Emma Richler - Feed My Dear Dogs

It is possible that on some long nights in the observatory, Hubble sees exploding shells in the showers of light that are galaxies rushing away from him in every direction, or Jack Johnson, maybe, dropping to the floor in a knockout punch, Jack at his feet, a man seeing stars. Liar, fabulist. Never mind. It’s a tiny flaw in his makeup, whatever keeps a man going on a long night in a dangerous world, fantasy nothing but a deep breath to someone else. It depends how you look at it.

A tiny flaw.

When the Hubble Space Telescope is launched in 1990, all the starmen huddle around the computer terminals for the first images from deep space, but the Hubble does not focus, it has spherical aberration. They believed they had built the most perfect mirror in the world, testing its shape before launch, again and again, by way of little mirrors and lenses and measuring rods ½m long and lcm wide, but in the end the mirror is too flat, the light reflecting from the edge and from the centre focusing in two different places. How did it happen?

The Science of Deduction and Analysis.

It is discovered that the cap of one measuring rod is chipped, a 2mm fleck of black paint falling away to expose a chink of metal, deflecting light, and so distorting the dimensions of the most perfect mirror in the world by one-fiftieth the width of a human hair.

Watson: You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae .

Holmes: I appreciate their importance .

The science community at NASA falls apart. Hope has become a problem for them. Astronomers are carted off by guards to rehab centres where they lie next to each other in identical beds, suffering from drug and alcohol abuse, from hopelessness, a state of temporary aberration lasting long enough only for the starmen to swing loose a while, and take the time to make a little order out of chaos.

In three years’ time they are ready to correct the optics on the Hubble, installing a new camera and fitting a new mirror to match the flaw in reverse, and so cancel it out, a mission entrusted to seven astronauts who will go on five space walks to achieve it, stepping out from their space shuttle named Endeavour , just like the ship James Cook captained in 1768 under the auspices of the Royal Society, sailing off to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun and finding time also to locate New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and come up with fine ideas about diet and sickness and high doses of vitamin C. In three years aboard the Endeavour , not one of James’s men suffers from scurvy.

Navigation is an art.

1993. The astronauts step out with great resolve and fortitude and the special encouragement of their space commander, a leader of men.

‘We are inspired,’ he says, before the first walk. ‘We are ready! Let’s go fix this thing!’

The men fit the new mirror, they install a camera.

‘Good work, guys!’

Now the starmen huddle around their screens again, pointing the HST into clouds of gas where new stars are forming, and in an experiment named Hubble Deep Field, they focus the telescope for ten days on the least obscured, the most bland patch of sky they can find, looking for the earliest light from the earliest stars from the beginning of time, and in that seemingly bland patch of sky, they see some four thousand new galaxies, but these galaxies are fully formed, kids, as one astronomer puts it, not babies at all. What is going on here?

The scientists realise they are not looking back far enough, and to probe what they call the Dark Ages and see galaxies taking shape and coming together and changing in time, they will need to build a new telescope with a more perfect mirror, so large it will have to fold away. Will it work? one of the starmen is asked.

‘I can’t tell you how long it will take or how much it will cost,’ he replies, leaping around a model of a folding mirror. ‘But it will work. Eventually,’ he adds, smiling, because hope is not a problem for him any more.

Mrs Rosenfeld, my mother has unknown origins. Nobody knows them. But one day, a soldier comes for her and takes her home with him, because it’s a dangerous world and everyone needs protection from something.

Be prepared, the soldier learned that, he remembers everything. The night before he chooses you, he lays out his things, he is ready, he will be well turned out, he can see himself in his shoes and they are the right shoes, always the right shoes, no matter what emergency situation he is in. He has ironed his shirt, Sunday best, the cuffs still fine. He has filled the stove for tomorrow. He won’t be gone long and when he is back, the soldier will be two not one. It’s late, he’s not sleepy .

He fills his pipe and steps on to the little balcony. No smoking inside, she doesn’t like it, it makes her cough, it makes her tired, she is always tired. No one in the courtyard, no one about but him, and he stares through the archway to the big tree, he loves that tree. It’s so big. A pint would be good. No drinking, he doesn’t drink any more, not since she left him in the lock-up that night. Wow. She was right though, she is always right, and now it makes him smile, and there is spare money too, he’ll need it, for little shoes and things, hair ribbons, you need all kinds of things for a baby .

Things will be different this time, it’s a choice he makes, no pretending this time, no pillow under her dress when they go out, the shame of it, except it’s all his fault, there is something wrong with him, from the gas, the poison in his lungs, in his body, it must be his fault, how she can’t have children, not since the awful first time, her dead son and the dead woman in the next bed and her live son, and the swap the nurse made, pass the parcel. Thomas. They never told anyone, he’d like to tell someone. About Tom. Then Dot, Dot who was a pillow once .

She says she won’t come with him tomorrow, so much to do. He misses her, he has known her for ever, she used to be so funny. Things will be different soon, tomorrow, she will be different. Maybe even let him back in. He just wants to smell her again, but he can’t say it, he can’t find the right words, and something else, something he’ll never tell her, how he hates this moment each night, unfolding his camp bed in the kitchen, the ringing in his ears suddenly so loud, a sound like bells, and then always the same thing, this sound of other men unfolding other beds around him, other men not there. He wants it to stop .

At the Salvation Army Foundling Hospital, they are expecting him, he has an appointment. This morning he is immaculate, he walks a firm line, his step is light, no shuffling, back straight, he is a soldier. Eyes right, eyes left, the nurse following on, take your time. Thank you, Sister. The soldier is looking for someone, he will know her when he sees her. Yes. That one .

She is six months old, fully formed, with large blue eyes, and dimples, and she is smiling at him, he could swear to it, but it’s not only that, he can’t describe it, a rattle in his guts, not fear, something new, and so he chooses her or she chooses him. No, that’s silly. He chooses, he thinks so. Never mind .

‘ Yes, please. Her, please .’

When he scoops her up, he is worried someone will stop him. You can’t have her, stop there. But no one stops him and he holds her in his corded arms, tight not too tight, as he remembers holding a man once, feeling the looseness in the man’s neck, limp as a dead pigeon, knowing it was nearly up with him, how he tried not to hurt the other soldier, just hold him a while without hurting him, tight but free, like they are just one body. What was his name? He doesn’t remember that. Don’t think about that .