The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space Read online

  He looks at the map before he leaves, just to make sure he knows where he’s going. The snowmobiles have got GPS on them and once the destination is loaded into them it’s pretty much point and shoot, but he wants to do it the old fashioned way, by studying a piece of paper and working out the bearing. It seems fitting. That’s the way the explorers would have done it.

  Of course, it’s further away than it looks and the wind is cold, even with two balaclavas and thick goggles. But it’s exhilarating and Joe realises this is the most he’s travelled in over six weeks, the furthest he’s been from other people. Out here is properly dangerous. If the snowmobile broke down and a blizzard started, he would be buried in snow in minutes. And the others wouldn’t risk their lives to save him. That’s the first thing you learn here, don’t risk your own life. Otherwise they’ll all go down.

  The memorial looks smaller as he gets nearer. This is a well-known optical illusion here. There is nothing else to compare the size of the cross to, so your eyes get confused and think that it’s large, then it’s small. He doesn’t get right up close to it, he stops the sledge a respectful distance away and stands there facing it. He wants to feel an emotion, but all he can think of is Smith.

  In his worst sleepless moments, he thinks Smith’s done it on purpose and come here just to torment him. Taking her wasn’t enough and now he’s got her, he’s come here to gloat about it. He hasn’t mentioned it but then he doesn’t have to. Just his physical presence, the bulk of him is a constant reminder of what happened.

  Joe makes an effort to think about the emperor penguin eggs – the men pulling the sledges through the dark for weeks to get to the colony, eating pemmican and cocoa each evening, telling each other tales as the snow and wind battered their tent. When one of the men finally returned to Britain and visited the Natural History Museum in London to deliver the eggs to the scientists there, they weren’t even interested. Things had moved on in science, they said. The eggs weren’t needed anymore. The men had been in the Antarctic for too long. They’d lost touch.

  Wherever you are on the base your eye is always drawn to the cross. There’s nothing else to look at. Something in those men’s minds as well as their bodies got them to the Pole. Something indeterminate, weighing less than the swish of air across the sastrugi and not trapped beneath the ice. The cross is only a metaphor for it.

  He’s sitting back in his work pod later than evening when Smith appears. The flashes are even fainter, even though the wiring looks sound, and Joe’s not sure what the problem is. Smith fills the doorway of the pod. For the first time Joe wonders what he’s actually doing here and why he’s left her behind for so many months.

  ‘One of the detectors has broken,’ Smith says.

  Joe continues looking at the screen, ‘I don’t think so,’ he says, ‘I checked them all this morning.’

  ‘Well, it’s broken. Kaput.’ And Smith makes a slicing motion with his right hand. ‘You want to go check it?’

  ‘That is my job,’ Joe says with obvious sarcasm.

  ‘Great. I’ll come with you,’ and he smiles. Joe can’t avoid noticing how guileless his smile is, as if he’s genuinely enjoying this encounter.

  ‘I can do it by myself.’

  ‘Sure, but it’ll be an adventure for me.’

  ‘You’re easily pleased.’

  In the boot room it takes him forever to get ready.

  ‘Want a hand?’ Joe offers as Smith tries to cram his feet into endless layers of socks. But Smith just keeps grinning, ‘Wow, this is so exciting!’

  That’s when Joe realises, she left him for Smith because Smith’s happier. He’s just more fun to be with. There wasn’t anything special about Joe apart from the neutrinos, and they weren’t really his anyway.

  Outside, the wind is starting to pick up and Joe knows they shouldn’t be out here too long. He uses the torchlight to guide them both over to the ground array of detectors. Sure enough one of them is flapping loose wires out of the back, like spilled black guts. It’ll be a major job to repair this, so he tells Smith that they need to go back inside for now and plan the work. As they turn to leave he flashes his torch into the distance, in the direction of the memorial. There’s no way the torchlight is powerful enough to illuminate the cross so it’s a futile gesture, but not everything that they do here has to be useful.

  Inside, Smith shakes his head free from the balaclava and goggles.

  ‘You need to hang everything up,’ and Joe points to his snowsuit left lying on the floor, ‘keep the place tidy, otherwise it’ll turn into chaos.’

  ‘Sure. Sorry,’ and he obediently bends down.

  Later, Joe’s in his pod, drinking his evening hot chocolate when Smith appears yet again.

  ‘Smith,’ Joe says, wondering what his first name is. What she called him.

  ‘Still at work?’

  ‘I like watching the neutrinos flashing,’ he sips from his mug. ‘I find it soothing.’ Then he regrets saying this, he doesn’t want Smith to know anything about him. He wants to be a smooth, opaque surface.

  ‘You do know you’re not actually seeing the neutrinos themselves, right?’

  ‘Yes of course I know that.’ He knows the neutrinos are invisible and what they actually detect is the light from the interaction between the neutrinos and atoms in the ice. For some reason Joe wishes he hasn’t been reminded of this.

  ‘I prefer the light in the fridge.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ but Joe refuses to smile at him.

  ‘You know –’ he is leaning against the doorway now in a chummy sort of way, as if he’s been here all his life, and Joe has a sudden horror that the rest of the winter will be like this, Smith telling him things that he doesn’t want to hear. He wonders what it would take to engineer a way out of here. If you get ill, really seriously ill, wouldn’t they have to come and rescue you?

  ‘You know – I think I’m really going to enjoy my time here.’ And he smiles at Joe again.

  Another detector breaks and this time they plan a trip outside, a longer trip to do some fixing. It’s tricky because you have to be able to use small screwdrivers while wearing mittens, so some manual dexterity is called for. He tells Smith what to do. At first Smith drops the screws in the snow but he gets the hang of it all surprisingly quickly. Quicker than Joe did in his first winter.

  ‘What’s that?’ Smith asks. The Moon is full and the cross can be seen way off, marking the edge of their known space here.

  ‘It’s a memorial. To Scott and his men.’

  Back inside they both pad to the kitchen to get a snack. Joe can tell that Smith’s finding it hard to stick to regular mealtimes in the never-ending dark.

  Smith opens a tin of soup, pours it into a plastic bowl and places the bowl into the microwave. The two of them watch the bowl revolve as if on a circular stage.

  ‘When I was a kid I tried to stick my hand in the microwave while it was on.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Joe doesn’t understand.

  ‘I used to imagine what it would feel like to be zapped by invisible rays. Microwave man!’ Smith is grinning but he also looks a bit embarrassed. ‘Guess I read too many comics.’

  ‘I put some ants in a microwave once,’ Joe has just remembered this. One boring summer holiday and an ant infestation in the kitchen driving his mother mad. He lured them in with a sprinkle of sugar.

  ‘And?’

  ‘They survived. They just kept running around. They must have been too small to get zapped.’

  The ants searched out the edge of the glass tray, exploring their new surroundings while he watched. He doesn’t remember rescuing them afterwards, they must have climbed through the vents and got lost in the invisible workings of the microwave. Now he wonders if they ever made it out again and back to the sugar.

  Later that night Joe takes the printout of the next week’s work shifts to Smith’s pod to show him his allotted tasks. Smith turns his computer screen away from Joe, but not quickly enough and he gets a glimpse
of sky blue. So, her image is down here in the base with the two of them. And for the first time Joe wonders what she’s doing, now that she’s by herself at home for all these months. Has she found yet another man to stroke her arms and talk to her about invisible, imaginary particles swarming through us all? Smith must be wondering. He can’t be certain of her. There must be some doubt in his mind, given her history.

  Joe talks Smith through the work shifts but he’s not sure he’s listening. Perhaps they should sing hymns to each other while the storm howls overhead.

  A week later and they’ve reached the other side of midwinter. From now on they can look forward to the light. They have a dinner to celebrate and send emails to the other people overwintering on other parts of the continent. Nobody else has to undergo as much darkness, because none of the other bases are as near to the Pole.

  After the dinner, Smith comes up to Joe and says, ‘Have you ever been to that memorial?’

  Joe nods. ‘Why?’

  ‘Quite fancy going to have a look myself. Want to tag along?’

  Joe surprises himself by saying yes. ‘But,’ he adds, ‘I think we should do it the old-fashioned way, the way they would have done it. Just walking. No motor sledges.’

  Smith looks a bit taken aback, ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘No,’ Joe knows he’s got him now.

  ‘But it’s miles away.’

  ‘Do you know how far those men walked? Hundreds and hundreds of miles. And we’ll have GPS bleepers on us. They’ll be able to find us and dig us out if anything happens.’ Sometimes futile and maybe heroic gestures are what’s needed.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ but Smith still looks worried.

  They arrange to do it the next day. There hasn’t been any new snow for a few weeks, so the surface underfoot is hard and relatively easy to walk on. The main problem is coping with the sastrugi. Smith isn’t used to this, and he soon starts to lag behind Joe. Even through his balaclava and helmet he can hear Smith’s feet slap against the frozen ground, and every now and again he slithers down the crest of a sastrugi in a way that reminds Joe of cows skittering down the ramps of lorries when they arrive at abattoirs.

  The grave is two miles away and they can’t walk faster than a mile an hour. A round trip of four hours. They have food, chocolate and nuts, in various pockets. Nuts don’t really freeze so they’re ideal.

  Joe realises he’s coping with Smith being here. He’s helpful around the base, even if he is messy, and he’s always cheerful. That counts for quite a lot, here.

  And he never actually found them together. There was nothing that obvious to make him realise what was going on. But he could picture it, and now the picture’s become a reality in his head. Whatever happened between them was undetectable, undefinable, but Joe could tell. It was the way they seemed aware of each other, even when they were at opposite ends of the room. Joe knew that when she ran her fingers down his chest, it was Smith she was thinking of. When Joe talked about their work, she imagined Smith describing the same work. Even the very words Joe used seemed to be contaminated with their affair. There’s no such thing as purity, except maybe in neutrinos and ice. And dead men.

  It’s hellishly cold. Joe doesn’t think he’s ever been out so long in winter here and even with all these layers on, his fingers are beginning to go numb. They’re wearing head torches but the narrow beam of light is no match for the Antarctic winter and for the first time he realises just how alone the two of them are. Two tiny specks of warm flesh on that vast frozen plateau.

  Finally they reach the memorial. Smith looks done in, so Joe digs a chocolate bar out of his pocket and hands it to him. He gives Joe a thumbs up.

  Joe’s never been this close to the memorial and without the motor sledge it feels eerie. He bows his head and stands there, trying to think about the expedition that brought these men here. But Smith, recovered now with the help of the chocolate, has bounded away across the ice to read the inscription on the cross. When he walks back, he asks Joe, ‘Is this actually their grave?’

  ‘No.’ His mouth can only shape a handful of words, ‘There isn’t a grave.’ He’ll have to leave the rest of the explanation for when they’ve returned to the base and are defrosting with the aid of hot soup. The bodies are deep in the ice now, several metres under the surface. And because of the movement of the glacier and the ice over the past hundred years, the bodies have travelled some distance. Nobody knows where they are, so they’re everywhere on the plateau, spread out under the ice and all mixed up with the detectors. The men are as ghostly as the neutrinos, and as present.

  The wind is picking up so they turn and head back to the base. Smith’s in front of Joe now and he obviously thinks he’s mastered the art of the sastrugi. He hasn’t yet learnt that some of them are hollow and can’t bear your weight. There’s no way of telling before you step on one, but perhaps Smith’s right. You may as well plough on, not knowing.

  The need for better regulation of outer space

  The GPS was the first clue – for us at least – that something had gone wrong. Day after day on the school run it insisted we were somewhere else. Snarled up in traffic in Saigon, stuck outside a checkpoint in East Jerusalem, or battling our way through the waves to St Kilda. We took the GPS back to the shop, but they said there was a problem with all the satellites now and they suggested we buy an A to Z.

  That was the same day we tried to watch the cup match on Sky, but the pitch was covered in echoes of past games all piled up on each other like pages torn out of an old book. Electric ghosts of players scored goals against themselves over and over again, at least until the TV burst into flames. It just couldn’t cope with all that information.

  Then the satellites started crashing into each other like celestial dodgems and all the astronauts in the space stations were trapped, waiting for help that could never reach them. It got to the point where we could go and sit outside at night, reading our books by the light of the debris catching fire as it slammed around above our heads.

  Some of this debris was large enough to survive the atmosphere and reach us on the patio, and we wondered why it had been so important to launch a coffee cup or a retractable pencil into outer space in the first place, and whether the astronauts had been slightly too ambitious in their choice of poetry anthologies. And exactly how much the dead millionaire had paid to have his ashes launched into space, complete with a brass plaque engraved ‘for all eternity’.

  We could use the coffee cups, but the poetry was a bit charred around the edges and frankly second rate stuff, so it went to Oxfam. The ashes sat on the mantelpiece and glowed as if they were being resurrected in heaven. That was ok, but the body of an astronaut still strapped to its ejector seat was too much. It only just missed our greenhouse and made a crater in the lawn.

  Now there’s no more night and the sky’s turned into grey junk, so we’re having our summer holiday in the living room. We’re pretending it’s Glastonbury under the dining table, converted into a shelter in case any more debris rains down.

  Identity theft

  In 1935 an official removed my grandfather’s citizenship, ignoring the scars inflicted at the Somme, and the medal awarded to him for bravery (he’d only been following orders, after all).

  On the wall of the official’s office was a diagram that reminded my grandfather of biology lessons at school. Green peas can be bred from yellow ones, but he couldn’t remember why this was so. How can greenness (or was it yellowness) lurk invisibly in a generation of peas before reappearing in their offspring? Now, as the official ran his finger up and down the lines connecting black and white circles, my grandfather wished he’d paid more attention at school.

  Then, after passing through the deaf and blind city streets, the official let himself into my grandfather’s apartment. It was his duty to confiscate my grandfather’s complete set of Beethoven symphonies, for safekeeping. The official scratched his Mendelssohn records and scribbled on the pages of his Kafka.


  But my grandfather could keep the theory of relativity, Communism, and that nonsense about the unconscious. So he set off for England, with Freud, Marx and Einstein to keep him company on the boat.

  Long before Crick and Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA, my grandfather could have told you about the twin strands of German and Hebrew knotted around his tongue. It was a difficult job to unpick all this and splice English words into it – words he accumulated from reading Dickens, jam jars, Orwell, army orders, ration books, newspapers, advertising hoardings, railway tickets, Joyce, laundry labels, street signs…

  I never met him, but I inherited from him a dislike of Wagner, and a predisposition to diabetes. His collected works of Dickens, with German words pencilled in the margins, are all mixed up with my books on my shelves. I trace the marks he made; hoping his interpretations can be trusted when I’m on holiday in Munich, swigging back the beer at Oktoberfest.

  And so it goes on. When I say ‘Aye’ in my South London accent, a Scottish friend laughs at me. It’s not my word, and anyway – why do I want it? But I’ll pick my way through your language. And like a magpie stealing shiny buttons, I’ll take what I want for my stories.

  The equation for an apple

  Robert stands outside the physics department and watches his supervisor’s office through the window. He’s been standing there for some time now, maybe half an hour or more. Other students have passed by, and asked him what he’s doing, but he hasn’t replied. Everything in the office is grey or black or white, the dust-covered desk, the blackboard with its mathematical hieroglyphics, the sun-bleached curtains bunched up on either side of the window. The only thing with any colour is the apple. He chose it especially for its redness and beauty, and he’s left it on the precise centre of the desk.

  He’s waiting. He’s waiting for the door to open and Blackett to enter, sit down at his desk, notice the apple, pick it up and take a bite from it.