Category: fiction

“The Men, The Moon, & A Machine” A Short Story By Martin Anton Smith. Contact me at martinantonsmith@gmail.com

Zac Brighton liked to call himself a “Journeymen Astronomer” – but the truth was that was an embellishment. After his PHD he had gained gainful employment – but for some reason never got past the “apprentice syndrome”. In other words, he was basically a walking disaster for someone his age of thirty-two.

Luckily after his PHD, he landed in the ‘ivory towers’ of the Academic world, which could easily absorb those whose talent fails to materialise. There was friction here & there at work, but the fact he was never fired showed overall that he was accepted – for who he was & what he was offering. You could say he was good for morale, & he could handle being laughed at anyway.

Zac scootered around the ‘real work’ at Skylark Uni & Polytech like a pro’ – the real work being ‘furthering the knowledge of the cosmos in the field of Astronomy’. Zac initially was interested in the ‘real work’ but soon totally disregarded trying to figure out ‘the hard stuff” – stuff that his esteemed colleagues such as Chester Tinkerton slaved away at, completed & then got the glory.

Zac was happy to toil away at the easy stuff around labs – he’d haphazardly set up optical lazers, & even these things called ‘mazers’ that used microwaves. In fact, one of the many laughing sessions at the staff club was the story how when tasked to set up a Lazer for Professor Tinkerton, he accidentally chose the invisible ‘Mazer’ instead, meaning when the equipment was switched on – no one knew it.

This resulted in Professor Tinkerton thinking the equipment was broken, so he never shut the equipment. Because of Zacs sloppiness microwaves shot all around the lab & adjoining cafeteria such that all the chocolate bars were constantly half melted, & it took seven days of mystery & confusion before Zac’s misstep was discovered. His story up until now was punctuated by simplistic toil & a well warranted lack of status & recognition. Many fell victim to ‘The Zac Field” or simply as TZF as they wittily dubbed it.

Sometimes a very ordinary person gets lucky & becomes the very bum with open eyes slash mouth that happens to point in the right direction at the right time. When this happens in an exciting field of science, it can amplify to become a totally new earth-shattering scientific breakthrough. Many of the ‘guns’ in the Astronomy dept. had a secret fear that Zac Brighton might somehow ride his TZF field into an accidental Nobel prize for Physics. In particular Tinkerton would wake up screaming with the recurring nightmare that he had switched places with Zac.

These fears were not entirely unwarranted, as Zac’s profession of Astronomy was a great profession for the ‘dumb luck’ effect – as all you had to do was look at the sky for ridiculous amounts of time, couple it with a method of recording data and you would be guaranteed of discovering something new – even if it was just a small asteroid or comet. There are after all, thousands of ‘citizen astronomers’ with asteroids, comets & even dwarf stars named after them.

Zac made good use of the hand the universe & the University had dealt to him. He could stare into space figuratively or literally such as through the University’s very expensive telescopes. On the day in question, Zac was using the new thirty million dollar ‘Maxometer6000 Telescope’ – he had already spent four hours randomly looking for a new comet – which is the easiest new stellar body to find & get the credit for discovering.

Not finding anything, he soon bored of this task & swung the telescope around to look at the moon – why shouldn’t he? It was fun to see an asteroid hit the moon in real time, as he had on many occasions sitting at the ‘Maxometer’. Looking at the moon also jogged his conspiratorial leaning mind. Five years ago, when Zac was twenty-seven, he had switched his opinion from ‘yes we went to the moon” to the “we definitely didn’t go to the moon”.

This switch of allegiance was on account of the ‘Van Allen Belt’ radiation field the Apollo astronauts were said to have successfully & safely traversed – all the while wearing totally inadequate solar radiation shielding of their space craft & also of their space suits. Zac new that in reality they would have been fried like an egg out there with shielding that was akin to aluminium foil.

Zac was amazed that his so-called superiors that intellectually ignored him daily were so highly intelligent with all their ‘published articles’ yet had allowed themselves to be brainwashed to ignore this brute fact – that humans & high energy radiation don’t mix well. Those apollo astronauts needed to have a very thick faraday cage around them absorbing high energy radiation, they had tin foil & the fact they wore tinfoil was the biggest hint of the scam for Zac.

Zac was looking at the ‘sea of tranquility’ area of the moon with the ultra-high-def-anti-blur telescope with thoughts of how unsurprised he was for the fact he saw no apollo mission debris or rover tracks, when he noticed something genuinely odd – he was sure that he saw a large patch that was slightly green tinged.

He got off his inbuilt telescope seat, rubbed his eyes & sat back down. The greenish tinge was still there. “Maybe it’s just gunge on the lens” he thought to himself. He had to double check the lens – as this could be something more than BIG. He temporarily squashed any feelings of physical & mental laziness & scaled the ladder affixed to the outer skin which protected the telescope & adjoining lab, much like a semi-circular tent does a camper. He would check if the ‘green tinge’ was just some slime that was on the big outer lens. The ladder climb round trip to the outer lens & back was quite an endurance mission – doubly so for Zac, who at 5 foot three & 110 pounds was in no ways a physical specimen.

In the more than ten minutes it took to slowly climb up to the lens his mind raced. “What if that massive spot of green tinge is evidence photosynthesis on the moon? That would mean what he saw was a forest or at least a large outcrop of trees or plants. That would mean an atmosphere. That would mean the possibility animals could breathe it in – and heck – maybe intelligent life!”.

Zac for a moment thought how utterly BIG that would be if it were true. But if it was true Zac thought of the next possibility – that the Moon had somehow terraformed in the fifty years since the supposed ‘apollo mission’ – that would also mean human beings may be able to breathe in it – perhaps unassisted. That would mean Man could live on the Moon & breathe freely like on Earth. This would mean the Moon could be an Earth Part Two – & perhaps a better one! This would be the “Discovery of the Millenia!” – with his name – Zac Anton Brighton – written all over it.

Zac’s daydreaming was halted as he finally got to the last rung on the ladder all while clutching a cleaning cloth in hand. He now looked at the almost one meter in diameter lens in front of him – apart from a few dust specs, it was virtually spotless. Zac had an immediate burst of endorphins – the brain chemical of ‘happiness’. The green tinges were the ‘real deal’.

He trundled down quickly & had a look through the eyepiece again – it was still there. He told himself to be calm & take ten deep breaths. After just three rushed breaths he closed his eyes in an effort to reset his exhilaration. He now needed to channel something great from within – something that until now was dormant. For once in his actually, in reality, quite drab life, he had ‘work of great importance’ to do.

He would look for more green tinges on the Moon & then do some spectrograph analysis of its atmosphere to see whether there was sizeable oxygen content & if its levels could be breathable, either right now or perhaps soon. Zac was assuming it was not already at twenty-one percent as there was no perceptible blue tinge in the Moon’s sky.

To figure all this out for sure Zac decided he needed to spend at minimum of seventy-two hours in the telescope & it’s adjoining inbuilt lab to analyse the data – luckily his timing was as usual propitious – it was nine-thirty on Friday evening, this meant no one else would be using the telescope or the adjoining technical analysis lab until Monday at ten pm – in exactly seventy-two hours and thirty minutes time. He would rest assured be left alone with this mega discovery until then.

Zac looked at the scheduling whiteboard to see who had that coming Monday telescope appointment – it was Chester Tinkerton – a much talented Astronomer who practically never even acknowledged Zac’s existence whatsoever – unless it furnished derisive ends or an attempt at public humiliation. Like many of the so called ‘successful’, Chester Tinkerton was brilliant, but not very nice – especially to ‘the help’ – i.e. people like Zac Brighton.

Zac knew this sleepless three-day task would, to say the least be energy sapping work – luckily the lab had a snack vending machine, he had access to cookies, crisps, sweets & pop soda, & plenty of cash & coins to pay. He decided to give himself half an hour to refuel & over eat a little before his mammoth task of three days without sleep to gather & analyse the almost certainly, revolutionary moon data. He went over to the triply oversized well stocked vending machine. Zac thought to himself as he gazed at the behemoth, “another example of a typical university budget overspend”.

He put in the money & punched in the code that represented one of the Cookies. Then he went for the Pop Soda – he got two cans, one for now & one in his pocket for later. Hed did the same for the sweets. He gulped down the goodies in no time especially as he had forgotten to eat for some eighteen hours already – a common occurrence for him as a partial scatterbrain.

He knew he needed more calorific fuel so he punched in for another two cookies. The first one winded off the spiral & clunked at the bottom. The second unwound but got stuck on the end of the spiral feeder coil. Zac couldn’t believe his bad luck. He’d have to shake the machine to make it drop. He looked down at his puny body & then up at the giant triple sized vending machine & let out a big sigh.

Zac outstretched his stick-figure-like arms, attempting to hug the machine first & then he’d rattle it as best as he could. The problem was that this machine was so big his other arm was at least a foot short of the other edge. Even so he tried to shake it – it barely made a sound. There was no way he would be able to shake it, he’d need another strategy – leverage.

Zac decided he could use a metal lever, and wedge it under the front of the machine which was on legs. If the lever was long enough, he’d multiply his force & the machine would rock back & forth & the cookie would drop off the spiral. He looked around & pretty soon found a long iron beam from the adjoining lab. He used his own two boosted soled shoes, one stacked on top of the other. This would make the pivot for the metal bar.

He & tested his method. He put about half his power & the machine rocked nicely. He thought “this is gonna be easier than I thought”. He put in about three quarters of his power, pushed down on the lever & watched the machine lift off its legs backward about a foot’s distance. Zac in only his socks on the high polished floor tiles slipped a little, then he fell over flat on his back the iron rod clunking beside him.

Slowly ominously & surely the machine toppled forward, Zac prayed hopelessly that his three-quarter energy input was not going to be enough to make the machine topple over on him. If it did fall, it would squash him, meaning he would be seriously injured or even killed – let alone the fact it would ruin gathering the data to back up the fact that the moon had terraformed & sprouted at least plant life & a breathable atmosphere.

Time slowed to a crawl as he watched the top of the machine pivot further forward. He saw it slowing even further as its hinged motion almost stopped. The giant machine then stopped in mid-fall, it was actually perfectly balanced, half wanting to fall over & half wanting to fall back. Zac stared at it waiting for his fate, making sure he was ice berg still. Amazingly it stayed perched on its gravitational knife edge, as if bowing to him like a giant-mechanical-fridge shaped-sumo-wrestler.

Zac now needed another plan. The options as he saw it boiled down to two options. He could slowly move out of the way hoping that his movements wouldn’t be strong enough to make it fall one way or the other. On this option if he was wrong this would mean a fifty-fifty chance of it falling forwards so squashing & potentially killing him. Of course, if that happened it would stop him from his Moon lab-work analysis, which he had a gut feel it would show life on the Moon & the chance for Man to inhabit the Moon and live freely. Zac had always trusted his gut & it invariably paid off.

He then had a very out of character thought – he thought of his possible upward trajectory in the social hierarchy, after the news had broken worldwide. He knew that if he broke the news of the Moon’s new status first, he would no longer be an ignored as an ‘at best’ journeymen astronomer, at a small medium-to-low ranked university. Within a few weeks of global media fanfare, he’d be right up there with Ptolemy, Copernicus & Kepler & would have ‘Einstein like’ fame. He checked his thoughts & was scared that he had begun to think that way. He turned back to pressing reality & now weighed up of the other option – option two. He could throw his Pop Soda can at the machine, when it hit it should provide momentum to topple over safely away from him towards the back wall.

Zac decided on option two as the option one to crawl slowly & hope was far too risky in comparison. He rationalised that he could throw the can with as much energy as humanly possible & by the laws of momentum it would have to move the machine safely backward. He braced himself to throw the pop soda can, then he had another thought – “if this fails & I end up dead then the next person in here will probably not see me at all under this giant machine at all. They also won’t smell my decaying body because the telescope & lab is kept at a very low temperature & is also well ventilated”.

Zac’s thoughts continued: “This means they will go straight over to the telescope, look through it & see the green tinges on the Moon & then decide like me, to do the necessary seventy-two hours worth of data analysis. After this very perfunctory work, all will be confirmed & soon they will become one of the greats of Astronomy, Physics, Science & History itself. In short, they’ll steal my earth-shattering discovery all because I died in a freak oversized vending machine accident!“.

After this disturbing thought of having his thunder stolen, and worse, by a colleague who sneered at him daily, Zac committed himself to throw the pop soda can harder than anything he’d ever thrown before – not that he’d thrown many projectiles in his mostly bookish life.

He motioned to grab the full pop soda can that was in in his pocket. His hand was only centimeters from it anyway so he gambled that the friction of the vending machines leg stoppers was enough to dissipate the tiny nano – ‘earthquake’ in the floor that his reaching for the soda can would create. Zac still felt the cliched time dilation feeling that people on disaster shows talk about when facing life or death situations – it was disturbing but he recognised it was simply ancient DNA programming that to help him escape death by giving him more problem-solving time.

It seemed like a minute when he moved his hand the 10 inches to grab the top of the exposed top of the can. The five minutes he spent wiggling it out of his pocket seemed like an hour. He now had it freely in his hand. He took one last look at the Logo, wondering if that’s the last time he’d read that ever present curly white writing or indeed any writing again at all. “Now or Never” he thought & he wound up his throw like a baseball pitcher, only a more careful wind-up speed. He threw with all his might aiming at the top middle part of the vending machine. The can left his outstretched hand & unwound pitcher’s arm & flew through the air like some ancient Roman-era mega sling-shot firing a one tonne stone boulders at some soon to be conquered barbarian village.

Zac sat & saw the pop soda can tumble end over end & get closer & closer to the bowing giant vending machine, then a sense of horror spread through his mind body & spirit – he had now realised the can was not thrown on the right trajectory – it hit the very top edge of the machine, ricocheted up, hit the ceiling, then hit the back wall directly behind the machine. It then exploded on impact & sent pop soda flying everywhere. it immediately dribbled down the walls with the empty can hitting the ground with an empty, but full of meaning, ‘clink’ sound.

Zac then realised something he couldn’t quite fathom – the hulking vending machine was still bowing forward on a knife edge, unshifted. His terrible throw had gone unpunished & he was amazingly still alive and could think of the next problem solving move. After so much stress absorbed into his system, he couldn’t but help but let out a king-sized laugh.

The laugh’s sound waves travelled around the vending machine which focussed the energy waves onto the back wall just like a lens, which then made the hundreds of residual pop soda drips each vibrate to-and-fro a few millimeters. One drip that was being microscopically shaken was inside the electrical outlet that the machine was plugged into – the coke droplet shifted onto two frayed wires & short circuited them with a mighty CLAP sound the accompanied explosion sent sparks flying.

Zac saw the flash first & the clap of explosion a distant second then he saw the top edge machine move forward off its knife edge tilt, snapping out of its respectfully bowing, ‘suspended animation’. As a last-ditch effort to escape, he tried to move his legs to scramble away. Having taken off his shoes, his socks had no traction & they slipped repeatedly as if he was a cartoon character. As the machine fell, his eyes focussed on a pack of candy inside the machine. On the wrapper he saw the image of a space man on the moon holding the candy with a speech bubble saying “MoonFizzles Sherbet – A Sour Explosion In Your Brain”.

Zac’s remaining time on Earth was only ninety seconds. Stuck in the machines vice like grip, he could only move an arm & his index finger. His last act was to scrawl out a final message in the sand like sherbet that exploded everywhere. He completed the message & everything faded to black.

His little body was completely enveloped by the machine, so much so someone walked past an hour later they would just think the machine had been placed that way on purpose, perhaps for maintenance reasons. There were no movie-like pools of blood for someone to notice & then scream at.

At Monday 9:50PM Chester Tinkerton appeared at the telescope & adjoining lab as per his reserved slot. He as usual wore a colorful green & grey striped jersey to combat the cool climate-controlled environment of the Telescope enclosure. He stroked his grey goatee and adjusted his grainy specs as he thought about how he was going to spend the next three hours most productively. These telescope affairs were mostly ‘just for fun’, but Chester as a consummate professional & perfectionist, always liked to achieve at all times.

“First things first” Chester thought & he took out an old-fashioned transistor radio – he always liked to work with classic rock ‘n’ roll playing as it helped him think clearly – and he was old enough to just remember the late fifties slash early nineteen sixties rock ‘n’ roll. He hummed along to the Eddie Cochran song I.O.U as he looked through the eyepiece & saw something he couldn’t quite believe. Then he realised he’d been distracted & forgotten to do the basic task even every half serious Astronomer does before anything – clean the eyepiece of the telescope.

Chester reached for old fashioned well weathered leather satchel. He opened its metal lined jaws & got some isopropyl alcohol, a mini torch & a lint free cloth out of it & dripped the cleaner drop by drop onto the cloth. He carefully unscrewed the outer cap of the eyepiece cleaned both sides in time-honored fashion. He turned on the mini torch, then took the unscrewed eyepiece & looked through it so he could see the torch light which would show any dirt or smudges. It was now crystal clear.

He then looked at the cloth & saw a fair amount of green mildew or perhaps it was a build-up of bacterium. He said to himself in a funny voice “I knew it was too good to be true Chester me old boy – yes there will be no greenery on the Moon today”.

Chester took a plastic sandwich bag out of his nearby satchel, put it back in the bag & thought nothing more of it. He screwed the eyepiece on & sat down in the viewing chair & looked forward to a relaxing but productive night of rock ‘n’ roll music & asteroid hunting. This would be accompanied by his ritualistic half-time trip to the big vending machine to buy his favourite sherbet ‘Moonfizzles’.

He had his pocket change for the machine, he just hoped that it wasn’t ‘playing up’ again, which over the years it randomly seemed to do. Mostly this was just swallowing change, but sometimes it was known to slice and crush a few hands, & Chester knew of the ‘silly’ staff-club legend that it had electrocuted then crushed a young technician when it was situated at a prior university & so some said it was “possessed”.

At half-time through his telescope time, Chester walked over to the machine. He immediately saw it was face down on its side – obviously out of action. He noticed it was slightly ajar off the ground & not flat, as you’d normally expect.

He bent down to look what was underneath it, but before he did, he saw a big patch of scattered grey sherbet, & then he saw some writing poking out. It was some words in the sherbet. With ‘chicken scratch’ style writing inscribed in a similar way a child writes in the sand with a finger – it said:

I, Zac A. Brighton saw the

greenery on the moon first

Z.A.B

Chester’s cold heart sank. He knew what this likely meant – a dead faculty member. It his gut he knew who it was. Chester being Chester he pretended he had never seen Zac at all – he knew tomorrow the cleaner would find him anyway & then they’d do the necessary call to authorities, that way he could also avoid the guilty feeling overcoming him in waves.

Yes, Chester pretending he hadn’t seen anything untoward was immature, but he had a big speech interstate tomorrow at a conference & he’d never cancelled an appointment in his life. The only problem was if anyone noticed that his ‘surprised & horrified’ look when told of Zac’s death was fake. He convinced himself he’d practice tonight in front of the mirror in the bathroom while his wife was asleep.

Chester got up from his crouch, turned & left for the door, but not before erasing his boot-prints in the sherbet. Unbeknown to him, he left a partial boot-print with his size fourteens also with the shoe-makers logo on it – ‘Fleetfeet’.

After returning from conference, he’d not sat down for more than two minutes when an authoritative knock on the door sounded. He knew his laziness regarding Zac had caught up with him. He weighed the two options over in his mind & backed himself to double down “what does it matter – it’s not like I killed him! It’s just a white lie after all – so what if the cops don’t believe me – I erased all evidence of being near the machine anyway. Everything will be fine – I’ll stick to my guns”.

After seventy-two hours of questioning Chester & investigating the death scene the local Police realised the death was an accident. Chester was cautioned but luckily never charged with misleading Police, too which he then finally & tearfully confessed to.

Chester returned to his job at university – but things were never the same at Skylark for him, he had lost much esteem in the eyes of his colleagues for ignoring Zac when he was alive & ignoring him in death & then lying about it. He was even barred from entering the newly opened ‘Zac Anton Brighton Observatory’, which had a 17-foot lens, top of the line anti-blur correction, and was an entirely self-cleaning telescope.