Kicking Up A Little Dust

My friend, Sandra, was huddled in the corner of the room, blankets pulled to her chin while watching the news on television. She shuddered.

"I've got bad feeling about this," she muttered.

"Is there something wrong?" I asked, genuinely alarmed.

"Don't you see?" Sandra said sharply. "They're bringing all that comet dust back from who knows where. Isn't there enough trouble down here on earth? This can only bring more catastrophe."

I noticed the dust that had been accumulating on the top of the TV. I hadn't noticed it before. It didn't look all that dangerous, though I'll have to mention it to the housekeeper. If I had a housekeeper. If I had a hammer. There's a phenomenon about household dust. Once you notice it in one spot, it seems to be everywhere. Dusting becomes an endless search and wipe-clean mission. On the TV screen, the NASA scientists were celebrating the safe landing of what looked like a rusty spittoon in the Utah desert. The capsule had made a long journey through the heavens to collect a portion of dust from a comet. The cargo resembles dirty ice. Like slush that had accumulated along the highway in the mountains. You know, I can't remember the last time I defrosted the refrgerator. But this was no ordinary slush. This was from the entrails of a comet that has been flying through space for millions and millions of years. Or perhaps, as the great Carl Sagan would declaim so deliciously, "Billions and BILLIONS of years!" The scientists gave the extraterrestrial project a lyrical name: Stardust.

I thought of the great Hoagy Carmichael tune with the words, "And now my great consolation is in the stardust of a song ..."

I began to see Sandra's point. Stardust is something ethereal, untouchable, something that will always be wistfully beyond our reach.

And should be. It's not supposed to be captured and shipped back home in a crate or a parcel. It's designed to produce that celestial razzle-dazzle in the sky that makes lovers hold tight and inspire loopy poets to scribble away on spindrift pages as they look up in perfect silence at the stars.

But Sandra isn't worried about the purity of the moment. She believes capturing comet dust signals a bad omen and portends great misfortune. Perhaps, as it is in all those science fiction movies, the paranoid parables of my 1950's childhood, the space debris that's been harnessed for analysis will bring an alien contagion to our planet. A bird flu that's winged in from the great beyond. Or it could upset the delicate cosmic balance. It doesn't seem all that delicate.

Here's a more fanciful scenario. Perhaps the protectors of interplanetary cometary property will come to Earth from distant galaxies and demand its return and then all hell will break loose because we will fight to keep our precious space dust. A war of the worlds right here in the world of the weird. Not likely, though. The Elgin Marbles aren't going anywhere, either. In an odd twist, the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto, are now being carried on the New Horizons spacecraft to that farthest planet -- the farthest as far as we know -- on a nine-year journey. Ashes are coming and going throughout the universe.

Scientists explain the purpose of the Stardust project in their usual way: it will unlock clues to the origin of our solar system. I wish them luck. I can't even understand where "American Idol" came from. The logic behind this insatiable desire for discovery is that if we figure out where we came from, we might have an idea where we are going. The answer to that is already all too apparent. All of our best and noble efforts are likely destined to end up on the dustbin of history, as transitory as a shooting star. Maybe Sandra, a fastidious housekeeper, dislikes dust so much because it's not only messy and pervasive -- it's downright primordial. And maybe a little creepy.

Like Clyde Tombaugh, we are, in the final analysis, all inevitably bound together by a common reality; we will ultimately be reduced to flakes and seemingly insignificant cinders. For many, that's a bleak prospect. Too dreary for a self-important humanity to contemplate. It's the same old story, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That's why the results of the Project Stardust research will never be widely disseminated. Once the answers are found, they will all be quietly swept under the rug.

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Bruce Bellingham is the author of "Bellingham by the Bay." He confesses he gazes at the stars far too often and must be dusted off from time to time. bruce@brucebellingham.com