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RogerDodger
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High Above
Patrick had always wanted to become an astronaut.
Maybe it was the way its room was oriented, back in the years when he was still sleeping in his cot. The picture window opening on a wide expanse of land, with nothing up to the horizon but a golden ocean of wheat stalks that bent and purred when the wind amorously stroked them, those gorgeous sunsets that seemed to last for an eternity, and those tiny twinkling specks that lit up in the darkening sky as if to celebrate the daily capsizing of the sun.
Each night, he would close his eyes lulled by the tender crooning of the stars.
Or maybe a few years later, in the quad of the elementary school during the morning recesses, when he would sit alone on a bench, looking absentmindedly at the other boys playing with that round ball painted in black and white. What was that ball for them, he reflected, but an object of fun, something you would kick around as hard as you could, while for him its shape was already a promise, a promise as plump and ripe as the other planets he had read about in the yellowed, dog-eared astronomy book his father has—purely by chance—salvaged from his short stint in middle-school.
While the other boys’ thoughts were locked on the ground, his were soaring high above where no birds fly.
So he began to devour books about every corner of the human knowledge: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. Nothing escaped his greed. The librarian of the small town, to his own wonder, soon had to subscribe to a special program in order to borrow advanced books only available at the bigger libraries of the capital city. None of those volumes were so precious to Patrick’s eyes than those who painted with vivid description and colourful images the marvels that roved the night, bordering on the infinite where his bold imagination would lead him in fancy adventures: Monday he was climbing Mars’s Mount Olympus, the highest known volcano in the whole universe; Tuesday he spent exploring the icy moons of Jupiter; Wednesday landing his ship on the gauzy rings of Saturn; Thursday bathing in the chilly methane ocean of Neptune; Friday playing with the marbles that dwell in the gloom at the outer rim of our Solar system. And during the weekend, the galaxy was but a tiny splotch in the abyss through which his spacecraft darted.
The sky’s not the limit, he would told himself. No, the sky’s only a springboard. A starting point.
He had no real friends. Who could possibly cozy up to such a drip, whose eyes were constantly trained at the horizon rather than at the tawdry baubles or the latest trainers that were all the rage? And it did not matter if his older brother’s friends would snub him when they dropped by during the sunny Spring afternoons. He would hear the harsh laughs and the echoes of their horseplay while pondering on a puzzling concept, or the whisper of their slurs as they clomped by the doorframe of his room, bathed in sweat and grime. Of course, somewhere deep inside him there was a yearning, like an invisible wound that tingled and burnt. But he had learnt to ignore it, or at least deal with it until the passing hours took the edge off, and he could eventually brush off the scab pretending he had never been hurt in the first place. Only at night he would gnash his teeth and softly curse in his dreams those who had decided once and for all that he had to be an outcast.
Mud caked their soles, while his shoes, like those of the antique God Hermes, had wings stitched on them.
His parents also had trouble understanding him. Farmers of Irish stock, their fields and cattle were all they could ever grasp. Their life was regulated by the seasons, and only in winter did they have time to inquire about the outside world and glance briefly at the remote and often incomprehensible images that flickered on the television set. The moon represented for them a white and wise adviser whose phases guided their everyday chores, from the planting of the seeds in early Spring down to the Autumn harvesting. The other planets and the stars they disdained altogether, as the gnarled hand can disdain the exquisite carvings that decorate the haft of the knife. So they regarded their younger son with a mix of wonder and disappointment, for they had no idea how such a prodigy—egghead, highbrow, wonk, as the other children named him—could one day be helpful to them. Farmers since the dawn of time, all they could envision as a future for their own children was to take over when the spooky figure with its long scythe would finally come to claim their lives and they would rest at last in the entrails of the soil that had nurtured them all those years.
Their universe was hemmed in by the stakes that marked the limits of their property.
Years went by, and Patrick was always ahead of his class. His grades in science were stellar, and it often turned out that his personal knowledge outstripped that of his teachers. His life had not changed: at the age of thirteen, when the other boys began to look up from their feet to peek at the bust of the girls, his thoughts were still lost in the meanders of space and the mazes of arcane mathematics. He had grown rather cute, slender with dark hair and keen green eyes, a snub-nose and cheeks spattered with freckles. Even though his readings had not protected him from the zits, more than once a girl in the quad gave him the eye and sometimes he felt butterflies in his stomach, like a vague emptiness that craved to be filled. His voyages in biology had seldom led him to the shady realm of sexual physiology, but the few that he had read had aroused disgust more than curiosity. Even the idea of a true, French kiss he had associated with muck and gunk rather than love and lust.
His betrothed, he knew, was not anyone the Earth had ever borne.
During the weekends he would often escape to the village and give a hand to the old Simon, the owner of the grocery shop, bargaining a few hours of crate lugging and shelf marshalling against a handful of dollars that he would collect in a secret piggy bank. When he had hoarded enough money, he would beseech the bookseller to order him books even the libraries in that fabulous capital city he only knew the name did not own. And thus, every so often, the mailman would deliver parcels full of strange texts, whose covers sometimes were simply plain and drab, sometimes daubed with arabesques and cusps that hinted at a higher reality, forever out of reach of simple, matter-of-fact minds. As to what lay inside, despite they were written in English, even simple sentences would befuddle anyone that dared look over.
Anyone around but him.
When the time was ripe to enter high school, the mayor came personally to visit his parents. Patrick, he explained, had reached such a level that it was folly to send him to the nearest high. Everyone of his teachers had agreed that he should be sent to a special private establishment where pedagogy befitted young geniuses like him. The boy, they added, had the potential to become a leading figure in science, but only if he was given proper care and a suitable environment for him to bloom. The nitty-gritty, however, was that the school’s headquarters were set in an outskirt of the capital city, and it was a private institution. That meant that not only Patrick would have to leave home, but his parents would also have to pay an astronomical tuition for his education, which would obviously extend way beyond to college and maybe further still.
But, the mayor added, the municipality was willing to aid. It was a unique opportunity for their small village to have its heyday. How could Patrick’s family turn such a chance down?
Thus, at the end of the summer, Patrick prepared his bindle. He carefully culled all the stuff he deemed the most precious—space in his new premises would be severely cramped—and discarded the useless cruft: old notebooks, introductory tomes, dusted toys he seldom had played with. A few pictures of his childhood he elected to take, as if total severance from home would be a burden too heavy to bear. He felt elated, however, as if he was moulting an old skin, like a caterpillar which sheds its worn-out, pedestrian shreds to slip into its airy butterfly attire.
His real life had only begun.
His new school was all he had ever dreamt of: his room was small but snug, the library was a treasure trove, the teachers were the most competent people he had ever met, and his classmates were of the same ilk than him: he could interact with them, and they understood one another when they evoked the wonders that hide beyond the involved formulae he routinely scribbled on his notebooks. Recesses were fun at last, and, for the first time, he had to own up to feeling a real attraction for a redhead, bespectacled peach of his class, admitting reluctantly to himself that there was more to life than rockets and heavenly bodies, and that maybe necking was not such a repugnant pastime whatsoever.
It was another sort of heaven, but, despite he was utterly unprepared for it, perhaps it was worth exploring it, too.
When vacations chimed, he would move back to his old home, where his parents and his brother would welcome him as much as they could, given the necessities of the farm. Soon he found that seeing his folks only every now and then, he was able to pick up on changes that before were lost in the flow of days. His parents he found more tired and humped each time, as if weariness and the weight of years became increasingly difficult to withstand; his brother, who had chosen to stay home and help, he witnessed age at a surprising pace: at eighteen, his face had already arrayed itself in subtle wrinkles, and his hands had slipped into the brawn and calloused gloves that betoken Earth’s servants. And despite he was deeply indebted to them, since they had accepted his transfer to that outstanding school, he also found increasingly difficult to connect with them: while his former life implied everyday contact and at least partial involvement in farm matters, now that fate had put hundreds of miles between him and them, he did not feel this obligation any more, and most of his vacation he spent in his room evoking past memories or roaming in the fields in search of solitude.
This had always been his home, he reflected, but he was now feeling a stranger in these parts.
And so his visits gradually became infrequent. His holidays he either enjoyed staying in his tiny room in town, when he could, sharing his time between reading and computer programming, when he was not browsing the web in search of the latests breakthroughs in physics or astronomy. But, more and more regularly, he was invited by one of his classmates and spent some days away with whoever was generous enough to welcome him. Only during the extended summer break he felt compelled to turn back home: however aloft his mind was, there was a part of it that stubbornly stuck to the ground and forced him to return where he had been reared. He yearned for those evening meals, when nothing broke the silence but the spluttering of touchwood in the fireplace and the hard, tedious chewing of gristly meat, all faces hunched over the plates, until his father would put his knife and fork back on to the table and look up straight in Patrick’s eyes, vainly trying to decipher what sort of strange mind lurked beyond those pupils.
Patrick needed to fall down, take his breath, summon back all his strength to be able to jump farther up.
He was in his eighteenth year when both his parents died in succession, his father first, then his mother one month later. The burials were straightforward, as seems fit for simple people that had never really ventured outside their few acres of land. Blessed are the meek, recalled the priest, for they shall inherit the Earth. And, added Patrick in thought, blessed are the scholars, for theirs is heaven. When church was over, almost all the inhabitants of the village filed by the grave, each one throwing his handful of mould on the coffin with a soft incantation. Patrick and his brother thanked them warmly in turn, and watched them dawdle away under the leaden sky. When everyone had left the cemetery but the birds and the squirrels, the two brothers hugged each other, and it was time for tears to flow. And when they parted after a last embrace, Patrick knew he would never see this place again.
For good or for evil, his childhood was over.
His graduation was a breeze. The mayor of his native village found a charitable organisation for gifted orphans that accepted to fund his studies further, and he moved several miles downtown to attend one of the best college of his state. There he chose to specialise in physics, but he always stayed true to his child’s dream: leave this Earth and sail through the void. Within physics, he took cosmology as his major, and pulled out all the stops to land internships at the nearby space agency laboratory, in the hope he would get picked out. And, indeed, two of his tutors recommended him to apply to the space agency school for astronautics, once he would get his M. Sc. The school, they said, was eager to enrol young gifted scientists like him, and they whispered of a brand new spaceship and a pioneering mission to the outer planets that would require highly skilled people such as him, if he could make it on time. The outer planets… maybe a swingby round Jupiter while en route for Saturn, then back to Earth. His imagination run wild.
But his decision was firmer than ever.
Unsurprisingly, once his diploma in advanced physics and general relativity secured, topped with a warm recommandation from his college, his application was immediately accepted, and he was enrolled as a space academy cadet. During the first months he had to abandon pen, books and computer for a highly intensive physical training: out there in space, mind was important, but the body also had to be up to snuff. It was highly demanding, and often his days would shut down around nine PM, right after dinner, when he would flop down on to his bed and fall asleep almost immediately. One night, just before turning in, he thought of his brother and his parents, and he wondered if they too had experienced the same exhaustion he was routinely feeling. He had always taken them to be simpletons; what if they simply were too tuckered to think?
He went into the land of Nod before finding the answer.
Patrick quickly became one of the golden boy of the academy. He was dashing, affable, and showed an eagerness to learn that was hardly matched by any of the other cadets of his year. Had he wanted, he could have picked up a girl a night, but, albeit he had sloughed off his shyness and was now as flirty as any other “normal” boy of his age, his thoughts were always elsewhere. He had now—under the seal of secrecy—been officially told of the secret project his former internship managers had only hinted at: a return trip to Neptune, with stops at Jupiter and Saturn. The main goals of the expedition were triple: first, evaluate a new ionic propulsion system capable of collecting and using the Solar wind; second, gather precise data on the planets visited; third, evaluate how humans would behave in a confined space during a trip that would last about five years. Crew of fifteen, with exactly two seats for cadets of his age.
One of those was his. It had to be.
The year passed like a dream, and it seemed to him that his lucky star was shining at its brightest. In the academy, he never graded under A. One Saturday night, he bumped into a blond cutie with whom he hooked up almost instantly. She was an undergraduate in literature at the local university, and while he opened up to her about his life and his dream, she introduced him to the wonders of the written words, showing him that there was more to his language than factual sentences and long, tedious explanations about mathematical equations. At the same time, he stroke up a friendship with one of his instructors, a former astronaut from the time when orbital stations were the new frontier and lunar flights just a flash in the pan of a bygone cold war. Together, they would spend many an evening, dining at some swanky downtown restaurant, drinking in private clubs, or simply bantering at each other’s place, Patrick confessing the hardships and frustrations of his childhood, and his instructor relating tales of a past century when man still dabbled in astronautics and the moon was almost a virgin.
Often, after they had parted late in the wee hours, Patrick wondered if he had found his true father, eventually.
The long awaited day arrived, in the middle of which the names of the chosen ones were to be publicly known. All the cadets gathered in the cafeteria in front of the computer monitor. When noon struck, two names appeared on the screen.
His wasn’t part of them.
He rushed to the administrator’s office and asked to see his file. Feverishly, he flicked through the sheets, until he found was he was looking for. On his application report, every one of his instructors had given him the green light. Every one but one, who had cast doubts on his ability to follow orders and put up with superior officers that he would consider inferior in skill to himself. A major liability for this kind of mission, the instructor has pointed out. And to cap it all, the conclusion was that he was not mature enough. It was like a thwack in the face. Patrick closed his file face ashen and tears in his eyes. He knew this opportunity was unique. For want of budget, there would be no other flight to the borders of the Solar system, at least none in the next thirty years. By then, he would be unfit to apply again.
But it was not that realisation that was hurting him the most. No. What hurt deep inside was that the instructor who had sealed his fate was none other than he whom he regarded as his foster father.
A chilly northern wind had descended on the already cold winter’s night, carrying in its gusts flurries of snowflakes whose erratic paths cast flickering shadows under the eldritch shafts of sodium lamplight. Swaddled in a trench coat, Patrick, almost invisible in the murk, slouched against the bole of a big lime tree, patiently waiting for the right shape to appear in the doorframe of the dull breeze-block building standing across the street.
Two hours after his arrival, he was finally rewarded. He jumped outside the gloom on to the pavement and hailed the indistinct figure that had already reached the foot of the stoop. “Professor Rawls!”
The other man stopped and turned around, curious to know who had called his name. He spotted the young astronaut in the middle of the road. “Ah, Patrick! I’d lie if I’d say I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Can we talk for a while?” Patrick asked, joining his instructor on the sidewalk.
“Of course. Why don’t we walk down to the Viva bar and have a tequila? I’m sure you’ve a lot to tell me about.”
Not waiting for an answer, the professor resumed walking, and Patrick followed suit. For a short while, they both trod silently, neck and neck, their soles crunching on the thin layer of snow.
“Why?” Patrick finally asked in a whisper.
There was a long pause. “You read it,” the professor answered, “didn’t you?”
“I don’t understand.”
The professor sighed. “Son,” he said, and he wrapped his arm around Patrick’s shoulders, “I know the bloke they’ve picked up for captaincy, that Franck Simmons. The guy for sure knows how to command a crew, he has a knack for that kind of thing. And he has the guts for the job. But he’s also stuck-up, and want everyone to obey his orders to the letter at the double, even the silliest ones, even if he’s obviously wrong. On the other hand, I know how you are, son. Ready to obey as long as you deem the orders justified, but also ready to question them when you find them arbitrary. You two wouldn’t get along more than a few hours. And we talk about five years, and no possible escape.”
“I would adapt, I’m a grown-up.”
The professor smiled. “I don’t think you would. Maybe you would indeed swallow a few bitter pills, but the pressure would build up inside you and eventually it would burst off and cause a major incident that could ruin your career and jeopardise the mission. I can’t allow that to happen, for your own good. I know this is a huge letdown for you, but, believe me, son, having you board this craft was the worst present one could’ve given you.”
Patrick did not answer, and both proceeded in silence, until he suddenly halted. The professor took a few steps ahead before stopping in turn and pivoting to face him.
“Still, you had no right to decide for me,” Patrick said so softly it was barely audible. His right hand popped out of his pocket, clasping something that flashed under the lamplight. The professor squinted to identify the object and his face abruptly crumpled.
“No, you had no right,” Patrick repeated.
He didn’t feel his finger pressing the trigger, nor did he perceive the bang as the bullet darted out of the barrel. The professor jerked, doubled up, and collapsed on to the ground. The snow around his body began to redden.
High above, in a crack between two dark clouds, Mars’s crimson eye was glowing.
They built the gallows a few miles off the space terminal. Patrick’s lawyer had spent every possible application or appeal, and all he had scraped was the right to choose the exact date of the hanging. Patrick had picked the very day the rocket would be launched, at the exact time of the ignition. And thus, when he climbed on to the scaffold and the noose was slipped around his neck, his gaze remained trained at the spindly shape of metal he should have boarded on, if destiny and an old, prissy instructor hadn’t decided otherwise.
One minute before T-time, white vapours enveloped the rocket amidst the thunderous rumble of the engines. A few seconds later, roaring flames burst from the ground, and the mighty machine began to fight its slow ascent towards the zenith. At that very moment, Patrick’s feet lost contact with the ground, and he fell a few inches down.
He couldn’t care less. He would reach Heaven well before them.
Maybe it was the way its room was oriented, back in the years when he was still sleeping in his cot. The picture window opening on a wide expanse of land, with nothing up to the horizon but a golden ocean of wheat stalks that bent and purred when the wind amorously stroked them, those gorgeous sunsets that seemed to last for an eternity, and those tiny twinkling specks that lit up in the darkening sky as if to celebrate the daily capsizing of the sun.
Each night, he would close his eyes lulled by the tender crooning of the stars.
Or maybe a few years later, in the quad of the elementary school during the morning recesses, when he would sit alone on a bench, looking absentmindedly at the other boys playing with that round ball painted in black and white. What was that ball for them, he reflected, but an object of fun, something you would kick around as hard as you could, while for him its shape was already a promise, a promise as plump and ripe as the other planets he had read about in the yellowed, dog-eared astronomy book his father has—purely by chance—salvaged from his short stint in middle-school.
While the other boys’ thoughts were locked on the ground, his were soaring high above where no birds fly.
So he began to devour books about every corner of the human knowledge: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. Nothing escaped his greed. The librarian of the small town, to his own wonder, soon had to subscribe to a special program in order to borrow advanced books only available at the bigger libraries of the capital city. None of those volumes were so precious to Patrick’s eyes than those who painted with vivid description and colourful images the marvels that roved the night, bordering on the infinite where his bold imagination would lead him in fancy adventures: Monday he was climbing Mars’s Mount Olympus, the highest known volcano in the whole universe; Tuesday he spent exploring the icy moons of Jupiter; Wednesday landing his ship on the gauzy rings of Saturn; Thursday bathing in the chilly methane ocean of Neptune; Friday playing with the marbles that dwell in the gloom at the outer rim of our Solar system. And during the weekend, the galaxy was but a tiny splotch in the abyss through which his spacecraft darted.
The sky’s not the limit, he would told himself. No, the sky’s only a springboard. A starting point.
He had no real friends. Who could possibly cozy up to such a drip, whose eyes were constantly trained at the horizon rather than at the tawdry baubles or the latest trainers that were all the rage? And it did not matter if his older brother’s friends would snub him when they dropped by during the sunny Spring afternoons. He would hear the harsh laughs and the echoes of their horseplay while pondering on a puzzling concept, or the whisper of their slurs as they clomped by the doorframe of his room, bathed in sweat and grime. Of course, somewhere deep inside him there was a yearning, like an invisible wound that tingled and burnt. But he had learnt to ignore it, or at least deal with it until the passing hours took the edge off, and he could eventually brush off the scab pretending he had never been hurt in the first place. Only at night he would gnash his teeth and softly curse in his dreams those who had decided once and for all that he had to be an outcast.
Mud caked their soles, while his shoes, like those of the antique God Hermes, had wings stitched on them.
His parents also had trouble understanding him. Farmers of Irish stock, their fields and cattle were all they could ever grasp. Their life was regulated by the seasons, and only in winter did they have time to inquire about the outside world and glance briefly at the remote and often incomprehensible images that flickered on the television set. The moon represented for them a white and wise adviser whose phases guided their everyday chores, from the planting of the seeds in early Spring down to the Autumn harvesting. The other planets and the stars they disdained altogether, as the gnarled hand can disdain the exquisite carvings that decorate the haft of the knife. So they regarded their younger son with a mix of wonder and disappointment, for they had no idea how such a prodigy—egghead, highbrow, wonk, as the other children named him—could one day be helpful to them. Farmers since the dawn of time, all they could envision as a future for their own children was to take over when the spooky figure with its long scythe would finally come to claim their lives and they would rest at last in the entrails of the soil that had nurtured them all those years.
Their universe was hemmed in by the stakes that marked the limits of their property.
Years went by, and Patrick was always ahead of his class. His grades in science were stellar, and it often turned out that his personal knowledge outstripped that of his teachers. His life had not changed: at the age of thirteen, when the other boys began to look up from their feet to peek at the bust of the girls, his thoughts were still lost in the meanders of space and the mazes of arcane mathematics. He had grown rather cute, slender with dark hair and keen green eyes, a snub-nose and cheeks spattered with freckles. Even though his readings had not protected him from the zits, more than once a girl in the quad gave him the eye and sometimes he felt butterflies in his stomach, like a vague emptiness that craved to be filled. His voyages in biology had seldom led him to the shady realm of sexual physiology, but the few that he had read had aroused disgust more than curiosity. Even the idea of a true, French kiss he had associated with muck and gunk rather than love and lust.
His betrothed, he knew, was not anyone the Earth had ever borne.
During the weekends he would often escape to the village and give a hand to the old Simon, the owner of the grocery shop, bargaining a few hours of crate lugging and shelf marshalling against a handful of dollars that he would collect in a secret piggy bank. When he had hoarded enough money, he would beseech the bookseller to order him books even the libraries in that fabulous capital city he only knew the name did not own. And thus, every so often, the mailman would deliver parcels full of strange texts, whose covers sometimes were simply plain and drab, sometimes daubed with arabesques and cusps that hinted at a higher reality, forever out of reach of simple, matter-of-fact minds. As to what lay inside, despite they were written in English, even simple sentences would befuddle anyone that dared look over.
Anyone around but him.
When the time was ripe to enter high school, the mayor came personally to visit his parents. Patrick, he explained, had reached such a level that it was folly to send him to the nearest high. Everyone of his teachers had agreed that he should be sent to a special private establishment where pedagogy befitted young geniuses like him. The boy, they added, had the potential to become a leading figure in science, but only if he was given proper care and a suitable environment for him to bloom. The nitty-gritty, however, was that the school’s headquarters were set in an outskirt of the capital city, and it was a private institution. That meant that not only Patrick would have to leave home, but his parents would also have to pay an astronomical tuition for his education, which would obviously extend way beyond to college and maybe further still.
But, the mayor added, the municipality was willing to aid. It was a unique opportunity for their small village to have its heyday. How could Patrick’s family turn such a chance down?
Thus, at the end of the summer, Patrick prepared his bindle. He carefully culled all the stuff he deemed the most precious—space in his new premises would be severely cramped—and discarded the useless cruft: old notebooks, introductory tomes, dusted toys he seldom had played with. A few pictures of his childhood he elected to take, as if total severance from home would be a burden too heavy to bear. He felt elated, however, as if he was moulting an old skin, like a caterpillar which sheds its worn-out, pedestrian shreds to slip into its airy butterfly attire.
His real life had only begun.
His new school was all he had ever dreamt of: his room was small but snug, the library was a treasure trove, the teachers were the most competent people he had ever met, and his classmates were of the same ilk than him: he could interact with them, and they understood one another when they evoked the wonders that hide beyond the involved formulae he routinely scribbled on his notebooks. Recesses were fun at last, and, for the first time, he had to own up to feeling a real attraction for a redhead, bespectacled peach of his class, admitting reluctantly to himself that there was more to life than rockets and heavenly bodies, and that maybe necking was not such a repugnant pastime whatsoever.
It was another sort of heaven, but, despite he was utterly unprepared for it, perhaps it was worth exploring it, too.
When vacations chimed, he would move back to his old home, where his parents and his brother would welcome him as much as they could, given the necessities of the farm. Soon he found that seeing his folks only every now and then, he was able to pick up on changes that before were lost in the flow of days. His parents he found more tired and humped each time, as if weariness and the weight of years became increasingly difficult to withstand; his brother, who had chosen to stay home and help, he witnessed age at a surprising pace: at eighteen, his face had already arrayed itself in subtle wrinkles, and his hands had slipped into the brawn and calloused gloves that betoken Earth’s servants. And despite he was deeply indebted to them, since they had accepted his transfer to that outstanding school, he also found increasingly difficult to connect with them: while his former life implied everyday contact and at least partial involvement in farm matters, now that fate had put hundreds of miles between him and them, he did not feel this obligation any more, and most of his vacation he spent in his room evoking past memories or roaming in the fields in search of solitude.
This had always been his home, he reflected, but he was now feeling a stranger in these parts.
And so his visits gradually became infrequent. His holidays he either enjoyed staying in his tiny room in town, when he could, sharing his time between reading and computer programming, when he was not browsing the web in search of the latests breakthroughs in physics or astronomy. But, more and more regularly, he was invited by one of his classmates and spent some days away with whoever was generous enough to welcome him. Only during the extended summer break he felt compelled to turn back home: however aloft his mind was, there was a part of it that stubbornly stuck to the ground and forced him to return where he had been reared. He yearned for those evening meals, when nothing broke the silence but the spluttering of touchwood in the fireplace and the hard, tedious chewing of gristly meat, all faces hunched over the plates, until his father would put his knife and fork back on to the table and look up straight in Patrick’s eyes, vainly trying to decipher what sort of strange mind lurked beyond those pupils.
Patrick needed to fall down, take his breath, summon back all his strength to be able to jump farther up.
He was in his eighteenth year when both his parents died in succession, his father first, then his mother one month later. The burials were straightforward, as seems fit for simple people that had never really ventured outside their few acres of land. Blessed are the meek, recalled the priest, for they shall inherit the Earth. And, added Patrick in thought, blessed are the scholars, for theirs is heaven. When church was over, almost all the inhabitants of the village filed by the grave, each one throwing his handful of mould on the coffin with a soft incantation. Patrick and his brother thanked them warmly in turn, and watched them dawdle away under the leaden sky. When everyone had left the cemetery but the birds and the squirrels, the two brothers hugged each other, and it was time for tears to flow. And when they parted after a last embrace, Patrick knew he would never see this place again.
For good or for evil, his childhood was over.
His graduation was a breeze. The mayor of his native village found a charitable organisation for gifted orphans that accepted to fund his studies further, and he moved several miles downtown to attend one of the best college of his state. There he chose to specialise in physics, but he always stayed true to his child’s dream: leave this Earth and sail through the void. Within physics, he took cosmology as his major, and pulled out all the stops to land internships at the nearby space agency laboratory, in the hope he would get picked out. And, indeed, two of his tutors recommended him to apply to the space agency school for astronautics, once he would get his M. Sc. The school, they said, was eager to enrol young gifted scientists like him, and they whispered of a brand new spaceship and a pioneering mission to the outer planets that would require highly skilled people such as him, if he could make it on time. The outer planets… maybe a swingby round Jupiter while en route for Saturn, then back to Earth. His imagination run wild.
But his decision was firmer than ever.
Unsurprisingly, once his diploma in advanced physics and general relativity secured, topped with a warm recommandation from his college, his application was immediately accepted, and he was enrolled as a space academy cadet. During the first months he had to abandon pen, books and computer for a highly intensive physical training: out there in space, mind was important, but the body also had to be up to snuff. It was highly demanding, and often his days would shut down around nine PM, right after dinner, when he would flop down on to his bed and fall asleep almost immediately. One night, just before turning in, he thought of his brother and his parents, and he wondered if they too had experienced the same exhaustion he was routinely feeling. He had always taken them to be simpletons; what if they simply were too tuckered to think?
He went into the land of Nod before finding the answer.
Patrick quickly became one of the golden boy of the academy. He was dashing, affable, and showed an eagerness to learn that was hardly matched by any of the other cadets of his year. Had he wanted, he could have picked up a girl a night, but, albeit he had sloughed off his shyness and was now as flirty as any other “normal” boy of his age, his thoughts were always elsewhere. He had now—under the seal of secrecy—been officially told of the secret project his former internship managers had only hinted at: a return trip to Neptune, with stops at Jupiter and Saturn. The main goals of the expedition were triple: first, evaluate a new ionic propulsion system capable of collecting and using the Solar wind; second, gather precise data on the planets visited; third, evaluate how humans would behave in a confined space during a trip that would last about five years. Crew of fifteen, with exactly two seats for cadets of his age.
One of those was his. It had to be.
The year passed like a dream, and it seemed to him that his lucky star was shining at its brightest. In the academy, he never graded under A. One Saturday night, he bumped into a blond cutie with whom he hooked up almost instantly. She was an undergraduate in literature at the local university, and while he opened up to her about his life and his dream, she introduced him to the wonders of the written words, showing him that there was more to his language than factual sentences and long, tedious explanations about mathematical equations. At the same time, he stroke up a friendship with one of his instructors, a former astronaut from the time when orbital stations were the new frontier and lunar flights just a flash in the pan of a bygone cold war. Together, they would spend many an evening, dining at some swanky downtown restaurant, drinking in private clubs, or simply bantering at each other’s place, Patrick confessing the hardships and frustrations of his childhood, and his instructor relating tales of a past century when man still dabbled in astronautics and the moon was almost a virgin.
Often, after they had parted late in the wee hours, Patrick wondered if he had found his true father, eventually.
The long awaited day arrived, in the middle of which the names of the chosen ones were to be publicly known. All the cadets gathered in the cafeteria in front of the computer monitor. When noon struck, two names appeared on the screen.
His wasn’t part of them.
He rushed to the administrator’s office and asked to see his file. Feverishly, he flicked through the sheets, until he found was he was looking for. On his application report, every one of his instructors had given him the green light. Every one but one, who had cast doubts on his ability to follow orders and put up with superior officers that he would consider inferior in skill to himself. A major liability for this kind of mission, the instructor has pointed out. And to cap it all, the conclusion was that he was not mature enough. It was like a thwack in the face. Patrick closed his file face ashen and tears in his eyes. He knew this opportunity was unique. For want of budget, there would be no other flight to the borders of the Solar system, at least none in the next thirty years. By then, he would be unfit to apply again.
But it was not that realisation that was hurting him the most. No. What hurt deep inside was that the instructor who had sealed his fate was none other than he whom he regarded as his foster father.
A chilly northern wind had descended on the already cold winter’s night, carrying in its gusts flurries of snowflakes whose erratic paths cast flickering shadows under the eldritch shafts of sodium lamplight. Swaddled in a trench coat, Patrick, almost invisible in the murk, slouched against the bole of a big lime tree, patiently waiting for the right shape to appear in the doorframe of the dull breeze-block building standing across the street.
Two hours after his arrival, he was finally rewarded. He jumped outside the gloom on to the pavement and hailed the indistinct figure that had already reached the foot of the stoop. “Professor Rawls!”
The other man stopped and turned around, curious to know who had called his name. He spotted the young astronaut in the middle of the road. “Ah, Patrick! I’d lie if I’d say I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Can we talk for a while?” Patrick asked, joining his instructor on the sidewalk.
“Of course. Why don’t we walk down to the Viva bar and have a tequila? I’m sure you’ve a lot to tell me about.”
Not waiting for an answer, the professor resumed walking, and Patrick followed suit. For a short while, they both trod silently, neck and neck, their soles crunching on the thin layer of snow.
“Why?” Patrick finally asked in a whisper.
There was a long pause. “You read it,” the professor answered, “didn’t you?”
“I don’t understand.”
The professor sighed. “Son,” he said, and he wrapped his arm around Patrick’s shoulders, “I know the bloke they’ve picked up for captaincy, that Franck Simmons. The guy for sure knows how to command a crew, he has a knack for that kind of thing. And he has the guts for the job. But he’s also stuck-up, and want everyone to obey his orders to the letter at the double, even the silliest ones, even if he’s obviously wrong. On the other hand, I know how you are, son. Ready to obey as long as you deem the orders justified, but also ready to question them when you find them arbitrary. You two wouldn’t get along more than a few hours. And we talk about five years, and no possible escape.”
“I would adapt, I’m a grown-up.”
The professor smiled. “I don’t think you would. Maybe you would indeed swallow a few bitter pills, but the pressure would build up inside you and eventually it would burst off and cause a major incident that could ruin your career and jeopardise the mission. I can’t allow that to happen, for your own good. I know this is a huge letdown for you, but, believe me, son, having you board this craft was the worst present one could’ve given you.”
Patrick did not answer, and both proceeded in silence, until he suddenly halted. The professor took a few steps ahead before stopping in turn and pivoting to face him.
“Still, you had no right to decide for me,” Patrick said so softly it was barely audible. His right hand popped out of his pocket, clasping something that flashed under the lamplight. The professor squinted to identify the object and his face abruptly crumpled.
“No, you had no right,” Patrick repeated.
He didn’t feel his finger pressing the trigger, nor did he perceive the bang as the bullet darted out of the barrel. The professor jerked, doubled up, and collapsed on to the ground. The snow around his body began to redden.
High above, in a crack between two dark clouds, Mars’s crimson eye was glowing.
They built the gallows a few miles off the space terminal. Patrick’s lawyer had spent every possible application or appeal, and all he had scraped was the right to choose the exact date of the hanging. Patrick had picked the very day the rocket would be launched, at the exact time of the ignition. And thus, when he climbed on to the scaffold and the noose was slipped around his neck, his gaze remained trained at the spindly shape of metal he should have boarded on, if destiny and an old, prissy instructor hadn’t decided otherwise.
One minute before T-time, white vapours enveloped the rocket amidst the thunderous rumble of the engines. A few seconds later, roaring flames burst from the ground, and the mighty machine began to fight its slow ascent towards the zenith. At that very moment, Patrick’s feet lost contact with the ground, and he fell a few inches down.
He couldn’t care less. He would reach Heaven well before them.