The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  Frank Borman sticks the camera in Bill’s face.

  ‘In the beginning,’ says Bill, ‘God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.’

  Jim wonders: How did God divide the light? Did he divide it, like Newton, with a prism? There are no colours here. Jim has looked at the far side of the moon, and he cannot imagine that moonlight contains any colour. Pass it through a prism, every band will shine bright white.

  Now the camera is in Jim’s face. It is his turn. They have practised this. ‘And God called the light Day,’ says Jim, ‘and the darkness he called Night.’

  He takes the camera and points it towards Frank Borman. After the broom-cupboard that was Gemini, the Apollo command module feels as spacious as an ordinary room – until you start throwing TV cameras around.

  Frank Borman: ‘And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.’

  And were the waters blue? Jim wonders. Was the land grey, or brown, or sandy yellow? Or green with verdigris, or rusty red from all the iron in the earth? He thinks, there is iron in the Moon, but it cannot rust.

  It comes to him that nothing is being withheld them here: it is simply that they have come out here with the wrong sort of eyes – eyes that see the colours of earth. They are blind to the colours of space, whatever they may be.

  ‘And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.’

  Jim is thinking back to their last lunar orbit: the way the Earth rose over the Moon as they swung clear of the far side.

  Earthrise. Above the grey of the lunar surface, the Earth was a colour. The Earth was many colours. Red and yellow in the blue. The different blues of ice and ocean. Green in there somewhere, too. Colour belonged nowhere else but on that ball.

  Jim shifts the camera away – it’s in the script, they’ve practised this – up to the window and in, filling the homes of Earth with the first ever television image of their planet. As he does so, a simple thought strikes him: it is only on the Earth that colour makes any sense. Away from Earth, colour means nothing: neither ripeness, nor rot; neither springtime, nor fall. Of course there is no colour out here. There is no one out here to benefit by it.

  He thinks: We have no need of colour now. We must let it go. This kaleidoscope, this bauble of our childhood. We must lay it down, Jim thinks, and look about us at the world as it really is. We must press on into the greater world, the real and terrible world we have found beyond our little corner: the world of black and white.

  And he finds himself transported back, imprisoned in that jet again, the Banshee, a lonely dot over the Pacific, and his instruments are out and his lights are out and there are no stars and there is no Shangri-La and he knows his fuel is low and it is so dark the sea might as well be above him for all he knows. The sea might be above them, beside them and below them all at once, behind them and in front of them.

  Rising in a calm black ocean, this bright little bubble of ape hope.

  ‘And from the crew of Apollo Eight,’ says Frank Borman, wrapping up transmission, ‘we close with goodnight, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  For their hospitality and good advice I owe many thanks to Patricia and Chris O’Dell, the Barclay family, Susie Tiso, Rhidian Davis, Geoff Ryman and Nancy Hynes.

  Without my agent Peter Tallack and my editor Louisa Joyner, this book would be much the poorer.