watching and waiting for the future to be brought to her, because the present is so unbearable.

  ‘Jeanette, look at this!’

  It’s four in the morning, the dead hour when all you can do is try and stay awake, but Maggie sounds alert, excited even. This is almost the first thing that Maggie has said to her all night so, intrigued, she stands behind her to get a better look at the screen, yawning discreetly into her hand.

  She sees oval blobs of different sizes, the largest as big as a thumbnail, and there are about thirty of them making up a cluster of galaxies. A thin arc, no wider than a couple of pixels, appears to join two galaxies near the centre of the image.

  ‘Nice,’ says Jeanette, but something is puzzling her. ‘That’s the wrong galaxy.’ She points at one of them, at its faint whirlpool arms.