The machine had him. For a moment the two figures within it - the shadow of the professor, the terrified, struggling form of the servant - seemed to perform a little dance, a perverted waltz. There was an explosion of light, which engulfed them both and from which only one of them finally emerged.
It was the professor. Or rather - his image. Floating above the prone body of the servant, this shimmering, transparent form raised its hands to its face, perhaps in disbelief. Only the eyes of the figure held any real semblance of life; filled with a burning desire, they fixed upon Miss Bringhome's smiling face. Descending now from the confines of the Engine, the professor floated closer to his daughter's waiting arms.
I was standing to one side, still in a profound state of shock from the events of the last few minutes. I may as well have not been in the room at all, for all the attention the two people paid me. Slowly now, as though nervous of the lost years, father and daughter came together in a tentative embrace.
It was only then that I realized that the professor had never had a daughter, and that his original experiment had been only too successful. For before my very eyes, Miss Bringhome discarded her old woman's image, and the image beneath that, of the beautiful young woman I had occasionally glimpsed. In their place stood the uncompromising appearance of Lucinda Tonguebright, albeit made from light, rather than flesh. I remembered then the words from the professor's final notebook: 'Lucinda will be mine alone.'
And the two gossamer contours wrapped around each other, in intimate reflection of the Charisma Engine that stood behind them.
Without saying a word, I left the room. I walked quickly up the stairs and out of the front door. I did not stop even to pick up my belongings. It was enough that I took this with me: this body; this trembling, thickset, awkward mess of flesh and blood.
SPACEACHE AND HEARTSHIPS
This morning, the papers and the television were filled with pictures of the sky lit by fire. Now that the British lunar rocket has finally been launched, I feel duty bound to write of my own journey to the moon. Consider me mad or simply a liar; the decision is yours, whoever you are and whatever world you inhabit.
Five years ago I was asked to join the team of scientists in charge of preparing the flight path. As first assistant to the esteemed Professor Lucas Gull, the country's leading expert on gravitational science, my job would be to help him plot the optimum course for the mission, weighing all the sky's myriad factors.
What we actually found was an entirely new world to explore.
I would dare to claim the first sighting, being the witness to a slight blip on one of the instrument panels; a tiny kink in the gravitational field of the Earth, easy to ignore. Luckily I reported my finding to Gull the next day. Most senior astronomers instantly dismissed the anomaly, of course, calling it computational error. Or else, if real, too small to be of concern.
We worked for many lonely months, the professor and I, to track down the cause of the deviance. I will freely admit that I too disbelieved, when Gull came to his startling conclusion; namely, that Planet Earth had a second moon in tandem with the first. The slight fuzziness on the screen was in fact the shadow of another satellite, somewhere in orbit, invisible and strange. This extra moon would have to be extremely small and extremely close to the Earth, in order to satisfy the read-outs.
Professor Gull pleaded with the authorities to call off the launch, because the presence of the second moon could have an adverse effect on the flight path. Of course they thought him mistaken, misguided, mad even - because hadn't the Americans managed the journey years before, with no such problems? Gull's arguments caused him to be dismissed from the project.
So it was that the disgraced scientist and I set up our own. mission to find out the exact size and orbit of Luna Two, as we called the new discovery. Working from Gull's own laboratory, we spent another year in constant search and frustration, surviving only on a pittance, until we could be certain of our calculations. The second moon was circling at exactly the same pace as the Earth, always floating above the same point on the planet, that point being somewhere in the city of Manchester, England. Twenty-four feet above the surface, the twin moon was, and only 11.0457 inches in diameter. Further work allowed us to pinpoint its exact co-ordinates: a street name, even a house number. Simple enquiries revealed that the house was owned by a Mrs Gladys Selene. According to the records, she lived there alone.
It was, I remember, early evening when we arrived, but already dark. The house seemed no different from any other in the street: a small two-up, two-down council property. A faint yellow light glowed from an upstairs window.
The door was opened a tiny crack by a middle-aged woman. Gull stormed into the place, pushing the woman aside. She began to scream and to argue, but then suddenly collapsed, as though the fight of years had gone out of her. Tearful, drunk on cheap vodka and resigned at our intrusion, she motioned us to go upstairs.
In the front bedroom we found her only child, a young boy, ten years of age. His name, she told us, was Joe; Joseph Selene. At first sight I could only wonder at just how very fat the boy was. Then I saw that his bloated, distended stomach actually glowed; glowed with wave-pulses of pure amber, the only source of light in the room. The boy had spent his whole life in that small space, with no schooling or contact. He could neither speak nor write, and lived his days in painful solitude. Only the various maps of the moon, images from the early flights, and models of the Apollo 11 spacecraft dotted around the room brought him peace. From our enquiries Gladys revealed that she had conceived Joe with the help of a travelling salesman, whose name she could not recall, nor his intentions, except that he was selling cheap atlases.
The instruments of measurement were prodded into Joe's veins, and a body-scan taken. A dark, poisonous smudge appeared on the printout, reminding me of nothing more than the original blip I had seen on the gravity read-outs.
I can hardly state the following without remembering my horror at the revelation: the second moon was living inside the boy's stomach, desperate to be born.
'Beautiful…' whispered Gull. 'Quite beautiful…'
He decided it best that Joe not be moved, 'for fear of disturbing the gravitational field', so we carried all our equipment into the house, set up a field-lab there. I was to stay awake through the night, standing guard; nightwatchman to the Earth's second moon. Once alone, I rested myself in a chair next to the boy's bed. I very quickly fell into the slow, pulsating rhythm of the moonlight. I felt the moon was guiding me dreamwards…
Suddenly. Where am I?
An empty, grey landscape, pitted with holes. I imagine this to be the inside of Joe's skull, the convoluted surface of his brain, sluggish to think. Until a puffball-costumed figure comes slow-bouncing over the horizon. He's dressed in the antique NASA spacesuit, long studied from the old Apollo landings. Face hidden behind his visor, the astronaut speaks in a weary tone, words broken by radio static: 'It's been a long time,' he crackles.
'Who are you?' I ask, my own words floating through the loose gravity of this sleep-haunted world.
'Does no-one remember?'
I glance at the nametag on his suit. 'Commander Armstrong? Apollo 11?'