Log-4 (The Search for Out There)

Before there was a 9th world in our solar system there was a mathematical prediction insisting it must be there. Nobody had seen it. It’s hyper-arctic glaciers brown had yet cooled no fevers. It was not quite material enough to raise it or downgrade it to a wobbling disc, a somersaulting satellite, a dwarfmoon, asteroid king or icish rock of planet-like dimension. But when that frosty giant became the apple of the eye of physicists like those Werble Frost so admired, it was an eleven-year-old girl named Venetia who suggested they give it the name it now bears: Pluto.

It was an appropriate title as the gelid mystery stone so many millions and millions of space throws away held the power of that Roman god who could also make itself invisible by the donning of a magic helmet. How many days had the young Werble spent launching his own rockets in the field to experience the taste of burning fuel in order to gain the thrust to break away from the torment of terrestrial life with no sails. How many opinions did he form about the solid state of its place in the galaxies.

There were Jupiter flybys, and Mars photos resent. Each time the New Horizons Mission mailed back its messages from the true Ocean above, hotter still would burn the yearnings felt in an astronomer’s chest. And Frost had a very large chest. How slowly that rig made its voyage from one far off planet to the next. It was a patience to surpass Job’s.

Werble’s father had mocked his wasted time studying charts, drawing maps. Even when Werble spoke his father’s language — the linguistics of armament — promising him a day when his son would guide missiles to their destinations across the planet, Schlack Frost would only look down on his growing boy and remind him of the nonsense of dreaming. Then would thwack the boy with the back of his heavy ring, re-opening a repetitive wound where that jewelry always landed. Werble had a knot still decades later, which he’d sometimes fondly rub.

Even Werble’s teachers could not fully get on board that ship in his mind to affirm for the young giant that it was good for him to dream of captaining a path in those highways. They knew he was bright enough. But that wretched family he came from! You might think it unfair to associate people in such ways. But you’ve likely done it yourself, and it’s doubtful you’ve met a crew like his. And with sad kinship, came of course the pitfalls of never knowing a lick about how to work on a team. And that was the curse for our giant. And so he limped the only way he knew how.

It was the recent down-grading of Pluto from a Life-Orb to a planetoid or giant asteroid that greatly grieved and hyper-bonded our giant to its final coordinates. To be a fully mature planet, a sweeping and swirling amassment of Space-rock and water must clear a defined lane in the heavenlies, so to speak, must gather enough size and shape to form a force formidable enough to call it gravity. Werble might have appeared to clear his lane, but he certainly pulled few people to his orbit — or at least he had trouble retaining them.

Though small among superstars, suns and other planets, Pluto was no pebble. And great was its shadow it cast on jewels so many billions of miles away, so great that men would plot decades to come and visit it. But wounded like Werble was its hold on prominence. Cold and far away, perhaps even beautiful, was it’s dark shimmer in the Universe. These also seemed much like the pain of Scholar Frost.

Long before Pluto became a planet, and then large rock, people saw its sillhouette and predicted it was there. How did they know? Because Uranus and Neptune were behaving as if there were a rock in their collective shoes. Their glidings through time were affected by the path of a cold something else.

And so it was with the lesser bodies down here. A giant ogre could walk among them, an ogre with a softer side to it. He also would perchance have to fend for himself. Fend away obstacles, and hope to be finally discovered also. But time was getting thin for the scientist, as it always does for a mortal. Werble no longer believed a ship was coming for him. This is why he dreamt of lifting off himself, and leaving these shores, to find what could be found, in that massive blue lagoon of light and diamond ice up out there.

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