The Machine was nearly ready.

Twisting his hands out to stretch his oil-blackened knuckles, the wiry man observed his craft with pleasure and a surging feeling of excitement. He, Joseph Christopher Keane, was aspiring--no, was certain--to be the first human being to traverse that deep, soundless region beyond Earth’s blue sky.

Space. Keane felt a bubbly sensation whenever he thought of what might lay hidden behind the rolling summer clouds, past the night-time globe of constellations, past even the shining sun--new planets, new moons and atmospheres, maybe even undiscovered beings just like him! Who could know? He rubbed his hands to occupy his nervous, itching mind.

One more day, Keane thought happily, and I shall leave this world to visit others.

That night in his journal he wrote:

The Seventh Of June, In The Year Eighteen Ninety-Eight, Birmingham, England, The Continent Of Europe, The Planet Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe.

On morning next I set off to explore Space.

After fourteen months of diligent work and depressing failure, my Flying Machine is nearing completion and my soul feels as though it were re-animated. It is with happiness that I observe the ever-expanding Heavens for perhaps the last time from this Earthly soil. I leave behind no family and only few distant friends, as well as the records of my Work, which, although practised merely in these last several months, has occupied the majority of my life on Earth.

I take great pride in being the first of my kind to penetrate the firmament, to sail the Celestial Winds and to delve into the mysteries of the Extra-Terrestrial Environment. However, I do not feel inflated to a disproportionate size, as one may expect; rather I feel the smallest of my human kin. For I alone shall be witness to the vastness of the Universe as I will be surrounded by unconfined, terrific Outer Space (which, though we call it “empty,” will seem, I presume, forever more the opposite). I cannot deny that the fierce beating of my heart is sped not only by happy excitement but by the fear of what remains unknown to me. It is my fervent hope that these nervous mysteries will reveal themselves gently, and without the harm that I dreadfully suppose.

One may gather that my action is made in the name of Progress, or even that of Mankind itself, but neither of these notions has survived to fuel my Purpose. You might say instead that I make this feat in the spirit of Discovery, in the spirit of Smallness that we feel when faced with the infinite magnitude of the Universe and our own size in relation. When I understand this spirit with which I make the decision to travel, I do not feel so frightened, nor so alone.

Everything is set and I am left with only a restless night to prepare my mind and body for the great expedition. My final hours on Earth are filled with potential energy: nerves, excitement, fear, and hope; and it is with this energy that I will say my fare-well.

Respectfully,

Joseph Christopher Keane.

He signed his name and closed the leather book and wrapped its cord around the binding, then tucked it into the pocket of his jacket which was set out for the following morning, and turned down the lamp. He ran over the list of preparations in his mind, carefully bringing to memory each task that must be done before take-off, and counted on his fingers to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. Then he closed his eyes, though his brain refused to quiet itself, and spent the night in sleepless rest.

Two hours before dawn, he awoke, made his bed, and cooked a savory breakfast of eggs and sausage and toast and tea. He did not feel very hungry but the food helped to spur his tired body, and soon he was feeling light and nervously happy again as he pulled on his jacket and trousers and shoes, and headed out into the morning cold.

The Machine was waiting in the dark, dewy grass, underneath a heavy cloth held down with round stones. Keane held a lamp aloft as he removed each stone and carefully drew back the covering, folding it up and laying it underneath the stoop of the cottage where he lived. He returned to the Machine and knelt down to make a few adjustments, then tied a long line to a stake that he had hammered into the ground. He disappeared into the cottage and came back hoisting a heavy container that held some sort of fluid, which he poured into a nozzle inside the basket of the Machine, then sealed the container and placed it on the floor of the basket. Finally he re-entered the house one last time, returning with a metal box packed with dried food and flasks of water. Then he closed the cottage door and locked it, placing the key under the mat.

It was now one hour to dawn. Keane checked his pocketwatch and ran over his mental checklist once again as he packed his things into the Machine. “It’s a bit early,” he thought, “but it shan’t hurt to set off now.” He made one final round, then opened the little door to the basket of the Machine and fastened it behind him.

Taking a matchbook from his pocket, Keane lit a match and dropped it into the cylindrical nozzle into which he had poured the fluid. A steady fire began to roar inside, and Keane pulled two thick gloves onto his hands and tilted the nozzle at a forty-five degree angle towards a massive circular aperture that rested upright on the grass. He pulled a lever that was attached to the fuel container, and a loud blast erupted in his ears. The fire roared greedily and hot expelled air rushed into the aperture, filling the balloon slowly. Keane watched, timing the rise of the giant sphere with his pocketwatch.

At last the enormous balloon began to lift into the darkened morning air. Keane tilted the fuel nozzle slowly until it was once again at ninety degrees to level and the balloon loomed over the little basket in a perfect gargantuan globe. The roar of the fire was now deafening. Keane made a few notes in a book filled with measurements and calculations. Then he felt the basket swaying as it, too, rose off the ground. After a few moments the rope underneath it pulled taut, and after the basket had settled a little, Keane pulled out his penknife and opened the door to lean over the side.

“Well, this is it,” he thought, and he severed the cord in one quick motion.

The balloon lifted off into the dark sky. Keane watched as first his little garden disappeared, then his cottage, and finally he could barely see anything but a smattering of trees here and there, and the thin snaking road that wound along the countryside, until that, too was gone and he was alone in the darkness in the ever-ascending Machine.

One mile and counting.

It was a damp morning and the clouds were still low in the sky. Keane could see nothing ahead of him or below him or above him, only blankets of darkness and fog. A feeling of trepidation seized him. Perhaps I ought not to have lifted off so early. But he dared not turn back now. So he cowered close to the circle of light cast by his lantern, and made calculations in his book to pass the time.

Two miles into the sky, and moving fast.

The air was colder here and Keane was grateful for his warm winter jacket. He removed the gloves from his hands for a moment and warmed them near the fuel cylinder. It was about time to start slowing the Machine’s ascent, so he moved the lever up a bit to lower the flame. The atmosphere should do the rest until he reached the outer body of the sky, where oxygen would be scarce and the flame might die altogether. Keane could only count on reaching escape velocity before it did.

At three miles, Keane was beginning to feel oppressed by the air. He sat down in the bottom of the basket, feeling sick to his stomach, and waited out the uneasy lightheadedness with his pocketwatch and notebook before him on his knees. He was nearly faint when suddenly he noticed a rosy tinge in the air around him, and he wondered what was happening. He still could not see anything around or below him, only a grayish pink color in the foggy air, and finally he realized what it was: he was inside a cloud. The sun was rising.

He came out of the cloud into a piercingly bright blue sky. Blinking his eyes in the harsh light, Keane remembered that he was now vulnerable to the Sun’s more vicious rays. He turned down the lantern, which he no longer needed, and placed it at the bottom of the basket. Then he turned his back to the Sun and consulted his watch: four miles from Earth’s crust, by now. Inwardly he rejoiced that the sickness was banished from his insides at the sight of sunlight.

Finally, at five and a half miles from the surface of the Earth, the sky began to darken again. Keane had the sensation that he was rising up into another haze, only this one was somehow clearer than the sky itself, though it appeared dark. As the balloon floated up slowly into the clear black air, Keane watched the blue sky shimmering below him like the rainbow cast by a waterfall.

The balloon gave a sudden lurch. Keane had anticipated the turbulence, and he held fast to the side of the basket while it swayed and tremored in the unbalanced air. With a burst of excitement Keane noted that he had reached the very fringes of the sky. The Machine was rising very slowly now, and the tremors seemed to slow it even more. The whole expedition hinged on this moment. If Keane did not act quickly and correctly, he knew, he would be lost there forever.

Fighting against the pressure of the air, Keane reached out and threw down the lever on the fuel cylinder, sending up a final desperate burst of hot flame. He squinted at his pocketwatch, which was swinging on the end of its chain, but he couldn’t make out the seconds. So closing his eyes he counted mentally over the racket of the turbulent air and the roar of the last scorching flame from the furnace. Then he reached up and pulled fiercely at a chain in the aperture, and the balloon collapsed.

Keane’s body was shaking so badly that he could barely see the explosion-like display as the balloon split itself into four quarters like a peeled orange, the aperture falling beneath the basket and yanking at its rigging, and finally the four pieces of the balloon settling like a great cylindrical curtain in the space beneath the floating basket. The shaft of hot air sent the basket shooting on its own through the last reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere, the furnace suddenly silenced as its fire ceased to exist, and at exactly six miles above sea level, the man and his Flying Machine were in Space.

He was almost afraid to stand up. He had fallen down on the floor of the basket and could now see nothing but blackness above the four walls, but somehow light was falling on everything around him. The air was still and silent. Keane felt reluctant to take a breath, for fear that the smallest sound might awaken something deadly in the purely quiet vacuum.

And then a thought occurred to him: This is the air which has never been breathed. And he felt that he must stand up and take in his surroundings before he could make that first breath his own.

Keane steadied himself and rose up slowly on his two feet.

With his first inhalation of the silent air, he saw what appeared to be Darkness reflecting Light. All before him was the vast enormity of the Universe, depths that reached far past the distance of an Earthly horizon, far past the focus of the human eye, stars and bodies ascending and descending from Heaven without direction, without comprehendible perspective. Keane stood in awe of the infinite complexity until he felt that he must bow down his head, and so it was with his exhalation of that same breath that he saw the next great sight:

Beneath him, tapering slightly like a monstrous convex window, the Earth was spread out in the light of the Sun, blue and green and deep as the ocean, white clouds churning like foam on the crest of a wave. Keane turned his head toward what he guessed was considered the “Westward” part of the globe, and with amazement he saw the Earth’s black shadow curling over its edges. He looked “Eastward” and saw the curved rim of the planet glowing with an unbearable crown of blazing light. To think that he could stand at this distance (and growing ever farther!) from the Earth and observe, on the one side, a country in mid-night darkness and, on the other, an island of bright mid-day sunlight! The Machine floated slowly away from the planet, and as a patch of clouds cleared momentarily on its surface, Keane gave a sudden cry of delight, for he could make out the shape of his home continent of Europe as clearly as if he were looking at a map of the world.

“It’s a Sunday,” Keane thought to himself. “They must be just waking up down there in the village.”

It felt strange to think of England as “down there” rather than anything else--almost too strange, for Keane--and so he diverted his attention once more to the expanse of Space stretching out to his right and left. He had thought before that it appeared to be Light reflected on Darkness, and he began to expound upon that theory in his mind. For as far as he could see, the infinite area of Space was pitch black, interrupted only by multitudes of brighter-than-white bodies, glowing with the reflected light of a star or emitting their own spectrum of rays. How could anything be so distinctly different, so opposite and yet so interconnected? Keane marveled at the darkness of Space and the brightness of its contents. He wondered how that great expanse could be so dark not because it lay in shadow, but because it was so far away from light that it was simply not visible, or perhaps it was even nothing at all, perhaps that was what Nothing looked like...

As the Machine carried him further into Space, Keane began to recognize the shapes of other planets, still far away but steadily approaching, and a new excitement welled inside him. Here, looking more and more itself like a planet, was Venus, its surface swimming with yellow clouds; and Mercury, only a speck of glowing dust like the distant stars, but certainly much closer; and where was Mars? He would have to find that one, next...

A sort of childish happiness was taking hold of him, and Keane barely noticed that his attention was constantly directing itself from one wonder to another. It seemed he could go on forever observing all of Space and would never tire. Whenever he made a new discovery, he scrambled to jot down notes in one of his books, or to sketch out constellations with a mad hand, or to pitch forth a wildly calculated guess at the distance to some interesting body. At times he wanted to fall to the floor in awe, at others he wished he could scream in ecstasy--but it seemed he could do neither without somehow discrediting the beauty of it all. Perhaps, being human, it was only his duty to be still and silent, and to watch.

After what felt like a very short time but was really much longer, Keane took out his pocketwatch and glanced down to see that it had stopped. He looked behind him and saw the Earth, now very far away, accompanied by its single shining moon. Beneath him the stars tumbled away in endless depths, and before him the planets rose up in their colored majesty. All around him was the beauty and mystery and fantasy of the Galaxy.

Keane gazed out of his Machine, and a smile crossed his face. There was so much to see, and what more after that? Other worlds, other galaxies, other creations unbeknownst to him.

“So much,” he breathed. And he drifted silently toward the stars.