The Needle

Book One

A novel of the End

by: Steven Robert Morrison

Copyright 2020 Steven Robert Morrison

Far beyond the edge of the solar system

to the here and now

For Darlaine

For her patience and for her love

THE NEEDLE

1:

Honey? Honey, can you hear me? Hurry up, you will be late for school.

Mom, it is okay, it is Tuesday, and traffic is light, it is only a ten-minute drive, and damn it, Mom, I am an associate professor at the college, a world-class University, so it is not really, being late for school.

Caswell Olind Stewart, you are my daughter, I am your Mother and every day that I am on this Earth, it is my duty as your mother to tell you what to do, when to do it and how to do it. If you take my advice, I would be very pleased, and if you don’t, well we all know the results of that.

Caswell, fumed as her mother once again intentionally or not reminded her that, yes, her mother was right about advice for her life. Her mother had been unhappy with her running off to South America to use the telescopes in the Andes. It was there that Cas had fallen in love, and that led to her failed marriage, which lasted four long and lost years, and that was the reason why she had to move back home and start establishing her life again. Her whirlwind romance to a Chilean astronomer Sebastian Contreras may have been a mistake, but anything in the way of a union that produced her two children, her twins; Matias and Valentina could not have been too much of a mistake.

Walking through the kitchen, she looked at her mother and speaking in a lisping whispering tone, Okay, Mommy I will look both ways crossing the street, not talk to any strangers and wear rubber boots if it is raining. The first two she thought to herself made a lot of sense, as for the third, she couldn’t really remember wearing rubber boots in the rain, or even the last time it rained in the early summer.

The seasons had changed, rather than still having the four traditional historical seasons of the Midwest, there were seemingly only two seasons, one an unbearably cold, windy dry winter and an unbearably hot windy dry summer. But that was a job for meteorologists and climatologist and even paleo-geologists, her field of study was space, in particular, the third zone of the solar system.

The first zone; was the space inhabited by the four rocky terrestrial planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and the rocks, asteroids, along with the dwarf planets in stable orbits in the asteroid belt. The second zone was the domain of the gas giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The third zone; was beyond those, it was the realm of real study, of almost planet-sized dwarf planets, ruled by Pluto. Planetoids like Eris, Haumea and Makemake, Quaoar, and Senda along with at least 100 other dwarf-planet-sized Kuiper belt objects and reaching far out into the Oort cloud.

The first zone had been known since antiquity, the second since the days of Galileo and Copernicus. But the third was only discovered within the generation of people that Caswell had met. Some of who had met Pluto’s discoverer. It was only in 1930 when a young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, and now most of Earth’s population remembered when the New Horizon spacecraft took the first close-up look at Pluto and sent home amazing pictures.

For her, women had a place in science, and that included astronomy, if she could discover a planet or two, she would have immortality. Maybe, it would be future astronomers who would know who she was, but she would be known.

As she entered her office, a voice yelled over to her before the door was closed, Cas, we have a large load of data coming in from the CFH on Mauna Kea. There have been some glitches over the past few days, and it looks like all their data packages may not have come through intact, so they will be resending everything, early morning their time.

She nodded to her assistant Jax Munro, who at the best of times was a spatial mathematical savant, other times when his 19-year-old boy hormones acted up, he was more of the idiot part of a savant. Cas thanked him and then asked if the coffee was the unique house blend. Other than just data packets from the Canadian – French - Hawaiian observatory, they also got a few pounds of Hawaiian coffee shipments in monthly.

Accepting to work in Hawaii would have offered her so much more, but Sebastian often flew to the big island to use and share actual face-time with people who used the other big dishes and lenses there. The last thing she needed of any kind was an emotional reattachment to him now. She had almost forgotten about him, at least during the moments when she was not thinking about him.

The predawn hours were slipping away fast as a rose band spread across the eastern sky above a yet deep indigo Pacific. The night was the best time to be in Hawaii, and at more than 4,000 metres, or two and a half miles above the sea, the air was still, fresh and offered an unbelievably view of the stars to the naked eye. That is why there were half a dozen telescope installations there. There was no light pollution, no air pollution and a near-constant moderate temperature.

Halbert Stehlik was a man of simple pleasures, one of them was that he simply liked to be left alone, and therefore, the night shift on a mountain top on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was just about the ideal dream job. Technically, he did not have to be on the island, and he was not alone, but the six other people with him, all pretty much thought the same way as he did. At least, that is how he felt that they felt about life because everyone kept to their own business and tasks and only spoke only when required.

Stehlik walked back into the more brightly lit interior and thought as he looked at the others at their workstations, someday, someone here may make a discovery of some significance, and right now we do not even know each other’s name. The only person here that he knew to any degree was his working partner, Anita Messner, working with him on what was called a photo-shoot. They did more than just take the camera, point and click. It was a little more complicated and considerably more confusing than that. Stehlik could call out all the minute details and specifics. It was more, in the same way, that the WIRCam with its infrared mosaic of 4 detectors totalling 16 megapixels, forming a cryogenic camera designed for the J, H, and K spectral bands and chilled to –200 centigrade, was more than just a camera. Because of that, he knew there were only a few dozen people on the island who knew what that meant. There was less of a chance of running into someone who may want to talk shop, and that too made him happy.

Excuse me, Hal, Anita, piped up, just as he looked at her. We have all the sampling we need, it is bundled and ready to be sent, once you give the okay.

Okay, I will give the okay, once I needlessly check over things that you have checked over two or three times and that the computer has flawlessly created, established, and packaged. This is nonsense, you know it, and I know it.

Yup, but that is how the weird wired world of everything works, you can interact, control and create from half a world away, but our lizard brains are still in panic mode. Fearful of being devoured, and thus, we double and triple-check everything and lock the doors of our mind.

Yeah, that is truth Anita, but no lizard with or without a brain ever tried to map the heavens. We are longer standing on the threshold of the star and space. We have taken more than just a first step. Now, as a group and a culture, we have walked through the door and left the ancient room.

Anita looked back at him and smiled and laughed, just as he said, Yeah, go ahead and smile. I was starting to weird myself out with that kind of poetic talk too.

The packets that were bundled were sent off to about two dozen schools, colleges and universities. There to be studied and analysed by experts, and they were also filed and fired off into the clouds… somewhere for amateurs to play around with. Stehlik realised that maybe again, we had not despite our technology, crawled too far out that primordial door. All of their raw data was available to anyone, but individual scientists and institutions wanted their own distinct package, which was exactly what other people got and everyone could get. He reckoned it was a lizard brain equivalent of crawling to the back of the cave with a big piece of raw meat and going. Nom, Nom, Nom, this is all mine. While the rest of the tribe ate the same fresh meat from that day’s kill.

But if that was the case, we as people also had a hive mind, and in the Astronomy of the twenty-first century, the hive mind and collective purpose also served us well. Thousands of people and their computers would look at the pictures he took, and depending on the nature of the beast, they could find any anomalies. The ones in temperature or spectrum bands or even notice an insanely minutely small shift in a black dot against a distant star or a very dim speck of light on the infinite black canvas of space. Then with another double or triple check, something new may be found.

Looking for a change of position of a spot was how Tombaugh found Pluto, but now computers do that routinely, so if a new large piece of rock were to be found, it would be more complicated than that.

The Sun was almost overhead in Michigan, and it was just above the horizon if you were on Mauna Kea. Still, from a stationary point far away, very far away, the Sun was merely a brighter than usual star holding fast against a fixed background of countless other stars. That is how the Sun would have looked from an observer’s vantage point five billion kilometres beyond Pluto, far out in the Kuiper belt.

2:

Jax stood behind Cas, looking over her shoulder as she checked the incoming data from the CFH computers. She knew as she watched the loading transfer rate moving up toward 100%, Jax’s eyes were, if not on the burning a hole in the back of her neck, firmly fixed on the top side and contours of her breasts. Men and boys, any males, they were all the same. She could hear him shifting his feet back and forth every time she moved in her chair. To her way of thinking, there was no difference between a paunchy middle-aged long-haul trucker, a soon to retire silver-haired professional like a lawyer, or a shaggy looking man-boy teenage geek with an IQ in the top tenth, of a tenth of a percentile. Men and breasts, both were boobs Boobs, all of them.

Pulling her shoulders back and arching her back, she half-whispered, These look good, and I like what I see. Forming little circles with her index finger said, pointing at the screen, Do you like what you see too?

She had to hold in a laugh as Jax mumbled and ran together a fracture sentence of words, which sounded like gibberish while stepping back about three or four steps.

After a silence of about fifteen seconds or in the realm of man-boy embarrassment time, half a lifetime, he spoke up, Yes, Cas, the numbers look fine. I will go pick up the printouts, and send a confirmation to Hawaii, then if you want I can check the analytics schedule and block out additional time.

That would be good, and next time, don’t worry Jax, it is all cool.

What, what do you mean cool? What?

Nothing, it is okay, Jax.

"Okay, whatever Cas, I guess. Umm Cas, I thought that maybe, if you think it is a good idea, that I could do something more, I mean more here at work. Maybe, I could, I mean we could run a secondary programme with a contrast increase, and look for any gravitational lensing, somewhere in the background. There may be an exoplanet lurking along our sightline. It would not interfere with the movement detectors or take any more than, maybe 5 per cent more computing power, and as it is, we are only running about 60% capacity of what the campus gives us now. So, should I set it up?

"I got your email on Thursday, and I replied to it with a yes. Don’t you read anything in your email, or have you marked everything from the college as spam again?

I don’t really like all the news and admin stuff, and I don’t care if we are scoring more goals and winning more face-offs than other schools now. I find that stuff boring.

"Well, for a genius, you could or should know that it is summer outside, the college has a championship baseball team, and we are winding up for another great football season, and you score and win face-offs are in hockey, which is