Beyond

Katey was extremely antsy and of course her parents made her put on a nice (and, of course, itchy) dress and comb her hair so she looked “presentable,” according to her mother. She didn’t understand why they were making such a colossally big deal out of the day. To her, it seemed, these sorts of things happened all the time—at least they did on television. The television made everything feel smaller, compact, easier to explore, and more accessible to people who couldn’t be trussed up and trotted out by their parents to see these things. Nothing seemed too far away when if could be explored on screen in her living room. However, thanks to the television, Katey didn’t understand how big and wide and wonderful the world truly was. She also couldn’t begin to fathom just how massive the universe beyond actually was. Naturally, she figured she could count all of the stars in the sky some day and that space travel was some sort of regular experience. Every now and then someone with a lot of money and even movie stars would end up among the stars. Cartoons made it seem easy, and she was a child who had so, so many questions and sometimes her parents took the mystical, magical (easy) sort of answer route.

Planets like Mars just didn’t seem that far from Earth anyway, it was the next planet over, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that where Marvin the Martian was from, after all? Even the moon seemed so close on some nights that it was like it was whispering her bedtime stories and tucking her in. The vast universe just seemed like a printed picture on a plastic placemat for a child of only seven. Why was a rocket ship going in to space such a big deal after all? She imagined it wasn’t much different than that time they took a plane cross country to visit her aunt Bethany, and some people do that every day, so it couldn’t possibly be dangerous. Maybe even like that road trip they took to her grandparents but with no rest stops and without her Dad grumbling about gas prices, or the price of eggs these days.

The crowd buzzed with excitement and it served only to make Katey increasingly more antsy. Other children skipped and ran through the massive swarm of humans, running off all of their own anxious, excited energy. Katey, however, refused to move from her family, holding on to her mother’s hand so tightly her knuckles were turning white. She didn’t want to miss a moment of the hubbub, but also didn’t want to be swallowed up by the impressive crowd. She noticed some people pointing ahead and she realized a young man had scaled a billboard near the rows of cars to get a better view, one hand shielding his eyes from the beating sun, the other gripping the sign for balance. Some other folks had their cars tuned into the radio to listen to the launch broadcast. People were selling snacks and drinks and even little trinkets, wandering and weaving through folks. Katey turned back to the spectacle ahead and remained at her mother’s side, too afraid that she would miss something truly exciting on the launchpad getting distracted by watching anyone else.

It wasn’t until the countdown hit that the din squirted everyone finally stilled. Children stopped in their tracks to stare at the rocket on the launchpad.

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ENGINE IGNITION

WE HAVE LIFTOFF!

Smoke billowed beneath the rocket like the clouds in the sky the rocket would pierce on its way to the stars. The engines thundered as though mighty Zeus himself had ignited its takeoff with thunder & lightning. The rocket leapt from the launchpad to a symphony of excited voices, echoes of oohs and aahs, cheers and applause growing louder. Every head was tilted upward to watch the ascent into the heavens as it moved like Icarus soaring through the open skies. But just like in legend, Icarus fell from grace and in a single moment, so did humanity’s first mission to Mars.

An explosion ripped through the rocket and lit the sky like a misfired firework trapped in some sort of terrible, melancholy celebration. The joy of the event was immediately drowned in a confusion and sorrow.

There was a silence that fell quickly over the crowd like a weighted blanket. It was heavy and suffocating, like there was no edge to pull up. Every gasping breath before the quiet sucked up the air and left it tainted with apathy. A ripple of murmurs and questions moved through quiet rows of humans as they searched their minds for answers, grappling for a hopeful reality that would snap back and hit them. There was no hope, though, their hope had been carried on the backs of the astronauts before disaster struck. Hope had burst into flames along with any chance of a sooner escape from a world that was increasingly falling to ruin. It was all too good to be true until it was gone. The crowds, reminded of their own frailty, their own fallible humanity, turned and shambled, stunned and sullen to their vehicles. They grappled with the reality that an escape to another planet, another world they could build up and consume, was as much a pipe bomb as a pipe dream.

Debris rained from the skies like stardust, a reminder of the constellations unreached by the astronauts. There was no escape to Mars for humanity, not now, not anymore. The explosion would set progress back for years if not decades. There was so much time, money, resources and most importantly, lives, spent on this mission and it was all gone in a moment.

Earth was dying, and humans were spending more time trying to escape rather than work to save it. Running away from a destroyed planet instead of working to restore what they could.

Katey was far too young to grasp at these thoughts now, but as she would age, she would begin to understand. The planet would continue to change, continue to detrioriate, and the hope of man along with it.