Shine (39 page)

So, as his tweets became ever better aimed, I finally accepted one (which is printed after the story). I hope and suspect it also helped him write the story below, a fantastic tale of hope, which--among other things--seems to say: why can't we do both? Solve our current problems on Earth and go to space?

I guess it's what we can expect from an optimistic Mars geologist...

One day, Joe the Martian was making the engine for his flying space ship. The year was 2074. He and his family were getting ready for a trip. All of a sudden, Joe's son had blown a circuit in the space ship! His son was injured. He had broken a leg. A big bubble formed on his leg.

15 February 2006

I was doodling on the little Marriott-provided notepad when my cell phone vibrated. Oh good, I thought, I can step out for a cigarette. The speaker, a fortyish female JPLer that I didn't know, droned on about the development schedule for a Titan mission that would never leave the ground. As I left the conference room, I flipped open the phone and pressed the 'send' button.

"Kishosha," I said as I headed through the hallway toward a double glass door and Pasadena sunshine.

"Paul--"

Happiness? I switched from English to Kisukuma. "Happy? Why are you--" I stepped outside and tried to hold the phone between shoulder and chin while I fumbled for my cigarettes and lighter.

"It's mother. She is asking for you."

I had the cigarettes in one hand, lighter in the other. But I stopped short of taking one from the pack. "How long does she have?"

"I--I don't know. How soon can you be here? If I tell her, perhaps she will hang on..."

I was supposed to be explaining NASA's planetary protection policies after lunch. "If I can get a flight this evening, I can be there on Friday--wait, is she in the hospital?"

"No, no, we are home. The doctors can't do anything at this point."

"Tell mother I love her. And I am coming." I hit the 'end' button and stuffed the phone, cigarettes, and lighter into a single pocket inside my jacket.

I returned to the conference room and my laptop and used it--and the hotel's wireless--to arrange a flight. LAX to Mwanza by way of Amsterdam and Kilimanjaro. It was going to cost me, but I'd saved for just this sort of thing.

After packing up the laptop and its cord, I pulled Harold Franz out into the hall, explained what was going on, and handed him a thumb drive with my viewgraphs on it. Harold would give my talk. As my counterpart at JPL, he pretty much knew the spiel, anyway.

The Martian family could not go on their trip. Joe tried an
experiment
to cure his son faster. Now he tried it on his son. It worked and now the space ship was fixed and the family left. Soon they landed on planet Jupiter. They decided to stay there for the night. Joe's little girl always goes off on her own at night. That night she found a fun activity. She called it Drop-the-Rock-in-the-Canyon.

24 February 1980

The whole family had gone to bed. It had been an exhausting Sunday of worship, song, and fellowship at the church. My favorite part of Sunday Mass came afterward--the potluck dinner. My uncle Azimio, one of my mother's brothers, was visiting for a few days. He didn't come to Mass, but he did show up after Father Mtambalike gave the blessing so he could share in the feast of chicken, fish, rice, ugali, cassava, beans, mangoes, and so forth. The fish were very fresh, caught early in the morning on Lake Victoria.

While everyone was sleeping that night, uncle Azi and I hiked out away from the home, into the cotton fields. The sky was brilliant with stars and a high, gibbous moon illuminated from the west.

He lit a cigarette. He offered me one but I was only nine years old. I said no.

"Do you see that bright red star over there?" He pointed into the eastern sky as a mosquito buzzed near my ear. "That is Mars."

"Mars?" I wondered.

"It is another world." In the moonlight, I could see his face as he blew smoke from his nostrils. "A world like we live on, only smaller and farther from the Sun."

"How do you know? What is it like, there?"

"It is a cold, desert world."

"A
cold
desert?" I doubted that a desert could be cold. "Does anybody live there?"

He put his arm around my shoulder and we continued gazing at the red star. He said, "The Americans landed two machines there--they found no one."

"Well, maybe they were looking in the wrong place," I suggested.

Uncle Azi laughed a deep, happy laugh. "Perhaps. But I'll tell you this: The first human beings on Earth were Africans. The first human beings on Mars, too, could be Africans."

After the next 99 years they landed on Pluto. It was cold there. Quickly, they saw a leopard frozen solid! It had a tag, it read: African leopard put here in the year 2080. The Martians put him in the space ship. Soon he came back to life. They trained him. They named him Beauty.

5 March 2006

The sky was overcast and the temperature and humidity were fairly comfortable for late summer in Tanzania. I was having a cigarette out by mother's old truck. I heard from behind me, in Kiswahili, a boy saying, "Uncle Paul, are you alright?"

I turned around and there was my sister's eldest son, Enos. He was thirteen or fourteen. He was carrying a football under his left arm and a battered folder in his right hand. One of mother's dogs--I didn't know his name--trailed him.

I pulled the cigarette from my mouth. "Sure, uh, Enos," I looked at him, then down at the dog, then at my cigarette. "I am fine. I was just thinking about how I need to go into town and get some more of these," I held out the cigarette.

"Mother says they're bad for you."

"She's right," I winked.

At first, Enos didn't seem to know what to say. Then he looked like he remembered why he had come to find me. He set the ball down on the ground and then waved the folder at me and said, "Mother found this in the house, while she was going through Grandmother's things."

"And?"

"In here are some stories you wrote." He handed the folder to me.

I opened it and looked inside.

I'd forgotten about these! "Did you read them?"

"I did, yes," Enos looked uncertain, perhaps worried that he shouldn't have.

"And what did you think?"

"Well, not bad, for a kid," his eyes sparkled. "And I liked your drawings. How old were you?"

It was shortly after Uncle Azimio's 1980 visit. "Nine. Maybe ten, something like that," I replied. "I did them for my spelling homework."

"So, that explains the underlined words."

"Indeed."

I flipped through the folder while the cigarette hung from my lips. There were five stories in all, each one illustrated with pencil and crayon. They detailed the adventures of Joe the Martian as he visited the many worlds of our solar system. As I looked at these forgotten treasures, I realized how much this effort--this spelling homework activity--must have influenced my career choices. All the way to NASA Headquarters.

Something slipped from the folder and fell to the ground.

Enos picked it up and dusted it off.

The book!

Enos opened it and began to read a random page out loud, in Kiswahili, "There were faint marks on one wall. 'What's this?' Jim asked. 'It's a Martian painting. Most of the paint has flaked off this one, but in some of the others they're still in good shape. The dry climate preserves everything.'" He stopped, flipped through the pages, pausing at some of the illustrations, and said, "I was looking at this, earlier, too. Someone translated the whole book."

Hand-written in the language of the Waswahili, the translation was crammed into the narrow spaces between the English sentences. I told him, "Yes, yes, I remember this very well.
The Lost Race of Mars
, written--oh, I think almost fifty years ago--by a man in the U.S., Robert Silverberg. Uncle Azi--your grandmother's brother--he found this book among donated goods at a church in Arusha."

Enos continued flipping through the yellowed, paperbound kid's book while the dog sniffed around my ankles. I dropped my spent cigarette and stamped it out.

"Who translated--"

"Uncle Azi. He knew I couldn't read the English. I'll tell you though, later on, it helped me learn English to see the words right there, with Kiswahili on the same page."

Enos handed the book to me and I put it back in the folder while he said, "Do you want to kick this ball around?" Then, more eagerly, "Are you going in to town today? To get those cigarettes?"

"Would you like to come along?"

We sent the dog home and made our way down to the road, passing the ball back and forth. At the road, we continued playing with the ball for about twenty minutes before we were able to flag a dala dala for a ride into town.

One day Joe went for a walk. He was anxious to see the rocks that grow. Joe said, "This is a cold day." Sure enough, it was cold outside. When Joe came to the growing rocks, some were in a type of triangle shape. Over Beauty they kept a hot light so he could keep warm.

16 March 2006

"When are you going back?" the schoolteacher, a young Asian from Canada, asked me. Her name was Kelli Pak. I think she was hoping I could take some things to her family.

"I'm actually not going back," I explained, "I'm going to close out my work, remotely, and then I'll be staying here."

Mother, on her deathbed, had made me promise. "Paul, my beautiful son," she'd said, "Don't go back to the States. Tanzania needs people like you. Stay here and find a wife. Have some children. Tend to your siblings and their children and their grandchildren, when they come. Take that wonderful education of yours and use it here."

How can you refuse your mother's dying wish?

And so, here I was, in a school just outside of Mwanza. It was run by missionaries from a megachurch in Alabama. The headmaster had a brother at NASA Marshall, and people around here talk. And so I was invited to come speak to the children at the school. "Tell them what you do. Tell them about the planets," the headmaster said in English. "They've never seen a Sukuma scientist who works in the States. They will enjoy hearing about what you do."

Kelli Pak's children were six, seven, and eight years old. They looked nice and clean in their little uniforms.

"Welcome and good morning, Doctor Kishosha!" they said in unison, in Kiswahili, as I was introduced.

"Good morning, children!" I smiled.

I looked at the teacher again. She was cute, but a bit young--maybe twenty-three--and a bit too small and thin for my taste. She nodded a bit as if to say, "Go ahead, the class is yours."

"Uh--As Miss Pak explained, I, uh, work for NASA. The U.S. space agency."

A boy shouted, "Are you an astronaut?"

Another added, "Have you been in space?"

"Miss Pak said you went to
space
," a girl said.

I looked at the teacher. She nodded again, indicating, "Continue."

"Well, no, I'm not an astronaut."

Everyone sighed with disappointment.

"But I am here to tell you about the planets. Other worlds."

They seemed to lose interest after that. I began rattling off the names of the planets, but the kids were looking out the window, or at Miss Pak, or at their notebooks.

What did I know about talking to little kids?

Miss Pak came over to me and put her right hand up on my left shoulder. I turned toward her and she motioned that I should lean down to match her height. She whispered in English, "Try another approach."

Flustered, I didn't know what to do.

Then it hit me. Worth a shot, I figured.

I went over to the chalkboard. Yes, chalk.

I drew a character on the board. I made a narrow parabola--with the vertex at the top--and gave it two legs, two arms, two antennae, a huge smile and big, dark eyes. The kids were watching me, now. I looked at Miss Pak and she was smiling but she also had look of "what is he
doing
?" on her face.

"This is Joe the Martian," I began, "He is from Mars."

I drew a circle and shadings to represent the polar caps, dark Syrtis Major, and the light Hellas basin. Inspiration struck: I moved to the left and drew the sun, Mercury, Venus, and Earth.

"This is Earth. Where we live," I pointed, and then drew in a moon, "and the moon. And this is Mars, fourth from the sun," I pointed again, "where Joe the Martian lives."

I proceeded to draw more planets. "These are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. They have rings around them," I drew the rings, with Uranus' tilted near ninety-eight degrees.

Past Neptune, on the far right side of the chalkboard, I drew a bunch of small circles, none much bigger than the moon I'd drawn. "These are what we call the KBOs. This one," I pointed, "Is Pluto. People argue about whether it is a planet. I think so. It has three moons: Charon and two so recently discovered that they don't even have names yet."

The kids seemed to be getting bored again. So, I drew a cat. With whiskers. And spots. Above Pluto.

"And this is Beauty the Leopard. He is a male leopard."

The kids began to buzz.

"Joe the Martian found Beauty on Pluto. He was frozen solid."

"Miss Pak! Miss Pak!" I turned around and one girl was waving her right hand in the air.

"Yes, Husna-Beth?"

"Why is the leopard
frozen
? Why is he on
Pluto
?"

"Doctor?"

"Uh--people--Basukuma--brought him there but left him behind. By accident."

"Why?" A boy asked.

"The Basukuma were on their way to the stars."

The growing rocks break easy. When Joe got back to his space ship he and his family went to sleep. The next day they were ready to go home. When they tried to leave, an electrical invisible fence surrounded them. They could not leave! They were stranded! That day they saw life on the planet! Out of the growing rocks came strange creatures! They were MIGHTIER than the Martians. The creatures had special rocks that blow up! Soon the creatures started to bomb the Martians! A feud started. The CREATURES against the MARTIANS.