A substantial crowd showed up for this one. Most of Carlisle's colleagues came. And a small army of Judy's friends. More than he knew she had. There were even a couple of reporters, and a delegation of her students. And although Carlisle was pleased to see his wife get the attention, it hurt to realize that the press had never come for him.
Judy glowed that night. She kept him on her arm, and introduced him to everyone who came within their orbit. She glowed, like in the old days. My husband the cosmologist. And he realized that night that his marriage had undergone some fundamental chemical change.
The evening was still bright and clear in his memory. She had drifted through the celebration, dancing with everyone, laughing, maybe drinking a little too much. Some of the men, some of his friends and some of hers, looked at her with such undisguised abandon that he was shocked. Carlisle was not ordinarily a possessive man, and he felt no reason to doubt her, but the sight of all that male interest elicited a twinge even now.
Across the years, her eyes cut him like distant stars.
His old electric razor (which he'd thought lost) was tucked away in the top of a closet. He'd always made a point of looking bright and polished before starting home in the morning. It still worked.
Lowenthal had been wrong. Carlisle never did come back, never again approached a breakthrough. He was a methodical investigator, persistent and precise. He did not make mistakes, but that is a clerical virtue. The hard reality was that he lacked the vision of a Zwicky or a Wheeler. He was good on the follow-up effort, performing the detailed analysis to determine whether someone else's brilliance coincided with the way nature really worked. While the long hunt for the value of the Hubble Constant went on, and the debates over cosmic bubbles and macrostructure heated up, Carlisle was always a step behind.
In the spring of 1987, Judy's father died and she received a surprisingly large inheritance. They used some of the money to buy a time-share at Cape Hatteras. The house was big, with broad decks, and ocean views on both sides. It had a fireplace and a jacuzzi, and it was a damned good place to work. One does not need a telescope to do cosmology, he was fond of telling the postdocs. It is essentially an exercise of the imagination. And nowhere else did he feel so free, so unleashed, as in the big rug-covered living room, with the fire at his back, and the stars floating on the Atlantic.
Judy preferred to prowl the shops and beaches. One day, she returned with a surprise. "I wanted you to meet Griff," she said. He was average-looking, beginning to gray, a few years older than Carlisle. Dumpy. "He owns the Golden Coin." An antique shop, it turned out.
Carlisle shook the man's hand, and made the appropriate small talk. Good to meet you. Must be considerable business for antiques in a place like this. (Judy had bought a finely-worked tray, which she said dated from the 1920's.) He was congenial enough, but slow-witted.
"Griff says there's a concert tonight. By Prelude."
"Who the hell is Prelude?" He kept his tone light. Jaunty. He knew she didn't expect recognition from him. It was part of the game they played with each other.
"A string quartet," she said. "Hugh, why don't we go? It would be very nice. It's outdoors."
He would not usually be averse to a string quartet, but he hated to lose one of his few evenings on the Outer Banks. "Sure," he said bleakly. (It occurred to him now, dropping his paper weight and his desk lamp into the packing box, that he would like very much to recapture that night, recapture her, and have it all to do again.)
She had responded as he knew she would, allowed her eyes to close momentarily, had turned to Grill. "I'd better pass."
"Nonsense." Carlisle was aggressively generous. "No reason for you to stay home. Maybe Griff would like to go—"
Fool that I am.
Not that Judy would have been tempted to cheat. But he knew he had sent the wrong message.
He sealed the boxes and carried them one by one down the stairs and out to his car. The wind was picking up and, despite the clear skies, rain was in the air. Lightning flickered to the west. He counted off the seconds until he heard the rumble. Seven miles.
Something about Hatteras had always stirred Carlisle's ambitions. And his discontent. "I need to get away from here," he told her, two years after Griff and his antique shop had passed into oblivion. He was pushed back into a leather armchair, watching sheets of rain pour into the Atlantic. "No, not here, but from Kitchener. UEI. It's time to go, to move on."
She was standing near the windows, looking out. Judy loved terrible weather. She came alive when the wind blew and the sky rolled, as if the electricity flowed into her. Arms folded, she had been weaving gently to the rhythms of the storm. But he saw her shoulders tighten. "Why?" she asked. "Lowenthal will be retiring soon. You'll be in line for his job."
"I don't want his job. Judy, I've been here too long already. I'm getting the wrong kind of reputation. If I'm ever going to break out, I have to do it now."
"You have a good reputation." She meant it. And he did. He could expect to get the directorship, and possibly even the astronomy chair at the University.
"That's not what I want."
"What do you want?" Her voice was soft, but he felt the undercurrent.
"Judy, I'm part of the cleanup crew. Somebody somewhere has a good idea. The superclusters are really pancakes, and they're stacked in layers. Hugh, check it out. The voids between the galaxies are really vast bubbles, and the galaxies are out on the rims. Hugh, what about that? There are people like me in every major observatory in the world. Martin at Palomar. Babcock at McDonald. Leronda at Mauna Kea. Dureyvich at Zelenchukskaya. Flunkies. People who get to bring the coffee while things happen."
She looked at him, and the air thickened. "I'm sorry you feel that way."
How many times had he tried to explain it to her? "Judy, I might be able to connect with Schramm at Fermi. They're looking for somebody. I met him last year and I think I made a good impression."
Her eyes clouded. "When would you want to go?"
"The job's open now."
"Hugh, I can't just pick up in the middle of November and walk out. I could leave at the end of the year."
The rain slid down the windows. After a while she rose and came over and sat across from him, on the sofa. There had been a time when she would have tried sex, to ease the moment, put the decision off until they had both had time to think. Prevent anyone's position from hardening. But they knew each other too well now.
In the end, she encouraged him to try for what he wanted. He had, but the appointment went elsewhere.
The evening finally came when she asked him to sit down, when her gaze dropped to the carpet and her voice turned especially gentle.
He took it well. Don't make a scene. Don't embarrass yourself. He understood quite suddenly, quite painfully, that he did not want to lose her, and that to react badly was to throw away whatever chance he might have. He was wrong, of course. But the moment passed, fled, was long gone before he realized his mistake.
He dropped the last box into his trunk, banged it shut, and went back inside to rum off the lights.
The universe was filled with light: whole squadrons of suns nearby, creamy galactic swirls floating beyond the Local Group, flickering pinpoints deep in the abyss. From the time Hubble discovered, in 1923, that there were other galaxies beyond the Milky Way, that there appeared to be no end to them, astronomers had argued over distances and measurements.
Something more than Carlisle's blue stars was needed. Something on a qualitatively different scale.