The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (7 page)

The lab-man came upstairs to see her. She told him about
her work and showed him some earlier outputs of the code.

Later that night as he covered her breasts with his hands he said, ‘Beastie.’ She smiled, thinking he was trying to be funny, but he seemed unsettled by something.

‘You don’t know what they look like,’ she whispered. Somehow the dark made it easier to say things.

‘Yes I do.’ He twisted into her, ‘They look like you. You made them, didn’t you?’

They stopped talking at that point but afterwards an idea came to her. As he lay sleeping she thought about it some more, until she’d figured out a way to do it.

She had to break into the lab. But there wasn’t any broken glass on the floor or a figure prowling around with a stocking over her head. It was more mundane than that; all she had to do was make sure the lab-people were at the pub, then return and remember the access code for the door.

Down here the smell felt three-dimensional, both sharp and dank. In the corner a tap dripped as incessantly as a heartbeat and hollowed-out lab coats hung on the wall. The blinds were not entirely drawn shut so that moonlight made a barcode on the floor and walls.

But she ignored the coats and the stripes of light; she had a job to do. She’d watched the lab-people at work, so she went over to the incubators where the samples were kept, and opened one of the doors. A neat stack of flasks glinted at her. Now she set to work. She scraped her cheek with a wooden spatula, and sterilised what she’d collected so that her cells became decontaminated and pure. At this stage those cells were practically invisible and she could barely see them as she deposited them in a flask. She held the flask up to the window, imagining them growing and forming a thin film on the culture, before becoming more substantial and making their presence felt.

She wanted to work her way through all the flasks, but there
were a lot of them and her cheeks became raw very quickly, so she had to consider other possibilities.

Together, she and the lab-man hadn’t gone this far in the lab. The previous day there had been a surreptitious fumble, a half-hearted struggle against the firm grip of waistbands and bra straps, but not this gleam of naked skin in full moonlight or this parting of her legs in plain view of the workbenches. As she claimed her own cells from inside her, she pictured the brains stored nearby. Now the lab felt like an appropriate place for bodies to meet and touch, and assert themselves against their stripped-down, disassembled counterparts in the lab fridges.

Back in the pub she saw that the lab-man was talking to a lab-woman, his arm within touching distance of her shoulders. And she wondered why she had been so easy to forget.

After a bit the lab-man noticed her standing there, and slid his arm away from the other woman. He even smiled. ‘Where’d you disappear to, Beastie?’ he asked and he swallowed the last of his pint, the Adam’s apple in his neck working hard.

‘The lab,’ she replied and he laughed. ‘I want to go back there with you,’ she told him. But he laughed again and the other woman joined in, so all she could do was pretend she’d made a joke, and wait for him to finish talking.

That night in bed she thought of what she’d done in the moonlit lab, until the audience of lab-coats trembled in her head. Afterwards, she realised the lab-man was watching her. ‘In your own world, weren’t you?’ he said as he slid away from her.

The code was working as she hoped; the mutation that she’d introduced made the beasties move at different speeds, the slow ones cultivated the grass and the fast ones hunted the meat. They shared food with each other so that everyone got a varied diet. The program ran and ran and generations of
beasties grew and ate, and she could imagine them sitting around their fires at night telling each other stories of famous hunts in the past. They probably wove necklaces with the longer stalks of grass and made musical instruments out of old bones.

There was a rumour. Something was happening downstairs in the lab, something unexpected was going on with the new cultures. Tests were being carried out but the lab-people were confused and her boss was worried. When she hurried past his office one morning she could hear him shouting down the phone, the cultures were behaving oddly and he wanted to know the reason why. In the sanctity of her own office she doodled, and analysed the beasties’ activities.

Later that day she emailed the lab-man. She hadn’t seen him for a few days and so they arranged to meet after work in the carpark. Usually, as he left the lab, the lab-man was whistling but today there was just silence. She suggested that they go for a drink but he didn’t seem keen. He wanted to go back to work and figure out what was happening with the cultures.

It was cold outside, the cars were losing their colour in the twilight, and she felt that if she stood here for much longer she would become part of this shadowy half-world. Other people were leaving the building and she watched them hurry away as if eager to abandon their earlier daytime selves.

She tried to start another conversation but her words just dwindled into the air.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t have time for this.’ He walked away, and after a few seconds she couldn’t see him anymore. She guessed he’d disappeared back into the building.

She stood there for a bit longer before she also went back inside, because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. In her office, yet another job offer popped into her in-box, her fourth. Around her, the possibilities of her future lives flickered but she found it difficult to believe in any of them
now. They seemed more virtual than the beasties.

Many floors below her, she knew the lab-man would be looking down the microscope at her cells, growing and dividing. His eye staring right at her without knowing what she ever was.

Heroes and cowards

If this is a proper story written down in a book, then I myself most likely would not be the hero of it. I would be the narrator, the man on the outside watching the events. But whatever kind of story it is, it started that morning in the café and it came after the end of a much larger story, one which I took part in and which has been written about elsewhere. Well, most of it anyway.

I’m sitting in the café trying to work out how long I can afford to stay in LA before having to go back east to my home town, and I’m wondering what’s happened to my life since I got demobbed. I got the suit, I got a job and then another job, but nothing’s stuck to me. At least not the things I want; money, a girl, a decent place to live. Or perhaps I just think I want them. Why don’t I give up and go home? But that feels like the wrong direction, I want to stay here in a city where so many things are still unknown to me and waiting to be found.

It’s raining. I didn’t think it was supposed to rain in LA. But I stir my coffee and look at the rain and wonder what to do with the rest of my life. I wasn’t expecting to get this far.

I’ve got my ‘gimme a job’ smile – I practise it each morning when I shave, but it’s not a good smile. It’s like a dog, trying to get you to like him. I know it makes people want to kick me. Hell,
I
want to kick me.

Still, I feel as fresh as a peeled egg as I sit in that café checking the situations vacant column in the newspaper, so engrossed that at first I don’t notice the other man. And it’s only when he clears his throat that I look up and realise he’s waiting for me to notice him before he speaks to me. He’s
polite like that. He’s always polite.

‘Looking for work?’

I smile. He can see me reading the paper. ‘You too?’

He shakes his head, ‘Not me, no. I’m fixed up.’

‘Well, good for you,’ and I’m about to go back to my paper when he sits forward.

‘Stan.’ I should be surprised that he know my name, but somehow I’m not. He opens his matchbook and I see the clean rows inside, ‘How many job interviews you had, Stan?’

I don’t reply. I’ve got my pride.

‘You’ve enough money for eight more days before you’re on that train back home to Milwaukee. That’s the case, isn’t it?’

He’s done the math better than I can. I nod. I wonder if it’s going to rain for those eight days and then rain some more when I get home. I want him to put the matches away, but he just flicks one of them with his thumbnail before continuing, ‘I saw you this morning in your bathroom, shaving in front of the mirror. Nice the way you’ve set it up so the mirror’s opposite the window. To catch the light, I suppose. Makes it easy for us.’

Us
. Who is he? Who are they? I fold my paper into quarters and make a neat cross with my pencil next to one of the adverts without reading it.

‘Back home to your family. Your family’s originally from Germany, isn’t that right?’

He has the quietest voice. I have to lean forward to hear him properly, and the whole time he speaks, his mouth barely moves.

I pull down the sleeves of my suit as far as they go, ‘It was a long time ago, way before –’

‘Of course, of course.’ His voice goes even softer.

‘It’s the Commies now, I thought –’

‘Yes Stan, it is the Commies now.’

The waitress pours me some more coffee. During the week that I’ve been coming to this café, it’s always been the same waitress with the same smile. I wonder if she peels it off and
stashes it away with her nylons each night. I wonder if she’s waiting for something, too, the same way I am.

The man waits until she’s gone before continuing, ‘You speak German, Stan?’

I nod again, even more confused, ‘A little, with my folks. My dad, he’s not so hot at English.’

‘That’s going to be very useful.’

‘Useful? For what?’

And that’s how they get me. What choice do I have? They’re right, after all. I do only have enough money for eight more days before I have to get on a train and head back home to that dump of a town near Milwaukee. So I take it. It’s not so bad. It’s not all hanging round on street corners. Well some of it is. And the other guys, they’re alright. They’ll stand you a coffee.

They give me this job. I have to follow some German guy and get information about him for a committee hearing the Government is organising. I never heard of him before but they said I’m ideal for it. I ask them what information I’m supposed to be getting, but they’re vague. Anything, they said. Anything at all. The guy writes stuff for the movies, and his name is Brecht.

Brecht and Laughton decide to have a break from working and Brecht goes into his little kitchen to make tea for them both. They’ve been working hard, translating and updating Brecht’s play ‘Galileo’ into English in time for its run at the Coronet Theatre which will start in a few weeks. Laughton will play the title role.

They do not speak each other’s language very well, so work is slow and not terribly efficient. In spite of this they talk a lot to each other as they work. Everything depends on the words, according to Laughton. Brecht is not so sure, the physical gesture is just as important.

While he waits for the tea, Laughton puts on a record of ‘Die Dreigroschenoper’ and sings along to it.

‘For Heaven’s sakes, stop that noise!’ Brecht bellows from the kitchen.

‘Why? It’s one of your own, I thought you’d like it. A bit of your past.’

‘The way
you
sing does not remind me of my past, it just gives me a headache. And we need to make progress.’ Brecht appears in the living room with two small glasses of black tea.

‘Black again?’ Laughton mutters almost under his breath, ‘can’t we ever have milk in our tea?’

‘Disgusting English habit,’ Brecht sets the glasses down on the low coffee table, ‘and we cannot even agree about the ending to the play.’

Laughton wanders over to the window of the study and looks out at the garden, ‘Perhaps we’d do better working outside. A bit of fresh air and sunshine to stimulate our brains.’

Brecht purses his lips, ‘Surely it would distract you, dear Charles.’

Laughton remains at the window, with his back to Brecht, ‘I never get fed up with the weather here. If you’d come from where I came from, you’d feel a thrill every time you saw the sun and the turquoise sea, and all these flowers and pretty girls in skimpy clothes…’

‘I thought you preferred staring at pretty boys.’

Laughton peers nervously around the room as if his wife is hiding there, ‘Ssh.’

‘I thought Elsa liked pretty boys too. I thought it was something the two of you had in common. Anyway, how is Elsa? We haven’t seen her lately.’

Laughton pauses before answering, ‘I think she’s fine.’

‘Why don’t you both come over to dinner tonight?’ Brecht spreads out his hands, ‘Helene will make some of her terrific dumplings and we can all imagine we are somewhere civilised.’

‘We’re usually busy in the evenings. Elsa goes out a lot. But
thank you anyway.’

They sip their tea. Laughton is obviously trying not to wince at the bitterness and Brecht smiles to himself.

‘I think we should work at my house tomorrow,’ Laughton announces as he sets down his empty glass, ‘there is so much more space. And we have all the dictionaries there.’

Brecht shrugs. Laughton clearly needs his milk and sugar. And his boys. And maybe even his wife.

Laughton clambers out of the rickety armchair that made it to Los Angeles from Germany with Brecht and Helene, and stands as if he is on stage addressing an audience, ‘Alright, alright, let’s get on with it. The end of the play. We’re going to let the audience feel some sympathy for Galileo? After all, he’s old and broken, and up in front of the Inquisition.’

‘Sympathy destroys what we are trying to achieve, Charles. When those Nazi gangsters started snivelling at their trials in Nürnberg, did you feel sympathy?’

Laughton looks shocked, ‘Of course not. It’s hardly the same thing. But you’ve made the old man look like a coward.’

‘Perhaps it’s better to be a coward than a hero.’ As usual, Brecht has an answer for everything and he can’t resist replying to Laughton. ‘Cowards generally live while heroes die. But he should have spoken up for science and not given in. Those scientists who built the Bomb, they did exactly what Galileo did; they obeyed the authorities. Except this time, it’s even worse.’