The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  ‘Asteroids are great big boulders in space,’ I said. ‘The Millennium Falcon had to fly through a whole field of them to get away from Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer.’

  Dr Weir nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, that’s right. But that was in a galaxy far, far away. In our solar system, most of the asteroids – and there are millions and millions of them – orbit the Sun in a wide belt between Mars and Jupiter.’

  At this point, Dr Weir drew me a detailed diagram showing the Sun, the planets and the Asteroid Belt. It wasn’t to scale, she said, but it was accurate enough for our purposes.

  ‘Now, Alex. Usually these asteroids don’t get anywhere near the Earth, as you can see. But occasionally, they get thrown out of their regular, stable orbits. Sometimes they collide like snooker balls, and sometimes they get captured by Jupiter’s enormous gravity and then launched on a whole new path round the Sun. As you probably know, Jupiter is extremely massive and has a very powerful gravitational field. Some of these captured asteroids will eventually impact with Jupiter, and some are thrown so far that they leave the solar system entirely. And some – a tiny, tiny percentage – become meteoroids. That is, they’re hurled onto an orbit that puts them on a direct collision course with the Earth.’

  Dr Weir drew on her diagram a little dotted line representing the hypothetical path of a disrupted asteroid crossing the Earth’s orbit. I thought that this was something my mother would have enjoyed looking at. She often talked about how the movements of the planets could affect events on Earth, but she’d never really explained how that worked. Dr Weir explained it much better.

  ‘Anyway,’ Dr Weir continued, ‘most of the asteroids that collide with the Earth are very tiny and are vaporized high in the upper atmosphere. But a few – like yours – are big enough and dense enough to make it all the way to the ground without vaporizing. And an even smaller number are so big and heavy that they’re hardly even slowed down by the atmosphere. They leave craters and create huge, incredibly destructive explosions. Most scientists agree that it was probably a meteor originating in the Asteroid Belt that killed all the dinosaurs.’

  I looked at the orange-sized meteorite in my hands. ‘I’m not sure that one meteor could have killed all the dinosaurs,’ I said sceptically.

  Then Dr Weir talked for a very long time about how the meteor that probably killed all the dinosaurs was much, much bigger than mine – probably at least ten miles wide – and how a meteor that big would have caused waves as high as mountains and then acid rain and forest fires and a cloud of dust that would have circled the entire planet and blocked out most of the sunlight for the next several years. There wasn’t any meteorite left from that meteor because it had exploded with the force of one hundred billion megatons of TNT, but there was a huge sixty-five-million-year-old impact crater under the sea near Mexico. There was also a suspiciously high amount of iridium-193 in the sixty-five-million-year-old rock samples. Iridium-193 was one of the two stable isotopes of iridium, and it was extremely rare on Earth but much more abundant in meteoroids. An isotope was something to do with atomic mass and extremely tiny particles called neutrons, but that was somewhat harder to grasp, and Dr Weir told me that it wasn’t necessary for me to understand all the subtleties right there and then. The main point, she said, was that finding all that iridium-193 in the sixty-five-million-year-old rocks was like finding a smoking gun.

  I thought about all this information for a long, long time.

  ‘Dr Weir?’ I asked. ‘Did they find any iridium-193 in my head? You know, after they took the swabs? Because that would be a smoking gun too, wouldn’t it?’

  Dr Weir was delighted with this question. She told me it was exactly the sort of question a scientist would ask. And the answer was yes: the swabs had been analysed using all sorts of special chemical tests, and this had confirmed the presence of a number of meteorite metals, including iron, nickel, cobalt and lots of iridium-193. Not enough to build a spark plug, she said, but still lots by normal, earthly standards. And this meant that it was 99.999 per cent certain that my skull had been struck directly by the meteorite fragment, and not merely by falling masonry, as the ambulance man had suggested. That made me only the second person in recorded history to have been significantly injured by a direct meteorite hit.

  I felt very triumphant at this point, but also slightly nervous. Because there was one question I still needed to ask.

  ‘Dr Weir,’ I said, ‘what’s going to happen to my iron–nickel meteorite now? Do you have to take it away again?’

  Dr Weir smiled and stayed quiet for a few moments. ‘Well, Alex, I think really that should be up to you. I don’t need it any more. I’ve got enough data and samples from that meteorite to keep me busy for the next six months at least. Usually I’d say that a specimen that beautiful should be put on display in a museum, because I’m sure that there are a lot of people who’d love to see it. But, really, it’s your call. If you want to keep it, you should keep it. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t.’

  I hugged the meteorite close to my chest. ‘I think I’d really like to keep it,’ I said. ‘At least for now.’

  And I did. I kept my meteorite on a special shelf in my bedroom for the next five years. Then, on 20 June 2009, I decided to let other people enjoy it too. It felt like the right time, but I’ll get to that later on. I think, for now, I’ve said enough about my meteorite. If you want to go and see it, you can. It’s in a glass cabinet on the first floor of the Natural History Museum in London, in a section called the Vault – about a hundred metres from the dinosaurs.

  THE QUEEN OF CUPS

  Once all the doctors had agreed that my brain was okay and my skull was healing itself beneath its degradable bone plates, I was discharged from hospital and into a series of media scrums. The first occurred six feet outside the main entrance, the second at my mother’s car, the third at our front gate, the fourth in the same place the following morning, the fifth just outside my mother’s shop, the sixth as we were closing up that evening and so on and so forth for the next two days. Rather surprisingly, my thirteen-day coma had helped to sell a lot of newspapers. It didn’t matter that twelve of those days had been completely uneventful. A whole universe of speculation had been created from just a few unpromising particles. According to reliable and never-named sources in the hospital, my situation was critical, then desperate, then critical but stable, then just stable, then uncertain, then (for twelve hours) improving, then uncertain again and then steadily bleaker with each passing day until everyone agreed that there was very little chance of my ever waking up. At that point, I woke up, escaping the cul-de-sac into which I’d been written.

  Of course, journalists were not tolerated within the hospital walls – not unless they had broken bones or terrible diseases – but that didn’t stop several dozen well-wishers (‘friends of the family’ and ‘distant relations’) turning up on the ward during visiting hours (and I should tell you that our ‘family’ had about three friends and precisely zero known relatives). My mother left instructions at reception that no one should be allowed through without her explicit agreement and all incursions were quickly repelled. The articles written about my recovery were, therefore, just as speculative and non-eventful as those that had documented the various phases of my unconsciousness. But during the week that I was awake, the media did at least have plenty of time to work out all the best ambush points for when I was finally set free.

  Progress across the hospital car park was glacial, and by the time we’d made it out and were waiting at the roundabout, my mother had resolved that I was not going to answer any more questions or stand still for any more photographs. She couldn’t stop the reporters from lurking around her car or inspecting the inside of our wheelie bin, but she was not going to put me on parade; and the only time she came close to breaking this resolve was during the final stage of the ongoing bathroom-roof saga, which is another thing I should probably tell you about.

  Upon arriving
home, I discovered to my horror that the bathroom roof had been repaired and was now completely back to normal. It was only in the newspaper cuttings that I would ever get to see the devastation wrought upon our house by 2.3 kilograms of metal travelling at two hundred miles per hour. It transpired that the roof had actually been fixed weeks ago, by a local builder who had offered his services for free. He had tried to contact my mother shortly after the accident, but she was away at the hospital, and in no state to think about roof repairs. Luckily, the Stapletons, who were collecting our mail and looking after Lucy, had been able to accept this kind offer on our behalf. But then I woke up and my mother could think again and she was overwhelmed with gratitude and immediately told the builder that she wouldn’t dream of letting his generosity go unrewarded. After all, his was a small, family-run operation, and our bathroom had been a bomb site. It wasn’t just the metre-square hole that had been punched in the roof – there was also the floor, which needed retiling, and the shattered sink, which needed replacing. The cost in terms of labour and materials must have been substantial. And because we had comprehensive insurance, it seemed silly that the builder should be left out of pocket.

  It was this last piece of information, of course, that had finally swayed him. He sent my mother the invoice, she sent the invoice to the insurance company, and, two days later, the insurance company sent her a very long, very wordy letter saying that regrettably they were unable and unwilling to foot the bill. In a strange oversight, our house was covered against fire, flood, subsidence, earthquakes, vandalism, terrorism and every extreme of weather – including blizzards, tornadoes and hurricanes – but not against meteors, which fell into the category ‘Acts of God’. As a large corporation of international repute, with shareholders and premiums to consider, they didn’t feel it would be ethically responsible if they agreed to pay my mother’s claim – not when our builder had previously been so willing to work for nothing (a detail that had made the local papers and which had not escaped their notice).

  ‘An act of God!’ my mother fumed, scrunching the letter to the density of a neutron star.

  ‘Dr Weir said it was probably an act of Jupiter,’ I told her.

  My mother looked at me for a long time with a strange crooked expression. Then she said, rather mysteriously: ‘I think, Lex, it was an act of Mars.’

  My mother often said mysterious things, and usually there wasn’t much point asking for an explanation, which would in turn need explaining. Sometimes you’d find out what she meant, and sometimes you wouldn’t. In this case, I did eventually find out what she was talking about – it was to do with tarot and the Tower, and a truly bizarre act of prophecy – but you’ll have to wait a while to hear about that. First, I have to conclude the roof saga.

  My mother isn’t usually quick to anger – she tends to kind of float around in this weird insulated bubble, like the ones they use to contain children without immune systems – but the day she received that letter from her insurance company, she was filled with righteous fury. She felt herself to be left with three equally unpleasant options: 1) tell the builder that he wasn’t going to get paid after all (this was never going to happen; my mother has never broken a promise in her life); 2) take out a second mortgage; 3) sell me and my exclusive interview to the highest bidder – and, as I’ve said, for a few hours, this third option was looking like the lesser of the three evils. People from magazines and production companies had been leaving messages on my mother’s answering machine for at least a month at that point. We both knew that she only had to give the word and Richard and Judy would happily pay to have our entire roof retiled in meteorite-proof armoured plating. But, for my mother, the issue was not primarily a financial one. She felt that even if the insurance company hadn’t broken the literal terms of the contract they shared, they had certainly broken the spirit of that contract, and this was just as serious a matter. She was not going to be happy until they’d been made to see the error of their ways.

  She spent the rest of the evening deep in her own counsel, and the following morning, I knew from her changed demeanour at breakfast that she’d hit upon a solution. As it turned out, this solution was basically a form of blackmail or extortion, but for the reasons outlined above, I don’t think my mother ever considered it in this light. She saw it as the only way to balance the moral books.

  She phoned the insurance company at nine o’clock on the dot and told them the following: if they (the insurance company) genuinely believed that they shouldn’t have to pay for our roof because it was some form of divine judgment on our family – and as such not covered in our policy – then perhaps they’d like to contact the press to make this opinion known? If not, she’d be more than willing to do it for them.

  The next day, we received a second letter from the insurance company saying that while they accepted no liability for the damage to the roof, they would be happy to pay the bill as a gesture of goodwill. My mother wrote back saying that while she had serious doubts about the sincerity of their ‘goodwill’, she was nevertheless prepared to accept it at face value – although she also suggested that they rethink the wording of their documents in the future. She was still upset about the ‘Acts of God’ clause, and would remain so for some time.

  By the time I’d woken up and been discharged from hospital and escaped the media and seen the satisfactory conclusion to the story of the broken roof – by then, it was pretty much time for the summer holidays, and my mother didn’t know quite what to do with me. Since she worked in the shop full time six days a week, and had done so for as long as I could remember, this wasn’t exactly a new problem. But that summer, the need for me to be fully and properly supervised at all times seemed especially high on my mother’s agenda. I could understand that she didn’t want me to be on my own, but to my mind, the best solution was also the simplest. In fact, this solution seemed so obvious to me that I was amazed my mother had not even considered it.

  ‘I don’t see why I can’t just stay in the house with Lucy,’ I said. ‘She’s in most of the day, near enough, so I won’t be alone – not really.’

  ‘Lex, that’s just about the silliest thing you’ve said all morning,’ said my mother.

  ‘It’s not that silly,’ I snarled.

  ‘I hardly think that Lucy counts as adequate supervision.’

  ‘She can keep an eye on me and I can keep an eye on her. You know, in case she’s got any ideas about getting pregnant again.’

  Upon hearing this, Lucy turned her head and shot me an extremely withering look. My mother snorted. ‘Lex, we both know that if Lucy decides to get pregnant again, then there’s very little either you or I can do about it.’

  ‘Yeah, but maybe if she had a bit more company—’

  ‘Lex!’

  And my mother gave me the look that meant this conversation is over! Lucy, meanwhile, rose from her chair and left the room, with her nose pointedly in the air. A few seconds later, I heard the cat-flap slam. This was typical Lucy behaviour. She never acted much like a cat – I never once saw her climb a tree or chase a bird – and, since I could remember, I’d always thought of her more as an older sister. I’m aware this may sound odd, but you have to bear in mind that our family was very small. I didn’t have any human siblings, nor a father, that I knew of. I also had no living grandparents and no aunts and uncles, and hence no cousins either. I had my mother, and she had me, and we both had the cat, and growing up in a situation like that, it always seemed obvious that Lucy was an integral part of our family unit, which I was loath, even in my imagination, to deplete. Furthermore, it was quite apparent, as has already been indicated, that Lucy shared my concerns that our family was a little on the small side. By the time I was ten, she’d already borne four litters, and at the time of writing, this number has risen to nine. This might seem improbable, but you have to bear in mind that cats remain fertile throughout their lives and are capable of reproducing several times every year. The world record for the number of kitte
ns born to a single mother across her lifespan is four hundred and twenty.

  Unfortunately, if Lucy had notions of increasing the size of our family, she was fighting a losing battle. My mother refused to have her spayed because she thought this was against the natural order of things, but neither was she willing to keep any of Lucy’s kittens – whether long- or short-furred, male or female, black, white or any combination in between. Each new litter was of unknown paternity and this threw up some pretty weird and wonderful genetic variations. These variations tended to affect how long each new kitten ended up being advertised in my mother’s shop window. Generally, the long-furred kittens were snapped up much more quickly than the short-furred kittens, because these were seen as having pedigree, although, in my opinion, the short-furred, scraggly ones were usually friendlier and more fun. The ones that inherited their mother’s long white fur also tended to inherit much of her aloofness, suggesting that there was a direct connection between these two characteristics. But, obviously, this is just speculation. I’m not a cat geneticist.

  The main point is this: for whatever reason, my mother didn’t agree that Lucy was a suitable babysitter for me during the summer holidays. In fact, after the coma and everything, she seemed reluctant to let me out of her sight for even ten minutes, which I didn’t think was very fair or very rational. Later, after Dr Weir had sent me a big book all about meteoroids, meteors and meteorites, I was able to explain to my mother that the chance of me getting struck by another meteor – that is, two meteors in one lifetime – was about one in four quintillion (which is a four with eighteen zeroes after it), and that these odds would be unaffected by whether she was watching over me or not. If she was serious about protecting me, then she should keep me locked up in a metal box in the basement. I rehearsed this speech at least ten times before I aired it, so, let me tell you, it was pretty well honed. I don’t think the wording or delivery could’ve been bettered. But this made no difference to my mother. She didn’t care how many zeroes there were, I still had to go to work with her every day. It was that or spend the day at the Stapletons’, and, between you and me, this wasn’t such a great alternative. So I ended up spending most of the summer in my mother’s shop.