DOSSIER: JASON MAXIMILLIAN UHLRICH
He was born to genteely impoverished nobility in the Austrian city of Linz, which was famous for the pastry called Linzertorte and for being the childhood home of Adolf Hitler.
Tales of the family’s bygone splendor filled his childhood, and his father still had enough influence to place young Jason in good schools. Because he was bookish and got better grades than his classmates, and because he was pompously proud of his family heritage, but most of all because he was slightly built and physically frail, Jason became a favorite target for the bigger and more rugged boys. He got his revenge against them by consistently being first in his classes, despite occasional swollen lips or bruised ribs.
It was at the prestigious University of Vienna that Jason Uhlrich turned to the study of astronomy. He had won a full scholarship and started in the physics curriculum, inspired by one of the university’s most illustrious alumni, the Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger. But astronomy lured him away from theoretical physics: Uhlrich fell in love with the study of the stars. Nobel Prizes rarely went to astronomers, he knew, but Uhlrich burned with an ambition to be among the rare few who achieved that lofty goal.
Alas, reality was very different from his dreams. Uhlrich was a gifted teacher, but only an ordinary researcher. A generation of students adored him, some of them going on to outstanding careers in astronomy. Uhlrich himself remained virtually anonymous: a slim gray figure in the background, not the forefront, of astronomical research. He was the person to whom his students dedicated the books that made them famous.
Then came the accident. He was working with a graduate student, a pretty young Hungarian woman with thick honey-blond hair who was specializing in infrared astronomy—at Uhlrich’s suggestion. She was building a sensitive IR detector and—again at Uhlrich’s suggestion—using liquid hydrogen for its coolant rather than liquid helium. When she worried about the dangers of the highly flammable hydrogen, Uhlrich assured her that the increase in the instrument’s sensitivity would be well worth the risk.
It wasn’t. One fine spring afternoon, as he worked alongside the student, inhaling her lovely perfume, the hydrogen exploded in a searing fireball that burned the student to death and destroyed both Uhlrich’s retinas.
Stem cell therapy could rebuild his burned face but could not repair the completely destroyed retinas. Neurosurgeons made Uhlrich see, after a fashion, by rewiring his visual cortex so that it could be stimulated by the auditory and tactile centers of his brain.
He saw through his ears and his fingertips. He was hailed as a living miracle of medical science. He returned to an almost normal life. The miracle was not perfect, of course: the images his visual cortex drew in his mind were not perfect reproductions of the people and things about him.
But he did see that lovely young graduate student in his mind’s eye. Saw her afire, heard her screams, every time he closed his sightless eyes.
Uhlrich exiled himself to the Moon. The newly independent lunar nation of Selene was starting a university and looking for top-flight people to fill its faculty. Through old associates (he had very few friends) Uhlrich received an invitation to head the astronomy department of the fledgling University of Selene.
“We need good men like you, Professor,” said one of his former students, who now headed Selene University’s selection committee. “Dependable, reliable, the kind of man who can turn out top-notch students.”
Thus Uhlrich traveled to the Moon, learned to live underground in the strangely light gravity, walked and talked and existed almost like a normal, sighted man, and tried to forget his previous life and sorrows.
Then another of his former students, now a leading astronomer at the University of Arizona, discovered Sirius C, an Earth-sized planet orbiting a star that was less than nine light-years away, so close that the International Astronautical Authority launched a plan to get visual imagery of the world that the popular news media dubbed New Earth.
Suddenly Uhlrich was seized by a frenzy. Selene was already constructing a radio telescope facility on the far side of the Moon. Why not build an optical interferometer that could image Sirius C—before the IAA’s grandiose plan for space-borne telescopes could be completed?
Insisting that Selene could gain enormous prestige from the project, Uhlrich faced the lunar nation’s governing council in a white fury of ambition. They decided to study his proposal, which Uhlrich took as a polite way of refusing him. Just as when a father tells his importuning child, “We’ll see,” what he really means is no, but he doesn’t want to have an argument about it.
Desperate, Uhlrich sought an audience with Douglas Stavenger, the retired leader of Selene, the man who had directed the community during its earliest years, who had led Selene’s brief, almost bloodless fight for independence, who had chosen the very name for the lunar nation.
Stavenger, still Selene’s éminence grise despite his apparent youth, smiled at Uhlrich’s enthusiasm and agreed with him. Selene should be the first to obtain visual imagery of New Earth.
Selene’s governing council agreed to support the project—minimally. Which led Uhlrich to seek additional funding from the McClintock Trust. He had not expected the scion of the McClintock clan would actually come to the Farside Observatory and interfere with his operation.
But Uhlrich was determined to do whatever was necessary to make Farside Observatory succeed. His one chance for a Nobel Prize was at his fingertips.
Almost.