by Ben Mezrich
“One hundred months.”
There was laughter all around, because nobody believed him. They began peppering him with questions, demanding the real truth, but he didn’t say another word, he simply crossed into the bedroom and lay down on his bunk.
It wasn’t until the five o’clock news, when the prison population learned he had been telling the truth—indeed, Moon Rock had gotten a sentence of more than eight years in federal prison—that they all grudgingly got down on the floor and began doing push-ups.
41
A few days after his sentencing, Thad received two pieces of news that, together, were just enough to keep him from contemplating suicide. First, he was being transferred out of the Submarine. Because he was now a sentenced federal prisoner, he was going to be taken to a midlevel security camp, which had to be better than the county jail where he had been held for the past fifteen months. But that news paled in comparison to the news his lawyer gave him at their next meeting.
Rebecca had received permission from her probation officer to talk to him one last time.
Thad memorized the phone number his lawyer gave him, intending to make the call as soon as he got back to his cell. But by the time he’d been uncuffed and unshackled, he’d missed his chance at the pay phones; he was forced to spend the next eight hours of sack time—the last hours he’d spend at Orient—sleepless and tossing and turning against the steel bunk.
The transfer to the federal penitentiary went by in a blur. Thad briefly remembered being on a Continental flight, chained up next to a frightening-looking man who just wanted to hear stories about moon rocks—and then he was being led into his new home, where he’d be spending the next phase of his life. And it was true, the federal camp was much better than where he’d come from; there were two-to-four men to a cell, and there were multiple television rooms, well-kept outdoor areas, and best of all, porcelain toilets—with real seats.
But the real difference between county jail and the federal prison was something Thad discovered a mere hour after he’d been checked into his new cell. Although it was the designated lunch hour, he had chosen to stay behind to take care of a bit of business he hadn’t been able to get to during his flight over from Orient. He was seated on the porcelain toilet, halfway into what he needed to do, simply reveling in the idea that there was no one standing a few feet away, playing cards, cracking jokes—when a guard suddenly stuck his head into the room. A tray had apparently gone missing from the lunch area, and since just like in county, all trays had to be accounted for—the guard had been sent to check the cells. But seeing Thad seated on the toilet, the guard did something that took him completely by surprise.
He gave Thad an embarrassed look, and turned away.
“Sorry, man, I’ll come back when you’re done.”
Thad sat on the toilet in shock. It was the first time he’d been treated like a human being in more than a year.
…
Twenty minutes later, he was in front of another pay phone—this time a phone that was situated in a cubby carved into one of the cinderblock walls, separated from a TV room by a low paneled divider. It was a level of privacy that Thad hadn’t enjoyed for quite some time, but it didn’t make him any less nervous as he dialed the number.
He had practiced what he was going to say, but he was pretty certain that as soon as he heard her voice, he was going to forget everything he had planned.
He wanted to tell her that he expected her to move on; he wanted her to go and live a happy life. He knew, now, that he was going to be gone for a very long time. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, but that he would understand, she was young, she needed more. It was going to be a hard conversation, but it would also help him find a way to deal with what had happened, where he now found himself.
Since it was a collect call, as soon as he finished dialing, a mechanized voice came over the line—indicating that the person receiving the call had to hit the number five in order to accept the call, or seven to refuse. At the proper moment, Thad spoke his name for the recording, then listened as the operator put the call through. Two rings, and Rebecca picked up, but before Thad could say anything, she hit a button—and the phone went dead.
Thad felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. She’d hit seven. It didn’t make sense. His lawyer had told him that Rebecca had wanted to have the phone call. Thad quickly redialed the number. He went through the same routine, giving his name; this time Rebecca picked up on the first ring. And this time she hit the right button, because her voice suddenly splashed in his ear.
“I’m so sorry. I thought I was supposed to hit seven. I heard it wrong.”
In that instant, as he had suspected, Thad forgot everything he wanted to say. She sounded so close, like she was standing just a few feet away, and her voice brought him spiraling back that year and a half, even further, to their first date, to an image of her pointing out fish in an aquarium, to her smiling reflection against a thick wall of glass.
They talked quickly. He told her that he still loved her, and she responded that she still loved him. He told her that she was free to do whatever she needed to—and she responded that she didn’t want to think about any of that, that all she could think about was him.
As the collect-call limit drew nearer, Thad rushed to say the thing that was most important to him.
“I need a way to communicate with you. There has to be some way. And if it can’t be you directly, if it has to be a friend that I’m talking to, that’s fine. There just needs to be some way. I need that to survive in here.”
“But my father—”
“Rebecca, there has to be some way.”
Rebecca finally relented; she gave Thad her sister’s address, speaking slowly enough so that he could memorize it as she went.
“I’m going to write you every day,” Thad whispered. “And the letters will be my lifeline.”
Before Rebecca could respond, before Thad could tell her one more time that he loved her, the operator’s voice cut in—and then the line went dead.
* * *
Beautiful Rebecca,
I hope you find yourself living a dream. I think of you often and send my love out into the unknown, hoping that somehow it finds you and warms you with a smile. I hope you have not let trouble convince you of impossibilities. There is no dream beyond your grasp, Rebecca. You are the rarest type of person there is and you deserve the best that emotion and experience can offer. Someday I hope to learn that every day finds you laughing, that your path matches your dreams, and that you have discovered that your fate isn’t to be an old lady with a few cats, but to live in passion to receive love, companionship, trust, and comfort to the degree that those fires live in you … the ones I knew briefly. Although it pains me to imagine you with another, it hurts more to imagine you living without love.
* * *
42
And for the next year, it was those letters that kept Thad sane. Through the flowery, sometimes clichéd, but always sincere missives, which he toiled over for days on end—writing and then scratching out words, phrases, sometimes entire pages—he was able to hold on to his sense of self way past what either he himself or jailhouse wisdom could have predicted. Those letters really were lifelines, even if they were entirely one-way. Thad was able to artificially keep alive the character he had created at NASA, the romantic, adventurous, fantasy persona that would never normally have been able to exist in a place like prison. He was surrounded by animals, but when he finally found a moment alone, holed up in his bunk or in a corner of the laundry room, or even on the toilet, he could go back to that place and become the person whom Rebecca had fallen in love with.
He never got a response, not a letter or a message via his lawyer or any sort of phone call. But the letters he wrote were enough, because they allowed him back into that place where he was most powerful, his own mind.
It was because of that inner strength that he was able to embark on what he would later see as a revolu
tionary journey—which began, really, as just an attempt at finding a way to keep busy in between letter-writing sessions. Leafing through the adult education manual that was given out to all inmates who had been in the federal system long enough to qualify for classroom privileges, he quickly realized that there wasn’t anything advanced enough for someone with his background. So instead of taking a class he was overqualified for, he decided that maybe there would be a way for him to share his own knowledge with others.
He lobbied the warden and the heads of the adult education program, and he eventually received permission to teach an astronomy class—the first of its kind in the federal penitentiary—to any inmate who was interested in the stars.
The first day of class, Thad arrived at the small, windowless classroom not knowing what to expect. To his surprise, he found the place crowded; his notoriety as the guy behind the Moon Rock Heist had appealed to inmates who wanted to hear stories about NASA, spaceships, and often alien life. From the very beginning, Thad used the inmates’ eclectic interests to guide them into a more basic study of space and the unknown. Because they couldn’t exactly go outside at night to look through telescopes, he focused on the many theories behind the science of astronomy, and did his best to get the inmates excited about the mysteries of the universe—things like black holes, supernovas, and dark matter.
He had only one requirement from his students. If they enjoyed his class, when they eventually got out of prison, they were each to send Thad one physics book—so he could continue studying the subject he had found the most challenging of his three college majors. Since, as a prisoner, he could only keep up to five books in his cell at one time, he had other inmates hold them for him, rotating through as many books as he could read, as quickly as he could get them.
Week after week, month after month, he taught astronomy and spent his nights reading physics—and slowly he found himself focusing on the current state of quantum theory. It was a topic he had been introduced to back at Utah, before he’d distracted himself with other pursuits; given an almost infinite amount of time, and a pretty good collection of the current literature, he set out to devise his own new theory, to make better sense of the things that he found missing from the accepted liturgy.
Some men found God in prison, others found themselves—but Thad threw himself into advanced physics, which led him to look at the world in a new way. He was intrigued by the fact that when physicists studied very small things—quanta the size of atoms—these objects were characterized by a certain level of indeterminacy. Stimulated by further readings on quantum mechanics, Thad began, in the simplest terms, to look at the world of these tiny particles—from their perspective.
From a distance, the image of a Teletubby on a TV screen appeared continuous and fluid; the closer you got to the screen, the easier it was to see that in fact, the image was made up of tiny pixels—but still, the pixels seemed part of a continuous whole, connected to one another on every side. But when you got even closer, so close that you were the size of one of those pixels—you realized that in fact, the pixels were not set into a static plane, or part of a continuous whole; they were individual units adrift in a sea of similarly tiny quanta. To describe these individual units correctly, and stirred by his readings on string theory, Thad began to learn that you needed to throw out the idea of four dimensions, and move to a more accurate theory involving eleven—nine of space, and two of time—and even formulated some ideas of his own.
Thad’s prison astronomy students did not have the physics background to begin to understand a multidimensional way of looking at life, but the classroom sessions still became a passion for him, because it was a place where he could go to work out his ideas, and to inspire people to at least begin to fantasize about a world beyond the prison walls.
As the months passed, Thad settled into his new routine, teaching, writing, and always reading—and despite where he was, despite his sentence, he began to carve out a life that he could tolerate. And he continued like that, complacent if not content—until the day that one of his cell mates approached him at the end of astronomy class to tell Thad that he’d received a sizable allotment of mail. Even so, Thad expected nothing more than a package filled with physics books, sent from an overly grateful ex-student.
But as soon as he reached his cell door—he saw that it wasn’t books at all.
To his utter shock, there, on his bunk, stacked together in a pile more than a foot and a half high, were all of the letters he had written to Rebecca. Posted but unopened, every one of them marked return to sender, address no longer valid.
Thad stood there in the doorway to his cell, unable to breathe. Rebecca hadn’t read any of them. Either her sister had moved and left no forwarding address, or she had simply refused to send them along to Rebecca. Thad had been writing into a vacuum, pouring all his love and passion into nothing more than a cosmic black hole. Rebecca was gone, and he would probably never hear from her again.
And in that moment, the last connection to who he was before vanished, the last strings tying him to his old life severed, the persona he had built up through equal mixtures of hard work and fantasy emptied out of him, and he collapsed to the floor of his cell.
* * *
I will always cherish the experience of you. I will always love you and wish for your happiness—even when I cannot be a part of it.
Please allow me some closure, Rebecca. It’s time for this wound to heal.
Wishing you wide-eyed wonders, love, and contentment …
Love,
Thad Roberts
* * *
43
Axel had just walked in from the popinjay field, his shoes caked in grime and his thick, meaty shoulders aching from the crossbow, when he saw the little package on his front stoop. He knew before he even saw the address whom it was from, because the markings all over the manila packaging were as easy to recognize as a René Magritte. It was from overseas—which meant America, because the only people he knew overseas were in America. And since there were no official seals imprinted anywhere on the thing, he knew it wasn’t from the FBI. But it was from a government agency.
Dr. Everett Gibson had first reached out to Axel right after Thad Roberts had been sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison. At first, Axel had harbored mixed feelings when he’d read about the harshness of Thad’s sentence; after all, the kid hadn’t really been the master criminal Axel had pictured, he’d been naive and foolish, maybe a bit arrogant, and certainly misguided. He hadn’t physically harmed anyone, and the samples had been recovered.
But the crime he had committed—it wasn’t like stealing a car; it had involved a national treasure. Taking those moon rocks was like slapping his country across the face. And after meeting Dr. Gibson in person—as a reward, the esteemed scientist had actually come over to Belgium and spoken to Axel’s mineral club about the ALH meteorite and the possibility of life on Mars; boy, the youth center had been busting at the seams that snowy night!—Axel had finally decided that maybe Orb Robinson had gotten what he’d deserved.
Everett Gibson had suffered greatly because of the Moon Rock Heist; at the time it had gone down, he had been in Australia on vacation, and upon landing back in the United States, he had been taken by the elbow on both sides by federal agents, interrogated, and wholly embarrassed by what had occurred in his lab. Apparently, there had been a series of numbers affixed to the top of his safe, which Thad had wrongly suspected to be the combination. In truth, they were a simple algorithm: all you needed to do was take the square root of the numbers and triple them, and you had the combination. But just seeing those numbers may very well have inspired Roberts to think he could succeed in the crime.
And Gibson had lost more than face; the night of his lecture at the mineral club, he’d nearly had tears in his eyes as he told Axel about the missing green notebooks that he still, to this day, believes Thad Roberts destroyed. At trial, Roberts had denied ever seeing those notebooks, and Axe
l would never know for certain what the real story was. But Gibson was a respected man of science, and Axel took him at his word.
At the “Mars in Antwerp” lecture, Gibson had presented Axel with an official plaque thanking him for, essentially, saving NASA’s bacon; and along with that, a framed photo of a lunar landing, signed by a real astronaut himself! And to Axel, that would have been enough.
But standing on his front stoop, tearing into the manila package with his blistered archer’s fingers, he quickly discovered that Gibson had one more little symbol of his gratitude to bestow.
Inside the package was an official letter, stating that Dr. Everett Gibson’s request to the International Astronomical Union had been approved. They had renamed Asteroid 15513—which would now orbit the sun under the name “Emmermann.”
You will live forever in the heavens between Jupiter and Mars, Dr. Gibson wrote.
It was an incredible thing. The very idea—unimaginable!
There was a rock between Mars and Jupiter that was named after Axel. Seven kilometers long, two kilometers wide. Axel would never see it, or touch it, or visit it, but it was there, and it would always be there. Spinning through the vast emptiness of space, forever.