Christopher WunderLee - The Loony - a novella of epic proportions

Out-of-room voice 1: Looking across the beauty of the moon, it's the most barren place imaginable because there's never been any life up there. But it's beautiful in its way because it's rolling terrain, gray in color.

Out-of-room voice 3: (Singing) If you get caught between the moon and New York City… the best that you can do…

Out-of-room voice 6: (From file footage) Well, it's a great majesty to look up in the velvet sky and to see the earth with all of humanity back there, and that's where home is. The moon was a magnificent desolation.

Out-of-room voice 3: Houston confirms a good ignition. Start on (unintelligible).

Out-of-room voice 2: What a ride! What a ride!

INTERROGATOR 1: So what are we to do for Albert? How do we help him?

Out-of-room voice 1: Doctor Albert Lochner, good morning.

INTERROGATOR 7 (Galactica): Good morning to you too…

INTERROGATOR 1: What irrefutable evidence do you have that this never happened? You’re a scientist, where’s your proof Albert. Let’s talk about that…

LOCHNER: Well, I have first-hand experience, the fundamental reason I know is because I saw it faked, I helped you fake it. I was there from the very start. From the first day, you recruited me, I was only too willing.

INTERROGATOR 3: I, I mean, after all, we were not big buddies with the Soviets during the Cold War. We had an arms race, and the space race going on. We were able to detect what the Soviets were doing. They were certainly tracking what we were doing, and if we'd filmed the whole thing, and the notion that we had some sort of sweetheart deal with the Soviets…

INTERROGATOR 4: Right, because I was going to say…

LOCHNER: …that’s ignorance, I think that time will tell, we’re in league with the whole globe, invented history, pay-offs, kick-backs, promises, contracts, all so one nation can claim some historical truth, but its all in the past, you willy-nilly bastards, don’t you see, there’s no way to verify it, you can’t witness it, you take secondary hearsay sources and you say: Shakespeare was most certainly a vampire, but you never saw him, never met him, never heard his voice, or watched him write.

INTERROGATOR 2: …fighting the Vietnam War, you think I don’t know men who’ve been maimed by gooks and died by the Cong’s sneaky guerilla warfare? There’s dominoes falling all over the place, a wonder none have hit you, you’re ignoring the arms race and the Russians in Cuba, going after Key West…that we paid them off, I think makes it very difficult to understand why we were fighting the Vietnam War, why we had the arms race and everything else going on. This would — frankly, if we had paid off the Soviets to not tell anybody about the moon race, that would not be the big story.

LOCHNER: The big story’s that every century was a hoax, and I don't think anybody believes that.

INTERROGATOR 4: But what sort of cahoots are we talking about here, are we talking about the friendly buddy, buddy kind of warm regard, or we talking serious fucking?

INTERROGATOR 1: I think this has a lot more to do with the very American suspicions of big government, the idea that the King is up to no good and at our expense. Its very independent, very spirited, the very ideals our country was founded upon. But I think in this case Albert’s taken his theories too far, his inhabited them, and that’s why he’s here. We need to help him come back to the land of the real, throw our lassos up there and swing him back to earth.

LOCHNER: I would tie roses to your knots as peace offerings… perhaps send a lunar emissary with a note, but he’d refuse to land, only pump up the helium and float back without a response.

INTERROGATOR 4: I knew they were up to no good, damn royal family, just a bunch of Nazi cows with anemic blood. That’s why Rasputin was able to overthrow the czars, and Anastasia was the only one to survive, probably gave ‘em all a go at her hinny.

INTERROGATOR 1: And you say it's really quite implausible that we stepped foot on the moon?

LOCHNER: Easily explained.

(File footage of Albert Einstein teaching, young students nodding, and college graduates walking down the carpet with diplomas)

INTERROGATOR 5: (Singing) This is ground control to Major Tom, you’ve really made the grade…

INTERROGATOR 7: (Singing) …and the papers want to know whose shirts you wear…

INTERROGATOR 5, 7, 2, & 4: (Singing) This is Major Tom to ground control, I’m stepping… (humming) …through the door…in a most peculiar way… (humming) …and the stars look very different today…

INTERROGATOR 1: Like the leap from no rockets during the Second World War to moon walking in just twenty years, or the radiation, and the know-how…

LOCHNER: Right, right.

INTERROGATOR 1: We went from biplanes to jets in a relatively short amount of time.

LOCHNER: You don’t understand how time really works. Everybody knows about minutes and hours and days and months and years, but they really haven’t comprehended the dimensional aspects of what time is, the directional significance, the longitude and latitude of time. Nor do you understand what time can do to the truth, it’s a bit like bleach.

INTERROGATOR 1: The implication being…

LOCHNER: We’ve been brainwashed by the concept.

INTERROGATOR 1: …we’re somehow conditioned or programmed to — to accept false information, that time is what?

LOCHNER: The question isn’t about tricking us about the exact nature of time, but the evidence is always present. Ever notice how different days feel longer than others do or how one person can think that two hours have passed by, while another thinks only minutes. Consider sleep…

INTERROGATOR 1: Are we sleeping?

LOCHNER: …its an active part of life, the brain is doing some funky things, and it takes up time, 1/3 of your life, and yet, you have no concept of the hours you laid in bed, it doesn’t feel like six hours or eight hours, or a short nap can seem long, while a full night of sleep can seem like a second. What we’re talking about here is a major event horizon conspiracy, a myth so entrenched in our subconscious, we cannot fathom its fallacy, its fabrication. If its so pliable, so conscious-based, can’t it be utilized as a tool, like directions… which way is north? If you are standing on the South Pole, every way is north, but can you go west? Time is little more than direction intensified… events happen in time, just like they happen at specific locations, which are defined by their relation to other places, so if things happen at specific times, in relation to other times — not that day, but the next, or not that hour but two or three before, where did the relationship originate and how do we, as laypeople, know it is true?

INTERROGATOR 1: Either that or, as we know, things happened when we think they happened…

LOCHNER: A conspiracy of titanic proportions.

INTERROGATOR 1: …perhaps involving some fabrication, but generally speaking, true. What other things, or what would be the benefit, Albert, of creating a myth as you’ve described? How would this help people or assist government? Is there some reasoning behind them selling us this bill of goods?

LOCHNER: How do you know Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492? How do you know that the country was founded in 1776 or that there was a war of 1812? Have you met an eyewitness or seen any incontrovertible evidence? Is there any way to really know for sure that history actually happened, that the world wasn’t created the day before you were born? We’re told in church that indeed, one day the world was puff — there. Is there any way to know when that day was or if there ever was a day or if this is all just the dream of a species of angels?

INTERROGATOR 4: Breeding angels?