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CHAPTER 8

LIGHT ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

There was no doubt about the zeal of Margaret. I'm over the moon! she exclaimed to Ralph as they met briefly at a fast-food server, to discuss paternal relations. This is the third time I've applied for a medical post on the moon, and I guess as I am so young that to expend me is not very important, and the likelihood is just that, they're letting me go.

That makes three of us, two from one family said Ralph soberly.

We'll be able to co-operate against crafty enemies, enlighten each other on special findings about security, collaborate on dangerous plans, forestall enemy action by our intimate data sharing and have a wild spree at the same time.

Wild ? yes. Spree ? No, said Ralph, whose romantic side was stirred by Harry's sister, at it had been for some years; though with misgivings. Such high-charged exuberance and verbal vigour combined with danger could mean gunpowder; but it was certainly lively.

If we are not killed by the Russian station's errors, or the Chinese copy's subtle plans, then perhaps our own government's financial harassments from years of over-spending will enable some economising to blast us uncovered into space from our lunar platform.

There is always another 0-ring spectacular! Margaret's grave words came, clothed with a slight sardonism.

It IS challenging when the Challenger goes because someone did not check adequately or someone did not check the articles thoroughly or some people felt that there was room for profit without too much concern, or the automated assurance of the 'greatest nation on earth' allowed trivial oversight to kill.

It is even more challenging, Ralph responded,  when Russia and China are talking economic exploitation of the moon, and providing military occupation of their surface areas, with who knows what hidden wonders in their ray-protected emanation areas.

Well this is 2020 vision all right. It was to be in a few years, when I was a precocious kid, back in 2002, and I can still remember that Chinese authority Ouyang Ziyuan, reported on BBC News, 20 May I think it was, as saying that China was planning to launch its first mission to the Moon in 2010, with a note to the effect that as report had it, their long-term goal was to set up a base on the Moon and mine its riches.

Rather a long haul home for the stuff they mine! Margaret rejoined. Mining in the airless hole, almost no atmosphere, with power I suppose from the lunar polar stations, so perilously exposed to attack, which collect the power for operations. In Glace Bay, Canada, where I spent a teen-age time visiting with the school, there are literally miles of underground coal tunnels, sub-marine passages, where people naturally die every now and again, since it is perilous. THAT is mining!

But this ? Mining on an airless surface where cold and hot are so vast that some areas come with a few score of absolute zero, with enemies called friends ...

Yes, Ralph gurgled as he swilled his milk-shake with emotions not designed to facilitate ingestion. Emotions and eating are poor companions at times! The Chinese guy  I mentioned said that it was "for the benefit of humanity" but did not quite so clearly specify which PART of humanity he had in mind.

I used to make quite a project of the moon; the 'man in the moon' was always fascinating to me, right from the early days when I wondered if he had a tooth-ache to give that slightly ponderous cheek and sad expression. There'll be man enough in the moon now! It may almost swarm with his kind.

Ralph, having despatched his drink, continued his talk. It was soon afterwards, he recalled, still in May 2002, in fact the change came the very next day, when the same Chinese scientist moved away from the reportedly precise predictions about having people on the moon in 2010, to say that they would not be launching a manned mission to the moon in the foreseeable future. Political interference patterns possibly disturbing the scientist's thought ? However he did say that they were just at the start of preparing plans for exploring the moon.

That scientist's words seemed a masterpiece of propaganda and suspense warfare. First the message was that our spacecraft will ride around the moon, and then there will be a soft-landing machine. We have many plans... That was the sort of verbiage used, at first. Sounds nice as intimidation. Manned landings ? perhaps 2020 - 2030. Now we're on, now we're off! Marvellous for the technology of propaganda.

But who would have thought Russia could make it ?

Yes, Ralph responded thoughtfully. Yet the USA has for so long made a mimicry of co-operation with
the Russians, old pals from former meetings that were frequent enough in the Cold War, that Russia simply sailed on to take possession of a lot of fundamental detail. Is it so cold that they cannot think, over there ? is that the thought ?

Then there was the thrust given by this international passion that the Bilderberg group is so fond of, in company with the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, and which Death of a Nation so dramatised in its exposure of such things. You know the idea,  that it is morally wrong for USA to be the pre-eminent nation, in case world peace is ruptured by overbearing arrogance, unitary direction or some other politically incorrect option, that frankly might conflict with dictatorship from the World Ruler of the coming day ...

Well, Margaret urged, Earth Unity Force isn't doing a bad job in filling in the gap left by the USA's former hegemony, and that of Britain before that! The only trouble is that those two nations had at least some Christian feeling, ideology and impact, restraint, so that the worldly forces in each case did not utterly control the dealings; but now, the pagan secularism, the humanistic hollowness, the meaningless fraud of empty principles in resounding caverns of the human psyche, boasting itself, parading itself, esteeming itself, becomes like a hypocrisy nightmare, and worse still at the international level, a sort of no haven like our heaven chant. In fact, it becomes less like a haven and more like an anti-heaven daily. 

To listen, you might imagine that all that is desired is good for all. However, the overtones drown the music, with little trills and rills and thrills that sound like this:  provided it means first good for me, my nation, my ways, my plans, my programs, my ideologies. Earth Unity Force makes its OWN good sound like the human good, but it is a body with a mission for itself. It is rather like an impersonation of a self-service store that got it wrong, as if its PURPOSE were to serve itself.

And as to the international musics from the talk feists, they range through direct action to neglect, from brutal submersion of the poor of the earth - that is, the spiritually poor such as Christians,  whose braggart-tagged ideas do not pose a challenge to the rich, the inflated, the spiritually arrogant,  to excited talk by those actually able to vote, about how wonderful the world is to be. This seems to be the limit of it: talk. It is balanced rather nicely by the wholly contrary FACTS! Like a see-saw, it goes up and down, but doesn't get anywhere.

Why then do they go through all this: assault them first in word and then in body ? It is for the sake of the humanistic bubble, to the unification of all things human, as if God, and without God, to make the most meaningless muddle of the terrestrial puddle you could imagine. Christians are becoming more and more a target, and we seem to be one of the last redoubts in this country ... but for how long!

Margaret's tongue had a quality that drew Ralph to her, in a way so strongly opposed to the case with her father, that it was pleasant to watch his mellowing gaze rest  upon her.

Man by man ? she responded. Yes, rather like The Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Molière, or Tartuffe, the religious hypocrite! Man sketching man in comedy, or even realistic tragi-comedy, that is one thing; but when the sculpturing is done on the item itself, increasingly on  the whole human race, it is time to realise that human cloning is child's play in iniquity, though it is profound and contemptible,  compared with race manipulation; and that even this is trifling, compared with outrageous religious manipulation! It is a sort of submarine culture.

Submerge spirituality in the interests of terrestriality: that is the mundane, the profane, the humanist illusion, the thief syndrome, grabbing from God every possible resource, and using it to praise man. It does not raise man, but comes nearer to razing him.

Yet when you play with foibles and faults, the fiascos of the race, and satirically vent your detestation in satire, so that they might wake up, that is one thing indeed, mused Ralph. However, to make man of ONE religion with ONE power and ONE idea for him and ONE set of ideals made by ONE set of savants with ONE intention, namely to take over God's creation and desecrate it into a form where man at the top, guesses and grabs, making from the divine deposit, a withdrawal which is leaving the race bankrupt: this is devilish.

It is also the current dance of the Earth Unity Force dervishes! sparkled Margaret. Yet is it not quite meaningless, is it ?  only so in outline. Since they know no truth, having sacrificed both in the flesh, Jesus Christ, and in their minds His principles, unmooring themselves willfully from all basis for thought, certainly it is and has to be meaningless. Yet in their illusions, it is far from so; for to them, it is a dance of life, not death. Their perspiring bureaucratic brows are rich in the inert gases of argon, neon and krypton, if you will, and toning everything down, man to woman, woman to man, rich to poor, poor to rich, free to bound, and bound to bounders: they are 'creating' rather in the way it used to be said of naughty children.

Creating, my dear ! Ralph pondered, but was at once disgusted with the patronising sound his exclamation might have, wondering how on earth it slipped out. Yet he proceeded with this: They are creating the nearest approach to chaos this earth has ever seen.

Man by God, in fact, and now the culturally revised edition, man by man! like some dress by ... Dior, or whatever other fashion designer. Ralph could not help chuckling as he shared his browsing through recent history; and then he continued with more force.

Now impoverished by his wild pertinacity, man cannot manage since although man, he is now by his own exclusion, without truth, without personal power and without hope, merely using up the gas in the tank, while attacking the service station and seeking to murder the owner. Mere force is left to him, and he is using that increasingly to his own doom.

Margaret looked at her brother's friend with renewed interest. He might be voluble, virtuous and a slave to his work, but what is wrong with that ? if he is liberated from mere consuming passion to labour, but knows WHY and for WHOM he is labouring ... she mused.

Ralph felt the same sense of à deux intimacy, an empathy with delight and charm, and declared:

You know, Margaret, when we get there, if the Ruskies don't shoot us down, and the Chinese don't take us out in some way, in a strictly pleasant way to work for them, faces being saved all over the place but not souls: then YOU will be my doctor.

I am afraid, she replied, that this is not a mere matter of choice. There are only three doctors there, and as you and I are both Americans ...

But this is the American Moon Station! said Ralph. While there are others beginning, this is where we are, for the time at least.

Yes, but there are plenty of others present with us there, in terms of our wonderfully apt international passion, and there is a strong likelihood at least, that you will be one of my patients, in the unlikely event you ever get sick.

WHY are you going ? he suddenly asked.

To be where the action is, to carry the Gospel in the clothes of science, to be ready for any psychiatric developments, and to ensure that a Christian coverage is available, to seek to imbue perspective where it is lost, where reason can and does live, and revelation chimes in like orchestral symphonics; and to help our mission to succumb neither to disease of mind or body. I love freedom and offer what in fact is needed and works; but no one is forced to follow where I lead, just as I could not lead elsewhere, since cul-de-sacs are dead-ends. It is like an operation with some surgeon: if you do not want it, it remains the best he has to offer, and so he offers.

And you ?

As a Chaplain, to evangelise, Ralph spoke glowingly; to help them carry the burden which bland and beautiful government ideas are sure to make. That is oppression:  allowing ideals to substitute for reality, and reality to be distorted into the international mutation of the humanistic disease. It is all very well to UNITE, but if it is with a virus, the wisdom is more than doubtful.

Margaret, in her turn, mused a little. Yes, she responded, that is the dark side of the moon station isn't it, this passion for international co-operation irrespective of the objectives of the others, and this the more so, since the American objective increasingly is as clear as a mud puddle when children have been scurrying in it.

Certainly, Raph rejoined with ardent eyes and thoughtful tone. Treacheries and trickeries are sure to hatch under the warmth of plaguing human ambition for this or that nation, or for the international snatch, and which would seek to land us all in the grasp of the Great Leader, the Founder of the Faith of Man in Man, or other such nomenclatures, borrowed temporarily from the devil. He sits like a coach in the sidelines,  pending his final lung for the Manacled Messiah, the new version under his own sway, a dragon dressed like a lamb, a mouth for his pride, a focus for his disfaith and a commander for his wild spree for sovereignty, once and for all, over this race. He will come across as ‘the pace for the race’ or some such appeal to pride and vainglory.

Humanistic hollowness! You might as well try to have sovereignty over the atom as over man, and far less scope is there for it; but they love power, manipulation, intrigue, ideas of this and that, based on the love of power, even over God if it were possible, love of control, dominion, of program, for their own heads and their own illiterate and pungent philosophies. 

Slack with sedition against God, taut with teaching of man to behold the man! not Christ this time, but mankind: they move towards the unveiling of their leader. The devil almost changes his glower for power into a glow for show at such times. It will be short, the tussle, when it comes to the point like Hitler's night of long knives, perhaps, in his early days, before he too became the Fuhrer who went no further.

Fiction always is temporary as well as temporal; it comes and goes. When it goes this time, history will have a new beginning.

Ralph smiled at Margaret in a way which held a sharp aroma of active fellowship. Fiction is short, he pondered, but reality simply continues. When the robber barons take over this world, the continuance will mean in quite short order mean  DIS-continuance for them, in a way to make Nuremberg seem the work of amateurs! The trials come, not from man, but from God Himself personally. Acts 17:31 says it.

Meanwhile, as to Christ's world-embracing Gospel, instead of that unbearable bear hugging it to death: well I'm taking it to the Moon, and soon, it will be too late. While there is time, I act. The moon is My Spiritual Space Station. That's my schedule, Margaret!

Partner, she cried, with her soul in her eyes and her hand in his, this is going to be a great space race, to bring reality in Christ to an offscouring of the universe called the moon, because people are on it; and maybe on its distant side from the earth in particular, there will be blood. I am sure of it - and not where I like to see it, in the veins and arteries.

Ah! yes indeed, responded Ralph. While the moon has no permanent dark side, since it rotates around every 27 days, while keeping its face, apparently  through gravitational attraction, always the same side, to the earth, it ALWAYS has a distant side. It rotates as it revolves and revolves as it rotates, so that all of its surface is reached some time by the sun, but the ‘dark’ part is that there is always something about which WE are in the dark, the distant side, always facing away from us, whether in light or shade.  That is the far side of the moon! It is always turned away, like the face of someone loved, but not reciprocating. Whether the mood be bright or dark, they do not respond. That face of the moon is indeed averse to the earth!

For that matter, said Margaret, it seems that some parts of the moon, near the poles, may be more moderate, for the moon’s axial tilt being slight relative to the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun, there may be only a slight elevation of the sun, or declination over the horizon. The temperature change being perhaps only 70 degrees fahrenheit or thereabouts, instead of 450 degrees nearer its equator, where the sun is more scorching and the light when gone, more distant. Since it is perhaps to be my new home, I have been looking at its rooms!

Ralph grew interested, and added to Margaret’s thought. Then, he exclaimed,  a high mount, or hill near the pole could thus perhaps get heat all year around, but glancingly, and so make for less temperature extreme; whilst there is a six months long payment to be made for the privilege, in terms of darkness or near such, when the pole dips slightly, and the sun is just below the horizon for the other six months. It begins to look interesting, he declared.

By what I was coming to reflect, in any case, Margaret observed, is that there are on the moon very different areas, where not polar but equatorial sunshine comes more nearly, and where it is long blocked because of the moon’s relatively slow rotation. On the moon, it appears that extremes of the most critical can occur, and that darkness being so intense a thing, with cold added perhaps 250 degrees Fahrenheit below zero not seldom, there is a metaphorical darkness too. It is a sense of being outcast while the extended night runs on, especially near the poles, something alleviated only slowly as the light peers into it, in this slowly rotating body as it brings its nether side back into the light of the sun.

Who knows what darkness will be there, gripping, barren, wasted, withering, lightless, impersonal, with the darkness of men’s minds using it for hidden deeds while their normal passions play, uncooled by the cold, as barren of hope and thought as the moon itself.