Joseph Kanon - Stardust

“Dieter says the old road was worse. From the south. In the beginning, not even paved. They had to bring everything up in wagons, with mules. All the pieces of the telescopes. Imagine what that was like.”

The turnoff road for Mt. Wilson seemed narrower, not intended for highway traffic. They had had the sun behind them and now the slopes were becoming shadowy, gathering dark at the bottom. Ben, hunched over the wheel to concentrate on the road, saw what it must be like at night, even headlights swallowed up in the pitch black. Kaltenbach had actually closed his eyes, not wanting to look anymore. There were more trees, forests of conifers.

“Like Germany,” Ostermann said. “So many pines. The Harz Mountains. Well, a long time ago. Heinrich thinks it’s the same.”

“What are you saying?” Kaltenbach said from the back, hearing his name.

“That you should stay here.”

“Another flag-waver. Like Dieter. Even the oranges are better. It’s easy for him. Numbers. You can do that in any language.” He was quiet for a minute. “I’d have a post. At the university. A professor, like him.”

“But you’re still here.”

“You know Dolner, at RKO, is giving Exit Visa to Koerner-he’s the head.”

“You think they would make it now?” Ostermann said politely. “A war story?”

“No, an escape story. That has an appeal anytime. Dolner thinks it’s possible. Even now,” Kaltenbach said stubbornly, a man clutching a lottery ticket.

“Dieter’s fond of Liesl,” Ben said, to change the subject.

“He sees her mother.”

“Were they alike?”

“A physical resemblance. Anna was not so strong. It was hard for her, to live like that, new places. Liesl, maybe she was always an actress. German, now Austrian, French-you learn to adapt. But Anna never did. It killed her, I think. Of course Dieter says it was me, waiting too long. He never saw the nerves, the worry. Not like Liesl that way. To escape with Daniel. The danger. Anna could never have done it.”

Ben saw the solar towers first, poking up through the trees like radio antennas. Beyond them was the dome for the telescope and even farther, on the other side of the complex, another, much larger dome. Scattered between, on side paths, were wooden frame buildings where the staff lived, like a permanent summer camp under the pines. Liesl’s car was turning left to one of these, a long white building with green trim. A man came out to greet Dieter, signaling Ben to park on the side.

“There’s been a little mix-up about the rooms,” Dieter said when they joined him, annoyed but trying to be pleasant. “Professor Davis brought some graduate students, so we’ll have to double-up. They won’t be in the way-they’re working with the sixty-inch-but it does mean sharing. Ben, how about you and Hans? Then Heinrich with me. John will show you where you are.”

Professor Davis, full of dates and statistics, showed them the grounds, a visitor talk he’d obviously given before. The first tower in 1904, then the sixty-inch telescope, finally the one-hundred-inch in 1917, still the largest in the world. The dome was on its own promontory, reached by footbridge over a shallow chasm and a reservoir pond. It was getting dark now, flashlights needed on the path.

“The site is remarkable,” Davis was saying. “It has the best ‘seeing’ in the country.”

“Seeing?” Kaltenbach said.

“The best conditions. Very little atmospheric turbulence.”

“But so close to the city,” Ostermann said. “The lights.”

“Yes, but even so. It’s the turbulence that matters. You know if you stand in a swimming pool and look down, the water moves, your feet seem to move. Turbulence is like that. We see the stars twinkle but they don’t-it’s just air moving across their light. But up here, with the good seeing, they’re steady. Well, you’ll see later. Shall we have some dinner now?”

“They don’t twinkle?” Ostermann said. “It’s a little disappointing.”

Davis looked at him, puzzled.

“All the poems,” Ostermann added lamely. “Songs.”

“Well, songs,” Davis said, at a loss.

Ben hung back as they got near the dining room.

“Now what?” he said to Liesl. “Am I supposed to sneak out while he’s sleeping?”

She smiled. “Like a teenager.” She touched his arm. “Maybe it’s enough for now. To know we want to. Don’t look like that. What are you thinking?”

“Ever hear of Arnold Wallace?” he said, his head still in the letter.

“No,” she said, an abrupt change of mood.

He went down the sheet in his mind, one typed name after another. “Raymond Gilbert?”

“Who are these people?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“More friends of Daniel.”

“People he might have mentioned.”

She looked away. “Not to me.”

The graduate students left as soon as they’d finished eating, but the emigre group lingered, talking with Eric, Professor Davis’s assistant, who had now taken charge of them. Eric was tall and gawky, but eager to please, consumed by astronomy. It seemed to Ben a conversation from another world, beamed in from one of the stars, not nine miles up the slope from Pasadena.

“The hundred-inch is really the point now. Mt. Wilson began as a solar observatory but after Professor Hubble’s work, there was a shift to nighttime research. Without the hundred-inch, modern cosmology-”

Ben drifted and he could see the others were having trouble keeping up. Dieter, to whom all this was familiar, seemed to be monitoring their response, glancing at each of them, ready to interrupt if things became hopelessly tangled. Ben felt the envelope in his pocket. Maybe the names were arranged by studios. How many groups had there been? Five majors, maybe a few Poverty Row companies. But none of the names were familiar. Technicians, screenwriters? He hadn’t heard of Schaeffer at Fox until Minot’s files. But not in the phone book. They couldn’t all be unlisted, not technicians.

“The key was proving that spiral nebulae are distant galaxies. Outside the Milky Way. In other words, the universe is expanding.”

“Expanding,” Ostermann said thoughtfully. “What does it mean? Oh, I know,” he said, waving off Eric, “there’s an explanation, of course. But how do we imagine such a thing? The universe expanding. How do we even imagine the universe?”

“You don’t have to imagine it. You can see it,” Eric said, getting up.

Outside they trailed behind him to the big dome, the sky all lit up.

“If you look that way,” he said, pointing, “you’ll see the section we’re studying at the moment. There. Keep it in mind when we go inside. You’ll see how much more the telescope picks up.”

It seemed impossible there could be more, the stars already too numerous to count, much less name. As Davis had predicted, they were steady lights, not twinkling.

The telescope was more than just the giant shaft that shot out through the dome’s opening. There was the heavy platform with its gears, the series of reflectors and magnifying properties to explain, and Eric grew more excited as he talked, a boy with his wonderful toy. Ben smiled to himself, thinking of the Hal Jaspers at the Moviola, both mechanics at heart. But why would Minot want technicians? Recognizable faces. Nobody cared about the Hal Jaspers. Maybe these weren’t the intended names, just ways to get to them. Sources, like Danny.

They had made an adjustment to one of the mirrors that brought the sky into sharp focus, a swath of stars leaping out of the black. Ben stared at it for a minute, as silent as the others, dazzled. He felt himself getting smaller, a speck, reduced to nothing by a vast indifference. The universe expanded without us. None of it mattered-not the preview audience’s reaction or whether Julie Sherman could sing or whether Danny had filed reports. They were just frames flying by in a movie we’d made to keep us awake in the dark.