Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

Allen, who was on the phone with someone at the European Space Agency, paused from speaking rapid-fire Spanish just long enough to flip George the bird and spin toward his computer, where he was seriously bungling a game of Snood.

George felt it all slipping fast away. All throughout his two-hour commute on the icy LIE, he’d been thinking of exactly how to tell his coworkers that he had finally proposed to Sara. Fatherly Dr. Cokonis had certainly been asking long enough when he would finally “make an honest woman out of her” or, as Allen preferred, “put some bling on that shit.” But now this would be the main business of the day — hell, if not the month. George’s doctoral and now postdoctoral research centered on what were called prestellar cores, essentially huge clusters of cosmic gases that sometimes collapsed into young protostars. Allen had been predicting this fate for 237 Lyrae V all year, despite George’s lovingly constructed models that suggested the contrary.

Privately, George imagined himself as a sort of astronomical Darwin, creating algorithms that could hypothetically be used to better predict the stellar landscape millennia from now. The earliest results had led him to identify dozens of cores that were on the verge of becoming stars — but discouragingly, none of them yet had. His formulas had also revealed several highly stable cores, like 237 Lyrae V, in the Ring Nebula, which were statistically unlikely to ever reach T Tauri status, with orbiting planetary bodies and asteroid belts and all the rest. It was these predictions on which his entire project was based, but if Allen was right, it was all about to be disproven on a grand scale.

It took George a half hour to confirm Allen’s data, and another hour to rerun the numbers through a series of algorithms on the computer, which spat out even more numbers, which then had to be rechecked. None of them looked hopeful. George simply willed it not to be true, and after another hour he could think of nothing to do but call Sara. As he dialed, he anticipated the relief he’d feel in complaining about this devastating development — but as her phone rang, he hesitated. He didn’t particularly relish the idea of Allen overhearing such a breakdown, and he didn’t see how he could ruin Sara’s day with worrying. She’d been so excited to tell everyone at the Journal about the proposal—

“Hey, you!” her voice came on the line.

“Hey, yourself,” George said, more smoothly and cheerily than he felt by a mile.

In the background he could hear the busy hum of Bistro 19, one of their group’s go-to spots. Sara was cutting out of work early to have lunch with Irene to keep her mind off the fact that the doctor might call with the biopsy results. According to Irene, they had said they’d know something “later next week,” which made George think there’d be no word until Thursday or Friday, or else they’d have said We’ll call first thing . But he knew it was important to Sara, even if not to Irene, to be the sort of friend who insisted on having lunch with you when the doctor was probably not going to call.

George cleared his throat. “So, some stuff came up over the weekend. I’ll have to stay late tonight to get it straightened out.”

He could hear her disappointment as she said, “But Irene got us all tickets to see The Death of Eurydice tonight.”

“Oh, right. Well, the thing is that one of the most important prestellar cores in my research is undergoing some pretty surprising shifts.”

“Sweetie, your star will still be shifting tomorrow. It’s not like you can stop it.”

George wanted to argue, but at the same time he realized that she was right — if the prestellar core really was collapsing, that really meant it had already collapsed, more than two thousand years ago, because all the information they were collecting right now had actually been traveling at light speed across space for two millennia, and so whatever was happening was all over and done already, one way or the other… but that didn’t change the fact that his research, here and now, might all be a complete and total waste of time. Four years of his life shot — a blink in the existence of 237 Lyrae V, but a long time to him, especially at the start of his career—

Sara broke in on his long silence. “Fine, I’ll see if William can take your ticket then.”

“Don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

“Good. And see if you can find out what happened with him and Irene on Friday.”

“I can’t ask him that.” A pause and then, “Though I might ask her if she ever shows up.”

“There you go. You’re a reporter. Do some digging!”

“I’m an editor . I edit other people’s reporting. If you can call it that.”

“Just a joke,” he said. There was a long sigh. “Everyone’s really excited about our big news,” George lied, his voice low so Allen wouldn’t hear.

Then a happy noise. “Here too! I’m already making up a guest list. You should get the home addresses of anyone you want to invite from the department.”

“Let’s invite everyone but Allen,” George said, louder now, earning another middle finger from his office mate.

“Good luck with your star. There’s an after-party thing. Meet us there, okay?”

He released a long sigh. “Just text me the address?”

“It’s in Greenpoint.”

Long sigh, redux .

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

He got off the phone. He didn’t know what to do next. He closed his eyes. How could this be happening? He had to remind himself that Allen wasn’t capable of collapsing a giant molecular cloud of gas, a hundred times larger than their solar system. But that didn’t stop him from resenting his colleague, who had been ascending with Machiavellian precision through the department by subtly undermining the research of others.

George had fallen in love, thirteen years ago, with the dream of all the infinite things in the universe still to be discovered, of theories to be pieced together and daring connections made. The Allens of the world, however, seemed to outnumber him at every turn… researchers who didn’t look out into the universe, pondering, but instead busied themselves attending conferences and reading abstracts, looking for flawed research to tease apart or supposed discoveries to disprove. George knew, in theory, that the world — the universe — needed these doubting Allens to check the ideas of the dreamers, but he wished they didn’t enjoy it quite so much.

George called Jacob, whom he could usually count on for sympathy in these matters, but his friend didn’t answer. If he was up at the asylum, he couldn’t usually pick up.

“Kaaaaaaa”—George heard Allen shouting behind him—“BLOOEY!”

“Are you in the third grade?” George asked without turning around.

“I wish. Okay. So I just got off with the guys in Madrid. They’re getting us some time on the Messier Telescope tonight to get the last of the data.”

“Us? Don’t you have the Phoenix-13 all afternoon?”

“That weakass telescope can’t get us the readings we need. Come on.”

“Again, who is this us ?”

Allen shouted, “You and me, G-man! I’m telling you — this is exciting shit!”

“This is a catastrophe, Allen.” George pointed to the shelf full of black three-ring binders, identical except for the steady fading plastic, moving leftward, as they went back in time toward his first research years. “Four years in those. Two thirty-seven Lyrae V was supposed to be stable .”

“That’s what makes it so interesting, G-man. She ought to be one of the most stable cores in the Ring Nebula, right? I mean, from what you’ve found so far, it should take a goddamn supernova to collapse two thirty-seven. Only there’s not one. So we’ve got to ask ourselves, in the words of our great scientific forebears — what the fuck?”