The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (11 page)

‘Once, I remember looking out of the window and I thought I could see two suns. Of course, it was just a reflection in the glass. But it seemed to me that nothing was normal in a place where there could be two suns.

‘Even after I was let out of the camp with the other kids to go to college, it didn’t end. Those days in August ’45 when the Bombs were dropped, the people around me were nervous, afraid of my reaction. But you could tell they were excited by it as well. That was the disgusting part. They were excited by the – extremeness of it. It was like they’d been mesmerised by the blasts.

‘Why did they drop two bombs, and not just one? It’s like a murderer shooting his dead victim over and over again, peppering the body with bullets. It was unjust.’

The room feels very empty and silent, and I have to wait a moment before daring to speak, ‘Did I mean anything to you?’

Her head snaps back so that she can glare at me, ‘You have no right to ask me that. No right at all.’

Back in the café where it all began. And Walter is there with me.

‘We need to talk, Stan.’

‘What about?’ I am weary, I haven’t been sleeping so well.

‘Your little friend. You didn’t tell me about everything she had planned for that demonstration.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Well then, she didn’t tell
you
,’ he pauses so I can remind myself just how little Hiroko did tell me. ‘You see Stan, none of this set-up worked very well. We let you carry on seeing her because we figured it would be useful. But – you got too involved, didn’t you? You didn’t really want to screw information out of her, because you were too busy trying to screw
her
.’

I can’t be bothered to say anything to him. I think about turning round to look at the waitress’s legs but it seems like too much effort.

Perhaps Walter realises just how tired I am and how sad, because he changes the subject, with obvious tact, ‘The hearings are going pretty well. All your information was very useful.’

‘Really? Seems Brecht made a laughing stock out of us.’

‘Oh no, he did very well indeed.’

‘But I heard it on the news reports. He was mocking it all. The way he spoke…’

‘Doesn’t matter how he
sounded
. If you look at the transcript it reads as though he showed up, and he answered the questions. Means the other guys have to do the same now. And
that
means we’ve got plenty more work on the go, Stan. No one’s going to have to take any trains home to Chicago.’

‘Milwaukee. I’m from Milwaukee.’ I catch sight of the waitress’s legs. Shapely, definitely shapely. But still they don’t cheer me up.

‘Whatever. Anyway. We’ve got another nice little job for you. You know that guy Oppenheimer? He’s got a file as long as your arm, but there are a few loose ends. Ideal for you. And we won’t need you to translate any German poetry this time!’

Back in my room, I chew a lukewarm frankfurter. I could move from this place now, I’m earning enough for a better
room, maybe even one with a kitchenette. But this place kind of suits me. I can imagine the waitress here. She wouldn’t need to take off her grubby apron, I wouldn’t mind.

I should be out there, working, gathering information. But after I’d had to translate some of Brecht’s poetry for the hearing I’d got into the habit of reading it. I pick up my notebook and thumb through it until I reach the poem that keeps singing in my head:

Just whose city is the city?

Just whose world is the world?

The search for dark matter

I used to fly apart all the time. There was nothing at my centre and everything around me was so attractive that I could not stay still and quiet. I was always moving around from the last place to the next. It was exhausting but I could not stop.

I remember once getting on a train, running down the platform and clambering through the last open door just as the whistle was being blown. I didn’t know or care where it was going, I just needed to feel that jolt of acceleration pushing against my bones. And when we arrived and the train seized to a halt inches from the buffers, I just waited a little bit before it turned around and I came home again.

But ‘home’ didn’t really exist for me. I had a house with stairs I could run up and down. A garden full of trees that waved their branches at the sky. And a husband. At first he knew how to anchor me with his kisses, but that didn’t work for long and I started running. On Sunday mornings I would fling back the blankets and leap out, before he could come at me with the cups of tea and try to drag me over to his half of the bed.

At night, the sky was either bright with the Moon the colour of my wedding dress and more moth-eaten each month, or dark with cloud and unmet desires. At night, I pushed him out so I could escape the wrestling, his knees and elbows always in the wrong places. I gave him a telescope and sent him out to measure the sky and count it all up. He had a double entry book where I taught him to write down the stars.

I was exhausted but still I had to move. By day I worked in a laboratory where they weighed the air. A large column of it pushed down on my scales, and I had to make the needle point
upwards by balancing the air with iron weights. Some days were light and other days heavy and it took all my skill to keep the system steady.

At home my husband was full of holes, gaps so many and so various that I could not stop moving in and out of them. I searched and searched for something to stop me flying away from him into the sky.

I made mistakes. The error bars were so large that anyone would have fitted. The first one was a short man who squatted over me. His feet planted on the hotel bed either side of me and his soft penis curled on my stomach kept me there, but only for one night before I was on the move again.

I learnt it’s best if you can’t see them. In the dark you can make them large enough to fit your need. The next one was a man in a club. I never heard him speak because the music was too loud, but the air escaping from his mouth tickled my ear and made me laugh. He trapped me against the wall outside the nightclub and I liked the feeling of his skin on my stomach. But outside it was too quiet, and I could hear him lessen the size of himself as he talked his way into my pocket. As soon as he finished I floated away again, leaving him tiny by the side of the road.

I calibrated my need until I understood what I was looking for. There’s the right person for everyone, you just have to keep hunting.

I finally found him at the end of the garden, by the fenced-off wasteland where the foxes fought. I couldn’t see this man and we never spoke. His hands curved around mine and the rotten wood gave way beneath us. The fit of him was so marvellous I knew he was the one, and this was the way it was going to be from now on.

Daytimes in the lab became boring. The air always stayed the same weight, the same column of nothing drifted far above me. I got so good at it that the error vanished.

I could only meet the man on nights dark enough to hide
in. He kept his distance during the daytime, but that was alright because then he couldn’t shrink into the sky like a used balloon. And if I didn’t know who he was, I could keep playing the game without having to win every time.

Each morning I would see Mr X at the bus stop. He was the same height as the man and his fingers looked the correct size. He smiled at me but never spoke.

Each evening I would see Mr Y tidying his garden, his wife helping him to select the weeds. I thought I could smell foxes on him but maybe it was her. He smiled at me but never spoke.

Mr X stood next to me on the bus, stroking words in a book. Mr Y’s wife waited in front of me at the butcher’s and asked for her meat to be minced. Mr X walked ahead of me in the rain, water caressing his hair. Mr Y stacked flowerpots by his front door in neat piles, but one day they were broken. Kicked over by foxes, so his wife told me.

One night the man wasn’t there. I waited for him until dawn, when I could see how near the foxes were, all sitting in a circle around me. They had been watching me during the night, that was for sure.

I cried and couldn’t go to work. The column of air toppled over and suffocated everyone and it was my fault. All I did was sit on the sofa and feel the emptiness in my arms and legs. I didn’t even know his name. I thought I was bigger than him, so how could he leave me? My husband didn’t mind. He brought me cups of tea on trays and showed me his favourite stars in his book. He had caught all the double stars; the bright stars and their dim companions.

The men in the daytime were still there, and they still smiled at me but I didn’t smile back. He could have been either of them. Or both, perhaps they took it in turns. I should have bitten him on his face, the way that foxes do, and looked for wounds in the daylight. You can’t hide everything.

My husband ran out of stars to catalogue and he started on the spaces in between. He said it would take a long time
because there were so many of them and they kept growing. He said it would keep him busy at nights and I should not wait up for him.

So I lay in bed curled up under the sheets. When I went to the window I could see the black shape of my husband as he worked on his catalogue. All night I watched him grow larger and after he came to bed in the morning, he was so heavy that he was able to push the night back into me and we went hunting for new spaces together.

Furthest south

The countdown to the Antarctic winter has started this week. If Joe looks out of the window from his work pod in the base, he can see the deep twilit sky, as the Sun hovers just below the horizon. Day after day. What would only take an hour or so at home is stretched out here into slow motion. In a few weeks it will be winter, and they’ll all be living in pitch-black.

The final lot of overwintering scientists are due to arrive on the plane tomorrow and after that they’re physically cut off for seven months, until October. Living in the space station must be similar to this.

The entire base is sitting on top of a giant experiment buried in the ice, which is designed to detect sub-atomic particles called neutrinos. These particles aren’t rare, in fact they’re very common, but they’re difficult to detect because they hardly interact with anything. They whizz straight through people, through the Earth and out the other side. The ice is needed to screen out all other interference so the experiment can pick up the interactions when they do occasionally take place. The neutrino detectors are little glass balls suspended on strings of wire and buried two kilometres down below the surface. Joe and the others sit in their base, an aluminium capsule on top of the ice, watching the results of the detections which appear as flashes on their computer screens. It’s his job to maintain the detectors, check the wiring, and make sure everything stays connected even during the worst of the winter weather.

This experiment can’t be done anywhere else in the world, there’s too much interference from daily life, from mobile phones and TV and cars and planes, and from the sheer mass of other people. So Joe took a break from the lab and came out
here the year before last. Now he’s back again for another long Antarctic winter.

After a meal of soya burgers he goes to his room and tries to fall asleep. He quite often suffers from insomnia here because there are no natural cues for sleep, so he’s had to invent his own; a train of soothing thoughts, images, ideas. Sometimes it works.

He imagines the glass balls suspended in ice deep below as he lies in his bed with the down quilt pulled up to his chin, although he knows he will get too hot later and have to throw it off. Now, the neutrinos are in his head shedding white cotton-wool trails, like the ones that planes leave behind them in the sky. The neutrino trails criss-cross the blue sky. But blue is problematic.

Because she’s also in his head, wearing her sky blue dress, the one she wore that summer. He remembers slipping the thin straps of that dress off her shoulders and feeling it fall to the floor beneath the two of them. Because of the hovering Sun, the immobility of day and night, he feels jammed up against all his history. Here, she left him only a few hours ago.

And in that same time frame it was just a hundred days ago that the explorers died. Scott and his men were the first people to reach this place, to struggle up the mountainous glacier and clamber across the surface of the sastrugi frozen into ridges and furrows by the constant wind, to see the crystals form in midair and make rainbows.

There is a peculiarly lifeless quality to the air here on the polar plateau that Scott remarked on in his diary and Joe has felt it too. This is not the sort of air that helps you breathe, it stops you in your tracks and makes you gasp. This air has the coldness of death in it. The giant black cross which is the memorial to Scott’s expedition stands only a few miles away from the base, and all over the continent there are natural features named after those men: mountains, glaciers, bays.

Unusually, he sleeps well for eight hours, then he gets up for
his work shift. The plane is due to arrive at midday, and he’s looking forward to it, it’s the last new thing before the winter. After that everything will be routine, and utterly predictable. He knows that if he tries, he can find a comfort in that routine.

The detectors are all working fine, their outputs are flashing on his screen so he goes to the kitchen to prepare a snack. Outside the plane touches down on the ice, and he watches through the window as everyone scrambles down the metal steps. A small huddle of people in Gore-Tex and goggles, one man is taller than the rest. They disappear round the side of the base and then he can hear them as they enter the boot room, laughing and talking. He could go and welcome them, but the soup’s nearly ready, and they’ll all be spending plenty of time in each other’s company soon enough.

So he gets a shock when the kitchen door opens and Smith walks in. Joe should have known that he was the tall one. Larger than Joe, larger than everyone else. He grins at Joe and sits down opposite. Joe doesn’t stop eating, he doesn’t even look at him. He stares down into the soup bowl. Red tomato soup.