Sex on the Moon (29 page)
Authors: Ben Mezrich
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Criminals & Outlaws, #Science & Technology, #True Crime, #Hoaxes & Deceptions, #Science, #Space Science, #History, #United States, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #General, #Nature, #Sky Observation
Dr. Everett Gibson had first reached out to Axel right after Thad Roberts had been sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison. At first, Axel had harbored mixed feelings when he’d read about the harshness of Thad’s sentence; after all, the kid hadn’t really been the master criminal Axel had pictured, he’d been naive and foolish, maybe a bit arrogant, and certainly misguided. He hadn’t physically harmed anyone, and the samples had been recovered.
But the crime he had committed—it wasn’t like stealing a car; it had involved a national treasure. Taking those moon rocks was like slapping his country across the face. And after meeting Dr. Gibson in person—as a reward, the esteemed scientist had actually come over to Belgium and spoken to Axel’s mineral club about the ALH meteorite and the possibility of life on Mars; boy, the youth center had been busting at the seams that snowy night!—Axel had finally decided that maybe Orb Robinson had gotten what he’d deserved.
Everett Gibson had suffered greatly because of the Moon Rock Heist; at the time it had gone down, he had been in Australia on vacation, and upon landing back in the United States, he had been taken by the elbow on both sides by federal agents, interrogated, and wholly embarrassed by what had occurred in his lab. Apparently, there had been a series of numbers affixed to the top of his safe, which Thad had wrongly suspected to be the combination. In truth, they were a simple algorithm: all you needed to do was take the square root of the numbers and triple them, and you had the combination. But just seeing those numbers may very well have inspired Roberts to think he could succeed in the crime.
And Gibson had lost more than face; the night of his lecture at the mineral club, he’d nearly had tears in his eyes as he told Axel about the missing green notebooks that he still, to this day, believes Thad Roberts destroyed. At trial, Roberts had denied ever seeing those notebooks, and Axel would never know for certain what the real story was. But Gibson was a respected man of science, and Axel took him at his word.
At the “Mars in Antwerp” lecture, Gibson had presented Axel with an official plaque thanking him for, essentially, saving NASA’s bacon; and along with that, a framed photo of a lunar landing, signed by a real astronaut himself! And to Axel, that would have been enough.
But standing on his front stoop, tearing into the manila package with his blistered archer’s fingers, he quickly discovered that Gibson had one more little symbol of his gratitude to bestow.
Inside the package was an official letter, stating that Dr. Everett Gibson’s request to the International Astronomical Union had been approved. They had renamed Asteroid 15513—which would now orbit the sun under the name “Emmermann.”
You will live forever in the heavens between Jupiter and Mars
, Dr. Gibson wrote.
It was an incredible thing. The very idea—unimaginable!
There was a rock between Mars and Jupiter that was named after Axel. Seven kilometers long, two kilometers wide. Axel would never see it, or touch it, or visit it, but it was there, and it would always be there. Spinning through the vast emptiness of space, forever.
EPILOGUE
Deep into a seven-and-a-half-year sentence, the only dimension that really mattered was time, and it wasn’t measured in minutes, hours, days, or even years, it was measured in seasons—because the seasons were something you didn’t need to mark on a calendar or scratch into a cinderblock wall. The seasons you felt against your skin and in your bones, during the brief minutes you got to spend outdoors, milling about a rec yard or playing cards at a picnic table, and also late at night, listening to the wind or the rain or even the snow whipping endlessly against the steel-and-concrete exterior of the prison walls. The seasons were something real and unavoidable, and they couldn’t be controlled by a hack in a uniform or a judge in flowing robes.
At Florence Federal Prison in Colorado, located just ninety miles from Denver, the season that had the most resonance to Thad was winter; snow so deep you could wade through it, the air brisk enough to wake you from the numb monotony of life in a cage. And although this medium-security compound didn’t have walls and catwalks and guard towers or even fences around its perimeter, it was still a cage, one of a half dozen Thad had been transferred to and through over the past few years of his life since NASA.
Overall, life in Florence was as tolerable as Thad had experienced since his disintegration and slow, internal rebuilding after finding his letters to Rebecca returned, unread and unopened. He had survived that moment, somehow, but it had taken months before he’d resumed his teaching, reading, and contemplating—not as the person he was at NASA or before, but a numbed, yet stronger version of himself.
It was in the midst of this reformation, in the middle of a winter that seemed to go on forever, that Thad also found himself reconnecting with the outside world, in the form of an acquaintance from his school days at Utah, a bright, adventurous kid named Matt who had shared a few physics classes with him back before he’d even gotten the job as a co-op at NASA, one of the few people—if not the only person—who had not completely forgotten about Thad. For whatever initial reason—curiosity, sympathy, genuine kindness—Matt had reached out to Thad in prison, first in the form of letters, then in fairly frequent visits, building what had become a true friendship, or as true a friendship as two people could have, separated by the federal justice system. Matt had remembered Thad as the brilliant kid in physics classes who was willing to go further and think freer than anyone else; and in the letters and visits, as Thad told him about his new multidimensional physics theories and his teaching in prison, Matt became intrigued by what Thad was doing, how he was again reinventing himself in such a dark, difficult place.
With time shaved off on appeal and for good behavior, the end of Thad’s sentence was approaching, but it was almost impossible for him to think about life after prison in any real, concrete terms, but Matt had made it his mission to help him regain at least some of what he had lost. Still affiliated with the University of Utah, Matt set his sights on getting Thad back into the university so he could finish his undergraduate degree and then go on to chase a Ph.D.
To Thad’s surprise, the physics department at Utah—especially the chairman of the department, a man Thad had known well and impressed when he was a college student—was initially very supportive of the idea. But there was a clear roadblock—the geology department fiercely opposed the idea of letting Thad back into school. During the trial, the fact that Thad had stolen fossils from the university museum had been part of the prosecution’s arsenal against him—and the geology department had branded him a thief right along with NASA. Matt himself had been to a few of Thad’s dinner parties, where Thad had shown off the fossils he had taken from the museum—Matt hadn’t known at the time they were stolen, just that it was an incredibly impressive collection for a fellow student to have—and it was understandable that the geologists at Utah wouldn’t want Thad back in their lives. But Matt also knew that Thad was a different person—that he had served his time, that he had been punished far beyond what Matt felt he had deserved.
A handful of professors at the university agreed, especially in the physics and philosophy departments—but still, it seemed impossible; Matt simply couldn’t get Thad reenrolled in the university. Not because he was the kid who had stolen the moon; even several years later, the geology department could not forgive Thad for the earthly rocks he had taken from the bowels of the museum.
Still, with Matt’s help, Thad made the idea of reenrolling in the university his new goal. He came up with a simple plan; once he was out of prison and placed in a halfway house for the few months of supervised release that would begin his probationary period, he would get a job on the university campus—anything, really, as menial as it had to be. He would offer himself up as a teaching assistant to the professors who still believed in him, the ones in the physics and philosophy departments who still felt he had the potential to do something important with his life. Eventually, they would see that he was serious, and they would let him reenroll. Not in geology, of course—he doubted they’d ever let him anywhere near that department again. But physics, philosophy, and eventually the philosophy of science, which was where he now wanted to go. He had always been a good student in the past, and he would one day prove that he could be a good student again.
August 4, 2008
A brilliant Colorado morning, the clouds like twists of cotton, the sun breaking through in beams so bright they played across the prison compound like strips of lightning.
It was a Monday, and the procedure started at ten, but Thad didn’t actually let himself believe he was getting released, that it was really, finally happening, until he was truly on his way out of the prison—more than three hours later. He’d heard too many stories about other inmates who thought they were on their way to freedom, when something happened to gum the works, some sort of prosecutorial appeal. Even after so many years, Thad couldn’t let himself believe that it was finally over. He had served his time.
Dressed in his greens—green pants, green button-down shirt over a white tee—and his steel-toed prison boots, he was led past the track that circumnavigated the prison yard, his final steps across the compound. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how many times he’d run around that quarter-mile strip of dirt—just doing the math in his head, he knew he’d circled it so many times he could have run from L.A. to New York a dozen times. And then he was past the yard, being shuffled into a waiting van for the short drive to the processing unit. All he had with him, other than his prison greens, was his single belonging—his physics theory, compiled in a book that was now almost four hundred pages long, loose sheets of paper held together by a pair of rubber bands. He had the book tucked tightly under his arm as he was led through processing. He had no idea what he was going to do with it—but to him, it was more valuable than a safe full of moon rocks. He truly believed it was his future, his reinvention, his new self.
Once the processing paperwork was finished, it came time to get paid. Most inmates spent the money they made working in the prison—the twelve cents an hour they were paid to do laundry, bang out license plates, shovel rocks and snow. But during his years in prison Thad hadn’t needed anything other than books, which he hadn’t been allowed to buy—so he’d saved up more than a thousand dollars in his prison account. He felt a little burst of excitement as he watched a young officer behind a desk count out the money from a register—until he saw the bills themselves.
“What the hell—is that monopoly money?”
The officer laughed, shaking his head, explaining that in the years Thad had spent locked up, the government had changed the look of fives, tens, and twenties. Thad realized with a start that he hadn’t even seen a single dollar bill since he went to prison. No doubt that would just be the beginning of his culture shock; he’d been in a time capsule, a state of stasis—the world wasn’t going to look the same as it had when he’d been sent away. It was a terrifying, sobering thought.
After the processing unit, he was led back into the van—and then it was finally, truly happening; he was leaving the compound for the short trip to the station where he would wait for the bus that would take him the first part of his journey back to Utah. He spent most of the van ride simply staring out the window, watching the prison compound until it had receded into the horizon, as it went from three dimensions to two, to one—just a pinpoint at the farthest reaches of his vision, nothing, a memory.
An hour later, he wasn’t a prisoner anymore, he was just a guy sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. But he didn’t wait long—even though the bus wouldn’t arrive for another couple of hours, he couldn’t sit still after so many years in prison; he couldn’t spend another moment in frozen isolation. It was against the rules—already, just after his release, he was technically breaking the law—but he’d arranged to have one of his astronomy students and closest prison friends who had been released a year earlier, a former gangbanger named Joey, pick him up at the station. He hadn’t planned on really going anywhere—but Joey had taken care of the details for him. A few miles from the bus station was an Olive Garden restaurant—they’d have no problem making it there, having lunch, and making it back in time to catch the bus.
It was the most fascinating lunch of Thad’s life; the food, the people, the noise, the colors—even the walls, so different from the white on white he had grown used to—it was all one massive, distracting, mind-blowing sensory overload. He didn’t even know what he was eating, just that there was so much flavor and heat, and it kept on coming, until he could barely stand up from the table and follow Joey back out to the car. Everything felt so surreal. Even as he shook Joey’s hand, thanking him for his first real, truly free moment in aeons, he felt like he was in some sort of dream, that any moment he’d wake up in his bunk back in the prison, staring at the white-on-white walls.
But instead, he went from the Olive Garden to the back of a bus heading to the nearest airport, his physics manuscript still tucked under his right arm. His body was sated by the heavy meal, but his mind was still racing. He had no idea what was next, but the world seemed so open, so new.
He felt the weight of the physics manuscript against his arm. He knew that there were people who would say it was nothing but another one of his fantasies, another game of his mind finding its way into reality. A dream, even a con—yet another reinvention.
A fantasy—like the idea that a kid from nowhere, from nothing, could somehow believe that he could one day be an astronaut, that he could one day be the first man to walk on Mars.
That this brilliant, enthusiastic, impetuous kid could fall so deeply and fully in love with a girl he’d only known for a month—that he’d be willing to throw it all away.
A fantasy, a dream—maybe even as impossible as stealing a piece of the moon.
