Of Man and Fallen Stars

Of Man and Fallen Stars

Joe Portes









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         There's certain events in life that no matter where you are, you will always remember what you were doing the moment they happened. Hitler invading Poland, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, the Miracle on Ice, the September 11th attacks, the first black man being elected President of the United States. I wasn't alive for any of that, but I'll tell you about what I was alive for.

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         I was eight years old, sitting Indian style in my driveway, playing with hand-me-down matchbox cars when it happened. I had just built this massive double-loop race track with a six-inch  jump finale. My favorite orange race-car was braced for its daredevil mission.  It was perched at the top of the ramp, waiting a push, when I heard my mom yell.

         “Honey, grab Danny and come inside...Now!”

         My dad didn't understand how important this jump was. He grabbed me and told me I could play with my cars later. A hairy forearm swooped under my ribs and Dad was carrying me inside. We went into the living room. I sat on the floor and my parents were glued to the T.V. like robots. I didn't care what was going on at the time but I noticed the same thing was on every channel. My dad flipped through ABC, NBC, CBS, TNT; all of them where showing the same ten-second clip over and over again. There was this really bright thing speeding down through the gray sky toward the ground. The caption on the bottom said it was in Columbus, Ohio. It was a gloomy morning, but once that thing was about a hundred feet from the ground, it lit up the whole damn field like a Christmas tree. It smashed into the Earth, knocked down hundred of trees, burnt all the grass within a couple miles, and created a crater four-hundred feet wide. At first, the scientists thought it was a small meteor or asteroid. But it was much brighter and very oddly shaped. The government performed several tests for many days until they came to a conclusion. It was Polaris - the North Star, the handle of the Big Dipper – that hit the Earth.

         It was amazing. Luckily, nobody was hurt and nothing really bad happened except for a little vaporized grass and fallen trees. The video clip circulated all the news channels and websites. There were interviews with all the top scientists and NASA officials airing on T.V. for months. The main question they were all asked was: how did this happen? Nobody had an answer.

         It didn't take long for the attraction site to be set up. “Come see Polaris,” “The shining bright star of the north for your viewing pleasure,” “Polaris viewing tour. Special family value price for a limited time only!” The last one is what got us. Couple days after we saw that commercial, my dad rounded up the family into the SUV and we headed over to Columbus, Ohio. We lived in Garrison, New York, so it wasn't too far of a drive.

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         We got there around three in the afternoon. Cars we backed up for nearly a mile. I guessed all the other families were enticed by the low low family price of $300. That's right, $300 to see something that's been in the sky for millions of years. Nobody really looked at it then, nobody cared. Who needed the North Star anyways? We had things called GPS's which talk to you and to you exactly how to get some where. Does the North Star talk? No. Especially not now, it's dead. Anyways, we finally made it to the front of the line, and my dad shelled out the three-hundred bucks. We parked in Lot C next to this swanky van of rich people from Danbury.

         “We'll hit up the gift shop first, before everyone else is done with their tours.” My dad said.          He was a smart man, always thinking. So we went into the gift shop. First thing I set my eyes on was this photo-booth. “Take your picture with Polaris!” it said. Not quite. You weren't allowed to take a real picture with the fallen star, security was real tight. The best you could do was use this booth to photoshop your stupid little face next to a real photo of the star. And it cost $25. There were “star fuel” energy drinks in the cooler next to “big dipper ice cream cups.” Everything was severally overpriced, fake, and cheesy. Of course my dad bought the ice cream cups. I asked for star fuel but he said that energy stuff had way too much sugar. I was convinced that it had real star power and it would give me enough energy to jump to the moon, even though I knew better. It was just basically Red Bull but with a different label – in fact, the slogan on the cooler even read “forget wings, Star Fuel gives you light speed!” After Dad got his ice cream and novelty back scratcher and Mom bought this tacky red “Shine bright like Polaris!” sweater, we went on the tour.

         Our tour guide, “Guy,” was probably the lamest person I had ever met. He had a fanny pack with about twenty pins - one of which lit up and played music – and a visor that read “North Star Nerd.” During the whole tour, I couldn't help but stare at this giant hairy mole below his left nostril. He kept blabbing on and on about the history of the star and every couple minutes he fixed the square-framed glasses that slid down his sweaty nose. All we did was walk in a circle around the star and everyone went “ooohhh” and “aawww” like we were at a damn fireworks show. After we were done, we got back in the car and drove home.

         My parents wouldn't shut up the whole drive home. They kept talking about how “beautiful” and “magnificent” it was. I didn't get it.

         “Wasn't it more beautiful when it was bright and in the sky?” I asked.

         “No honey. You'll understand how special it is when you're older” Mom said.

         “He's too young to appreciate it” Dad chimed in.

         For the following year it was the biggest news story and for good reason. Even CNN devoted an hour of air time a day to the star. The crater tour was eventually shut down a couple times a month (thank God) for celebrities and political figures to visit. U2, Coldplay, and Green Day all put on concerts in the crater. They all talked about how blessed we were to have the star here on United States soil. No one seemed to consider the fact that the most important star in our solar system – aside from the sun – was no longer in the sky. Because the concerts were held on a stage in the crater, ticket prices sky-rocketed. The shows all sold out the same day they went on sale. I never went to any of them and never wanted to. My parents went though, they went to the U2 concert. Mom said Bono delivered this “absolutely amazing” speech about the star and how it's a sign from God and about us coming together as a world of peace and blah blah blah.

         Then, a couple years later, the inevitable happened. Some rich guy bought the star. This billionaire CEO paid the government a lot of money to have private ownership of Polaris. Jim Bramford was his name. Well, Jim bought that star and immediately had it broken up. He cut it up into about a million pieces. What'd he do? He made necklaces, earrings, bracelets, paperweights, and they even found a way to produce a type of oil out of it – real star fuel. All the jewelry went on sale, but not a normal sale; they were all auctioned out to the highest bidders. Obviously there weren't enough pieces to just sell in your regular old Kay Jewelers and then how would Bramford make profit? The man wasn't stupid. Oh, and the oil, that was available at certain gas stations as alternative fuel. It wasn't quite as cheap and efficient as gasoline and it was actually worse for the environment, but hey, if you could afford it, why not? There wasn't anything quite like driving on star fuel.

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         Polaris was the first of many. Every year a new star would fall; each one duller and less impressive than the one before it. The faster we broke up and commercialized the stars, they faster they fell – or so it seemed.

         The text books were constantly changing; constellations were slowly disappearing. Sailors and campers were having a hard time finding their way without the North Star, and it became even harder as more stars fell. The nights were getting darker. Eventually, the crime rates went up on account of it being so dark at night. But we just kept chipping away at the fallen stars.

         It took the world until there was only a thousand stars left in the sky to hold a UN meeting. The nights were threatening to become pitch black and nobody knew what to do to stop it. Russia suggested constructing man-made stars and launching them into the sky with rockets. China quickly shot down that idea, pointing out the fact that the light from the stars in the sky are thousands of light years away; so then if we were to shoot man-made stars into the sky, the light wouldn't reach us until we were all dead. Then came a brilliant idea from one of the poorer countries. I'm not sure which one because they never got proper credit. They displayed a chart of the rate of falling stars over the years. It was static the for a little while after Polaris fell and then steadily increased until the present. They suggested that the increase in the rate of falling stars was caused by our destruction of the downed stars. Stop busting up the fallen stars and maybe the last thousand would stay in the sky, they said. It was the best plan the world had.

         So, a few years went by and no stars fell. Giant spotlights were constructed in large cities around the world to compensate for the missing the stars. The police forces were nearly doubled and jails were being erected left and right. Everything was beginning to shape up, until North Korea found another use for the dead stars.

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         I'm surprised it took so long for some one to discover that the stars contained immense explosive power. With enough heat and shock impact, the stars could create a massive explosion. Some of the bigger fragments had as much power as twenty-five megatons of TNT, that's about one thousand times more than the Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 

         There was a global arms race to produce warheads out of star bits. Almost every country in the world had at least one star fall in their borders and many of them hadn't broken them up into smaller pieces. The third-world countries were generally the ones with the biggest fragments because they didn't fragment the stars for fuel or jewelry. This created a very interesting world dynamic; the poor countries, essentially, had more power over the rich ones.

         With the world on the brink of pitch black nuclear winter, many countries started secretly evacuating their citizens to the moon. I was one of the chosen ones; I was young and able to fight if a war were to break out on the moon; my parents were not. They were left on Earth.

         The moon had no water, no farmland, and no borders. Everyone had only what they transported from Earth. The United States tried the best it could to provide for its citizens, shipping over food and water on a weekly basis. There were daily radio transmissions from Earth detailing that the Nuclear War could start at any time.

         Then the transmissions stopped. We all assumed that it had began. Nobody heard from Earth from then on and we just had to go on with our new lives. It was like starting civilization all over again.  Everyone was nomadic and there were no laws or alliances. It was pure savagery. And the saddest part was; everyone knew how hopeless it was. Once our food and water supplies would run out, we'd all be as good as dead.

         I'm writing this in hopes that mankind will live on and find some way to thrive on the moon, either that or return to the apocalyptic wasteland that surely is Earth. There's only a couple hundred of us left on the moon and supplies are dwindling. Oxygen refill tanks are getting low. People are dying everyday.

         All I can do now is think back. Think back to the time when the stars were in the sky and not on the Earth. No one really knows how the first one fell or what really caused all the others to follow suite but it doesn't matter now. I guess both of the mass extinction theories were correct; the world was ended by an impact event and a nuclear war. I bet they never thought both would be caused by falling stars. But then again, no one could have ever known this was possible. If some one would have said the world would have come to an end after the North Star fell out of the sky, everyone would just laugh at them.

         But now, as my oxygen is running low and I'm weak from hunger and fatigue, I can only think of one thing. I think of the day when it all started, and I wish. I wish I could have just gotten to see my favorite orange race car make the double-loop and hit that jump. I just know it could have made it.