His bride had been so taken by the notion of an infinite number of Judys and Hughs living subtly different lives beyond the stars, beyond our stars, she had said, that she wrote the idea into the ceremony: It may be that there are places where your eyes are gray, or where no one here would recognize my name. But wherever we live, if we have met, I love you. The wave function can break in no other direction.
They exchanged rings engraved with infinity, the mathematical symbol for infinity.
And if Allan Sandage and Gustav Tammann had beaten him to the blue stars, it didn't matter.
One of the great questions of the era was whether the universe was expanding in a uniform manner in all directions. Or whether the superclusters were so massive that they skewed expansion and created an imbalance. Preliminary results suggested that the Milky Way had been drawn off its natural course, and was falling into the Virgo Supercluster. Was that actually happening? If so, how fast was it moving? Could they devise a method to measure the Virgo effect? Carlisle took charge of the Kitchener team and they began assembling data.
He virtually moved into the observatory. Lowenthal encouraged him and made it clear that Carlisle could expect future high-profile assignments. "It's just a matter of time before you make your mark," he said. "I want to be sure you're in a position to take full advantage of the opportunities." And when Carlisle thanked him, the old man grinned. "Establish your reputation," he said. "When you've done that, you can thank me in public."
The issue proved inordinately difficult to settle. It remains unanswered.
He used the cartons to push the door open. There wasn't much left in his office.
He hadn't taken down his pictures. Carlisle standing beside Brent Tully at the Kona Conference, Carlisle shaking hands with John Schwarz at CalTech, Carlisle eating lunch with Allan Sandage in New York. An aerial photo of Kitchener beneath a full moon. A color enhancement of the Horsehead Nebula. A stylized rendering of an H-R diagram.
And of course his favorite picture of Judy, posed against an ominous sky at Cape Hatteras. He had taken it down at the time of the breakup, and then put it back a few months later.
He found old notebooks in the bottom of the lower right-hand desk drawer. They were spiral-bound, yellowed, tattered. Dated from before the arrival of his PC. He slipped off the fat rubber bands, sat on the edge of the desk, and thumbed through them.
They made painful reading: his comments and observations were pedestrian. With the advantage of hindsight, he could see his limitations quite clearly. Hugh Carlisle's prime talent seemed to be recognizing the obvious.
He flipped through his rolodex. He had never purged the thing, and there were names of people who had long since retired or died. And names he couldn't remember. He dropped it into one of his boxes.
During the early years of their marriage, they'd gone to a lot of live theater. In fact, they had seen George Washington Slept Here on their second date. Later, Judy would insist that it was his reaction to that romantic comedy that had piqued her interest in him.
But their working hours never blended. After he became permanently attached to the observatory staff, he worked primarily at night. He'd get home as Judy was getting ready to leave for school. But they tried to make time for coffee. "What's going on up on the mountain?" she would ask.
"We're counting globular clusters again, but what we'd really like to know—"
"Yes?"
"—Is why the universe is so homogeneous."
"How do you mean?"
"Why is it so balanced? How does it happen that microwaves arrive from opposite sides of the sky, from places that could never, in the entire history of the cosmos, have had any contact with each other, or any influence over each other, and the microwaves are identical?"
She loved these vaguely mad notions. "I don't follow. What else could the universe look like? Are you suggesting all the stars should be in the southern sky? And nothing in the north?"
It was hard to explain. A lot of it was hard to explain. And it didn't help that, within his own limitations, he didn't quite grasp the finer points that Zeldovich and Steinhardt were making.
He was often too busy, or too tired, to try to lay it out for her. Occasionally, he wondered whether he shouldn't have married a fellow professional. Like Harrigan. Or Cholka. An image of the energetic Russian rose before his eyes. Now there was someone he could really have talked to.
Judy enjoyed the intimacy of evenings out, together among strangers as she liked to put it. He tried to comply, even though the weight of his own responsibilities increased after he became department chairman, and then assistant to the Director at Kitchener. Nevertheless, he did not complain, and in fact hid his feelings rather well.
He wasn't sure where things had begun to go wrong. Judy understood what drove him, knew he needed to put his name to a discovery, to find a Carlisle Effect, or formulate Carlisle's Theorem. She also understood that it was a compulsion not fostered exclusively by vanity, but by a genuine desire to make a contribution, to be at the focal point when they broke through into one of nature's secrets.
But she did not understand that he saw his time running out. It wasn't that he was getting chronologically old, but he knew that talent, genius, if it was present, manifests itself early. He had begun to fear that he was only a mediocrity, someone to hold the reins for Achilles. When he tried to explain, she assured him that everything would be okay. You're having a brilliant career. And, Whatever happens, I love you.
In time, the emphasis changed. You're a Type A personality, Hugh. Type A's get ulcers. Die young. You need to take some time off.
Eventually, she began to spend time with her friends, and they trooped off occasionally for evenings on the town. She always invited him. "If you can make it," she would say. Or, "If you think you might enjoy this—"
And there was Wade Popper, the superstring theorist. Popper made no effort to disguise his interest in Judy. They began meeting out on the jog path. And having lunches together. Only friends, her demeanor assured him. But Popper's intentions were transparent.
She had read his discomfort and discontinued the tete-a-tete. The incident left a dead spot, a neutral zone between them, an area that he was never after able to penetrate.
"What does inflation mean?" The subject had come up at about the time of Lowenthal's retirement. The Kitchener team was working full time trying to determine how much dark matter would be required to make inflation theory work. The answer: a lot. Maybe ninety percent of all the matter in the universe would have to be dark. And Judy had asked about it during one of his rare evenings at home.
"It means that the universe, in its early expansion, exceeded the speed of light—"
"But that's impossible, right?"
"Not necessarily."
Her eyes flashed. "Sometimes I think you guys just make up the rules as you go along."
"Sometimes we do." It was a little exasperating, like teaching Cosmology 101. She knew just enough to get everything confused. "The trick is to construct an explanation, sometimes any explanation, that fits the observations."
He looked out through his windows, down at the treetops, and tried to listen to his own words. What had they sounded like to her?
He lifted the last of his books into a box, sealed it, and put it aside. He took his CD player down off the shelf. The filing cabinet yielded folders filled with papers he hadn't looked at in years.
Gradually, her questions had become less frequent. Conditions at the high school were deteriorating, and she became absorbed in her own problems. But in '86 she was voted Teacher of the Year, and they celebrated with a party at the Radisson.
Carlisle enjoyed parties. The people at Kitchener and in the science department threw them regularly. Threw them, in fact, with such energy that they were barred from the local Holiday Inn.