The Aeronaut

No one can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say… And sometimes—even on the Earth—you need to scream, and maybe run and maybe wave your arms just to locate yourself. I have also found that this is much the same feeling one gets telling a true story that is not believed.

I am an Aeronaut. Not a balloonist or “extreme balloonist” but an explorer by balloon, in the most classic sense. We like to say that Humankind saw the Earth for the first time, from up in the heavens, through the eyes of an Aeronaut.

Admiral Byrd is really the one to blame for all of this. My buddies are too but it all started with Byrd. When a man takes a dive into a dangerous adventure of some sort, he usually has his buddies to blame for pushing him off the end of the diving board.

We were all hanging out in the man cave, watching YouTubes, and came across this video of a TV program circa 1950s sponsored by the Longines Chronoscope and hosted by Frank Knight.

Once we realized what they were saying, we stopped breathing: “Admiral Byrd”, started the interviewer, “you went to both the North Pole and the South Pole. Is there any unexplored land left on this earth that might appeal to adventurous young Americans?” The Admiral answered, after a long and considered pause, speaking steadily as a man who’d just sworn an oath: “Yes, there is. And not up around the North Pole because it’s getting crowded up there now and because they found out it’s really viable not only to live in but militarily. But strangely enough, there’s left in the world today an area as big as The United States that’s never been seen by a human being—and that’s beyond the pole on the other side of the South Pole from Little America. And, I think it’s quite astonishing that there should be an area as big as that unexplored. So, there is a lot of adventure left down at the bottom of the world…”

The interviewer, after what we imagined to be a stunned silence, then asked—a bit cautiously, it seemed: “Admiral, do you hope to see that?” And our Admiral Byrd answered—with his keen gaze and an almost boyish smirk he quickly suppressed, “I do. Yes.” And he adjusted himself in his seat. So did all four of us, in the blue glow of the TV. Mike, Jim, Scotty and Dale. Jim is our researcher who can find pretty much any piece of information we need; Scott can source any gadget or materiel or tech we need and fabricate it; Dale is our mentor and a great jet and prop pilot who taught us everything we know about flying balloons—and me, Mike. I guess I’m the patsy who gets to fly the balloons off to places from which I may never return.

Anyway, back to the video we were playing from our 75 inch Sony. The unreality of it all floored us. Here we are, watching a 50s interview revealing a discovery as big as Columbus and the show cuts away to a frickin’ watch commercial! It started to make us feel that everyone around us was asleep—and we were kinda spooked to consider how many more things in relation to which everyone in our society might be sleep-walking, if news of an entire continent the size of the US got barely a yawn and hardly any serious attention before or after the commercial break. And, there we were, it seemed—the only ones awake, sitting in that basement mancave, eating Cheetos and drinking Diet Cokes.

We went through bag after bag of Cheetos like a buzz saw and kept playing and replaying this interview—after a while not even bothering to wipe our fingers and covering our mouse with splotches of liquified orange cheese powder. Obsession with a purpose combined with Diet Cokes and snacks down in a dimly lit mancave is a kind of sacred catacomb where wild speculation starts to feel more and more like reality.

Next, we grabbed our parents’ 1958 Encyclopedia and looked up Antarctica, thinking we were over being shocked but we ended up leaving our Cheeto’d finger prints all over the pages, passing around the thick leather-bound volume, as we read aloud the whole entry—and especially one passage that was so on fire it seemed like it could melt the snow on the whole Antarctic continent: “These flights proved the inland areas to be featureless in character with a dome 13,000 feet high at about Latitude 80 degrees South, Longitude 90 degrees East.” “A dome!” was all I could blurt out. “What the heck?! This is unbelievable”, Jim said, starting to type furiously on his laptop. “Now, there’s a frickin’ dome? You’ve gotta be kidding me”, Scotty added guffawing. Dale was looking steadily at the screen and said with a quiet weight of reflection in his voice: “I have over 7000 hours as a pilot and I’m beginning to wonder why I never questioned the fact that we corrected for everything like wind speed and altitude but we never corrected for the rotation of the earth which is 1000 miles per hour—depending on where you are— nor did we correct for its curvature.”

This led to more binging and Diet Cokes and yelling comments from the bathroom, to keep ourselves in the whole frenzied conversation. James was soon tossing more fuel into the fire with declassified CIA documents talking about things like Russian studies by a doctor Zubko and others on The Firmament, referencing photographs and statistics measuring things like light refraction on docs that looked like they’d been faxed and re-faxed and read by dozens of horn-rimmed bureaucratic spooks. We learned that the Hebrew word for Firmament in the Bible could be translated as “dome”.

“Gentlemen, sounds like a mission for the Piccard!”, James got out, just ahead of a burp. We regularly toasted the black and white photo we had up in the mancave of Auguste Piccard – the first man and Aeronaut to reach the Stratosphere. He pulled this off in 1931 and, when they asked him what he saw, he said: “The Earth looked flat with upturned edges.” We’d always chalked up his description to the bias of the times and never thought much about it—until we heard about “The Dome”.

The Piccard itself is our masterpiece—proof in and of itself that The American Garage is one of the wonders of the world; we all refer to ours as “The Garage Mahal”. There is no human problem that some American is not working on in his garage, on his way to unveiling the answer that will save Humanity. One guy you may have heard about created a fuel cell in his garage and drove across the country on a gallon of water—and then died under mysterious circumstances shortly afterwards. Speaking of the 50s and space flight, one teenage American kid named Pete Peterson tracked the coordinates of Sputnik from his parents’ garage with such a high degree of accuracy that, when he transmitted them over ham radio, the government paid him a visit.

We consider Bezos, Branson and Musk to be one of us but maybe a little too heavy on publicity & commercial flights, lighter on actual discovery voyages. The Piccard, as a vessel for travel to the edge of space and the ends of the world, far surpasses anything we’ve seen them do. It’s several times the size of Bezos’ Blue Origin and can sustain flight for months in the stratosphere, just using balloons. How are we able to pull this off financially? Well, one word will explain it all… Wait for it! “Bitcoin”. Thanks to our man Gabe the Greek, we knew the score early and had one of our famous sessions in the mancave about it. That entire weekend, we binged on Doritos and plowed through mountains of information about the blockchain revolution and bought—we won’t say how much—lots and lots of Bitcoin when it was at just a few cents.

Anyway, back to Le Piccard. From what we can tell, it’s got the largest-balloon gondola extant, since the Hindenburg, anyway— octagonal in shape with room for eight full-sized weather balloons at the corners and three complete levels with viewing portals on all but the bottom level which was fortified for rough landings and housed the propulsion system and other systems for heating and cooling and the like. Fuel? Well, you might not believe it but you do meet a lot of people, when you’re a pilot, and one of Dale’s regular passengers—during his flying days—knew the guy who drove from coast to coast on one gallon of water. Let’s just say that all the necessary arrangements were made with the inventor and, because of this, his widow is now well taken care of. And, the Piccard now has its own inexhaustible propulsion system and power supply. This early in the story, we don’t want to give away too much about the gadgets we made a part of this little masterpiece of ours but the airspeed significantly exceeds the Hindenburg’s 84 mph and has an instantly-deployable parachute with navigable glider capabilities for emergency landings, is fully seaworthy and all the ballast needed to right itself, if capsized.

“So what are we all saying here? Hey! Listen up a minute!”, Scotty said as he was standing on the couch jumping a little bit as he yelled to the room. We all looked up, still chewing but silent. “OK, focus for a minute. The governments of the world signed The Antarctic Treaty in 1959 and, apparently, that makes it illegal for a private individual to travel to the South Pole—and we don’t even know if it’s a pole or something else OR, if we landed, whether we’d ever be able to take off again.” “Hang on there, Scotty, let’s step back and put together the main factoids we have so far and see what we can deduce”, I suggested. “OK, we know Bezos’ Blue Origin has gone up 330,000 feet or 62.5 miles, by rocket”, Scotty added while nodding. "And", I interjected, “Patching this logic together with some more chewing gum, we know a private rocket went up 73 miles and was abruptly stopped by “something”; so, let’s assume for the sake of conversation that these data points put us somewhere within 10 miles of the top of the dome, assuming there is "a dome.” “And, that’s too high for a helium balloon to go”, Dale chimed in and continued. “When the density of helium in the balloon matches the surrounding air, that’s all she wrote”, Dale finished. “The Encyclopedia is the key”, James said, standing up from his zero gravity chair. “I’m grabbing some more ice”, he said, walking across the room toward the refrigerator to refill our ice bucket with Sonic ice and then coming back to his chair. “Anyway", James continued, "Remember how high up the Encyclopedia said the Firmament was—and they gave us the coordinates?” “13,000 feet!”, we all said at once. Scotty was standing up again now too: “Shhh, shhh, shhh! Listen to this! We don’t need to go as high as Bezos. We only need to go high enough to find the Firmament at the coordinates the Encyclopedia gave us and then follow it down to the end of the World where it touches the earth.” We all stopped and sat back on our couches, jolted—seeing it all in a flash for the first time.

“Well”, Dale said with some weight in his voice, “There’s the problem of finding a place to take off. Then, there’s taking off and flying without detection and then there’s reaching the destination and returning home.” Dale was from the generation that actually said “problem” and didn’t try to call it something else like “a challenge”. “Piece-a-cake!”, Scotty laughed while sitting back in his seat on the couch and looking around himself at all of us in the room, feeling it all.

“Cape Horn”, James interjected out of the blue." He scooped up some more Sonic ice from the 50s era ice bucket with penguins stamped into it that Dale had donated to the mancave, at one point. “Whaaat?”, we all asked at once. “We take off from Cape Horn”, James said. “It’s the land mass in this Hemisphere pretty much the closest to Antarctica. “The Dome”, James said making air quotes, “if there is a Dome, would be well within the maximum height a helium balloon like the Piccard could go. We only need to be at 13,000 feet to touch the Firmament, according to the Encyclopedia, at the coordinates they gave us. We might have to go a few hundred miles out to sea or even cross the shores of Antarctica but we’d meet the Firmament, again, if it’s there.”

Dale said, “Guys, let’s just agree that this is all about finding the Firmament and, if we do not find it by a certain point along the flight path, there’s no point in going all the way into Antarctica. We’re on a mission with a flight path to the end of the World and we either find the dome”—Dale's pointer finger shot up and shook once at the ceiling—“or we turn back.” He settled back in his seat, his eyes off in the distance: “This must be how the old explorers felt”, he continued, with a thousand mile stare, “All they had to go on was their common-sense logic, their powers of observation and some legends—and, to be quite frank, these seem like legends.” Dale got up to take a leak and was still talking to all of us from the bathroom, “We’re going to need stealth plating and a canopy over the balloons attached to the gondola by some industrial quality springs, so we can protect the balloons from the Firmament. May even help to have wheels on the side of the canopy facing the Firmament. It’s also best if the entire exterior and everything up to and including the canopy is wired with heating coil, so we can take off again, even if we land in a snow storm. We should probably make sure we pack some shovels & heavy duty snow blowers, though. Scotty? Whathya tink, Bubster?", Dale said drying his hands and looking out from the bathroom. “Piece-a-cake, Dad!”, Scotty answered with what we all seemed to notice had a greater measure of confidence than hilarity in his tone—which oddly-enough gave us an added measure of comfort in the enterprise.

James had seemed far away but now he was back: “If we get to latitude 80 degrees South and longitude 90 degrees East, we either find the Firmament at 13,000 feet or we don’t. That’s our turning back point. We’ll know the Encyclopedia misled us and there’s no sense in dying alone in the most godforsaken vast landscape of frozen hell we could imagine. Agreed?” For the first time, the room was silent and we were all nodding our heads.

James continued, “Now that we’ve covered more or less the main solid reference points—and we know there will be more—let’s switch gears a minute and lemme read ya some glowing lettering right here on the pages of The Book of Enoch: “The Book of the Revolutions of the Lights of Heaven. Each as it is, according to their classes, according to their period of rule, and their times, according to their names, and places of origin, and according to their months.” James stopped: “Whether or not we agree with how Enoch saw the heavens where we will be journeying—at least we’ll be on the lower fringes of the robe of the heaven he describes—we need to be open to discovering an order to things we have not known previously. Just be open and respect the new information; don’t try to fit it all into what we think we know—because, if we confirm even a few of these main data points, our Universe already will be way different than we see it here tonight. As different as a mythical landscape is from the landscape of the materialists. We're free to look at it our way and they're free to look at it in their way. It’s just that what makes this all worthwhile is that confirming a couple of these data points tells us so much about the nature of reality—it justifies us living in a state of wonder for the rest of our lives, knowing we are truly significant and at the center of things and not pecks of dust in a universe so vast that it’s impossible to imagine anything about human life would represent something meaningful--at least in the ultimate Cosmic sense.”

We all sat there in silence again. James started crunching some ice and Scotty said what we all felt: “Read some more.” James picked up The Book of Enoch again, reading aloud, as if announcing something: “I saw twelve Gates in Heaven, at the ends of the Earth, from which the Sun, and the Moon, and the stars, and all the works of Heaven, go out in the East and the West.” He stopped reading and put the book down on the coffee table, among all our half-eaten bags of Cheetos and bottles of Diet Coke. This seemed like the wrong spot to place such a book but James spoke again and brought home the significance of Enoch’s vision into our mancave world: “The ancients seemed to believe that there were gates on the edge of the world where the Sun and Moon and even the luminaries we call stars, rested. Well, if they turn out to be even partly right about the Firmament, maybe we’ll discover they’re right about some other things—like these gates.” That jolted us. It really did. He was right. How many other possibilities would be wide open then, if the Firmament was true? How much of the Universe we think we know now would disappear? What else would have to be true and possible, in order for there to be gates in which the Moon rested and then somehow rose again to make its journey we all see it make across the sky under a dome stretching over the whole Earth? This was how we discovered our “Why”… Why risk it all? This is why.

Dale mentioned stealth technology. He also mentioned certain other “modifications” we should probably make to The Piccard. This got us into our wheelhouse. You see, Americans working in their garages know you can order anything in the mail—especially if you call it by its less common name for an ostensibly common purpose… My friends and I have a phrase for this: “pliably deniable”. And, yes, we figured out how to make stealth metal paneling. Our “Garage Mahal” started as your usual two-car garage in the suburbs but, after our little liquidity event, Scotty bought a small community airport and the Garage Mahal is now an airplane hanger of some considerable size. Scotty, standing up in the room on the orange shag carpet of the mancave with a sense of gravity in his words said, “Gentlemen, this calls for a meeting of The Board.”

The Board was made up of Tom, a surgeon and the best man at my wedding, a man of singular—you might say “surgical” clarity of mind; then there was Steve—another doc with a grandly well-informed and integrated intellect; Mark was the most sane and balanced and practical-minded of all of us and a transit & logistics planning expert. Brian was probably the smartest of anyone. He had developed the world’s fastest computer. In order to do this, he had to develop a new computer language and, in order to do this, he had to develop an entirely new mathematical system. Brian did for computer science what Pythagoras did for Geometry—reducing the words making up all computer code into mathematical objects that can be tested and proven consistent by logical theorems. Let’s just say that The Piccard’s computational capabilities benefited from the brain of Brian which guaranteed they functioned consistently, under all circumstances. These four guys went back to boyhood days for me. We rarely saw BG in person but Bulgarian George was our connection to all things scientific & cyber in the murky world of Eastern Europe—a master but ethical hacker par excellence. Then, there was OZ –the man who was one degree of separation from everyone we ever needed to meet. We already talked about Gabe the Greek. Last but not least, Setra would be on the way—the Bruce Lee of Cambodia and oriental wiseman who saw connections between most things that we could not see and loyal to the death for his friends. They all began landing their private planes at Scotty’s airport—our airport—and the Board began its proceedings. It was decided unanimously, with one stipulation: I would not go alone per usual. Setra insisted on being the one in the group who would accompany me on the journey.

OZ connected us with the owner of an Argentinian shipping company who rented us the freighter that would take The Piccard to Cape Horn. Tom and Steve would wait for us in Buenes Aires to attend to any medical care we might need upon our return and did all the necessary pre-flight medical testing. Mark spotted at least 10 things we had not considered which saved our butts several ways and coordinated all the logistics; BG cloaked our communications in the cyber world and made sure that some extra tech we needed was shipped to us through alternate channels, so to speak.

The launch day was upon us. We had the Piccard out on the windy peninsula of Cape Horn, at the tip of the hemisphere. We were all there. Even BG. And we all knew why. And we were ready. There it was –Le Piccard… all eight weather balloons deployed and its canopy-with-topside-wheels over them, supported by steel springs and the heating coils which gave The Piccard a kind of “steam punk” look. Setra was right there with me, making sure every last detail was handled—even though everyone else had checked things down to the last item many times over. We all knew this might be the last time we would ever see each other again in this life—and we accepted that possibility.

OZ had procured an 1811 vintage Napoleon Grande Fine Champagne Cognac. OZ had a rumbling baritone timber to his voice, having studied opera in Milan and was a bit of a showman on special occasions—something we were glad for. OZ began: “The good weather of 1811 was attributed to the Great Comet of 1811 which came at precisely the time when the grapes were being harvested and stayed in the sky for weeks. The tail of the comet appeared to be as long as the Sun’s diameter and this was taken to be a sign of God’s blessing, by the people of that time—something which we will also take as a sign for us, in the same spirit.” That was old Ozzie. I’ll spare you the goodbyes, because we spared each other the goodbyes and Setra and I boarded the Piccard not even looking back.

Setra was keen on all the matters at hand, as we rose up into the vault of daylight. I pretty much let Setra take us up and enjoyed the thought of what was happening looking at the horizon that rose up flat-lined with us. It was the death of the entire Cosmos we had so carefully constructed in our minds that awaited us. BG had set up encrypted radio communication with some military-grade tech he got from a black market at an undisclosed location along the Black Sea. We tested propulsion and were off the tip of the horn toward the forbidden waters at the bottom of the world.

The stillness was deafening. Setra knew I liked classical symphonies and asked if I wanted anything like the theme from 2001 but I declined because I thought it would seem a little corny—something for which I later felt guilty. The boys we left back at Cape Horn read our minds, though, and did it anyway and started piping in the theme from 2001 over the radio waves. We could hear them laughing in the background until it all faded away. Admiral Byrd’s words were repeating themselves to me in black and white: “But strangely enough, there’s left in the world today an area as big as The United States that’s never been seen by a human being.” Then, we set our navigation system to Latitude 80 degrees South, Longitude 90 degrees East – and The Dome.

We were rising to about 30,000 feet and that was where we planned to remain, until we crossed into Antarctica, against the wishes of all the nations in the World who were silently pushing back against all we would learn in that wasteland captive to its own Ice Age. Setra was checking on everything and asking me how I was doing, several times--with no thought for himself ever entering his mind, as was his way. There was something that was starting to block the radio signal—which shouldn’t have been happening. We watched the Sun setting upon the frozen icy waters and there remained only a sliver of light across the horizon, as we were encased by the frozen darkness, with all lights out on the Piccard

We were making good progress. The Piccard was not letting us down and seemed determined in its mission, as if the gondola sat in the palm of a hidden hand in the blackness as the stars appeared all around us and looked as if they were pulling near to our windows like a cloud of witnesses. The radio signal had long ago crackled out and was gone. It would be just under 45 hours at around 100 miles per hour and we’d be crossing the shores of Antarctica. Time was gone. Setra was completely awake: “Did I ever tell you about the ancient Cambodian Kings, Mike?” He had and he knew he had told me before but I said: “No. Tell me.” That’s what good friends do. They always listen to a buddy’s story, as if it’s the first time they were telling it—no matter how many times they told it before. “Our people lived under the Drago constellation”, he began. “The great Cambodian Kings would go as high as they could into the mountains and sit absolutely still for days, without food, and listen in silence for the wisdom they would need to rule the people. Pretend I am not here, Mike. I need to be alone and listen.” It was as if he really could disappear sometimes. I could not take my eyes off of the stars whose constellations dignified the stillness with a growing sense of expectation.

One thing we worried about being in stealth mode was that airplanes would not see us and we would not be fast enough to get out of their flight path—especially traveling with all external lighting out. Mark had charted the timing of our flight path to miss all known commercial flights. However, my worst fears started to grow into an only slightly subdued sense of terror, as I looked out from the largest viewing portal of the gondola—three layers of enormous bullet-proof glass windows, climate controlled against frost and blatantly open against the night. Off in the distance coming straight toward us I saw an arrestingly gigantic light. It looked like many airplanes in circular formation with the coronas of their lights blending into one.

I knew we needed to rise up by about 10,000 feet to have any hope that whatever it was would pass under us. All I could think of was that it must have been military aircraft possibly out to intercept us… Had the stealth tech failed? There were too many of them. So many planes would never have been dispatched to intercept us, I reasoned to comfort myself. Setra was wide awake. We hopped to it and jammed our elevation controls upward. We were out of time and it all seemed like forever as we rose. 3,000. 3,500. 4,800. 5,300. 6,200. 7,300. The luminous disc of light arched through the night air, like a gargantuan white whale breaking the surface of the waves just under our gondola. We were only a couple thousand feet above it now and we could see the light stretched out for miles in a rectangle shape like a 1000 lane highway brightly lit with an arch in its middle. This is for sure what blocked our radio signals. It all seemed to be in slow motion now and took what seemed forever to pass by under us. There was an echoing sound that filled the air, as if a giant bell had just been rung and—when it was passing under us—the soundwaves shook the gondola so violently I could picture the rivets loosening all around us, until it passed and we could see the opposite-facing side. We still couldn’t recognize it, because you can’t see a thing that is so massively out of place. It is said that, when the Incas first looked out from their shores to ocean horizon, they could not see the sailing ships of the Spaniards which should have been well within view from the vantage point where they stood, because they could not in their experience imagine anything the likes of the galleons and their tall sails ever being there. Not imagining meant they could not see.

Then we saw what it was—not believing our eyes and straining our minds somehow to see anything else but what was staring us in the face. Setra and I knew it first in our bones still shaking from the soundwaves of a bell that seemed as big as the whole World all of a sudden. We were staring into the face of The Moon. My first thought was that the altitude had caused us to hallucinate but the loosened rivets in the gondola knew. Our shaking bones knew. And, the words of The Book of Enoch about The Gates of the Moon at the ends of the Earth blazed before our eyes as we stared transfixed, our hearts seeming to be pulled out of our chests and into the lost and frozen night air.

“We are meant to follow her”, Setra said slowly, a bit haltingly. I wanted to run somewhere with grass to lay upon and warm summer air with crickets and a shining Moon above me, far away in outer space. “It’s our mission, Mike.” And, Setra turned the Piccard squarely perpendicular to the face of The Moon that was now quite a bit further distant but still a menace to the entire Universe that was being shattered in our minds.

We didn’t make any entries in our logs as to time, riveted as we were on our course. The arch of the Moon’s path seemed to be taking us toward and over the continent and was actually descending further and further down below our line of sight. We could not see what was around us at all, except what the light of the Moon gave us to see. After several hundred miles, the canopy with its upward-facing wheels that Dale insisted we install bumped and rebounded off of something but, since this did not recur for several hundred miles more, we thought nothing of it, as we continued our own descent.

The Moon was now lowering from view in a downward arch enough so that we could see the stars again over it’s corona of light. Our nautical gauges told us we were deep into the Antarctic continent, all seeming as if no time had passed. It had been several days of sunrises and sunsets and now we were shaking with hunger and nerves, because we had done nothing but stare into the face of a new Universe. The most unexpected Universe possible. The real Universe. The Universe of Enoch.

We were nearing 13,000 feet and the sun was setting again over 5000 miles from Cape Horn and we seeing nothing but the Moon and the Encyclopedia’s “inland areas…featureless in character”. The air glistened above us like a stratum of tiny diamonds as far as the eye could see, as we tracked our prey to her secret destination. Once we knew her secret, the vision of her Universe with its Moon Gates and Firmament and undiscovered lands would fill us and she would belong to us again, in a way she never belonged to us before. We had always belonged to the Truth. Now, the Truth would belong to us.

Why was the sheet of tiny diamonds in the sky cast all around us in the slating light of the fading sun? Why did it seem that it glistened in front of us as far as we could see ahead of us and in the sky behind us? We thought the glistening of the massive snow-covered continent must be creating this colossal shining atmospheric almost aurora borealis effect which in Antarctica is called Aurora Australis or The Southern Lights. We were off course longitudinally because we were following our girl home, though we would reach the key marker of 80 degrees latitude albeit at a different longitude than the original flight plan. We bumped and brushed on something above and we could hear the wheels spinning hard above us in a sustained hum. Setra said quietly, “We're at 80 degrees latitude and 13,000 feet. This is it, Mike. The Firmament. She sleeps under sheets of starlight and diamonds.” The wheels were whirring wildly now and the curve of The Dome was giving spark-making resistance, at our 100-mile-per-hour speed. We completely backed off propulsion and began our descent, taking the Piccard down to half speed, keeping under whatever was above us.

I could not even yet accept that it really was The Firmament—even after staring The Moon straight in the face. “You need to accept it, Mike”, Setra said with an almost sacred sense of finality. “We are in a new World—a new Cosmos.” For a moment I was repulsed and felt my guts pushing back against all of it; I wondered if we had died, somewhere back over the ocean, after being hit by a jet liner or shot down by military jets and that we were continuing our ghostly journey as disembodied spirits who did not realize they were dead. A whole Universe had died within me and its disembodied voice was trying to convince me that I had died with it… And yet, I felt myself shouting from deep within my ribcage with everything that still felt like me. I was shouting aloud now, inside the gondola—waving my arms and jumping to locate myself. If Setra had not been there, I may never have believed I was alive. “We have to focus now, Mike,” Setra said quietly looking ahead at the vision, as if he was seeing something he had seen before, long ago.

It seemed the Moon was also slowing in her descent and glowing from her own inward apertures to the light of eons within the depths of the most unforgettable face of all time. We could even see the stars sometimes through her face which we thought was reflected light at first but the sextant told us the starlight came from particular constellations that were behind her face. Our altimeter told us we were less than 10,000 feet high above the “featureless” ice and snow. She was going to her gate. The place where she was the only “feature” for as far as she or anyone else could see, until a hidden hand lifted her up into the sky, once more.

I began to wonder if it was possible for the modern mind to think these thoughts for very long without descending into madness. The control panel showing our descent brought me back to flying. Oh, now I could see we were getting real close... She had seemed to be stopped now and only a slice of her was appearing at the very end of the horizon which we could see from our galactic observation windows, as Scotty liked to call them. I could see her resting in the distance and felt our canopy with wheels occasionally bumping “something” above us, forcing us to descend lower. This was the issue: I couldn’t hold in my mind the two thoughts at the same time: the thought of the Moon resting in a “Moon Gate” and the thought of the Firmament or “Dome” stretching over the whole Earth. For now, the Firmament was only going to be “something” we were bumping up against that told us to go lower.

We landed in the night and thank God there was no storm. The stars shone so close it was as if they made the curving expanse of diamonds glisten all the way down to the Earth itself. “We’re about to land, Mike”, Setra said a couple of times, shaking me out of my reverie. “1,000 feet to touch-down. 900. 800. 700… 3,2, 100.” The Piccard bounded along the surface of the ice and snow, it seemed like several miles, as if being pulled toward the Moon Gate. Then, silence in the gondola—silence, until we heard the wind and the now soft reverberations of the rung moon bell, as the gondola settled into its spot. We waited. I don’t know what we were waiting for but we waited until the silence and the wind and the soft humming of the Moon grew deafening. “We are here, Mike. We made it.”

We donned our space suits for warmth and opened the gondola door. The freezing blast of air in the airlock perked me up and I looked at Setra and said: “One small step for Man…” and he punched me really hard.

I kept having to remind myself I was alive and on the Earth. As we looked ahead, we had to look up and up and up at the sheer expanse of her. A slice of her was showing from behind a shadowy, square-shaped behemoth whose dimly lit surface interpenetrated the colors of blue and green in a motion like the clouds. We were forced to accept that this was “The Gate”. The famous dimples and birthmarks on that side of her face that all humanity had seen in all the photos and through all the telescopes were showing now in walking distance through the Antarctic’s night air -- all of her filled with what seemed the milky essence of starlight from the whole galaxy attracted within her. The reverberations humming in our bones, our hearts being pulled out of our chests toward her again, the belief for a moment that I was a ghost walking toward a mirage across a frozen wasteland. And then we heard the crackle of radios up ahead. We put on our night-vision goggles and there they were. A couple of small outbuildings and a few silhouettes of figures we could not see in detail walking about up ahead. We had not been seen. We could take pictures, I guess, and go home but I wanted to touch her with my own hands—even though my mind could not even form the questions I would ask. And, who would answer?