Florence Morrow hunts for Planet X
Fall 1928
The day after the party, very early the next morning, when she is sure no one will be around, not even Alan, Florence lets herself into the Brick Building and climbs six stories to the the archives and, flipping on the lights, searches until she finds what she knows is there: the copy of Lowell’s Memoir of a TransNeptunian Planet . Thin, brown, it slips easily into her satchel.
At home again, feeling upright and very stern, not very badly hung over, she sets it out on the cherrywood study table and begins. And over the next three weeks she forces herself through it, slowing where she needs to and sketching alongside when she cannot quite see the things in her head. The first difficulty, she understands immediately, is in distinguishing the actual residual anomalies in a planetary orbit from just plain old observational errors. The method of least squares is a means to, as it were, smooth out these errors and reveal the remaining orbital waggle; but the work is so fine and minute and so dependent on the initial observations that she wonders whether LeVerrier were not just extraordinarily lucky when he pointed Galle to Neptune. There is no way around this problem, as Lowell himself acknowledged. So this is the first problem. This is why he accumulated so many observations, over so many decades and centuries – in order to account for, and to reduce, the necessary imperfections in the data.
But the second problem is even more worrisome.
The second problem is this: if Planet X is where Lowell thought it was – between 43.0a’ and 44.7a’ – and if it is as large as Lowell thought it was – larger than Earth, smaller than Uranus – then its perturbative effect on the inner planets would be negligible anyway. You can have the best observations possible and still see almost no effect.
These two difficulties do not mean mean that Planet X does not exist, only that it will be a very delicate and doubtful business to divine its current position mathematically. You might spend months or even years to arrive at an entirely wrong location. And then there is the business of getting a picture of it, which is another matter entirely.
Alan will have a hell of a time of it, she thinks with satisfaction.
The Memoir, in an offhand conclusion – as though Lowell never expected anyone to really look seriously into the matter – gives the most likely orbital elements –
ε’ = 22°.1 ε’ = 205°.0
a’= 43.0 a’= 44.7
m’=1.00 m’=1.14
e‘ = .202 e’ = .195
ώ’ = 203°.8 ώ’ = 19°.6
lh = 84 (7.1914) lh = 262°.8 (7.1914)
An albedo of 12-13 magnitude, a disk of at least one arc second, and inclined to the plane of the ecliptic around 10°. Decades of work by the best and most thorough minds: the first set of elements puts Planet X currently in the middle of Draco; the second set of elements puts Planet X near Delta Gemini.
Though she does not know for certain, she assumes, given these elements, that the Lowell search will begin either in Draco or in Gemini, depending on which constellation is at opposition when the new photographic telescope is actually ready to be used for the search program. She guesses that they will figure these places are as reasonable as anywhere to start, and that possibly the new equipment will turn up what had been invisible before. Draco is at opposition now, but it will have set by the time Alan is in Arizona, so if she can start her own search in Draco now, she will have a head start on Alan – since the boys at Lowell will not be able to get to Draco until next summer at the earliest, when it rises again.
It is true that she has no access to any of the Harvard College Observatory telescopes. And Julius’ 10-inch reflector is barely more than a toy; and she has no experience with astrophotography besides.
On the other hand –
On the other hand, if she uses Lowell’s elements as a starting point, as she assumes they will in Flagstaff, she can run the orbit of Planet X back in time. Back in time, to see where it was. Because what she does have access to, of course – what she has in exhaustive, abundant supply – is history.
Yes: if Planet X exists, there is a photograph of it somewhere in Harvard’s vast plate library. Somewhere, imprinted one of the thousands of exposed photographic plates, an image of Planet X has been captured, appearing for all the world like a variable star – not a bright one, but not too dim either. The Variable Catalog lists more than 53,000 known or suspected galactic variables in the Milky Way; there are 3,174 in the constellation of Gemini alone. It will take her some time to correlate Lowell’s orbital elements with the known coordinates of Geminid variables – a few weeks, she guesses, providing for a wide swath of approximation on either side. Until she does this work it is no good pulling plates – any variable of magnitude 12 or 13 might be Planet X, and tracking every single one of them down to see whether just one them has moved in a suspiciously planetary fashion – well, it would take decades.
When the three weeks have passed she sneaks back into the archives and returns Memoir of a TransNeptunian Planet, sliding it carefully back into place on the shelf. Only Alan might possibly have noticed its absence, but she cannot help this; still, the little windowless archives room is rarely visited, and when she turns out the light and pulls the door shut she has the sense of a secret well guarded. In the weeks that follow, at home at the study table, Florence begins to do her own set of calculations – not on a roll of butcher paper but on a series of plain loose sheets, as she has always done, with the Variable Catalog beside her. It feels very good to be at work in this way, and anyway she finds she has mostly lost the urge to see people. The green lamp on her desk gives a good strong circle of light in the evenings, and sometimes she comes into the study early in the morning as well. In these quiet pre-dawn hours the view from the study window is very plain: brick housefronts with their Federal stateliness lit by arc-streetlamps, which also send their beams into the twiggy domestic interiors of the street’s naked maple trees, and, once in a while, someone’s jostling headlamps throwing frantic splashes of light on the asphalt. On a rooftop across the way stands an old, oft-repaired water tank, its parts lashed together with iron bands and twirls of wire, emerging from the darkness until it is outlined against the gray morning sky like a giant spider carrying a great burdensome egg sack.
“Still at it,” Dickie says, leaning against the door jamb in his striped blue pajamas.
“I’m going to get him, Dickie.”
“That’s my girl. Lop off his conk,” he says, and goes out to the dining room where Mrs. Fliegler has set out the coffee. “Salvado!” he cries, and pulls out a chair.
Get him. Catch him. Match him. Whatever she is doing.
And Dick, it turns out, is off on his own hunt. Since Sealton – since the party, about which he suspects he has heard everything – he has had almost nothing to drink. He is drying up, his long frame slimming even further into a sort of leathery toughness, like a giant chewed sinew, and his skin is very slow to give up its summer tan, so he is still nearly dark as a mummy. One afternoon he comes clomping up the stairs in his monster’s boots and knocks on her door, his shirtsleeves rolled up to bear his brown and bony forearms. “Say,” he remarks, “maybe you ought to come look at this.”
He has the avid, peaceable look he wore at Moss Rock, years ago, or a version of it. Anyway something tells her to follow. She stands up from her work and he leads her out into the rose-carpeted entryway and through the heavy basement door. Once on the basement stairs the alkaline stink of developer meets her. She has knows about the darkroom, but now she has the faintly creepy notion that she is being admitted into a chamber of secrets. The basement has a painted cement floor and hefty beams, treetrunks, in fact, supporting the massive weight of the house above, and the walls are tidy brick, uniformly the color of dried blood. In a corner of the basement Dick has converted the old workman’s bathroom, adding a deep sink, a piney work table, and a drop light, and sealing all the cracks with metal foil.
“Oh, Dick – oh, I know what you’ve got.” She stops short, halfway across the floor. “Oh, Dick.”
He is thrumming, electric, and shoots her a shivery grin. “Come on, cousin,” he tells her. He pulls open the creaking door. It is a small room, brown jugs of developer and fixative stowed on the floor, a pair of black rubber gloves draped over the edge of the sink. She can’t help it, she creeps forward.
“Ta da,” he says.
They are all pinned up, all the shots of her in the buff.
She is speechless. Not embarrassed, but, yes, ashamed; not because of the pictures exactly but because she senses, immediately, that she can’t match his interest in them, that she hasn’t got the power of feeling to match him. He has purposely worked himself up to something, some pitch of interest or passion, and it shames her, troubles her. “You’re ridiculous, Dickie. What if someone comes in here?”
“Aw, no one comes down here. I’ve got a lock, anyway. I think you look pretty super, actually. Look at this one.” He unhinges the jaws of a clothespin and tips the polished print into the light. She is on the bed, hands behind her head, a lolling, stupid expression in her eye.
“I look like I’ve been hit in the head with a brick.”
“You do not. You look like you can’t stand it any more.” He sets it down and reaches for her. She comes into his arms and accepts his kisses. “You look like you can’t stand it one more minute.”
“Well, that was a pretty fun time.”
“I guess it was. I guess you didn’t mind it much.”
“I liked it plenty.” It is only difficult, she tells herself, to change direction so abruptly. “I liked it a whole lot, Mr. Morrow.”
“I bet you did. I bet you liked it plenty.” His hands are at work on her blouse and then his big wide lips are on her nipple. “I bet you liked it.” She grasps his head, its wiry hairs threading around the back of his skull. Dozens of her naked self, staring back, black and white, black and white.
It is in the second week of November that Mrs. Richard Morrow at last goes to the Gemini shelves and pulls her first plate pair. They are both among the oldest in the basment, tiny three-by-five-inch panes of glass, long unconsulted, wrapped in paper, with Henry Draper’s own crabbed handwriting scrawled across them. The resolution will not be of the best, of course, and it is very unlikely that Planet X is on these plates in the first place.
But possible.
With a thudding heart, she takes them to the stairs. What is this that is charging through her? Revenge. And joy, the joy of the hunt. And – no, she won’t look at it, but it is there, it is always with her – a wild, invisible, forbidden devotion buried deep in the bottom of her heart. What will come of it, she has no idea.