Bright and Dangerous Objects Read online

  “That’s standard practise for astronauts anyway, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure you have to be, like, under two hundred pounds to get into NASA.”

  Elijah laughs. “There go my hopes and dreams!”

  “You and me both, buddy.”

  “Anyway, Tereshkova logged more flight time than all the American astronauts who’d flown before her put together.”

  “Yeah, and everyone was like, ‘That was cool.’ But then no women went to space for nineteen years after that.”

  “The second one to go was Russian again, I think?”

  This is an even more difficult run than I’d anticipated. The coastal path is narrow and uneven. I really hope James is all right.

  On the podcast, Elijah and Powell have started talking about American women in space. Apparently, the US has sent up forty females since 1983. My mum died in December 1983, so she’d have been alive to witness Sally Ride, the first American woman, go up in June of that year.

  Elijah talks about female astronauts from all sorts of other places: Japan, China, Italy, South Korea. And one from Britain too. Helen Sharman got the job after responding to a radio advertisement. At the time, she was working for Mars, the confectioners. Her job involved studying the physical and chemical properties of chocolate. She beat thirteen thousand other applicants, and off she went to a Soviet space station. “From Mars to Mir,” jokes Elijah.

  Powell has been quiet for some time. “Elijah,” he says now, “let’s talk about sexism.”

  “Sure,” Elijah replies. Am I imagining irritation in his voice? “Female astronauts, who the media once dubbed ‘astronettes,’ have had to deal with a lot of prejudice, particularly in the early days of space travel. Jerrie Cobb, who was part of Mercury 13—”

  “Mercury 13 was a group of thirteen American women who underwent many of the same tests as the men in Project Mercury, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “But NASA cancelled the women’s programme and didn’t select any of them to go to space.”

  “Jerrie Cobb,” continues Elijah, “passed all three phases of her tests, ranking her in the top 2 percent of all astronaut candidates of both sexes. During this gruelling process, whenever the press interviewed her, they asked her about cooking. And before Shannon Lucid spent 188 days in space, she was quizzed about how her children would handle her being away for so long.”

  “It is a weird one, though,” interjects Powell. “I don’t know how I would’ve felt having my mom blast off to space when I was a kid.”

  “What about your dad?” asks Elijah.

  “Well, my dad was never around.”

  There’s a pause before Elijah goes on to list several well-known male astronauts with families. Alan Shepard’s three kids frequently attended NASA events. John Young had two wives and two children. Buzz Aldrin had three wives and three children.

  I’ve got to go to a conference in Nottinghamshire for the next round of the competition. I’ve told James I’ve got a dive coming up in Liverpool, that I’ll be cleaning out a reservoir.

  My gaze wanders up towards the sky. It’s not selfish to want to see what’s out there, is it? Kids may never happen, after all. It’s only sensible to have a plan B. Even if I do get pregnant, the first crew isn’t due to set off until 2030. If I give birth next year, she’ll reach double figures by the time I’m due to leave. Surely I’ll have done all the important groundwork by then? And we could still communicate regularly. It takes about twenty minutes for a message to travel back to Earth from Mars. A bit slower than ideal, but at least I wouldn’t have my helium voice. And a lagging conversation could teach my child a lot about the virtues of patience.

  As for James and I . . . well, it’s a lot like going for this run. I’m doing my thing, he’s doing his. We’re together, but that doesn’t mean we have to be joined at the hip. Who wouldn’t want a cosmic girlfriend? Also, and this is the main thing: As if I’m going to win the competition! As if I’ll ever go to Mars! Pigs might fly!

  I’m looking so far into the distance that I trip and fall onto my hands and knees. My palms are flecked with rock dust: an inverse night sky.

  18

  As I switch off the car engine, I have to remind myself to breathe. One small step for man, I think, as my feet hit the tarmac.

  I think I’ve always underestimated Center Parcs. Calling it a “holiday village” conjures a whole host of nightmarish images. Gurning families, decaying chalets, a theme-park-sized swimming pool, and water slides as tall as skyscrapers. But this Center Parcs is located in Sherwood Forest. The ancient woodland is expansive and peaceful, and the living accommodation looks classy: honey-coloured wooden cabins, with big windows and clean lines.

  I take my rucksack out of the trunk and head towards Lodge 355. Inside, it’s basically an IKEA showroom. There’s an angular grey sofa with a matching footstool. On the wall is a black-and-white print of a woodland scene. Off to the right is the kitchen area, full of shiny white cupboards and wipe-clean surfaces. The sort of person who might live in a place like this is a single, organised businesswoman, with a name like Jenny. Jenny wouldn’t put her bags down by the door. She’d take them into the bedroom and put her clothes straight into the wardrobe, so that’s what I’m going to do.

  The bedroom is a study in maroon. Maroon walls, maroon bedcovers, maroon lamp. Maroon is a word I haven’t thought about for a very long time. Maroon is Jenny’s favourite colour. It hides stains, while adding a touch of sophistication.

  I put my rucksack on the bed, chastising myself for not owning more elegant baggage. Then I take out my clothes and hang each crumpled item in the wardrobe.

  Next, I plonk the supplies I picked up on the way here on the kitchen counter: a bottle of red wine, half a baguette, and a packet of salami. This is perfect. A simple charcuterie. Jenny would approve. I prepare my food slowly, enjoying opening and closing cupboards, discovering the crockery and cutlery that is to be mine for the next two days. The plates are white and round as full moons, fecund with possibilities.

  I take my meal to the sofa. This is such a small thing, to be here in Center Parcs with a salami sandwich and a glass of wine, but the adrenaline is coursing through my bloodstream. I feel as though someone is filming me for a documentary about my life. As though I am about to achieve something so great, so momentous, that every boring thing I have ever done suddenly has great significance.

  “What was she doing the day before her future was decided?” people will ask. “Sitting on the sofa eating a sandwich,” others will answer. There will be a collective gasp.

  I switch on the TV and flick through a few channels. Take Me Out. Four in a Bed. The Secret Life of the Zoo. I take a swig of red wine—my first taste of alcohol in three months—and briefly quiz myself. First man in space? Yuri Gagarin. First to set foot on the moon? Everyone knows that. Last to set foot on the moon? Damn it, I’ve forgotten.

  “The pygmy marmoset can rotate its head up to 180 degrees,” an earnest young zookeeper says straight to the camera. I switch off the telly.

  I open Spotify on my phone and type Mars into the search bar. There it is: “Mars, the Bringer of War” by Gustav Holst. I hear the urgent plucking of strings and I increase the volume. I imagine myself floating up, up, out of Jenny’s skin, and out of Sherwood Forest.

  I pick up my phone and text a single word to James: Hope.

  19

  What do you mean? That was his first reply, but there were others.

  How was your journey?

  Having fun in Liverpool?

  Fuck, Solvig. Pick up your phone.

  I’ve completely forgotten what my text message meant. Something highly profound and utterly stupid, no doubt. As I trek towards the conference centre, I manage to cobble together a reply: Meant to say: hope you’re having a good evening. Oops! Talk later.

  It’s 7:30 a.m. and I didn’t bring anything with me for breakfast. I’ve cleaned my teeth, but my mouth still tastes sour. The wine went to my head
fast. I ended up working my way through Holst’s entire Planets suite. I was laughing by the time I got to “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity,” but then, halfway through “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age,” I became maudlin. If only I hadn’t polished off that whole bottle, I could have gone for a run this morning. There are plenty of healthy people out here, jogging around the forest trails.

  It’s hard to get my head around being in a holiday park for such a serious occasion. I wonder why the organisers chose this place. I’ve seen the Center Parcs adverts enough times to know that there’s a gigantic water slide here. I can’t help but picture the conference involving us having to fling ourselves down the slide one by one, shouting: “To infinity and beyond!” I do know that Center Parcs was founded in the Netherlands, same as the Mars Project. I wonder if it was picked for that reason, or just because it’s a convenient location. The ancient landscape of Sherwood Forest feels apt, in any case. It has areas of woodland dating back to the Ice Age. Funny to think about space as an ancient landscape. Feels like it’s the future, even if everything we can see out there—all of it—has already happened.

  I walk past the inexplicably French “Jardin des Sports” and towards the “Subtropical Swimming Paradise.” In the middle of the park, I spot a sign with the least exotic of all the place names on it: “The Venue.” The building ahead is wooden and angular, in keeping with the rest of the architecture at Center Parcs. However, other places I’ve passed have been decorated with colourful canopies and bright outdoor furniture. This place has none of that stuff. It means business.

  I have one last attempt at smoothing out the creases of my outfit, and head towards the entrance.

  Outside, a few people are smoking. Are any of them fellow space hopefuls? If so, are they trying to quit, or will they break the habit once their seats to Mars are secured? Perhaps their plan is to go cold turkey at lift-off. I used to know a saturation diver called Bill who smoked twenty cigarettes a day. He had to go without them every time he went into the chamber. “Don’t do me no harm,” Bill would say, shrugging his broad shoulders, but we could see him, jiggling his legs up and down, sticking on patch after patch, counting down the days until he was set free. Last I heard he’d given up diving and had become a children’s entertainer.

  As soon as I enter the building, I see a metal stand with a piece of A4 in its frame, displaying the words “Mars Conference.” I’m tempted to pull out my phone and take a picture, but I hear voices close behind me.

  A woman says: “It was either this or go and work for Elon Musk in LA.”

  A man replies: “Yup. Yup. Yup. I know what you mean.”

  I walk briskly in the direction of the arrow until I come to a table full of badges.

  “Name,” says a man in a tweed jacket.

  I tell him what he wants to hear, and he hands me a badge.

  “Cloakroom on your left. Refreshments yonder.”

  Some people might call this man abrupt, but I admire his efficiency. Rather than waste his time with words, I thank him with a nod and head for the snacks.

  I’d been half expecting space food to be served here: tubes of applesauce or freeze-dried eggs. I’ve heard that NASA is currently developing 3D-printed food. A 3D-printed fry-up would sort my hangover right out. Still, a croissant and coffee will suffice. I help myself, then find a chair. The coffee tastes okay. Coffee is normally a reliable first indicator. If the coffee’s good, you can be optimistic about the rest.

  There must be about fifty of us in the foyer so far. A few look as if they’re about to be interviewed for slick finance jobs. Others don’t. I can count eight NASA T-shirts from where I’m sitting. Someone has a Ziggy Stardust flash over his right eye, and there are a couple of steampunks over in the corner, wearing trench coats, top hats, pocket watches, and mechanical accessories. I look down at my boring outfit and wonder if the mundane, practical look might be exactly what the organisers are after.

  The male-female split is roughly fifty-fifty. That sort of thing shouldn’t be a shock, but perhaps because I’m the only woman on my dive team, I mistakenly assumed I was going to be outnumbered here too. Normally it spurs me on, being among men, feeling like I have to prove myself. Here, there’s no way I can coast through to the next round of the contest by being “the token woman.” I need to find a way to stand out.

  There’s a red-haired woman picking up a pain au chocolat at the refreshments table who’s clearly pregnant. Must be at least seven or eight months gone. She’s wearing a floral dress, and she looks very feminine and, frankly, very out of place. I wonder if she’s an administrator or one of the speakers. I blush as she looks over in my direction, but she hasn’t caught me staring. She’s spotted the empty seat beside me, and heads over. We eat our pastries side by side, and I focus on other things: the teenage girl manning the coffee machine, the various levels of polish on delegates’ shoes, the faux chandelier above the refreshments table.

  After a few minutes, the door to the Major Oak Suite opens. I want to make sure I get a good seat, so I put down my empty cup and plate, wipe my greasy hands on my trousers, and head in.

  The room is impersonal: rows of black chairs facing a stage, on which there is a podium, a screen, and a large speaker system. No space paraphernalia. No to-scale model of the pod that the first humans on Mars will be residing in. Nothing to give away the momentous nature of today’s event, other than another piece of A4 paper, with “Mars Conference” printed across the middle of it in black ink.

  I opt for the third row: keen, without being too eager. Two young women in tinfoil hats make a big fuss of squeezing past me, irritated that I’ve picked an aisle seat. I don’t really care. I’m damned if two girls wearing tinfoil are going to have a better view than I am.

  One of the final stragglers to enter the room is the pregnant woman. She takes a seat at the front.

  There’s a crackle on the speakers, and Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” begins to play. Everyone falls silent, as if we’re at church listening to the organ while we wait for the coffin to be carried in. Bowie sings to us about sunken dreams and saddening bores, and then, as the music dies down, I hear the woman in the tinfoil hat next to me hiss to her companion: “As a matter of fact, that song has nothing to do with Mars.” I miss her friend’s response, because at this moment, a woman in a beige trouser suit walks down the aisle towards the podium.

  “Good morning, everyone,” she says. There’s a twinge of a foreign accent. She looks in her midforties, with jaw-length hair and an extreme side-parting: professional and futuristic. As she runs her gaze over the audience, it feels as though she’s appraising each and every one of us. I sit up straighter.

  “I’m Fabienne Baas, head recruiter for the Mars Project.”

  It’s so quiet I hear myself swallow.

  “During this morning’s session,” Fabienne says, “I’m going to give you some crucial information. Then, this afternoon, we’ll split you into groups and observe you.” She tucks her hair behind her ears. Her expression changes from serious to excited. Or at least a well-rehearsed impression of someone who is excited. “Let’s get straight to it. Who here wants to live on Mars?”

  As if we have been primed by a TV producer for a live show, we clap and cheer. The cheering is like rain after a humid day. Too sudden, too strong, but it clears some of the tension in the air. I notice that the pregnant woman in the front row is whooping.

  “Good. That’s great.” Fabienne’s smile is starting to look genuine. “It’s wonderful to see so many of you here in the Major Oak Suite. I am reliably informed that this room is named after Robin Hood’s hideout. For the purposes of today, though, it’s more like the Major Tom suite, don’t you agree?”

  Another round of applause.

  Fabienne switches on the screen behind her. We might be planning the most advanced interplanetary expedition ever attempted by the human race, but we’re still at the evolutionary stage where PowerPoint presentations are the done thing.

&
nbsp; “Here you can see a timeline for the project.” Fabienne points at the screen. There’s an arrow running from left to right. Above the start of the arrow, it says “Now.” At the end, it says “2030.” There are five other points marked along the way:

  • 2020 - Select crew

  • 2021 - Train crew

  • 2025 - Communications mission

  • 2027 - Cargo mission

  • 2028 - Outpost preparation

  Fabienne tells us that there is a lot to do before we are ready to colonise Mars. We need to send out a rover to prepare the outpost, and communication satellites to enable contact with Earth. We’ll need living units, as well as support units containing air, water, and food. Fabienne’s voice is calm and reassuring, and several people nod as she speaks. My guess is that they’re nodding less out of comprehension than relief. Relief that someone has thought this thing through.

  Reaching the end of the timeline, Fabienne points at the final date. “This is the big one,” she says. “In 2030, Mars will be inhabited.”

  Several people fidget, me included.

  “As you probably know, the planets need to be properly aligned, so there is only one launch window to Mars every twenty-six months. That’s when Mars is at its closest point to Earth, known as the perigee.” A PowerPoint slide pops up with the word PERIGEE in capital letters. It’s quickly replaced by a picture of a spacecraft that looks a bit like a giant battery pack. “This,” says Fabienne, pointing at the slide, “is how you’ll be getting there.”

  She pauses. “That’s right—I said ‘you.’ Because it could be you, or you, or you.” She points at specific people in the audience, and I’m annoyed that on the third “you” she points at the girl in the tinfoil hat next to me.

  Fabienne raises a finger to her lips, hushing the whispering in the room. “Now listen,” she says. “You’re probably wondering what kind of candidates we’re looking for. Well, if you’re serious about taking part in this mission, you’ll need to be . . .” An acrostic appears behind her: