"According to the calculations of H. Gerstenkorn, later developed by H. Alfven, the terrestrial continents are simply fragments of the Moon which fell upon our planet. According to this theory, the Moon originally was a planet gravitating around the Sun, until the moment when the nearness of the Earth caused it to be derailed from its orbit. Captured by terrestrial gravity, the Moon moved closer and closer, contracting its orbit around us. At a certain moment the reciprocal attraction began to alter the surface of the two celestial bodies, raising very high waves from which fragments were detached and sent spinning in space, between Earth and Moon, especially fragments of lunar matter which finally fell upon Earth. Later, through the influence of our tides, the Moon was impelled to move away again, until it reached its present orbit. But a part of the lunar mass, perhaps half of it, had remained on Earth, forming the continents.
Because it was a thing that, though you couldn't understand what it was made of, or perhaps precisely because you couldn't understand, seemed different from all the things in our life, our good things of plastic, and nylon, of chrome-plated steel, duco, synthetic resins, plexiglass, aluminum, vinyl, formica, zinc, asphalt, asbestos, cement, the old things among which we were born and bred. It was something incompatible, extraneous.
....in that corridor of night sky glowing with light from above the jagged line of the cornices; and it spread out, imposing on our familiar landscape not only its light of an unsuitable color, but also its volume, its weight, its incongruous substantiality. And then, all over the face of the Earth-the surfaces of metal plating, iron armatures, rubber pavements, glass domes-over every part of us that was exposed, I felt a shudder pass.
"Yes, the planet Moon has come closer still," Sibyl said, before I had asked her anything, " the phenomen was foreseen."
Now, I have use the word "excrescence" to indicate the Moon, but I must at once fall back on the same word to describe the new thing I discovered at that moment: namely, an excrescence emerging from that Moon-excrescence, stretching toward the Earth like the drip of a candle.
Would it stop in time, the Moon, as Sibyl had said, before one its tentacles had succeeded in clutching the spire of a skyscraper? And what if, sooner, one of these stalactites that kept stretching and lengthening should break off, plunge down upon us?
The Moon was moving off in the sky, pale, and also unrecognizable: narrowing my eyes, I could see it was covered with a thick mass of rubble and shards and fragments, shiny, sharp, clean.
The true materials, those of the past, are said to be found nom only on the Moon, unexploited and lying there in a mess, and they say that for this reason alone it would be worthwhile going there: to recover them. I don't like to seem the sort who always says disagreeable things, but we all know what state the Moon is in, exposed to cosmic storms, full of holes, corroded, worn. If we go there, we'll only have the disappointment of learning that even our material of the old days-the great reason and proof of terrestrial superiority-was inferior goods, not made to last, which can no longer be used even as. There was a time when I would have been careful not to show suspicions of this sort to Sibyl. But now, when she's fat, disheveled, lazy, greedily eating cream puffs, what can Sibyl say to me, now?"
Link for text here
No comments:
Post a Comment