“Like I said before Crass, I’m just the insurance policy in case all three of the D.P. systems go down, which by the way has never happened on any LunAucity XCursion. The Japanese don’t build shitty technology. I’m talking about the people that brought us reliability. Toyota, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, even Mario Bros. and the Nintendo.”
Mario was Japanese? How mindboggling, Crass thought.
“He’s right,” Mickey said, speaking up in between bites of a ham sandwich. Mustard had kissed the crust, leaving a yellow smear of tartness.
“I had this 1986 Toyota pickup my Dad gave me when I first started driving to school. You couldn’t kill that thing if you tried. There’s no telling how many times we sunk her off into a mud pit and I’d hook up the winch and pull us right on out like it was nothing. Loved that truck. It’s in my backyard right now, and still runs like a champ.”
“You talking about Old Blue?” Crass asked.
“Yeah,” Mickey said. “It’s got over three-hundred thousand miles on the original motor. Beautiful thing.”
Eva was looking at Crass, curiously. He glanced out the windows and saw where the rocket ship was headed. It looked like a subway rail car sitting in the sky. It was bright and shiny, and colored in white, black, and shimmers of gold. Stars peered through the black space beyond it.
Crass floated back to his seat and sat down, enjoying the ride for a moment. Eva was already sitting there and looked up at him as he nestled in.
“Hello astronaut,” she said, her eyes glowing and reflecting a light Crass was sure he could dance around in all night long. “Nice day, isn’t it?”
“It’s perfect for a trip to the Moon,” he replied.
A few of the remaining chocolates floated around the cabin in unorthodox patterns, tracing across his line of vision. Mickey was talking with Skye about something, both of their faces smiling largely. The teenagers were having a video chat with their parents at home, and Captain Don was at the computer, looking over the blue screen carefully.
The lunar module grew larger and larger as we hovered closer to it. It pulled the ship closer and closer, like the string on a yo-yo.
From what Crass had read on space travel pre-flight, the Earth was pictured as a deep artesian, where we are all known to start out from. Perhaps the biggest objective was climbing out to the top where you could fully see the light of day strike you in the eyeballs.
You’d start out being very heavy on Earth, then next would come weightlessness experienced in L.E.O., and then a gravitational pull over to the near side of the Moon, covering a distance of nearly a quarter million miles in about four hours time.
The dark side was too cold for ideal conditions and the Space Committee decided it was better to shoot for the lit side, or near side, where the lunar day lasts for a fortnight and, likewise, the lunar night. If everything went smoothly, we’d be landing on the surface of the Moon shortly.
“Everyone hold on,” Captain Don said. “There’ll be a slight bump when we dock with the Odyssey lunar module in about three minutes.”
In the giant windshield of our cabin came the railway car, edging closer to our ship and looking like a heavenly abode just about anyone could sneak away in. The feeling of claustrophobia was beginning to work on the inner framework of Crass’s mind. Sweat beaded up on his palms and his face felt hot with a growing rage.
The ship came closer until the white space unit was directly in front of the bow, anxiously waiting for its deployment over to the big satellite in the sky.
The computer screen display was blinking with the words:
DOCKING SEQUENCE……01:28
The rocket ship moved closer to the Odyssey and attached itself with the use of robotic computers. Underneath his boots came a shuddering that moved through the metal floor like vibrating snakes, briefly massaging the soles of his feet and running up his calves.
He felt more than tickled to be where he was—flying through Space, taking a trip over to the Moon that had looked down on him his whole life. What it didn’t know was that he had looked up to it regularly, for a sign, a message, an anything that could tell him more about himself.
They were almost there yet again.
Captain Don was moving around the pilot’s seat, watching the ships connect out in the black reaches of Space. A woman’s voice, slightly mechanical and automated, spoke up through speakers on the interior walls of the cabin.
“Docking Sequence is complete. Stand Clear! Hatch will open in ten seconds.”
There was a hissing of air as the hatch came open and Captain Don weaved his body through the hole, floating along a narrow corridor with lockers and drawers on both sides. He came back towards us moments later with a three foot scroll in his hand. He floated back over to his chair and peeled the paper open, revealing a geographical map of the Moon.
The onboard computer showed the ship’s progress across Space with lines that resembled a figure-8 almost, but not nearly completed. The ship had another three-quarters of the way to travel before it made it over to their vacation destination.
~
Crass was sitting in his seat and watching three random peanut-sized chocolate candies go floating across the cabin. They were suspended in the air with a natural elegance. They had a little bit of flight time left to go and Crass closed his heavy eyelids, drifting off into sleep’s welcoming embrace.
You would think crossing over into the world of dreams while traveling across 236,000 miles of black space at fifty-thousand miles per hour would be strange, but it’s not. Crass was across the border in a matter of minutes, hopping a tall chain-link fence on the way over to the strange land.
He bounced down on red soil and looked across the Martian landscape filling the hills and dry valleys before him. Across the deserted land, and sitting in a dried river bed were two old trees with bark the color of molasses. Stretched between the widening trunks in the shape of the crescent Moon was a white hammock. He stomped over closer to it, silently hoping and wishing it wasn’t a mirage or some silly illusion fooling his eyes.
High in the sky above, two round discs like natural moons, cast forth a hazy white light on the rocky landscape. The mountains blotted out the horizon. He walked closer still, noticing the hammock wasn’t alone.
Someone was there. Were they napping?
He’d made it to the trees and the hammock when Eva peered over the side. She smiled, and told Crass to come over and sit down next to her. The next thing he knew, he already was and they were already talking up a storm. He caught up with the conversation somewhere in the middle.
“If you could build anything right out there,” she said, pointing her sharp finger at the erratic landscape. “What would it be?”
Gusts of wind picked up loose layers of the Martian dirt and cast them in careless and blowing storms, across jagged rocks, and roughly cut trenches, on and on to the giant mountains growing on the distant horizon. Rounded slabs lay scattered, like a giant had dropped his rock collection on the open plain when shuffling by one day.
“Probably a drive-in movie theater,” he said cheerfully.
“That’s a great idea!”
“Any favorite movie you might play?” she asks again.
Crass thought about it for a minute.
“Of course,” he said. “Back to the Future.” He turned and looked at her face. She was staring out over the deserted landscape, and slowly tuned to meet his starry gaze. Her eyes were the color of the cosmos, all possibility and infinity transposed.
She grabbed his jaw, and nudged it forward to look at something. He followed the trail of his eyes over the dirt. It exploded upwards as a giant screen the size of a highway billboard erected from a secret cavern under the red and stony landscape. Piles of loose soil fell around the sides and collected in heaps below the metal legs jettisoning out of the desert.
The mountains in the background looked like inferior dwarfs now that the screen had taken over the graying horizon in front of them.
> “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is,” Crass answered back, drawing a deep breath of the air.
The lights of the planet dimmed and the movie trailers started to roll, one right after another for the next twenty minutes. He caught some and missed all. He was busy talking to the pretty girl on his starboard side, and the inclination of the hammock was to bring their bodies together. The more you pulled away, the harder the weaving nylon sought to tie you down.
He asked if she had any idea where the hell they might be? The place was strange, remotely alien if the term does apply, which he felt most surely that it did.
“I thought it was Venus initially, but you seem to have an effect of your own on this place,” Eva said, twisting her body around the hammock.
“Is it Mars maybe?” he asked.
She looked at him dubiously. “Could be I guess. It appears the dream has terraformed, sort of merging the effects of both planets.” Eva stood up and inspected the landscape.
“Is that good?” he asked, getting up off the hammock and hoping she had an answer.
“Probably not,” she said. “Start looking for a phone.” She walked back over to the tree, and bent down to grab something.
Start looking for a phone? What kind of fucking req…nevermind. Geez. What good would it do on a Martian fucking planet without any communication towers he could see?
Crass thought: Help me God. Help me Alexander Graham Bell. Help me fucking Western Union.
Where the hell was a phone when you really needed one? When the girl you’ve just met on Mars or Venus or whatever asks you for one, what are you suppose to tell her?
Crass was at a loss for words. He knew if he was in the 1990s, then somewhere on planet earth he could find a goshdamn payphone at almost any intersection on the block. His ears started picking up a muffled sound coming from under the dark soil. Five seconds passed and the muffle built into higher volume swells, the last of which a yellow payphone shot out of the sand like a long lost friend.
He walked over to it. The numbers were polished silver and the obsolete manual of black and yellow numbers hung below, rippling in the wind moving over the darkening landscape. Eva walked over to him with her purse on her shoulder and the wind blowing her hair high across her forehead.
“You found one,” she said. “Thank the Lord.”
“Ok, what’s his number?” Crass asked, grabbing the yellow receiver from the silver cradle. “I’ll call him up.”
“We’re waiting on a call. You should hang up the phone.” She pushed her hair back as the wind picked up, whipping across the movie screen, and starting to tear it apart in pieces that flew into the night.
“Who’s calling?” Crass asked her.
“The dreamkeeper,” she said, looking at him like he should’ve known that much. “This isn’t my dream either. Looks like we both hopped the fence.”
Eva took lipstick out of her purse and started applying it behind a compact mirror she produced quickly. The payphone started to ring distantly in the dark night. Thunderstorms were forming on the horizon, casting lightning across the black skies, and far off he thought he saw volcanoes spewing hot lava from their precipices.
The phone rang again. Crass picked it up just as Eva closed in on him, gripping him around the waist and bringing her wet lips closer to his.
He didn’t have the slightest clue what was going on. All he knew was that he’d been kissed by a beautiful girl, and momentarily forgot everything he was doing. This was his escape route—through the airwaves. He looked at Eva for a moment, then again, and said hello into the receiver.
A familiar voice said: “Hey buddy. Where in the hell are you two?”
“Hard to say, Mickey.” Crass looked out over the dark desert and noticed the remains of the television screen being eaten alive by menacing rain, a highly acidic mixture it looked like.
“Could be Venus or Mars. It’s changing and quite rapidly I might add.”
“Boys and girls. Did you ever see the clash of the Titans?” Mickey asked. “Not the movie, don’t think that. What you’re seeing is the battle battle, the war that’s raging on and on.”
Lava was beginning to slowly crawl over the hills in the distance, edging down and filling the dried river beds and canals below.
“I guess Mickey. We need to go before this lava gets over here.” He looked over at Eva. She was gazing back solemnly, unafraid and ready to go wherever.
“Then wake up buddy. CRASS! WAKE UP!!” Mickey yelled. The sound echoed through the receiver and instantaneously transported us back to the cabin of the spaceship being pulled closer and closer towards the surface of the Moon.
Crass opened his eyes, and looked at Eva. She was blinking and looking over at Crass silently, but still curiously.
“That was weird,” Crass said, gazing at the back of the empty seat in front of him. Looking around the cabin, he saw the spaceship driving itself with computers and satellite positioning. The other crewmembers were floating around in the newly acquisitioned lunar module.
“How did you get there?” Eva asked. She unbuckled from the seat and moved around the cockpit loosely. “It’s not very often I share a dream with people I’ve just met, and especially not when sleeping beside them.”
He grabbed an aluminum pull, and pulled himself towards the round windows and close to the computer bank.
“I’ll tell you how, Eva,” he said, diverting his attention out the window. “I hopped a rather tall chain link fence and started walking. Then I saw the trees and the hammock and then…I don’t know…eventually you were just lying there, and I walked up and joined you.”
Eva pulled over to the round porthole beside him and took in the view from the Peregrine I cockpit. The Moon had become much more advanced in terms of albedo (reflected light) and distance. It looked like a series of unnatural lights were springing up over the grayish terrain of regolith, little cities of light. Beacons.
Behind us, the Sun was ascending upon the Atlantic seaboard—and far, far from them sailed our ship through the blanket of Space, headed for the only satellite the Earth knew.
“They’ve been building up here,” Eva said. “Do you see the brighter lights near the South Pole and up towards the Sea of Islands? Look over there to the left of the Grimaldi crater. See it?”
“Tourist attractions,” Crass said nonchalantly. “Mining and excavation sites for the scientists, the gold diggers, and other lonely people of the world.”
“It’s not that dismal,” she said, slapping him on the arm. “C’mon Crass, it’s the Moon. Our brightest neighbor!”
She got up and floated off to find the others in the lunar module.
The computer screen was giving LunAucity XCursion number fifty-seven another hour and twelve minutes of flight time until the rocket reached the surface under the direction of Captain Don. The Peregrine I was approaching its destination, now more than halfway across the distance between Earth and its friendliest neighbor.
The tides moved under its (Luna’s) direction, poets scribbled words down on loose stationery, and novelists took off with the idea, filling up lots of precocious space.
Crass sighed and floated off to the lunar module. The party had moved and he was moving there now, floating on a horizontal plane.
Space had its benefits.
~
Having to pee while in mid-flight wasn’t one of them. Captain Don suggested we all go ahead and get familiar with the apparatus, because sometimes you had to go when you had to go. Accidents were to be avoided, also at all costs.
The Captain guided the gentlemen through the procedure, and later came the lecture for the girls, which was altogether brief, and for which Crass was very thankful indeed.
Remembering the urinatic device wasn’t pleasant, but for shits and giggles he felt that he should state a few words about it. It was a white rubber sleeve that held the end (tip) in place perfectly, not unlike the docking sequence on the outside of the rocket
earlier. A light vacuum would turn on and when the flow hit the hose, it captured the liquid waste into an onboard tank that flushed itself once done with the strangely erotic procedure.
“And that’s how it’s done boys.” Captain Don said, escorting us out of the small restroom compartment built into the rear of the lunar module.
“Now you know,” he said, bringing us back to the command module. He made sure to tell the girls about their procedure in a more private area of the floating ship. He even bothered to shut the hatch, preventing any eavesdropping attempts, like we cared.
After they’d come back, Eva sat down beside Crass again, telling him all about the ‘suction-cup’, her personal nickname for it. He’d found a ham and cheese sandwich in the pantry and was munching down half of it. The other half was floating around the cabin in its cellophane plastic. He figured when he got hungry enough, he’d be sure to find it, savoring the delight of having saved a treat for later.
Whoever had made the sandwich, had taken much delight in skimming the bread with not enough mustard and way too much mayonnaise. Cholesterol clung to the crust in blobs. He put it out of his mind for a while, enjoying the cheesy mash of a meal.
Mickey and Captain Don were talking over the map of the Moon when Crass noticed something strange resting on top of the armrest of the Captain’s seat. It looked like the eye patch.
Crass unbuckled from the seat and pushed the weight of his body towards them. Mickey saw him coming, and waved as the Captain turned around with a curious expression painted across his face in soft wrinkles and a few stretching dimples. Both eyes were there, both green, and apparently both in operating order.
“Crass, my unrefined friend,” the Captain said, patting him on the back.
Crass looked over at Mickey, who spilled the beans after the bewildered sideways glance he gave him.
“He does it for show,” Mickey said, grinning. “To intimidate any would-be terrorists or space criminals before the ship sails.”
Mickey laughed as the Captain smiled and took long glances at the computer screen. The instrument panel looked immaculate; clusters and dials, switches and relays, radios, gauges, navigation, and lights. It had the whole nine yards in one big ass screen.
LunaDome: A Novel Page 7