Rockets make Mark think of his father, whose feelings about them, one could fairly say, were mixed. He liked to watch clips of failed launches: the rocket rising a few meters, hesitating, schlumping back, exploding. Or rising farther, fishtailing, turning upside down, now using its thrust to drill itself into the ground. He found these clips hilarious. The poor guy got more and more reclusive as he grew older. The inability of Mark’s parents to communicate with each other in the smallest helpful way in their last twenty years pained Mark a great deal. They were each locked in their own world, comforted by mutually antagonistic interpretations of every event of their lives. Ah, well.
Time to get to class. He grabs his laptop and heads down the hall. (Right there, exactly there.)
Should he be worried about Mette? Her mother often berates him for not “passing the test,” by which she means the Turing test. He wonders occasionally if she has a point. Whereas, as far as he can tell, she never questions her own emotional responses, which is somewhat annoying. He’s not blind to the evidence that he’s slow to notice certain things. And really, it’s not that he’s not a tad concerned. But he’s never gotten the impression that Mette relies on him for emotional support. His impression is that when her mother tries to interfere, she bristles. He and his daughter sometimes go months without communicating, and it has never bothered either of them.
“Hi, Professor!” Students are entering the lecture hall.
“Hello,” he says to their collective heads. Follows them in, glances at the clock. Six minutes to go. The only way to never be late is to usually be early.
Shortly after his father died, Mark found among his papers a file containing testimonial letters from his colleagues, solicited and compiled on the occasion of his retirement by his long-term publication collaborator, a younger female colleague who seemed to have a soft spot for the old man. Mark can’t remember her name. One of the notes, from a much younger male colleague, was arranged like a poem on the computer printout, that dear old z-fold paper with the printer track-holes along the side:
I usually think I know the answer
Then there’s a UV question
I haven’t a clue
I turn to you for help
You know exactly how to explain
A light dawns
You are a guide
With a kind heart.
Of all the testimonials, this one was the most moving, and Mark has wondered if his attempts to write those data set things stem from having read it.
He’s never been good at remembering names, and he seems to be getting worse as he ages. He has also begun to experience mild anomic aphasia. For some reason, “table” gives him particular trouble. “Put that on the—on the—on that—” Whereas he’s always had, and still has, an excellent memory for numbers. So much so that he never bothers to enter phone numbers in a contact list. Through all these recent months during which he was packing up his childhood home and preparing it for sale, he had nostalgic thoughts, but was never close to tears. Then yesterday he called the relevant telecommunications giant to cancel the telephone number he’d grown up with. The woman on the other end of the line said, “Our records indicate that you’ve had this number for a long time. Would you like to transfer it to your new location?” Mark said no, because he already had a number. And discovered that his eyes were smarting.
He remembers when his home exchange was called Volunteer 2. His dad’s workplace was Volunteer 1. Then came All-Number Calling, when he was six. When he was eleven, his dad’s lab reorganized and his office number changed, which bothered Mark. He still remembers both numbers, plus all four of his college telephone numbers and all three from his graduate years. He pulls out his phone, keys Mette’s number, composes a text.
Your mother is concerned.
He stares at that for a moment. Doesn’t seem quite right. Deletes it.
Are you okay?
Presumes too much, maybe. Might be offensive. Deletes it.
Hope you’re doing well?
Sounds like something from a business acquaintance. Deletes it.
Time’s up. He mutes his phone and pockets it.
“Hello everyone. Let’s get started.” He opens the file on his laptop, throws the lecture title up on the screen behind him. “This is the eighth lecture of our course, entitled ‘Planets are Everywhere, but Where is Everybody?’ You all should have read chapter 24 in the textbook and the two excerpts I posted on the portal, from Kasting’s How to Find a Habitable Planet and Ward and Brownlee’s Rare Earth.
“To recap from the previous lecture: the first confirmed detection of an extrasolar planet did not occur until 1992, yet today, thanks in large part to HARPS and the Kepler space telescope, we have identified more than two thousand. And when we get the first data release from the Gaia astrometry spacecraft later this year, that number will increase dramatically. Who among professional astronomers would have predicted, twenty years ago, the existence of hot Jupiters? Today we know that, not only do they exist, they are quite common. It turns out that planetary systems are far more varied than we had previously assumed, and this realization presents fascinating challenges to our theories of stellar-system formation. Astronomers today are lucky to be living at a time in which, in so many areas, we are discovering just how wrong we have been. To a scientist, being right might be good for the ego, but being wrong is good for the brain. Or to put it another way, being wrong is much more interesting.”
This is his favorite
