Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  At 7.51 on December 21st 1968, the last clamp was released and the largest rocket ever to carry a human being as its payload started to rise from the earth. The progress was almost imperceptible at first, but its pace rapidly increased until the giant black and white tower was barely visible at the head of a miles long plume of white smoke.

  When the exultant launch crew passed over responsibility to Mission Control in Houston, there was more than one member who recalls being glad that their part was over.

  Breaking the Sky – the official history of Apollo 8

  We were behind schedule before the crew left Earth orbit. There were concerns over the third stage of the rocket. In unmanned testing, it had failed to ignite for the trans-lunar injection stage of the mission. We kept the astronauts sitting in Earth orbit for a couple of hours before we gave them the go-ahead for the burn that would send them on their way to the moon. We had to get it right. Any mistake and they would have been the first men to crash onto the moon, or we could have sent them into solar orbit that would have left them as a permanent monument to our failure, so we made damn sure before we got them to press the button.

  Who knows, maybe the way it turned out, we should never have given them the go-ahead. We couldn’t possibly have been expected to foresee what actually happened.

  Mission Commander’s evidence

  Congressional Archive, Washington DC

  A8 – Houston, the S-IVB has been successfully jettisoned. I repeat we have confirmation for the S-IVB jettison.

  MC – Roger that. Do you have visual confirmation?

  A8 – We are rotating the capsule now, Houston. We should have visual confirmation of jettison in just a few... Oh my God.

  MC – This is Houston. We did not read your last transmission fully. Please repeat last transmission.

  (pause)

  MC – This is Mission Control, Houston. Please repeat end of last transmission. Respond please.

  A8 – Uh, sorry, Mission Control. We were just taken a little by surprise by the sight out of the window. We live on a beautiful planet. It looks so serene and peaceful from up here.

  MC – Roger that. Glad nothing more serious. The history books will read forever that you three are the first people to see the planet in its entirety. Welcome to your place in history, boys.

  A8 – Roger that, Houston. We just wish that everyone could see this. It comes with its own change in perspective.

  MC – Make sure you bring us back some good pictures.”

  A8 – Roger that, Houston. We now have the S-IVB in sight. We have visual confirmation of jettison. It is still quite close and travelling on a parallel course, however. Suggest separation manoeuvre.

  MC – Roger that. We will take it under advisement and get back to you. In the meantime, enjoy the view.

  Transcript of Apollo 8 radio communications

  Courtesy of NASA

  The rest of the flight was pretty uneventful, right up until the end that is. The Commander on board had a bout of space adaptation syndrome, or space sickness if you must, though at the time we thought it might be 24-hour flu or a reaction to the sleeping pill he had taken. He had no symptoms prior to the launch and had suffered no adverse reactions to the same sleeping pills during training, but back then we knew a lot less about how weightlessness can affect balance and digestive systems. It soon passed, anyway.

  The crew gave their scheduled telecast 31 hours into the flight and another one 24 hours later. That gave the people of Earth their first views of this planet we inhabit. Those images alone should have been enough for us all back home to change our ways of thinking even without what happened after.

  Mission Commander’s evidence

  Congressional Archive, Washington DC

  A8 – Houston, we have a problem.

  MC – This is Houston. We’re listening. What is the problem?

  A8 – Houston, navigator has been taking sightings with sextant and they are wrong.

  MC – Can you give us more information? Please define ‘wrong’.

  A8 – Well, either we’re not where we ought to be or the moon isn’t.

  MC – Copy that. You are reporting course error.

  A8 – I’m not sure that I am, Houston.

  MC – We hear you, but we are not sure we understand. Please explain.

  A8 – Houston, we can’t. The reading on Earth puts us right where we ought to be, well within the margin of error. However, the lunar reading...”

  (pause)

  MC – Commander, we have lost the signal. Repeat your message.

  A8 – Houston, you did not lose the signal. It is just that these readings do not make any sense. We have all taken them and the results are impossible.

  MC – Commander, report your results. We will verify them here.

  A8 – No, you won’t, Houston, because they make no sense. There is no equipment malfunction and we are not suffering a human error problem.

  MC – Nobody is suggesting anything. We just want to check the data in order to diagnose the problem.

  A8 – It’s not a problem with us, Houston. The problem is with our stars.

  MC – Say again, Commander. Please say again.

  A8 – The stars, Houston. The stars are moving.

  (pause)

  MC – This is Houston. Please check attitude settings.

  A8 – I don’t have to check our attitude settings, Houston. The stars aren’t moving relative to us. They are moving relative to each other.

  MC – Please confirm, Apollo. Did you say that the stars are moving relative to each other?

  Transcript of Apollo 8 radio communications

  Courtesy of NASA

  It was impossible of course. Fixed points as far away as stars do not move relative to each other. Not enough to be visible to an astronaut with a sextant anyway. That’s why we have constellations that we can recognise. Or so we thought. Our understanding of the nature of the universe was about to change.

  Mission Commander’s evidence

  Congressional Archive, Washington DC

  MC – Please confirm, Apollo. Did you say that the stars are moving relative to each other?

  (pause)

  MC – Please confirm last transmission, Commander.

  A8 – Houston, Apollo. This is crazy.

  A8(background) – I can see something. I can see it out there. Do you see it?

  A8(background) – Let me take a look. What? I don’t...

  A8 – What? What do you see?

  A8 (background) – That’s not possible. That’s just totally not possible.

  A8 (background) – It’s right there. How can you not...Oh no. We need to change course.

  A8 – What are you talking about? What is out there?

  A8 (background) – There’s no time. We have to turn back.

  A8 (background) – It’s too late. Dear God, I’m sorry.

  A8 (receding) – What is wrong with you two? What is going on? What have you seen? (pause) Oh my God, you’re right. That can’t be. Houston, it’s not real. None of it’s real. Houston, we have reached the end of the sky. We have reached the end...

  (recording ends)

  Transcript of Apollo 8 radio communications

  Courtesy of NASA

  Everything that we knew about the universe changed because of that one radio conversation and the subsequent investigation. All the theorising about an infinite, expanding universe emerging in the wake of the Big Bang was shown to be false. Mankind had hurled itself out into the void and crashed into the firmament itself, learning in the process that the stars were indeed just lanterns hung from the sky to make the night seem less dark. We have all seen the telescope photographs of the capsule wedged up there against the hard outer shell of our small, small universe.

  Faith in the Divine Being, which had been eroding throughout the previous two centuries, was restored by the loss of those three brave men and what they showed to us.

  In a very real way, Apollo 8 gave us b
ack our God.

  Proving the Divine

  The Archbishop of Canterbury

  Another Brick in the Wall

  It was an obsession born of loneliness.

  I lost my wife to cancer shortly after we celebrated our twentieth-fifth wedding anniversary. There was a time when I thought that the only evil in the world lay within the hearts of men, but cancer proved me very, very wrong. It was Dickens’ ‘worst of times’ without his ‘best of times’.

  I remember with absolute clarity the moment that the specialist shuffled into his office to give us the prognosis. He didn’t even have to speak the words; I knew everything that he was going to say from the expression on his face. First, there was the bad news, delivered in clinical medical language in a calculated attempt to make it more impersonal, less frightening. The attempt failed. Following on from that, there was the upbeat reporting of what progress had been made in the treatment of this particular disease, of the success rates and the new and exciting advances being made all the time. Only the doctors get excited about anything to do with cancer. Even the announcement of complete remission is a matter of overwhelming relief rather than excitement. I learned this from others attending the support meetings, the eighth level of hell that is exclusively reserved for those whose loved ones have cancer.

  I can also recall perfectly the moment that my Joanna slipped away from me for the very last time, though by that time she was pumped full of so much pain medication that she could barely focus her eyes on those around her bed let alone recognise who any of them was. The transition between life and death was as simple as her, by this time frail, chest falling and then not rising again. It was such a quiet moment that nobody else seemed to notice until I gently placed her hand back on the thin cover that had been all she could bear to have pressing down on her body and walked out of the room. Both kids turned to their own spouses present and so any consolation from me would have been superfluous. I doubt that I could have provided any significant support at that moment anyway.

  Between those two moments of total recall, lies a blur of denial, doctor appointments, hospital appointments, acceptance, invasive therapies, anger, sleepless nights, pain, cleaning up bodily fluids, monitoring medication and always pretending that it is not having any effect on you at all.

  I’ve heard it said, possibly at those eighth circle of hell meetings, that diseases like this are harder on the loved ones than the patient, which is patently nonsense. Though they may appear to have come to terms with their own fate, the afflicted still get to see everyone else suffer because of their illness whilst having to deal with the pain and the indignities that are heaped upon them in greater intensity every day.

  The children made some noises before the funeral about coming to stay, and even moving house to be closer to me, but life has a way of going on whether you want it to or not and their lives were now entangled with the lives of others more than with mine. Which is the way that it is supposed to be, so nothing ever came of it. I could have fought harder to keep them close to me, but the pain of Joanna’s loss was never stronger in me than when I was with the children she bore so proudly and I know that they felt the same around me. Most of the fight that we had in us had been lost over those last two years. It was just easier for us all that way.

  And, of course, that might just be me rationalising away my own shortcomings as a parent. I had brought in the money as a jobbing architect, and brought in enough of it to give us a comfortable life in suburban Buckinghamshire in a large house set in its own grounds, though this was positively modest when compared with some of the unashamed displays of wealth that could be found all around us. Michael and Jennifer were provided with good educations, at state schools to be sure (Joanna wasn’t ever going to budge on that principle no matter how far into the middle class we climbed), but the best ones in the area. When the time came for them to marry their respective partners, Christopher and James respectively, we were able to present them with sizeable deposits for increasingly unaffordable homes.

  Joanna had been the stay-at-home parent, dealing with the daily travails of potty training, school, birthday parties, swimming lessons, piano lessons, ballet lessons, football training and hockey matches, shopping for school uniforms and pencil cases and book bags, first dates, bad dates, breakups and the conversations about love and safe sex. Nothing was decided without my approval, but everything was decided before my approval. It was an arrangement that worked and one that everyone seemed comfortable with. Joanna cried when Jennifer left and cried again when Michael left.

  We all cried when Joanna left.

  And then life, as it has a habit of doing, went on.

  Everyone understands in the first few months after a bereavement. Everybody is sympathetic and nobody expects very much of the bereaved. As the months pass toward the first or, heaven help us, second anniversary, understanding is harder to come by. Those who haven’t experienced that loss cannot comprehend why you haven’t been able to move on, why you haven’t gone back to normal and why you can’t do the things that you did before. You can’t explain to them the flatness that comes into your life, the lack of joy, the simple absence that underpins everything that you do. When I left the firm, it was with a mutual consent that was heavily weighted on their side. The payoff was generous and I had enough in a modest, but carefully managed, portfolio of stocks and bonds that allowed me to survive well enough on a couple of small, bespoke technical drawing commissions a year.

  I drifted.

  There is no other word that more accurately captures the aimless torpor that gripped me.

  The box was unremarkable, so it was surprising that it created a sense of unease in me that was certainly out of all proportion to its size or appearance, neither of which was out of the ordinary. The box, though, whilst unremarkable in size, shape, or appearance was remarkable in that it was unexpected.

  Joanna’s illness had been unexpected.

  Unexpected was something that I had come to be very, very wary of.

  The courier who had dropped the box off, and made me scrawl my name on an app on his mobile phone to prove that I’d received it, had been spectacularly unhelpful in terms of clearing matters up in respect of the unexpected box.

  “What is that?” I had enquired, somewhat stupidly I agree in retrospect.

  “Delivery for Mr Furst,” he said with the kind of cheery lack of concern that comes with not having an unexpected box put into his hands.

  “I’m not expecting anything,” I objected.

  The courier looked at the top of the box, where the shipping receipt was held in a transparent plastic pocket taped firmly to the cardboard. “Definitely Mr Furst. You are Mr Furst, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I admitted unhappily.

  “And this is Stablemere, Cheshire Climb?” he continued to read off the shipping label.

  “Yes, yes it is,” I did briefly consider denying it, but since the name was on the gate at the end of the drive and the road was signed at either end it hardly seemed worth it.

  “Then unexpected or not, it’s for you,” he replied, holding out mobile phone and stylus. “A nice surprise.”

  I could have argued with him. I could have pointed out that, if anyone could have been bothered to undertake the research, it could probably be statistically proven that surprises, by and large, were not nice. I could have used my own sad case to illustrate the point that I was making. I could have done all these things had he not accepted his newly signed mobile phone back and gone walking happily back up the path toward the green and yellow van parked across the end of the drive, leaving me with an unexpected box in my arms.

  A short time later, the same unexpected box sat and glowered at me in the full glory of its unexpectedness from the centre of the kitchen table as I considered it. In the end, there was only one way of dealing with it. Well, actually there were two, but stuffing it directly into the wheelie bin for unrecycled refuse seemed to be going a little over the top, not least
because I’d probably get another lecture from the bin men on the importance of separating the garden waste into the brown bin and the recycling into the blue bin. Exactly why the green bin was for the all unrecyclable stuff heading for landfill, nobody could explain to me.

  I took the smallest sharp knife from the block by the sink and neatly slit open the packet holding the shipping documentation. Returning the knife to its place, I slipped the paper out of the plastic sheath and read it. It didn’t help very much. The return address was an online retail company and the description merely said ‘toy/game’ and gave the number as one.

  I knew that I hadn’t ordered anything recently to be delivered and certainly nothing that could be termed a ‘toy’ or a ‘game’.

  Taking the knife back out of the block, I carefully sliced through all the tape sealing the box and put it back in its place. I opened the shipping box and looked inside. The only thing I could see was the mass of crumpled up brown paper that they use when the contents fall between the standard sizes of their shipping boxes. I pulled all that out and, sure enough, nestling beneath was a box. It was wrapped in generic gift-wrap and with an envelope affixed to the front. I pulled the envelope off the box and extracted the card from within. It carried the word ‘Gift’ in bright letters on the front. I flipped it open and finally found an answer to the mystery

  There, in their impersonal computer font of choice was the message:

  Dad,

  It’s time to start building again.

  J

  I took out the gift-wrapped box and used the sharp knife for the last time in order to cut through the clear tape holding the paper in place. I hadn’t noticed that I had smoothed out the brown paper and folded it up on the table.