Eventually, by the beginning of December, Luke was in possession of ten pounds’ worth of gleaming, newly-decimalised change in assorted denominations. At the bank on the high street he exchanged the coins for a pair of crisp blue five-pound notes.
The long-awaited transaction took place, by prearrangement, in the school playground shortly before morning assembly. Barry Griffin strolled away with the two fivers folded tidily in his trouser pocket, while Luke was left clutching the chunk of moon rock, scarcely able to believe that this moment had finally arrived. For over two weeks he had been on tenterhooks, not knowing for sure if was going to be able to scrape the money together in time or if someone else was going to get the rock that he so earnestly desired and so eminently deserved to own. Now, with the coveted object in his hands, he was excited, certainly, but he was also suffused with a sense of utter rightness and calm. The agony of uncertainty was over. An inner tumult had subsided. He had passed from an ocean of storms to a sea of tranquillity. The rock was his.
Luke could not remember a time when the Apollo program had not been a fundamental part of his life. His father liked to claim that Luke had been born the very day in May 1961 on which President Kennedy made his speech to the US Congress vowing that America would put a man on the moon before the decade was out, and although this was untrue—Luke had been born two days later—it did, with its suggestion of a synchronicitous and quasi-mystical source for Luke’s moon-landing mania, make for a good story.
The truth was, Luke had loved the moon from a very early age. He loved its quiet radiance; the way on clear nights, when full, it illuminated the scene outside his bedroom window, picking out every detail—every leaf, every roof-tile, every blade of grass—in delicate silvery filigree. He pitied its solitude, surrounded by cold blackness and the inferior stars. He admired its modesty (so unlike its brash daytime counterpart the sun). And when he learned from his father that it was not merely a glimmering, face-like disc in the sky but an arid, airless, orbiting planetoid, earth’s lesser twin, his compassion for it only intensified. He longed for it to be happy, and wished there was some way for it to know that it was not alone.
Then one day he learned in school that over in America, at a place called Houston, plans were afoot to send men to the moon in a rocket. Suddenly it seemed that his wish had been granted. The Apollo missions would be a slender bridge between the earth and its satellite, a lifeline across the void. The moon would be lonely no more.
He began pestering his parents for further information about the Apollo program. They, only too keen to encourage their son in the pursuit of knowledge, bought him a Ladybird book about space exploration. He devoured it and begged for more. More books followed, and then for his fifth birthday his parents presented him with a large wall-chart consisting of detailed maps of both sides of the moon. Immediately Luke set about learning the name of every feature of lunar topography, every mountain range, crater and sea. Daily he pored over the wall-chart, until its monochrome patterns were etched in his mind and its grey contours were virtually a map of his own brain.
Thereafter, further lunar-related gifts came in from relatives who were delighted not only that serious-minded young Luke had developed such a passionate and mature interest in so grown-up a subject, but also that this made choosing birthday and Christmas presents for him so much simpler. By the age of eight Luke had amassed an enviable collection of paraphernalia both directly and tangentially related to the moon landings. If, before the purchase of the moon rock, he had had to single out one item that he prized above all the others, it would have to have been the telescope from his great-aunt Georgina, for its lenses brought the moon into such close proximity and such sharp relief that sometimes its earthward-directed face appeared to be little more than an arm’s length away, almost within reach of his fingertips.
His relatives also began sending him articles, clipped from newspapers and magazines, on the subject of the Apollo program. These he pasted neatly and methodically into a series of scrapbooks, and read and reread until he had grasped most of what the journalists were trying to convey. A certain amount of the technical jargon remained beyond him, but the gist of the articles was quite clear, and the narrative they were cumulatively telling was an encouraging one. Step by step, month by month, the people at NASA were steadily drawing closer to their goal.
The first three lunar-orbiting missions, Apollos 8 to 10, occurred while Luke was nine and ten. He followed their progress via the newspapers and television, but did not allow himself to become too excited. Not yet. He knew that these missions were merely appetite-whetters for the main course, the overture before the opera began.
The moment Apollo 11 took off from the launchpad and tore into the sky in a hypergolic blaze, Luke was transfixed and transfigured. Teachers noted a decline in his attentiveness in class; friends found him more than usually aloof and prone to bouts of dreamy, faraway staring. It was as if he was no longer completely there.
And he wasn’t. His body was on earth, but his mind was with Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins in their spacecraft as they hurtled towards the moon at the unimaginable speed of over two thousand miles per hour.
By special parental dispensation he was allowed to stay up late on the evening of July 19th 1969 for the live broadcast of the lunar module Eagle’s touchdown. (In truth, his mother and father knew that, had they denied Luke permission to do so, he would probably have never spoken to them again. Besides, it was the school holidays and a Saturday.)
Cross-legged on the living-room floor in his pyjamas, Luke watched the blurry black-and-white images relayed by the BBC with rapt fascination, adding his own commentary to that of the onscreen reporters, pundits and experts, and on a couple of occasions hotly and indignantly correcting them when they got their facts wrong.
When Eagle finally set foot in the lunar dust, it was a moment of epiphany for Luke. He cried. He chortled. He hugged his legs and crowed with glee. And when, around midnight, he received his last warning to go to bed or else, he made sure before crawling beneath the covers that the curtains in his room were wide open so that, lying in the dark, he could see the moon through the window.
“We’re here,” he whispered to the shining, lopsided face in the heavens as he sank exhaustedly into slumber. “We’re here.”
The next day there was further joy for Luke, as the footage of the first-ever moonwalk, which had taken place while he slept, was played and replayed on TV. It was one small step for Neil Armstrong, one giant leap for Luke Weatherby’s soul.
After the wonder and majesty of that July weekend, everything else could only be an anticlimax. Nevertheless, Luke devotedly followed each of the subsequent moon missions, even as the media decided that the Apollo program was of diminishing public interest and accorded it increasingly less coverage. He made sure he was clear on the scientific objectives of each mission, and assiduously and with painstaking exactitude marked the site of each landing on his wall-chart with a fluorescent orange sticker-dot and traced the route of each moonwalk with a dotted line drawn in red fibre-tip pen. While the crew of Apollo 13 were struggling for their lives in the vacuum gulfs of space, Luke was with them in their spacecraft every inch of the way, sharing, as acutely as if it were his own, their anxiety, their fear and, in the end, their relief when they splashed down safe and sound in the Pacific.
Throughout 1970 and 1971 Luke kept his faith in the continuing validity of the Apollo program even while others more important than him were losing theirs. By 1972, however, it was clear even to him that the adventure was coming to an end. NASA’s funding had been cut, Apollo 18 had been cancelled, and it was commonly held that Apollo 17, scheduled for liftoff on December 7th, would be the last manned mission to the moon for the foreseeable future, and possibly for ever.
Autumn of that year, therefore, was a time of hollowness for Luke, a long, protracted period of mourning and decline. The days cooled, the nights drew in, and within Luke a deep-seated ache of loss yawned ever wider
.
The moon rock—sought at such risk, bought at such expense—offered some consolation. With the help of his woodwork teacher Mr Eden, Luke fashioned a display container for it, a plywood box eight inches square with a sliding perspex lid and a raised inlay of navy-blue card with a circular hole cut in it for the rock to rest in. The box was accorded a place on a shelf all its own in his bedroom, just below his library of space-exploration literature and Apollo-article scrapbooks, and at least once a day he would fetch it down, take the rock out, and turn it over and over in his hands, committing every detail of its surface to memory, every minuscule cleft and declivity. He would hold it up to his nose and inhale its peppery, alien scent, then would rub the tip of his index finger over its rough surface until the whorls of his fingerprint were grimed with ashy moon dust. He wondered if, hammered open, the moon rock might reveal an interior of white anorthosite, or maybe green olivine. But of course he would not dream of damaging it, not even in the interests of science.
He felt, when all was said and done, that he had got the better end of the bargain with Barry. In retrospect, ten pounds didn’t seem too high a price to pay for so beautiful and cherishable an artefact. Ten pounds to own a part of the moon? If need be, he would have paid twenty, fifty, a hundred pounds for it.
On Monday December 11th 1972, as scheduled, Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt landed in the lunar module Challenger at Littrow crater near the Taurus mountains.
On Tuesday December 12th, Luke learned how cruelly he had been deceived.
It was the last day of term. The classrooms and corridors of the school were bedecked with paper-chains, tinsel and handmade foil stars, and throughout the building there was an atmosphere of hilarity, of barely restrained anarchy. Voices were loud. Every now and then someone would break out spontaneously and raucously into a Christmas carol. Teachers smiled and indulged a certain level of misbehaviour.
It would have been pointless trying to cram any last few crumbs of knowledge into the minds of boys and girls already filled to bursting with thoughts of the imminent holidays and freedom, so lessons that day were unscripted and extracurricular. In science, Miss Barker put on a “fireworks display” of pyrotechnical chemical reactions, which included dropping tiny fragments of pure sodium into a bowl of water so that they raced about like fizzing insects, and igniting a small pile of orangey-red powder so that it erupted like a volcano, spewing itself into a conical heap of dark green ashes; while in RI, Mr Clement led the class in an improvised retelling of the Nativity story, giving the events a contemporary setting—an inner-city high-rise block—and recasting Mary as a single mother, the shepherds as Hell’s Angels, and the Three Wise Men as a trio of peace-loving flower children; and in English, Mrs Lloyd had each member of the class come up to the front of the room in turn and give an impromptu one-minute talk on any subject he or she wanted, as an exercise in off-the-cuff public speaking.
Luke, naturally, took the moon landings as his topic, and delivered a ferocious harangue against the Nixon administration, criticising its shortsightedness, its criminal irresponsibility, in halting the Apollo program. A reusable space shuttle was not, he admitted, an idea entirely without merit, but in his opinion NASA ought to be concentrating its efforts on establishing a manned lunar base. The moon, he argued, was mankind’s stepping stone to Mars, our gateway to exploring and colonising the entire universe. And, he said by way of conclusion, one day mankind would return to its senses and send rockets there again.
This last claim was not just bravado. It was, as far as Luke was concerned, a promise.
The speech earned sustained applause from his classmates and commendation from Mrs Lloyd, who said it had been an impressively fiery and eloquent piece of rhetoric.
After the lesson, Luke bumped into Mandy in a corridor. He was eager to brag about his speech, but she had news that took precedence.
“I should have told you this yesterday, Luke,” she said, “but I wasn’t sure how to go about breaking it.”
“Breaking what?” Luke replied breezily. At that moment he was feeling invulnerable. Invincible. Mrs Lloyd’s praise had kindled a fire of pride in him that was still blazing strongly.
“Look, it’s just something I overheard, so it may not be true. He could just have been boasting.”
“Who could?”
Mandy hesitated. “Barry Griffin.”
“Go on,” said Luke.
“Well, you know how in the downstairs girls’ bogs you can hear everything that goes on in the downstairs boys’ bogs?”
“It works the other way, too. The sound all sort of echoes through the ventilation system.”
“I know. Anyway, I was in the girls’ yesterday afternoon, and I heard Barry and someone else talking in the boys’. Whoever Barry was talking to just went kind of ‘duh’ and ‘uh’ so it must have been Kevin Holroyd. Anyway, I wasn’t really paying much attention until I heard Barry mention your name.”
All of a sudden Luke felt a chill, as though a cold draught had blown in through a chink somewhere. He had had his first, vague presentiment of the bad news that was coming.
“Of course he could just have been saying what he said in order to impress Kevin,” Mandy went on.
Luke’s voice was hoarse and hollow. “Tell me what he said.”
“It was about the moon rock.”
“What about it?”
But he knew. He knew what Mandy was going to say. Perhaps he had known the truth all along, but in wanting to believe that the moon rock was genuine, in wanting so much to obtain some small, tangible memento of the magnificent era that was shortly coming to a close, he had deliberately not listened to his instincts; had deliberately ignored common sense and handed over a large sum of money for a fabulous illusion.
The rock, it transpired, had been a gift from Barry’s uncle, but thereafter everything Barry had told Luke about it had been false. The uncle was not a part-time rocket engineer, he was a coalminer from Swansea. Last November he had come down to stay with Barry’s family for a weekend and brought the rock with him as a present for his nephew. He had thought Barry might be amused by it because it looked like something from the moon, even though it actually had come from nowhere more unearthly than a slagheap near Merthyr Tydfil. According to Mandy, Barry had then gone on to inform Kevin that his uncle was coming down to stay again over Christmas and that Barry had asked him to bring a few more “moon rocks”, which he could then flog to that stupid sucker Weatherby. And at that, Barry had started a gleeful chortling which Kevin, after taking a second to work out what the joke was, had joined in.
“I’m sorry, Luke,” Mandy said, laying a hand on his arm. “I didn’t want to tell you but I really thought you ought to know, and I thought it would be better coming from me than anybody else.”
“That’s OK,” said Luke. His eyes felt hot and there seemed to be an excess of saliva at the back of his throat which he had to gulp down. “I mean, actually I’d pretty much worked it out for myself.”
“Really?” said Mandy, dubiously.
“Yeah. By examining the rock. The mineral content was all wrong. As a matter of fact, I’ve been meaning to have a word with Barry about it for some time.”
“Right,” said Mandy. “Yes. Of course.”
He was grateful to her for granting him, for his dignity’s sake, that small figleaf of a lie.
He didn’t confront Barry about the rock. Of course he didn’t. Walk up to the biggest bully in the school and accuse him of swindling? Not likely. Not unless he was keen to lose a few teeth.
Instead, at home that evening, he took the rock from its display box and rolled it from hand to hand while he debated whether to pound it to smithereens with a hammer or merely toss it into the bin like the piece of worthless rubbish it was.
In the end, after much pondering, he decided against either course of action. He simply put the rock back into the box and returned the box to its shelf.
Forty-one years later, Professor Sir Lucas We
atherby, the Astronomer Royal, became the first civilian British astronaut to set foot on the moon.
The first thing the professor did, after stepping out of the airlock of Selene Base in the Aristarchus crater on his maiden moonwalk, was bend down and plant something in the dust at his feet. It was an object he had brought with him aboard the Euro-CIS lunar shuttle Stanislaw Lem all the way from the launch site at Baikonur in Kazakhstan—a small, round, unremarkable-looking lump of rock.
Then, straightening up awkwardly in his spacesuit, the professor spoke the following words, so softly that the comms mic in his helmet did not pick them up.
“We’re here. I said we’d come back, didn’t I? And we’re here.”
SEVENTEEN SYLLABLES
A moment of thought
The poet heeds his spirit
Brush falls on parchment
In the year of his fiftieth birthday, Dr Matthewson took a long hard look at his life and decided it needed simplifying.
There were, he saw, too many Things in it. Too many possessions, too many appurtenances. Too much extraneous baggage. Too many matters which demanded his time. Too many problems which were not of his making but which took up valuable acreage in his mind. Too much chaff and fluff and clutter. Too much that seemed to inhibit his enjoyment of living. Too much that he could do without.
Dr Matthewson longed for a lack of complexity. He longed for a life that was straightforward and unencumbered. He longed for a life that was as precise and economical as a Japanese poem, a life that could be encapsulated in seventeen syllables. A life like a haiku.
Diversifications Page 3