National Library

The National Library’s reading room becomes Kristín’s research base as she seeks to understand what happened in 1967. Its microfilm archive turns the decade’s newspapers into a record she can search, and her discovery of the astronaut visits supplies a concrete lead in her investigation of the glacier operation.

The reading room and its archive

The reading room is deserted while Kristín works at a clumsy microfiche reader, turning a heavy wheel to move through newspaper pages. The amount of material on each film varies with the physical size of the newspaper: some films hold two years’ worth of editions. The machinery lets her watch headlines pass in rapid succession, compressing a decade of public events into a single research session.

Among the headlines are the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the student uprising in Paris in 1968, and Nixon’s presidential candidacy. The archive’s sweep gives Kristín a brief interval of solitude in which to catch her breath, think through the preceding hours, and plan what to do next.

The 1967 discovery

Kristín finds newspaper coverage of the astronauts’ visit to Iceland in 1967. There were twenty-five visitors, and the press followed their movements closely. One of the pilots accompanying them was Ian Parker, the man Thompson had mentioned, who used to fly Scorpions. The reports also note that Parker had belonged to an earlier group that came to Iceland in 1965.

The 1965 party consisted of eight astronauts and was taken into the uninhabited interior, to the volcanic desert around Herdubreidarlindir and Askja. The same trip was repeated when Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts visited. Armstrong drew the most press attention; the newspaper portrayed him as reserved, quiet, and serious, with a strong interest in the technological challenges of spaceflight. It also reported that he had piloted Gemini 8 in 1966 during the first successful docking of two crewed spacecraft in orbit, and was the only member of the team to have been in space.

A lead and a change of scale

The newspaper trail helps Kristín connect a name already raised by Thompson with the publicly reported astronaut visits. Her search is not simply an effort to understand her brother’s danger: she wants to discover what the plane contains and expose those who tried to kill Elías and killed his friend. The library’s record of a highly publicized visit therefore sits beside a question about the operation that Kristín believes has been concealed.

The press attention surrounding Armstrong also catches Kristín’s notice. She repeats to herself the report that he disliked the enormous attention he attracted wherever he went. In the reading room, a newspaper detail becomes part of her effort to interpret the people and events behind the 1967 journey, while the microfilm turns the library into the place where her investigation gains its next specific direction.