The same thing happened on Monday, March 11, 1985. That morning the first data from the VLBI, Very Long Baseline Interferometry, the telescope as large as the whole world, were due in. A number of young astronomers from Leiden had spent the night watching in Westerbork with the technicians; but he himself did not even call. At breakfast he first leafed through the morning paper, in a bad mood. Chernenko was dead; within four hours the Central Committee in the Kremlin had chosen a successor, a certain Gorbachev, but of course he wouldn't change anything, either. Nothing would ever change; the Cold War was forever. The remnants of a dream were still haunting him — an image of Ada: her organs were floating in the air outside her body, like in certain kinds of cross-sectional diagrams of the inside of engines, so that at the same time it looked like a still photograph of an explosion.
"I'm going to have dinner at Tsjallingtsje's tonight," he said, getting up with a slight groan.
"Will you be coming home?" asked Sophia.
"Maybe, maybe not," he said. "I'll see." He ran one hand over Quinten's shoulders and said: "Do your best."
As he drove through the hazy spring morning to Westerbork, he listened to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, conducted by Bohm. It was still indestructibly beautiful, but he did know every note of it, as by now he did of almost all music.
Once he was in the busy terminal his depression lifted and he looked with the same curiosity at the computer printout that Floris gave him as he would have when he was half his age — except that there were not yet any computer printouts then. As far as his enthusiasm was concerned, it was as though time had stood still. On the other hand, one thing that was governed by the passing of time was the quasar — and he saw at first glance that something was completely wrong.
"Good luck," said Floris sarcastically. "You might just as well throw it in the wastepaper basket."
Because Quinten had discovered the historioscope at the age of twelve, Max had once sketched the portrait of a quasar for him: a mysterious, superheavy object at the limits of the observable universe that emitted as much energy as a thousand galaxies of 100 billion stars each, while the quasi-star was much smaller than even one galaxy. Probably there was a black hole in it, the most monstrous of all celestial phenomena. The most distant known quasar, OQ 172, was over 15 billion light years away; so that you could see from it what the universe was like 5 billion years after Big Bang, when it was only a quarter of the size it was now. A contemporary of his from Leiden— who now worked at Mount Palomar in California — had discovered that distance in four-dimensional space-time through the red shift in the hydrogen lines in the optical spectrum. When a jet plane approached, Max had explained to Quinten, the sound of its engines became higher, and after it passed over you, it became lower: first it retracted its sound waves a little, making them shorter, and afterward it stretched them, making them longer. The fact that the strongest spectrum line of OQ 172 had moved a long way from ultraviolet in the direction of the longer wavelengths of red, into the middle of the visible spectrum, meant that the thing was moving away in the expanding universe at over 90 percent of the speed of light.
Quinten had shown only moderate interest — in the last analysis, Max reflected, he was still a real arts man, just like his father. Moreover, MQ 3412 refused to conform to the pattern of the almost two thousand quasars now known. And the VLBI now turned out to have a serious teething problem, probably a defect in the incredibly sensitive communications between the hundreds of mirrors in scores of countries on different continents; or perhaps there was something wrong with an atomic clock somewhere, so that the things had not been put into the computer with absolute synchronicity. Max looked at the calculations as though at an unbelievable juggling trick for which one would actually prefer not to know the explanation. This time MQ 3412 had decided to move at infinite speed, as appeared from the desolate radio spectrum.
"In other words," said Max "our tachyonic friend is at all points on a line simultaneously with an energy of zero."
"A. Einstein would have raised his eyebrows at that," said Floris.
Max spent the rest of the day in meetings, telephoning as far as Australia, reading and sending faxes and discussing things with the engineers. One of them suggested that the mistake might be theirs. Gas was being extracted from the earth beneath Westerbork, which may have caused minute subsidences, so that the mirrors were no longer absolutely perpendicular; a few months ago a small earthquake had been recorded near Assen, with a force of 2.8 on the Richter scale. It was decided to recalibrate everything and to contact the gas board in Groningen. It struck Max as remarkable that an event deep in the earth, in the perm, might have disturbed one's vision of the edge of the universe.
Toward evening he withdrew into his little office in order to look at the data at his leisure, but he couldn't make head or tail of them. It was though a monkey at a typewriter had tried to write a sonnet. But he was also reminded of a revolutionary experiment that had been conducted three years before in Paris. It related to a fundamental conversation in the 1930s between Einstein and Bohr — that is, between the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which had never gotten along very well.
Einstein's putative experiment was tested in 1982, and it turned out that Bohr was right. Even then there seemed to be instantaneous, infinitely fast signals — that is, faster than light; since no one doubted that this was impossible, it indicated something in reality that no one had foreseen. Could it be connected with this? But how? Maybe the solution would only come with the VLBI in space, dish aerials on satellites, enabling a telescope to be built with a cross-section of 62,000 miles — but that would take ten years, and by that time he would probably have retired.
Around him there were tables, cases, and shelves overloaded with piles of papers; as usual with his things, though, the order among them was immediately visible. One wall was taken up by a green blackboard, on which formulas and diagrams were written in different-colored chalks — not scribbled down higgledy-piggledy in brilliant frenzy, with carelessly erased sections, but in a harmonious composition, as in a work of art.
He put the papers into a folder, rested his chin on his hands, and looked out the open window. On every side his view was blocked by the giant black skeleton of a mirror. They were calibrating. In the complete silence he heard at short intervals the soft hum of the mechanism with which the rotation of the earth on its axis was being compensated, in order to keep the observed object in focus. What kind of sinister irony was it that under the former Westerbork concentration camp it turned out that they were extracting gas?
Dusk was already falling, but in the distance visitors were still walking around the site — not looking at the telescopes, but at something that was no longer there. If those directly involved had wanted nothing more to do with the camp, in the new Jewish generation voices had recently been raised in favor of restoring it to its original state. The barrier was back in its old place and a watchtower had been restored by the buffers. There had even been a case made for ousting the observatory. If they really persisted in this, he would write a letter to the editor of the New Israel Weekly, extol the synthesis radio telescope as a "Jewish observatory," and argue that it could only be destroyed if after the complete restoration of Westerbork camp the ninety-three trains also appeared at the Boulevard des Miseres, to bring the people back from the gas chambers.
49. The Westerbork
Over the years Max's relationship with Tsjallingtsje had assumed the calm character of a marriage. While she still cried out "Oh God!" when she came, the stationer's above which she had lived had been taken over by a large publishing firm, which needed her rooms for storing cut-price English art books. He had arranged for her to move into a rustic Hansel-and-Gretel-type house on the edge of the village of Westerbork, where a shy electronics engineer from Dwingeloo had entertained young farmhands until he retired.