The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space Read online

  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 ut
terly 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.

  ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ Smith asks.

  Joe doesn’t reply, he just finishes his soup and washes out his bowl, before drying it and putting it away in the cupboard. It’s important to be clean and tidy here, otherwise people start arguing and everything falls apart. Seven months with Smith. He didn’t expect that.

  Almost ninety percent of the instrument is submerged in the ice below them, very little is visible on the surface, which is just as well because it has to be protected from the weather. But each afternoon Joe needs to go outside and check the wiring. Today is no different, in spite of Smith, so he goes to the boot room and prepares himself. Two layers of outer clothing, a balaclava and goggles. And boots of course.

  Outside, every tiny feature of the landscape casts long blue shadows. His own body stretches out huge towards the horizon. In this environment it’s difficult to know what the true size of things is, because there’s no way of comparing what you see in front of you with what you already know, and your eyes play tricks on you. He watches the pilot climb back into the plane. There’s just one short moment when he wishes that he was on the plane too, but what would he be going back to? Then he checks the wiring. And then it’s back inside the base.

  He does the same walk around the detectors each day and it feels pathetically utilitarian compared to what Scott and his men coped with. A round trip of a few metres to check the wiring and he’s feeling almost comfortable in the cold weather because he’s wearing so many insulating layers.

  Just one of the many reasons for Scott’s expedition was to collect emperor penguin eggs, and the trip to the penguin colony had to be carried in complete darkness at midwinter before the eggs hatched. Some of the men from the expedition trekked hundreds of miles to reach the penguins, with nothing but a canvas tent to protect them when they slept. At one point during a particularly vicious blizzard the tent blew right off, and all they could do was lie in their sleeping bags buried in snow and sing hymns to keep their spirits up.

  The first evening with all the overwinterers is always an occasion. The eating table is set quite formally with napkins and wine glasses, and they toast each other. Joe makes sure he’s sitting at the other end of the table from Smith, but even so, he can’t help noticing him. Although he’s never been here before, Smith looks quite at ease. He’s the sort of person who fits in anywhere, he picks up the routines, the customs. They all laugh as he describes how he was sick on the plane journey, and someone gave him a hanky so he could mop his face. Joe thinks he wouldn’t have given him a hanky.

  He can’t get to sleep that night, perhaps he’s eaten too much, or something else has unsettled him. He runs through the images but he’s finding it difficult to imagine a sky blue dress when the sky here is now flushed deep red. And when he does get to sleep, finally, there’s no comfort to be found in his dreams. Just a lot of bodies and it’s difficult to tell if they’re asleep or dead. In any case they don’t respond to his touch, and he wakes, sweating.

  The base is divided into three sections: work, play and sleep. There’s a communal living room and kitchen and everyone has their private areas. They’re encouraged to personalise them, to decorate them with photos of loved ones from home. That is what it says in the welcome manual. This is supposed to keep them calm and happy, and make them feel that the base is home for as long as they’re here. Of course, it doesn’t help to realise that the base itself is sinking. No base lasts here for more than a few years before it gets buried by the snow and ice. They are surrounded by the submerged remains of at least three or four older ones. The last one is occasionally seen in good weather, the edge of its corrugated metal roof an inch or two below the surface, casting a grey sheen to the snow.

  Today, when Joe checks the detectors, he notices that some of the wires have worked their way loose even though there hasn’t been much wind yet this winter. He mends them and goes back inside to check the detections. They’re fine, perhaps a little fainter than usual, but nothing to worry about.

  He likes watching the light flash on his screen. It’s a random process, but on average you get about one flash every five minutes. Neutrinos are so ghost-like. They fill the Universe, they travel through bodies and minds without anyone ever being aware of them. He likes the idea that there’s something happening deep below that gets transmitted to the surface where it becomes visible to him.

  At lunchtime, Smith appears as Joe’s eating his sandwich. He hangs around, putting Joe off his food so he gives up and pushes away his plate.

  ‘You finished with that?’ Smith points at it.

  Joe nods and turns away so he doesn’t have to watch Smith eat the remains of the sandwich in his wolfish manner. He has a big appetite. He looks like a bigger version of Joe, he takes up more room and makes more noise. That may be the reason for what happened, or it may not, Joe supposes he’ll never know for sure. She didn’t explain it to him and at the time, he didn’t want her to. Now, sitting here, he’d like to know. You need to know everything you can in life because there are too many unknowns.

  ‘Thanks,’ Smith says, ‘for your leftovers.’

  Joe can’t resist that, of course, ‘They’re not always leftovers, are they?’

  ‘Pardon?’ He’s wiping his mouth on his fingers and he looks up.

  ‘What you take from me isn’t always left over. Sometimes I haven’t finished.’

  But Smith doesn’t respond to this, making Joe feel a bit childish and obvious in his animosity; he just belches loudly and walks away, so that Joe is left staring at the crumbs scattered on the white surface of the table. Honestly, you’d think that whoever designed this place would have had the sense to include some colour. Outside is just endless white, so inside they could do with a little variation. Joe refuses to wipe away Smith’s crumbs, even though they’re supposed to keep everything clean and shipshape. But this isn’t a ship.

  That afternoon Joe just sits and watches the flashes. He doesn’t feel like doing any work.

  Neutrinos are almost but not quite nothing. They’re fragments required by some cosmic accountant to ensure that energy is conserved in certain sub-atomic interactions. They’re colourless, flavourless, textureless. They fill our skulls, stream through our bodies, wash past our fingers and toes. And after working on them for so long Joe feels suffused with them, as if they’ve thickened his mind.

  After the days in the lab spent watching weightless flashes of light manufactured in wires, it was a relief to get home and hold onto her. Understand the way the freckles were distributed on her back, listen to how she’d mispronounce his name, ‘Yo’. That was the way they would say it in her country, she told him.

  When you meet someone, you realise there aren’t just new ways of describing the same essential aspects of them, they bring to life new categories that you’d never dreamt of. Before he met her he hadn’t realised how interesting he could find the nape of a girl’s neck, or the insides of her wrists, or the hollow beneath her ankle bone. She gave Joe this knowledge. He was never sure what he gave her in return.

  She even had an interesting
job. She was the public engagement officer for the physics department, she went round schools and encouraged kids to be planets dancing around the sun in the playground, or electrons dancing round an atomic nucleus. She said there was always a lot of dancing. It was challenging to get the kids interested in neutrinos, but she tried, she said.

  In return, he told her about the neutrinos. But he realised how difficult it was to describe them. You need them in physics, they’re essential, but they don’t seem to have any properties. They are themselves and that’s about it. But he tried to dress them up, make them interesting, give them attributes, names even, but now he realises it wasn’t enough. And towards the end, when he opened his mouth to speak, he’d feel the neutrinos lying on his tongue. His words were blurred by them. He became nothing but mass. He had no spark, no soul, no attributes. The ghost in her bed.

  So he would sweep her hair off her shoulders and show her her own reflection in the mirror, but he couldn’t make her understand how lovely she was to him. Perhaps she didn’t care that he found her lovely.

  And now Joe isn’t surprised that she turned from him to Smith. He has a permanent image of them in his head, Smith on top of her and his back all covered in sweat. And the sky blue dress crumpled on the floor next to the bed.

  It’s dark now, properly dark all the time. Smith seems to be everywhere in the base. He’s large and loud, and even when Joe can’t see him he can still hear his voice. So one day, Joe takes a break from work and decides to do something different. He’ll visit the memorial. He didn’t do this the last time he was here, that whole winter the memorial felt out of reach, a bit like a lighthouse marking the edge of their known territory. It was something he’d always meant to visit but never got around to. Well, now he’s going there, if nothing else but to avoid Smith for a few hours.