The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  ‘The forbidden zone is now the permitted zone and the permitted zone is now the forbidden zone. Got that?’ He said this quite quickly and almost casually, but I guessed that he’d practised it, perhaps in the bus on the way up here that morning.

  ‘But –’

  ‘What about our objects? What are we actually looking at now?’ The deputy was standing up behind his desk. It was the first time any of them had ever spoken to an official.

  ‘They were never your objects, were they?’ he chuckled quietly, ‘they are slightly too far away for any realistic claims of human ownership.’

  ‘But –’ I couldn’t think of anything to say apart from repeating the deputy’s question, ‘what are we going to observe?’

  ‘Just map the horizon the way you’ve been mapping the sky, and log everything you see. I’ll come and collect all your observations on a regular basis.’ He shuffled some papers together and looked at his watch, his bus was due. He started to walk out of the hut and then he stopped suddenly, ‘What is that?’

  The deputy’s blackboard was facing him, its graph quite visible. I just hadn’t thought. Before a routine visit by the official everything in the control room is checked and double-checked, but this visit caught me unawares. Fortunately there were few indications of what the graph actually showed, apart from the numbers chalked by the side of each data point. He may have recognised these numbers from his work in the Government, I couldn’t guess.

  ‘Ah – just the numbers of dark objects we have found, logged on a regular basis. It helps keep up the staff morale to show a visible tally.’ I didn’t look at the staff but I could hear the deputy sit down heavily at his desk and sigh, as if releasing something held inside him.

  ‘I see.’

  I followed him down the path. He was standing in front of me peering into the distance as he murmured, ‘Rub that board out, won’t you, and I’ll pretend I never saw it.’

  I nodded, even though I was behind him and my gesture was presumably invisible to him. Then something else struck me, ‘The dish will sweep right across our hut when it does its measurements. Are we to be included in the data?’

  ‘Of course.’ The bus had arrived and he climbed on board. I could just make out the back of his head as he showed his ID card to the driver. Then the bus drove off and I was left pondering my new tasks.

  The story of life

  The wife’s bought him another shirt for Christmas. Surreptitiously he tucks it in the cupboard behind all the other shirts. A lab coat covers up everything and nice shirts are wasted when you’re working with fruit flies, yeast, reagents and acids. And he knows how much she hates ironing.

  On the first day back at work he gets up early, leaving the wife in bed. He pecks at the air above her face before going to make his breakfast and a sandwich for lunch, and he even remembers to wrap the last of the Christmas cake for a snack. The department’s a fair distance from anywhere handy, right out of the city on the side of a glen, and there aren’t any shops for miles. You have to be organised and take what you need. After ten years of working there, he’s always organised. That’s why he’s the Gaffer, the chief technician. Other people may be the professor or senior lecturer and have their names on the website and the stationery, but he’s the one who actually runs the place.

  Today, as usual, he’s the first to arrive. The department feels empty and disused after the winter holiday but he knows that won’t last and by later on this morning it’ll be full of graduate students and post-docs, all slotted into their usual places along the benches in the lab. He goes to check the flies in the fly room next to the lab, where the test tubes of fly larvae and flies are kept. On this first day back he knows the smell of the yeast will hit him like a punch from a drunk man. He also knows he’ll get used to the smell and by the end of today it’ll be a single hummed note as a backdrop to his work, ready to greet him tomorrow and every day after that.

  The fly room is the correct temperature, the racks of test tubes are buzzing. He doesn’t look at their contents, that’s not his job. He’s got more than enough to do.

  An email reminds him of a new post-doc requiring bench space, another one has the delivery information for the new machine arriving on Thursday.

  Then it’s coffee time, a pause for the cake and to catch up with colleagues, or as his assistant Lucy puts it, ‘relive the pain.’

  ‘It was venison for us this year,’ he tells Lucy.

  ‘Roadkill for your Christmas dinner? Did Mrs Gaffer hit something she shouldn’t have?’ Lucy always has the right response. Her work’s neat too, the test tubes clean and sparkly, the reagents mixed to the right concentration, the flies dosed with carbon dioxide so that they sink as peacefully as a baby going down for its nap. So he lets her have her occasional ‘Mrs Gaffer’, even takes pride in this title awarded to his absent wife. Because it just reinforces what everyone knows; he is in charge.

  He goes back to his desk to study the requirements for the new machine. It’s a complicated piece of equipment, that’s for sure. A space in the lab has been cleared since before Christmas for the machine itself, and its sidekick of a console which is needed to send instructions to it.

  It’ll do the boring bits of the technicians’ jobs, all the piping of liquids into wells, the endless syringing that has probably cost him a chunk of the motor action in his right wrist. He’s been looking forward to this machine for a long, long time.

  Back home in the evening and the wife is working through a new recipe to use up Christmas leftovers. He studies the ragged meat heaped on the chopping board, ‘Where did you get that venison from?’

  She looks up from the cookbook, ‘I told you.’ She doesn’t like to be interrupted in the kitchen, so he leaves her alone and goes to the conservatory to sit and wait for his dinner. Was it venison? How would he know? He’s never tasted badger or hit-and-run dog.

  It’s a full moon tonight but he can’t see it because the conservatory roof is – maybe fatally – dimmed with algae and moss. He should clean it. He will clean it. Maybe when spring arrives, when he can see what he’s doing in the evenings.

  On Thursday he gets up even earlier, keen to get to the lab and wait for the machine but something happens that morning which annoys him. There’s been a light snowfall in the night and he’s surprised to see footsteps already marking the path to the department. Usually he’s the first.

  Inside he can hear voices; the Prof and someone else – a woman? He finds them in the corridor outside the lab where the Prof appears to be in the process of handing over some keys to a tall woman who is not exactly slouching, but leaning against the wall. He’s aware of her looking at him as he approaches. Her eyes are so dark there’s no difference between the pupils and the irises. Her hair matches her eyes and as if in deliberate contrast, her shirt’s as white as a just-laundered lab coat.

  ‘Ah,’ says the Prof, and to the Gaffer’s mind he looks guilty, as if he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. ‘Good. Glad you’re here. This is –’ but the Prof mumbles and he doesn’t catch her name. She definitely isn’t a post-doc, it’s not that she’s too old for that, just different. As if she’s taken a meandering path through life to get to this point. He knows about that sort of path, he’s taken a slightly unusual one himself, and somewhat more unusual than the official version on his CV. But he still doesn’t understand what the woman is doing here. And the Prof’s dropped an entire set of lab keys in her hand and scurried off before anyone can properly explain to him.

  ‘You’ll be wanting bench space?’ he tries. He’s obscurely annoyed, he can always provide space but he needs to know in advance. These things can’t be presumed. He shouldn’t be taken for granted.

  She shakes her head. Maybe she’s a theorist visiting from another institute, and that’s why she isn’t going to work in the lab. Theorists can be a bit peculiar. But if that’s the case, why did the Prof give her the keys to everything?

  ‘Office space then? In the
computing section?’

  She shakes her head again and he can tell somehow that she’s wanting to smile.

  ‘Forgive me Miss—’ he pauses to allow her to insert her name, but she stays silent so he has to continue this rather pompous sentence, ‘forgive me for asking, but what is it actually that you’ll be doing here? What do you need?’

  After she studies him for a moment she finally replies. ‘I don’t need anything. I’m a writer; I’m the writer in residence.’

  He’s still feeling out of sorts even as he stands with the others around the machine, fingering his plastic cup of plonk. Although the Prof did apologise after the encounter this morning. ‘Sorry about that, clean forgot about her until she showed up. She shouldn’t be any trouble, she’s had all the health and safety training.’

  ‘What is she actually going to do here?’ But the Prof wandered off again, and then he’d been busy sorting out the ceremony.

  They don’t actually smash a bottle on the side of the machine, it’s far too expensive and important for that. All during the Prof’s speech about how it’s going to revolutionise their work and bring in some much-needed money, the Gaffer is aware of the writer. When he turns to look, she’s leaning against the back wall staring into her wine. For almost the first time in his life, he wonders what a woman is thinking.

  The next morning and the snow has deepened. After he’s crunched his way into the building, he reaches the fly room. As he’s about to unlock the door he glances down and notices something small on the floor at his feet. Small and oddly shaped, and looking rather out of place in the man-made corridor.

  He looks closer. It’s a dead mouse, lying on one side, claws outstretched as if still trying to grasp something. Its fur is pointlessly smooth. He looks into one eye but there’s nothing to see so he fetches a dustpan and brush and sweeps it into the bin. Then he washes his hands, even though he hasn’t touched the body, and starts work.

  Inside the fly room, he wonders. They’ve never had mice here before. Perhaps it was attracted by the yeast? There must be more, you never get a single mouse.

  Sure enough, the next morning he finds another body. And another the morning after. Nobody else ever finds any, and he begins to feel as if the mice are dying just for him. And he always finds them in the same place, by the door of the fly room. Are they trying to get in or out?

  After the fifth mouse, he tells the wife. They’re eating something bird-like for dinner and he’s finding the remnant bones rather disturbing. He tries to explain to her.

  ‘Something sweet,’ she says. ‘That’s what they like nowadays. You need a trap with a bit of chocolate in it.’ She begins dishing out the pudding but he shakes his head.

  He starts to measure the week in mice. One, two, three, four, five dead bodies. If there are any live ones in the building they’re ignoring his offerings of chopped up Mars bars spiked onto traps. He’s secretly relieved, he’s not sure he wants to deal with bloody corpses. The mice show no signs of violence, and there’s no indication of the cause of death.

  The writer appears at his desk one morning, ‘Can I see the fly room?’ This is the first time she’s asked him for anything so, surprised, he says yes.

  She follows him into the room and he realises what a cramped space it is for two adults. He watches her peer at the ranks of test tubes on the shelves. The ones on the left hand side of the room are still larvae, not yet hatched out. It takes about twenty-eight days or so for the flies to hatch. The tubes on the right hand side are full of silently buzzing flies. He knows without looking at them the way they swarm around in the tubes, crawling under and over each other, burrowing into the plug of yeasty beige goo that’s both their nursery and their food.

  ‘You can’t really see them properly until you get them under the microscope, but the flies on each of these shelves have a different phenotype.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A different physical form.’ Her hair is densely black and not at all shiny, so that when he looks at it, it feels like looking down a long dark hole. He points at a low shelf, ‘These ones have legs growing out of their heads.’ He feels obscurely sorry for these flies but he supposes they don’t know any different.

  ‘Like circus freaks,’ she says before she stands up straight to face him, ‘do you mind if I watch you while you work?’

  He does mind but he can’t think why. ‘I work all over the department, sometimes in here or in my office, sometimes with the new machine. You have to run to catch up with me!’

  ‘That’s fine. I’ll cope.’

  Later that same day he’s sitting in front of the console, learning how to instruct the new machine. He hears Lucy in the office, talking to a bunch of post-docs. ‘It’s not ready,’ she’s saying, ‘you’ll have to wait.’

  As expected, they don’t believe Lucy so they come through to check with him. ‘I’m still working on it,’ and he gestures at the glass box, ‘you’ll have to wait until I’m done.’ They go away again. Lucy’s a good girl but she’s not quite got it, not yet. She will do, given time. He’s usually right about these things.

  The machine’s big, about two metres on each side. It’s a square box supported on legs and covered with a glass canopy so you can see what’s going on inside. It reminds him of an architectural model, all different shelves and levels, with metal troughs for the liquids. The row of tips suck up liquid and dispense it into the rows of wells; eight, twelve, twenty tips at a time.

  ‘Has it got a name?’ The writer is there.

  ‘A name? No, no, not yet.’ It’ll acquire a name only after it’s settled in, and made its characteristics known. He glances at her. From this perspective she’s all angles, strong nose, hair pulled straight back off her head, long arms. Even her fingers splayed on the glass front of the machine remind him of some geometrical problem that needs to be solved. After she’s wandered off to the other end of the lab he realises he still doesn’t know her name either. He carries on with the instructions. Each time it’s used, the machine has to work out for itself how big it is, and where all its components are. He runs through this procedure now, but something’s not quite right, the metal tips crash into the bed with an audible scraping sound that makes him wince. The writer looks over, ‘Is everything ok?’

  ‘I’m learning.’

  ‘I thought you knew everything,’ and she smiles. She seems to be looking at him with a sort of tender regard similar to the way he’s seen the scientists look at their flies, and he wonders if she’s carrying out an experiment. And who the subject of that experiment might be.

  Dinner that night is just plain nasty and sometimes he wonders if the wife does it on purpose. No wonder, he thinks as he refuses pudding yet again, that he gets up so early in the morning to escape to work.

  The flies have gone wrong. It happens occasionally, no point getting worked up about it. They’re more aggressive than normal so Lucy had problems doping them with the carbon dioxide, and then a test tube of them flew right into her face before buzzing off. It’s the ones with the extra legs growing out of their heads and she screamed the place down. He doesn’t blame her. The writer looks on as he gives Lucy a hanky.

  They all stand by the window of the lab, staring at the flies banging against the glass. ‘They’ll die soon,’ he says and this is meant to calm Lucy, but the writer replies, ‘That’s a shame.’ She’s studying the flies as if she’s reading a book.

  ‘What went wrong?’ she asks him.

  ‘Not sure.’ He’s thinking about how to get the lab’s money back from the company who provided them.

  A fly dive-bombs Lucy and she screams all over again. Perhaps she smells funny to them. The writer makes a note in her notebook.

  Over dinner he suggests to the wife his plan for cleaning the conservatory roof in spring.

  ‘About bloody time,’ she sniffs. ‘I’ve been asking you for ever.’

  At least it’d get him out of the silent house in the evenings.

  There have
n’t been any mice for a few days and he’s almost forgotten about them as he walks up the silent, snow-bound corridor. She’s already there, leaning against the wall the way she does, waiting for him. They don’t speak. High above them, suspended from the ceiling, is a model of the double helix made out of the letters A, C, G and T. The sunlight casts shadows of the letters, making unpronounceable words that float onto the walls, the floor and her face. He’s never noticed these letters until now.

  On the floor at her feet is a small oval object. A nut? It’s the size and shape of a large nut, but no, it seems to be a sort of squashed piece of matter. An animal turd, maybe. He squats down to inspect it.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks her.

  She kneels on the floor by his side and looks closely.

  ‘Thank goodness it’s not a mouse,’ he says, almost laughing. The thing has no claws, no semi-stiff tale. No obsolescent eyes.

  She starts to laugh herself, ‘Actually it is a mouse, in a manner of speaking. At least, it used to be a mouse.’

  And then he understands. It’s an owl pellet. She pulls out her phone from some obscured fold in her clothes, ‘I want to take a photo of this.’

  ‘Wait –’ but she’s too quick and when she shows him the photo, it’s got his disembodied hand apparently floating above the lump of matter. He has a sudden and startling image of a mouse running up and down the corridor being pursued by a barn owl, white and ghost-like. He can see the dark shadow of the owl’s wings caused by the strip lights above it, hear the creak of moving feathers as it beats the air. See the mouse scampering in a zig-zag this way and that, trying to dodge its death. And then after the kill – the owl standing on the floor, its talons sliding on the shiny floor as it gobbles the mouse. The tail would be the last thing to be swallowed, maybe even still flickering with life as it protrudes from the owl’s beak. It feels like he’s remembering this rather than just making it up. He has seen a barn owl once, silently hunting near Loch Tay, turning and turning again in the weak winter light as it searched for its prey.