Dr. Swan Donalson was counting stars through a break in the clouds when she missed the turn onto the snowy lane that led to her parents' house. She reacted by slamming on the Rover's brakes. The Rover fish-tailed more than any salesman back in Southern California would have cared to advertise. The Rover made three rotations across ice-covered roadway and then slid into a snow bank. After a moment of stunned reflection Swan put the transmission into reverse. The wheels spun plaintively and the vehicle lurched to the right. The Rover was now at least a foot deeper in the white muck. Swan momentarily wondered if the snow bank was bottomless.
Swan rested her head against the steering wheel and turned off the engine. No sense adding suffocation to the list of tonight's troubles. She glanced at her watch: eleven-thirty PM.
Merry Christmas. Well, almost.
Swan switched off the headlights. Snowflakes glittered in the dying beams before being engulfed by the deep shadows of the surrounding pines. Swan opened the door. Cold bit her face. It was enough to take the breath away from someone who called herself a California girl. She shivered.
Get used to it, a little voice chided, it's at least two miles to Mom and Dad's.
She stomped the large boots she had bought at a local-but-trendy sporting goods store. That had been with her first paycheck as Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Oswego College. She had purchased a jacket there, too. The little booklet that came with the jacket had made the impressive claim that all the materials in the jacket had been slope tested on Denali. But could they survive a night in Northern New York?
She zipped up the jacket and felt suddenly warmer. She laughed and confidence sparked within her. Those two miles would pass pretty quickly. Fer sure.
She was about to slam the door when her eyes fell upon the manila envelope that rested on the passenger's seat. All that Swan had brought from Stanford to tiny Oswego resided in that envelope. The images of the emission nebulae were a product of her clout and her investigator's allotment on the Hubble Space Telescope. Before her arrival, the Oswego group had spent years submitting proposals for investigation on HST. All had been rejected. It was only with her name on the list of co-investigator's that Oswego's huddle of astronomers had gotten their first crack at the orbiting telescope.
As of today that effort had been deemed a failure.
Fuming, Swan stuffed the envelope into a small satchel, zipped the leather case closed, then locked and slammed the door. She still couldn't get the faces of the investigator team out of her mind. Anger. Anger as if she were somehow responsible for the poor images beamed up from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. She knew that bastard Dr. Frost was a backstabbing SOB, a barracuda among the fish in this little pond. If Frost wanted he could force her to lose her position while keeping the group's HST time alive. Now that Oswego's project had time scheduled with Hubble the group could continue for years with or without her.
Thanks a bundle, baby.
Crunch, crunch, crunch...The clinging snow demanded her attention as she walked. It had been a long time since she had traversed a snow-covered road, field, sidewalk, anything for that matter...crunch, crunch, crunch.
The snow-sound had once been so familiar yet it now echoed with an odd nostalgia. She had grown up amid these snowy lanes and this place had been her entire world. But at 18, college swept her to the West Coast. Life and work had conspired to keep her there and she had never really looked back. Until the divorce. Then one rainy day it occurred to her that twenty-two years was a long time to be away from home. She wondered if she would feel a similar nostalgia for Steve twenty-two years from now. Hmmm...probably not. Anger simmered. Goodbye to her old life and everything else that bitch from Cupertino had stolen!
She sighed heavily and the exhalation gusted gray around her. For a moment the fog about her head had the same hues as a nebula seen through a backyard telescope. The snow under her feet added a coldness that her imagination told her was the texture of deep space. She smiled. Childhood memories bounded. It was on a night like this that she had pointed her first telescope skyward. How old had she been...eleven, twelve?
The box her father had presented to her was long and deep. The wrapping paper was a royal blue over which three tiny magi rode toward a spike-tailed star. Without hesitation Swan ripped and tore the paper apart. A second's beat later revealed a package beneath the crumpled wrap. Her parents were librarians at Oswego College and this gift had consumed most of their Christmas budget. They watched their daughter open the gift with looks of bemused apprehension. Would their little girl like this thing they had given her?
"A telescope!" Swan finally breathed.
"It's like the ones in those magazines you're always looking at," Dad said.
"A small one. A starter-scope. Just your size," Mom said.
A wide, toothy grin spread across Swan's face. When she spoke her tone was reverent, "A refractor! I bet I can finish my Messier List with it!"
Behind his beard her father blinked as he always did whenever he was perplexed. "Oh sure. Your Mez...your list."
"When I'm done with the List the Astronomical League will send me a certificate," Swan said gleefully.
"She's been filling out a log, Edward," her mother said.
Swan nodded. "Mom's been helping me fill it out." Swan had once told Mr. Byrne, her science teacher, about the List but he hadn't seemed interested in her extracurricular activity. That had left Mom.
Swan thought about her parents and smiled. Mom and Dad were retired and living in Florida, now. Their move and her divorce had happened at nearly the same time. She had gotten the little farmhouse at what she knew to be a bargain basement price. The spot where she had set up that first telescope was now overgrown with blackberry thickets. Odd how after becoming a professional astronomer she rarely touched a scope. Computer analysis and number crunching had been the foundation of her PhD.
Swan waded through a snowdrift. A gust of wind sent a swirl of flakes past her. The Tug Hill region of western New York was infamous for its lake effect snow. Wet, moist air from Lake Ontario rose and mingled with frigid air masses moving south from Canada. The effect could be devastating. Several feet of snow could pile up in a matter of hours.
Until this moment Swan hadn't thought much about snow squalls. Berkeley offered its worries but snow squalls weren't among them. Should she have left the Rover? She glanced warily skyward and gasped.
There were no clouds to be seen. A steady wind had pushed away the storm cell that had chosen to dump a foot of snow on Oswego County that afternoon. Now the sky was full of wonders. Sirius burned arrogantly, calling all who sought the music of the spheres to pause and listen to its song. Rigel and Betelgeuse stood opposite one another like the heraldic ensigns of lost foes. The Pleiades reminded her of a diamond pin her grandmother once wore. The great square of Pegasus always made her think of Narnia. And Ursa Major, her oldest friend in these skies, made her smile.
Then she remembered her constellation and sought the western horizon.
As a child she had learned that Cygnus meant Swan. Thus she had given that constellation her utmost attention. Deneb, Sadr, Gienah, and Albireo stood low on the western horizon. Ancient Arabians had given the stars of Cygnus their names. She knew that the three main stars were all red giants. These were dozens of times bigger than the sun. Swan stared and felt a tingle of wonder.
On that special Christmas Eve long ago Swan had turned her new telescope toward Cygnus and its mysteries. Special clouds of dust hovered around Cygnus. Swan knew that two of these clouds were on her Messier List. The List was a catalog of 110 deep space objects such as clusters, galaxies, and nebulae. Charles Messier was an 18th century French astronomer who had first cataloged these bodies. The telescope had helped her capture these objects and ultimately earn her the certificate. Her mother had framed it and hung it on the living room wall. It still resided with her parents in the condo in Titusville.
Swan passed a large oak and realized that she only had another mile to go. The bare branches of the ancient tree reached upward, grasping the fabric of the night sky and the diamond swan that flew through heaven. The bird laughed and flew on, unencumbered. The image made Swan smile. It was as if that constellation had somehow followed her back here, back home.
Swan continued walking but her mind focused less on the road and more on the Hubble images. It was ironic that the images she carried in the satchel were of the Veil Nebula in Cygnus. When she first spotted it through that old scope she knew nothing about emission nebula. Now, she knew everything about them.
Or not enough, according to Frost's committee.
Emission nebulae were a subclass of gaseous clouds that existed close to a hot star. Photons from the star excited or ionized the gas clouds. The ionization created bright spectral patterns. Such nebulae were not a new field of study, but what Hubble was showing them of the Veil Nebula was totally unexpected. The long filaments that made up the nebula were speckled and broken. Indeed, the Veil itself, or what they could see of it amid the annoying flecks, was contorted and twisted beyond anything that they had thought possible!
Explain this! Frost had demanded. Something was there that shouldn't be. Had she chosen the wrong filters? Fed the controllers the wrong coordinates? Why were the images so splotchy? She had fielded these questions as best she could. She was certain she hadn't made any mistakes.
"Maybe some type of equipment failure?" Old Prof Van Rijn had suggested. Frost would have none of it. True, he had pontificated, the last time anyone had imaged the Veil was before Hubble's mirror aberration had been corrected. But even taking that into account the new Veil images didn't look anything like those old ones. Something was seriously wrong.
A grin crossed her face. For all of HST's wonders she had fonder feelings toward her old scope. That old scope was...what was the California term?
Pure.
Everything seemed pure on a night like this. The air, the stars, her being. Beneath her feet the snow seemed steady and solid. Indeed, it was a veritable presence. It sealed her return, transforming it from mere arrival to certain belonging. She belonged here, she decided. She belonged at the college. Her stride quickened and the satchel felt lighter. She'd get through this thing with the HST images. She had solved bigger mysteries, hadn't she? .
The gloved hand that was holding the satchel was getting cold. She switched the satchel over to her left hand and shoved the other into the thick folds of a pocket. That was better. The cleansing coldness of this place always amazed her. She remembered her first night observing with that old telescope. The night had been frigid. Dressed in boots, a nightgown, woolen hat, and cloth overcoat she had stood shivering in the yard, setting the refractor up on its tripod.
When all seemed ready she pulled an eyepiece from her pocket and slid it carefully into the vertical tube at the back of the refractor. She aligned the star Deneb in the viewfinder and then, holding her breath, gingerly lowered her eye toward the tiny circle of glass. And gasped! This was like nothing in the books and magazines she had read! Deneb was surrounded by quivering rainbows! Awestruck, Swan pulled her eye away from the reticle and stared at Cygnus. What was going on? None of the stars in the books ever looked that way! Was it a nova, or a nebula, or some unknown cosmic tangle of matter?
"Rainbows," Swan had declared proudly.
The rainbows were Dr. Swan Donalson's first astronomical discovery. It was short lived. Swan moved her mitten to the little wheel at the base of the eyepiece. When she turned it slowly the rainbows around Deneb congealed and faded. Swan was left looking at an intense point of quivering light. No form, no structure, just a burning presence.
"The rainbows are gone!" Swan had called to the empty pines and snow that surrounded her.
Swan turned the knob until the rainbows returned, then turned the wheel again until Deneb shone as a crisp pinpoint. The vision of that spark held her in thrall. She knew stars were very far away. What amazed her was that her telescope could bring them no closer. It was a very personal measure of how vast the universe was. She and the telescope were standing under the arch of the Milky Way, like two bystanders on the edge of a starry lane.
"The rainbows meant the focus was wrong," Swan whispered to the heavens.
When Swan saw lights around the bend of trees she knew she was nearing the house. A gust of wind lifted icy crystals from a snowdrift and hurled them toward her eyes. She squinted to avoid the stinging particles. Her vision blurred and she staggered slightly. The wind roared and she stopped in mid-stride, putting an arm over her face. The whipping snow was like an angry swarm of insects, biting her neck and face. The satchel dropped to the ground and became a lopsided rectangle rising out of the snow.
A swarm? Bugs?
The roaring gale passed as quickly as it came. Swan stooped down to collect the satchel. Her vision was watery but returning. What if something like this had happened to Hubble's instrumentation? Could particles impacting the mirror cause some new type of aberration? Swan closed her eyes and gripped the satchel. No, the HST team down in Baltimore would have been alerted by something as gross as physical damage to the mirror.
As Swan rose to her feet the question persisted. What if the Veil's distortion had been caused by something else? Something common to the space environment, yet easily overlooked?
n instant later she knew the answer. "Cosmic rays caused those flecks. A swarm of cosmic rays."
Swan gusted a sigh. That suggestion made more sense than anything that had been bandied around the Physics Department's conference room earlier that evening. Cosmic rays were high-energy particles. If they had impacted the Hubble's CCD imaging array then the excess charge transferred to the pixels could account for the strange flecks and distortion. The images could be cleaned up with the proper software.
She hurried toward the house. Once inside she turned on several lights and started a fire. Then, still feeling chilled, she put on a pot of water for some hot chocolate. While she waited for the water to boil she opened her satchel and fished out the photos.
"What a mess!" she breathed. "Just like the rainbows." With trembling hands she spread the half dozen photos across the oak table and stared.
Swan put in a call to the HST center in Baltimore. Somehow she scared up a grad student in the imaging department. He was very courteous and eager to please and was quick to access the Oswego team's files. A little digital correction and the images were appearing on Swan's home computer. As the sun rose on a beautiful Christmas morning Swan couldn't resist printing them out on the LaserJet. All of the glossies showed the Veil Nebula as intertwined filaments of ionized gas. The Hubble's amazing resolving power revealed delicate strands of incredible complexity spread across an immense distance of space. These images were the best she had ever seen. As if by magic the cosmic ray specks had all disappeared!
They had been cleared away like rainbows around a distant star.
END
When he's not writing, R. Scott Russell runs a test lab where he is allowed to break things for a living. He currently lives in Rochester, New York.
The image accompanying this piece is of the Veil Nebula - taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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