No longer afraid, David had wished the night would never end. When his father’s deep breathing confirmed he’d fallen asleep, David had marveled at the Milky Way from the cocoon of his sleeping bag. So many stars, he’d thought, and every one a gigantic sun like ours. Maybe even with planets of their own, his dad had explained. As he’d felt his heart beat and tried to imagine the immensity of the universe, David thought his brain would burst. Then, from out of the void, he had heard the voice of God speaking directly to him, sounding like Oz booming from beyond the stellar curtain to proclaim the glory of His creation.
Years later, when Dmitri had shared the reminiscence with his mentor, McPinsky had a provocative explanation. “Your child’s mind was hardwired to respond to its first glimpse of the infinite, thus evoking the auditory image of the divine creator.”
Dmitri again shut his eyes and recollected the details of McPinsky’s surprising response. The professor had told him about the sensory deprivation experiments pioneered by the neuroscientist and dolphin researcher John Lilly. “Lilly immersed his human subjects in a flotation tank of body-temperature water while wearing opaque eye patches and ear plugs. After a brief period of sensory starvation, many experienced auditory and visual hallucinations. Lilly hypothesized that the brain is so conditioned to process information, it generates its own ‘lucid daydreams’ to compensate for the absence of external sensations.”
Dmitri was a trained skeptic, steeped in the empirical principles of the scientific method. “Sounds intriguing, Professor, but a single study isn’t conclusive.”
“Later researchers tested subjects in sensory deprivation rooms and confirmed Lilly’s observations,” replied McPinsky. “They concluded that the brain superimposes its own patterns when deprived of sensory stimuli from the environment. Depending on the circumstances, it’s unable to distinguish whether the source is internal or external, real or imagined.”
Shortly after their conversation, McPinsky had confounded the scientific community, going public with a journal article, “Cultural Psychopathology of Interspecies Communication Deprivation,” about the profound impact of human existential isolation. “Humanity is achingly alone in the vastness of the cosmos. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans abhor the vacuum of isolation. Our intrinsic nature compels us to connect with others and to share our inner selves. Until now, however, our species has been unable or unwilling to have a dialogue with another intelligent species on this planet or from anywhere else in the universe.”
McPinsky hypothesized that, in a manner similar to Lilly’s experiments, the collective unconscious region of our minds fabricates the illusion of contact to substitute for the absence of interspecies communications. “This,” he said, “gives rise to various paranormal phenomena such as close encounters with spirits and ET’s and even conversations with God.”
Dmitri had been galvanized by McPinsky’s challenge to humanity’s collective ego. It was part of why he still loved the professor: for his ultra, out-of-the-box mindset and the chutzpah to “stick his neck out” for his contentious theories.
“Over there!” Greg’s voice shattered the silence.
Shocked back to the present, Dmitri saw a green bolt of light blazing in the heavens.
“It’s erupting from those domes.” Greg pointed up the hill.
“The LURE Observatory!” exclaimed Dmitri. “I’ve seen those domes before, but I never realized they could shoot laser beams into the sky.”
“Hey, let’s check it out. Maybe we can talk our way into a tour of the place.”
“Absolutely! The Goddess of Fire is restless tonight. Pele’s sending us a message—a beacon to guide us to new discoveries.”
“Or a warning omen about the perils of a McPinsky-inspired quest.”
“It’s freezing out here. Let’s go stargaze.”
THE LASER RANGER
LURE Observatory, Haleakala Summit—early evening
“Watch out!” Greg gripped the passenger door safety handle.
Dmitri had nearly driven off the cliff when the flare of another laser arrow illuminated the stark volcanic moonscape. “Sorry. I feel like a fighter pilot in a dogfight.” He fought with the steering wheel as he banked left and right up the winding road leading to the LURE Observatory. The car’s high beams were as anemic as a glorified flashlight in the pitch black night.
Greg sighed with relief when they pulled into the observatory’s parking lot. When they opened the doors, their faces felt the sting of the frigid mountain air.
“And I thought you were nuts when you suggested jackets for this trip.” Greg followed Dmitri’s lead and slipped a poncho-style windbreaker over his hoodie. “I’d feel even better in a down parka.”
The two Californians stood shivering, their arms clutched to their chests. Dmitri glanced ahead to admire the floodlit, Kremlin-like profile of a single-story block building bookended by towering domed structures. Approaching the only illuminated door, he thought about the spiel that would hopefully gain them entrance into the facilities. Despite the warning sign posted on the door, ACCESS RESTRICTED TO GOVERNMENT PERSONNEL, they were undeterred. Greg and Dmitri never passed over an opportunity to engage other researchers, anytime or anyplace.
“Let’s just stick to our standard SoCalSci introductions,” Dmitri advised.
Greg pressed the button for the door entry buzzer. After a few impatient moments, he pressed it again. Dmitri felt the temperature plummeting and watched the swirling vapors of their breath vanish into the night sky. Greg began pounding on the door with his fists. Still no one answered. As they started to walk away, the door opened and Dmitri saw the faint crescent of an ethereal Asian face.
“Hello,” said the face. “Welcome to the LURE Observatory.” She poked her head further out the door, unveiling a Gioconda smile. “May I help you, gentlemen?”
Dmitri felt soothed by the gentle waves of her voice. She enunciated her consonants as melodiously as vowels, as if she were speaking English with a French accent. He’d dismissed his friends’ stories about their love-at-first-sight encounters, but what about “love at first sound?” He’d always felt awkward in the presence of a beautiful woman, but a beautiful voice?
“I’m Dmitri, and this is my friend and colleague, Greg.” He tapped a fist to his associate’s shoulder. “We’re from SoCalSci University on a whale watching vacation. We saw a laser flash from the lookout, and curiosity propelled us to your doorstep.”
“Well.” She hesitated. Still peeking out the door, her sober gaze scanned him top to bottom, and Dmitri held his breath. Her eyes shifted, ping-ponging over to Greg and back to him. At the conclusion of her due diligence assessment, she stepped into full view. “My name is Melanie. I’m sorry there are no whales here at ten thousand feet, but I do fire a mean laser.” She flashed Dmitri a dimpled grin, then fished into a lab coat pocket and extracted a business card.
Dmitri read the inscription: MELANIE MARI, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII, LASER RANGER. His eyes locked onto the last two words. “Laser ranger” sounded like some mythic hero in a Buck Rogers tale. “I do declare,” he drawled. “I’ve met forest rangers and a Texas Ranger, but this is the first time I’ve ever even heard of a laser ranger. I’m actually just a humble associate professor of engineering.”
“And I’m just a garden-variety mathematician,” said Greg.
“I’m familiar with SoCalSci’s reputation. You have more Nobel Prize winners,” she tapped an index finger to her temple, “than any other university.”
“We were wondering if you could give us a brief tour of the facility?” asked Dmitri. “Of course, if you’re ever visiting our neck of the woods, we’d be more than happy to reciprocate.”
“We’re normally too busy to deal with tourists’ special requests.” Melanie’s slender fingers caressed a silvery, oval-shaped, yin-yang pendant. “I suppose I could spare a few minutes to show you the duties of a laser ranger in exchange for some details about your professional credentials. Do you two h
ave business cards?”
They whipped out their wallets and presented their cards for her inspection. “Well, that seems to be in order. It’s cold. Come on in and take off your jackets.” She waved them inside. “This is your lucky night.”
Melanie whisked them into the central portion of the main building. Dmitri saw facilities akin to SoCalSci’s Mechanical Engineering Lab. An array of cubicles, framed by four-foot by six-foot padded wall panels, formed the perimeter of a roughly forty-foot, square-shaped room. A cluster of computer workstations and a pool of ergonomic office chairs dominated the center of an open-plan workspace.
During a brief round of introductions to her two youthful colleagues, Melanie’s take-charge attitude impressed Dmitri. She directed her guests’ attention to a pair of stations adorned by a cheerful menagerie of stuffed marine animals. “We program and operate the telescopes and the laser from these two computers.” She branched her arms and pointed left and right. “The domes for the telescopes are located at opposite ends of the control room. There are operational stations next to each of the telescopes.” With a beckoning wave, she said, “Follow me.”
The two professors trailed Melanie’s echoing metallic footsteps up the stairs of a freestanding spiral staircase. They emerged onto a second-story platform which served as the observation deck in the seven-meter-diameter dome. The exposed girders, beams, and support structures reminded Dmitri of a giant erector set.
Melanie donned a wireless communication headset as if crowning herself with a high-tech tiara. She relaxed her back and leaned against the framework supporting the various gears, belts, and motors that controlled the telescope. “The transmitting telescope has been modified to accept the collimated beam from the laser as an input source to its forty-centimeter objective lens. Notice the laser is adjacent to the telescope.” Her amplified voice reverberated throughout the room, enveloping Dmitri in its embrace.
“What a beautiful set of instruments.” Dmitri gazed appreciatively, first at Melanie, and then upon the gleaming assemblage of black-and-white tube structures housing the array of large mirrors and electronic components. “I never expected an encounter with such sophisticated equipment here on the mountain.”
Melanie stood center stage, her silver earrings and yin-yang pendant glistening beneath an intense spotlight. “I’ll bet you didn’t know the LURE Observatory was built in 1974 and that LURE is an acronym for Lunar Ranging Experiment?”
“Not a clue,” replied Greg, “but it’d be a great Jeopardy question.”
“You SoCalSci guys don’t miss a beat.” Melanie pointed up at the sky. “With the LURE telescope, our UH scientists can measure the time it takes for the laser’s light pulses to bounce back from reflectors on the moon.”
“You’re telling us there are laser reflectors on the moon?” Dmitri glanced over at Greg.
“Everyone remembers the grainy videos of Neil Armstrong and his merry band of Apollo astronauts doing kangaroo bounces on the moon. What people don’t know is that they installed the reflectors just for the LURE experiment. We can measure the distance between the moon and the earth to an accuracy of less than two centimeters.”
Dmitri fiddled with the touch screen on his iPhone. “Outstanding! That’s a precision of one part in ten billion.”
“Not too shabby, huh?” Melanie’s smile accentuated her cheekbones. “Taking the measurements at different times of the day and month, it’s just basic trigonometry to accurately compute the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates, to measure the length of a day based upon the rate of change of the Earth’s rotation, and to calculate the precession of the Earth’s axis.”
“Answering another Jeopardy question, it cost the U.S. taxpayers twenty-five billion dollars to land on the moon,” said Greg. “Considering that the reflectors went along for the ride, it’s quite a bargain in return for the amount of science that’s been reaped.”
“Forty years later and they’re still working,” said Melanie. “My all-time favorite LURE discovery is the lunar orbit measurement accurate enough to confirm Einstein’s prediction using general relativity.”
“You reminded me of my all-time favorite Einstein quote,” said Dmitri. “‘Spend a week in Maui and it seems like a day. Spend a day at work and it seems like a week. That’s relativity.’”
“That’s special relativity,” she replied. “But I can’t picture Albert Einstein in a speedo.” Melanie’s laughter resonated with a distinct musical quality, delighting Dmitri.
Greg was in a more serious mood. “I recently read an article in Scientific American about the measurements of continental drift. I vaguely remember the mid-Pacific plate is moving in a northwesterly direction and dragging the Hawaiian Islands along with it.” He motioned with his arm to illustrate the point. “Does the data from LURE confirm this?”
“Correcto, about five inches per year, moving toward Japan. This is really fascinating for us locals because it explains the formation and spacing of the Hawaiian Islands predicted by plate tectonics. Here, follow me.” She paused and, with a dancer’s grace, motioned them toward a freestanding whiteboard.
While Greg asked the questions, Dmitri’s own visual tracking system scanned the contours of Melanie’s East-meets-West fusion features, shaped, he surmised, by the merging of Asian, Pacific, and North American genetic tectonic plates. He was pleasantly distracted by the multiple images of her movements reflected back to him from the glass and metal surfaces of the telescope.
Melanie grabbed a marker pen and drew a schematic map of the Hawaiian Islands. “Geologists have discovered a huge column of upwelling lava that lies at a fixed location called the mid-Pacific Ridge. As the ocean floor moves over this hot spot at about five inches a year, the lava rises to the surface and creates a steady succession of new volcanoes.”
“I’m picturing a gigantic conveyor belt of volcanic islands spreading away from the source,” said Dmitri.
“The Hawaiian archipelago of nineteen islands was built by this lava plume over millions of years,” she told them. “New islands are being born as we speak.”
“Which is great for your tourist industry,” interjected Greg. “Sorry to drift off of the subject, but we noticed the laser beam had a greenish hue—” He stopped in mid-sentence when Melanie started scribbling some esoteric numbers on the whiteboard.
“The YAG laser produces one-centimeter-diameter light pulses of 200 picosecond duration every 200 milliseconds,” she said. “The wavelength of the light of a YAG laser is 5,320 angstroms, corresponding to the visible green light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.”
Dmitri cleared his throat and raised a hand like a schoolboy. “What’s a YAG?”
“YAG is an acronym for yttrium, aluminum, garnet crystal.”
Dmitri smiled. “Only a laser ranger could shed such a stimulating light on the optics of angstroms and picoseconds.”
“Just think,” she replied. “In the four-billion-year history of our solar system, no photon of light could make the 500,000-mile, round-trip trek to the moon and come back to the exact location it started from.” Melanie extended her arms and twirled a full three-hundred-sixty degrees. “That is,” she added, “until lasers were invented and the reflectors were delivered to the moon’s surface. And I’m the lucky laser ranger operating all of this amazing technology, firing the zillions of photons heavenward.”
When she arched her back and reached for the sky, Dmitri was mesmerized. He’d never imagined a planetarium show could combine astronomy with graceful dance movements.
“Even then,” she continued, “only a handful survives the round-trip. We need a special amplifier to capture and detect those few photons so we can measure the time of their journey.”
“Those photons remind me of the few salmon who survive the round-trip to spawn their species,” said Greg.
“Very interesting,” replied Melanie, looking thoughtful. “I never thought about it quite that way.”
“So much for the c
onspiracy theory that the moon landings were a hoax,” said Dmitri.
“Yes,” she said. “We’re an adaptable species, but it’s also our nature to cling to the security of existing belief systems. There’s been a status quo resistance to new ideas throughout history.”
“Like the Creationists rejecting the theory of evolution,” added Greg. “Although we’re just a few DNA base pair degrees of separation removed from the genomes of our simian relatives.”
Dmitri nodded his agreement. “It’s unfortunately true. Humanity’s vision is skewed. We filter objective awareness through the lens of our insecurities and ideological bias.”
Melanie grasped her pendant. “That’s interesting. I’ve been reading about the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti. He advocated that the ideal state of right thought is attained by awareness without judgment.”
Dmitri’s mouth was agape. “Simply amazing,” he replied. “My college advisor and mentor quotes Krishnamurti.”
“Great minds think alike.” She tossed him wink. “Bet you didn’t know that, in 1924, Joseph Campbell accidently bumped into Krishnamurti while sailing back from Europe. Although Campbell was only twenty years old, they discussed Asian philosophy and the Hindu and Indian belief systems.”
“That I didn’t know,” said Dmitri, impressed by the breadth of Melanie’s interests. “Their conversation probably influenced Campbell’s ideas on the relationship of myth and the human psyche.”
“Very cool,” replied Greg. “We should all be so fortunate as to chance upon such an inspirational mentor.” He winked at Dmitri.
“Here’s my take on the photon round-trip,” Dmitri announced. “It’s a metaphor for the process of self-discovery. We learn about ourselves by building a bridge of symbols with others and reflecting upon information reflected back to us.”
The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond Page 4
