An Ending (Ascent)
July, 1969
Somehow he’d forgotten it was today, even though it was all over the papers and it was all the radio announcers spoke of. A dozen people stood outside Tyler’s, crowding around the Sony Trinitron display, and he remembered that up in the darkness, in the vast blackness beyond the Earth’s thin atmosphere, a tiny ship circled the barren moon.
Aziraphale joined the fringes of the crowd and he could just about see the flickering, grainy images through the bobbing heads, just about hear some man’s voice droning on about modules and landers and fuel. The picture wasn’t of space but some BBC studio somewhere, Earthbound men in ties nattering on.
The astronauts were suspended up there in their little origami spaceship, poised between Worlds. Crowley had explained it all to him, sketched it all out on his back when they’d laid in his bed. It had been incomprehensible. And it wasn’t that he was bad at numbers, you had to be good at doing maths in your head at St Thomas’s. But the way Crowley had described the Newtonian mechanics of it all made his head spin. Trajectory, velocity, acceleration, deceleration.
(Crowley’s fingers drawing circles and flight paths on the bare skin of his back, his low voice gone soft, a smile in it, instead of teeth. That’s what had made him dizzy. Not the numbers, not the idea of being in a tiny little shoebox in the sky. Just a precious human thing, skin on skin, the two of them lying there in the dark.)
This is my preview for the Good Aumens event, written for the prompt “doctor”, coming on June 7.
The 1960s are ending, and Dr Aziraphale East has fled to a small country town to escape a tragedy. Against the backdrop of the first moon landing, he forms an inconvenient bond with his neighbour, Anthony Crowley.
