A room full of wall-mounted plasma monitors, with people in casual attire gaping at them. I looked up with Joad at the nearest screen. “CNN DATELINE 24 DECEMBER 2012 – LIVE PICTURES FROM MARS PROBE”. Above this we could see against the background of reddish Martian rocks and thin sky, a robotic arm picking up what the voice-over called an ‘anomalous artefact’ – a piece of dusty latticework, like a piece of a plastic tennis racket or a snow shoe. A TV studio full of excited pundits chimed in, live; some voices were trying to explain this away – debris from an earlier mission, a strange geological feature – whilst others attempting to place a historical significance on this discovery. ‘The end of mankind’s innocence’ proclaimed a talking head, before the commercial break.
The office in which we stood erupted into heated debate. Was this real? What would this mean for us all? Soon TV was back with the Martian rover. The camera, which had been focused on the latticework artefact, panned slowly upwards from the floor of the gully on which the probe had been standing. We looked up towards the far end of the gully. There, we were – both out of our time – we thought we could see... a tubular structure crossing from one edge of the gully to the other. By now, digitally-enhanced images of the latticework object were appearing on thousands of websites, some of these being brought up onto the bank of monitors before us. The rover began to roll up the valley floor, its camera zooming in to the top end of the gully. Joad looked at me in amazement. There we were – both out of our own time, myself but a year and half into my own future, Joad more than three-quarters of a century – witnessing above the hubbub of this high-tech office what could be the most significant moment in the history of mankind.
The office in which we stood erupted into heated debate. Was this real? What would this mean for us all? Soon TV was back with the Martian rover. The camera, which had been focused on the latticework artefact, panned slowly upwards from the floor of the gully on which the probe had been standing. We looked up towards the far end of the gully. There, we were – both out of our time – we thought we could see... a tubular structure crossing from one edge of the gully to the other. By now, digitally-enhanced images of the latticework object were appearing on thousands of websites, some of these being brought up onto the bank of monitors before us. The rover began to roll up the valley floor, its camera zooming in to the top end of the gully. Joad looked at me in amazement. There we were – both out of our own time, myself but a year and half into my own future, Joad more than three-quarters of a century – witnessing above the hubbub of this high-tech office what could be the most significant moment in the history of mankind.
The TV pundits were quiet. The images were clear, they were being witnessed by hundreds of millions of viewers around the globe – a tubular bridge linking the two banks of this Martian valley. Looking like a huge cigarette, mostly off-white in colour, yellowy-tan like a filter tip at the left-hand end, with what seemed to be windows (reminding me a bit of a pedestrian walkway spanning the motorway at a service station), this was unambiguously a structure of non-human construction.
The pundits were beside themselves. Not just an anomalous artefact. This was some 100ft long by 12ft diameter engineering project erected by some race that had got to Mars before contemporary man. All TV channels were by now showing the same image. A talking head in the BBC World studio put forward the proposition that it could have been an ancient Earth based civilization that built this bridge – Atlanteans. The studio pundits – sober scientists – were in a fluster – all of a sudden Atlantis had become just as plausible to them as aliens from other solar systems.
Joad and I left the offices. We boarded an 88 bus (I had seen a toy London bus with this number in the little shop in the caravan site in North Wales) heading down Oxford Street towards the suburbs. We sat on the top deck. All talk was of Mars. “It was not even like this the day the Great War broke out”, said Joad, somberly. He asked me how I thought this would affect the beliefs of organised religions around the world; would the discovery sharpen or dull mankind’s drive to learn and discover, were these alien bridgebuilders still alive…
I was about to reply when the dream faded, or rather mutated. Joad, the bus, London disappeared, I found myself atop Mount Olympus (no doubt a reference to Mars’ highest peak), surrounded by scantily-clad Greek goddesses...
I woke up sweating. My sweat has a strange smell, like liver sausage pâté on a shortbread biscuit.
Before breakfast I wrote down the key points of the above-mentioned dream, and continued to finish reading Joad’s book. A few days later I was home, holiday over. With unfettered access to the internet I carried out another search to find out more about the author of Experimenting with Time. I, entered a few key phrases into Google’s search box. There were several second-hand copies for sale listed, lots of chaff - D. W. Joads from Australia or California boasting of their sporting prowess or their real estate business – and finally – the info I was looking for –
“D.W. Joad – Aviation Pioneer and Author. Born Westbury, Wiltshire, 18 September 1874, died 30 July 1935, Southgate Asylum for the Insane”.
The pundits were beside themselves. Not just an anomalous artefact. This was some 100ft long by 12ft diameter engineering project erected by some race that had got to Mars before contemporary man. All TV channels were by now showing the same image. A talking head in the BBC World studio put forward the proposition that it could have been an ancient Earth based civilization that built this bridge – Atlanteans. The studio pundits – sober scientists – were in a fluster – all of a sudden Atlantis had become just as plausible to them as aliens from other solar systems.
Joad and I left the offices. We boarded an 88 bus (I had seen a toy London bus with this number in the little shop in the caravan site in North Wales) heading down Oxford Street towards the suburbs. We sat on the top deck. All talk was of Mars. “It was not even like this the day the Great War broke out”, said Joad, somberly. He asked me how I thought this would affect the beliefs of organised religions around the world; would the discovery sharpen or dull mankind’s drive to learn and discover, were these alien bridgebuilders still alive…
I was about to reply when the dream faded, or rather mutated. Joad, the bus, London disappeared, I found myself atop Mount Olympus (no doubt a reference to Mars’ highest peak), surrounded by scantily-clad Greek goddesses...
I woke up sweating. My sweat has a strange smell, like liver sausage pâté on a shortbread biscuit.
Before breakfast I wrote down the key points of the above-mentioned dream, and continued to finish reading Joad’s book. A few days later I was home, holiday over. With unfettered access to the internet I carried out another search to find out more about the author of Experimenting with Time. I, entered a few key phrases into Google’s search box. There were several second-hand copies for sale listed, lots of chaff - D. W. Joads from Australia or California boasting of their sporting prowess or their real estate business – and finally – the info I was looking for –
“D.W. Joad – Aviation Pioneer and Author. Born Westbury, Wiltshire, 18 September 1874, died 30 July 1935, Southgate Asylum for the Insane”.
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1 comment:
Most excellent prose. Within our dreams, the architecture of our complex reality becomes more apparent.
JW
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