I fly.
Not with wings nor wind fly I, but strapped in a capsule of metal and flame. I launch into a vast blue sky swirled in white. Navy, royal, midnight--and darkness fills the screen. Good-bye, my blue marble.
Just dark and stardust. Twinkling everbright, neverending. Lights streak past--
And I’m on the moon.
And so are other people.
Our buildings are stone and white as the stone cold moon. No sun to see by yet, but there’s lamplight somewhere, lighting the ground against the dark of space. We walk around, dressed warmly of course, for it’s chilly here. There’s moondust . . . somewhere . . . but not here. Below my feet is lots of rock. Bumpy, holey, stretching for miles--well, for one mile at least--until it falls away and space begins.
If space begins. It doesn’t.
I wave to people by the buildings as I go on my walk. I leap from crater to crater, leaping here and walking there, at my leisure. Convenient, that. No one needs gravity anyway.
I pause. I breathe. An infinite space of stars and wonders surrounds me. I will never get enough.
Then I see it.
The sun. It wasn’t there before. Where’d it come from?
Blinding white, it crests the Earth. It swallows my planet whole. People are running--the sun is bright, too bright. Into the buildings they go, but I stop and stare at my missing world. Bad idea! Light blasts my eyes. I look away, back at the moon, spots flickering in my vision. Everything goes from cold to sweating. The moon glows and glows, erupting in light, bursting to flame.
Why are we here? I can’t remember. We need our planet--the one that doesn’t catch fire from the sun. I want it.
Like a switch, light off. The sun is gone. The moon returns to stone, white against black and stars. Earth is gone.
But it can’t be. There weren’t that many people here on the moon. Where is my world? Where is life? It’s boring, too, to live forever on a rock.
My eyes adjust and I look down. I’m wearing a spacesuit now; no helmet, but there is a pocket! I reach inside and pull out a blue marble. Blue with swirling white.
I toss it into space. It flies, it shrinks, it disappears. My heart flies with it. Then there, right there before me, a world grows. It grows until I see shapes. Lands, nations, oceans, storms. I feel the life--animals, trees. People. People loving and laughing and helping. People hating, people starving, people crying. People living. People dying.
My marble grows until blue and green and white and brown are all I see. Good-bye, space.
I leap to my Earth.
