Moon Landing

By Catherine Child

Astronaut Armstrong's thrilling words still remain in my memory. At that time, the strong smell of my father's Turkish tobacco from the worn carpet, the smell of my mother's lavender talcum powder, and other stale smells still remain in my mind. The moment Armstrong stepped on the moon, I choked with ecstasy and my throat throbbed...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Catherine Child
• Release date: May 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224866182

Book preview

Moon ChildMoon Landing

Chapter 1

On the momentous day when humans first walked on the moon, my brother Toth and I lay on the floor of the upstairs suite of our father's store in Newark , drinking wine and watching the dramatic event on an old black-and-white television.

One small step for man , one giant leap for mankind."

still remember the breathtaking words of astronaut Neil Armstrong . I still remember the strong smell of my father's Turkish tobacco and my mother's lavender powder from the worn carpet and other stale smells. The moment Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, I choked with joy and my throat was throbbing.

Now they have found the money! Thoth's blatant jealousy almost ruined my mood at that time, and I am still trapped in Hotrenploz!

Even though the Moon Children were not born until many years later, their story began at that moment.

This story seems too difficult for me to tell, so I hope to choose someone who is better at speaking than me - preferably a storyteller to tell it. Who can take on this important task? I think it must be Gulliver created by Swift.

Gulliver has always been my favorite literary character. I have never been able to understand the profound theories of Swift's theological satirist, but I have always felt very close to Gulliver - a very simple, ordinary man, sensible and honest, who has no faults but is involved in all kinds of things that are beyond his ability to handle.

The life of the Moon Child is more thrilling than the Adventures of Gulliver written by Swift. I am not of the character or the wit to tell it well. Perhaps my brother Thoth should be the narrator. He and I have the same weight in this story, and he is a man of humor and imagination. I recall my father saying that Thoth was the natural poet in the family, and I was just a fool.

Please, Gamo! Mother said to Father. She defended me tenderly, You're hurting Jin's heart. You've taught Toth too many of your old tricks! It's better to be a fool than a thief!

Your son is already a thief? Ha!

He winked at her like a wounded innocent and then told a Jewish joke. Although Toth chuckled knowingly, I didn't understand. Mother looked back at them both angrily and suddenly asked me to go to the delicatessen to buy ham.

When my father heard about eating that thing, he wailed, but my mother said ham was cheap.

Despite these altercations, Toth knew how to shake my hand and make peace. In general, we were friends. I remember when man landed on the moon and we learned that the Eagle (space shuttle) had landed safely again: we stood up, made peace, and both decided to become astronauts.

What chance do you have, children of Gamo Hodian? The mother looked sadly at the potatoes she was peeling and sighed impatiently.

What's wrong with Dad? Thoth stared at his mother. He's smarter than anyone else. Just like what they say on TV, 'Now, everything will change.' If Jin wants, he can be your beloved stupid guy. But I, I want to use my talents on the planet.

Don't talk about Jin like that.

That's what Daddy said, Toth reminded her. As for me, I don't care what happens to Kim. I've made up my mind to go to the moon.

It’s best to finish high school first.

Better help your little one blow his nose, Toth smirked at me, I'm going to be successful, Daddy said I'm going to be another capable person and do as good a job as him.

Mother's lips lost color as she listened, and she bent over to continue peeling potatoes. I felt sad for my mother and myself, and my tears blurred my vision.

She was a tall, skinny, blonde woman who must have been an attractive girl, although judging by her wedding photos, she had begun to age when she got married.

Once she caught me and Toth rummaging through a lavender-scented black lacquer box of old photographs and trinkets that Toth had found in her closet. Her pictures looked pretty to me, but Toth sniggered that her breasts were as big as a cow's. She slapped Toth and snatched the box away. But later she showed me her mementos and told me how she had escaped from a miserable family in the Arkansas mountains—hoping for a chance to perform on the stage.

She couldn't help crying when she talked about it. She said she was too big and her voice was too thin. She tried the Old Opry in Nashville, Hollywood, and New York, but luck never came to her. When she met Gamo Hodian, she was working as a waitress in a third-rate bar.

Hodian must have been a pseudonym, but I never knew my father's real name. He was a dark, stocky, and elusive man. He spoke several languages, but they were all very poor, especially English.

He is secretive and tight-lipped about everything.

My mother said he was Egyptian and secretive. Toth thought he was Jewish. I once heard his business friends call him a sneaky, sneaky Armenian thief. My father said he had no nationality. His passport was Turkish, but it was probably a forgery.

My father had wanted to name my brother Tamar and Kemal, but my mother wanted him to call my brother Toth and me Kim. Hodian must have been the name my father took when he came to America—towards the end of World War II, long before he knew my mother. He called himself an importer. We always lived in cheap housing, above or behind a grimy little shop. The house was sparsely decorated with his cheap imported perfumes and tarnished brass, and the carpet on the floor was torn into pieces.

There were other goods at home that my father imported, but I didn't know much about them. Those strange customers always made him nervous. He was not at home most of the time, and my mother always said he was out buying goods.

Once he was away for nearly three years. Mother told us he was ill in Ankara, but Toth snorted and said his father was in prison somewhere.

My father disappeared the year I entered high school. Because he hated Sicilians, my mother insisted that the Mafia had murdered him. But much later, among my mother's things, I found a small package of scented letters from Marseilles to a Staten Island post office box addressed to Hobbs et Monsieur, clearly addressed to my father. They were written in a very feminine (French) hand. They begged him to return to Zilly and the child he had with her. Perhaps he (my father) did so.

Although my father was never a big moneymaker, without him, life became increasingly difficult. My mother closed the store and began looking for work. Some of my father's old friends verbally promised her some relief, but none of them came through. I think this was to keep her mouth shut and to keep the old friends a secret.

One time, one of these old friends took me to a bar to talk about my future. He was a dark, cautious, nervous little man who smelled of garlic and cheap liquor. He asked questions in a low voice and was absolutely skeptical that I knew nothing about my family's connection to my father. My mother must have begged him to give me a job, but he stalked out of the bar angrily and proudly, leaving me to pay for the drinks.

Mother later stumbled (or fell) in front of a truck. I graduated from high school that spring. Two fat sisters and my baptized missionary brother came back from Little Rock for the funeral. I cleared the house of gin bottles. I didn't tell them that the coroner found drug needle marks on Mother's arm.

By then, Toth had begun work on the moon landing. Older, stronger, darker, and smarter than me, he was more like our father, and he had a better eye for important opportunities than I did. He had gotten rid of his Hindi (or Jewish) accent and earned a scholarship to college to study space science.

I was doing badly. I didn't earn any scholarships because I had no math skills. After paying all the bills, my mother's insurance had $6,000 left. I took my share of the inheritance to Las Vegas to try my luck. But I had no luck. I spent all my money in just three nights.

I really started to learn how to do things from this disaster. I was in a state of hunger for a long time.

I was arrested by the police two or three times before I realized I had not inherited my father's talent. Later I managed a bar, drove a taxi, and sold second-hand goods. I bought a guitar and learned to sing folk songs on the street, but my voice didn't sound any better than my mother's. I wrote songs, but no one sang them; I wrote novels, but no one printed them. I worked as a DJ , a TV reporter, and even worked as a political party campaign manager for a candidate who later lost the election.

Thoth, however, was getting closer to our childhood dreams year after year. He entered the space armed forces from the university campus and eventually joined the Universe Organization - a civilian organization of human beings in interstellar space, whose purpose is to peacefully develop and utilize space. Thoth often made fun of their lofty slogan A free world belongs to free people. It wasn't long before he was one of the first team members to enter the Universal Organization's training base on the moon. He even changed his name to Thomas Hood.

He also joined the satellite survey team. The engineers of the space organization are improving an Explorer-style survey rocket. It can carry complex instruments weighing tens of tons for communication and analysis of the surface of alien planets when flying in low orbit. According to the plan, it will fly around the moon for a test, and then survey hundreds of satellites and large planets.

I don't think we'll find anything, sneered Thoth, but it would be a pleasant little errand to go to the Moon, for it's close to home and Robin Hudson.

Robin was the daughter of Howard Hudson, a hotel magnate whom he had met before. She had the charm of a melancholy goddess and a large fortune from her father, so since Toth and his astronauts had met her, Toth was more interested in her than the moon.

Toth took me to her father's resort, Antiris Hudson, to spend the weekend with his three-member expedition team. Explorer 1 was already in lunar orbit, while Toth and the Explorer 2 crew waited for engineers to analyze the recordings.

I was flattered by the invitation, for he had treated me like a beggarly relative because I refused to change my last name to his, but I was glad to go, because the failure of the party election had left me without a job.

We see his teammates arguing about the true purpose of this space survey on a bright balcony above the hot, milky Caribbean coast.

Safe! said Eric Thorsen, a tall, red-haired Nordic man. Space Organization personnel must be civilians, and he had just resigned from the position of major in the United States Space Force, but he still behaved and dressed like a soldier.

Military security! he said, banging his empty beer glass on the table. That's what I wanted.

Then your efforts will always be in vain, retorted Yuri Marco, all you can achieve is failure and self-destruction. What I seek is something else...

When he saw us, he stopped talking, so Thoth introduced me to them. Marco was tall and gentle, wearing black-rimmed glasses with a strong prescription, and looked very serious. He politely asked us to sit down, and then continued his speech.

We're going to look for life, he told Thorsen. There's nothing like this . . .

May God save us from alien life! Thorsen swung his empty wine glass like a baseball bat. We can't even fit in here. Why go to other planets and bring back trouble?

Trouble? Marco's black eyes looked anxiously at me and Thoth, as if seeking help from us. Our space neighbors have never hurt us, and they will never hurt us in the future. I hope to find life that is more advanced than ours, an intelligent life that can travel through space and between stars.

Thorsen sneered disdainfully.

"That's our real purpose,"

Marco leaned over and said to him, I believe that life can develop on other planets. There must have been life on other planets before life on our Earth. If interstellar travel is indeed possible, those explorers from outer space must have visited our world. We should be able to find their traces.

On the moon?

Any world without air should be visited, Marco nodded. Wind and water can eliminate everything. But traces of the moon landing, such as broken tools or empty wine cans or even a footprint, may remain for millions of years.

Pray to God that we don't encounter any alien creatures.

Thorsen staggered forward, with Toth following behind to comfort him. I stayed with Yuri Marko. At first I was disgusted by his deep, serious, coaching demeanor, but we soon found common ground.

His parents, like my father, were immigrants who were Ukrainian traitors. A political idealist, Marco had voted for my ill-fated One World candidate. I discovered that he had a keen interest in the Explorer.

At that time, the forms of life on Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter were still mysterious and inferred. No one had ever seriously proposed that these space neighbors might be more advanced than us, but Marco stimulated my imagination. Suppose we are not alone, and there is alien life out there, he said in a hoarse Cyrillic accent, describing the vastness of space. I had never felt that big before, and I was excited. He continued, Imagine a more advanced alien species, a society spanning the stars, in which our Earth might be just an insignificant village. You may not be able to fully visualize our space biological companions, but this effort can at least give you a more realistic impression.

Last night at Antiris Hudson, Robin gave us a party at her apartment. The lights were dimmed so we could see the waves reflecting white off the glass seal. Robin's father was there, a wealthy man with a cold look. Later, I guessed why Thoth had invited me.

It turns out that Mr. Howard Hudson, who controls the offshore hotel industry, has set his sights on space. The Hudson Orbit and Hudson Crater are about to open. What he wants from us is quick secret intelligence, anything that may reveal economic benefits from this moon landing. The news will be obtained by me through Thoth and translated into some kind of private information code.

When Eric Thorsen realized what was going on, his face turned red with rage. He smashed his champagne glass against the shiny glass seawall and threatened to blow up the place. Thoth hinted that Thorsen had secret military ties to the Space Force, something the Cosmic Organization didn't like. Thorsen turned pale and agreed to keep quiet about the matter.

I saw Marco's contempt for me.

Listen, sir, I pleaded with him, Tot takes too many things for granted. He never mentioned this to me. I won't interfere. Believe me, sir! I think he still didn't believe me.

The purpose of the invitation brought our party to an abrupt end. Tot told me rudely that I was no longer his guest. But the result was that I remained at the resort after his group left. I was left there without money to pay the bills that I had not expected. I went to the public office and finally got a job as a writer.

Exploring the moon, it turned out, was not the comfortable missionary activity that Todt had hoped for. After Explorer 1 crashed behind the moon, there were no survivors, and certainly no one to report what went wrong. Todt and his crew were called up to Explorer 2 to continue exploring the moon.

My brother wasn't the only one who was stunned by what the Explorer found. The moon was hiding its secrets well, with plenty of empty space larger than all of Africa. The early astronauts saw many empty craters of various sizes and expected to find more. Thoth and his team also hoped to find something exciting.

Although the moon is lifeless, planets like it have shown us the threats and temptations left by unknown life. Robots have begun to collect samples on Mars for analysis, and we have seen complex biological molecules from the telemetry data. The first people who came into contact with this dust sample contracted a painful strange disease, and they stayed in the quarantine of the Space Organization base in Fuobos until they died.

The first men to orbit the moon failed to solve old mysteries but discovered new ones.

They saw many black spots in the upper layers of the clouds, which they speculated were larger biological forms in the ecological pyramid based on lower life. They found that wisps of brown and yellow suddenly appeared on this empty planet. Just as they reported the discovery of unexplained energy loss, their signal disappeared.

The dark clouds of Venus conceal secrets that are equally hidden from human eyes. Although unmanned probes have brought back simple, secondary forms of life from its upper atmosphere, no probe (manned or unmanned) has ever returned from the unseen lower surface.

Only one of the first three people who went to Mercury returned. He did not see any signs of life. He stayed in the quarantine station on the moon for a year and brought back some photos. The photos showed a strange tunnel surrounded by craters and iron walls. His two companions never returned.

Although no probe has returned from Jupiter's atmosphere, the space organization has conducted preliminary inspections on its large satellites. According to the crew of the first spacecraft that arrived at the satellite closest to Jupiter, when the spacecraft took off, there was an intermittent short-wave radiation tracking them, as if something on the planet was observing them with radar.

Despite the uncertain omens, the crash of Explorer 1 was enough to shock the world, and the first reaction was anxiety , if not fear, that unfriendly life had developed on the far side of the moon. Howard Hudson took advantage of this panic.

I was still working for Antiris Hudson at the time, and what I saw taught me a lesson about business. Due to confusion on the part of Cosmos' lunar officials and delays on the part of Earth's censors, public announcement of the incident was delayed by several hours. During this time, Hudson's private spy system was making a fortune.

News of the crash reached our ranks in secret, disguised as a weather report sent from orbit on the Hudson, and a colleague deciphered the message and could not help but share it