An Icy Golden Hoard
One might reasonably ask why a story about An Icy Golden Hoard would have the subtitle: A Space-Age Tale of Silver and Steel? Gold or silver, which is it? This isn't a rhetorical question, the answer is gold. Furthermore, the author, forced to reckon with the subtitle, can offer no explanation for the reference to silver beyond alliteration.
The gold of the title is on the moon, and our protagonist is the only one who knows about it, through a bit of sorcery best left undescribed; and this knowledge drives him to reach the moon before the gold is discovered by competitors, foreign or otherwise. This race to the moon is not about politics, nor ideology, nor scientific inquiry, rather, the simple lust for gold. Gold, beautiful gold! Is there anything so captivating? Personally, I'd say yes, as gold is pretty far down on my list of captivations, but not so for our protagonist. His accomplice is called Neil Armstrong. No, not that Neil Armstrong, a different one. Neil's interest is not love of gold, rather, some weird craving known only to him. Truth be told, he's likely a psychopath. Together, Neil and our protagonist will reach the moon by hook or by crook. But ideally, by rocket. This is the story of that rocket, of their quest, and of a bunch of gears, I suppose, going by the header graphic.
Following are a few excerpts from the novel...
Excerpt 1 ――
My thoughts wandered back to the argument I’d had that morning with my wife. She’d accused me of cowardice for my planning to send Neil to the moon rather than going myself. And furthermore, I’d robbed her of the pleasure of being able to introduce her husband as the first man on the moon. Pleasure? All well and good for her, but I could see no pleasure in spending the rest of my life being asked, “How did it feel to take that first step on the moon?” With a shudder I imagined myself at a cocktail party surrounded by eager halfwits awaiting hyperbole I hadn’t the stomach to force out.
“How did it feel? Well, take a step forward. There. It felt like that.”
I’d explained to my wife that I hadn’t the physique of an astronaut. Neil, conversely, had been born to wear a space suit—short, slender, and extraordinarily fit. Once at gunpoint he forced me to watch him do a thousand push-ups—with the gun pointed at me the whole time! Furthermore, Neil had grown up dreaming of being the first man on the moon, and now so close to his goal, he was a savage beast chained a foot from his prey. I didn’t admit it to my wife, but I might as well be honest here—Neil scared the crap out of me.
Excerpt 2 ――
“My name is Hildegaard von Wessen. I once built rockets for the Führer.”
I couldn’t believe my good fortune.
“This is a remarkable coincidence. Just a moment ago I was cursing myself for boarding this plane, and here I find myself seated next to one of the few people in the world who might be able to bring my scheme into being.”
“What is your scheme?”
“I’m arranging a manned flight to the moon.”
“How do you intend to get there?”
“My friend Neil has sketched an idea for a rocket, but to be honest I don’t think it will get off the ground. I’ve been looking for a proper rocket scientist to make sense out of the design.”
“Do you have your friend’s design with you?”
“No, but it’s easy to describe. Imagine a metal tube about seven feet long. Big enough for Neil to stand up in. At the top is a glass cone through which Neil can peer out. On the bottom below his feet is the fuel tank and below that, things that Neil calls blasters.”
“What about oxygen?”
I shrugged.
“What about shielding?”
“Inside he’ll be zipped up in a sleeping bag. Neil reckons it’ll be cold in space.”
Hildegaard leaned back and did not speak for a long moment.
“Your friend Neil has designed a coffin, nothing more.”
“I forgot to mention the steering wheel.”
“Connected to what?”
Good question. I closed my eyes to better visualise Neil’s diagram and realised his steering wheel wasn’t connected to anything.
“It’s just a preliminary sketch,” I assured my seatmate. “Neil thinks it’s ready for construction and I humour him, but I’m well aware that what he’s drawn would never make it to the moon.”
“What did he intend to use as fuel?”
“Gasoline, I guess.”
“He expects to use an internal combustion engine?”
“No, his rocket uses blasters, remember?”
The woman sighed and shook her head.
“Don’t waste your time building a moon rocket,” she suggested, while fishing the last of the peanut brittle out of her little snack pouch, “I’ve sent many rockets there and can assure you it’s a waste of time.”
There had already been rockets to the moon? Even from an ex-Nazi rocket scientist, this was quite the bombshell. Obviously, I inquired further.
Excerpt 3 ――
I snatched the sandwich from her so hungrily that I’d already filled my cheeks before remembering my manners and thanking her for the nosh. Egg salad on rye bread was far down on my list of favourite meals, but I was not about to complain after a month subsisting on rusty rainwater and squashed army ants.
The little woman gave me a once over with a suspicious brow.
“You don’t look like you’re here about bulls.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. My mouth was full, so I responded with a shrug.
“Did you just wander down off the street?”
I chewed thoughtfully for a moment, and then nodded.
“I’m pretty isolated here. I don’t get to talk to many people, so you can just sit there and eat while I get a lot of talking out of my system, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You understand English, good.”
“It is kind of amazing that anyone understands any language.”
“I know, I know. Even the stupidest idiots can figure out an entire language as if it’s nothing at all. Not just easy words like cat or run, but abstract stuff like why and of, and long strands of words strung together into complex ideas. Amazing is truly the word for it.”
“What do you do down here?”
“Watch movies mostly. Keep an eye on the bulls. I don’t have to feed them or anything. When they’re hungry they just eat each other.”
Excerpt 4 ――
The Professor scratched his name on the chalkboard along with the name of the course to ensure everyone assembled was in the right room.
He then asked us to look at the person sitting to our right. I dutifully turned to face the back of the head of the guy sitting to my right. The Professor then asked us to look at the person sitting to our left. I turned to face no one, as I was on the aisle. “Both of the people you just looked at,” the Professor explained with a chuckle, will pass the course, because everyone passes the course.” Everyone laughed. I missed the joke.
Already lost, and the first lecture hadn’t yet begun!
The Professor then handed a stack of outlines to a student in the front row with the instruction to pass them along. Mine never arrived. The stack was spent before it reached me. The professor apologised for his oversight and promised to run off more during the break. This boded well—I was here to learn from the best, after all, and my understanding of geniuses was that they were uniformly absent-minded.
The class began.
My enthusiasm quickly waned. Life Sciences seemed less scientific the more our absent-minded Professor described its fundamental principles. It was, evidently, the study of the unifying pulse that guides all life in the universe. Our Professor, despite appearing in all manner to be a man of not limited intelligence, proceeded to lecture on the archaeological evidence of Persephone’s visit to the underworld. He put up a slide of what he insisted was the fossilised skeleton of a two-headed dog.
Suffice to say, I never received the class outline because I did not return after the break.
Excerpt 5 ――
Conrad was his name, and he lived in the suite directly above Neil. Neil would often rap on his door to complain about noise. Conrad played kettle drums in a local barbershop quartet and because of his day job at the meatball factory, he practised in the middle of the night. After being awoken for the fifth time in a week, rather than rap on Conrad’s door, Neil kicked it down and stabbed the kettle drummer in the head.
Remarkably, during the consequent legal proceedings, each learning of the other’s sorrowful upbringing, Neil and Conrad became best friends. All charges were dropped. Tears followed, and then oaths of eternal brotherhood.
But on the first night back from the hospital, Conrad returned to his kettle drums and Neil returned to kicking down his door, this time to club him with a sledgehammer.
An immediately remorseful Neil called for an ambulance. The police arrived first.
After prodding Conrad’s squashed feet and having a look-around at the damage to the apartment, the officers asked Conrad if he wanted to press charges. Conrad checked Neil’s expression before answering. Neil was still penitent. Good. So Conrad answered yes, he would like to press charges. Neil nodded sorrowfully.
Neil insisted on coming along in the ambulance.
“He might need blood,” Neil argued.
“What blood type are you?” the attendant asked.
“N,” Neil answered.
On the way to the hospital, he began muttering about hot dogs, quietly at first, then progressively louder until he’d worked himself into a fit. He demanded the driver stop for hot dogs. Conrad, reasonably fearing Neil’s rising temper, agreed that stopping for hot dogs was a good idea, if Neil wanted one, but the driver ignored the request. Neil spent the remainder of the trip screaming at the driver that he was going the wrong way.
After finding the hospital cafeteria closed, Neil angrily knocked over a stack of trays and ran home.
On the way he spotted a half-eaten hot dog in a puddle.
By the time he arrived back at his apartment with his hot dog craving sated and his heart once again overflowing with the milk of human kindness, he decided to fix everything he had in his rage broken in Conrad’s suite. But Conrad’s door was frustratingly locked, forcing Neil to kick it open once again. Then he smashed everything he had not yet smashed—everything Conrad owned, smash smash smash, including the little shoebox filled with childhood treasures. All of it, smashed to dust. Neil smashed everything except, strangely, the kettle drums.
Excerpt 6 ――
My good luck with seatmates had run out. I was helpless but to sit and listen to whatever the tedious woman chose to tell me. For instance:
“I studied Antiquity in Berlin. This was during the war, you understand. German archaeologists had just discovered a pair of gorilla skeletons in a Roman burial site in North Africa. Everyone was talking about it, everyone had an opinion. But at this time the British were on the offensive and many feared that the war would pass directly over the site.
“In an unorthodox and desperate move, the entire student body was sent to the site so that it could be hastily documented. Most of us, myself included, hadn’t a clue what we were doing. We were theorists who had never worked in the field. Moreover, we arrived into what was hardly an ideal learning environment—we could hear the shelling and we watched the sky light up at night.
“I was one of a dozen students entrusted with a camera. All day I inched through the site taking pictures of every grain of dirt. At night we set up huge lamps. We hardly slept. Each day the war crept closer.
“On the fifth night we were approached by a column of tanks. We prepared ourselves to be taken prisoner. But it was not the British, rather Field Marshal Rommel. When the big rumbling tanks rolled up alongside us, a dust-covered Rommel hopped from his car and ordered the rest of the column to continue north and await his arrival.
“While he poked curiously around our diggings, he warned us that the British would arrive by morning, although as we were unarmed and our presence plainly academic it was likely they would simply pass us by.
“My professor was delighted to give the great man a tour of the site. He explained to Rommel how the gorilla skeletons threw into doubt everything we thought we knew about Roman settlements in the area, and—”
I cut the woman off.
“If you insist on talking throughout this flight, could you at least talk about something interesting?”
“Discussing Roman gorilla skeletons with Rommel isn’t interesting?”
“No madam,” I replied, “it is not.”
The full text of this novel is currently available by appointment only.
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