Exquisite Melancholy

“We all owe death a life.”

—Salman Rushdie

Thaddeus lifted his collar against the chill. The uninsulated domed building offered poor protection against the high desert air, even if the dome was not open to the clear night, as it presently was. From the outside, the building looked like a giant soufflé from which a thin slice was cut. 

Inside the dome, Thaddeus sat on a chair perched on a platform at the base of a huge telescope. On the sturdily-built table next to his chair sat a steaming cup of tea, recently refilled, and filled often throughout the nights. The only sounds a whir, as the electric Langdon motors moved the huge telescope into a new position and the faint clicks of the spectrograph as he took another reading…add to this the occasional sucking noise as he absently puffed on his pipe or took a sip of tea.

For three-quarters of every year, Thaddeus spent his nights here, alone, except for the occasional maintenance worker who might carry over some tasks past normal quitting time, and though he was not yet famous, he was brilliant, well-educated, and damn well intended to be someday famous: “I’m not spending three-hundred and seventy-five nights this year perched on this damn mountain unless I get tenure and at least three books out of it. Two publications for the learned imbeciles and one to make my fortune with the illiterate masses.” It was a good plan, certainly within his capabilities, but there was just one problem…the data made no sense. 

The reader already senses we are not dealing here with a pleasant man. And, in fact, we’re not; at least in any sense of the word as we commonly know it. That he ran this project was more a testament to his talent, which was prodigious certainly, than it was to his congeniality. Enough talent that the Foundation had, two years ago, entrusted to him this research observatory and a staff of assistants and support personnel—all of whom worked the dayshift, whenever possible.

Not to belabor the point—but we shall—folks who didn’t know any better might think Thaddeus worked alone on his mountain this night due to its remoteness and elevation, which resulted in a stunning clearness of sky, but also the hardship few others could endure inherent in a dull pursuit that required privation and a relentless, mind-numbing repetitiveness. Most who knew Thaddeus would’ve left him to his solitary pursuits even had the mountain been a low hill and just outside their front door.

A few more clicking noises disturbed the quietude. Thaddeus turned some knobs on the control panel and the telescope moved a few inches to the left and then up a few more. The chair, table, and control panel at which he worked rotated in synchronicity with the eyepiece. A few more clicks. The faint whirring. Again and again, throughout the night.

At each stop, he paused to peer into the eyepiece and take aim at a point of light located an unfathomable distance away. Some were sharp single points of light, which he knew to be suns similar to his planet’s own suns. But too many of the points were smeared, as if a tiny dot of cream were being stirred into a cup of the blackest tea by an invisible and even tinier spoon, while other lights appeared slightly-elongated; he wasn’t sure if his eyes were playing a cruel prank or the lenses in the telescope had imperfections some fool workman had not detected, or cared not one whit about, even if the rascal had noticed. Answering these mysteries was expected of him, though he was sure success would be met with jealousy, and this would give him yet more satisfaction.

Through one of the windows that lined the base of the dome, his office was visible, the only room lit tonight. A large desk squatted in the middle, taking up most of the room, and on which were placed stacks of spectrograph plates and papers; these were trophies from his hunting amidst the night sky. On two walls were hung large slateboards filled with equations only his most astute colleagues understood. He had enough data now that he should have answers; instead, he faced only puzzlement, the kind which left men in his position with an uneasy sense in their bowels that forebode a career was at risk of not being a bright one. The Foundation hadn’t said anything yet, but he suspected their growing unease at perhaps having bet a lot of money on the wrong horse. He could not know the phrase “On the wrong horse’s ass” had actually been used in a conference far away, and only a few weeks ago.

Thaddeus faced a simple dilemma: “Clintock’s equations were correct, they had to be; experiments at least as brilliant as his own, he grudgingly admitted, proved this, but something was not quite right here on this mountain. The wavelengths were off ever so slightly—and consistently so.”

On every other point the equations shed blinding light: Mass and energy are merely different forms of the same thing; the speed of light is constant; the speed of time is dependent on its frame of reference; gravity bends light; acceleration and gravity are more than kissing cousins. That a single human mind could fathom such discovery—and that it wasn’t him—led to more than a little resentment on Thaddeus’s part. Nevertheless, there were discoveries to make here, on this mountain, followed by a seemingly limitless future of accolades and awards.  If only his data matched the damn equations.

And so, the Foundation waited with decreasing patience, and his colleagues with increasing schadenfreude, he suspected.  The unfinished paper weighed heavily on him this evening. “I better damn well have a good explanation, which would be a coup because this alone would make my name. But it makes no sense…” 

It was at this moment that a door opened…and the janitor entered the domed room.

“Excuse me, governor, I’m late getting things mopped up in here.”

Thaddeus grunted what may or may not have been an assent. The janitor gave no indication he took offense. 

“Nice night, eh?” asked the janitor, not looking at Thaddeus; instead focusing his mop on the tiled floor.

“Yes,” the scientist grumbled.

“Funny how you coop yourself up in here when the view’s outside. I never seen so many stars.”

Thaddeus lifted his eye from the scope and glared, and somehow managed to withhold an urge to slam his fist on the table and tell the man to shut up. “What a dolt!” he screamed to himself. The view’s outside, indeed. It’s the lenses and vacuum tubes which show the way. Not to mention the astrospectrometer Thaddeus had invented. The human eye is inadequate for the work which needs be done. Leave such whimsical tomfoolery to the poets—and why do we waste tenure on those misty-eyed dreamers, anyway!

The janitor ignored the glare, if he noticed it at all, and began whistling a little ditty Thaddeus assumed was a mindless tune carried down from one generation of inbreeders to the next.

At some point during his mopping, the janitor innocently asked: “What’ya looking at, governor?”

Thaddeus had just taken a sip of tea and a puff from his pipe, and perhaps this put him in a better mood than he otherwise would’ve been. The scientist found he actually wanted to answer the question. Hadn’t somebody once said the best theory is one you can run outside and explain to the first person you meet on the street?

“I’m following up on Clintock’s equations.” That the janitor knew who this was came as no surprise. Harveld Clintock was, after all, the most famous scientist of all time. Kids in school would tease their more supercilious classmates: “What do you think you are, a Clintock.” A boneheaded action would be greeted by sarcastic jeers: “Okay, Clintock!” 

“What are those ‘quations, if I may ask?” 

“Well…they prove the speed of light is constant, matter and energy are one and the same, time is relative to its frame of reference, and gravity bends light among other things. There is a correction factor he put in one of the equations I need to prove has a basis in something physical rather than leave it remain an unexplained mathematical abstraction.” The scientist took note of the puzzled look on the custodian’s face and realized he hadn’t explained things very well, certainly not to anybody on any street.

The janitor didn’t begrudge the scientist his attempt. “You know, governor, stars are like women. They run away and someday come back…”

“What did you say?” said Thaddeus, bolting straight up.

The janitor paused a second, not at first sure the scientist wasn’t going to come down off his platform and strike him. The earnestness in Thaddeus’ voice frightened him. “Ah…I said they come back. You know, the dawn leads to a new dusk that same day.”

Thaddeus stared straight ahead, deep in struggle with a jumble of thoughts. Uncomfortable at the sudden silence, the janitor remembered something: “My daughter, when she was maybe seven or eight years old, told me once, ‘Sometimes I look up and it seems like the stars’ll fall like raindrops, back to earth…”

The scientist leaped from the platform and raced past the janitor, startling the man into dropping his mop. Through the office window, he watched Thaddeus tearing through a stack of papers, pausing only long enough to read something of obvious importance and toss the paper to the floor before doing the same thing to the next page.

After ten minutes of this, the scientist slumped into his desk chair and the custodian steeled himself to approach the office doorway. “Are you okay?” he inquired. “You look like you’ve seen a Galigan Devil Toad.”

Thaddeus looked up at the man, pitying his ignorance, while wishing at the same time he himself were fully imbibed with it. “The wavelengths are a bit shorter than they should be…they’re all a bit shorter.”

“Is that important?” the janitor asked, not understanding why but sensing full well that it was.

An overwhelming cloud of hopelessness draped Thaddeus. There were no words he could assemble to explain the significance of this to the doomed workman standing in front of him.

All he could do was say over and over: “The correction factor didn’t belong there in the first place.”

An hour later the janitor called down the hill to the university and asked that somebody come up here, quickly.