When he got home, he couldn’t believe his eyes.
Most of his roof was missing and his garden was strewn with debris on all sides. Amongst the rubble he could see broken tiles, lengths of splintered timber and fragments of smouldering carpet. After circling the outside of the building he stood looking at the front door. There didn’t seem to be a mark on it. He unlocked it and entered. There was a tremendous heat and a pungent smoke drifting up from a gigantic hole where his lounge room used to be. He stood, taking in the great gaping sections of floors and ceilings. He looked up at the great expanse of open sky that now replaced what used to be his upstairs bedroom and bathroom.
He approached the gaping chasm with caution. The intense heat and acrid fumes rising up made it difficult to peer down into the abyss. From what he could make out, he was looking down into a bottomless pit with walls glowing bright orange as far as his watering eyes could see. His mind boggled as he asked himself what could possibly create a hole that size. Regardless of how impossible it seemed, he felt sure that there had to be a perfectly rational explanation for what he was looking at.
Meanwhile, far away, in fact on the other side of the planet, a technician arrives at a rocket launch site. He stands looking at a similar hole. This blackened crater was quite clearly located at the very spot, that only the day before, a very large rocket had stood.
He was also aware that on the previous day, specialists had been brought in to make a number of extremely delicate adjustments to the rocket’s reverse thrusting system.
He began to speculate…
