LITMIR.BIZ

       5

       FROM MERCURY TO THE OORT

      The place where Astronomy 101 was given wasn’t a regular classroom. It was one of the rooms that were designed like miniature theaters, with curved rows of seats enough for a hundred students. Almost every seat was occupied, too, right down to the level that held a desk, a chair, and a lecturer who didn’t look to be much older than Ranjit himself. His name was Joris Vorhulst. He was obviously a Burgher, and it was almost as obvious that he had chosen to leave the island for his graduate schooling.

      The schools he had gone to impressed Ranjit, too. They were hallowed names for astronomers. Dr. Vorhulst had got his master’s at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, where he had interned on the vast old Keck telescopes, and he’d gone on to his doctorate at Caltech, with a side order of working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. At JPL he had been part of the team that ran Faraway, the spacecraft that had flown by Pluto into the Kuiper Belt—or into the rest of the Kuiper Belt, as Vorhulst would say, because he was loyal to the old profession-wide decision that had stripped Pluto of its claim to true planethood, so that now it was just one more of the countless millions of Kuiper snowballs. (Actually, Vorhulst told the class, Faraway had gone pretty much all the way through the Kuiper Belt by now and was already taking aim at the nearer fringes of the Oort cloud.)

      Vorhulst went on to explain what all those unfamiliar (at least to Ranjit) things were, and the boy was fascinated.

      And then, when the class was nearly over, Vorhulst gave them some good news. Everyone in the class, he announced, would have the privilege of looking through Sri Lanka’s best telescope at the observatory on the slopes of Piduruthalagala. “A really neat two-meter reflector,” he said. And then he added, “It was a present from the government of Japan, replacing a smaller one they’d given us earlier.” That got a smattering of applause from the students, but that was nothing compared to what they did when he said, “Oh, and by the way, my computer password is ‘Faraway.’ You’re all welcome to use it to access any astronomical material on the Web.” Then there were actual cheers, among the loudest the ones that came from the Sinhalese boy in the seat next to Ranjit. And when the professor looked at the timer on the wall and said the remaining ten minutes could be used for questions, Ranjit was one of the first to have a hand up. “Yes,” Vorhulst said, looking at the identifying board on his desk, “Ranjit?”

      Ranjit stood up. “I’m just wondering if you’ve ever heard of Percy Molesworth.”

      “Molesworth, eh?” Vorhulst shaded his eyes to get a better look at Ranjit. “Are you from Trincomalee?” Ranjit nodded. “Yes, he’s buried there, isn’t he? And yes, I have heard of him. Did you ever look up his crater on the moon? Go ahead. ‘Faraway’ will give you access to the JPL page.”

      That was precisely what Ranjit did, the minute the class was over. He quickly located Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the World Wide Web on the rank of computers in the hall and downloaded a splendid image of the lunar crater named Molesworth.

      It was indeed impressive, nearly two hundred kilometers across. Though an almost flat plain, its interior was dotted with a dozen genuine meteor-made craters, including one with a magnificent central peak. Ranjit thought of his visits to Molesworth’s grave in Trincomalee with his father. How nice it would have been to let his father know that he had seen the lunar crater for himself. But to do that seemed impossible.

      The rest of Ranjit’s courses, naturally, were nowhere near as interesting as Astronomy 101. He’d signed up for anthropology because he’d expected it would be easy for him to get through without actually thinking much about it. As it developed, it was easy, although the other salient fact about it, as Ranjit learned, was that it was very nearly terminally tedious. And he’d signed up for psychology because he’d wanted to hear more about this GSSM syndrome. But in the first session the teacher informed him that he didn’t believe in GSSM, no matter what some other professor in some other class might say. (“Because if multitasking made you stupid, how would any of you ever manage to graduate?”) Finally, he was taking philosophy because it looked like the kind of thing you could bluff your way through without the necessity of a lot of studying.

      There he had been wrong. Professor de Silva was a devotee of the practice of giving spot quizzes almost every week. That would have been tolerable enough, perhaps, but Ranjit quickly also learned that the professor was the kind who required his classes to memorize dates.

      For a while Ranjit tried to take an interest in the subject. Plato was not a total waste of time, he thought, nor Aristotle. But when Professor de Silva began getting up to the Middle Ages, with Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas and all those people, things got worse. Ranjit did not really care about the difference between epistemology and metaphysics, or whether God existed, or what “reality” really was, exactly. So his flicker of interest flickered a bit more and then went out.

      But, wonderfully, the joy of exploring Sol’s other worlds kept getting better and better. Especially when, in the second session, Dr. Vorhulst got into the possibilities of actually visiting some of the planets, at least perhaps one or two of the least forbidding ones.

      Vorhulst ran through the list for them. Mercury, no; you would hardly want to go there because it was far too hot and dry, even though there did appear to be some water—actually, ice—at one pole. Venus looked to be even worse, wrapped in that carbon dioxide blanket that trapped heat. “The same kind of blanket,” Vorhulst told the class, “that is causing the global warming right here on Earth that I hope we may actually, one day, escape. Or at least the worst parts of it.” On Venus, he added, those “worst parts” had added up to a surface temperature that would melt lead.

      Next out was the Earth, “which we don’t actually need to colonize anymore,” Vorhulst joked, “because apparently someone, or something, did already, a good long time ago.” He didn’t give them a chance to react to that but went right on: “So let’s look at Mars. Do we want to visit Mars? More interesting, is there life there? That argument went back and forth for years.” The American astronomer Percival Lowell, he said, had thought not only that there was life on Mars but that it was a highly civilized, massively technological kind of life, capable of building the enormous network of canals Giovanni Schiaparelli had observed on its surface. Better telescopes—with the help of the late Captain Percy Molesworth of Trincomalee—ruined that idea when it was established that Schiaparelli’s “canali” were only random markings that his eye had tricked him into linking into straight lines. Then the first three Mariner missions ended that debate by sending back pictures of a surface that was arid, cratered, and cold. “But,” Dr. Vorhulst finished, “better photographs of the surface of Mars since then have shown indications of actual flowing water. Not flowing anymore now, of course, but pretty definitely real water that did flow sometime in the past. So the life-on-Mars people were riding high again. But,” he added, “then the pendulum swung back. So which way is right?” Dr. Vorhulst swept the audience with his glance, then grinned. “I think the only way we’ll know is to send some people there, preferably with a lot of digging equipment.”

      He paused. Then he said, “I guess your next question is, ‘What would they be digging for?’ But before I answer that, do any of you know of a place in the solar system that we have left out so far?”

      Silence for a moment while a hundred students counted on their fingers—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars—until a young woman in the front row called, “Are you talking about the moon, Dr. Vorhulst?”

      He glanced at his finder plate for her name, then tipped her a salute. “Right on, Roshini. But before we get to the moon let me show you some pictures of a place I’ve actually been to, namely, Hawaii.”

      He

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