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.“I thought I’d found a world like Earth,” he said, crushingly disappointed.“What are you doing in here?” his father demanded.“You ought to be in bed, asleep.”“I…” Tom took a deep breath.“I’m celebrating my birthday.”“Your birthday? That’s not until tomorrow.”“It’s past midnight, Dad.”Dad’s frown melted slowly into a smile.“Yes, so it is.Well, happy birthday, son.”“Thanks, Dad.”“I had a surprise party arranged for you,” Dad said, almost wistfully.“With a videophone call arranged from your mother and sister.”Tom tried not to laugh.“I guess I surprised you, instead.”“I guess you did.”Dad spent almost half an hour studying Tom’s discovery.“Well, it’s not like Earth is now,” he said at last, “but Earth had a lot of methane in its atmosphere a few billion years ago.”“It did?” Tom brightened a little.“Yes, back when life first began on our world.”“So this world is like ours was, way back then?”“Perhaps,” his father said.“You’ve made a real discovery, Thomas.This is the first world we’ve found that could become Earthlike, in a few billion years.By studying this world we might be able to learn a lot more about our own.”“Really?”Dad was grinning broadly now.“We’ll have to write a paper for the journal about this.”“We? You mean, us?”“You made the discovery, didn’t you? Daniels and Daniels, coauthors.”“Wow!”The two of them worked side by side for several more hours, using the telescope’s sensors to measure as much as they could about this distant new world.Finally, as the morning shift started coming into the center, Tom asked, “Have you ever made a big discovery, Dad?”His father shook his head and smiled sorrowfully.“Can’t say that I have, Tom.I’ve put my whole life into astronomy, but I’ve never made what you could call a big discovery.”Tom nodded glumly.“But here you are, fifteen years old, and you’ve already made a significant discovery.You’re going to make a fine astronomer, my boy.”“I don’t know if I want to be an astronomer,” Tommy said.His father looked shocked.“Why not?”“I don’t know,” said Tom.“I was lucky tonight, I guess.But is it really worth all the work? Night after night, day after day? I mean, you’ve spent your whole life being an astronomer, and it hasn’t made you rich or famous, has it?”“No, it hasn’t,” his father admitted.“And it keeps you away from Mom and us kids a lot of the time.Far away.”“That’s true enough.”“So what good is it? What does astronomy do for us?”Dad gave him a funny look.Getting up from the computer, he said, “Let’s take a walk outside.”“Outside?” That surprised Tom.He followed his father down the bare concrete corridor and they struggled into their outdoor suits.“Science is like a great building, Tom,” Dad said as he opened the inner hatch.“Like a cathedral that’s still being built, one brick at a time.You added a new brick tonight.”“One little brick,” Tom mumbled.“That’s the way it’s built, son.One little brick adds to all the others.”Dad swung the outer hatch open.“But there’s always so much more to learn.The cathedral isn’t finished yet.Perhaps it never will be.”They stepped outside onto the barren dusty ground.Through the visor of his helmet Tom saw the spidery frameworks of the Lunar Farside Observatory’s giant telescopes rising all around them.And beyond stretched the universe of stars, thousands, millions of stars glowing in the eternal night of deep space, looking down on the battered face of the Moon where they stood.Tom felt a lump in his throat.“Maybe I’ll stick with astronomy, after all,” he said to his father.And he thought it might be fun to add a few more bricks to the cathedral.AFTERWORD TO“A PALE BLUE DOT”This story was inspired by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who in 1967 discovered the first pulsar while she was doing “grunge work” as a graduate student at Cambridge University.Pulsars are collapsed stars that emit powerful pulses of radio energy.INTRODUCTION TO“INSPIRATION”In this story we again breach the frontier of time travel.Traveling into the past or the future is not forbidden by the known laws of physics, and what is not forbidden might one day be accomplished by determined human minds and hands.When H.G.Wells first published his novella The Time Machine, Albert Einstein was sixteen years old.William Thomson, newly made Lord Kelvin, was the grand old man of physics, and a stern guardian of the orthodoxy who proclaimed that physicists had discovered just about everything that there was to know.The frontier of knowledge was closing, according to him.Wells’s idea of time as a fourth dimension that we might be able to travel through would have been anathema to Kelvin, but it would have lit up young Albert’s mind.Was Einstein inspired by Wells? Did a science fiction tale lead to Einstein’s concept of relativity?Hence this story of Wells, Kelvin, teenaged Einstein, and a time traveler.And one other person, as well.INSPIRATIONHE WAS AS close to despair as only a lad of seventeen can be.“But you heard what the professor said,” he moaned.“It is all finished.There is nothing left to do.”The lad spoke in German, of course.I had to translate it for Mr.Wells.Wells shook his head.“I fail to see why such splendid news should upset the boy so.”I said to the youngster, “Our British friend says you should not lose hope.Perhaps the professor is mistaken.”“Mistaken? How could that be? He is a famous man! A nobleman! A baron!”I had to smile.The lad’s stubborn disdain for authority figures would become world-famous one day
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