The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] (9 page)

I took a sip of my margarita, and slouched down in my chair.

Susannah looked me in the eyes. Hers are big and light brown and clear as a perfect agate held up to the desert sun. “There isn’t any insurance, is there, Hubie?”

16

The walled-in patio on the east side of my living area is accessible from either of two French doors, one from the living/dining area and one from my bedroom. The wall is eight feet high with no openings except a few small ones at ground level to allow rainwater to drain away.

Chamisa sprang up against the wall some years ago, and I let it grow. I like the tallow flowers in the spring and the strawlike look of the plant in the fall. Two cottonwood trees support a hammock, and the final horticultural touch is some sort of grass growing between the rust-colored flagstones.

The patio also contains some man-made objects. One is a
kiva
oven my enthusiasm for clay made me build. I thought I would learn how to make bread. After fifty or sixty attempts, I abandoned all hope, but I sometimes light a wood fire in it for warmth. I also have a kiln for firing my pots and two telescopes. Actually, I don’t fire the telescopes; I just look through them.

The two scopes serve different purposes. My refractor scope is what you probably think of when you picture a telescope. It’s a long thin tube with a lens at one end and an eyepiece at the other. It’s good for observing close objects like the moon, the planets, asteroids, and the moons of other planets. It was also great to have when the Hale-Bopp comet passed over in 1996.

The problem with refractor scopes is they don’t gather enough faint light to provide a good view of distant galaxies. For that job, I have a Newtonian reflector, a squat looking thing that uses a concave parabolic primary mirror to collect and focus incoming light onto a flat secondary mirror that reflects the image to an eyepiece that sticks out from the side of the tube.

Stargazing is a great hobby for many reasons, but what I like best is how peering out to the fathomless night sky calms the nerves and soothes the soul. No matter how great your earthy troubles, they fade into insignificance as you lose yourself in the immensity of space. No wonder our myths of paradise always locate it in the heavens. Perhaps Ptolemy captured the wonder of it all when he said, “When I follow the multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth.”

The Centauri stars – A, B, and Proxima – are the nearest ones to us not counting our own sun. They’re four and a half light years away. That’s 25,000,000,000,000 miles, or in words, twenty-five-thousand-billion miles. Does that mean anything to you?

Me neither. I know intimately how far a mile is. I walk so much that I can tell you within fifty yards when I’ve covered a mile. I can also do the math to convert light years to miles, but the number of miles is so large that I can’t really get my mind around it.

The Centauri stars are best seen if you’re south of about 29 degrees. New Mexico’s southern border is around 30 degrees, so we’re a bit too far north. A and B are about the size of our sun. Proxima is much smaller and dimmer and can be seen only through a telescope. My refractor wouldn’t do the job, but my reflector would. Chile would be a great place to view the Centauri threesome because it’s at a good latitude, has clear skies, and also has some great observatories.

So far as I know, it has no pot smashers.

I try to restrict my travel to places I can reach and return from in a day, so I’ll never see our closest stellar neighbors. If you ever see them, you’ll be looking at light that started out four and a half years ago and is just now reaching earth. To put it another way, if Centauri A burned out at this instant, we wouldn’t know it for four and a half years.

If our own sun burned out, we would know it in only eight minutes. Eight minutes compared to four-and-a-half years. That’s how much closer we are to our sun than to the other stars.

The sun is expected to become a red giant, swallowing up the planets Mercury, Venus and Earth. Fortunately, that won’t happen for about 5 billion years, so there’s no need to make any contingency plans at this time.

There are countless stars other than Centauri, of course, and gazing at any one of them from any location makes you realize your own insignificance.

English has borrowed words from many languages over the centuries and is full of spelling rules notable primarily for the number of exceptions. Homonyms are common and so are jokes based on them. Every kid knows a newspaper is black and white and read all over, but of course that works only when spoken, not written.

Because Spanish is purer than English and also rigidly phonetic, it has few homonyms and few jokes based on them. There is, however, one such riddle Consuela taught me as a child. “
¿Cuantas estrellas hay en el cielo?
” How many stars are in the sky? The answer is “
Sin cuenta,
” which means “without count” but sounds exactly like the word for fifty –
cincuenta
.

Even though the cocktail hour with Susannah had helped calm me down, I was still obsessing over the pot-smashing incident. I fixed myself a light dinner of tacos filled with the last of the Emilio’s
cabrito
and washed them down with two bottles of
Cerveza Del Mar
.
Del Mar
and
Cabana
are two new imports from El Salvador. Maybe after they gave up fighting civil wars, they all turned to brewing beer.

After dinner, I was out in my patio scanning the sky at random using my Newtonian and reflecting on the fact that the stars are indeed without count and space is without end. (I suppose if I had been using my other scope, I would have been refracting on it. Sorry – I couldn’t resist.)

I did eventually switch to the refractor and located Mercury, which displays retrograde motion three or four times a year, and this was one of those periods. Of course you can’t tell it in one viewing session. You have to track it for a couple of nights.

Ptolemy was born around the year 85. Any year with only two digits is a long time ago, but the most amazing thing about him is not when he was born. It’s that the system he devised – the circles on circles thing I told you about – still works today. You may think charting the motion of the planets is no big deal. All you’d have to do is just watch and keep a chart of where they are on each date, and people had more leisure time back in the year 85 because they didn’t have cell phones and television.

But it wasn’t a simple task for Ptolemy because he believed, as did all the learned folks back then, that the heavenly bodies had to travel in circles around the Earth. Why? Because the Earth was considered to be at the center of the universe, and the circle is the perfect figure and the heavenly bodies are gods, so they’re perfect.

But nothing in the heavens appears to travel in a circle. Ptolemy’s genius was to show that by using circles around circles, you can actually create a path that matches the one your eyes see. I think of Ptolemy as the inventor of the first Spirograph. You remember those? It was a sort of drawing toy with a set of plastic gears. The smaller gears fit inside the larger ones and rotated along the circumference of the larger ones. You would put the rings over a piece of paper, put the point of a pencil through a hole in one of the rings then start everything turning. You could make great patterns. Ptolemy showed how circular motion could account for retrograde motion. As I thought about Ptolemy, I heard
The Windmills of Your Mind
playing in my head.

Kepler was born in 1571, still a long time ago but at least it’s a date with four digits. He showed you could explain retrograde motion more easily if you assumed the planets orbit in ovals rather than perfect circles. It also helped that he adopted Copernicus’ idea that the earth revolves around the sun, but that’s another story.

I was marveling at how Ptolemy and Kepler came up with such ingenious ways to explain the strange reversing motion of the planets. I was also marveling at the telescope that allows residents of a speck of dust in a small corner of the universe to see the far reaches of the cosmos.

And that’s when I figured out how to get inside Rio Grande Lofts.

17

I walked in to
Dos Hermanas
the next evening and handed Susannah a dozen blue irises.

“Hubie! You brought me flowers. That’s so nice, and they’re beautiful. I’ll ask Angie for a big glass with some water, and we’ll put them on the table.”

“That was so nice, Hubie. I said I never get flowers and you got me some. Of course – no offense – it would be even better if I got them from a handsome new sweetheart, but getting them from my best friend is the next best thing. And you’re a very handsome man, Hubie. I’ll bet all the other girls in here think I’m dating a suave older man, and when they look at you, I’ll bet they’re jealous.”

“Of course not. But you are the sort of person who brings a girl flowers to cheer her up. And they’re so pretty… Hubie!” she almost shouted and then glanced around and lowered her voice. “I just realized why you brought me flowers. You used the flower delivery ruse to get in Rio Grande Lofts.”

“I didn’t, but I might in the future. The flower delivery plan needs some further thought. For one thing, I don’t know the names of any of the residents, so who would I tell the doorman the flowers are for?”

“You know Gerstner lives there. You could say they’re for him.”

“He also knows me. What if the doorman won’t let me take the flowers up? If he calls Gerstner to come down to the lobby to get the flowers, I’ll be recognized.”

She sipped her margarita while she thought about it. Cold air had spilled south out of the
Sangre de Cristo
Mountains, and there was already some powder on the top of the
Sandias
. A few hardy folks were on the veranda wearing quilted vests to keep them warm, but Susannah and I had taken refuge at our usual table inside.

“Maybe you don’t need a name. After all, you’re just the delivery boy, not the person who took the order. You could just say ‘Flowers for apartment 13’.”

“You’re probably right, but I think I’ll save the flower delivery ruse for back up. I have another way to get in.” I told her the plan I’d hatched while stargazing.

“You can’t be lonely unless you’re thinking about yourself. When I look at the stars, I forget everything about myself, so I’m not lonely or sad or anything else.”

“I know what you mean. My father always says ‘A man who’s wrapped up in himself makes a very small package’.”

“Your father is a wise man.”

“He is. When I’m writing about a painting I really like, I can get caught up in it and never give a thought to anything else. Like my non-existent love life. But when I finish the paper, I’m still not dating.”

“What about your computer plan?”

I thought she blushed ever so faintly. “I started working on it, but it’s harder than I thought it would be. Maybe you can help me.”

“See, the problem is I looked at what other people wrote just to get some ideas, and now everything I write sounds like the trite stuff everybody else writes. ‘Fun-loving girl seeks adventurous man.’ What does that sound like?”