Seeing Stars

Seeing Stars

  by

  John Gibson

  All rights reserved

  Copyright 2014 by John Gibson

  Seeing Stars

  Leonard Burbridge placed his index finger against the glowing blue plate, the door of his apartment slid silently open. He poked his head out into the corridor beyond and looked left and then right. ‘Nobody about,’he thought, ‘good!’. He ducked back into the apartment and re-emerged a few seconds later pulling a heavily laden sack-truck behind him. Inside the apartment, through the open doorway, he could see a six-foot-high image of Lana Johansson’s face on the giant floor to ceiling Teevee. Her luscious pink glossy lips seemed to dominate the entire screen. There was something sensual, almost pornographic, in the way those two-foot-wide moist juicy lips moved as she introduced the remaining contestants.

  He touched another illuminated panel and the door slid shut, blocking off his view of Lana’s perfect pink mouth. He’d left the Teevee playing of course, to do otherwise would be to arouse suspicion. There were persistent rumours that the Guardians down in Central Control had an indicator board which pinpointed the location and owner of all inoperative Teevees. To switch it off now, on this evening of all evenings would certainly be to invite a ‘courtesy’ visit from the state police ‘just to check that everything was OK’.

  He’d chosen his timing with care. The final of Celebrity Stuntman was just beginning. Over the next three hours Lana would be putting the twelve contestants through a series of challenges including base-jumping, parkour, train-surfing and high-diving. Whoever was still alive at the end of the show would collect one billion-dollars in prize money for the charity of their choice. Incidentally of course they’d also be guaranteed to be in work, for the next few months at least. Anticipation was at an all-time high, there’d been countless trailers in the run up to the final. It was already known that Darleen DuPont had broken both her legs whilst attempting to jump seventeen double-decker buses on a motorcycle, and the word on the street was that Eddie Edmonds had been killed in a human cannonball act that had gone wrong.

  For Leonard the important point in all this was that, for the next three hours at least, everyone in London, everyone in the whole country in fact, would be glued to their Teevee screens. There was no-one to see him as he pushed his sack-truck with its precious load along the plushly carpeted hallway towards the elevators.

  The lift seemed to take ages, he glanced nervously up and down the corridor while he was waiting. Leonard was seventy-three years old and was six-foot-three tall. He walked with a slight stoop and had a long drawn face and a long drawn nose. There was something birdlike about his appearance and mannerisms. Tonight he was wearing a heavy overcoat, black knitted woollen gloves and a plaid hunters-cap with flaps over the ears.

  Eventually there was a ping and the big brass doors slid open, he entered pushing his valuable cargo ahead of him and punched the button marked ‘500’.

  There was a Teevee on each wall of the elevator. Lana was standing at the top of a giant ramp now, it sank sharply away behind her, seeming almost to vanish to a point in the dizzying distance below. Darleen DuPont stood beside her, she was dressed from head to toe in black leather and wore a blue crash-helmet with her name emblazoned on the across the side of it in gold letters. She stood with her legs astride a big and powerful looking motorcycle.

  ‘You OK Darleen?’ Lana shouted above the roar of the engine, ‘You happy?’

  Darlene nodded her head and gave a little thumbs-up gesture. She didn’t look happy.

  ‘Alright!’ shouted Lana. She gave Darleen a slap on the back, ‘You go girl! Break a leg!’

  The elevator doors pinged open and Leonard once more stuck his head out into the corridor an looked around. There was nobody in sight. Two hundred yards along the corridor on his right was another lift, this one unlike any of the other elevators in the building. Instead of burnished brass its doors were coated with a dull grey flaking paint and instead of the regular call button there was a ten-digit keypad with a red LED display above it. This was the service elevator for the roof.

  Leonard stood the sack-truck up in front of the doors and punched in the code: 3141. With a clunk the doors opened. He’d got the code from Stanley Hardwick who used to be the Building Supervisor, ‘how long ago?’ he couldn’t remember, certainly Stan had been dead these past thirty years or more. Twenty seconds later he emerged onto the roof.

  It was dark up here; pitch black, he could barely see his hand in front of his face. He looked up at the sky and felt a tinge of excitement as he saw the familiar constellations, the Big Dipper and Orion and Cassiopeia. The night was moonless but he could see Jupiter high in the western sky with Mars a little to the left of it.

  The roof-space was enormous, the size of ten football fields and just as flat. Over a quarter of a million people lived in this one building, identical buildings were dotted about the whole of London.

  The lift shaft emerged at one corner of the giant skyscraper. He’d been here many times before, sometimes during the hours of daylight, he knew that the edge of the roof was about six feet away on his right. Cautiously he moved towards it, dropping down onto his hands and knees as he got closer to the edge, inching forwards millimetre by millimetre until his fingertips encountered nothing but fresh air.

  He stretched out then, laying flat on his stomach on the gravelly surface, and craned his neck out over the void. The view was dizzying, it made his head swim. The black windowless wall of the building fell away like a sheer cliff-face and was lost in the clouds about six-thousand-feet below him. Here and there, through gaps in the cloud cover, he could make out an interweaving network of shimmering golden threads: street-lights on the ground another two miles or so below that.

  He reached up and pulled the cap from his head, he wanted to feel the wind ruffling his thinning grey hair. He felt exhilarated, alive. He could hear the blood rushing through his hardened arteries and veins. He wondered what it would feel like to jump into the yawing chasm before him. To feel himself suspended in mid-air, in free-fall, accelerating at thirty-two feet per-second per-second towards his destiny on the cold hard pavement below.

  He’d felt it before, this mad suicidal urge to jump. It frightened him sometimes. Sometimes he felt almost compelled to do it. He visualised it in his minds eye. He’d just stand up and walk forwards, a couple of steps, that’s all it would take, then gravity would do its thing. There’d be nothing else to think about then, no more decisions to make. His fate would be sealed.

  A shudder went down his spine, suddenly alarmed at the morbid direction of his thoughts he wriggled backwards away from the edge and retreated to the comparative safety of the elevator shaft.

  The trolley was where he’d left it. He grabbed ahold of the handles and set off along a diagonal path towards the centre of the roof. After about a hundred yards he stopped and set down the sack-truck. He quickly unsnapped the pair of bungees which secured the canvas-wrapped load and shimmied the truck out from beneath it. Then he carefully unwound the tarpaulin. Beneath it was a telescope.

  He’d built the scope nearly fifty years ago. It was a simple affair consisting of a pair of open-ended boxes, each about fourteen inches square and eight inches deep. The lower box, which contained the main mirror, was mounted on a simple wooden gimbal which allowed it to tilt or swivel to any position. The upper box was suspended about five-feet above the lower one on a series of metal rods and held the diagonal mirror and focuser.

  He removed the cover from the lower box to reveal the main mirror. It was old and tarnished now but it still served. It had to there was no way he could get it re-silvered. It had been possible to do such things in the old days, to buy the requisite materials and parts on the black-market, but no
t now. He remembered making that mirror from an old ship’s porthole that he’d found on the dump, it had taken him over two years. Two years of patient grinding and polishing and lapping, checking the curvature with his home-made Focault Tester, and grinding and polishing and lapping again.

  He fished around in the pocket of his overcoat and produced a couple of eyepieces. These were handmade too. He’d bought the lenses from Surplus Shack and had turned their walnut and brass housings himself on the lathe in his fathers garage.

  That was before his father had been forced to sell up and move to the Walthamstow tower-block, before Surplus Shack, like all other independent retailers, had been forced to close. All goods were now supplied by Central Depot, everything from foodstuffs to furniture, from Teevee’s to toilet roll. Requisitions had to be submitted in triplicate together with a clear statement of need. Leonard smiled to himself sardonically as he imagined submitting a request for silver nitrate to resurface his mirror or for new lenses, such a petition would undoubtedly be turned down and would probably result in a friendly visit from the state police.

  He slipped one of the eyepieces into the focuser and tightened the little retaining screw, then he stood back and looked up to