Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Prometheus, they say, brought God's fire down to man.
And we've caught it, tamed it, trained it since our history began.
Now we're going back to heaven just to look him in the eye,
and there's a thunder 'cross the land, and a fire in the sky.^[1]

I'm just old enough to remember watching some of the Apollo launches on television, just old enough to remember watching the first lunar landing. Like an awful lot of kids of my generation, I wanted to be an astronaut (as well as wanting to be a race car driver, and a scientist).

There's legends galore in the pulp SF lore
'Bout shipwrecks of spacers a-spacin',
When meteor holes come 'tween men and their goals
By demolishing ships that they're racin'.^[2]

Even as a kid I had some vague notion that space flight was Dangerous Stuff. But it was the sort of not-quite-real danger, movie danger, that a child understands as danger. I was too young to remember Apollo I. And we didn't get all that much news of the Russian space program.

For the price was paid on a winter evening
When "Fire in the spacecraft!" somebody said.
In smoke and flame the shadow passed
And in Capsule Twelve three men were dead,
In Capsule Twelve three men were dead.^[3]

I remember reading, in high school, a Ray Bradbury story told from the point of view of a boy whose father died in space, and the effect that had on the boy and his mother (most of my books are still in boxes so I can't easily look it up -- was that "The Rocket Man"?). I was reminded of that story today.

And for a week, all I could see wherever I looked was crystal blue sky and a white smoke flower with dingy tips to its petals, getting bigger and bigger.

After 9/11, I walked outdoors and stared up at the deep blue sky, unstreaked by contrails or smoke, and wished for rain, snow, fog, hail -- anything but a clear blue sky betokening disaster. Even now, if there are no clouds anywhere, the back of my throat gets dry and my stomach is uneasy.^[4]

Twenty years ago I was in a car with three co-workers, on our way out to or back from visiting a contractor to check on the progress of a project. I remember seeing that one of their programmers was putting IBM PC "extended ASCII" box-drawing characters into strings to be displayed by a COBOL program that was going to run on a Xenix system with several different types of dumb terminals attached. I remember how difficult it was to get him to understand that no, other computers were not all just different brand names on IBM PC clones, and why concepts like "record locking" were going to bite him in the ass. At the time, I don't think my job title had even been upgraded to "programmer" yet. I wonder whether I'd remember that quite as clearly if it were not linked to another memory.

Suddenly I feel very cold.^[5]

Three years ago (minus a few days) that other memory came back and kicked me in the gut.

We got into the car, that day twenty years ago, and our supervisor turned on the radio. We heard that the shuttle had exploded.

shock

One of my co-workers asked, "Knowing what just happened, if you were offerred a seat on another shuttle going up tomorrow, would you go?"

My answer came to mind quickly, but I choked it back to reflect a moment and ask myself whether it was really the answer I truly meant. It was.

"Yes. I'd still go. I'd be scared shitless, but I'd go."

Yet the Gods do not give lightly of the powers they have made.
And with Challenger and seven, once again the price is paid.
Though a nation watched her falling, yet a world could only cry.
As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky.^[6]

[1] from "Fire In The Sky" by Dr. Jordin Kare
[2] from "The Ballad of Apollo XIII" by William Warren
[3] from "Memorial" by Mercedes Lackey
[4] from twistedchick, "Requiescat", this morning
[5] myself, 2003-02-01
[6] from "Fire In The Sky" by Dr. Jordin Kare