Barry Patterson January 2000.
Previous page: Story Outline
This page: two short extracts.
The story was written to be performed & the comments in italics are instructions to the storyteller.
"Star of wonder...." chorus from "We Three Kings."
Jimmy looked up & he wondered. Dark lumpy clouds were crawling across the sky & in the gaps between them you could see the stars. How bright was the star of Bethlehem? It must have been very bright if the three wise men could see it from so far away....did that make sense? No! "All the stars are really far away!" he thought, "That's silly!" But standing there with all the others the sky looked so wild & wonderful that he suddenly felt something special & despite his disappointment about seeing the bike, at last he felt Christmassy! The singers had stopped singing & were quietly chatting. Someone noticed Jimmy craning his neck to see the stars & said something. Then everyone was silent, looking up into the sky as if they expected the Star of Bethlehem to appear, or Santa Claus on his sleigh a night early.
Looking up, pointing.
Of course the stars are very very far away, Jimmy was right! They're so far away that it would take years & years to get there even in the fastest spacecraft that we could make. Shows like Star Trek make it seem easy but its not that easy at all. A week before this story happened, the astronauts from Gemini 7 had returned after 2 weeks in orbit around the earth which was the longest, furthest space flight ever.
Some of the "stars" we can see in the sky aren't really stars though, are they? What are they?
Field responses - we're after planets. If anyone pre-empts you by saying meteorites you say:
Meteorites are rocks found here on earth that are from space. If you see a shooting star in the sky that's actually a meteor. But more about that in a minute!
Space is very big - things are very far apart. Flying through space is like falling, but there's no up & down. Sometimes space is very cold, sometimes it can be very hot or full of radiation. Out there you can see lots more stars than we can down here because there's no air; its clearer. Imagine that long, falling flight through the billions of years, the billions of miles. A long, lonely, cold curve that carries us through space. Then we see the earth, first like a bright blue star, then a disc the size of the moon, but patterned with the swirls of white cloud. Then we can see the sea & the land & we fall under its spell! The earth's gravity has caught us & is pulling us in! We start to go faster & faster & faster. We hit the top of the atmosphere & start to heat up. All this sudden heat! Its too much! We start to glow! We start to bu-urn!
Bang!
At about 4 o'clock in the morning of Christmas Eve our meteor hit the atmosphere
150 miles above France. It was travelling at several miles per second &
it immediately started burning up. There was patchy cloud so you could have
glimpsed it through the gaps it as it flew north.
Bang! Stand & make two fists move & them parallel to one another.
The heat was too much for it! It exploded & broke into two pieces both of which kept on travelling roughly north west about 10 miles apart. It was seen over Reading, in the Thames Valley, it was seen from the Malvern Hills near Worcester. It was seen from Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Birmingham & Leicestershire. Goodness gracious great balls of fire!
Point, gasp!
With long smoking tails & travelling faster than the speed of sound!
Boom, boom, boom!
When things travel that fast the air makes a booming noise like thunder - you could hear it in Warwick & Coventry, & in Rugby it was bursting people's light bulbs!
Bang!
Before it reached Coventry it exploded again. One of the new pieces was quite small & burned away without ever reaching the ground. People all over the area started phoning the police; many of them were scared. Over 150 people said that they'd seen something that night. The next piece disappeared. No-one ever knew if it reached the ground. But the last remaining piece. Ah, the last remaining piece got as far as Barwell, where everything was just too much for it, poor thing, & it exploded - scattering the roofs & gardens & streets of the town with dust & rocks from outer space.