“Let’s invite everyone but Allen,” George said, louder now, earning another middle finger from his office mate.
“Good luck with your star. There’s an after-party thing. Meet us there, okay?”
He released a long sigh. “Just text me the address?”
“It’s in Greenpoint.”
Long sigh, redux.
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
He got off the phone. He didn’t know what to do next. He closed his eyes. How could this be happening? He had to remind himself that Allen wasn’t capable of collapsing a giant molecular cloud of gas, a hundred times larger than their solar system. But that didn’t stop him from resenting his colleague, who had been ascending with Machiavellian precision through the department by subtly undermining the research of others.
George had fallen in love, thirteen years ago, with the dream of all the infinite things in the universe still to be discovered, of theories to be pieced together and daring connections made. The Allens of the world, however, seemed to outnumber him at every turn… researchers who didn’t look out into the universe, pondering, but instead busied themselves attending conferences and reading abstracts, looking for flawed research to tease apart or supposed discoveries to disprove. George knew, in theory, that the world — the universe — needed these doubting Allens to check the ideas of the dreamers, but he wished they didn’t enjoy it quite so much.
George called Jacob, whom he could usually count on for sympathy in these matters, but his friend didn’t answer. If he was up at the asylum, he couldn’t usually pick up.
“Kaaaaaaa”—George heard Allen shouting behind him—“BLOOEY!”
“Are you in the third grade?” George asked without turning around.
“I wish. Okay. So I just got off with the guys in Madrid. They’re getting us some time on the Messier Telescope tonight to get the last of the data.”
“Us? Don’t you have the Phoenix-13 all afternoon?”
“That weakass telescope can’t get us the readings we need. Come on.”
“Again, who is this us?”
Allen shouted, “You and me, G-man! I’m telling you — this is exciting shit!”
“This is a catastrophe, Allen.” George pointed to the shelf full of black three-ring binders, identical except for the steady fading plastic, moving leftward, as they went back in time toward his first research years. “Four years in those. Two thirty-seven Lyrae V was supposed to be stable.”
“That’s what makes it so interesting, G-man. She ought to be one of the most stable cores in the Ring Nebula, right? I mean, from what you’ve found so far, it should take a goddamn supernova to collapse two thirty-seven. Only there’s not one. So we’ve got to ask ourselves, in the words of our great scientific forebears — what the fuck?”
“Allen—”
“I’m saying, George. It’s not too late to get on board with this paper I’m writing.”
“You’re writing?”
“Okay, okay — we’re writing. We’re going to watch the collapse in real time, G-man. That’s rare as shit. We’re talking ‘target of opportunity.’ We’re talking you and me are going to get time on the motherfucking Hubble,” Allen said, standing quickly. “Look, I’ve got a lunch with Cokonis. I’m going to catch him up on all this. Think it over. If this is what I think it is, you don’t have a lot of time to start writing grants.” He was practically skipping as he left the cubicle.
“Oh, and by the way, I’m getting married…” George said to the empty air. There was a long quiet, and then steadily he heard the clack of keyboards and the squeak of chairs from the other cubicles all up and down the hallway. The click of phones being put back into their cradles, the hum of fluorescent lights, the scuffing of rubber soles on carpeting.
Allen was right. George knew it. He had been massively wrong about everything leading up to it, but aside from that fact, 237 Lyrae V’s collapse could actually be huge for them. Shouldn’t he want that?
George rolled his chair over to Allen’s computer, where he’d left the interface open for the Phoenix-13 telescope. Pausing the data stream Allen was downloading, George’s fingers typed in the set of complex coordinates without conscious thought: Right ascension of 18h 53m 35.079s. Declination of +33°01′ 45.03. There was a long pause as the telescope, twenty-five hundred miles away in Arizona, adjusted its mechanized gaze to a completely different part of the universe. The sheer scale of these little keystrokes still floored George some days and still briefly distracted him from the heinous particulars of his job — that morning consisting of ten e-mails in two hours from Cokonis about getting the next round of grants written up, about publishing his next paper, about presenting at a conference in Wichita.
The images began to come up on the screen. The Ring Nebula, aka Messier 57, aka NGC 6720. A planetary nebula in the constellation Lyra, a great reddish ring of fire surrounding an iris of blue-green like ocean water. On the sad little computer monitor, George couldn’t see much detail, but he knew it glowed like an ember on the big infrareds… and that it was, in its way, an ember, left over when a star exhausted its supply of hydrogen and the outer layers pushed outward and it became a red giant. He zoomed the telescope to its maximum point and found his little core inside the nebula. Just a hundred thousand years old. Practically an infant in cosmic terms, emitting no light, only heat and gas, but he knew it was there.
He’d first seen the Ring Nebula in AP Physics C. Mr. Pix had put it up on a color transparency, explaining, “Every once in a while, a dusty red giant star can become a nebulae, like M fifty-seven, here, which contains an unknown number of nebulosities, and in this way, one dying star becomes a kind of breeding ground for new ones.”
George had been stunned. Until then they’d been so fixated on heat death and entropy and black holes that he’d never stopped to think about the fact that the universe was constantly generating new stars. Against all the data it now seemed as if 237 would become one of them. But, as Sara had reminded him, its fate was sealed. Whatever was happening had happened already. The weak light he could see had left the star two millennia ago. It had all been over and done with back in the days of Babylon and Plato, when the first astronomers had turned their lenses toward the black sea above them and ventured to look more closely at those white shining spirits. His little dot was just one in 400 billion, but George didn’t care. It was his, and he whispered to it, there in his cubicle, “Don’t you die on me.”
2
How exactly like George, Sara thought, to ask someone to marry him at three in the morning, when she couldn’t call everyone she knew. She considered this while waiting for Irene to arrive for lunch — already twenty-five minutes late. Maybe there had been news, and Irene had decided to bail. She was a disappearance artist, Irene was. Days or weeks could go by without contact, either because she was working on a new piece or because of something personal. She could be maddeningly private. Evading the circling of an impatient waiter, Sara pretended to be on her phone while she replayed the weekend’s events in her mind.
For the first two minutes after George had asked, she’d said almost nothing but “Oh my God” until George reminded her she technically hadn’t said yes yet, and so then she said yes for the two minutes that followed. But after those four minutes were over, she had wanted nothing more than to burst into the bedroom Irene and William had vanished into, except maybe to call her parents in Gloucester, except maybe to call her sister in Vancouver, except maybe to call Sue, her best friend from third grade, and then there were her grandparents in Sacramento and Austin… but it was still after midnight there and everywhere else.