Lunar Regolith
Jakfter was drawn to the house, its walls shaded and worn-out, the cobbles in the front smooth and gap-toothed, the moss-encrusted gate rising like a wave of water underneath the ocean’s surface. He wore the gloves, pat his pockets and put the cap on. In the distance an aeroplane flew overhead, its twin lights like jewels, and beyond it the moon a mere sliver. He climbed over the fence and waited in the bushes, hearing for sounds around him.
Crouching under the ornate window he pulled loose the hand-drawn map to consult it, guided only by the light of his phone’s torch. He had been told, the old woman, Usharak, who lived in the house had planned to bequeath the house to a science lab instead of leaving it to her nephews and nieces. He, Jakfter the contract tradesman, was assigned to ensure the original ‘will’ prevailed. The plan was to steal the regolith from her, because without it the house had no value. The researchers at the science lab would simply revoke her offer of the house, if it came without the regolith. He had to wait until the old woman went to sleep, which was not an easy feat, what with her age, and declining sleep quality. She could rise with the tiniest movement in the house, as had been evident from the time he spent watching her closely these last few days.
In the garage he saw the parked cars, the trolley full of octogenarian accoutrements, and wondered not for the first time if it was alright, to steal from an old woman. But the days he spent vacillating were behind him; if he did not take his opportunity now he may not be getting another one... When he flattened the hand-drawn map, he was reminded of course that this job was not as easy as it seemed; one of his cousins, Velfax, was almost shot by the woman the other day.
Velfax, a short and muscular man, had dug a small nook for himself behind the tool shed where the spades and hammers lay rotting. His plan was to stall, to learn as much as he could, from this vantage point, of the activities and visitations the old woman was involved in. He learnt that her colleagues from the science lab came to visit her on Mondays — this was the time when she was most occupied; they would all sit in the high-ceiling room in the first floor where they stayed until late in the evening. They ordered their food and mostly stayed cooped up, hatching whatever stratagems… He found this amusing at first, and after a few weeks his plan to steal the Lunar regolith became clearer to him. He was going to sneak into the house through the study door window which was rickety, its hinges creaking, looking out over the dried fish pond onto the fence. He drew over the map, adding flourishes, and scribbled a few notes on it which he planned to share with Jakfter so his cousin could expand it. Team work!
But in the end Velfax tripped the security system, and even managed to get terrified over a discarded dog collar on the floorboards, stumbling, and knocking a glass vase behind him, alerting the old woman in the process. The old woman hastily set the dog on him and shuffled over to the window where she rested the gun’s hilt on a cornucopia of shattered glass where the perpetrator’s warm blood shone brilliantly in the torch light. He must have cut himself pretty bad, she thought, her hand recoiling from the toy gun which had given the poor bugger much fright.
‘I don’t think she is dying’ Jakfter said.
‘She is old, of course she is dying,’ Velfax surmised with a bow of his head, mocking Jakfter for countering the obvious.
Jakfter was not an idiot like his cousin who faltered and failed. Armed with the map, Jakfter had done his planning. He chose today because it was a social gathering with many cars parked along the tree-lined rise to her house. He was dressed as a delivery boy, slipping past the men relatively unnoticed. Once inside, he went straight to the dried pool behind the house where he made sure the dog was chained under the patio.
The old woman was no match to his physical strength; he confronted her near the bathroom where he made his motive clear, the gun probing her left ear, ready to dislodge the bullet if need be, to make its way through the grey matter. She guided him discretely, towards the cellar room where the lab equipment lay. When she dangled it between them he snatched it without preamble. The lunar regolith was tied inside a bag which he pocketed discretely under his delivery-boy uniform. She volunteered to stay quiet until he was gone, which he could not quite fathom, but agreed nonetheless.
Usharak waited till he was gone as promised. Then she went out to chat with her friends and family who had come to listen to her, about her voyages to the far side of the moon. She was one of the astronauts to have stayed on the moon an entire month, long enough to experience the lunar day and lunar night in equal measures, two weeks of each. The mission was to understand the tidal locking between Earth and Moon, and the influence of that on human biology. Could the lunar regolith support life despite its mixture of glasses and oxides? After returning from her recent mission she had been hospitalised, her lungs coated with a layer of lunar silica, so fine and abrasive that it scarred the upper lobes permanently. She could not breathe steadily, fatigue more often than not resulting in nausea. The lunar stuff was highly reactive — she had been warned but it was her life’s mission, and this was the era of privately funded mission anyways. There was no stopping the inevitable…
Lung cancer soon followed, with physical therapy sessions to drain mucus among other things. Alone at home one night she decided to risk derision of her family and friends by contacting the solicitor to rewrite the ‘will’ — the beautiful house which she had been bequeathed with, was to be donated to lunar research. The phone calls came not too soon after — are you sure you want this for your grandchildren? I wish you had never returned from the moon? why don’t you eat some of the lunar regolith?
The last remark, she did find useful. She contacted the lab straight away and ingested some of the regolith before asking if they could put her under observation. After having been bombarded with meteors and charged atomic particles over billions of years the lunar regolith had achieved the current abrasiveness, essentially the smallest possible shards of radioactive glass. The lab objected of course. That was to be expected. Usharak however, had made up her mind.
And this is what puzzled her so much — what is it that the short, stubby man was after, when he tripped the alarm, and put himself in the cross wires of her toy gun? It was not until she found the hand-drawn map, crumpled in a crevasse by the dried pond, that it dawned on her. They were after the lunar regolith. Usharak spent the next few days researching about this. At first she thought the websites or media she is after would be obfuscated under veils of disguise but it was all too open. People were after moon dust because these particles had undergone electrostatic levitation on the daylit side when their electrons were robbed from them, charging them positively in the process. It led some people to believe the dust particles had special properties, prompting a good number of underground laboratories filled with people who tattooed their arms and torsos with what looked like moon craters.
In one of these underground menageries of science, a hapless victim emerged. The woman’s daughter had fallen critically ill recently, to a yet unknown disease. But when she was exposed to lunar regolith in a last bid the child recovered. The website claimed the child had misfolded proteins in her brain, and the lunar regolith what with its cosmic waterfall dance of electrostatic levitation, induced the brain to remedy this situation. But it could be that lunar regolith was enriched in atomic nuclei deposited from the solar wind — there were too many variables. Having said that, who was she to deny someone a case of experimental drug when she herslef had ingested the stuff recently…?
So when the man cornered her today with a gun to her head all she said was — ‘Do you have someone you are trying to save with the regolith?’ She gave him the bag of regolith and even told him she won’t raise alarm until he left the premises. He seemed genuinely concerned for her, as if he knew she was going to kill herself, or had already begun the process of it.
Velfax pulled Jakfter closer, ‘She won’t be able to bequeath the house to outsiders now,’ he proclaimed, ‘you have done it brother,’ he added.
‘No,’ Jakfter said.
‘I mean she put some dust in her mouth before handing me the bag, I don’t think she knows what she is doing.’ Jakfter now paused as clarity flooded his head. He continued ‘she was very ill brother! this lunar stuff could have done that to her…’
