Far Enough to Touch

The youngest astronaut in history chooses to let go. Rene Duport, Belgian prodigy aboard the moonship Prospero, has spent his brief career hurtling toward the stars. But when the mission ends and Earth calls him home, he does the unthinkable: he releases his grip on the hull and pushes off into the black. What follows is a desperate rescue, a crewmate's impossible dive into the void to retrieve the boy who has become a falling star in reverse. They pull him back, unharmed, his body intact. His mind, however, has traveled somewhere they cannot follow. Batholomew's 1960s masterwork is less about the mechanics of space travel than about the unbearable weight of the infinite. It asks what happens when a human being, especially one so young, so brilliant, so hungry for meaning, finally comes face to face with the universe's silence. The catatonia that claims Duport is not defeat; it is something far stranger, a reaching of one consciousness toward another and the breaking that occurs in the reaching. For readers who linger on the edge of the page, wondering what lies beyond the known.