Listen to the programme on Celtica Radios 'Squaring the Circle'
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The
long lunar nights can be cold and lonely and the eternal night of the
farside made time stand still, frozen in a moment of stillness and utter
silence. Keeping busy during these downtimes was always a problem for
Commander Wotan and as he gazed out the wide viewport across the barren
lunar sea, he felt his gloved hands drumming unconsciously on the plexar
console. Although the station more or less ran itself, there was always
need for a real human presence on the base from time to time to change
batteries, check readouts and make sure all the little things that
robots couldn't actually accomplish were taken care of. If he was honest
with himself though, Wotan knew he actually secretly enjoyed the
solitude and the extreme isolation, if only for a little while, as the
busy spaceports and waystations were constantly thronged with traffic
and officials barking orders or requesting information. The small base
of Farside Station was a welcome relief from the bustle and press of
life and Wotan had happily volunteered to pay a brief visit to the
station before taking off again to man Mars Base in a few lunar days.
There was something extremely romantic and nostalgic about Luna, he
thought. It had been mans first foothold into space centuries ago and
the stepping stone for forays into the inner system during the second
space age after the urge to explore the planets and the means to travel
efficiently and quickly between the stars had been developed. Now, as
man had effectively colonised the solar system and Earth had become a
virtual backwater due to its dwindling resources, its Moon was largely
overlooked too. Farside Station was home to a series of navigation
beacons, a large astronomical telescope array and an emergency rescue
facility. In all the time that Wotan had visited the station during his
tours of duty, the rescue ship had never been launched.
The
only time there had been anything like an emergency was several years
ago when the base scanners had lit up with a collision warning - he had
been realigning the main ATS array to focus on Jupiter as it was wracked
by an especially intense storm and the alarms had rung out through the
empty corridors, and it had taken Wotan several terrified minutes to
find his helmet and scramble back to the main unit to check the
telltales and look out the viewport in the direction the scanners had
indicated, to see a huge mass heading across the horizon.
In
the utter silence of the lunar night, a large vehicle of unknown design
had fallen out of space and plummeted towards the plain about a mile
from the base. Wotan had watched as the craft had catapulted into the
dust, showering debris across the landscape. There had been no explosion
or any kind of discharge from the impact, which he found unusual - had
any kind of ship crashed, the fuel would have ignited, incinerating the
craft even in the airless environment. As it transpired, the object had
been a large container, presumably launched some time ago and punched
into lunar orbit, before crashing down to the surface as its orbit
decayed.
Wotan
was used to finding wreckage on the moon and also aware of the
activities of freelance junkers - salvage teams looking for scrap. This
time however he reached the point of impact before anyone else and was
amazed to discover the bulk of the container had survived the crash. It
had been a very old looking design and the outside shell was pitted and
scarred, it had obviously been drifting for some time. After hauling the
object back to Farside behind the Molab, he had managed to break into
it to discover it had been a virtual treasure trove of artifacts from
decades ago. Securely wrapped in several layers of mylar had been a
small plaque which gave brief details of the person who had sent this
capsule into space. As Earth had begun its decline and the natural
catastrophes had begun to render the planet inhospitable, one man - a
prominent industrialist - had taken a large portion of his personal
collection of treasures, literature, art and history - sealed it into a
container and blasted it into space on board a chemical rocket. His
intention had apparently been to direct the rocket into deep space, but
technical malfunction or just improper astrogation had conspired against
him and the container had eventually entered a long, elliptical lunar
orbit. Decades later, the feeble gravity of the moon and the last
fingers of influence of the Earth had conspired to bring the capsule
down onto the lunar surface. On the obverse side of the plaque was an
inscription - a few lines of an ancient poem, presumably reflecting the
industrialists frame of mind as he packed up his message to the stars:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Of all the materials in the container, Wotan had found this bleak
message the most poignant and had taken the plaque and placed it at the
crash site on the edge of a lunar rille, facing deep space and the lunar
horizon. The rest of the container he had unpacked and amongst the
various boxes of strange unreadable media and esoteric artforms, there
had been a great number of books. Wotan had seen images of books, an
archaic method of using pressed vegetable fibre made into sheets,
collated into stacks and then printed on with text and images. To hold
one in his hands was a revelation - the weight in the hand and the
peculiar smell from the pages engaged his imagination and transported
him to a distant unknowable time when such things were commonplace and
all information was held in such fragile, impractical vessels. A lot of
the books had been historical and periodical texts and he had given
these over to the archives on Cydonia base, for preservation. But one or
two of the volumes had proven fascinating to him, especially some of
the fictional tales of the exploration of space and he had kept these
for himself. One particular book had become a special favourite of his -
a large treatise on early space exploration which showed pictures of
the unfeasibly strange vehicles which had heralded mans first tentative
steps off the motherworld into near space. The volume covered all the
major events up to the end of the 21st century when mans interest in
space had paled and eyes had turned inward to the failing Earth and the
means to preserve humanity.
It was during these periods of peace and quiet, when there was nothing
to do but wait for the relief shuttle and potter about the station
checking and rechecking the seals on the airlocks or cleaning the solar
panels, that Wotan took down one of the smaller books and read stirring
stories of science fiction from so long ago.
He had almost come to the end of one of the fragile tomes and was
wondering absently what to do next when a burst of static broke the
silence in the base. Wotan sat up, carefully placing the book down
safely and wandered over to the main communications array. The static
roar had begun to modulate into separate bursts, becoming a signal of
some sort. Wotan directed the main receptor dish towards the signals
source and the crash of static and white noise faded to be replaced by
an increasingly clear tone. It wasn't unusual to have pilots visit the
remote base unannounced as they passed through, but he generally
recognised the transmission codes. This signal was different, strange
somehow - a spare and bleak sequence of squeals and discordant notes
that Wotan had never heard before. The console had automatically
pinpointed its location now and the dish was tracking the signals
source.
The visual scanners had been
brought into play and Wotan could hear the sound of the servos adjusting
the alignment of the main scope above the base and it occurred to him
that it was rare that the scope had to be moved so far out of position
as it scanned the heavens. As the monitor kicked in and he saw the image
flicker to life, he realised that the scope had been moved a full 90
degress and was currently trained on the distant lunar horizon and was
still moving lower, to scan the dusty mare.
All this time, the sound of the ghostly signal became stronger and Wotan
could now make out a definite sequence to it. Long bursts of garbled
squeals were punctuated by a sequence of five distinct notes before the
rapid staccatto began again. Just then the screen froze and the noise of
the motors manoevering the telescope ceased. The image on the screen
showed a distant lunar hill on the edge of the teminator where the
eternal night of the darkside began to give up its hold to the light.
The image flickered briefly as the scan zoomed in and centred on a small
plume of dust at the base of the hill. As Wotan watched, something
caught the light at the base of the plume as it moved out of the dark.
Another jump of focus and the telescope found the source of the signal
and the monitor suddenly filled with a close up view of a strange and
wonderful vehicle. Trundling fitfully across the rocky base of the hill
was something that Wotan realised was a throwback to a different age.
Eight wire wheels supported a round bowl-like hull which sprouted
antennae and lights and above and behind the body sat a large round
mirrored dish, the upper quarter of which was catching the glimmer of
sunlight reaching across the mountains. As the vehicle trundled towards
the light, the long spear-like anntenna on its roof appeared to scan the
horizon and Wotan became aware that the brief pauses in the signal
corresponded to the movements of the antenna. The vehicle appeared to be
searching for something..
Setting the comms array to gather as much information as possible, Wotan
dashed out of the unit and back to the rec room. Amongst his few
belongings which he carried with him from base to base were some
creature comforts for him to enjoy in his solitude. One thing that
always came with him when he left Cydonia base was the old book on space
exploration. He was working his way through the information, memorising
the historical details of the brave pioneers who had gone before and
marvelling at the means at which man had struggled to visit the Moon.
Grabbing the book, he headed quickly back to the comms unit and threw
himself into the seat again, checking the monitor. The weird contraption
was still barely visible and it had crested a small hill now and was
paused, its mirror catching the full light of the sun. Fanning through
the pages and decades of the book, Wotan found the section he was
looking for. Apparently at the early stages of the exploration of the
moon, a great rivalry had existed between what had then been the major
powers on earth and it had a been a race to uncover the secrets of
Earths nearest neighbour. Many frantic attempts to reach the moon by
umanned probes had been tried, some successful and others less so. Space
travel had been vastly expensive and arduous then and sometimes it was
at great expense that a flight to the moon was attempted.
The
book described a remotely operated vehicle which translated as
'moonwalker' that had successfully reached the moon and transmitted
photographs and live video back to earth. The book went on to suggest
that beside the two successful official launches, many other covert
operations may have taken place, but due to the secrecy surrounding them
and the rivalry between the countries, any failures were not made
public. The technical schematics and images of the Moonwalker vehicle
bore a startling similarity to the contraption sat on the surface of the
moon before him now, although Wotan could not fully understand how,
after so many long years, it could still be operational.
Checking
the current position of the vehicle against the maps held at the base
and triangulating the original source of the signal, he discovered that
it had originated somewhere just at the lip of the darkside. The book
explained that in order to minimise weight, the majority of the power
onboard these early probes was derived from solar panels and the large
mirrored dish was in fact a single solar array. If the probe had
accidentally wandered off course and landed near the darkside, sunlight
would be in very short supply and the vehicle would have become
stranded. Somehow though, after decades of inactivity in the lunar cold
and shadow, the probe had juddered into waking life and the dish
covering the main body of the vehicle had sprung open, catching the wan
light of the distant sun and the battery had been able to gather enough
charge to operate the onboard systems.
Now
the Moonwalker sat on top of a lonely hill, its computers desperately
searching for a home long gone, its signals crying fitfully across the
void in search of commands from a country now dissipated, a base lost in
history. Watching the insectile craft waving its antenna like a
confused beetle and hearing the discordant strains of its electronic
calls crackling from the voder, Wotan felt a tinge of sadness. Its
makers and commanders would now be less than dust back on earth, its
mission a little known memory and its purpose now redundant. Suddenly,
the sound of its frantic searching ceased and the image on screen became
still. For long seconds, silence reigned once more and Wotan became
aware that he was holding his breath - the sound of the moonwalkers
chatter now conspicuously absent.
Without
warning the screen flared brilliant white like a magnesium torch and it
took a fraction of a second before a filter kicked in to reduce the
glare before the brightness burned out the receptors. Automatically,
Wotan had thrown up a hand to his eyes to shield them - he had seen
enough explosions and ignitions to know what the blast of light
signified.
The moonwalker had
gone. As the screen cleared, a cloud of dust hung in the image, silent
and ghostly. Whether the sudden influx of light and power had been too
much for the ancient systems he would never know. Perhaps the vehicle
had been fitted with a device to preserve its secrets after its mission
was over or perhaps the moonwalker had looked to Earth for instructions
and found none - after so much time had passed the falcon could no
longer hear the falconer and things had at last, come apart.
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