Photo: The Illumination of a Dull Star (PublicDomainPicture.net)
TIME AND PLACE
2030s (or so). An observatory in California.
CHARACTERS
DR. ZO MARIE CURIE, female.
DR. ALBERTA EINSTEIN, female.
PROFESSOR VIKTOR WOOLF, male.
A Voice, over the radio.
Voices, from Curie’s cellphone speaker.
Center stage: CURIE, EINSTEIN, and WOOLF are busily preparing the Catcher (which an outside observer might mistake for a giant searchlight, across the observatory room from an equally large opening in the outside wall, covered by what could be a bank vault door). A radio, on a table in the room, is broadcasting the back-story, while a light alongside the “bank vault door” shines red.
Voice from the radio
Not all that long ago it was calculated, by Stephen Hawking,
that nothing can possibly escape from a black hole.
Nothing. The gravitational pull is so strong.
Not light. Not time. Not even a shank of time.
Which makes a black hole a form of intergalactic, velvet blackout curtain.
So, where does this strange light come from at night?
Astronomers worldwide are scratching their collective brains.
There’s a light, where it’s not supposed to be, from the heart of our galaxy.
Through the purest darkness of the deepest night, there’s a light.
Over at the shank-in-time place. There’s a light, burning in the void of space.
And doomsday enthusiasts are electrified.
Predicting, as they have for ages, that at last the world is coming to an end.
Between climate change, construction of the longest border walls in history,
and resuscitating cities devastated by the recent Tidal Wave Pandemic,
we’ve been told that Washington is about to be moved offshore.
That Constitutional revisions are under way to combine the 2nd and 19th Amendments. You’ll have to own a gun to vote.
And that half of California will be moved underground into massive vault-like cities.
Klaatu Barada Nikto.
Voice from the radio
Just for your information, the black hole at the core of the Milky Way
has a density of nearly half a billion suns,
crammed into an area about the diameter of Earth’s solar orbit.
So massive it can whip approaching stars millions of miles an hour,
shredding them to Christmas tree lights.
We watch it carefully, of course. From observatories on Earth and in orbit.
And during the last few months a fiend appears to be materializing inside it.
With the shape of a lion, the head of a man,
and a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun,
what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
is slouching its way toward Earth to be born?
Some cosmologists have opined that shortly an enormous beam of light will explode out, with extraordinary brightness.
Like nothing ever witnessed on this planet before.
“We’ll never see anything like it again,” one astral observer prophesies.
Why? Why is this happening? Now? To us?
Perhaps the black hole’s magnetic field is buckling.
Perhaps it ate something it can’t digest.
Time will tell. If … there is enough time.
And that’s precisely what a blue ribbon team of astrophysicists at Lowell Adjunct Observatory, in Monterey County, California, is hastening to determine.
Dr. Zo Marie Curie; Dr. Alberta Einstein; and Professor Viktor Woolf.
The crew has our fate in its hands. Maybe the Earth’s one hope of unraveling this apocalyptic mystery before our clock ticks out.
EINSTEIN turns off the radio.
EINSTEIN
Little do they know how little time there actually is.
For us here.
Working our butts off. Hoping against hope.
CURIE
Tonight’s the night, Alberta. It’s now or never. I just know it. And you do, too.
WOOLF
My mother used to tell me, “Viktor, tonight’s the night. But no matter how good you look tonight, you’ll always have your big butt tomorrow.”
CURIE
What’s that supposed to mean, Viktor? Your translation machine’s not ready?
WOOLF
Vie vouldn’t it be?
[beat] Are you all right, Zo Marie?
CURIE
No…. I’m not “all right.” I’m not even near “all right” Viktor.
And I’m not ever going to be “all right” again. Not after tonight.
Either we catch this thing; and it freaks us out for the rest of our lives.
Or we miss it. And that freaks us out the rest of our lives.
We’re doomed, either way. So? Am I “all right?” Who are you kidding? Are you?
WOOLF
I’m perfect. I’ve done everything vat I should. And everybody knows it.
CURIE
Do they? Viktor? Do they?
Your meta-celestial, deep space translator?
You’ve done everything possible, to get all the metaphors out of it? I doubt it.
WOOLF
Vat do you mean?
It’s been tested a thousand times over. On all sorts of cosmic vaves.
Everything the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder could give us.
It worked on them fine. Didn’t it? Vaves from even four billion light years avay.
EINSTEIN
It worked fine? on them? Hardly. Sounded more like a Japanese baseball broadcast mixed with chopsticks and static.
CURIE
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation, back to Howth Castle and Environs.” What in the name of Joy is that supposed to mean?
WOOLF
I have no idea. It’s gibberish. I admit. But that’s not the point.