The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Think about it. If you were suddenly told you were going to be locked up for an extended period with four women, wouldn’t you be attuned to their physical presence in a whole new way? (I’m speaking from the male perspective, though I’m sure the women were privately making their own assessments of the four of us men.) The fact was, I wouldn’t have Judy anymore—or Rhonda Ronson, whom I’d met at this very bar a month ago—and I’d have to have somebody, wouldn’t I? I wasn’t signing on to enter a monastery. And E., her face aglow with the light of the candles in their golden globes and her hair shining and her breasts pushing at the fabric of her dress till you could see the outline of her nipples, became the foundation of a whole new way of thinking. But I couldn’t look at her. I turned to Stevie, who was flying just as high as E., and we laughed over something, and then I turned to Diane, who’d gone deep inside herself and couldn’t seem to rise above shop talk, and all the while I studiously avoided eye contact with Judy, who sat in pride of place at G.C.’s side at the head of the table, with Dennis, Little Jesus, right beside her.

  I went home alone, parked in my usual space and climbed the stairs to my second-floor efficiency in the Residence 1 building on campus. It wasn’t till I came through the door and glanced at the clock radio on the nightstand that I realized how early it was: just ten past eight. Mission Control—Judy and Dennis, that is—had orchestrated things so that the evening would be celebratory in a strictly controlled way in order to insure that we’d all be well rested for the public unveiling of the final roster, or The Eight, as Richard had begun calling us. I wanted a drink. The double vodka had long since dissolved in the stew of garlic bread, veal parmigiana and tossed salad in my gut and the red wine accompanying dinner had been so stingily poured it barely had an effect, plus, like all of us except maybe E. and Gretchen, I was working hard to surfeit my vices before closure shut them down (hence Judy, whose knock I was expecting any minute now). I kept a bottle of Stoli in the freezer and I poured myself a good healthy dose, marveling in a purely scientific way at how the viscid liquid silvered the sides of the glass—a beautiful sight, really, as exquisite as anything unfolding in nature—before easing it to my lips.

  I held it in my mouth a moment, savoring the cold chemical caress of it against my tongue and palate, and then I crossed the room and lit a cigarette, though smoking was discouraged on campus and about as stupid and self-destructive an activity as anything our species has devised. I knew that. And I wasn’t suicidal, or not particularly—no more than the next person. I’d smoked in college for the cool of it, the cigarette as prop and phallic symbol both, but I’d given it up junior year when I first began to think seriously about the environment and the future. My future, that is. I was going out with a girl then who didn’t smoke and didn’t like the taste of it on my lips and it didn’t take much convincing to make me crumple up my pack of Larks, toss it in the nearest trash can and go cold turkey (that’s the sort of thing I can do, believe me, because I’ve got an iron will when I want to bring it into play). But now, as of a month ago, I’d begun smoking again. Why? Because it was a vice and a vice that would be denied me inside where every molecule of the environment was reprocessed in a matter of weeks if not days and you were, quite literally, what you ate. And drank. And smoked. At first, the smoke had tasted bitter and harsh and I went around nursing a sore throat, but by the night of the annunciatory dinner I was up to a pack a day and that was beginning to seem insufficient.

  Anyway, I had the drink in one hand and the cigarette in the other when Judy’s knock came and I opened the door to let her in. Her face, usually so vulpine and sexy, didn’t show much as she swept into the room, glancing first at the drink, then the cigarette, and finally at me. “What was that business with Dawn tonight?” She took the drink from my hand and knocked it back in a gulp, her eyes gone greedy suddenly. “If I didn’t know better I’d think you were hot on her or something—”

  I shrugged.

  “And you’re smoking now? You think that’s a good idea?”

  “No,” I admitted, “it’s never a good idea.”

  “Then why do it? Just because you won’t be able to inside?” Instead of handing the glass back to me, she went to the freezer, extracted the bottle and poured herself a drink atop the dregs of mine. “And Dawn—she has a boyfriend, you know. Johnny Boudreau? Does that ring a bell? Not that it matters. Once you’re inside—the two of you—I suppose you can do anything you want, or are you doing it already? Is that it?”

  I didn’t like her tone. This was a moment for celebration, congratulation, booze and smokes and sex. I didn’t need this. “Right,” I said, “we can do anything we want—just like the inmates at the penitentiary.”

  She shot me a look, then turned away to cap the bottle, jerk open the freezer door, and thrust it back inside. I had her shoulders to look at—shoulders bared in a spaghetti-strap cocktail dress in Terranaut red—and from the rigidity of the muscles there I could see how angry she was. “You,” she said, pronouncing the pronoun so carefully it sounded like an accusation, “are one of the luckiest men on earth, one of the four luckiest”—and now she turned to me so I could assess the way the anger sat in her features, heavy there, gravid, anger that was all about two lingering kisses on Dawn Chapman’s soft yielding lips and the fact that what we were about to do, the sex we were about to have, was complicated by betrayal and, even worse, the knowledge that it was going to have to end and end soon. “We could have picked Malcolm, you know.” (Malcolm Burts was, realistically speaking, my only rival on the extended crew, a former PR man and weasel of the emotions who wasn’t half what I am, but there you have it.)

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, putting a little weight into it and watching her face the whole time.

  She looked less certain of herself all of a sudden, as if she’d been caught out, but that wasn’t going to stop her. “You might not want to hear this but Jeremiah actually preferred him—and so did Dennis.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She took a sip of the drink and nodded her head like one of those souvenir dolls they give out at baseball games on promo night. “You owe me,” she said. “I’m the one who stood up for you. I was like a canary in there, singing your praises—I mean chirping all day and all night, so don’t you tell me—”

  What this last bit signified, I couldn’t say. I wasn’t trying to tell her anything—she was the one trying to put something over here, laying down ground rules, boundaries defined in bright yellow adhesive strips like no-parking zones, acting as if I’d already thrown her over when we both knew we weren’t in love and never had been. Sex with Judy was all about getting closer to God—to G.C., anyway—and the delicious danger inherent in that. Whereas she might have been described uncharitably as uptight in her managerial capacity and especially the way she related to people she perceived as being subservient to her (i.e., the members of the crew), in bed she brought a good clean no-nonsense approach and she always got exactly what she wanted out of the transaction. And what she wanted was control. And she had it. Or had had it. Which was just what this little contretemps was all about. Okay. Fine. I went to her, took the glass out of her hand and pressed my lips to hers.

  It was nice. It was always nice, as all vices are. But what I was thinking was that from here on there would be no stopping me. I was going inside. And once I was inside I could fuck Dawn Chapman, Diane Kesselring, Gretchen Frost and Stevie van Donk in succession—in the same bed on the same night and do it all over again in the morning—and there was nothing Judy or anybody else could do about it.

  The press conference the next day was all business, the New Age trappings that had defined the first mission shunted into the background now, though not entirely. What we were projecting was scientific rigor, emphasizing the array of environmental and atmospheric studies we would undertake—living science—while at the same time reaffirming the ruling principle of closure absolute and unbreakable, i.e., the hook. Four men, four women, locked up toget
her! And no, it wasn’t a stunt. And it wasn’t theater. But certainly those elements were present, because while we were trying to avoid the missteps of the first mission, we were at the same time actively seeking to recapture some of the public attention that had fallen away so catastrophically during the course of it. I don’t know. Call it science-theater. Call it a dramatization of ecological principles under the guiding cosmology of Gaia, in which E1, the original world where we were all born and nurtured, could be viewed as a living organism negotiating the heavy cosmic seas—“Spaceship Earth,” as Buckminster Fuller, one of our foundational thinkers, dubbed it. Everything connected, everything one. And E2, the new world, the first and only world apart from the original one, was to be our laboratory and our home, Gaia in miniature.

  Of course, it was largely up to me, as Communications Officer, to present all this to the press, TV cameras whirring, flashbulbs flashing, my fellow Terranauts at my side with their gleaming faces, far-seeing eyes and the rigid posture of Marine Corps recruits, all of us squeezed into designer jumpsuits the color of tomato juice that had been created for us by the Hollywood costumer who’d come up with Marilyn Monroe’s celebrated levitating dress, among other miracles. We stood behind our chairs at a long table set up twenty feet from E2’s entrance chamber and the airlock it framed—a visible symbol of what we were committed to.

  G.C., as our God and Creator and chairman of the board, kicked things off with a hortatory speech and a florid introduction of each of us. Once he’d had his say—orotund, that was the word that came to mind as he compared us to the gods of the Greek pantheon on the one hand and ecological grunts on the other—the baton passed to me. I looked out into the faces of the spectators—some three hundred or so, which was a decent crowd, really, since we still had just under a month to go till the main event and the elaborate closure ceremony Mission Control was planning—and felt emotional all over again. In that moment I was practically dripping the milk of human kindness, lactating like a nursing mother, and here were all my babies arrayed before me, and I loved—deeply, truly and sincerely loved—everybody seated beside me and everybody in the audience too, especially the TV cameramen. The way they crouched, hovered and shifted like some new form of terrestrial life, half-flesh, half-machine. This was my moment—our moment—and I made the most of it.

  “Greetings, earthlings,” I said, aping the robotic diction of Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still, and was rewarded by an appreciative chuckle. I paused a beat, grinning widely, before continuing. “I want to say that while my fellow Terranauts and I are most appreciative of the self-generating ecosphere you’ve got here, a beautiful place, really, none finer, we are all of us eager to step through that airlock behind me and become the second set of human beings, the second team, to inhabit an ecosphere other than this one. We’re all looking forward to setting forth on our journey into the unknown as surely as the Apollo astronauts who first set foot on the moon looked forward to theirs. The moon, however, if I might remind you, is two hundred forty thousand miles away, but the Ecosphere—E2—stands right here before you!”

  I’d expected applause at this juncture, but none came except for a faint rasp of dry palms brought limply together under the long low gaze of the sun poised on the horizon (we’d chosen sunset as the appointed hour because of the way the engorged light played magically off the Ecosphere with its struts and pinnacles and the high flaming tower of the library cum observation deck a full ninety-five feet up off the desert floor). Yet this wasn’t about applause, I reminded myself, and it wasn’t about me. It was about getting information out, about piquing interest (Four men, four women!), and I shifted now to pedagogical mode, highlighting some of the numbers that could be found in the press release people had clipped to their notebooks or rolled up in a tube for convenient stowage.

  The first number I gave them, perhaps the most significant of all, was 3.15. Three point one-five acres was the total extent of our new world, though the space extended to the stainless-steel tub of the basement underlying the entire structure and its eight-story height. The next number, by necessity an approximate one, was 3,800, the number of species, both plant and animal, seeded in the Ecosphere at its inception, two years and five months previous. Next? Twenty percent. That was the figure, again approximate, of species that had gone extinct during the Mission One closure. And yes, those species would be replaced or substituted for as we experimented with the introduction of new species altogether, one of the investigations in closed-systems ecology we were undertaking here involving what is called “species packing,” in which more species than necessary are put in place in order to leave room for extinctions and study the mechanism by which one species replaces another or, more accurately, inhabits its niche. There were more statistics, of course, as you might expect, and I could have stood there at the lectern till midnight running through them all, but I kept it short by design—the intent here was to intrigue and inspire, not put people to sleep. (How did Judy put it when she was grilling me earlier in the day on the parameters of my speech? We want to tantalize, not tranquilize.) Mindful of her admonition, and in the way of moving things along too, because I was no amateur at this, I gave them two final figures: five and two. Five biomes (rain forest, savanna, desert, ocean and marsh) and two areas devoted to the crew, the Human Habitat (our apartments) and the Intensive Agriculture Biome (our food source).

  “Before opening things up for your questions,” I said, grinning vastly, “I’d like to refine the notion of Ecotechnics for you. That is, Total Systems Management as a way of preserving the ecosystem, not only of E2 but by extension of E1 as well. What we are after, what underlies all our experiments here at E2, is synergy, synergy between the ecology of technics and the technics of ecology!” I delivered this last in the way of summing up, but I could see from the flat look of puzzlement on the upturned faces before me that no one was quite getting it (Read the brochure! I wanted to scream at them, but didn’t). The moment hung there. Finally, realizing I needed something more by way of an outro, I leaned into the microphone, brought my voice down to an electric whisper, and repeated our mantras: “Nothing in, nothing out. Four men, four women. Going where few have gone before.”

  There was the inevitable dinner afterward, but Mission Control had arranged this one (to be held at El Caballero, the only other decent, i.e., non-chain, restaurant in town) for the crew alone. No jumpsuits, no photographs. Tacos, burritos, margaritas. They wanted us to let our hair down and have this one evening, the last free evening till the days counted down to zero, for us to escape the pressure of public scrutiny and revel in our great good fortune. That is, to get shit-faced drunk, dance to the canned mariachi music and either vomit or not, as the case might be. I was feeling pretty good, I must admit, more than a little high on the vibe of the audience and the questions, mostly positive and engaged, that kept coming at us till finally G.C. had to rise magnificently from his seat to thank everyone and call an end to the proceedings (Read the brochure!).

  Music rattled through the speakers like a bus you can’t get off of and I had one cigarette to my lips and another in the ashtray, though three of my fellow Terranauts had already sidled up to me to comment negatively on the habit, which, I assured them, I was well on the way to kicking. We’d eaten hugely, starting with quesadillas and taquitos for the table, then ranging through just about everything else on the menu, enchiladas, carnitas, tacos al carbón, biftec and chicken in mole sauce, the whole washed down with pitchers of watery margaritas and bottles of Dos Equis. Judy wasn’t present—as I said, this was crew only—but still I stayed away from E. as much as possible, though of course with all my crewmates I was just as equable and sweet-faced and enraptured with every last detail of our lives and the mission as I could manage to be, and yet still, I didn’t see any percentage in pressing things at this juncture. As it turned out, the eight of us seemed to have separated unconsciously into two groups by the end of the evening, the men fixed in place at the ta
ble and squinting blearily over the remains of the meal (flan for dessert, which, to my mind, existed only as a medium in which to snub out cigarette butts) while the women swept from the bar to the table to the ladies’ room and back, their voices alternately rising in sudden explosions of laughter and falling to the breathy rasp of gossip.

  Richard and Troy, across the table from me, conferred in low voices—talking sports, I think it was. They were both fairly well gone, Richard especially, both his palms coming into play as props for his chin, which must have weighed three or four times normal. Tom Cook, our resident geek, whose job it was to repair whatever might break down once we were inside, was waving an empty shot glass and boring me upright with a seminar on the working parts of the air handler units, and I was feeling a little pressure on my bladder because I’d drained one too many beers on top of a glass or two of the punchless margaritas that might as well have been lemonade for all the effect they had on me. I made some noises to qualify my response and was just about to rise from my seat and take a restorative trip to the men’s, when I sensed a change come over the room, as if we’d all sent out feelers and they’d suddenly interconnected.

  But let me back up here a minute. A word about Tom Cook. His crew nickname was Gyro, after the Disney character, he was my age—thirty-six—and he wore his hair in a military cut. What he was interested in was technics, and that was fine, that was just what we needed, but there were times—like this one—when he could be maybe just a wee bit of a howling bore and make you wonder how in god’s name (or G.C.’s) you were going to survive two inspilling years under glass with him. His was the sort of personality they would have loved over at NASA, and there were times, not only on this night but on a whole host of others during the long months to come when I wished he was an astronaut rather than one of us and that they’d shot him way up there beyond the stratosphere and into the dimmest, coldest and eternally silent reaches of space.