Analog SFF, April 2010 (21 page)

"Yeah, everyone's doing it. I have six months to finish my thesis and stand out enough to land a postdoc. How am I supposed to do that ogling bloody ESEs?"

"Even Wertzberg is, and you know how it is to get the Germans to—"

"Great. You've still got two years left. Go away."

I was more pleasant by afternoon, probably because of Shakir's unconscious state. When I wheeled my bike into our office at four p.m. he was face down on his keyboard, while at her desk in the corner, our other officemate, Ingrid, played chess with the incrediblecomputer.

Suddenly, Ingrid turned to me. “This is an event."

"What do you mean?” I asked her, hanging up my helmet and unwinding the scarf that had protected my lungs from Toronto's pollution. It was easy to be paranoid when sitting next to an atmospheric physicist like her all day.

"This is the first time you two've been in the same room for a very long while. Everyone was starting to think that you and Shakir had merged into the same person."

I was not sure how to respond to that, and so instead I grunted. “Almost done for the day?"

"Yep,” she said. Ingrid was a theorist, most of her work being in the fictional realm that took place somewhere inside of a computer.

I plopped down into my seat to prod my computer from its slumber. “What job are you on now?"

"I'm tweaking a new model of Earth's atmosphere, fixing our pollution rates to be constant with contemporary values and running it a few hundred timesteps into the future.” The theorists always remotely logged onto the incrediblecomputer, a machine I had never seen. None of their clique would divulge its location. It could have been shoved away in a closet in Iqaluit for all I knew.

"Crystal ball physics, then,” I said. “The future never gets old."

"But it's a slow day on the incrediblecomputer,” she added. “Damn cosmologists with their space-curvature calculations. They're such resource hogs."

My computer wakened, I logged on, and the first thing that greeted me was the giant doomsday clock, red letters flashing across my desktop. It was counting down to when the Behemoth Space Telescope—BST, informally referred to as “Beast"—would be operational. Ten days, four hours, sixteen minutes, and five seconds. With a mirror large enough to satisfy the combined vanities of all the celebrities in Hollywood and Bollywood, the BST was to fill the void felt in infrared astronomy since the James Webb Space Telescope got put down. It was calculated that the BST would be good enough to directly resolve the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation emitted by an exoplanet. The only problem with it was that the gatekeepers who controlled it, deciding in advance which astronomers would be able to use the BST, had rejected all my proposals for observational runs on it.

To further my study of hot Jupiters I needed a spectrum that only the BST could provide. Electromagnetic radiation of a source could be represented as a plot of intensity versus wavelength of radiation, called a blackbody spectrum. An ideal blackbody spectrum was smooth and hill-shaped. Our sun peaked in the visual, and Earth, being cooler, peaked in the infrared. Because stars and planets were not perfect, their blackbody “hills” had chunks eaten out of them from molecules in their atmospheres that had absorbed radiation at particular wavelengths. From such spectra, one could piece together the composition of the object's atmosphere.

"Fuck,” I said after checking my email.

Ingrid raised a brow.

"Sydney and Cape Town have just rejected my applications. There goes them. What am I going to do if I don't land a postdoc?"

"Get a real job.” She shrugged.

I returned a glare.

For the next while I typed away at a paper I was supposed to write last week on my newest hot Jupiter discovery, and every few minutes I switched back to my desktop to stare at the doomsday clock as if expecting it to go faster. If I got time on the BST, I could point at my postdoc of choice. I scanned the new papers online at arXiv, wrestled with the office printer, made some coffee, and typed a bit more of my paper.

By six p.m. Shakir stirred, peered around the office as if he did not know where he was, blinked, and then saw me. “Did you look at them?” he demanded.

"Look at what?” I asked.

"The spectra, the radial velocities, my calculations."

"There's an eraser stuck to your forehead."

He groped at it. “Did you check them over?"

"No. How could I, when you didn't give them to me?"

"I put the printouts on your desk."

I eyed the stack of papers for the first time and discreetly pulled a folder over it. “Didn't see them."

"I suppose you did that too when you first analyzed the spectra. Kept the hot Jupiter and discarded the rest."

"Yeah, the interesting parts, the ones no one else is doing, the exoplanets that will get me my postdoc. All you're looking for are things like our solar system, boring rubbish. We already live in one."

He started packing his palmtop and notebooks away. “What I do isn't rubbish, and I need a second opinion. I found five pairs of extrasolar Earths from your observations of seventeen solar systems, as opposed to your two hot Jupiters. If you can confirm this and I did find enough extrasolar Earths, I might be able to squeeze in some time myself on the Beast for follow up."

I sucked air through my teeth. “You would never get to use the Beast!"

"I would before you! Hot Jupiters are no longer so ‘hot.’”

"It's all early universe high-redshift this, and extrasolar Earths that. Well, no one ever got any science done doing whatever is fashionable.” I used to be like Shakir that way, hopping onto whatever astronomy boat was popular at the time, making my research conform to the norm like a good sheep. It was only now, when I broke my own path, that I resented what I had been.

"Searching for extraterrestrial life is more than a trend,” he said.

"You should stop polluting your brain with science-fiction crap and aliens. It never comes true."

"I'll enjoy the look on your face when I do find them, and no less on one of these extrasolar Earths."

"On that day I'll be too busy checking you into the mental hospital."

"But aliens aren't nearly as insane as some of
your
pet theories,” he said. “What was that one you had, about the magnetic fields of mini-Earths? Then it was the mercury core of Gamma Cephei E. And hopefully you've ditched your hypothesis on the polar atmospheres of hot Jupiters."

Ingrid snorted. “Stick to observations."

"Shut up. Better to dream and fall a thousand times than . . . be like the pair of you.” And then something suddenly occurred to me. “Ohhh, Shakir,” I said, trying to sound kind.

"Mei, you know I hate it when you say that.” He was standing now, zipping up his backpack.

"If I check over your work, I'll get first billing on the papers."

He groaned. “Fine."

"And, if in the unlikely event, which is about as likely as you finding aliens, you get time on the Beast, might you squeeze in a few directions to call on some of my hot Jupiters?"

"I'll consider it."

"I can check over some of your older data too."

"And if I do find aliens, you won't put me in white?"

"Done."

I worked through the night, stopping only once to give a tutorial at eight p.m. It was a general astronomy course meant for undergraduates of the artistic persuasion who did not know a black hole from their own navels and were still under the impression that winter happened when the Earth was farther away from the Sun. They were there for the distribution credit, I was there for the cash, and so generally we had an understanding.

Shakir had outdone himself. I could not find a single blasted mistake in his calculations, for once, which meant that I could be making a mistake. I arrived in my apartment at two a.m., with curry and naan from the only Indian place open past midnight. I pushed aside clothes, books, and electronics from my couch to make a seat and dug in.

With two exceptions, the Cabal was relatively quiet tonight. In a poster beside the light fixture on my ceiling, Lisa Randall wrote out calculations on her blackboard. From his desk on the wall above my monitor, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar read a book. One of his corners was starting to curl from the heat. On my fridge Richard Feynman was playing his bongo drums again, while above him, on my freezer door with a magnet over his forehead, Galileo Galilei was shushing him. Richard grinned impishly and made a lewd comment about Galileo's frock.

On the wall across from me, Annie Cannon turned away from her photographic plate to give me a good squinting. “Found any more hot Jupiters today?” she asked.

"Shakir sucked me into that extrasolar Earth garbage,” I said and stuffed a large slop of curry on naan into my mouth. “But just for a while, until I can hijack some time on the Beast. Then, if I have one success they'll give me more time, even for something different. At least, that's how it has worked for the space telescopes in the past. So then I'll apply for use a second time without the ESE-baggage, and have it all to myself. I hate these politics, this paperwork, this kissing ass for resources. I just want to do science with my life."

"Hear hear!” Richard said, and gave his bongo drum a particularly vigorous whack.

"At least you didn't have to worry about politics or funding in your day,” I said to Galileo. “You could just go out and discover stuff, since almost everything remained undiscovered."

"Don't talk to me about politics,” Galileo said. “I had to deal with the Catholic Church."

I curled up and did some marking, and only spilled curry on two papers. The spectra fared better: only one drop of curry. I really started to question myself when still I failed to see anything Shakir did wrong, especially given the statistical anomaly of this sample. But there was little doubt, even within error, that those five solar systems had Earth-sized planets, two at once. I checked my watch. Seven a.m., time for bed.

I slept very little that morning and awoke early, just after one p.m., drawn to my computer. Still in pajamas, unwashed and unfed, I remotely logged into my work account and called up the data, needing greater detail than the printouts Shakir had supplied me with. There had to be more planets in these five systems that all seemed to have exactly two extrasolar Earths. Just as he only focused on the signatures of Earth-sized planets and I only focused on those belonging to Jupiter-sized planets; the rest got discarded.

The easiest to find were pairs of Jupiter-sized ones in all five, them being the largest. Of course, none of these were hot Jupiters—they were too far away from their suns for that—but neither were they so far from their suns as to be cold Jupiters. In fact, they might be considered just-right Jupiters like Baby Bear's porridge, at a distance from their suns comparable to our Jupiter. The planets that were Saturn-sized were the second easiest to pick out in the five systems. Next came the extrasolar Neptunes in pairs, and last the hardest to spot, being the smallest, extrasolar Marses. All these planets lined up in the same order from their sun: closest the two extrasolar Earths, the Mars, the Jupiter, the Saturn, and farthest the two Neptunes.

I rolled my chair back and did not want to touch my keyboard again, very disturbed by what I had just seen.

"Are you well?” Subrahmanyan asked me from above my monitor, putting his book down.

"I thought first, perhaps I had observed the same solar system five times by accident? But that can't be. The solar systems all have different coordinates in our sky, I remember doing different levels of correction for reddening from varying amounts of interstellar gas between us and them. And their suns are known to be at different ages. These five solar systems have to be different, and yet they're the same."

"Why must they be different?” he asked.

"Because the exoplanets in every solar system observed have a random distribution, various sizes and distances from their suns. It's like a box of chocolates,” I said, stammering. “Here, though, all at once I've discovered five systems that follow some correlation. What does this mean? Will this revolutionize planet-formation theory, favor one of those theories over the other, or destroy them all? Are solar systems predisposed to form their planets in a certain order?"

I turned my head sideways and looked at my monitor another way. “They're just like our solar system! My methods can't see something the size of Mercury, but I bet that the Mercuries would be out there too. One of each of Shakir's extrasolar Earths is a Venus, and one in the Neptune pairs is a Uranus. Those planets have similar masses. You should know that, Subra.” Venus was Earth's twin planet, a rock similar in size, radius and distance from our sun, only where Earth had been perfect for life, on Venus a runaway greenhouse gas effect reigned, making its atmosphere thick, clouded, and uninhabitable. Ingrid had once told me that Venus was like a prophecy, a warning of what Earth would soon become.

"I have the key to the Beast!” I cried.

From my kitchen, I could hear Richard smacking a victory jam on his bongo drums.

In ten minutes I wrote up my new proposal for the gatekeepers of the BST and emailed copies to Shakir and our supervisor, Dr. Onishi. Investigating this strange pattern we had stumbled upon would be far more satisfying than pairs of extrasolar Earths alone.

Dr. Onishi summoned me to her office in the tower that afternoon. The giant clock on her wall ticked the seconds by. Nine days. I had nine days left before the BST became available and I would not suffer to be left out of the first round. A hazy sunset spilled across the horizon from behind the Toronto skyline, leaching its glare into Dr. Onishi's office. She ran a finger down her window, and the glass darkened.

"I dislike west-facing offices,” she said, rolling back into her desk. She passed me a printout of my report, bleeding red from her old-fashioned penned corrections. “Did you do a statistical significance test?” she asked, picking up a fork and fishing around in a bucket of poutine that was as big as her head. “Do you know the probability of this happening spontaneously? Five identical systems out of the seventeen you observed?"