Thursday, October 3, 1957
Each night, when she is not at the observatory, my mother sweeps me up and away from Earth to soar among the stars. I follow her, as Wendy followed Peter Pan, across the night sky until we arrive below the constellation Cepheus, near Polaris. Always a fine place to start our journey, this constellation is visible no matter the season. Cepheus has the shape of a tall house that leans to one side, stooped perhaps, by its great age. Picking through the pinpoints of light that form this leaning frame, our practiced eyes fix upon Delta Cephei, a modest star, and the left cornerstone of the house’s foundation. Light from Delta Cephei began its journey to me this night when Vikings sailed cold north seas.
We pause to examine Delta Cephei, a yellow supergiant that behaves in a peculiar manner. Unlike our Sun, this star’s outer layers expand and contract at regular intervals, causing its brightness to change over time. It happens like this. The star’s outer layers cool as they expand. This cooling causes its brightness to fade. Then gravity changes things up. Tugging at the expanding layers, the big G brings the expansion to a halt and the outer layers collapse, heating up as they contract. More heat means a brighter light. If you observe Delta Cephei all week, it quickly becomes brighter, then fades, then grows bright again, in just that short time. Mom calls Delta Cephei a variable star because its luminosity, or brightness, changes over time. She and the other astronomers at the observatory use stars like Delta Cephei, they call them Cepheid Variables, to figure out how far it is to places outside of our Milky Way. I haven’t quite got the math for that process into my head, but I will.
Mom pulls a clipboard from her leather satchel. “So, what’s your estimate for d. Cephei tonight?” she asks.
I glance at two of Delta Cephei’s companion stars that form a little triangle. “It’s a bit brighter compared to Epsilon Cephei tonight. I’ll give it a 4.1.”
“4.1 at 9 p.m. on October 3, 1957,” my mother says as she writes.
“Add, clear with a pale half-moon in the comments,” I remind her.
“Got it,” she says, smiling at me.
I’m almost eighteen, and still her smile when she’s pleased with me…well, I still appreciate it.
And on we go. Since it’s fall, we visit Eta Aquilae and Zeta Geminorum, Cepheid variables as well, and I estimate their brightness. When we’ve finished our observations, we will plot our data on a period versus brightness graph, creating a luminosity curve for each star. You can think about a luminosity curve this way: it is a picture of events within a star’s life written with light. Some days shine bright. Some are dull. Some dark. The luminosity curve captures them all so that you can step back one day, examine the pattern and understand the changes.
We finish our journey in the constellation Perseus, where Algol, the demon star, awaits us, locked in its billion-years dance with an unseen partner. By then, the October chill on Mount Hamilton is nipping and we turn our attention back to Earth. The lights are off in the house, so they don’t interfere with our night vision, but the fire crackling behind the low hearth in the den calls us to share its warmth. Mom makes hot cocoa and we sit for a while, sipping, in just the light of the fire. It’s our ritual, the two of us.
Friday, October 4, 1957
“I’ll be at the observatory tonight,” Mom says the next morning as I emerge from the bathroom, robe-wrapped with hair swaddled in a towel, Carmen Miranda-style.
“You have a TV dinner in the fridge.”
“Um, thanks.”
Mom’s war against my hunger takes its cues from the cold war between the United States and the Soviets. She believes announcing her latest weapon-at-the-ready is sound doctrine and the TV dinner is her application of advanced technology for ease and satiation.
I join her at the table for breakfast. She serves steaming oatmeal poured into turquoise bowls shaped like fish. I place a finger against my fish’s tail to spin the bowl as I add sugar.
“A little sugar goes a long way,” Mom advises.
Through the sliding glass doors that form the back of our house, I can see the domes of Lick Observatory. The early sun has turned them an autumn red. Seen like this, they don’t appear as imposing as they do at night when they are dark and watching the skies.
“What will you see tonight?”
Mom plops her spoon back into her oatmeal in excitement.
“Oh, tonight, Sharon! Tonight is what I dream of.”
“So, what makes it special?”
Mom runs both hands through her short, dark hair and leans in toward my side of the table.
“I have this friend. He’s a radio astronomer.”
She says this in a hushed voice as if she is telling a naughty joke.
“So, he observes in the radio spectrum instead of the visual, right?” I interject.
There’s that smile again.
“Yes, yes, yes. He uses a radio telescope to capture the radio spectrum emissions made by objects in space. Well, he’s detected something that…that seems impossible—an object out there so powerful it doesn’t match anything we know of.”
“And?”
Mom scowls. “And, this thing, whatever it is, only shows up on a radio telescope.”
“Sounds a bit like a Sci-Fi movie. So, where do you come in?”
“So, I’m looking for something in the visible spectrum. Something we can see with my telescope that might be the source of the radio transmissions he’s receiving. Don’t you see? I want to match a visible object with what he is observing in the radio spectrum. I’ll call when you get home from school.”
That evening, while I made my variable star observations, I thought about Mom up there on the ridge. I could see the massive dome of the 36-inch telescope, the one she would be using tonight. I’ve been in that building so many times, and I have this mental picture of her standing beneath the great cylinder of the telescope, guiding it to a calculated place in the night sky like some modern version of an ancient sorceress, and all of it rendered in just gray and black save for the flickering pinpoints of starlight shining through the part in the dome above her.
I guess people might think we are a sad pair, this Friday evening, Mom and I, standing in the cold staring up at the night sky. We both should be out for dinner and dancing, or a movie, with some handsome suitor. Given any of those options, I bet I could finish my tour of the sky and be ready for Prince Charming in half an hour, tops. But here’s the rub. We live on Mount Hamilton. Population? Approximately, not many. Of that not many, even fewer boys my age. As Mom would say, “The distribution is skewed.” Just about everybody up here is connected with the observatory, somehow, though that doesn’t make it any better for Mom.
My mother’s been single for a long time now. Dad was an Air Force navigator who disappeared with his B-29 during the war, leaving Mom and me to find our way without him. Now, all her colleagues are men, but they’re older or made ineligible by a variety of circumstances. I don’t think it’s easy being the only woman astronomer up there either. Mom doesn’t talk about it, really, but I notice that she’s part of the staff, but always slightly apart from the staff. It’s like this. When the staff holds a summer picnic, she helps the secretaries with the food while her colleagues stand about and smoke their pipes waiting to eat. I can see how she might feel a little isolated by that.
I look out on the lights of San Jose spread below me, the twinkling suns of a vastly different universe. A much wider distribution down there too, but we’re separated by 20 miles of the crookedest road in California. Maybe that’s what Mom and I have in common, besides the stars. We’re a little isolated by geography and our demography.
The phone rings in the house, so I stop my musing and trot in to answer. It’s Mom.
“Sharon, the Russians have launched a satellite into orbit. Go turn on the television.”
What? I switch on the Philco set and a vertical line forms on the screen. I perch on the sofa as the TV warms up to reveal a news report describing a spinning gray sphere with spiky antennas. The newscaster calls the satellite Sputnik and says it will forever separate the old from the new. The fuzzy animated image makes an ominous beeping sound that stays in my head even after the newscast ends. I open the sliding door to the patio and step out beneath the night sky. The newscast said Sputnik might be visible as it sweeps through its orbits around Earth. So, my familiar evening lights have a new companion—a man-made star—shining in our night sky. Now it’s the Russians who are sweeping all of us up and away from Earth toward something new. I guess that’s how it works, isn’t it? One day, an unexpected something happens, and from that moment on, you just know everything is going to be different.
Saturday, October 5, 1957
“I was thinking we might drive down to town this afternoon for some shopping and a movie,” Mom says.
I pause mid-push on the wet mop that I’m swirling across the spatter-pattern linoleum of our kitchen. “Now, there’s an idea. What’s the occasion?”
“Forbidden Planet,” says Mom.
“It’s back?”
“Playing at the Mesa Drive-In, and I have to see that robot again. I thought we would shop a bit and then catch an early showing. What sayest you?”
“We ride at noon, m’lady.”
Mom swings the steering wheel and we lean hard into a curve on our way to San Jose. The sun flashes in the trees above us, the wind sends my hair dancing above my shoulders, and the road down Mount Hamilton becomes a twisty ribbon of carpet for our Davis Divan.
“We should find everything we need here. I have a cooler in the trunk for perishables,” Mom says as we wheel through the crowded parking lot of the grocer’s. Let’s fan out and make quick work of this, Robby the Robot awaits us.”
Forbidden Planet? Loads of fun. Warm night, top down, burgers and popcorn hanging from an ingenious tray on either side of our space-age car. Leslie Nielsen steals my heart, but the idea of an entire alien society, the Krell, undone by their science. That is troubling. On our own planet, the U.S. unleashed the atom in anger and now extols its virtues for peace. I just hope we can do a better job of balancing physics and psychology than the Krell did.
It’s my turn to drive home in my best Mom-pleasing style, hoping to transmit confidence and competence as we make our way out of the city and onto the welcoming shoulders of Mount Hamilton. Here, streetlights vanish and my familiar sky returns. We run the car’s heater full blast and keep the top down. The cold wind sweeps in a piney scent as we start our twisting climb toward home.
“Oh, Sharon, look!”
Mom stabs a finger toward our one o’clock position where a pinpoint of light draws a luminous arc across the sky.
“Meteor?”
“That could be Sputnik, Sharon. I’m sure of it. The orientation is about right.”
Unlike a meteor, Sputnik is no flash-and-fade in the heavens. I follow the little craft’s glowing line until I’m forced to look away to negotiate a tight curve. When I look back again, it is gone.
“Incredible,” says Mom.
“Yep.”
Seeing Sputnik like that makes it real in a way no newscast can, and it changes forever the way I look at the night sky.
I negotiate another sharp turn, the headlights shining for a moment out into the nothingness below the roadbed as we swing ‘round, and I glance across at my mother. Her face, lit by car light and starlight, shows signs of troubled thoughts: jaw set, eyes focused far ahead but seeing something that’s inside, not out. I swing around the next bend in the road.
“There’s something that always bothers me about that movie, Sharon.”
“Oh, I thought you loved it.”
“I do. For the most part. It’s just that…and maybe it is part of the movie’s examination of human nature and weakness, but those three men pursuing that young woman, Altaira, from the moment they see her. I mean from the very moment they lay eyes on her. It just seems so, well so, predatory. I hope we are better than that in the distant future.”
“Mom, you think beings like the Krell are out there, launching their satellites, watching the night sky from their own observatories, wondering if they’re alone among those twinkling lights?”
“I don’t know for sure of course, Sharon, but there are so many stars, it’s hard for me to imagine that life isn’t present around some of them. Someday, we’ll have a telescope that will allow us to observe planets around another star, maybe right here at Lick.”
So, I drive on and up Mount Hamilton, following in Sputnik’s wake, with Mom in silent thought about the Krell, maybe, or Robby the Robot, and I have that unsettling electronic music from Forbidden Planet merging with Sputnik’s beep pulsing in my head.
Monday, October 7, 1957
If driving up Mount Hamilton gazing at the heavens is sublime, diving under my school desk during an air raid drill is ridiculous. What good will it do to survive an atomic attack? The radiation’s always going to get you in the end. Have these people not read, On the Beach?
As long as I’m bandying clichés here, let’s try, “Every cloud has a silver lining,” even if it might be Strontium-90, and the drill today has one. I just duck under my desk and check my skirt for any embarrassing reveals, when I glance up and into the eyes of a boy who rams his head of splendid, jet black hair into the bottom of his desk as our eyes meet. He blushes, I stifle a giggle, and we both attempt to resolve the awkwardness with commiserating smiles. Flirting while simulating the apocalypse is an acquired social skill of the twentieth century and I’m gaining proficiency with every drill.
“Sharon McGregor,” I whisper, my internal clock ticking away the seconds until we resume normal life following this abrupt suspension. Time is my enemy.
“Pete,” he replies, rubbing the top of his head. Then silence.
Boys never get this part right. They either jet at you unchecked and unreasoning, or like Pete, they become unresponsive, frozen by the demands of a fight or flight decision.
“Of the family, Pan?” I posit.
Pete’s face is a blank sheet. I could pen a novella on it.
“Oh, no,” Pete finally responds. “It’s Pringle, actually.”
He didn’t catch…No matter. I have a name now and I can work with it. Peter Pringle it is. “Nice to meet you, Pete Pringle.”
“Nice to meet you, uh, Sharon.”
“You’re new here, aren’t you, Pete?”
“Drill is complete. Everyone back in their desks,” a voice calls from the ether.
Confound it! An atomic opportunity and all I manage is a “Nice to meet you, Sharon.” Science giveth. Science taketh away.
Wednesday, October 9, 1957
Wednesday in Calculus. First class of the day. I’m the only girl. A double-edged sword. Math and men require a delicate balancing act between revealing what you know and preserving the sensitive egos of tomorrow’s engineers. I’ve even stooped to recording an incorrect solution just to avoid drawing attention. My mother would fling me from the heights of Mount Hamilton if she knew I did that.
I claim my usual desk near the front, on the entrance door side of the classroom, Pete is two desks from me, poring over a newspaper. I can see the page he is reading clearly. It is a San Francisco Chronicle with the headline, “Russ Satellite Sighted over S.F.” A quick look around the room confirms that most of my classmates are chatting with each other or idly flipping through the textbook to locate the day’s lesson. You would think the Russian satellite would be the talk of the school—especially a Calculus class. Apparently, only Pete shares my excitement over the launch.
Our teacher, Mr. Bernhardt, moves right into a discussion of Sputnik, its orbit, and how differential calculus is used in orbital calculations. Well, thank you Mr. B! Maybe the silver lining to this Russian satellite is a little more attention in the U.S. for those of us who actually like math. As Bernhardt says, Sputnik wouldn’t be up there without calculus, and I think it’s remarkable that a tiny sphere, winging its way around the Earth, can reach right into San Jose High and set the topic for today’s lesson.
Saturday, October 12, 1957
I’m going to a cross country meet. Pete Pringle asked me yesterday in the hall between classes. The whole process was rushed, and I’m not sure we ever truly made eye contact, but he got the job done and was gone. He seemed just a bit out of breath. Doesn’t bode well for a runner, necessarily. I arrived in biology just afterward and perched on a lab stool thinking, hmm.
Surveying the meet upon my arrival, I decide that it looks like some medieval jousting match. There are team tents everywhere, each one stocked with a dozen men and a colorful banner flapping in the breeze. Making my way to our tent, I find that Pete isn’t there.
“He’s in the first heat. Warming up now,” says a voice from the knot of boys beneath the tent. So much for wishing him well. Should have gotten an earlier start. I make my way to the starting line where the first heat of boys is beginning to gather.
“Sharon? Sharon McGregor!”
It’s Wendy Alverson. She’s waving with one arm, the other is draped with a wicker picnic basket and rolled blanket.
“So, you’re a cross country widow too? Join me? I’ve got lemonade and sandwiches.”
“Thanks. I’d like that.” I reach out and lift the heavy blanket from Wendy’s shoulder. I ponder how easily she’s included me as one member of a matched set and notice for the first time how warm the day is.
“It’s too warm. Times will be slower today, I imagine,” observes Wendy with the tone of the seasoned sports veteran. “Not that it will matter much to my Tim. He’s a mid-pack finisher most races. Consistent though. I’ll give him that. Pete’s a different story.”
“Hunh?” I say before I can catch myself. A knowing look passes over Wendy’s face.
“First race, then?”
I shrug.
“Here’s how it works.”
I follow Wendy’s arm as she indicates each strategic point in the race course. Following Wendy seems to be the best plan to avoid appearing the complete novice. “What makes Pete a different story?” I ask. Wendy squints into the sun and gives me an appraising look.
“How long have you and Pete been going out?”
“We aren’t, really. He just invited me to the race and I thought I would like it, so here I am.”
“Pete invited you to a cross country meet for a first date?”
“Well, I don’t really see it as a date. Just an opportunity to get to know each other.” Time to curtail this line of questioning. “So, why don’t women run cross country?”
Wendy gives me a knowing smile. “Running’s not good for our internal organs. You know what I mean, Sharon?”
My education grows broader and deeper each day.
Pete places second behind an emaciated boy with stringy hair from one county over. We leave Wendy at the finish line, fussing over a now lame Tim, to walk back to the tent.
“Will you wait until after my cool down run?” Pete asks, directing his question somewhere above my head.
“You run again?” I ask.
“Just a short couple of laps.”
“Sure.”
At the tent, Peter rummages in his duffle bag and extracts a pair of old sneakers. Then he’s off without another word.
Wendy and Tim arrive at the tent. Tim has a bag of ice wrapped onto his ankle.
“Hey, Sharon, I’m going to drive Tim home. It’s his right ankle, you see. Pete rode with Tim. Any chance you could run Pete home? He lives not far from here. Would help us a bunch.”
I felt a wave of mild panic. Drive an unfamiliar route? And Pete will see the weird little Divan. Oh, this isn’t good at all.
“Yeah. Okay. Glad to,” I hear myself answer. The deal is struck, and upon his return, Pete is perfectly amenable.
“Where you parked?” Pete asks.
“Oh, this way,” I mumble and head in the direction of the Divan. I can just hear his comments to friends on Monday. Will he even ride with me? I cringe as we arrive at my car.
“Wait! This is your car?” exclaims Pete.
“Well, unfortunately…” I begin my disclaimer.
“This is fantastic! I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Coolest car I’ve ever seen! Sharon! Hey, can I drive? Promise I’ll be extra careful.”
“What? You like this thing?”
“Like it? Man, this is the future. Like science fiction in real life. Who wouldn’t like it?
“I do sometimes get a bit emotional over it, I must say.”
“Yeah, no doubt. Just sweeps you up and away doesn’t it?”
I’m certain I should never marry.
If Pete loves my car, I love his house—a raised rectangle surrounded by a Japanese garden—manicured and serene. Pete’s mother, clearly the source of the Japanese inspiration, meets us at the door, ushering us into a spare and spotless home. She offers tea. I accept. Pete glances at his watch.
“Almost time. We’ll be right back, Mom.”
He motions for me to follow. We move through two rooms with sliding panels into a smaller bedroom with desk, dresser, and bed. Pete’s room. Most of the desk’s surface is occupied by a large electronic contraption replete with a deck of tubes. Tidy stacks of paperbacks and comics, shoved to the desk’s edge to create a tiny workspace, tell part of Pete Pringle’s story: Infinity Science Fiction, Galaxy, Astounding Science Fiction.
“Ham radio,” says Pete.
“Cool,” I remark, shifting my focus back to the radio equipment.
“Old technology,” sighs Pete. “But works just fine. Here, let’s have a listen to Sputnik.”
“You can hear the satellite on this thing?”
“Sure, I can get Sputnik’s signal on 20.005 megahertz and 40.01 megahertz. It must have two transmitters. Dad showed me how to plot the signal on this plotting sphere. That way I can capture its orbit across an actual globe. Pretty cool, yes?”
“Pete Pringle,” I say.
“Yes?”
“Nothing.” I answer. I feel too warm again. How could I have known? I mean, Pete Pringle, boy electronics wizard. This discovery delights me in a way that’s on the thin edge of my understanding.
“You don’t like it?” Pete asks.
“No, I do…” Just then, an eerie beeping noise fills the room. My heart skips. It’s the same sound from the newscast a couple weeks ago.
“Right on time,” says Pete, picking up a grease pen and stop watch and heading to the plastic sphere on his dresser.
“Pete Pringle,” I say.
“Just a minute. Let me get this plot.”
We take our tea, Pete’s mom, Pete, and me, on a raised porch overlooking a rock garden.
“Oh, I have cakes,” says Pete’s mom. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where did you get your interest in electronics?” I ask, to fill the awkward silence.
“My father’s an engineer with Fairchild Semiconductor. He followed a group of eight guys over from Shockley. Fairchild’s looking to make transistors from silicon instead of germanium. It’s a big deal, but please don’t mention that I told you that. Trade secrets and all.”
“Mums the word from me, Pete.”
“Mom was interned during the war. Dad spent the war separated from her and working on radar for the Navy.”
“Oh,” I said, not knowing how to respond to such an injustice. I had heard of internment, of course, but never met anyone who lived through it. Pete’s Mom returned just then with the cakes and she, to my relief, took charge of the conversation.
“Tell me about your family, Sharon,” she began.
“My Mom’s an astronomer at Lick Observatory and we live up on Mount Hamilton. Easy for her to get to work in the evenings, you see.”
“Yes. Very wise. And your father?”
“Oh, well, he…he was killed in a plane crash when I was small.”
“I see. Very sorry to hear that.”
Pete’s mom’s face carries a genuine look of concern or sorrow. Maybe both.
“Mom and I have learned to find our way just fine without him,” I offer. She takes the veiled request and points to a well concealed antenna at the edge of the back yard.
“Pete and I have reached a compromise on his unsightly equipment. My trees hide it well, though I must run a hose out there to keep them alive in this desert.”
We talk a bit more about gardening and Koi ponds and satellites until I say that I have to head back up the mountain. Pete walks me out to the drive for a last awestruck look at the Divan.
“Just amazing,” he says.
“Yes, isn’t it?” I say, thinking of something else entirely.
Saturday, October 26, 1957
Pete Pringle has worked miracles with the Divan’s fickle electrical system. We now have all our instrument lights and the wipers work on both settings. The radio even plays louder. Arriving at a well-deserved break, Pete follows me from the carport into the kitchen.
Mom sits at the kitchen table poring over photographic plates from her observations. She still has no visual evidence of her friend’s mysterious radio signal. I wonder if that signal could be from another planet with people there reaching out across space to us. To say what? Hello? We’re here. Hold off on splitting the atom so often.
“Any luck with the radio signal?” I ask.
Mom rests her head in her hands. “Not a bit. None of these plates show anything visual at the radio coordinates. I’m quite discouraged, Sharon.”
“How many antennas is he using?” asks Pete.
“Good question,” says Mom. “Just the one, I think.”
“Two would improve his resolution,” says Pete, a mustache of milk on his lip from the glass I just handed him.
“Pete Pringle,” says Mom.
“Pete Pringle,” I echo.
“Aperture synthesis,” says Pete with a knowing look to Mom.
Thursday, October 31, 1957
“Sharon!”
Mom’s cry from the bathroom sweeps an icy wave through my body. I cover the five steps from my bedroom to the bath in two. She stands on the mat beside the shower, naked and dripping wet, arms around her chest, holding her body together by force of muscle and will.
“Oh, Sharon,” her voice quivers and breaks. “I have to go to the doctor.”
I snatch her robe from its hook on the door, drape it over her shoulders, and guide her down onto the commode. She shakes. I feel each tremor form and propagate through her, one followed by another. Kneeling on the cool tile, I pull her forward and against me until her lemony, wet hair rests beneath my chin. In all my life I’ve never held my mother this way.
“What?” I say. “Tell me what it is.”
“A lump,” she answers. “On the left.”
I miss her meaning, just then. It seems an age before my comprehension rolls from head to heart.
“Oh, God,” I whisper.
Until that moment, the hushed-tone hazards of a woman’s life seemed a fuzzy gray cloud on a horizon far removed from my present location. With Mom’s whispered revelation, I realize she has arrived unexpectedly at that place and its foul mist, and I know we, the both of us, are in the thick of it now. She once told me that time is an illusion. Our perception that time moves ever forward, as an arrow, is just that, our perception. Theoretical physics has it that the one-way path between remembered past and anticipated future applies to us, apparently, but not to the universe at large. I now despise this temporal tyranny, driving us along, ever away from what has been. Oh, to run the clock backwards and rid ourselves of this moment. I fight a sick tremor of my own. What now? Mom and I have always given our attention to stars with strange behavior, the fickle ones, each altering its appearance nightly while its companions shine unchanging, dependable. Which true star now to fix our eyes upon to guide us from this dark place?
Monday Morning, November 4, 1957
It takes four days and a half dozen phone calls for Mom to arrange an appointment with a specialist in San Jose. No way she is going without me, so I take the day off from school. Last night, I was all set to go with her. This morning, I woke up with a tiny flicker of anger inside me, and by breakfast it’s a steady flame. Resentment boils there too. I don’t know why. I have no right.
The drive down the mountain to the doctor is the definition of grim. Mom sits bolt upright behind the steering wheel, pale, eyes fixed straight ahead, gloved hands gripping the top of the wheel as she rotates it to negotiate the near endless sequence of turns. Radio is off. She says nothing. Worse, on the straight lengths of road, she looks over and gives me this kind of wan smile. Unnerving. I prefer a knock-down-drag-out fight with her to this. I consider opening up a conversation but can’t figure a way to launch into it. The car’s top is raised against the November chill, confining us both within its gloom. I glance upward through the front window into the slate sky, missing the freedom of an open car.
The news this morning is all about Sputnik 2. This one apparently has a dog onboard. America seems to be in full panic mode over these launches, with visions of nuclear bombs raining down on us from space, and the Sovs just sitting up there with their malevolent satellites, untouchable. Frankly, I remain a little skeptical of this threat. I’m no engineer but I did take our tape measure and lay out the diameter of Sputnik 1 on my bed. Multiply that by 3.14, and it’s essentially the size of my beach ball. Mom says atomic bombs are big, like car size, so I’m not sure how you cram all that into a Sputnik. Could that bit of engineering be the next great surprise they have waiting for us? My God, the free world might soon go the way of the Trilobite. So, I have all of that, a father at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and now this lump too. My swell and carefree teenage years. Maybe I’ll just catch a bus to San Francisco and howl with the Beats out on North Beach.
Monday Evening, November 4, 1957
While a specialist in the valley charts Mom’s future, we make our way home to Mount Hamilton and stand beneath a blank sky. Clouds hide every one of our stars, so we chuck our observation for the night and settle by the fireplace to melt away the cold. Mom drops a Bill Evans record on the player and places the needle on, “Haunted Heart.” We end up sitting on the floor across from each other, the fireplace between us. The flickering light illuminates one side of Mom’s face, leaving the other side in shadow. The natural movement of her head from left to right as we talk alters the portion allocated to each condition, creating a dynamic system, mutable and difficult to map, a study in light and dark driven by simple human interaction.
“You know, Sharon, when I really think about it, the medical consequences of cancer are only part of the challenge ahead of me. Does this wipe away everything I’ve worked for? When my colleagues see me at work, or in town, or at a party, are astronomy and cancer always linked together in their thoughts about me? So, it’s no longer Dr. McGregor who’s added so much to our knowledge about star formation or who’s dipping her toe into radio astronomy, pushing our knowledge of the universe just a little further out. No. Now, it’s just, there’s a woman with cancer.”
For the first time since she emerged from the shower with her revelation, I see tears in my mother’s eyes. Tears of anger.
“I’m not just blindly going to let them carve me up, Sharon. Science owes me more than that and I will make it deliver. Yesterday, I called around to a few of my Bryn Mawr friends. I have a name and a possible alternative to what they offer in the valley and I intend to pursue it.”
Wednesday, November 6, 1957
“Her name is Jane Wright. Director of Cancer Research at Bellevue Medical Center. She’s working with new drug therapies for cancer. And that’s the key here, drug therapies. Chemotherapy it’s called. A different approach than just surgery or radiation. The medicines can have benefits before and after surgery. A minority of experts think this is the future of cancer treatment,” Mom begins. “I’m going to pursue this course before I submit to any traditional surgery.”
Always the teacher, my mother.
Two mint green coffee cups sit steaming on our kitchen table flanking the telephone. Even through the phone’s tinny speaker Jane Wright’s voice fills the room, its measured cadence moving through the initial greetings and introductions and then guiding us all straightaway to the issue at hand. At this point, she speaks only to Mom, making the connection as women of science, describing her research, its underpinnings, recent results. She asks Mom a series of questions about her diagnosis and recommended treatment. She is quiet for a moment, then. I know she is writing. Scratching thoughts onto paper, likely with a freshly sharpened pencil. Thinking the problem through.
“I would like to include you in a clinical trial, Dr. McGregor,” she says at last. “I’ve been working for some years now with an adjuvant therapy using a drug called Methotrexate. It works by interfering with a cell’s ability to reproduce. You must know that this kind of chemotherapy is in its infancy, but it is highly promising and I’ve seen very encouraging results in my trials. We’ll know more in your case after an examination, of course. Shall we schedule an appointment in New York?”
And there it was. That unexpected event that sweeps you up and away to a different future. From the trough of life’s curve, upward, to an increase in luminosity.
Saturday, November 23, 1957
Mom and Pete sit at the kitchen, a photographic plate between them.
“The interferometry made the difference,” Mom says and smiles, running her hands through her hair.
“So, that’s it? That little pinpoint? That’s what’s making all the radio noise?” Pete asks. “It just looks like a star to me.”
“I don’t think it’s a star, Pete. This is something else entirely but I have no idea what. I’ve run three spectrographic analyses. Same result in all three. The spectral lines are indecipherable. And its luminosity changes over the course of a week. I have no idea what that faint little dot is.”
“Well, it’s like massively powerful, whatever it is.”
“Could it be an alien signal to us?” I posit.
Pete unrolls a scroll of graph paper from the radio observation. “This thing emits continuously. You would think if it was an alien signal it would be intermittent because the beacon wouldn’t always be pointed at us. As our planets rotate, we would lose the signal and then it would come back. This thing doesn’t do that.”
“Maybe it’s not on a planet. Maybe it comes from a flying saucer?” I say.
No one bites on my hypothesis.
“I believe radio astronomy has led us to a new kind of object,” Mom says. “Something different. Something unlike anything we’ve encountered in all the years we’ve been searching the skies. We’re on the brink of a new discovery here.”
“Sounds like radio astronomy is in about the same place as chemotherapy,” I say.
“Three days until New York. Wish I were flying,” Pete grouses.
Yes, up and away to something new. I only hope we like what we find when we get there.
Monday, November 25, 1957
We walk across the tarmac in our new traveling suits, Mom and me, toward the waiting TWA Constellation. The big plane’s windows glow soft yellow in the gathering twilight. An airport beacon flashes from behind us, green and then white, and I think of Pete’s description of an alien transmitter reaching out from the stars.
Three women in front of us carry hat boxes. Mom grips a briefcase in her left hand. Our journey is probably a different one than theirs. She is, we both are, following a new hope in a laboratory a continent away.
Mom stops abruptly. “Look, Sharon! Look there.”
My eyes follow her outstretched arm toward the sky above the airplane. A single bright star moves steadily west to east.
“It’s Sputnik,” she says.
I watch until the luminous arc fades above the eastern horizon. A few paces more and we reach the first step leading up into the great airliner. I take a last glance along the path Sputnik had taken and follow Mom up toward the cabin door. The Constellation is about to sweep both of us up and away to our uncertain future. There’s fear with that, of course. Like Mom, I can’t read the spectral lines emanating from that distant place. Who can? But, there’s optimism too, as we wing our way into the darkness, for we are no strangers to the night sky.
