Nearly Neptune
by Hugh Walters
"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"
I suppose Orinoco must still be picking up the litter in some park somewhere and I don't know about it and that makes me feel sad. The Clangers have had a hundred and four new adventures, of which I have only shared five or six. That makes me slightly sad as well. I haven't thought about Doctor Doolittle or Hal and Roger for decades. Maybe I should see if they are on social media.
Strange, the loyalty you feel to people who don't exist.
Some of our childhood friends grew up with us. Some people think it is terribly smart to say "Doctor Who is just a children's programme" or "Star Wars is just a 1970s B movie" but if they really thought that was true there would be no point in saying it. No-one has ever pointed out that actually Bagpuss is a children's programme.
"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"
Even at the age of ten, I could see that Hugh Walters had run out of steam. The formula of the series has become narrower and narrower and finally disappeared up Uranus.
It's not hard to see why. Space travel, simply as such, is not very interesting. Four guys in a small box, floating in literal nothingness a long way away from anything else. Space travel stories are mostly not about the getting there, but about what happens when you arrive. And if you don't know very much about planetary physics and have ruled out aliens, one destination is a lot like another.
Is space itself interesting? Hugh Walters occasionally pauses to tell us that it is very big, very black, and has lots of stars in it:
“Though he’d seen it many times before, the vision of space never failed to make Morey catch his breath. Innumerable points of brilliant light shone unwinkingly from every direction. He knew that the void itself, not having the power to reflect light, would be like black velvet, but there were so many stars that he scarcely saw a black patch at all."
There is some implication that the astronauts find just being up there among the sparkly velvet a spiritual experience, or (though Walters doesn't put it like that) an addiction. But I can't help feeling that it would have been safer and cheaper to go and swoon over some Lake District daffodils. Or possibly find a waterfall and have sublime feelings about it.
When I Was Very Young, I wanted more than anything to be an Astronaut. I think I harmed my Academic Career by insisting on doing science subjects, even though my bent was clearly towards the humanities. "O" Level Biology kept alive the dream of someday being a Space Man. Now I Am Six I read about the nasty rich guy's fantasy of space colonisation and I think "Even if I had a trillion pounds, I wouldn't spend it on being shot into near orbit and floating for a few seconds in a vacuum."
I couldn't have articulated any of this when I was ten, of course. But I vividly remember sitting on the bed in my Granny's spare room reading Nearly Neptune and thinking "They are going to sacrifice their lives for each other. Again. That's all that ever happens in these stories now." Expressions like "jump the shark" weren't in vogue. But you don't have to have an 'A' Level in English literature to spot that the ghost is always the fairground owner in a mask, and Dennis always ends up across his Dad's knee.
Did I stop reading the books? Of course I didn't stop reading the books. Do you imagine that I would allow my friend Chris to go on a space mission without me? But the Tripods increasingly became my drug of choice.
*
"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"
My four friends are shot in the direction of Neptune in a rocket. There is a technical fault. All seems lost. The ground crew give them up for dead. But with some technical acumen and a last minute intervention by God, they survive, and come back to earth, and start planning for their next trip. Which is to say, the plot of Nearly Neptune is exactly the same as the plot of the previous ten books: but there are no telepathic twins, floating martian ghosts, alien fungi, subterranean eggs or unexplained domes to add spice. There isn't even a Russian saboteur or a nasty boffin who turns out to have a heart of gold.
"Neptune!" Morey exclaimed "Why Neptune?"
Why indeed? One imagines Hugh Walters sitting at his typewriter coming up with titles -- Yacht to Uranus? Unicycle to Uranus? Yodelling On Uranus? -- and then giving up.
"Neptune is more favourably placed" explains Sir George Boffin "it will be several years before we could have another shot at it.
Walters is shamelessly good at dramatic opening lines. Of course I didn't actually believe that Chris or any of his three companions were dead, exclamation mark. True, Stan Lee had taught me that good guys did sometimes get killed off; but I knew perfectly well that entire casts never get wiped out on page one. Still, it was a good hook. And it could have been a good structural twist. Why not skip over the boring set up (briefing, training, launch) and skip straight to the part where there has been a Terrible Disaster and our heroes are facing Certain Death?
But Walters cannot resist the power of The Formula. Admittedly, we spend Chapter One in ground control. Sir George Benson, the chief boffin is "overwhelmed with grief" and Whiskers, the funny boffin is "smitten with deep grief". But Gillanders, the Australian Boffin says that "They accepted the risks openly and cheerfully" and everyone pulls themselves together.
By Chapter Two, we have gone into a flashback sequence. It's rather tiresomely written in the past perfect ("It had been six months before that Sir George Benson sent for his favourite crew") but otherwise it's business as usual. "Rides on the giant centrifuge had been childsplay....They had also to spend periods in hot and cold chambers to test out the insulation of their suits". By chapter three we're seeing the story from Chris's point of view. I suppose there are homeopathic qualities of dramatic irony because we know something is going to go horribly wrong. But something always goes horribly wrong.
*
"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"
Was Walters a plotter or a pantser? He typed for an hour each morning before going off to the furniture warehouse; and churned out two books each year. Did he write that first sentence knowing why our heroes were (apparently) dead? Or was he one of those writers who just put paper in the typewriter and started to type?
It's rather common in old-fashioned 2-cents a word pulp stories for Heroes to wake up in white rooms suffering from memory loss. They stagger through mysterious doorways into blank white landscapes. They keep drinking coffee or whiskey or in some cases smoking joints. We see the story forming in the authors head and on the page. Douglas Adams posthumous Dirk Gentley novel had the hero just walking randomly around London looking for a case to solve.
Miss Griffiths often told us to write a story on a set subject, say, A Picnic By The Sea or What Would Happen If Jesus Came To Tea. We wrote directly into our exercise books; in long hand with fountain pens, and were expected to finish inside an hour.
Did this first exposure to the idea of "writing" privilege pantsing over plotting? Did the emphasis on neat cursive writing tacitly teach us that revision was cheating? Crossings out were a mortal sin. What kind of writer does that tend to produce? A blocked writer, reluctant to put pen to paper until the perfect sentence has formed in their head? A dull writer, forced safely to write cliche and unadorned prose, with lots of adjectives? It was a beautiful sunny day when there was a knock at my shiny green door. Who should it be but sweet little baby Jesus himself. Would you like a nice cup of hot tea in a red mug I said brightly oh yes please he replied happily? I have always thought that the popularity of J.K Rowling owes something to the fact that her prose is the sort of prose that junior school English teachers would think was good prose.
But maybe the school teachers were unconsciously breeding poets in the mould of Ted Hughes and Alan Ginsburg where first thoughts are the best thoughts, the mind is tethered directly to the writing hand and once the thought fox has left his footprint in the white room it is really too late to change anything?
I think Walters wrote the first sentence at the top of his page, and trusted that the momentum would carry him through the set-up and the first few chapters, and that he would find out what the terrible disaster was at the same time the boffins and the readers did. I think he got to the Midpoint and realised he still had no idea what was going to happen; and said "Oh, soddit. Mechanical failure due to human error."
He drops a little hint that the ship is going to be pierced by a meteor. Holes made by tiny ones are automatically patched, but large ones could portentously puncture the oxygen tanks and the fuel pods. "But this was so unlikely that the possibility could be forgotten". And Walters does, indeed, forget it. The disaster just kind of happens.
"For some unaccountable reason there was a loose connection among the hundreds of wires that were housed within the hypo control casing."
You're the effing writer, Hugh: account for it.
*
The boys wake up from suspended animation. They find that the loose wire has caused a fire, wasting a lot of oxygen and fuel and filling the ship up with smoke. Chris "his chest feeling as if it was ready to burst" goes to the store room and "exerting every ounce of his ebbing strength" he manages to open the locker doors and find some space helmets. He "feels the perspiration running down his face" but "feels a great flood of relief" when he is able to use the space helmets to revive the other astronauts. They temporarily abandon ship. The sight of "the star-spangled heavens" fills Chris "with wonder at its indescribable beauty" but he also shivers when he sees the "vast emptiness surrounding the four astronauts". Everyone agrees that they are "tiny specks of life in a vast hostile universe".
Fortunately, the tiny specks of life manage to get the radio working and tell Mission Control that Chris Godfrey and his three companions are still alive. Unfortunately, the retro rockets are bust, so there is no way of turning the ship round. Fortunately, it would be possible for someone to go out into space, physically push the ship, and allow Newtonian mechanics to do the rest. Unfortunately, the person doing so would shoot himself off into space and never be heard from again. Fortunately, while Chris is nobly sacrificing himself, Tony, the only competent person on board, works out a way of using oxygen to fix the jet packs ("compressed air guns") and the ship is turned around without anyone being deaded. Unfortunately, the journey home will take eight months. Fortunately, Tony is able to fix the cryogenic system. Unfortunately, there are only two functioning chambers. And very unfortunately there isn't enough food for even two crewmen to survive that long. So while two of the crew are in with a good chance of getting home, the other two are quite definitely and irrevocably going to die. Which is very unfortunate indeed.
Walters has backed himself into a corner which raises genuine moral questions about life and death -- questions about the ethics of suicide and euthanasia. Questions about faith and mortality. Chris has been said to be an active church-goer. You might imagine he would at some point say something about heaven. Or ask one of the boffins to read them the Last Rites. I suppose Serge is a godless commie. I know it's a kids' book, but it's a kid's book which is all about dying. And it's rather peculiar about the subject of death.
George Boffin, on earth, wonders whether to leave the radio connected or not.
"Would it be kind to let he astronauts end their days in privacy? Or should they keep in contact right to the end? Benson didn't think he could stand that."
When he realises that he may have to decide which two get the cryogenic couches, he again seems to focus on his own discomfort:
"Now two only must be selected to live....It was going to be a ghastly job making the decision."
Chris naturally assumes that, as captain, he will sacrifice himself for his crew: and Serge and Morey both beg to be allowed to be one of the ones who cops it. Chris is a little disappointed that Tony is the only one not to volunteer. But of course, once he has completed the repairs, Tony goes off by himself, slips into a space suit, and jumps out of the airlock. Why he bothers with the spacesuit is not entirely clear. But while he "floats in space and lets oblivion come creeping over him" "a feeling of guilt floods over" all the others. They were all planning to leap out of the airlock as well, and are ashamed that Tony got there first. So they all go outside, drag him back inside, and try to have a civilised discussion about the situation:
"I’m sure we’d all be prepared to take a one-way walk into space but we must decide rationally who’s to do it.”
“Have you thought, Chris, how the two survivors will feel?” Serge asked quietly. “I don’t want to be one of them.”
“Nor me,” Morey burst out. “I couldn’t face life with that on my mind.”
Everyone wants to die on behalf of his friends because it would be too painful to know that one of his friends had died on behalf of him. Which makes you think that if they were really heroic, they guys would be offering to stay alive to spare their friends the emotional trauma. I am reminded of the old joke about the sadist and the masochist.) (*) Walters would have been a young child at the end of World War 1 and a young adult at the end of World War II: one wonders if some traumatic survivor guilt is working its way out in these stories?
When the team learned that they were going to Neptune, they were as "excited as schoolboys". When they thought about the dangers, they were "as gay as schoolboys". Early in the mission, Whiskers told Tony that he would "give him a good hiding" when he gets home if he was not more "respectful to his elders". By my sums, Chris is 37 and Tony is 29. But Walters is still writing them as if they were the adolescent heroes of Blast Off At Woomera and the Domes of Pico. Like the First World War poets, he sees a certain poignant beauty in the idea of young men expiring together before old age and women can spoil them. They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man, the lads that will die in their glory and never be old.
"We've always been together" Tony insisted "And we must be together to the end. Let's step out with arms linked and keep it that way."
In the end, they agree to, er, take it in turns, with two guys spending some time in cold sleep while the others try to survive on as little food and oxygen as possible, and then swapping places. Exactly how this helps, I don't know. I would have thought it introduces a ghoulishly random element, so that the two who are in deep freeze when the others drop dead from starvation get to go home. I suppose it means that no-one has to make the terrible choice. The discussion become even more ghoulish. What's to stop the two chaps who are awake killing themselves as soon as the other two chaps are asleep? They'd promise not too. But wouldn't giving your life for your best friend make it okay to break a promise, even if you'd crossed your heart and pinky promised?
“No, I don’t. If we give our word to each other, that’s more binding than anything,” Chris said.
“But we can easily counter that. We’d all give an undertaking that if any pair of us woke up to find the other two had broken their solemn pledge, then the survivors, too, would step out into space.”
The Russians used experimental dogs to test the early space craft. One wonders whether UNEXA ever used trained lemmings.
And in the end, there is a deus ex machina. Something in the original malfunction has affected the ship's heating system; so the two crewmen who were awake when it finally blows (Chris and Morey, as it happens) are accidentally put into cold sleep. When he introduced the concept, Walters had thought through how cryogenics might work: he talked about little implants to keep the heart functioning an special injections of space anti-freeze to stop the blood from freezing. But it seems that to get our heroes out of a hole, it works just as well to go to sleep in a chilly space capsule.
*
This is the twelfth novel and Chris's eleventh space expedition. Internal chronology suggests that twenty years have passed since his first adventure, and astronauts have to retire at the age of 40. Sir George, who must be close to 65, announces his retirement at the end of this book. Australian Boffin Billy Gilanders takes over as head of UNEXA, and asks Chris to be his deputy. Chris isn't too sure:
"He should have been proud, of course But was he? Was it worthwhile being recommended for this marvellous appointment if it meant the end of his journeys in space? He must take a long, long time before he made up his mind."
This question is considerably more interesting than anything which happens in this morbidly lacklustre volume.
(*) "Please, please, will you beat me?" "No."
