Jeff Noon - Pixel Juice

We worked for many lonely months, the professor and I, to track down the cause of the deviance. I will freely admit that I too disbelieved, when Gull came to his startling conclusion; namely, that Planet Earth had a second moon in tandem with the first. The slight fuzziness on the screen was in fact the shadow of another satellite, somewhere in orbit, invisible and strange. This extra moon would have to be extremely small and extremely close to the Earth, in order to satisfy the read-outs.

Professor Gull pleaded with the authorities to call off the launch, because the presence of the second moon could have an adverse effect on the flight path. Of course they thought him mistaken, misguided, mad even - because hadn't the Americans managed the journey years before, with no such problems? Gull's arguments caused him to be dismissed from the project.

So it was that the disgraced scientist and I set up our own. mission to find out the exact size and orbit of Luna Two, as we called the new discovery. Working from Gull's own laboratory, we spent another year in constant search and frustration, surviving only on a pittance, until we could be certain of our calculations. The second moon was circling at exactly the same pace as the Earth, always floating above the same point on the planet, that point being somewhere in the city of Manchester, England. Twenty-four feet above the surface, the twin moon was, and only 11.0457 inches in diameter. Further work allowed us to pinpoint its exact co-ordinates: a street name, even a house number. Simple enquiries revealed that the house was owned by a Mrs Gladys Selene. According to the records, she lived there alone.

It was, I remember, early evening when we arrived, but already dark. The house seemed no different from any other in the street: a small two-up, two-down council property. A faint yellow light glowed from an upstairs window.

The door was opened a tiny crack by a middle-aged woman. Gull stormed into the place, pushing the woman aside. She began to scream and to argue, but then suddenly collapsed, as though the fight of years had gone out of her. Tearful, drunk on cheap vodka and resigned at our intrusion, she motioned us to go upstairs.

In the front bedroom we found her only child, a young boy, ten years of age. His name, she told us, was Joe; Joseph Selene. At first sight I could only wonder at just how very fat the boy was. Then I saw that his bloated, distended stomach actually glowed; glowed with wave-pulses of pure amber, the only source of light in the room. The boy had spent his whole life in that small space, with no schooling or contact. He could neither speak nor write, and lived his days in painful solitude. Only the various maps of the moon, images from the early flights, and models of the Apollo 11 spacecraft dotted around the room brought him peace. From our enquiries Gladys revealed that she had conceived Joe with the help of a travelling salesman, whose name she could not recall, nor his intentions, except that he was selling cheap atlases.

The instruments of measurement were prodded into Joe's veins, and a body-scan taken. A dark, poisonous smudge appeared on the printout, reminding me of nothing more than the original blip I had seen on the gravity read-outs.

I can hardly state the following without remembering my horror at the revelation: the second moon was living inside the boy's stomach, desperate to be born.

'Beautiful…' whispered Gull. 'Quite beautiful…'

He decided it best that Joe not be moved, 'for fear of disturbing the gravitational field', so we carried all our equipment into the house, set up a field-lab there. I was to stay awake through the night, standing guard; nightwatchman to the Earth's second moon. Once alone, I rested myself in a chair next to the boy's bed. I very quickly fell into the slow, pulsating rhythm of the moonlight. I felt the moon was guiding me dreamwards…

Suddenly. Where am I?

An empty, grey landscape, pitted with holes. I imagine this to be the inside of Joe's skull, the convoluted surface of his brain, sluggish to think. Until a puffball-costumed figure comes slow-bouncing over the horizon. He's dressed in the antique NASA spacesuit, long studied from the old Apollo landings. Face hidden behind his visor, the astronaut speaks in a weary tone, words broken by radio static: 'It's been a long time,' he crackles.

'Who are you?' I ask, my own words floating through the loose gravity of this sleep-haunted world.

'Does no-one remember?'

I glance at the nametag on his suit. 'Commander Armstrong? Apollo 11?'

The figure nods slowly, reflections of the Earth pinballing around his helmet's darkness.

'But what do you want?' I ask. 'I mean… what are you doing here? I mean… I thought you…'

'Died? Yes. Many years ago, but there are journeys still to make. I have landed on satellite Selene to complete the mission.'

'Mission? What about the boy?'

I woke up in early morning darkness. It took me a few seconds to realize what was wrong. Darkness! The boy! I stood up from the chair in a panic, only to bang my head painfully against the wall. Someone must have moved me around in the night. Scared now, I tried to place myself-

Flash! Retinal burn. Light drenching me, like take-off.

Gull and the boy's mother burst through the door. One of them turned on the overhead light, to find me cowering in a corner, screaming. My chair was jammed up tight against a wall, far from where it had been. All the furniture had moved away from the boy's bed, blown by a stronger force. Plastic models of the lunar rockets lay in pieces all around. Joe Selene was lying on the bed, gently moving; alive at ground zero.

Gull was running to his beloved equipment, all of which was dead, night-dark; the woman to the beloved child, resting her hands disbelieving on the loose folds of empty skin where the stomach had once engulfed her world. The light had gone from there, to flow into the boy's eyes; to flow, smiling in the aftermath, at last and somewhere…

'What happened?' Gull was shaking me. 'What happened in here? Where's the light!'.

I smiled. 'He took off, Gull.' Then I couldn't stop laughing. 'He took off! Neil Armstrong! He took off without us!'

It was a small cage, roughly four inches square and two inches high. Somebody had placed it on the roadway. To call it a cage is perhaps an exaggeration, constructed as it was from a fine wire mesh. It had no door.