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Bow Shock

Written by Gregory Benford

Ralph slid into the booth where Irene was already waiting, looking perky and sipping on a bottle of Snapple tea. "How'd it . . ." She let the rest slide away, seeing his face.

"Tell me something really awful, so it won't make today seem so bad."

She said carefully, "Yes sir, coming right up, sir. Um . . ." A wicked grin. "Once I had a pet bird that committed suicide by sticking his head between the cage bars."

"W-what . . .?"

"Okay, you maybe need worse? Can do." A flash of dazzling smile. "My sister forgot to feed her pet gerbils, so one died. Then, the one that was alive ate its dead friend."

Only then did he get that she was kidding, trying to josh him out of his mood. He laughed heartily. "Thanks, I sure needed that."

She smiled with relief and turned her head, swirling her dirty-blonde hair around her head in a way that made him think of a momentary tornado. Without a word her face gave him sympathy, concern, inquiry, stiff-lipped support—all in a quick gush of expressions that skated across her face, her full, elegantly lipsticked red mouth collaborating with her eggshell blue eyes.

Her eyes followed him intently as he described the paper he had found that left his work in the dust.

"Astronomy is about getting there first?" she asked wonderingly.

"Sometimes. This time, anyway." After that he told her about the talk with the department chairman—the whole scene, right down to every line of dialog, which he would now remember forever, apparently—and she nodded.

"It's time to solicit letters of recommendation for me, but to who? My work's already out of date. I . . . don't know what to do now," he said. Not a great last line to a story, but the truth.

"What do you feel like doing?"

He sighed. "Redouble my efforts—"

"When you've lost sight of your goal?" It was, he recalled, a definition of fanaticism, from a movie.

"My goal is to be an astronomer," he said stiffly.

"That doesn't have to mean academic, though."

"Yeah, but NASA jobs are thin these days." An agency that took seven years to get to the moon the first time, from a standing start, was now spending far more dollars to do it again in fifteen years.

"You have a lot of skills, useful ones."

"I want to work on fundamental things, not applied."

She held up the cap of her Snapple iced tea and read from the inner side with a bright, comically forced voice, "Not a winner, but here's your Real Fact number two thirty-seven. The number of times a cricket chirps in fifteen seconds, plus thirty-seven, will give you the current air temperature."

"In Fahrenheit, I'll bet," he said, wondering where she was going with this.

"Lots of 'fundamental' scientific facts are just that impressive. Who cares?"

"Um, have we moved on to a discussion of the value of knowledge?"

"Valuable to whom, is my point."

If she was going to quote stuff, so could he. "Look, Mark Twain said that the wonder of science is the bounty of speculation that comes from a single hard fact."

"Can't see a whole lot of bounty from here." She gave him a wry smile, another hair toss. He had to admit, it worked very well on him.

"I like astronomy."

"Sure, it just doesn't seem to like you. Not as much, anyway."

"So I should . . .?" Let her fill in the answer, since she was full of them today. And he doubted the gerbil story.

"Maybe go into something that rewards your skills."

"Like . . .?"

"Computers. Math. Think big! Try to sign on with a hedge fund, do their analysis."

"Hedge funds . . ." He barely remembered what they did. "They look for short-term trading opportunities in the market?"

"Right, there's a lot of math in that. I read up on it online." She was sharp; that's what he liked about her. "That data analysis you're doing, it's waaay more complicated than what Herb Linzfield does."

"Herb . . .?"

"Guy I know, eats in the same Indian buffet place some of us go for lunch." Her eyes got veiled and he wondered what else she and Herb had talked about. Him? "He calculates hedges on bonds."

"Corporate or municipal?" Just to show he wasn't totally ignorant of things financial.

"Uh, I think corporate." Again the veiled eyes.

"I didn't put in six years in grad school and get a doctorate to—-"

"I know, honey." Eyes suddenly warm "But you've given this a real solid try now."

"A try? I'm not done."

"Well, what I'm saying, you can do other things. If this doesn't . . . work out."

Thinking, he told her about the labyrinths of academic politics. The rest of the UC Irvine astro types did nearby galaxies, looking for details of stellar evolution, or else big scale cosmological stuff. He worked in between, peering at exotic beasts showing themselves in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum. It was a competitive field and he felt it fit him. So he spelled out what he thought of as The Why. That is, why he had worked hard to get this far. For the sake of the inner music it gave him, he had set aside his personal life, letting affairs lapse and dodging any long-term relationship.

"So that's why you weren't . . . connected? . . . when you got here." She pursed her lips appraisingly.

"Yeah. Keep my options open, I figured."

"Open for . . .?"

"For this—" He swept a rueful, ironic hand in the air at his imaginary assets. For a coveted appointment, a heady way out of the gray postdoc grind—an Assistant Professorship at UC Irvine, smack on the absurdly pricey, sun-bleached coast of Orange County. He had beaten out over a hundred applicants. And why not? He was quick, sure, with fine-honed skills and good connections, plus a narrow-eyed intensity a lot of women found daunting, as if it whispered: careerist, beware. The skies had seemed to open to him, for sure . . .

But that was then.

He gave her a crinkled smile, rueful, and yet he felt it hardening. "I'm not quitting. Not now."

"Well, just think about it." She stroked his arm slowly and her eyes were sad now. "That's all I meant . . ."

"Sure." He knew the world she inhabited, had seen her working spreadsheets, reading biographies of the founding fathers and flipping through books on "leadership," seeking clues about rising in the buoyant atmosphere of business.

"Promise?" Oddly plaintive.

He grinned without mirth. "You know I will." But her words had hurt him, all the same. Mostly by slipping cool slivers of doubt into his own mind.

****

Later that night, he lay in her bed and replayed the scene. It now seemed to define the day, despite Irene's strenuous efforts.

Damn, Ralph had thought. Scooped!

And by Andy Lakehurst, too. He had bit his lip and focused on the screen, where he had just gotten a freshly posted paper off the Los Alamos library web site, astro-ph.

The radio map was of Ralph's one claim to minor fame, G369.23-0.82. The actual observations were stunning. Brilliant, clear, detailed. Better than his work.

He had slammed his fist on his disk, upsetting his coffee. "Damn!" Then he sopped up the spill—it had spattered some of the problem sets he'd graded earlier.

Staring at the downloaded preprint, fuming, he saw that Andy and his team had gotten really detailed data on the—on his—hot new object, G369.23-0.82. They must have used a lot of observing time, and gotten it pronto.

Where? His eyes ran down the usual Observations section and—Arecibo! He got observing time there?

That took pull or else a lucky cancellation. Arecibo was the largest dish in the world, a whole scooped bowl set amid a tropical tangle, but fixed in position. You had to wait for time and then synchronize with dishes around the planet to make a map.

And good ol' ex-classmate Andy had done it. Andy had a straightforward, no-nonsense manner to him, eased by a ready smile that got him through doors and occasionally into bedrooms. Maybe he had connections to Beth Conway at Arecibo?

No, Ralph had thought, that's beneath me. He jumped on G369.23-0.82 and did the obvious next step, that's all.

Further, Andy was at Harvard, and that helped. Plenty. But it still galled. Ralph was still waiting to hear from Harkin at the Very Large Array about squeezing in some time there. Had been waiting for six weeks, yes.

And on top of it all, he then had his conference with the department chairman in five minutes. He glanced over Andy's paper again. It was excellent work. Unfortunately.

****

He sighed in the dark of Irene's apartment, recalling the crucial hour with the department chairman. This long day wouldn't be done until he had reviewed it, apparently.

****

He had started with a fixed smile. Albert Gossian was an avuncular sort, an old-fashioned chairman who wore a suit when he was doing official business. This unconscious signal did not bode well. Gossian gave him a quick, jowly smile and gestured Ralph into a seat.

"I've been looking at your Curriculum Vitae," Gossian said. He always used the full Latin, while others just said "CV." Slow shake of head. "You need to publish more, Ralph."

"My grant funding's kept up, I—"

"Yes, yes, very nice. The NSF is putting effort into this field, most commendable—" A quick glance up from reading his notes, over the top of his glasses—"and that's why the department decided to hire in this area. But—can you keep the funding?"

"I'm two years in on the NSF grant, so next year's mandatory review is the crunch."

"I'm happy to say your teaching rating is high, and university service, but . . ." The drawn-out vowels seemed to be delivering a message independent of the actual sentences.

All Assistant Professors had a review every two years, tracking their progress toward the Holy Grail of tenure. Ralph had followed a trajectory typical for the early century: six years to get his doctorate, a postdoc at Harvard—where Andy Lakehurst was the rising star, eclipsing him and a lot of others. Ralph got out of there after a mutually destructive affair with a biologist at Tufts, fleeing as far as he could when he saw that UC Irvine was growing fast and wanted astrophysicists. UCI had a mediocre reputation in particle theory, but Fred Reines had won a Nobel there for showing that neutrinos existed and using them to detect the spectacular 1987 supernova.

The plasma physics group was rated highest in the department and indeed they proved helpful when he arrived. They understood that 99% of the mass in the universe was roasted, electrons stripped away from the nuclei-plasma. It was a hot, rough universe. The big dramas played out there. Sure, life arose in the cool, calm planets, but the big action flared in their placid skies, telling stories that awed him.

But once at UCI, he had lost momentum. In the tightening federal budgets, proposals didn't get funded, so he could not add postdocs to get some help and leverage. His carefully teased-out observations gave new insights only grudgingly. Now five years along, he was three months short of the hard wall where tenure had to happen, or became impossible: the cutoff game.

Were the groves of academe best for him, really? He liked the teaching, fell asleep in the committee meetings, found the academic cant and paperwork boring. Life's sure erosions . . .

Studying fast-moving neutron stars had been fashionable a few years back, but in Gossian's careful phrasings he heard notes of skepticism. To the Chairman fell the task of conveying the senior faculty's sentiments.

Gossian seemed to savor the moment. "This fast-star fad—well, it is fading, some of your colleagues think."

He bit his lip. Don't show anger. "It's not a 'fad.' It's a set of discoveries."

"But where do they lead?"

"Too early to tell. We think they're ejected from supernova events, but maybe that's just the least imaginative option."

"One of the notes here says the first 'runaway pulsar,' called the Mouse, is now well understood. The other, recent ones will probably follow the same course."

"Too early to tell," Ralph persisted. "The field needs time—"

"But you do not have time."

There was the crux of it. Ralph was falling behind in paper count. Even in the small 'runaway pulsar' field, he was outclassed by others with more resources, better computers, more time. California was in a perpetual budget crisis, university resources were declining, so pressure was on to Bring In the (Federal) Bucks. Ralph's small program supported two graduate students, sure, but that was small potatoes.

"I'll take this under advisement," Ralph said. The utterly bland phrase did nothing to help his cause, as was clear from the chairman's face, but it got him out of that office.

****

He did not get much sleep that night. Irene had to leave early and he got a double coffee on the way into his office. Then he read Andy's paper carefully and thought, sipping.

Few astronomers had expected to find so many runaway neutron stars.

Their likely origin began with two young, big stars, born circling one another. One went supernova, leaving a neutron star still in orbit. Later, its companion went off, too, spitting the older neutron star out, free into interstellar space.

Ralph had begun his UCI work by making painstaking maps in the microwave frequency range. This took many observing runs on the big radio antennas, getting dish time where he could around the world. In these maps he found his first candidate, G369.23-0.82. It appeared as a faint finger in maps centered on the plane of the galaxy, just a dim scratch. A tight knot with a fuzzy tail.

He had found it with software that searched the maps, looking for anything that was much longer than it was wide. This retrieved quite a few of the jets that zoomed out of regions near black holes, and sometimes from the disks orbiting young stars. He spent months eliminating these false signatures, looking for the telltales of compact stellar runaways. He then got time on the Very Large Array—not much, but enough to pull G369.23-0.82 out of the noise a bit better. This was quite satisfying.

Ralph got more coffee and went back and studied his paper, published less than half a year ago. Until today, that was the best data anybody had. He had looked for signs of rotation in the point-like blob in front, but there were none. The first runaway seen, the Mouse, discovered many years before, was finally shown to be a rotating neutron star—a pulsar, beeping its right radio beams out at the cupped ears of radio telescopes.

Then he compared in detail with Andy's new map:

Clean, smooth, beautiful. He read the Conclusions section over again, mind jittery and racing.

We thus fail to confirm that G369.23-0.82 is a pulsar. Clearly it has a bow shock, creating a wind nebula, undoubtedly powered by a neutron star. Yet at highest sensitivity there is no trace of a pulsed signal in microwaves or optical, within the usual range of pulsar periods. The nebular bow shock cone angle implies that G369.23-0.82 is moving with a Mach number of about 80, suggesting a space velocity ˜ 120 km/s through a local gas of density ˜ 0.3 per cubic cm. We use the distance estimate of Eilek et.al. for the object, which is halfway across the galaxy. These dynamics and luminosity are consistent with a distant neutron star moving at a velocity driven by ejection from a supernova. If it is a pulsar, it is not beaming in our direction.

Beautiful work. Alas.

The bright region blazed forth, microwave emission from high energy electrons. The innermost circle was not the neutron star, just the unresolved zone too small for even Arecibo to see. At the presumed distance, that circle was still bigger than a solar system. The bow shock was a perfect, smooth curve. Behind that came the microwave emission of gas driven back, heated and caught up in what would become the wake. At the core was something that could shove aside the interstellar gas with brute momentum. A whole star, squeezed by gravity into a ball about as big as the San Francisco Bay area.

But how had Andy gotten such fine resolution?

Ralph worked through the numbers and found that this latest map had picked up much more signal than his earlier work. The object was brighter. Why? Maybe it was meeting denser gas, so had more radiating electrons to work with?

For a moment he just gazed at the beauty of it. He never lost his sense of awe at such wonders. That helped a bit to cool his disgruntlement. Just a bit.

****

There wasn't much time between Andy's paper popping up on the astro-ph web site and Ralph's big spring trip. Before leaving, he retraced his data and got ahead on his teaching.

He and Irene finessed their problems, or at least delayed them. He got through a week of classes, put in data-processing time with his three graduate students, and found nothing new in the radio maps they worked on.

Then came their big, long-planned excursion. Irene was excited, but he now dreaded it.

His start-up money had some travel funds left in it, and he had made the mistake of mentioning this to Irene. She jumped at the chance, even though it was a scientific conference in a small town—"But it's in France," she said, with a touch of round-eyed wonder he found endearing.

So off they jetted to the International Astronomical Union meeting in Briancon, a pleasant collection of stone buildings clinging to the French Alps. Off season, crouching beneath sharp snowy peaks in late May, it was charming and uncrowded and its delights went largely ignored by the astronomers. Some of the attendees went on hikes in the afternoon but Ralph stayed in town, talking, networking like the ambitious workaholic he was. Irene went shopping.

The shops were featuring what she called the Hot New Skanky Look, which she showed off for him in their cramped hotel room that evening. She flounced around in an off-the-shoulder pink blouse, artfully showing underwear and straps. Skanky certainly caught the flavor, but still he was distracted.

In their cramped hotel room, jet-lagged, she used some of her first-date skills, overcoming his distance. That way he got some sleep a few hours later. Good hours, they were.

The morning session was interesting, the afternoon a little slow. Irene did sit in on some papers. He couldn't tell if she was interested in the science itself, or just because it was part of his life. She lasted a few hours and went shopping again, saying, "It's my way of understanding their culture."

The conference put on a late afternoon tour of the vast, thick-walled castles that loomed at every sharp peak. At the banquet inside one of the cold, echoing fortresses they were treated to local specialties, a spicy polenta and fresh-caught trout. Irene surveyed the crowd, half of them still wearing shorts and T-shirts, and remarked, "Y'know, this is a quirky profession. A whole room of terribly smart people, and it never occurred to them to try to get by on their looks."

He laughed; she had a point. She was a butterfly among the astro-drones, turning heads, smiles blossoming in her wake. He felt enhanced to have her on his arm. Or maybe it was the wine, a Vin Local red that went straight to his head, with some help from the two kilometer altitude.

They milled around the high, arched reception room after the dessert. The crowd of over two hundred was too energized to go off to bed, so they had more wine. Ralph caught sight of Andy Lakehurst then. Irene noted his look and said, "Uh oh."

"Hey, he's an old friend."

"Oh? You're glaring at him."

"Okay, let's say there's some leftover baggage."

She gave him a veiled look, yawned, and said. "I'll wander off to the room, let you boys play."

Ralph nodded, barely listening. He eavesdropped carefully on the crowd gathered around lanky, broad-shouldered Andy. The man's booming voice carried well, over the heads of just about everybody in the room. Andy was going on about good ol' G369.23-0.82. Ralph edged closer.

"I figure maybe another, longer look at it, at G—"

"The Bullet," Ralph broke in.

"What?" Andy had a high forehead and it wrinkled as he stopped in mid-sentence.

"It looks like a bullet. Why not call it that, instead of that long code?"

"Well," Andy began brightly, "people might mistake—"

"There's even the smoke trailing behind it, the wake." Ralph said, grinning. "Use that, if you want it to get into Scientific American."

"Y'know, Ralph, you haven't changed."

"Poorer, is all."

"Hey, none of us went into this to get rich."

"Tenure would be nice."

"Damn right, buddy." Andy clapped him on the shoulder. "I'm going up for it this winter, y'know."

He hadn't, but covered with, "Well deserved. I'm sure you'll get it," and couldn't resist adding, "Harvard's a tough sell, though. Carl Sagan didn't make it there."

"Really?" Andy frowned, then covered with, "So, uh, you think we should call it the Rifle?"

"The Bullet," Ralph said again. "It's sure going fast, and we don't really know it's a neutron star."

"Hey, it's a long way off, hard to diagnose."

"Maybe it's distant, I kinda wonder—"

"And it fits the other parameters."

"Except you couldn't find a pulse, so maybe it's not a pulsar."

"Gotta be," Andy said casually, and someone interrupted with a point Ralph couldn't hear and Andy's gaze shifted to include the crowd again. That gave Ralph a chance to think while Andy worked the room.

There were nearly a thousand pulsars now known, rotating neutron stars that flashed their lighthouse beams across the galaxy. Some spun a thousand times in a second, others were old and slow, all sweeping their beams out as they rotated. All such collapsed stars told their long tale of grinding decay; the slower were older. Some were ejected after their birth in bright, flashy supernovas, squashed by catastrophic compression in nuclear fire, all in a few minutes.

Here in Briancon, Ralph reflected, their company of smart, chattering chimpanzees—all evolved long after good ol' G369.23-0.82 had emerged from its stellar placenta—raptly studied the corpses of great calamities, the murder of stars by remorseless gravity.

Not that their primate eyes would ever witness these objects directly. They actually saw, with their football-field sized dishes, the brilliant emissions of fevered electrons, swirling in celestial concert around magnetic fields. Clouds of electrons cruised near the speed of light itself, squeezing out their waves—braying to the whole universe that they were alive and powerful and wanted everyone to know it. Passing gaudy advertisements, they were, really, for the vast powers wrecking silent violences in the slumbering night skies.

"We're out of its beam; that's got to be the answer," Andy said, turning back to Ralph and taking up their conversation again, his smile getting a little more rigid. "Not pointed at us."

Ralph blinked, taken unaware; he had been vaguely musing. "Uh, I'm thinking maybe we should consider every possibility, is all." Maybe he had taken one glass too many of the Vin Local.

"What else could it be?" Andy pressed his case, voice tightening. "It's compact, moving fast, bright at the leading edge, luminosity driven by its bow shock. A neutron star, charging on out of the galaxy."

"If it's as far away as we think. What if it isn't?"

"We don't know anything else that can put out emissions like that."

He could see nearby heads nodding. "We have to think . . ." grasping for something . . . "uh, outside the box." Probably the Vin Local talking.

Smiling, Andy leaned close and whispered through his tight, no-doubt-soon-to-be tenured lips, "Ol' buddy, you need an idea, to beat an idea."

****

Definitely the Vin Local, yes.

He awoke next morning with a traffic accident inside his skull. Only now did he remember that he had exchanged polite words with Harkin, the eminence gris of the Very Large Array, but there was no news about getting some observing time there. And he still had to give his paper.

It was a botch.

He had a gaudy Powerpoint presentation. And it even ran right on his laptop, a minor miracle. But the multicolored radio maps and graphics failed to conceal a poverty of ideas. If they could see a pulsed emission from it, they could date the age and then look back along the track of the runaway to see if a supernova remnant was there—a shell of expanding hot gas, a celestial bull's eye, confirming the whole theory.

He presented his results on good ol' G369.23-0.82. He had detailed microwave maps of it, plenty of calculations—but Andy had already given his talk, showing that it wasn't a pulsar. And G369.23-0.82—Ralph insisted on calling it the Bullet, but puzzled looks told him that nobody much liked the coinage—was the pivot of the talk, alas.

"There are enough puzzling aspects here," he said gamely, "to suspend judgment, I think. We have a habit of classifying objects because they superficially resemble others."

The rest was radio maps of various blobby radio-emitting clouds he had thought could be other runaways . . . but weren't. Using days of observing time at the VLA, and on other dish systems in the Netherlands and Bologna, Italy, he had racked up a lot of time.

And found . . . nothing. Sure, plenty of supernova remnants, some shredded fragments of lesser catastrophes, mysterious leftovers fading fast in the radio frequencies—but no runaways with the distinctive tails first found in the famous Mouse. He tried to cover the failure by riffing through quick images of these disappointments, implying without saying that these were open possibilities. The audience seemed to like the swift, color-enhanced maps. It was a method his mother had taught him while playing bridge: finesse when you don't have all the tricks.

His talk came just before lunch and the audience looked hungry. He hoped he could get away with just a few questions. Andy rose at the back and asked innocently, "So why do you think the, uh, Bullet is not a neutron star?"

"Where's the supernova remnant it came from?" Ralph shot back. "There's nothing at all within many light years behind it."

"It's faded away, probably," Andy said.

A voice from the left, one of the Grand Old Men, said, "Remember, the, ah, Bullet is all the way across the galaxy. An old, faint remnant it might have escaped is hard to see at that distance. And—" a shrewd pursing of lips "—did you look at a sufficiently deep sensitivity?"

"I used all the observing time I had," Ralph answered, jumping his Powerpoint slides back to a mottled field view—random flecks, no structure obvious. "The region in the far wake of the Bullet is confusion limited."

Astronomers described a noisy background with that term, meaning that they could not tell signal from noise. But as he fielded a few more quick questions he thought that maybe the jargon was more right than they knew. Confusion limited what they could know, taking their mayfly snapshots.

Then Andy stood again and poked away at details of the data, a bit of tit for tat, and finishing with a jibe: "I don't understand your remark about not jumping to classify objects just because they superficially resemble other ones."

He really had no good reason, but he grinned and decided to joke his way through. "Well, the Bullet doesn't have the skewed shape of the Duck . . ."—which was another oddly shaped pulsar wake, lopsided fuzz left behind by a young pulsar Andy had discovered two years ago—"Astronomers forget that the public likes descriptive terms. They're easier to remember than, say, G369.23-0.82." Some laughter. "So I think it's important to keep our options open. And not succumb to the sweet temptation to go sensational, y'know—" He drew a deep breath and slipped into a falsetto trill he had practiced in his room. "Runaway star! High speeds! It will escape our galaxy entirely!"

—and it got a real laugh.

Andy's mouth twisted sourly and, too late, Ralph remembered that Andy had been interviewed by some flak and then featured in the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer, with wide-eyed headlines not much different.

Oops.

****

Irene had been a hit at Briancon, though she was a bit too swift for some of his colleagues. She was kooky, or as some would say, annoying. But at her side he felt he had fully snapped to attention. Sometimes, she made it hard to concentrate; but he did. When he got back to UCI there was teaching to catch up on, students to coach, and many ideas to try out. He settled in.

Some thought that there were only two kinds of science: stamp collecting and physics. Ernest Rutherford had said that, but then, he also thought the atomic nucleus had no practical uses.

Most scientific work began with catalogs. Only later did the fine distinctions come to suggest greater, looming laws. Newton brought Galileo's stirrings into differential laws, ushering forth the modern world.

Astronomers were fated to mostly do astro-botany, finding varieties of deep space objects, framing them into categories, hoping to see if they had a common cause. Stamp collecting.

Once the theory boys decided, back in the 1970s, that pulsars were rotating neutron stars, they largely lost interest and moved onto quasars and jets and then to gamma-ray bursters, to dark energy—an onward marching through the botany, to find the more basic physics. Ralph didn't mind their blithe inattention. He liked the detective story aspects, always alive to the chance that just because things looked similar didn't mean they had to be the same.

So he prowled through all the data he had, comparing with other maps he had gotten at Briancon. There were plenty of long trails in the sky, jets galore—but no new candidates for runaway neutron stars. So he had to go back to the Bullet to make progress. For that he needed more observing time.

****

For him and Irene, a good date had large portions of honesty and alcohol. Their first night out after the French trip he came armed with attention span and appetite. He kept an open mind to chick flicks—rented and hauled back to her place, ideally—and even to restaurants that played soft romantic background music, which often did the same job as well as a chick flick.

He had returned to news, both good and bad. The department wasn't interested in delaying his tenure decision, as he had fleetingly asked (Irene's suggestion) before leaving. But: Harkin had rustled up some observing time for him on the VLA. "Wedges, in between the big runs," he told Irene.

"Can you get much with just slices of time?"

"In astronomy, looking hard and long is best. Choppy and short can do the same job, if you're lucky."

It was over a weekend, too, so he would not have to get someone to cover his classes.

So he was definitely up when they got to the restaurant. He always enjoyed squiring Irene around, seeing other guys' eyeballs follow them to their table—and telling her about it. She always got a round-eyed, raised eyebrow flash out of that. Plus, they both got to look at each other and eat. And if things went right this night, toward the dessert it might be like that scene in the Tom Jones movie.

They ordered: for her, the caramelized duck breasts, and for him, tender Latin chicken with plantains. "A yummy start," she said, eyeing the upscale patrons. The Golden Coast abounded with Masters of the Universe, with excellently cut hair and bodies that were slim, casually elegant, carefully muscled (don't want to look like a laborer), the women running from platinum blonde through strawberry. "Ummm, quite soigne', Irene judged, trying out her new French vocabulary.

Ralph sensed some tension in her, so he took his time, glancing around at the noisy crowd. They carried themselves with that look not so much of energetic youth but rather of expert maintenance, like a Rolls with the oil religiously changed every 1500 miles. Walking in their wake made most working stiffs feel just a touch shabby.

He said, "Livin' extra-large in OC," with a rueful smile, and wondered if she saw this, the American Dream Extreme, as he did. They lived among dun-colored hills covered by pseudo-Spanish stucco splendor, McMansions sprawled across tiny lots. "Affluenza," someone had called it, a disease of always wanting more: the local refrain was "It's all about you," where the homes around yacht-ringed harbors and coves shone like filigree around a gemstone. He respected people like her, in business, as the drivers who created the wealth that made his work possible. But just today he had dropped her at the Mercedes dealership to pick up her convertible, in for an oil change. Pausing, he saw that the place offered free drop-in car washes, and while you waited with your cinnamon-topped decaf cappuccino you could get a manicure, or else work on your putting at a green around the back. Being an academic scientist around here felt like being the poor country cousin.

He watched her examine all the flatware and polish it with her napkin. This was not routine; she was not a control freak who obsessed over the organization of her entire life, or who kept color-coded files, though, yes, she was a business MBA.

"That was a fun trip," Irene said in the pensive tones that meant she was being diplomatic. "Ah . . . do you want to hang out with those people all your life?"

"They're pretty sophisticated, I think," he said defensively, wondering where she was going with this.

"They—how to put this pleasantly?—work too damn hard."

"Scientists do."

"Business types, too—but they don't talk about nothing else."

"It was a specialists' conference. That's all they have in common."

"That, and being outrageously horny."

He grinned. "You never thought that was a flaw before."

"I keep remembering the M.I.T guy who believed he could wow me with"—she made the quote marks with her fingers—"a 'meaningful conversation' that included quoting The Simpsons, gangsta flicks, and some movie trilogy."

"That was Tolkein."

"Elves with swords. I thought you guys were scientists."

"We have . . . hobbies."

"Obsessions, seems like."

"Our work included?"

She spread her hands. "I respect that you're deeply involved in astronomy, sure." She rolled her eyes. "But it pays so little! And you're headed into a tough tenure decision. After all these years!"

"Careers take time."

"Lives do, too. Recall what today is?"

He kept his face impassive, the only sure way to not get the deer-in-headlights expression he was prone to. "Uh, no . . ."

"Six months ago."

"Oh, yes. We were going to discuss marriage again."

Her eyes glinted. "And you've been hiding behind your work . . . again."

"Hey, that's not fair—"

"I'm not waiting forever."

"I'm in a crunch here. Relationships don't have a 'sell-by' date stamped on them—"

"Time waits for no man. I don't either."

Bottom line time, then. He asked firmly, "So instead I should . . .?"

She handed him a business card.

"I should have known."

"Herb Linzfield. Give him a call."

"What inducement do I have?" He grinned to cover his concern.

She answered obliquely by ordering dessert, with a sideways glance and flickering little smile on her big, rich lips. On to Tom Jones.

****

To get to the VLA from UC Irvine means flying out of John Wayne airport—there's a huge, looming bronze statue of the Duke in cowboy duds that somehow captures the actor's trademarked gait—and through Phoenix to Albuquerque. Ralph did this with legs jammed up so he couldn't open his laptop, courtesy of Southwest Airlines—and then drove a Budget rental west through Socorro.

The crisp heat faded as he rose up the grade to the dry plateau, where the Array sprawls on railroad lines in its long valley. Along the Y-shaped rail line the big dishes could crawl, ears cupped toward the sky, as they reconfigured to best capture in their "equivalent eye" distant radiating agonies. The trip through four-lane blacktop edged with sagebrush took most of a day. When Ralph arrived Harkin had been observing a radio galaxy for eight hours.

"Plenty more useful than my last six hours," he said, and Harkin grinned.

Harkin wore jeans, a red wool shirt and boots and this was not an affectation. Locals described most of the astronomers as "all hat and no cattle," a laconic indictment of fake westerners. Harkin's face seemed to have been crumpled up and then partly smoothed out—the effect of twenty years out here.

The radio galaxy had an odd, contorted look. A cloud of radio emitting electrons wrapped around Harkin's target—a brilliant jet. Harkin was something of a bug about jets, maintaining that they had to be shaped by the magnetic fields they carried along. Fields and jets alike all were offhand products of the twirling disk far down in the galactic center. The black holes that caused all this energy release were hard to discover, tiny and cloaked in gas. But the jets carried out to the universe striking advertisements, so they were the smoking gun. Tiny graveyards where mass died had managed to scrawl their signatures across the sky.

Ralph looked at the long, spindly jet in Harkin's radio images. It was like a black-and-white of an arrow. There was a lot of work here. Hot-bright images from deep down in the churning glory of the galactic core, then the long slow flaring as the jet moved above the galactic disk and met the intergalactic winds.

Still, it adamantly kept its direction, tightly arrowing out into the enveloping dark. It stretched out for many times the size of its host galaxy, announcing its presence with blaring radio emission. That came from the spiraling of high-energy electrons around magnetic field lines, Ralph knew, yet he always felt a thrill at the raw radio maps, the swirls