“Is Dr. Montgomery here?” he asked, sitting down on the edge of the desk Ruth was working at.
“No. She won’t be here until exactly 8:00 P.M. plus or minus thirty seconds.”
“That punctual?”
“You had her class. She starts at the click of the second hand and ends the same way. She is like that with everything. You have never worked with her in this environment have you?”
“First time ever,” James confessed.
“She will throw questions at you from time to time. Try not to blurt out the first thing that comes in your head. She throws in some fluff to see if you can cut through the clutter and get to the core of the problem. Critical thinking skills are really a big thing with her,” Ruth told him.
“Thanks. That’s good stuff to know.”
“And if you don’t know the answer, don’t try to fake it,” Jeff yelled from the telescope.
“Got it.”
“Got what?” Montgomery said, coming through the door with her briefcase in one hand and a sack in the other.
“The changeover of shift routine. I was just going over how we hand off the system from one person to the next,” Jeff said smoothly.
“Excellent. I must have heard wrong. I thought I picked up something about not faking it,” she said smiling.
“Damn Professor, can’t we ever get anything by you?”
“Apparently not. I’ll fill James in, you guys are relieved,” she told them.
Within a few minutes they were settled in with the professor on the telescope calling off readings. She knew a good ninety percent of them without him having to look them up. She was amazing to work with.
After an hour she had him come over and she showed him how to gather the data in a specific order. It sounded simple while she was explaining it but in reality he became lost almost immediately.
“Don’t get uptight. You’ll get it. This is your first hour of your first shift. By the end of the night you’ll almost have it down,” she told him.
“Almost?”
“Oh my yes. You will mess up for the first couple of weeks. Just less often with the more time you spend working with the system. I know it, now you know it, so just relax and we will get through it together.”
“You know Abigail I’m still a little fuzzy as to why I’m here instead of some of your more advanced students,” he said in between calling out the numbers of the locations of each body.
“It’s fairly simple really. You’re smart, dedicated, and hungry. I like motivated people who are willing to go after what they want. I have a good many smart people around me but most are lazy. They expect to be handed everything. That just doesn’t set well with me,” she replied.
“Well you’re right about most of that. I am hungry. Hungry for knowledge and I am willing to do whatever it takes to gain a better understanding of our universe.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it. I had one student, quite bright really, who told me he intended to master the universe. To have total understanding. Now there is a guy with unreasonable expectations. None of us here on earth are capable of a complete understanding the complex nature of the universe. I honestly believe it was created by a much higher being.”
“Really? I’m surprised to hear you say that.”
“Why? Because I’m a scientist?”
“Well, partly. I guess I just thought you believed in the Big Bang Theory as far as the creation of the universe was concerned,” James said.
“I am. I do. But the real question is what was before the Big Bang and who caused it? Spontaneity just doesn’t quite get it for me. Actually the whole theory behind spontaneity is flawed,” she told him.
The night progressed and they soon had a routine. James still made more mistakes than he wanted to and some that Professor Montgomery just corrected without even mentioning it.
By 6:00 A.M. his eyes were starting to see double. He noticed how many mistakes he was making since the last change of positions.
“How do you do it? I mean, even switching off, six hours of looking is a real eyestrain.”
“Believe me, in a few weeks you will be able to sit there the whole time. I’ll have to drag you off that thing. Especially when we start getting higher in the sky. The stuff we are cataloguing right now is just preliminary data. Where we will really have problems is when we start trying to determine what is beyond Pluto. Something is or was. The tenth planet is either lurking and we simply can’t see it or it has been broken up and become part of the asteroid belt or was flung out into space. One way or the other. That is what we want to determine. Proof that is it does or did exist.”
“But if it’s gone, it’s going to be pretty hard to prove it was there.”
“Ah my dear boy, that is where you are wrong. That is what you will learn all about. How to find what isn’t there. It’s easy to find what is there. The opposite is much more difficult but it can be done. I intend to teach you how,” she told him.
He really was going to have to do a reality check. No one like Dr. Abigail Montgomery took a recent graduate and gave him that kind of opportunity.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The team fell into a comfortable routine over the next week but background logging and cross checking is tedious and requires a great deal of concentration. By the end of the week James was becoming more proficient and Abigail was starting to trust his judgment more the longer he worked with the scope.
One person could have done both but with the new telescope being so recently added even Abigail had to work diligently. The new telescope gave them the ability to see further than ever before with more clarity. That presented both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was obvious but the curse came in the form of the increased background clutter.
“You’re getting pretty good on that thing,” Abigail told James just before the end of their shift.”
“I feel like I’m getting better. I don’t have to look down quite as often to make adjustments.”
“Believe me, by the time we are finished this will be second nature to you,” she told him.
“How much longer do you think it will take on just the background readings?”
“Two weeks if we can stay on schedule. Then the fun part begins.”
“Where are we going to start looking?” James asked.
“From the asteroid belt on out. I am convinced that the tenth planet was either between Jupiter and Mars and some external force broke it apart or Jupiter and Saturn. Some of it was flung off into space; some undoubtedly was sent hurling toward the sun and the rest? Maybe in the belt or who knows? That’s what a large part of this is all about,” Abigail told him.
“We pretty much know where all of the large chunks of rock, or asteroids are now. They are tracked by stations all over the planet,” James said.
“Really? Then how do you explain the one that just crashed into Russia? No one saw that coming. We were all fixated on DA-14 that passed within 17,000 miles or so of Earth. We sure weren’t ready for that.”
“Well it wasn’t all that big either. Sure it did some damage but nothing like if the asteroid Ceres hit the Earth.”
“You have to factor in more than mass. Speed and angle can make a huge difference. Ceres may be the largest asteroid that we know about but you have to realize we are still talking about the ones we do know about. What if another is lurking out there that is twice or three times the size of Ceres? Ceres is approximately 600 miles across. Consider one 1800 miles across. It would be hard to fathom what such a strike would do to the Earth,” Abigail replied.
“What about a planet?” James asked.
“There are a number of unstable planets floating through our universe but the chances of one even coming close to Earth are 1 in 100 million. That’s not what I am worried about. If the tenth planet broke up and is on a vast elliptical orbit and has gone undetected then it is quite possible it could intersect with the Earth’s orbit at some point.”