Very Large Array

"You want boredom, go sit in the center of the universe," he said. He cut into his blood-rare T-bone. I finished my coffee. Sturling's was empty except for the two of us and a pair of middle-aged Navajo women chattering over chocolate ice cream in the corner by the kitchen. It was after ten p. m. Each night now I stop by the diner for a cup of decaf and a slice of blueberry pie to fortify myself for the late milking. Occasionally I bump into an impatient young genius—an astronomer working with the radio telescopes a few miles down the road at the Very Large Array.

"And what's with the local motels?" he said. "At the VLA I can pick up radio waves from a gas cluster millions of light-years from here. But at the Beechnut Lodge and now over at the Meadow Wind, I can't get squat on TV—and the signal's from Albuquerque! Eighty miles! Last night I tried to make it through an old Hank Fonda Western, but Lord, the noise and the snow . . . "

It's an impressive get-up out there, off Highway 60. Twenty-seven giant antennae looking like some spook-set from a Hollywood movie. Visitors running around arguing about molecular clouds, magnetic fields. Their skin broils because they spend their lives under fluorescent lights and they show up unprepared for the desert. Star-guys. You'd think they'd understand about the sun. "The center of the universe," they call it: the Very Large Array, its ears pointed at the Big Bang, listening for God's salty sigh (surely, by now, God would be weary, bleached-out, and salty; I imagine His breath smelling like desert sage). But for the visiting scientists, who've applied for observation time on the 'scopes, the VLA experience is apparently less than stellar: all night in a tiny, carpeted cubicle monitoring computer screens, sipping soft drinks, trying to stay awake (ceiling fans purring to keep the instruments at a moderate temperature), watching for errors or distinctive data. Most of them—and this young Einstein, last week, was no exception—are more excited that Sturling's offers 32-ounce steaks for under five bucks. I've learned you get what you spring for—especially with Sturling—so I stick to the pie.

"What's your project?" I asked the guy. Nothing these Brains ever spill makes sense to me. I don't know a fucking thing. But I figure it's best to treat strangers kindly in case someday I find myself a stranger somewhere.

"Young stars," he said. "Where, in the Milky Way, most of them form. At McDonald Observatory last year I did an infrared survey on a supernova remnant, IC-443, and found a dense cloud in that arm of the galaxy that might be a star-cauldron. The VLA can determine if there are fainter young stars embedded in the cloud—if we get the damn equipment straightened out. Right now, Antenna 11 is out of commission. Pointing problems."

He was thin, this fellow, but I could see that twenty, thirty years under crackling lights staring at screens was going to soften him and settle him into something like a pudgy human ant hill.

"Young stars . . . you mean, like . . . "

"Origins. Birth. The birth of everything. Nothing comes from nothing . . . what do you do?" he said, polite but only half-there.

"Rancher," I said, checking my watch. "And the Holsteins're waiting for me." As I rose to leave, I caught the chill I often feel at night when lights burn low and people get scarce . . . cold space wafts between my body and the nearest living thing, and I remember my parents, gone now, because nights with them in the old house by the hearth used to be so pleasant, and I remember Liz, my wife, recently passed—leukemia, the doctors said, but I saw she was done for the first time I showed her my two-and-a-half acres and she glimpsed her hard life, whole, like a signal from the future, and standing...