Lunacy

It was, as our friends nearer the more local point of intersection of the earth’s axis of rotation with its surface are wont to put it, “a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht”. Penilune as the pedants have it, and nigh on perigee. It being near the summer solstice I had chosen to escape the heat of the house and to sleep in the hammock slung between the two wide spaced sycamore trees that grace our garden.

P areidolia is what they call it. I have it. I will not have it be said that I suffer from it – it is a gift, not a disability. A super-power. It is what causes peoples to see faces in inanimate objects, such as the woman in the moon. As I looked up I could clearly make out her features. Some say they are merely natural variations in brightness that only those with twisted minds can perceive as being eyes, nose and mouth. Distorted minds see it, some say. To me, since childhood, they have been the features of an old friend.

She – yes I have always known that the supposed man in the moon is a young woman – winked at me. This was no surprise, it had happened many times before. Less usual was that it was not a single wink. Not the friendly greeting I had rejoiced in many a time before. Weirder too was that the wink was not with a single eye as before. Now I was accustomed the fact that one eye, the left as looked at from earth, appeared larger than the other. An endearing asymmetry I had always thought. What was novel was that the winking was switching from one eye to the other.

In my not-at-all ill-spent youth I had been a Boy Scout. Among the skills I learned as such was the Morse code. As I had escaped conscription, would never have dreamed of volunteering for the armed services, nor had the slightest interest in ‘Ham’ radio, my Morse skill was limited to the use of flags. The convention I had mastered used two flags, held apart for a dash and both up for a dot. I was aware of, but had been taught to despise, an alternative convention, right flag up for dot, left flag up for dash – or was it the other way round? memory fades. This came back to me and it gradually dawned on me that the moon was signalling – a wink with the larger left eye for a dash and one with the smaller right for a dot. It was a struggle to recover my memory of Samuel Morse’s wondrous code and by the time it was back it was clear that I was only catching the tail of the message, although enough to learn that, slightly surprisingly, it was in English. Regret that I had missed it diminished when, after a pause it appeared to start again. My decoding was well rusty, and I had no paper and pencil to take it down, but as well as memory serves this is the message:

People of earth, I have a severe warning for you that you would do well to heed. An asteroid comprised of carbonaceous chondritic material is on an intersection orbit with your planet and impact will be severely disruptive. Had you the technology, which seems not to be the case, I should recommend a species wide evacuation. As it is, all I can suggest is that you take the best precautions you can. I wish you well.

Well, what would you have done? The lass who took my 999 call was calm and professional. However her questions gave the impression that the hypotheses were being entertained that either I was in need of the services of a psychiatrist or that my belief were conditioned by either alcohol or illicit drugs circulating in my bloodstream. Fortunately, I am not without contacts, although it does not seem right to name them, and I set wheels in motion.

The two smartly dressed persons who in time called at my door were extremely polite and gave no hint that I was not believed. The only oddity was the care with which they ensured that I did not bump my head when entering the back of their car as they drove me away. Arriving at what appeared to be a well appointed country house, I was ushered in, made comfortable, given a cup of weak tea and invited to tell my tale. Then I was escorted to a room whose only unusual feature was that the walls seemed to be covered in cushion. I have scant means of estimating the length of my stay in that establishment, where I was well fed, considerately cared for, and at all times treated respectfully. In time, after a number of what appeared to be cosy if probing chats, I was informed that it was recommended that I leave and resume life as if nothing had happened. Which I did.

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I had been home for but two days. I was comfortably settled on my father’s old leather arm chair, my feet on the matching footstool, a tray with a modest supper of smoked salmon on rye bread, rich coleslaw and a few cherry tomatoes on my lap and a glass and a bottle of the finest tawny port on the ormolu table beside me watching the news when enlightenment came. Apparently the ever watching telescopes around the globe and in space had, several months ago, detected a great asteroid. The mighty humming and whirring computers, which I gather neither hum nor whirr, had apparently calculated that, after a gravitational deflection as it passed the planet Mars, the object would impact Earth causing a fiery extinction that would cause us to share the fate of the late lamented dinosaurs. Politicians and scientists who were interviewed let it slip that the fact that this distressing news had not been made public until the danger had passed for the avoidance of engendering widespread panic in a populus not well versed in stoicism or the art of acceptance of the inevitable. Those, in a word, not minded to go gentle into that good night.

A mighty spaceship had been launched and by application of extreme but very gentle force, with great care not to shatter the object into an even more damaging shower of smaller fragments, had deflected it by a fraction of a degree, resulting in it passing Earth at a safe distance to the great joy of those amateur astronomers who were equipped to observe such a near‑black object as it skimmed safely past us into the void.

How I came to believe that I had received a warning of this grave potential danger is something that I, to this day, cannot explain. As Billy Wagstaff had Piglet say to his friend, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Edward, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”