The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (2 page)

Week 10

This week he’s onto entropy, and the growth of disorder and decay as time moves from the past to the future. This contradicts relativity, which doesn’t depend on time. You hoped relativity would win out over entropy, but you know what entropy is now.

Now, after each experiment, he picks the fluff from the rug off his clothes, smoothes his hair, and sniffs himself before he sends you out of his office. He has work to do; other courses to write. You find it difficult to concentrate on your own work. You are not sure what else to do apart from the experiment. You thought that would be enough for this course.

Week 11

The next deviation occurs. He talks about calculating the orbits of bodies. A two-body problem is analytical. Once the initial conditions are known, the entire future of the orbit is known. But if there are three bodies, the system becomes uncertain. The effect of any perturbation on this system, however tiny, can’t be predicted in advance. It can only be observed.

You check through your notes. You don’t know this material, previous courses haven’t covered it. He shouldn’t be talking about it.

When you are both lying on the rug in his office, you ask him why he is making changes. His shirt and trousers are still open, but his skin reveals nothing.

‘Nothing stays the same,’ he says finally. He stares straight ahead when he speaks, not looking at you. ‘Nothing should stay the same.’

Clocks, trains and torches are always there. Carol, Bob and Alice are always there. You lean over to touch him, but all you can reach are his fingertips.

Week 12

Entropy means that things change, orbits decay. Planets spiral into stars and are annihilated. As they do so, they send out gravitational waves; beacons of distress emitted across the Universe.

He doesn’t have much time any more, so the experiment is stripped down to the essentials. He doesn’t bother with kissing your throat.

‘Is this happening at the same time?’ you ask, afterwards.

‘The same time as what?’

At the same time for both of us, you think, but there is no point in saying it, not now. You should have said it before, at the beginning, when he did have time.

‘I have to go,’ he says, and he hands you your bra as if
he doesn’t want to see your breasts any more. You feel like weeping. You consider refusing to accept it, abandoning it here as definitive evidence. Now that there is a past to this, and maybe not a future, you want someone else to see your bra hanging from his chair, and know what has happened here. You’re not the observer of this experiment any more. Perhaps you never were.

Week 13

Bob has surprised everyone and bought a motorbike. It’s his turn to accelerate to the speed of light. Alice isn’t allowed to join him. As he roars along the motorway the light he emits settles into a sort of cloud around him, shielding him from everything else in the Universe, even Carol.

When you walk along the corridor to the lecturer’s office, the door is shut. He’s either not there, or he is there. You don’t know which is worse.

Week 14

The lecturer puts his notes into his briefcase, and leaves without looking at you. The course is over and the only other student is asleep at the far end of the lecture theatre. All you can do is follow the lecturer to his office. He has told you that you must keep a certain distance as you walk behind him, and that nobody must see as you follow him inside. You must not disturb anything, apart from yourself. Those are the rules of this experiment.

Week 15

You sign up for a different course next term. You hope the next lecturer will be pleased at your understanding of the subject. You hope your coursework will be satisfactory.

The first star

When we measure the stars on photographic plates, the first star on each plate is the reference to which all the other ones must be compared. I think of the first star as a bit like the head girl of a school. The head girl has the shiniest hair, the most upright comportment, the gentlest smile. She does not speak until spoken to, and when she answers questions, does so in a low and pleasing voice.

When I was at school, I could not be the head girl. I did not measure up to that standard, although I was good at my lessons, particularly mathematics, which is how I come to be here. Working as a computer at the Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill.

Mr Storey, who is assistant to the Astronomer Royal, visited the school although at that time I did not know who he was. I first noticed him waiting outside the headmistress’s office because it was a sunny day and he took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, as if he were at home after work and waiting for his wife to bring him his dinner. He did not see me looking at him, so perhaps that is why he felt he could do that. People generally do not notice me looking at them, which may be another reason why I was not suited to becoming head girl.

All summer term we had been talking about what might become of us when we left and had to make our own way in the world. Most of us were likely to be schoolteachers although I had a secret dread of that profession, because if I had to continue attending school as an adult then it would feel as if time had simply stood still. Especially as I had no money for new clothes and so would have to wear my old school dress.

But then I saw the rolled up shirtsleeves of Mr Storey, and wondered about him. Perhaps he was a clerk, or a bookkeeper. I was not far wrong in being enticed by the shirtsleeves, except it is myself who is a sort of bookkeeper, because after we measure each star we must enter its details into a large book; its coordinates in the left-hand column and its stellar classification in the right-hand one.

Stars have many classifications, from blue to red and most colours in between. It is a shame we do not see the colours on the photographic plate. But you can tell by the shape, the swell of the spectrum, whether its light is emitted towards the left end (blue) or the right end (red). I should like to see the true colours of the stars with my own eye as they appear through the telescopes here. But we leave work each evening at 5pm, as we are not allowed on the hill at night. Only the astronomers may look through the telescopes, and we cannot work with them. So I can only imagine what they see. It is not hard imagining, like constructing a sort of heaven. We were taught about the pearly gates at school and now I can picture them as dotted all over with different coloured stars.

As I watched Mr Storey tilting his face to the sun to soak up the warmth, the headmistress opened her door and peered out, and he pulled on his jacket in a hurry and disappeared inside. I continued to wait, ignoring the bell ringing for the afternoon’s lessons, and then I decided to wander towards the office. As I got there the door opened again, and the headmistress saw me and gestured for me to enter.

This was my first time in all the time at school that I had been invited into that office, and I thought it was very beautiful. The walls were a clean pale blue, as if the summer sky had been allowed to enter and take up residence. There were two china cups set on a wooden table, the headmistress and Mr Storey must have had tea together. The rest of the school was full of chalk dust and inkblots and little girls crying, but in
here I felt a million miles away from all of that.

‘I saw you waiting and watching,’ was the first thing Mr Storey said to me, so I was embarrassed and realised that perhaps I can be seen even when I think I cannot, ‘what were you waiting for?’

‘You, sir,’ which was a bit forward, and I didn’t know why I said that. But it was true, I was waiting for him to decide something for me. And it worked because he laughed.

‘This is one of our best girls,’ said the headmistress. ‘Her mathematical abilities are outstanding.’

Mr Storey nodded his head. ‘And would you like to earn a shilling each day?’

I said yes.

‘Good. That’s settled then.’

But I had no idea what it was that they wanted me to do for the shilling, and they didn’t tell me.

The day I started working at the Observatory I sat on the bus and arranged my dress very carefully around me so as not to crease it, and I peered out of the window the whole journey so I would not miss my stop at Blackford station. I walked up the hill slowly, I did not know what was waiting for me at the top and still nobody had told me. Of course I could see the Observatory towers, with their green metal tops, anyone can see them from the centre of the city. When I got there, I saw that beside the towers and the long building connecting them, there was also a large villa off to one side. As I stood at the Observatory’s entrance waiting for Mr Storey, a maid came out of the villa with a basket of wood. She saw me and stopped, and for a moment I wished I was her so that I would know what to do and where to go. And then that feeling went. I am an adult now, I told myself, and I will have to get used to not knowing things.

And at first when I was shown the photographic plates it all felt very odd, and I was very aware of every little thing that
I was being asked to do, but I should think anything is odd after so many years at school. Being married would also feel quite odd.

By the time the other girls started a few days after me, I knew the routine. I knew to handle the photographic plates only by the edges to avoid touching the emulsion, I knew to set them down on the table so that north is pointing up and east is to the left. I even knew why that was so: compass directions on the sky are a mirror image of those on Earth and everything is facing the wrong way. Mr Storey told me this on the first day.

The photographic plates are like nothing I have ever seen before. They are big square pieces of glass, but so thin that they can bend under their own weight. Because they are negatives, the sky is white and the stars are black. There are usually about a handful of stars on each plate, but they do not look like proper solid objects because they have been smeared out into black lines by a prism in the telescope. Mr Storey told me that each black line has its own characteristic, it may be thicker or thinner than its neighbours, it may swell at one end or it may even show white gaps. I think of these as gaps in the black fences of the stars.

Mr Storey oversees us, which is some feat because he works many nights and then comes to this office in the morning as we remove our coats and make our cups of tea (we have a kettle for the fire). He sets out the plates for us and decides what we look at, what is important and what is not. He teaches us how to position the eyepiece over the plate and focus it so that the stars become clear and sharp. At the beginning Mr Storey stood behind me as I tried to work the eyepiece. When I couldn’t do it he would reach around me and taking my right hand he would ease it round the dial. ‘Gently,’ he would say, ‘just gently.’

‘That’s why we hired you girls,’ he said, ‘because you have the right touch.’

I have never been that near to a man before and at first it
didn’t seem right to have him close enough that I could feel his breath on my hair and cheek. Hear him whisper those words at me, ‘Gently, just gently.’

‘A boy couldn’t do it. You need a lady’s fingers on those controls,’ he would say.

He always has his shirtsleeves rolled up so I can see the smooth skin on his arms. I never knew men looked like that.

Now I know how to do it, so he doesn’t need to stand behind me anymore. Flora still has problems though, and he still helps her. My mother didn’t like it when I told her about Mr Storey helping us in that way, so I stopped telling her.

Sometimes when my neck hurts from looking down at the plates I allow myself to glance up and away, out of the window. You can forget about the greenness of grass if you stare at black lines all day. Outside children play and the Astronomer Royal’s wife stands nearby gazing up at the sky, as if trying to estimate whether it will be clear tonight and whether her husband will be eating his supper with her and the children, or working on the telescope.

I don’t think she can see her husband very often, for he teaches the university students during the day, and works at the telescope at night. I wonder if she hopes for cloudy nights and then feels guilty.

She is good to us, she gives us bread and jam sometimes and asks our opinion of it, it seems she is writing a cookbook about jam and is trying different recipes. I enjoy them all so cannot really advise her. We do not have much jam at home, so I would like to buy a pot from her but I am nervous about suggesting it. She might not like the idea.

She has the groceries delivered to the Observatory twice a week, and I feel sorry for the horse making its way up that steep hill, laden with goods. The hill starts off gradual and then becomes harder and harder, like a mathematical test.

Sometimes I look at the maid wrestling the sheets onto the
line and am grateful I am not her. The maid stays up here at the Astronomer Royal’s house but she must be exhausted by night-time and in her bed before the stars are out.

There are three of us computers; myself, Flora and Jeanie. Flora is my age and Jeanie is a bit older. She has been a teacher but thinks this is better work, quieter and more peaceful. She says the children gave her dreadful headaches. Flora finds it difficult to walk up the hill, and arrives red-faced and perspiring each morning. When it is warm outside, she has a strong smell about her by the end of the day. But they are nice girls and we do well together in our little room, with Mr Storey to guide us.

I asked them what would happen when we finished looking at all the stars and they laughed at me.

‘The stars do not end,’ said Jeanie, ‘they go on forever.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Flora, ‘they must end, but there are still so many of them that we will have enough work for the rest of our lives.’

Even though they could not agree on the number of stars, I was very relieved at the thought of being able to stay here, for I do not know what else I could do apart from teaching. Or even worse, being a governess. My friend from school, Agnes, is a lady’s companion now and she said it is quite agreeable but the lady does go on at her so about her manners and style. She is not required to do much other than accompany the lady to other ladies’ houses and sit silently while they gossip about yet more ladies. It sounded deadly dull to me, but when I tried to tell her about my work, she said looking at black lines all day was very peculiar and would make her feel faint.