Whatever Happened To The Heroes?

My father once told me that out childhoods end the day we finally lose our scene of innocent wonder. For me, that day was my ninth birthday.

After months of begging, my parents finally agreed to take me to the Science Museum in London. I can still remember running around, trying to look at everything at once, my mind filled with questions. I saw dinosaurs and steam-trains, submarines and giant atoms that looked like the worlds greatest climbing frame. But my father led the way past these marvels, through the small coffee shop and into an almost deserted hall. It was darker than the rest of the museum, and I can remember my eyes slowly adjusting to the gloom, until I could make out the true wonders inside.

They called it the Hall of Heroes, but it's long gone now, the exhibits packed away in some basement, probably never to see the light of day again. My father, always a softly spoken but serious man, took my hand and led me slowly around, explaining everything. They had a portal from the Excelsior, the first ship to circumnavigate the Moon. The battered head of a Martian Death-Droid, its red eyes still menacing after all these years. Wax figures dressed in the bright scarlet and gold uniforms of the Space Exploration Corps., replica blasters in their hands. In the middle of the room was a half-sized model of a Venusian thunder-ape, its head almost touching the ceiling. At the back of the room was a mural depicting the Battle of Titan, where the combined space-fleets of Earth, Mars and Venus had set aside years of distrust to battle the insidious robot warlords of Planet-X and their mutant slave armies.

I was so engrossed by the image before me that I failed to see my father's eyes fix on the collection of photos set to one side. There were the crystal-domed cities of Venus, the ice spires of Europa and the majestic Martian capital, high atop Mt. Olympus. But he was looking at the other, more faded images; men and women stood beside sleek rocket ships, grinning from ear to ear. These were the heroes of the Space Exploration Corps., the first humans to venture out into the darkness beyond the sky. I looked at them, my mouth moving as I read the names below:

Captain John 'Flash' Falcon, Dr Sara 'Star' Saunders, Commander Diana 'Domino' Li, Lieutenant William 'Wild-Bill' Hunt, Chief Engineer Antonia 'Toni' Baxter and Space-Pilot First Class Kenny 'Kid' Kinkade.

These men and women had led the way, visiting every world and moon in the solar system, fighting any who wished Earth harm. I was mesmerized, too young to understand why they had gone away, why my father and I were the only people in that half-forgone room.

Two days ago I was sorting through boxes of old books when my own son, no older than I had been that day, found a book my father had bought me: An Illustrated History Of The Space Exploration Corps., 1899-1929. It's cover was torn, the pages yellowed and well thumbed, but it was just as I remembered it. There, in bright primary colours were the heroes of my childhood, long banished from my dreams. I sat and watched him as he red the book, cover to cover, struggling with some of the longer words, but never giving up. I knew that when he reached the end, he would ask me the same question I had asked my father on the way home from the Science Museum, almost thirty years ago:

What happened to the heroes?

I struggled with what to tell him. Should I lie? Tell him that it was all a fantasy? That there had never been adventurers willing to risk all to learn the secrets of the universe? Or should I tell him the truth? That the word grew scared? To afraid of what might be out there to risk looking up at the night sky? That we had turned our backs on our heroes, forcing them to chose between staying on Earth, or eternal exile? Should I tell him that they had lost their faith in us? That we had, in the end, proven to be unworthy of them?

I didn't have the hart to crush his dreams, so I took the book away, telling him that that was a story for another day. Because the truth is too complicated to explain to a child.

It wasn't a surprise when the Great War spilled over into space in 1915, and people who had fought side by side against alien invaders were forced to hunt and kill each other, something my old paperback glossed over. While neither side actively engage in orbital bombardment, it was only a matte of time before debris started to fall from the sky, not all of it burning up. The forced scuttling of the German Raunmarine at the end of the war was a blow to all sides, and was probably responsible;e for the renewed Venusian attacks on our Io and Titan colonies. With too few ships and inexperienced crews, no Earth fleet had been able to stand in their way.

The final straw was the bombardment of New Saint Petersburg, the Luna refuge of the Tzarina Anastasia and the forces still loyal to her by the Soviet Red Star Fleet in 1932. After that, the heroes we had relied on to keep us safe lost their faith in us, in the idea that Earth was a world worth dying to save. One by one they headed off into deep space, and our colonies on the Moon, Mercury and in the asteroid belt stopped communicating with us. Shortly after, Mars and Venus broke off what little diplomatic contact they had with us.

By the time the second world war started, we had turned out backs on the heavens, regressed our technology. Even today we flat out refuse to use anti-grav and energy weapons. Even our computers are a poor imitation of the old 'thinking engines' that once helped run the world. The night sky now something to be feared, guarded against with street lights. People argue that we're safer now, that we've not suffered an attack from space since the last ship blasted off in 1936.

But at what cost does this safety come?

We've lost our scene of wonder, our desire to see what's out there.

We've lost our heroes.

The End