First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

  After a while I asked, “How well do you know your way around the Big Eye?”

  “I lived with that telescope.”

  “Can you get inside it?”

  He smiled. “Have you never been inside the Big Eye?”

  “No.”

  “This is enough motor inventory for tonight,” he said.

  He led me upstairs. We stopped at the base of the telescope, looking up. The Hale Telescope’s tube hangs between the prongs of a fork, called the yoke. The arms of the yoke are called the East Arm and the West Arm. Each arm is ten feet in diameter. Juan stepped through a circular doorway into the base of the West Arm. I followed him. He flipped a light switch. He pointed to a small porthole at his feet. “One can climb down in there,” he said, meaning that I ought to. I lowered myself through the porthole, and then climbed through three rooms, separated by bulkheads. There were pools of oil in the rooms—Mobil Flying Horse telescope oil, number 95. I rubbed some on my fingertips. It was clear and golden in color, and had a sweet smell. Juan said, “This oil fills up with moths in the summer.”

  I climbed back out, and then Juan led the way up a stair that angled upward for three stories through the West Arm of the Hale Telescope, until we came to a landing with a cabinet standing on it. The cabinet contained a set of machinery that controlled the telescope’s motion north and south—the motion through declination, or latitude. He lifted a cowling from the cabinet, exposing clumps of motors, gears, and boxes leaking oil. This was a mechanical computer. (I learned afterward that a young engineer named Sinclair Smith had begun to design it in the 1930s. Smith had died of cancer. Bruce Rule, who designed the mirror-support machines, had finished Smith’s job.) Juan said that the observatory had recently installed digital computers to take over the work of these mechanical computers, but the observatory kept Rule’s computers oiled and ready for use, in case the digital computers crashed.

  Juan replaced the cowling over the computer and said, “This is like a submarine.” His voice echoed down the West Arm.

  “Or like Buck Rogers’s spaceship.”

  “It is literally a starship,” he said. He squeezed behind the mechanical computers and suddenly pulled himself upward and disappeared into a porthole.

  I followed him through the porthole, into a greasy passageway. We climbed upward through the telescope, and finally emerged into the upper half of the tubular West Arm, where there were no more stairs. Juan pointed to a hydraulic assembly. “That’s a clutch,” he said. “It slips sometimes. Then I have to climb up in here and fix it in a big hurry.”

  “Because the astronomer is screaming?”

  “They usually don’t scream,” he said. “But they are ready to do so.”

  We crawled upward on hands and feet, which produced faint, hollow booms in the arm.

  Having watched the Hale Telescope evolve during the twenty years he had served it as caretaker, Juan sensed its personality. He did think it had a personality: good-natured but quirky. On one occasion, every time he had pushed the “north guide” button, the telescope had moved south. Looking around the chamber we were in, he said, “There is one loose bolt in here somewhere. When you slew this telescope way over to the west, you can hear that bolt slide from one end of the telescope to the other.” Also, a door would sometimes slam unexpectedly inside the telescope, which would shake the stars. And the astronomer would be ready to scream.

  At the top of the West Arm we arrived at a bulkhead containing a porthole. I put my hands around the lip of the porthole. When I looked back over my shoulder, I realized that we had climbed a long way up the West Arm.

  “I am not afraid of heights,” Juan said, gripping the porthole. “But I respect them.”

  I put my head through the porthole and looked around. A view opened downward into a warren of dark chambers. Juan said that we were looking down inside the horseshoe bearing, which was hollow. He had climbed around in it, he said, but, “I don’t think you would want to.”

  The Hale’s horseshoe bearing is the largest bearing ever made—a C-shaped arc forty-six feet in diameter. It contains nearly half a mile of welded seams. The load-bearing outer curve of the arc floats on a film of Mobil Flying Horse telescope oil. The moving parts of the Hale Telescope weigh 1.1 million pounds and are as exquisitely balanced as the escapement of a watch. Bob Thicksten once disengaged the telescope’s clutches and counterweights and stood in the West Arm to see what would happen. The telescope began to tip westward, ever so slightly unbalanced by the weight of Thicksten’s body. Thicksten believed that if he had stood in the West Arm long enough, the telescope finally would have turned over sideways. The motor that drives the entire telescope in tandem with the moving sky is a one-twelfth-horsepower Bodine electric motor the size of a grapefruit, made in the U.S.A. around the year 1942, and it has never been replaced.

  A view of the prime focus cage at the Hale Telescope, drawn by Russell W. Porter. We are looking down the tube of the telescope toward the main mirror. An astronomer is sitting in the prime focus cage staring into the mirror. At Palomar you sometimes hear rumors of the remarkable Prime Focus Club, a mysterious and exclusive group of astronomers who claim to have made love with someone while in the prime focus cage of the Hale Telescope. This kind of thing would most likely happen during a cloudy night when the astronomers are bored and have nothing to do. (Photograph courtesy of Palomar/Caltech)

  Juan began to wonder what the weather was doing. We crab-walked down the West Arm, descended the stairs, and climbed out of the telescope onto the floor. Jim Gunn appeared.

  “Juan, we need you,” he said. We hurried into the data room. The sky had cleared. Forbidden to touch the controls, the astronomers had been pacing around the data room, wondering where Juan had gotten off to.

  Juan hit a bank of toggles. “Mirror opened,” he said. “We are looking out.”

  When Juan Carrasco was a boy and looked out, he believed that the sky was a hard bowl over the earth, that on the other side of the bowl lay heaven. He spent his childhood in a one-room adobe hut in Balmorhea, Texas, with six brothers and sisters, and like them, he was baptized by the parish priest, Father Salvador Girán. Juan’s father, Apolonio Carrasco, had built the hut with his own hands. When Juan was nine years old, Apolonio managed to get a loan from the Farmers’ Home Administration to buy a farm outside Balmorhea: sixty acres of black dirt and a small wooden Anglo house. In the cold winters of west Texas, the family burned mesquite in a stove in the living room, where they took their baths in a galvanized tub. The main piece of furniture in the living room was a bed, which was actually a couch for visitors. The Carrascos owned six cows, one lamb, and a few chickens. In a good year Apolonio raised twenty bales of cotton. In a bad year, “Bueno, hicimos el vivir,” Apolonio would say with a little shrug and a smile—“Oh, well, we made a living.”

  Carrasco is a scrub oak with a tough silver-green leaf, serrated with spines. It grows in clumps of chaparral on the sun-facing slopes of mountains throughout the southwest, and it tends to prosper in places where other trees do not. “Those Carrascos, they are rich,” went the talk around Balmorhea. Juan was not so sure. Other kids skipped school to earn a dollar a day picking cotton. Juan’s parents made their children stay in school. “Those other kids can buy a pair of Levi’s and maybe a new shirt,” Juan said to himself. Balmorhea had one gas station and a movie theater, “but we hardly had enough money to go to the theater on Saturday night.” On big nights Juan and his brothers dressed up and walked over to a place called The Country Club. “It was not the kind of country club you are thinking of. It was a cantina. We danced and drank beer.” Apolonio avoided The Country Club, thereby earning himself a reputation for being too serious about himself and his farm. When he went into Pecos to buy equipment or to borrow money, he put on a ten-gallon Stetson hat and gabardine trousers, and he tucked a silver-plated Colt .38—a gun known all over Pecos—at the small of his back. That gun had killed plenty of men. It had once belonged to the City Mar
shal of Pecos. Apolonio never tried to shoot anybody with it; sometimes he would blast it at a coyote hanging around the chicken coop, but could not seem to hit the coyote with it. His gun was a piece of jewelry; he wore it to weddings. All the men wore their guns to weddings. They locked the guns in their trucks before they went into the church, out of respect for Father Girán and the Holy Spirit, and later, at the wedding feast, they fired their guns into the air—vivas to the good luck of the newlyweds.

  Apolonio planted watermelons among his rows of cotton. The crows liked the watermelons. They would walk around and poke at them. Juan’s mother, Ysabel Carrasco, would cry out to Juan’s oldest sister, “Aurora, Aurora! Traite el quate”—“Aurora, get the twin.”

  Aurora would come running with a shotgun (the “twin”) and fire a load of buckshot over the heads of the crows. The kick would knock Aurora back a few steps, and the crows would take off with sullen, disconsolate flaps. It was necessary to guard the watermelons all the time, because they made cotton picking bearable. Juan remembered how sweet they were. “You could hit one of the little ones with a knife, take the heart, and wipe your face on your sleeve.” At the end of a day of cotton picking, Ysabel would line up her sons and peel off their watermelony shirts and drop the shirts into a gasoline-driven Maytag washer that stood in the backyard. “Aurora!” she would cry. “Commence the machine.” Aurora, who was nothing if not a gadgeteer, would pull out the Maytag’s spark plug and put a drop of gasoline in the engine’s one cylinder, put the spark plug back in, give the Maytag a terrific kick-start with her foot, and the Maytag would “commence” with a roar. It was deafeningly loud, and it blew flames out through its exhaust pipe. It washed their clothes in a hurry.

  Summer nights were too hot for anybody to sleep. The whole town of Balmorhea would be awake. The Carrascos sat on their front porch until the early hours of the morning, hoping always for a visit from the parish priest, Father Salvador Girán. Whenever Father Girán dropped by, the Carrascos put him in a chair of honor on the porch. Then Juan scrambled to put his chair next to Father Girán.

  “Would you like a glass of water, Padre?”

  “Gracias, Juanito.”

  The priest was of modest height but strong, from working with adobe, and he was a Spaniard by birth. He had milky Spanish skin and gold-rimmed spectacles, and he wore a black suit with a Roman collar. He had received a doctorate in physics in Spain. Then, for some reason, he had left physics to become a priest, and had gone to South America as a missionary, and then he had come to Texas. He told stories far into the night—about his travels in Spain and South America, about how to find water with a prayer book and a skeleton key; about the latest progress on his new adobe church on the grounds of the Mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which he was building with his own hands from adobe bricks; about an old Spanish lady who had once tried to poison him with a hard-boiled egg. Father Girán knew the constellations. “The Cross is high,” he would say late on an August night, and the Carrascos would lean off their porch to look.

  During a lull in the conversation someone might notice a shooting star. The Carrascos asked Father Girán where a star went when it fell off the sky.

  Stars don’t go anywhere, he told them. If a star hit the earth, there would not be anything left of the earth.

  Then did they drown in the sea?

  No, no! He laughed. They do not drown in the sea. The stars, he said, are enormous and far away.

  This surprised the Carrascos, especially Juan. But if Father Girán said this was true, who were they to question him?

  “The stars are in outer space,” he said. “They are a great distance from the earth.”

  Juan tried to imagine a space with stars floating in it. He said to Father Girán, “I wish I knew what a star looked like nearby.”

  “You already do,” Father Girán said. “The sun is a star.”

  The response of the Carrascos was dead silence. It was a silence of disbelief.

  He said that the sun, as a star, was an extremely hot ball of gas, and that its heat brought life to the earth; that, he said, was why the land produced cotton. The sun and the stars, he said, were many, many times bigger than the earth.

  The sun is bigger than the earth? Juan wondered. The stars are bigger than the earth? Then where does a star go, Juan asked, when it falls?

  The stars never fall, he said to Juan. You are thinking of a meteor—a pajita. He used the word pajita, which means “little straw,” because a meteor looks like a straw blowing in the wind. He explained that a pajita is a very, very tiny pebble coming in from outer space. Pajitas burn up through friction in the atmosphere.

  Apolonio and his sons had seen pajitas that lit up the whole sky when they were irrigating the fields at night. They mentioned this fact to Father Girán.

  “One of those really bright pajitas might be the size of a marble,” Father Girán said.

  That amazed the Carrascos.

  Father Girán said, “Juanito, if you are with your father in the fields and you see a spectacular pajita, you should be very quiet and listen. Try to hear something drop. You might even find one on the ground.”

  Juan often worked with his father in the cotton fields at night, when they would irrigate the crops. Sometimes Juan would point to a star and say to his father, “Can you believe that that star is many times larger than the earth?”

  “That I would never have known,” Apolonio would say. Then Apolonio might say, “Mire! Es una pajita!” and he and Juan would freeze, listening. “I wish the water weren’t so noisy around here,” Apolonio would say. But even when the water ran quietly in the ditches, they never heard the sound of a shooting star, and they never found one lying in the fields.

  Juan dropped out of school in ninth grade because he wanted to get a job. The job he found was that of working in the fields with his father. When the Korean War began, he was drafted into the Army and sent to guard the city of Pittsburgh. By the time he returned to Balmorhea, he wanted to get a salaried job, and so he went to San Antonio, where he enrolled in the Lewis Barber College, which was then located in a condemned building at 124 East Military Plaza, an easy walk from skid row. He started his training in the back of a vast room full of chairs, giving free haircuts to winos.

  The San Antonio winos were the slickest-looking bums in Texas. They populated the back chairs at Lewis Barber College. Juan and the other beginners began the treatment on a wino by giving the wino a shampoo. When you tilted the guy back in the chair, you could often hear a bottle of muscatel gurgle in his pocket. After the shampoo Juan would cut his hair. He would shave him with a straight razor. He would give the wino a mud pack on the face. He would rinse the mud off the wino’s face, and then he would vibrate the wino’s cheeks and neck with an electric machine that broke up fat deposits under the skin and enhanced the complexion. He would oil the wino’s hair with Wildroot Cream and give him a splash of rum aftershave. Then the wino would look in the mirror and say, “Damn! I didn’t know I was such a good-looking guy.”

  The college’s head professor of razors was a ferocious, seized-up old Texan named Patterson, who had either a wooden leg or a bad live leg—nobody was sure which and nobody dared ask him, since they said he had been in the Texas Rangers before he had wrecked his leg, and he carried a razor and knew how to use it. Patterson would limp around the back of the room, on the prowl for a student botching a job on a wino. “You be careful with those guys,” he said to Juan. “You keep the rum lotion locked up, you hear? Now, your customer might want to cough or jerk around or something while you’re shaving him. You could cut him real bad. You could infect his face.” He watched Juan prepare a wino for shaving. “What do you think you are doing?” he screamed at Juan. “Get that towel off his face! You’re smothering the customer!” Patterson opened his razor and fixed an eye on the wino, who fixed an eye on Patterson’s razor. Patterson stooped over and took up a leather belt and stropped his razor on it so rapidly that his hand went into a blur, while
he stared at the customer.

  The customer began to look alarmed.

  “Watch,” Patterson said to Juan. The blade went high and stopped for an instant, glinted, and flashed downward toward the customer’s face. Patterson slashed the customer fourteen times on the face with blinding speed, while the customer’s eyes darted all around, trying to track the blade. It was the world’s fastest shave. If Patterson had miscalculated, the customer would have hosed the ceiling with spurting arterial blood. Patterson wiped his razor and snapped it shut. He said, “The face has fourteen parts. You can shave each part with one stroke.”

  The customer fearfully and slowly put his hand to his face, and his eyes went wide; his face was smooth and hairless.

  As Juan progressed, he moved to the front of the room, where the lawyers of San Antonio sat in a row of chairs in front of big windows. The lawyers liked to gather in the front chairs, to talk with each other and to be seen in the windows. By the time Juan advanced to the lawyers, he had learned how to do flat-top crew cuts, known as flats. A flat required a heavy lubricant—butch wax. “One needed a good machine and a lot of grease to make the customer’s hair stand up straight,” he recalled. One also needed high artistry. The hair was greased with butch wax and pulled up vertically with a comb and buzzed back and forth with a pair of clippers until it was bristly, as smooth as a golf green, and stiff enough to rest a brick on. The wax was always jamming the clippers. Furthermore, if you lost control of the clippers, you could easily gouge a hole in the customer’s flat, the way a golfer knocks a divot out of a driving green. Patterson would come over to see how Juan was doing. He would take Juan aside and say to him in a low voice, “These guys are lawyers. They want to look sharp, and so you have to get the blackheads out of their noses.” After giving a lawyer a shampoo, a butch wax and a flat, a shave, and a mud pack, Juan would squeeze the lawyer’s nose with both his thumbs to extract the blackheads, and then he’d proceed with the rest of the treatment: a jiggle with the electric machine to break up fat in the cheeks, a splash of rum aftershave. The lawyers said, “Thanks,” and gave him thirty-five cents plus a tip. He graduated with a class-A barber’s license in 1954.