Part I: Photons
Leaves of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west.
Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.
The moon's good-bye ends pictures.
The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.
Only dark listening to dark.
Carl Sandburg Moonset
It had been, oddly enough, a quiet moon floating through a tree that first captured the little boy's imagination. Hanging up there in the sky as he waited for sleep, waiting in the shadows of dreams yet to be, yet soon enough he talked of little else.
"A man in the moon? Oh, really? Where?" he cried, once upon a time.
"It's right there! Can't you see him?"
"No! What are you talking about?!"
Even then the myths so casually passed along made little sense to the boy. Because, he realized, the people who pretended to know everything really didn't seem to know very much at all.
But then, in what would come to define the little boy, his curiosity blossomed. "...There has to be more I can learn --" became his mantra.
Because there always was more, and you could find 'more' when you pushed yourself hard enough to uncover it.
Then he had an odd encounter -- with, of all things, a telescope. On a camping trip in the Sierras with his fellow Cub Scouts.
The encounter came in the form of a kindly old man with a pristine four-inch refractor set-up on the simplest alt-az mount imaginable, yet when he first set his eyes on the moon through that telescope he felt his entire universe shift underfoot. He'd stared at the crescent orb for so long his eyes hurt, and he found he was trying to memorize everything he saw. He realized something important during that night, namely that he never wanted this journey to end. Perhaps just as important, the boy's father saw the explosion of real interest and watched with great interest.
Books followed, leading to his first steps beyond imagination. Simple books with big, colorful pictures on them because, after all, he was only a second-grader. An Atlas of the Moon waited for him under the tree the very next Christmas, and just five months later he watched as Alan Shepard and Freedom 7 kicked off a mad decade of exploration and experimentation -- everything coming into sharp relief when the boy was in high school when Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took a stroll on his beloved moon.
His father was a physicist; his mother a physician; both worked and taught at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He grew up not far from the university, on a narrow tree-lined street in Menlo Park, California, and in schools teeming with bright students, he was considered the brightest star of them all. He'd developed a profound love of and intuition for advanced mathematics, especially for calculus, by the time he left grade school, and he'd learned to play the piano simply in order to explore the mathematical possibilities within music notation. By the time he turned ten he was considered something of a prodigy -- until he realized that the planets and stars didn't sing all that much.
And so he turned his attention to the sky, but still almost always to the moon.
Until one night, on a field trip to the Mount Lick Observatory just east of San Jose.
The boy had, of course, seen pictures of globular clusters, and he'd even looked at M13 through a small telescope before, but the experience of seeing a pale smudge in the sky had been less than underwhelming -- and so he'd thought little of them since. Until that first night up at Lick.
One of the twenty-inch astrographs was being collimated that night, so no cameras were attached as technicians and astronomers aligned and realigned set screws on the delicate front objective, and actual eyepieces were being used to fine-tune the 'scopes final alignment. At one point, and when the boy happened to be standing nearby, this team of astronomers pointed the 'scope at Eta Herculis, then at M13 -- the primary globular cluster in the Hercules asterism -- and then one of the astronomers looked down and asked the boy if he might want to look at something interesting.
"Of course," the boy said as he made his way up to the viewing platform.
"Well then, try this out for size."
Eugene Sherman made his way to the eyepiece and after just a few seconds observing he knew his world had shifted once again, then he turned to the other astronomer up there with him and he smiled.
"Do you have a bigger telescope?" Eugene Sherman asked.
The boy was only a little surprised when his question caused all the other astronomers to break out in gales of raucous laughter, for that was, and is, the professional astronomer's mantra.
+++++
School was still school, which meant that Saturday mornings, especially in autumn, were best of all.
Because from the time he was just big enough to sit on his father's knee, when the Stanford Cardinals were playing at home he and his Old Man made their way over to the stadium to watch the game. And when "Gene" Sherman was just starting out in elementary school, he and his Old Man started throwing the football in the park, and by the time he went to middle school he was good enough to play quarterback, and oddly enough he only improved over time. By his junior year of high school, by the time he was ready to think about college, schools like Harvard and MIT wanted him enough to offer his football scholarships. So did Berkeley and even Princeton.
Only...Gene Sherman had decided he wanted to go to Annapolis, because by then he'd decided he wanted to be an astronaut. He wanted to walk on the moon, just like Armstrong and Aldrin had. He wanted to build an observatory up there, too, and he figured he was probably the best person for the job. But getting into Annapolis wasn't as straightforward a thing as getting into Harvard or MIT. Getting into a service academy meant getting appointed by a member of congress, so this he set out to do...in the same patient, methodical way he'd always turned to -- at least whenever he really wanted to get something done right the first time.
And so few were surprised when Sherman won his appointment to the Naval Academy, and he reported for duty in the summer of 1973.
He played football. He studied astronomy and physics, and because this was the Naval Academy he studied aeronautical engineering. When it became more than apparent there was no way into the astronaut corp without first completing test pilot school, which of course meant becoming a Naval Aviator, he set out to do this, too -- though there were some in the great scheme of things who were disappointed by his choice. They'd seen him working in more advanced, theoretical realms, more than likely working to develop a new sort of satellite-based navigation system, but they had decided to let him pursue his dreams -- for now. He'd earned that much respect and consideration, they said.
So...off the boy went, to Pensacola -- because, by his best calculation, that was still the best way to the stars.
+++++
April, 1979 Strait of Hormuz.
