But the man perched on the oddly shaped chair behind the impractical rhomboid desk seemed oblivious to the peculiar furnishings around him, doubtless because of familiarity. He stared at me with eyes full of a subtle humor that I found slightly disturbing.
Then he spoke in his unique baritone, and I had the impression he was far away, at the end of a long corridor. Only Professor Regardus is able to speak loudly and quietly at the same time. I have never met anyone else who can do this unsettling, useless trick.
“Well now, Mr. Livers! You have worked hard all term and passed the final exams with flying colors—and allow me to suggest that a study of how colors stay aloft might one day be a fruitful area for research—and so I have selected you as the prime candidate for a special project of great importance to our academic reputation . . .”
I waited for him to continue. He licked his wrinkled lips with a tongue that glowed purple in the rhythmic gloom.
“Panspermia. That’s the word for it!”
“I dare say it is,” I agreed.
“An attempt to confirm or refute the hypothesis; that’s the task. Do you appreciate the significance of this mission I’m entrusting to you? Proof of the extraterrestrial origins of life! It will change all our assumptions about biology, chemistry, and cosmology.”
I nodded but I felt awkward and so I gazed around the room, desperate to find an alternative focus for my eyes, to wrench them away from those wrinkled lips and bobbing chin. On the far wall of the office slanted a portrait of Harry the New, the little king or regulus of our newly independent land. I stared at that.
Panspermia. The hypothesis had been around for a long time. The idea that microbes originate in the vacuum of outer space, in gas clouds or in the hearts of comets, that they fall onto planets and seed them with life, a beautiful contagion spreading complexity and perhaps eventual sentience throughout the universe. Scientific heresy but plausible enough; and fame waited for any man who demonstrated its truth. The professor noticed the direction of my gaze and turned his head.
Then he jerked a bloated thumb at Harry the New.
“It’ll be a major scientific achievement for Wales, for this overlooked country of ours, this drenched clump of black hills and narrow valleys. It should put us back on the map again.”
In reverence, Regardus regarded the regulus.
“What do you say?” he prompted.
I accepted the assignment, of course. And off I went.
***
My name is Frampton Livers and I consider myself to be a champion of diligence and precision. Others share this opinion of me. I’m not given to delusions or fancies; and even when I sustained a blow on my head after a bookcase toppled onto me, my subsequent dazed ravings were muted and realistic. But how muted is the real world? The wound healed slowly and for months I wore a purple bruise that covered my forehead. I grew attached to this color, exactly the shade of certain plums and the style of prose we are urged in essays to eschew.
The rattling old locomotive finally reached the end of the line. With a groan that made my own grumbles redundant, it shuddered to a halt, and I stood and opened the creaking door of the carriage. It was as if I stared at a painting done by a depressed surrealist.
Framed by the rusty door, the landscape was rustier.
Brownish clouds foamed against the sides of Mochyn Budr Mountain, and the peak itself twisted like a mad goat’s horn into the ceaseless black rain, large oily droplets of which were caught by the wind after falling to the unseen valley floor and swept back up, so that every wet globe had a second chance to spatter a poor forehead.
On the very tip of the gnarled peak was perched the observatory, but it showed only its filthy white base. The rest was lost in the thick vapors and I had a sudden suspicion that perhaps the top had been chewed away by the acidity of the drizzle, leaving only a smelly stump like a dinosaur’s foot. Should I turn back at once and forget my mission? Before I had the opportunity to seriously consider my options, the locomotive departed in a mockery of stealth, freewheeling on its ugly iron wheels with squeals of self-hating laughter. I was trapped up here.
***
So I puffed the remaining distance to the door of the observatory, and with the key Bo Regardus had given me I went inside. I found myself in a tiny antechamber that contained only a hat stand. I divested myself of my coat and hung the dripping thing up. Then I passed through into the next room, the work area, the place of starlit truth.
The eyepiece of the telescope was located here and it was connected to the smooth length of the tube and the length of this tube was remarkable. Up it went, and up, to the roof of the dome, through the roof and through clouds, and still up, and somehow I knew that it kept going up until it was out of the atmosphere and in cold space.
I marvelled at the ingenuity of the man who had constructed the device and all my doubts vanished and I became dedicated to my mission again, a research student worthy of the name. And it seemed to me that I should begin work as soon as feasible.
There was a modest kitchenette in the farther corner and I prepared tea in a teapot and dipped my hands into the biscuit tin, for when in Wales do the same as the Welsh; it’s the safest way.
After this repast, which was all the more comforting for the sounds of the rain lashing the outer walls but unable to get me, I rubbed together my palms and said to myself, “Frampton! It’s time to make the wise professor so proud of you that he literally explodes with admiration, smirching that rug of curious design in his office with his monumental brains.” Naturally I meant that only as a primitive metaphor.
And so I fixed my best eye to the eyepiece, but there was no peace for my eye; not for my mind or my poor soul.
At once I was transported beyond this mundane world.
I floated free in the unhappy vacuum.
Stars and planets forced themselves into my brain, jumping down the tube and through my dilated pupil, and tightrope walking along my optic nerve to the security of my pulsing lobes.
“That’s odd!” I said as I tore myself away. And it was.
***
I had realized that there were no lenses in the instrument. It was simply a hollow tube of immense length that connected space with the ground. The audacity or stupidity of this design so bewildered me that I was forced to boil the kettle for a second session of tea.
As I dipped my umpteenth biscuit into the muddy brew in my delicate china cup, patterned with pictures of coal miners and other typical Welsh conceits, there occurred to me the suspicion that somebody had stolen the lenses, perhaps a disgruntled farmer in a valley below the mountain. After all, this was a region of crass superstition.
But that didn’t make too much sense. How could a simple farmer reach outer space to snatch the big lens from the far end of the telescope? It isn’t possible to escape Earth’s gravitational pull in a tractor. Much more likely that the lenses were never included in the first place, a probability that led me to conclude the observatory was a trick.
Or if not a trick, then a deliberate scam, a way of claiming government research funds and diverting them into private pockets. Bo Regardus as a master conman, an academic thief; the notion wasn’t wholly risible, but if this truly was the case, why send me here?
I drained my teacup and returned my face to the eyepiece; and my eye once again flew among the constellations.
“Ingenious!” I breathed softly, as understanding came.
There was no fraud involved at all. This telescope didn’t require lenses because it operated on a new principle.
The layers of air inside its length were at different densities, packed on top of each other like sheets of ultra-pure glass, so light from the universe was refracted through lenses made of air.
The arrangement worked superbly. It was wonderful.
“Frampton Livers,” I said to myself, “you have been given a chance to make cosmological history with this magnificent invention, so don’t spoil your prospects with a distrustful mind.”<
br />
I don’t enjoy berating myself but often it’s necessary.
As I continued to observe the multitude of stars and nebulae, an object as tiny and dim as a spider’s chin swam into my field of view; and though it should have been insignificant when compared with the glittering gems of the firmament, it compelled my attention. I frowned darkly, squinted at it, unglued myself from the eyepiece, wiped my sodden forehead with my sleeve, switched eyes and focused again.
The speck was still there and now it was bigger . . .
***
Over the following hour I watched it closely and it grew steadily and then I realized that it was inside the telescope and was spiralling down the tube toward me. Something alien and weird had entered that immense hollow cylinder, the starpipe of dreams, and was plummeting to the ground with a silent shriek. Taking a series of deep breaths, I calmed myself and made the necessary calculations in my head.
It’s common knowledge that an object that enters our atmosphere from the void will burn up unless it is sufficiently large and robust. And yet the conditions inside the telescope were milder than those outside: the layers of rarefied air were softer, less prone to generating friction, and lightning strikes were also extremely implausible. I deduced that the object would survive the fall and impact the ground.
The ground in this particular case was the floor of the observatory, or if I didn’t remove myself, my own face.
It seemed wise to leave before the critical moment.
From the rate at which the object grew in size, I estimated the time of its arrival as ten minutes into the future. Basing my actions on this figure, I transferred myself with reasonable haste into the antechamber, where I retrieved my raincoat. I then opened the outer door and braved again the elements of our more prosaic world, the lashings of remorseless rain that slapped the exposed skin of my hands and forehead like the bitter tears of one hundred thousand betrayed wives.
Hiding behind a rock, I waited for the collision.
***
But it never came. The clouds frothed and glooped over the summit of the mountain, lapping the base of the lopsided observatory until it resembled the largest toddler in existence paddling in milky coffee, but there wasn’t any hint of an explosion, no sparks or rubble. Nothing but the howling of the sour wind. I continued to wait anyway.
Thirty minutes later, it became clear that the expected catastrophe was a dud, some sort of illusion, and I returned inside to inspect the results of the strange object’s fall. But everything was the same as I’d left it, so with a sigh of frustration I stepped to the eyepiece of the telescope and placed my eye against the metal. Then I screamed.
The visage of a laughing goat peered back at me!
I toppled over in astonishment and clutched the eyepiece for support, but it wrenched itself off the instrument, opening the hollow tube, and the impossible goat plopped out, hooves kicking.
A musty smell assailed my nostrils, I felt warm wet breath on my neck, and slitted yellow eyes swam before me.
Then I tumbled and rolled; and the goat came with me, in my arms, an awful and absurd companion to share an accident with, and we ended up next to the kitchenette. Its wispy beard tickled the inside of my left elbow and I shrugged myself free and stood erect.
But the goat was up before me; and then I saw that it had only two legs. It was a man.
But not a real man; a combination of man and goat.
Some sort of satyr or faun . . .
“How did you get inside the telescope?” I cried.
He leaped onto the kitchenette worktop, stood with hairy hands on hips, and smirked down at me. “I really don’t know what you are alluding to. I know nothing about any telescope. This is an artificial womb, a birth canal that connects the up with the down.”
My legs became wobbly. “You speak human language?”
“If you prefer, I can talk my own.”
“No, no, I like it this way.”
“We drift free in the vacuum of interstellar space in the form of seeds, at the mercy of the solar winds and the gravitational currents. Many of us land on inappropriate worlds; we have no choice. So when we see such a miracle as this tube protruding from your world, we have no hesitation in making use of it. So would you if you—”
“Were a goat too,” I finished his sentence for him.
He corrected me. “A star goat.”
I accepted the rebuke without protest. Clearly he was more than just an ordinary goat. There was something unassailable about him; he gave off a sequence of sparkles that weren’t dewdrops in his hair but something else, the sharp glints of an adamantine compound. He was half goat, half man, but also half mineral; and if those fractions add up to more than one, I can only respond that he was more than one too, in fundamental essence and bearing. I felt overawed in his presence.
Now I comprehended why I had timed his descent to Earth incorrectly. I had assumed his shape was getting bigger simply because it was nearing my eye; whereas in fact he was turning from a seed into an adult goat man and growing bigger as he fell. So he had seemed closer than he was. The professor would laugh at me for making such an elementary error; I knew this. But I couldn’t wait to take him back to the Institute and demonstrate him in front of my peers. He was divine.
***
We waited in the rain for the rattling locomotive and the goat wore my raincoat and hat, his astral strangeness hidden from the gaze of normal folk, who would misunderstand him.
Without any protection, I sagged under the onslaught of oily droplets that lashed me like quicksilver ball bearings, stinging my eyes, blanching my skin, turning my hair into tendrils.
“Now I understand why it’s called Panspermia.”
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
“The theory that life originated in deep space. Pan is the god of your kind, isn’t he—the head star goat?”
He ignored my question. “Here’s the train.”
The black monstrosity groaned up the rails toward us, flaking rust as it went, coming to a squealing halt, but juddering horribly like a man who has swallowed hundreds of springs and is dying in bed as a result. The driver beckoned to us with a gesture that might have been a challenge to a duel and we painfully climbed aboard.
During the long journey back to the semi-civilization of the city where the Institute is based, I studied my travelling companion from the corner of my eye, for it is not yet illegal to steal glances. He seemed satisfied by his situation and the topaz orbs of his eyes blinked merrily at the sombre scenery outside. I imagine that bleak valleys and withered farms compare favorably with the nullity of outer space.
There still remained the mystery of how he could speak my language, but I settled this question in my own mind by telling myself that it was an example of magic, pure and simple. It’s a truism that star goats shouldn’t be expected to conform to the conventions of surface animals. And yet at no point did I dare ask him for his name.
***
We stood before Professor Regardus, the space satyr and myself, on that rug that resembled a map of a galaxy; and the smooth walnut-panelled walls glowed warmly in the light of the lamp that pulsed on the rhomboid desk; and I waited to be praised fulsomely.
But the professor took it all in his stride, a stride much longer than any I had beheld before, mental or physical, and he merely waved a hand and said lightly, “Yet another one. Excellent!”
I frowned and spluttered, “He is conclusive proof of the correctness of the Panspermia hypothesis, isn’t he?”
“Oh, I don’t think we require even more proof . . .”
I was shocked and retreated a step.
Regardus gazed at me critically, but there was no unkindness or even disapproval in his expression. He said: “Mr. Livers, do you mean to say that you believed what I told you the last time you stood here in front of me?”
“Why yes, of course. A research project of the utmost importance. An innovative telescope on Mochyn Budr Mountain. Are you abo
ut to inform me that those were merely illusions?”
“In a sense, yes, dear Frampton. There is no telescope on that peak nor has there ever been. It’s an incubator, a device for accelerating the growth of the star goats from loose seeds to adults in just a few hours. The way I see it—and I must stress I’m not the only one—is that the humans have made a mess of this world. They have lost a sense of magic and the hope and wonder that accompanies it; so it seems a good idea to encourage as many star goats to settle here as possible.”
“You talk about humanity as if you don’t belong.”
He shrugged. “If I had told you the truth at the beginning, you would have refused the assignment, deeming me mad. You had to experience it for yourself; you had to deliver a star goat in person. There was no other way of winning you over to our side.”
“Are you going to publish my results or not?”
“No. It’s best to keep everything a secret until enough of the star goats are in place to make a real difference.”
I was seized with a strange impulse. I overturned his desk, crouched forward, and lifted him off his chair. “You’re a goat too, aren’t you? You are a satyr from space just like him . . .”
And to my eternal shame, I yanked his trousers down.
“Now I’ll learn the facts!” I cried.
But his legs were human legs, hairy but not hairy enough, and it was clear that his slippers sheathed feet rather than hooves. I fell back and I saw my future career crumble like one of those rotting farmhouses up in the blasted valleys; but the professor calmly rearranged his clothing and righted his desk and then said softly: “That was my reaction when I was first told.”
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