The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (21 page)

‘There’s been no mistake,’ she replies.

He never mentioned any wife or girlfriend and he wasn’t gay. I invented that whole plotline about his wife walking out and him cleaning the greenhouse roof in penance. I wanted him to be single, that’s why in my story his wife leaves him. But he has to care a bit, because I don’t want him to be a monster. He’s a caring man. I know that, because I understand him. Better than I understand myself.

I’m an iceberg. Ninety percent of me is below the surface. Diving into the cold sea, I can explore the depths – and the wrecks.

Turquoise sea, turquoise dress. The dress I’m wearing matches my eyes, swishes around my legs. Summer’s just gone, and maybe it’s too cold now for bare legs, but I’m
sticking with the dress. I perch on a bar stool and make notes. I never stop writing, even when I’m not physically writing. I narrate my own life in my head. It’s the way I am. I know that much about myself.

I spot the writer at the entrance and wave him over. Watch him walk across the bar, carefully avoiding each chair. It’s crowded in here, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen this place. Crowds are dangerous, there’s always the worry that we’ll bump into someone we know. Someone who knows we shouldn’t be meeting like this and looking so happy in each other’s company.

When he arrives at my stool, I tell him, ‘I was in a lab today. With fruit flies and owls and dead mice—’

He laughs. He knows how I work, how I weave animals and people out of words and letters.

‘Owls,’ he says as he looks around for the bar staff. ‘I saw an owl once. It flew right over me.’

‘Was that near Loch Tay?’ I ask him.

‘How long have we got?’ This is a few hours later. The bar is emptier, I’ve moved closer to him and am no longer afraid of touching his arm when I’m talking to him, just to emphasise a point. A friendly touch, nothing more. That’s what I want it to look like in case anyone sees us. But a small part of me knows that the alcohol’s made me uninhibited, that I’m capable of doing something stupid. I don’t know exactly what, until I do it.

He looks at his watch, ‘An hour or so.’

I smile. That’s enough time. There’s a park nearby, it’s a warm night and all I’m wearing is a dress.

Afterwards I cry bitterly. Back home I sob as I sponge myself in the shower. There is a word for this behaviour, I tell myself, and that word is betrayal. I promise myself I’ll never do it again. And I believe myself, because in fact it’s always better before or afterwards. Never during. The actual act
is fraught with panic, always uncomfortable, hardly ever that satisfying. The anticipation beforehand is better, the memories are something to relive in my mind afterwards.

‘Your hair is too bright,’ he whispered earlier this evening as we leant against the park wall, ‘such red, red hair, my love. It shines in the moonlight.’ He buried his face in it and breathed deeply. ‘You smell of flowers, of roses and –’

‘Did you get my texts?’ I interrupted him.

‘Yes.’

‘Go on, then.’

So he knelt in front of me, pushing my dress up so that every part of me was exposed to the fresh night air. But I didn’t feel cold. Not until now, when I’m standing in the hot shower, having to wash my body everywhere he touched it. Like cleaning up after a scientific experiment that’s gone wrong. And I’m cold with shame and regret.

As usual the writer is sitting at the back of the lab, somewhere in the space behind him. They haven’t discussed her genetic test and he doesn’t know what she thinks about red hair or blue eyes. But now she starts to talk, so quietly that at first he doesn’t realise she’s talking to him.

‘Once upon a time there was a woman. She met a man and fell in love and they got married. She wanted to live happily ever after. But this is a story about what happens after the fairy tale ends. Her husband expected her to iron his shirts every day, and criticised her when she ironed creases into them by accident. And then she started ironing creases into them on purpose just for an excuse to argue with him.’

He turns round, ‘Is this a true story?’ he asks.

‘They’re all true stories. Even the made-up ones.’ She isn’t crying but her eyes look too shiny. ‘She was ironing her husband’s shirts, he had a lot of shirts and it was an endless task. He wore three shirts a day and she could only iron two because she had so much else to do. So, the shirts just piled
up on every surface in the house and before long they couldn’t find anything else. At night time, they had to burrow into the mound of shirts on their bed, and go to sleep in them.

‘Her husband was a circus master. He had a flea circus and he kept it on a mouse. It was the easiest way. That’s how he moved around with his circus, he went travelling with this mouse. She was a very obliging creature and quite affectionate.

‘He used to go touring with his circus, it was rather famous. And of course, the transport costs were cheap. Just a small wooden box for the mouse, and some Mars bars to feed her. He’d go off for weeks at a time. His wife was pleased because it gave her an opportunity to catch up on the ironing. She’d never actually seen the flea circus in action, she told him it made her itch just thinking about it. That was one of the many things they argued about. And when he was away she’d sprinkle flea powder all over their house, and vacuum all the soft furnishings.

‘One day, disaster struck. He’d come home after a particularly long tour and he was lying down on the sofa having a nap with the mouse asleep, curled up on his chest. She used to get exhausted with all the travelling and the excitement of the circus. But the wife must have forgotten to vacuum up all the flea powder because when the man and his mouse woke up a few hours later, the fleas were all dead. Every single last one of them.

‘The man was furious. He cursed his wife and she shouted at him that she hadn’t married him to look after a menagerie of insects. In their anger they forgot about the mouse who had taken fright from all this noise and disappeared.

‘Well, the man managed to get hold of another mouse and some more fleas and he spent months training them, but it was never the same. He’d go off touring though, and when he was away, the woman met someone else. This man was a falconer and he had a merlin, a kestrel, a sparrow hawk and a tawny owl, and they each wore little hoods on their heads. The owl
had a special hood. It was made of soft black suede and had a brass bell on it.

‘This man lived in a much larger house than the woman, perhaps there’s more money in falconry than in flea circuses. His birds were very popular, they were good at killing rodents and he used to take them to mice- or rat-infested houses and set them loose. They were much more efficient and cheaper than poison.

‘Well, the woman fell in love with this man and they had an affair while her husband was away. She would send him erotic texts and they would make love in the shed where he kept his birds. The birds couldn’t see what was going on because of the little hoods on their heads, so the woman thought they were safe. She’d forgotten about the mouse that had escaped.

‘One day the owl caught the mouse and ate it, and the falconer gave the resulting pellet as a sort of love token to the woman, who brought it home with her and put it in a drawer in the house. When her husband came back from his latest tour, exhausted and fed up because takings were right down, he found the pellet and recognised the remains of his old mouse. All hell broke loose and she ended up confessing to the affair.’

Silence in the lab. The Gaffer thinks for a moment, ‘Is that what my owl pellet was? A love token?’ He’s never thought of objects as representing emotions before. Certainly not regurgitated mice.

She comes and stands by the machine again, and he stands next to her. They gaze through the glass.

‘Wouldn’t it be good if there was never any glass to get in the way?’ He doesn’t know which one of them says this, the words are in his head.

When he gets home the house is still empty but there’s a note waiting for him in the kitchen, propped up against an empty beer can. It’s just one sentence:

CAN YOU EVEN REMEMBER MY NAME?

He screws up the piece of paper and throws it outside into the dark garden.

She’s gone. She’s not at the back of the lab, her notebook has disappeared and nobody seems to know anything. Lucy’s still away so he’s rushed off his feet all day, but everywhere he goes in the lab is saturated with the memories of her. Outside the winter sunlight is bright and sharp so the double helix is casting word-shadows everywhere, but she’s not here to catch them. Perhaps he imagined her. Perhaps she never was.

The Prof wants to have a talk about the flies. He’s not happy; the company won’t refund the money for the flies because it wasn’t their fault, and Lucy can’t come back to work here until every last one of the mutant flies has been found and destroyed. He suggests that maybe this should take priority over setting up the new machine and he reminds the Gaffer who is really in charge here. He doesn’t even call him the Gaffer, he calls him by his name.

After everyone’s left the lab at the end of the day, the Gaffer remains, sitting by the console and programming the machine. He’s learning how to get deep into the guts of its system, so he can disable the safety features. Now the lab is dark and he can just about see the glass canopy rise up, revealing the workings. He gets up and lays his hand on one of the beds, waiting for the sharp metal tips to do what they’ve been instructed to do. It will be a beautiful ending.

Further information

Some of the stories in this collection were inspired by historical people and events:

The first star

In 1913 the campaign for votes for women was at its height and in May of that year the Royal Observatory Edinburgh was bombed by suffragettes, damaging the West Tower. Visitors to the Observatory can see a small fragment of the bomb. The perpetrators were never caught and it’s not clear what the precise motive for this attack was. But it may have had something to do with the Observatory’s short-lived practice of employing female ‘computers’ (the term used for people who, before mechanical computers were developed, carried out routine processing of data), and these women were always paid less than their male counterparts.

The Snow White paradox

Alan Turing first concieved of his test of artificial intelligence as essentially gender-based and this was inspired by an old parlour game, the ‘imitation game’. The ‘Snow White’ record player as described in the story is real but here it is an anachronism because Braun, the manufacturers, didn’t put it on sale until 1956. Turing always had a fascination with the story of Snow White. The first major biography of Turing (‘Enigma’ by Andrew Hodges) agrees with the inquest that Turing’s death was definitely suicide; later biographers such as B. Jack Copeland (author of ‘Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age’) seem less convinced.

Heroes and cowards

Brecht’s play ‘Life of Galileo’ was first written in 1938 and then substantially rewritten during his stay in Hollywood in collaboration with the actor Charles Laughton, who played the title role in the world premiere of the English-language version. The earlier version of the play depicts Galileo as a typically Brechtian anti-hero who is prepared to do anything to double-cross the Roman Catholic church to get his message across. But after the Manhattan project culminated in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Brecht wanted to update the play to show how Galileo failed to stand up to the Inquisition and thus (in his view) set a bad example for all future scientists in their dealings with authorities.

This story uses quotes from Brecht’s actual evidence to HUAC. Oppenheimer’s line, ‘Sorry, no I can’t say that I am,’ is also taken from real life and was in response to a journalist asking him if he felt sorry for the use of the atom bomb. Oppenheimer did receive many awards for his work but the award ceremony in the story is entirely fictional.

Furthest South

There are several ongoing experiments to detect neutrinos based at the Antarctic. Scott’s expedition of 1910-12 had many scientific purposes, and one of those was to collect eggs from emperor penguins wintering at Cape Crozier to provide possible evidence that the embryos were more ‘primitive’ than the fully grown penguins and therefore might provide a link between reptiles and birds. The appallingly difficult trek to obtain some eggs is vividly recounted in Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s book ‘The Worst Journey in the World’. This book also describes how the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers were buried where they were found. There is a large wooden cross commemorating Scott and the men who died on that fatal expedition, but I’ve taken liberties with its location, it’s actually situated at Hut Point on the edge of the continent and not near the Pole.

The equation for an apple

In 1924 J. Robert Oppenheimer travelled from Harvard to Cambridge to start his PhD in physics. But he wasn’t happy there, something clearly went badly wrong and he tried to poison his PhD supervisor Patrick Blackett with an apple dipped in cyanide. This episode was subsequently hushed up by his family and the University authorities, and Oppenheimer went on to carry out his PhD work at Göttingen with Max Born. See ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer’ by Bird and Sherwin, and ‘Inside The Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer’ by Ray Monk for more information.

That sinking feeling

In the 1980s it was discovered that Einstein and his first wife Mileva Marić had had a baby before they got married. The fate of this child is not known, but it is possible she either died of scarlet fever or was adopted by friends. Einstein didn’t actually live in the same apartment block as Elsa while he was still married to Mileva – that is my own thought experiment. Walter Isaacson’s biography ‘Einstein: His Life and Universe’ is an excellent source of information.

Einstein’s thought experiment in which a man in a freefalling lift experiences weightlessness was an important aspect of the development of general relativity. The words ‘gravity’ and ‘grief’ are etymologically related.