The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space Read online

‘Why?’ Even now, when he seems to be angry with me I notice how very green his eyes are. I wish I could stop noticing all these little things about him because they are no use to me. ‘Why?’ he repeats, ‘because they are not true women. They are false, hysterical. They are not ruled by decency or by sense.’

  Jeanie and Flora appear, and they gaze at all the debris, round-eyed.

  ‘It was a bomb,’ I tell them before Mr Storey can say anything, ‘the suffragettes have done it.’

  The Astronomer Royal appears again, holding a large broom. ‘Make yourself useful,’ he says, and he hands me the broom.

  He is right, I suppose, we may as well help. So I start to sweep, and Flora and Jeanie stack the broken bricks into neat piles. As I sweep, the maid appears. She stands on the edge of the drying green with the basket of laundry at her feet and watches. I feel like calling out to her but I don’t know what I would say. I have never spoken to her before now. But it seems she watches us very carefully the whole time we are sweeping, and the laundry is forgotten.

  Later, we make tea in our little room. We sit and drink it and talk about what we should do now. I am still hopeful that everything will be put back to how it was, all the damage will be mended, and we will be allowed to continue with our plates but the others are not so sure.

  ‘There may not be any more plates. The telescope itself may be destroyed,’ Flora gets up and peers out of the window but you cannot really see very much of the rest of the Observatory from our room, so she returns to her tea.

  Jeanie is doing calculations on a scrap of paper. ‘I can last three weeks on my savings,’ she announces, and I realise that I have made no provision for the future. I have given my mother nearly all my earnings, and spent the remainder on bus fares and biscuits.

  Mr Storey comes in to the room just as we are admiring Jeanie’s neat sums. ‘I need to see your hands,’ he says. We look at him. As usual, his shirtsleeves are rolled up, but even though I try not to look at his arms I can’t help noticing dirt smeared on their undersides. He is usually so clean.

  ‘Our hands?’ I automatically look down at my hands waiting in my lap for their next instructions, like pale, obliging creatures. ‘Why?’

  ‘Never mind why!’ he is shouting, and we are not used to this from Mr Storey, he is not being gentle with us now, ‘just show me your hands!’

  This is not the way it was, with his hand carefully cupped round mine and both of them moving together around the dial. Now he grabs my fingers and turns my hands palm up as if looking for hidden sweets. Perhaps he thinks we have stolen something. He is rough with my hands, he squeezes my fingers before dropping them. Then he inspects Jeanie’s. Then Flora’s.

  ‘Ah!’ he points to something on Flora’s right hand, ‘what is this?’

  I look at it, and as Flora stays silent, perhaps because she is too frightened to speak I answer him myself, ‘It is a graze, Mr Storey. A small cut.’

  ‘Ah!’ he says again, ‘and caused by what?’

  ‘Caused by the washing tub, sir,’ Flora has found her voice, ‘I cut myself on my mother’s washing tub.’

  I am angry now, even as I watch Mr Storey drop Flora’s injured hand and hide his eyes behind his own fingers, as if he is ashamed of what he has just done. ‘Do you think, Mr Storey,’ I say, perhaps a bit too loudly for that small room, ‘do you think that when we are not at work here we simply fold ourselves up in a cupboard and wait for the next day to look at some more of your plates?’

  He doesn’t reply and Jeanie and Flora are staring at me. But I may as well continue, ‘When we get home we must all help our mothers, and look after our younger siblings. We cook, we clean, we wash. Why –’ because it really is very odd and now the flush of anger has obviously left him, I can dare to ask him, ‘why are you inspecting our hands?’

  ‘Because we have found blood.’ He looks at me and I have the odd feeling that this is the first time that he has actually seen me in all the time I have been working here, ‘The woman who did this must have cut herself. There are drops of blood scattered on the ground behind the tower and all along the path down the back of the hill.’

  When I ride the bus home that evening the story is in the newspapers, accompanied by a photograph of the Observatory. Whoever did it left behind a handbag with some safety pins and currant biscuits wrapped in paper. I try to imagine fire flickering around the tower and flames reaching up to the sky, but all I can think of is a woman running from the damage, shedding blood all along the way, and wondering what will happen next.

  And now, nearly two years later, I am still here. Flora and Jeanie have both left to work in the munitions factories and I am in charge of the new girls because Mr Storey has left too. I lay out the plates each morning and then sometimes I leave them busy at their work and walk over to the West Tower. The only reminders of that morning in the spring of 1913 are a new clock for the telescope and a narrow seam of pale brickwork in the tower wall. It’s easier to feel than to see, so I run my hands along it, thinking of Mr Storey who has gone to fight in France.

  Today, after my visit to the mended tower, I take the book of stellar classifications to the Astronomer Royal. I have an idea for checking the accuracy of our work that I need to discuss with him.

  How accurate do you need to be (to get on in life)?

  At first Catherine is pleased. Pleased they’ve chosen her to do the interview on the news about their discovery. It’s a good piece of work and she’s contributed to it. The closest documented near-miss yet by an asteroid, due to pass between Earth and the belt of satellites only thirty-six thousand kilometres above our heads. The astronomical equivalent of a car roaring past you on the motorway at a hundred miles per hour and missing you by a whisker.

  They like this metaphor. The team developed it over coffee in the canteen, just after they submitted the paper and realised it was going to be a big story. They deserve this attention in the media. They’ve all worked hard. Although to be honest some of them have worked harder than others. And no-one else was there when Catherine sat in the telescope control room at four in the morning calculating the orbit of the faint object she’d just detected, but that’s to be expected. She’s the most junior member of this team and that’s how it works.

  Which is why she’s pleased when they decide it’ll be her doing the TV interview.

  ‘Why not?’ they say, and they look at her. They’re used to looking at objects. It’s what they all do, as part of their work. Inspect the rocky surfaces of barren planets, the fizzing spectra of stars dying above the Earth, the imperfect shapes of galaxies rushing away as if they couldn’t bear to be in the same universe.

  Above everyone’s heads the asteroid gets closer. Every ten minutes, about the length of the planned interview, it travels another few hundred kilometres closer to Earth. Its closest encounter is due to happen in six months.

  It will miss the Earth. That is the crucial thing that Catherine has calculated. Because if it doesn’t, if it grazes the upper atmosphere, like a stone skimming the surface of a pond, then it will lose speed and fall inwards.

  Tunguska, Siberia, 1908. The last documented major impact. In the photo, the forest of pine trees look like matches scattered on a pub table. This one would be larger, much larger.

  But she’s shown it’s all ok, it’s not going to happen. Not this time round anyway. Perhaps on its next swing past the Earth in fourteen years something might have perturbed it, made it curve in towards us. It wouldn’t take much, just something relatively small, to change the asteroid’s orbit and make it dangerous. But they’re not so bothered about that. They’re not taking the long view. They’ve got their careers to think about, and this exciting near miss will do them just fine.

  Anyway, it’s all been double-checked.

  ‘Are you sure?’ they asked, the day she talked them through her observations and all the maths, ‘are you sure it’s going to miss?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure.’ Of course, she’s checked it,
several times. A few times at the telescope when she couldn’t believe what she’d found. Once on the plane home, still drunk with tiredness after the long observing run. And then finally at her desk early one morning, before she’d gone to the rest of the team to announce it and show them the image that can now be seen on all the websites.

  ‘Perhaps we’d better check as well. Can’t be too careful!’

  So they redo her estimate of the orbit and she’s proved right. There’s only a 0.01% chance of her, of them all, being wrong and the asteroid plunging into the Earth.

  When the paper’s published Catherine is surprised to see that she’s not first, or second or even third author. She’s much lower down in the lists of names.

  ‘It’s alphabetical,’ they say. ‘On account of it being such a large team.’

  ‘But only three of us actually did any work.’

  ‘Yes, but A was awarded the grant which supports the whole team, B wrote the original telescope proposal (even though he didn’t go observing with you on that run when you discovered it), C is an editor on the journal and that’s helped us get the paper published so quickly, D has got a slot at a major conference to talk about it next Summer, and we’d like E to come and work with us. E’s done some important work in this area.’

  She’s lucky to be K, she supposes. At least she’s not Z. She’s never even heard of Z. Perhaps Z is someone’s cat, added to the list of authors to make a nice round alphabetical number.

  Sometimes when they stand outside the team office and discuss where to go for a drink that night, and Catherine has to escape into the ladies to avoid them, she sweeps up her hair so it can’t be seen and imagines shaving it off completely. Binding her breasts. If they were cartoon scientists and wore white coats she could make a tent out of hers and hide in it.

  The skirt is problematic. Too tight, too short, and it creeps up between her legs as she walks to work, thinking about how she’ll describe the moment of discovering the asteroid. The grey and naked piece of rock, born out of the blank night in front of her eyes. She’s glad it’s not going to end up exploding into the Earth. Some people might call it ugly, but it’s hers. It came out of the night, to her.

  In the TV studio for the interview, she tries tugging the skirt down but her legs are still feeling rather exposed when she sits opposite the journalist.

  ‘Now,’ he says, ‘tell us all about your discovery. The asteroid that isn’t going to hit us,’ and he laughs so that she realises she’s just the light entertainment at the end of the news. After the daily dose of horror, of bombs and debt and proper domestic crises right on their doorstep, the viewers probably deserve something nicer, something restful involving a pretty picture of the night sky. She’s not there to be listened to. Or perhaps they’ve just turned off the telly and she’s an empty screen by now.

  ‘Well, it’s actually got a lot more interesting since we issued that press release,’ and she shifts in her chair, ‘we’ve received new information, more data.’

  ‘New –’

  Catherine cuts him off, ‘It seems we were a bit too optimistic in our earlier calculations.’ It occurs to her that she’s still using the collective noun signifying collective responsibility, and now might be a good time to stop. ‘I’ve redone all the work,’ she says, ‘all of the sums, and I can say with confidence that there’s a more than 10% chance that the asteroid will hit Earth.’

  He visibly gulps and looks down at his notes, ‘Is that a lot?’

  ‘Well, it’s significant,’ she smiles kindly, he can’t help knowing nothing about statistics.

  ‘And what would happen if it did hit us?’

  ‘All I can say is, don’t book your holiday for next year yet!’ she laughs as if she’s just made a particularly witty joke at a cocktail party. The skirt goes with the laugh. So there was a reason to wear it, after all. Then she stops laughing, because she hasn’t finished. This is the most important bit, ‘An asteroid that size slamming into Earth will be like a nuclear bomb going off. It could destroy an entire city the size of –’ she can’t think for a moment, ‘well, this city.’

  He’s gone a bit grey. ‘Can you be a bit more definite? When will we know for sure whether it’s going to –’

  ‘Oh,’ and she looks at her watch as if she’s working out the times of buses, ‘as it gets nearer we’ll be able to take more precise measurements of its orbit. Say, in about three months, we should know one way or another.’

  ‘One way or another…’ he repeats.

  Afterwards, as she treats herself to a taxi home, she imagines that blast. She can picture the fireball in the sky and the impartial raining down of debris on everyone below. Every last detail is so clear.

  The Snow White paradox

  Cambridge 1948

  I propose to consider the question ‘Can machines think?’ Imagine the following situation, you may recognise it as a party game. I will refer to it as the imitation game. A man whom I will label A, and a woman, B, each go into separate rooms and they can only communicate to the outside world by written notes. They are each asked a series of questions by a third person, C, who has the job of reading the written notes and deciding who is the genuine woman and who is pretending.

  Alan Turing pauses to look out of the window at the students cycling up and down the street, before turning back to his typewriter:

  I propose that the woman, B, is replaced by a machine. So, C has to judge who is better at imitating a woman, a man or a machine. If C decides that the machine is a better imitator than the man, then the machine can be said to exhibit some sort of human behaviour intelligence.

  Later. Light slants in through the pub window, angled by the beer glasses so that it spreads out all over the wooden table and spills over the edge onto the floor. Gorgeous, buttery light, like a blessing. So rich, Alan feels he can catch it in his hands and eat it.

  Alan and Neville, sitting with their drinks. It is safe in here, they can be themselves. Although Alan isn’t always sure he knows what that means, and Neville’s idea of being himself is to wear a feather boa. Sometimes, when he tutors the undergrads in mathematics (his subject) he wears lipstick. This is tolerated in Cambridge, if not exactly encouraged. It helps that Neville is very good at mathematics, although not as good as Alan. Nobody is as good as Alan.

  After the pub, they’re back in Alan’s rooms and Neville takes centre stage. He swathes himself in Alan’s dressing gown, lights a cigarette off the feeble gas fire, and strikes an attitude. ‘Who am I?’ he asks, fluttering his eyelashes.

  Alan stays silent.

  ‘Well?’ Neville is insistent.

  Alan thinks that there’s something in the way he squares his shoulders that would make any other man look – well, manly, but on Neville just makes him look even more effeminate.

  ‘Joan Crawford, in Mildred Pierce,’ Alan stands by the window, flicking through some papers.

  ‘Well done, Miss Observant,’ Neville replies, but he sounds a bit piqued at Alan’s refusal to enter into the ritual, to enjoy the artifice.

  ‘More gin?’ Alan puts his papers aside and uncorks the bottle.

  Neville nods, takes a sip and grimaces, ‘This is awful stuff, lukewarm and oily. Can’t you get anything better?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve swallowed worse than that,’ says Alan, and then regrets it. That knowing way of talking, with constant referrals – but never by name, never straightforwardly – to the unseen act is not his style. Everybody speaking in a secret code. Normally he leaves that sort of chat to Neville and his friends.

  Neville raises his eyebrows at Alan’s double entendre and takes another sip.

  ‘Do you always do that?’ says Alan.

  ‘Do what?’

  Take such small sips. Like a woman.’

  ‘Do they? I have no idea how women drink gin. I’ve never drunk gin with a woman. Unless you count my mother, which personally I don’t.’

  ‘Well, they do. And why don’t they ever drink beer? Why
always gin?’

  ‘That’s easy. Gin stops babies,’ Neville grins, ‘that’s why they drink it.’

  ‘Oh,’ and Alan makes some notes on a pad of paper.

  Neville sighs, ‘Can’t you stop working, for once in your entire life?’ He lets the dressing gown fall coquettishly around his shoulders, and purses his lips in a parody of a kiss.

  Neville is really very intelligent, but he hides it well. Lord knows Cambridge is tolerant of his sort of behaviour, in a city full of men and hardly any women (‘Unless they’re at Girton and hairier than the men’ as Neville says) there is, and probably always has been, a wide variety of male behaviour. Even so, Neville is one of the outliers at the extreme end of the spectrum.

  Alan lays his notes to one side. ‘I’ve got a new turntable,’ he says, ‘shall we give it a go?’ The turntable is a thing of beauty, a low sleek affair with a glass lid. ‘It’s called Snow White,’ he continues, ‘because it looks like a glass coffin.’

  As they start to dance Neville whispers into Alan’s ear, ‘Am I your handsome prince?’ For once, Alan won’t answer the question and they continue to dip and turn around the room in silence.

  ‘Play the game,’ Alan says. Another Friday night in his rooms, and Neville getting tight on his gin again.

  ‘What game?’

  ‘The game where I ask you questions and you have to pretend to be someone else. Imitate them.’

  Neville pulls a face, and Alan chuckles, ‘Humour me,’ he says, ‘it’s research. Be a woman.’

  ‘A woman? Which one? Princess Elizabeth riding a horse, the barmaid in the Eagle pulling pints, or some prozzie painting on her eye make-up?’

  ‘Any of them. All of them. So, what do you find attractive in a man?’

  Neville snickers, ‘That’s no good, is it? I don’t have to pretend to be a woman to answer that.’

  ‘Oh.’ Alan looks down at his hands, ‘Alright, how do you make a cake?’

  ‘Fruit cake or sponge?’

  ‘Oh, very good. Yes, that’s exactly it,’ and he writes this down before continuing, ‘now, what’s the best way of hemming a skirt?’