The final story of this collection comes
to us from the glittering future of Cathal
Ó Sándair’s Captaen Spéirling series. In
between averting World War III, fending
off a Martian invasion and preventing
a war between Earth and Venus, the
eponymous Space-Pilot helps to
establish trade relations with the moon
(Luna) and the other civilisations of the
solar system. The more things change,
however, the more they stay the same,
and even in this wonderful space-opera
world, Irish youngsters still emigrate
in search of a decent living. This story
was originally published in Irish as ‘An
Deoraí’, which appeared as an appendix
to Captaen Spéirling agus an Phláinéad
do Phléasc (1960). This translation is by
the editor.
SEÁN MURPHY had decided to return from Luna to this world, and to spend the end of his life in his native land – Erin’s emerald isle.
‘Yes,’ he said to himself, ‘to be back in a place without any need for an artificial atmosphere or space suits; that’s what would cheer my heart.’
A long time before this, when Seán was a strong young man in County Kerry, he saw an advertisement in one of the newspapers:
EMPLOYMENT ON LUNA
The Government of Luna welcomes young men and women between 18 and 25 years of age. The Government will cover the cost of the journey from Earth, and migrants will be employed as soon as they arrive. Additional information and a free booklet, Your New Life on Luna, can be obtained on request from the Lunar Information Office, O’Connell Street, Dublin.
For a good while before he spotted this ad, Seán Murphy had been entranced by all aspects of space travel. In addition, there were few households in the community that did not already have a family member that had gone to the Moon to seek their fortune. There were good wages to be had in the glass-canopied Lunar cities, and there was no rain up there either. Seán already knew all of that, but his mother never dreamed that he would ever actually consider going. She never imagined it – until she saw the envelope of the letter that came for him from the Selenites’ office in Dublin.
She left the letter in a place where Seán would see it; having done so, she gave a broken-hearted sigh. Her husband was long dead, and except for Seán, her children were all married, and none were living nearby. She had been hoping that Seán might marry one of the local girls, and that they might keep her company in her old age.
That afternoon, Seán spent a long time reading the booklet that the Lunar Information Office had sent; of course, the images contained therein were delightful. One of them was a picture of a spaceship that had just landed at a Lunar airport (the famed Airport of the Moon, obviously), full of passengers from Earth. There were three stages to that journey. For the first stage, passengers would ascend to the Space Platform that orbited the Earth like a satellite; this stage was carried out in a ‘ferry’ ship, whose purpose was identical to that of ferry-boats in the old days when bigger ships still crossed the ocean. For the second stage, passengers would board a bigger, sturdier spaceship to cross the firmament to Luna’s Space Platform. There, they would board another ‘ferry’ ship for the third stage, the journey from the Platform to the surface.
The other pictures in the booklet were just as enticing: pictures of Luna’s capital city; pictures of the wonderful factories situated there; pictures of its theatres, and its elegant hotels – and yes, pictures of the statues, monuments and works of art that had been created in honour of Captain Spéirling, the Irish space-pilot who first established contact with the Selenites in 2007.
Seán Murphy’s mother did not ask him any questions about the letter. Over the following week, however, her heart was almost torn asunder with worry – and, in fairness to the poor creature, this worry was not baseless. A week after the letter arrived, Seán spoke to her about it.
‘Mam,’ he said, ‘I’m about to … I’m going to be leaving you. At the end of the month, I’ll he setting off for Luna.’
His poor mother did not know what to do or to say. She wanted to hug him and beg him not to leave her there, old and lonely, but she did not give in to this urge. She remembered those young men whose mothers kept them at home; and she remembered how some of those men turned sour, as if they had suddenly aged.
‘Well, Seán my love, I won’t stand in your way,’ she said. ‘Go, if you think that you’ll do well out of it – and I hope that you will!’
Seán was deeply moved to hear this, and the tears were not far from his eyes in that moment, because he knew how impossibly difficult it was for his mother to let him go.
‘I’ll be back in five years, Mam,’ he said. ‘I will, without a doubt. I’ll be back with a power of money then, you’ll see. I’ll buy a fancy car, and I’ll bring you to see every nook and cranny of Ireland.’
‘Indeed, I’d love to take a trip like that, Seán,’ his mother said. ‘May we both be safe and sound to see it!’
Even so, that night she cried herself to sleep. She had little hope that Seán would return as early as he said he would. Of those she had seen go to Luna, few of them came home before twenty years had passed, and she was sure that she would be dead and gone before that time was up.
The end of the month came, and Seán went. He got the atomic train up to Dublin, and after that, he boarded the space-ferry. He got a good job in one of the huge Lunar mines, and three years later, he had been promoted to a kind of manager. A week after this promotion, however, he received a message from home – his mother was dead, and she had already been buried alongside his father.
For a good while after that, it seemed to Seán that his life was not worth living. Very often, while he was in the middle of his work, he could not help but think that he had failed his mother. He had been too hopeful that she would live longer than she did, that she would not be heartsick after him. However, he eventually shed that sorrow – especially after he and Nora Ryan got to know each other.
Nora was a steward on one of the space-ferries. She and Seán met each other in the Irish Club in Luna City. They got along with each other immediately, and a year later they were married.
‘My goodness, it’s a long way from here to there!’ Seán said to himself, on one of the days when he was thinking about returning to Ireland. He and Nora ended up together for forty years, and they saw their seven children disperse in all directions: Brian was an engineer on Mars; Pádraig was there too, working as a nuclear physicist, and Séamas was working all over Africa. Máire, meanwhile, was married to a man who had a job near the North Pole; Brigid had gone to Venus, where she was working as a nurse. Poor Peadar died when the spaceship he was travelling on was destroyed, and Mícheál, the youngest, was a space-pilot, and he spent more time flying around the void than he did on solid ground anywhere.
All of them gone! Them, and their mother Nora, who had passed away three years before. And so it was that at the age of seventy, Seán Murphy was left all alone in the house where his seven children had grown up.
Hans Marsden was the name of his next-door neighbour; Hans had a good pension, and he and his beloved wife Irma had a fine, comfortable way of life. Seán told Hans that he had decided to return to Earth, ‘to die there’.
‘Hans,’ he said, ‘before I go, I want one more view of the nicest place under the sun. I’ll take a coach trip around Killarney, and after that, I won’t do any more travelling. I’ll find lodgings in some friendly house, and on my death-bed, I’ll bequeath them whatever I have.’
Hans shook his head sadly. ‘That’s what you think right now, Seán,’ he said, ‘but I fear that you’ll be greatly disappointed. The Irish climate will not suit you, with you having lived on Luna for as long as you have. And another thing, Seán – very few are left of the people you knew when you were young.’
Hans did his best to convince Seán to stay where he was, but his efforts were futile. However, Seán did accept one piece of advice from him: Hans told him not to sell his house on Luna yet, and Seán agreed.
‘Perhaps you’re right, Hans,’ Seán said, laughing. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t sell the old nest until I have a new one sorted. I’ll leave the keys with you. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found a place, and then you can sell the house for me.’
After that, he went to the Luna City Bank. He had a good amount of money stored there – a little over £10,000 in Irish money, he reckoned. He took a fifth of it in cash, and instructed the bank to credit the rest to a particular bank in Killarney. At the start of the summer, he bade farewell to Hans and Irma; they were as old as he was, and they were sure that they would not see him again. They said goodbye to him sorrowfully, and it was not without sadness that Seán wished them well.
When he reached Ireland, he stayed in Dublin for a few days. At the start, he enjoyed being out in the open air, instead of being under Luna City’s glass canopy; before long, however, he was reminded that the air here can get very cold indeed. The following day, he was shivering, and he started to suffer from frequent bouts of coughing.
After spending a week in Dublin, he took the atomic train to Kerry. He arrived in Killarney as night was setting in, and as he was walking down the main street, he saw the Moon high above.
‘Luna!’ he said to himself. ‘I can hardly believe that I spent most of my life up there!’
He went into a shop to buy some tobacco, and the shopkeeper guessed from his accent that he was a returned Moon-migrant. ‘Have you just come back to the old sod, sir? I’d say things have changed quite a bit since you left.’
Seán replied that it seemed to him that the place still looked like the Old Country, and that was how he preferred it. The shopkeeper laughed, and gave Seán a strange look.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘are you by any chance the son of Pádraig Murphy of the Boats?’
‘Indeed I am, without a doubt,’ Seán said, with sparks of joy in his eyes. ‘Did you know my father?’
‘I can’t say that I did,’ the shopkeeper said, ‘but I’ve seen his picture – a picture of the greatest hurler that was ever in this area; no sooner did I see you than I remembered him.’
Seán went to a hotel and asked to book a room for the night; he was not there long, however, before a newspaper reporter approached him, looking for his comments for an article to be called ‘There’s No Place Like Home’.
‘Most young Irish men and women are emigrating to Luna, or Mars or Venus,’ the reporter said. ‘It’s an awful shame!’
‘It probably is,’ Seán said, ‘but sense comes with age. Can’t you see that sense came to me, and I returned?’
The following day was a wet one, but Seán went out to see the village anyway. Before long, though, he felt the cold starting to hurt him, and his cough was getting worse. He returned to the hotel and asked the maid to have an old-fashioned fire lit in his room.
‘A fine turf fire,’ he said, half-smiling. ‘There’s no turf on the Moon, you know.’
The maid found it odd that anyone would ask for a fire to be lit – especially in the middle of the summer. The age of fires in fireplaces was over; for a long time, central heating had been provided by atomic power. However, plenty of hotels kept their old fireplaces, on the off-chance that guests might enjoy them. In any case, she did as she was asked, and Seán kept his coat on until all the turf in the fireplace was ablaze.
He sat beside the fire, and he started to think of Hans and Irma. He had promised them that he would send a letter before long, and he felt now that he should fulfil his promise without any further delay. He would enjoy telling them how much he loved being back in his native land. He gathered a pen and paper, but no sooner had he done so than he lost all desire to write.
‘Yerra, it’s hard for me at the moment. I’m still tired from the voyage; it’d be better to wait until I’m feeling like myself again.’
The following day, he felt strange pains in his bones. This worried him, because he could not remember ever having pains like that before. He went to a doctor, and the diagnosis was not difficult to reach.
‘Neuralgia, without a doubt,’ the doctor said. ‘It happens to everyone who returns to Ireland after a long time spent on Luna – and you’re going to suffer with it as long as you’re here.’
Seán was shocked. ‘Hah? What are you saying, Doctor? Surely you can’t be saying that there’s no cure for it? I have plenty money, and I can pay for the finest treatment available.’
The doctor shook his head and smirked. He knew well that the likes of Seán believed that there was no cure that money could not buy; even though it was difficult for him, once again he said that Seán could not hope to be free of his neuralgia as long as he was living on this planet. He was right, and that much became painfully clear to Seán after he had stayed in the hotel for a couple of months. In all that time, he was not able to find a new home for himself; nor was he able to write anything to Hans.
The first week of August was very wet, and cold with it.
‘It’ll be a fine story in another few months!’ Seán said to himself one day, as the cold was chilling him to the marrow. He went to bed early that night, and he arose early the following morning. While he was sitting at the breakfast table, the maid told him that she would light the fire in his room as soon as she was able.
‘Yerra, don’t bother with the fire, love,’ he said. ‘I’ll be leaving ye today. Bring me my bill, please.’
The maid did as she was asked, and brought Seán his bill. He gave her a hundred Lunar dollars for herself, and she was extremely grateful for it.
‘I’m … I’m getting married next month,’ she said, ‘and this will be a great help.’
‘Good! Well, may God send good fortune to you and your beloved!’
Shortly after that, he went back to Dublin, and began the journey back to Luna.
When Seán Murphy reached Luna City, he quickly went back to his old neighbourhood. Hans saw him approach, and was clearly amazed at the sight of him.
‘You’re back, Seán,’ he said, as casually as if he had last spoken to him an hour ago.
‘I am, Hans,’ said Seán. ‘You were thinking that I’d return, and you were right. There’s no place like home!’