Hell Nyet! A Russian Space Mirror Obliterates the Night
Comes now into the night sky the Russkis, with that damn Znamya 2.5 Space Mirror

By Tad Friend

Dearest Nuuk: When you read this letter, I'll be dead, my body as frozen as my soul has long been. I have set myself loose on this ice floe to face my doom, to find the final truth hidden in the deepest dark of the longest night. Not that you should worry, or are capable of it. When I told you I'd been diagnosed with the first terminal case of seasonal affective disorder that Doc Takaheenatawaka had ever seen, you giggled. "Is the woogums gwumpy? A wittle gwumpy?" "Remember," you coaxed, "a smile is just a frown turned upside-down!" When I could not reverse my scowl, you fled south to frolic and drink hot cocoa through the short winter nights.

The irony of this moment — oh, taste of ash; oh, gall — is that I brought with me the newspapers that Lem, making his annual subscription rounds, had snowmobiled the 700 miles north to my cabin. There, on the "World in a Shot Glass" page of the local paper, The Unalakleet Local Paper, was the news that might have saved me:

"Russian engineers plan to send a fleet of giant mirrors into space to beam reflected sunlight into the polar north. A preliminary trial using a 75-foot-diameter mirror is scheduled for November. During the test, part of London will be bathed for five minutes in a three-mile-wide pool of light. The aim is not only to generate an alternative source of lighting for urban and industrial centres around the Arctic Circle, but also to bring psychological benefits to residents in the icy north, who are notoriously susceptible to severe depression."

— The Sunday Times of London, June 14

Nuuk, I cannot describe the hope that surged in my veins, veins that had heretofore known only the trickle of ennui (and, in the last hour or so, their own rapid constriction). Light and heat on tap 24-7! I read on eagerly. My salvation had a name: the Znamya 2.5. It was conjured forth by the blithe spirits at TZNIIMASH (the Center for Research and Scientific Institute of Machine Building) and DKBA (the Dolgoprudney Design Bureau of Automatics). In November their euphonious dreamchild will arc across the heavens for 16 graceful orbits, its aluminum-coated mirror shining like ten moons. And after it burns up in the atmosphere, as cleanly and discreetly as Skylab, another disk will be launched that will shine like 100 moons. Eventually there will be 200 orbiting space mirrors capable of brightening five large cities, shining down like 20,000 moons. Think of the sleigh rides! The howling wolves! The spontaneous menstruations! Those mirrors will be like God's own natural Prozac, only artificial.

Of course, Lem ran one of his usual doom-and-gloom editorials right next to this news. More inclined to take his own life than I am to begin with, as you'll recall from the incident with his snowmobile and the church nave (it was you who noticed the telltale "hesitation marks" in the snow), he gets particularly surly about progress. Lem says that if the night sky is all lit up we'll never be able to see the comets and asteroids bombing in on a collision course, let alone the saucers full of lizard-headed aliens. He also points out that all it takes is a few people looking up at the wrong time — "Aiiee! My retinas are on fire!" — and you've got a serious p.r. problem. Now, these are fair points. But then Lem goes miles off the reservation to speculate about how this scheme will make polar bears and penguins swap hemispheres, as well as disrupting the seasonal clock of northern flowers, causing them to bloom, fatally, in January. He adds that if we warm the north up too much, mosquitoes will multiply like plutonium in a breeder reactor and obliterate all animal and human life north of Moose Jaw. But I say to Lem that when you're doing trial-and-error science that toys with the dimly-understood fundamentals of the environment, you've got to expect a few glitches.

Still, there's something cuckoo here. I'm getting sleepy — and curiously warm — but I haven't gone so soft in the head as not to notice that though the Russkis have supposedly gone capitalist, this whole thing stinks of commie plot.

Have we learned nothing from 30 years of James Bond movies? I mean, come on: a futuristic satellite launched into elliptical high-apogee orbit, where its Mylar mirrors will unfold like the petals of a flower? That this contraption will be controlled by joystick from space station Mir is the last straw. Those cosmonauts know they're going to the great gulag in the sky, and they'll want to take a few million people with them. Can't you see it, Nuuk? Dozens of Russian technicians at their control boards, futilely tapping out commands:

"Kommandir! Orbital naya stintsiya ne otvechayetsa!" ("Commander! The space station doesn't respond!")

"Chto? Nevazmozhna!" ("What? Impossible!")

Then the satellite's mirrors taper into the ominous shape of a gun-barrel. Back in Moscow the head technician murmurs, "Pomogitye" ("Uh-oh"), and a red-hot laser melts Seattle.

You always said I had a vivid imagination ("clinically paranoid," I believe, were your exact words). But I am not imagining the fact that my fingers are now snapping off like breadsticks, while my eyeballs are the consistency of jellied consomm‰. I leave you, Nuuk, with this bittersweet valedictory: It's all your fault that I'm dying. Yours and those idiot Russians, who should have sent that satellite up weeks ago.

Yet, on further reflection, let my last words not be petty. I begrudge no one, especially you, my little packet of NutraSweet. I adore you. I forgive you. And I sincerely hope that your new home in Seattle will not be too badly scorched in the coming inferno.

Illustration by Rick Sealock