The Meteor Problem (1)

I was woken at just after 6.30 one morning by a polite, but firm, knocking on my back door.

 

How strange. It clearly wasn’t Alun’s knock, yet Alun is the only other person on the island. Who could it be?

 

I quickly dressed and rushed downstairs, to find The Boatman standing at my door.

“What is it?” I asked.

 

“It’s Alun,” he said. “He wasn’t there to meet the morning boat.  I’m worried about him, he’s not missed the morning boat in over 30 years.”

 

“Perhaps he’s got a cold,” I said.

 

“Perhaps,” the Boatman grudgingly consented, “but you’d better go and check just in case.”

 

“I’ll go over now. Are you coming too?”

 

“Me? I’ve got a boat to run. The archipelago would grind to a halt if I went around making house calls.”

 

“But you’ve called on my house.”

“That’s different. You’re only a few yards up from the bay.  Anyway, I’d better be off. You do know your bell doesn’t work?”

“I do, yes. Thank you.”

“And that you don’t have a front door?”

 

“Yes, I’d noticed that as well.”

 

“Well, I’ll be going then. But if you ever need a new bell, or a door, let me know. I know a man on the mainland.”

 

I watched the boatman return to his boat. As sole supplier of mainland goods to the archipelago on which Happy Island stands, the Boatman can stray into pushiness when it comes to selling you things you really don’t need. ‘You don’t have a door. Your bell doesn’t work. You’ve stopped wearing trousers. Your hat is losing its colour.’ If he had his way Happy Island would become just another outpost of the capitalist mainland, with every day bringing new fashion and ideas, but Alun and I are frugal in our ways and resistant to the mainland zeitgeist.

 

It took me just a few minutes to walk to Alun’s house. I knocked on his door but there was no answer, so I opened it and called up the stairs.

 

Still no reply.

 

Fearing the worse, that Alun had a bad cold and would be really grumpy for the rest of the week, I tiptoed upstairs. However, he wasn’t in his bedroom, so I continued up the stair, to his observatory, where he was sat at his telescope watching the sky.

 

“You missed the morning boat,” I said, “The Boatman was worried.”

 

“Baa, boats, boatmen, what do I care? I’ve made a discovery Jed.”

 

This was not good news. Alun’s last discovery had been a cure for writers’ block, the result of which was that he wrote a dozen dreadful short stories every day, and would read them out loud to me every time he saw me.  

“Discovery?” I said.

“Yes Jed. The Davies Meteor.”

 

“The Davies Meteor?”

 

“A new meteor Jed, I was the first to see it. It passed over the island at 3.13 a.m.”

 

“You were watching the sky at 3.13? Couldn’t you sleep?”

 

“Baa, sleep’s for wimps Jed. You don’t make major scientific discoveries by going to sleep.”

 

“Well, that’s not entirely true. Hayley discovered his comet while he was sleepwalking. And Einstein’s ‘Big hairy gorilla in the wardrobe theory of relativity’ came to him in a dream.”

 

“Yes Jed, and his ‘Zero-gravity custard theory’, but they were silly theories, not a proper discovery like a meteor.”

 

“You can’t be sure nobody else has seen it. Why, there are telescopes on the mainland big enough to see galaxies 13 billion light years away. Some of them are manned 24/7, not to mention the millions of enthusiasts around the world. Why, there’s Aaron Davies on Rival Island, he’s a sky-watcher like yourself.”

 

“Baa, Aaron, he’s just an idiot with a big telescope and nothing better to do. He’s not a proper scientist.”

 

“Neither are you. Anyway, have you posted your discovery on isawameteor.com?

 

“Of course I have, Jed. What do you think I am, a rank amateur?”

 

“Well, if you’ve recorded your finding it’s easy enough to check whether you’re first.”

 

Alun said nothing, but quickly turned to his computer and looked up the site.

 

“Blast, damned, and blast again,” he shouted. I looked over his shoulder. He had been first to see the meteor. Joint first. With Aaron Davies!

 

“That rank amateur is claiming he saw the meteor at the same time I did.”

 

“He probably did,” I said. “Rival Island is only a few miles away, he’d have seen it the same time, if he was up watching, and he clearly was, he logged it the very same second you did.”

 

Alun spent the rest of the day in his observation tower.

 

“Why don’t you come down,” I suggested on numerous occasions. “There’s a cloud as thick as a mainlander, you won’t see anything for the rest of the day.”

 

“What, come down and miss my meteor. It’s looping the world, it’ll pass by again before long, I’ll show silly Aaron Davies who’s the meteor watcher in this archipelago.”

 

“You won’t miss the meteor, it’ll be on youtube. The whole world’s watching out for it now, you can track it and watch out for it if it passes over. I’m pretty sure there’s an app for alerting you to the approach of meteors.”

 

However, nothing I said could persuade him to leave his watch.

 

As Alun wouldn’t come down, I brought the toaster upstairs, together with bread, peanut butter and a spoon (Alun spurned all other cutlery), but he still refused to eat. “I don’t have time for such irrelevancies,” he said, “I’m watching the realm of the gods, I have no time for such base human distractions as SunPat.”

 

“No you’re not,” I said, pointing skywards, “You’re watching a bloody great black cloud. Through a telescope. It’s a complete waste of time. ”

 

However, if I thought things were bad then, I had no idea. For within the next 24 hours the meteor would reveal a startling truth that would lead to us crossing the globe in our greatest adventure to date.

 

xxx