The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (12 page)

‘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.

He looks at the map before he leaves, just to make sure he knows where he’s going. The snowmobiles have got GPS on them and once the destination is loaded into them it’s pretty much point and shoot, but he wants to do it the old fashioned way, by studying a piece of paper and working out the bearing. It seems fitting. That’s the way the explorers would have done it.

Of course, it’s further away than it looks and the wind is cold, even with two balaclavas and thick goggles. But it’s exhilarating and Joe realises this is the most he’s travelled in over six weeks, the furthest he’s been from other people. Out here is properly dangerous. If the snowmobile broke down and a blizzard started, he would be buried in snow in minutes. And the others wouldn’t risk their lives to save him. That’s the first thing you learn here, don’t risk your own life. Otherwise they’ll all go down.

The memorial looks smaller as he gets nearer. This is a well-known optical illusion here. There is nothing else to compare the size of the cross to, so your eyes get confused and think that it’s large, then it’s small. He doesn’t get right up
close to it, he stops the sledge a respectful distance away and stands there facing it. He wants to feel an emotion, but all he can think of is Smith.

In his worst sleepless moments, he thinks Smith’s done it on purpose and come here just to torment him. Taking her wasn’t enough and now he’s got her, he’s come here to gloat about it. He hasn’t mentioned it but then he doesn’t have to. Just his physical presence, the bulk of him is a constant reminder of what happened.

Joe makes an effort to think about the emperor penguin eggs – the men pulling the sledges through the dark for weeks to get to the colony, eating pemmican and cocoa each evening, telling each other tales as the snow and wind battered their tent. When one of the men finally returned to Britain and visited the Natural History Museum in London to deliver the eggs to the scientists there, they weren’t even interested. Things had moved on in science, they said. The eggs weren’t needed anymore. The men had been in the Antarctic for too long. They’d lost touch.

Wherever you are on the base your eye is always drawn to the cross. There’s nothing else to look at. Something in those men’s minds as well as their bodies got them to the Pole. Something indeterminate, weighing less than the swish of air across the sastrugi and not trapped beneath the ice. The cross is only a metaphor for it.

He’s sitting back in his work pod later than evening when Smith appears. The flashes are even fainter, even though the wiring looks sound, and Joe’s not sure what the problem is. Smith fills the doorway of the pod. For the first time Joe wonders what he’s actually doing here and why he’s left her behind for so many months.

‘One of the detectors has broken,’ Smith says.

Joe continues looking at the screen, ‘I don’t think so,’ he
says, ‘I checked them all this morning.’

‘Well, it’s broken. Kaput.’ And Smith makes a slicing motion with his right hand. ‘You want to go check it?’

‘That is my job,’ Joe says with obvious sarcasm.

‘Great. I’ll come with you,’ and he smiles. Joe can’t avoid noticing how guileless his smile is, as if he’s genuinely enjoying this encounter.

‘I can do it by myself.’

‘Sure, but it’ll be an adventure for me.’

‘You’re easily pleased.’

In the boot room it takes him forever to get ready.

‘Want a hand?’ Joe offers as Smith tries to cram his feet into endless layers of socks. But Smith just keeps grinning, ‘Wow, this is so exciting!’

That’s when Joe realises, she left him for Smith because Smith’s happier. He’s just more fun to be with. There wasn’t anything special about Joe apart from the neutrinos, and they weren’t really his anyway.

Outside, the wind is starting to pick up and Joe knows they shouldn’t be out here too long. He uses the torchlight to guide them both over to the ground array of detectors. Sure enough one of them is flapping loose wires out of the back, like spilled black guts. It’ll be a major job to repair this, so he tells Smith that they need to go back inside for now and plan the work. As they turn to leave he flashes his torch into the distance, in the direction of the memorial. There’s no way the torchlight is powerful enough to illuminate the cross so it’s a futile gesture, but not everything that they do here has to be useful.

Inside, Smith shakes his head free from the balaclava and goggles.

‘You need to hang everything up,’ and Joe points to his snowsuit left lying on the floor, ‘keep the place tidy, otherwise it’ll turn into chaos.’

‘Sure. Sorry,’ and he obediently bends down.

Later, Joe’s in his pod, drinking his evening hot chocolate
when Smith appears yet again.

‘Smith,’ Joe says, wondering what his first name is. What she called him.

‘Still at work?’

‘I like watching the neutrinos flashing,’ he sips from his mug. ‘I find it soothing.’ Then he regrets saying this, he doesn’t want Smith to know anything about him. He wants to be a smooth, opaque surface.

‘You do know you’re not actually seeing the neutrinos themselves, right?’