by Sean Clark
“I hope this won’t be the last you’ll hear from me. I will be in contact with others in my field. There still may be hope for you.” Manases wanders around the desk and to the door, opening it and offering them through.
Chapter 11
Returning to Cecil’s cold apartment, Alika flops down on the couch. Snacks and DVDs from the night before are still strewn across the ground. “How do you feel about this new information, Cecil?” Alika tilts his head in Cecil’s direction.
“I’m exhausted.” Cecil paces the room. “Whenever I go to these people for help, I always leave feeling I have more problems than I started with. There’s no escape.” He stops, bending down to amass the piles of stuff that litter the floor.
“The first step in fixing a problem is finding out what it is. You were in the dark before. Do you have the CD? You should sleep with it, and I’ll stay here to make sure you’re okay.”
“You don’t understand. That dream there in the lab…. was almost too real.” Cecil sits down cross legged on the ground, chin rested against his arm, eyes glazed over. “When I think about the accident, it happened so fast. Then, three months later, I woke up and the pain had mostly subsided, my burns had healed. I didn’t have to think about it then. It was almost like it never happened. I mean, I still have the scars, and my vision will never be the same, but I skipped the majority of the physical suffering.
That dream… it felt as if I was going through it all again. It was worse than I could ever imagine. It’s like my mind is bringing up all the worst experiences I could imagine, opening old wounds, rubbing salt in them.”
“I understand, Cecil. But you need rest. You heard what Manasus said… rest is the best way to heal the mind. Perhaps if you allow yourself to face these fears, and purge them from your mind, you can open a path for yourself to heal.”
Cecil leans forwards. His eyes feel as if they were slowly sinking into his skull. He slips his glasses off and rubs his eyes deeply with the balls of his thumbs. His eyes readjust to the brightness of the room.
“I’ll be here for you.” Cecil looks up, taken aback by Alika’s comment.
◆◆◆
The low him of electronics had slowly begun overtook the silence of the room. Alika had turned down the blinds in the living room, bringing the sunlight down to a dull glow. Cecil had sprawled out onto the couch while Alika tossed the DVD back in the case and replaced it with the CD they had received from the doctor. As the disk started to spin up, Cecil adjusted himself atop the supple couch cushions. The drab menu of the player pops up on the TV screen, and Cecil imagines himself back inside one of the bunks on the station, blankets coarse and mattress unforgiving.
The strange white noise of the CD begins to play from the TV’s speakers, and Cecil closes his eyes. The low frequency of the recording is similar to that of the station as well. His body rests motionless. He can feel Alika kneeled on the ground beside him, breathing softly. The low tone drones in his ears, and the consciousness slowly leaves his body.
It was cold. His body felt weak, repressed, it was stifling him. Losing balance, he felt himself falling. He made contact with a hard surface, which quickly turned intangible. It sucked him in. The material was frigid. Attempting to stay afloat, he struggled. It was no use. He could not escape. Defeat sunk into his heart. He let himself go limp, free to drift.
Cecil His ears perk up. The voice is soft and comforting. Cecil. I’m here.
“Mother?” Cecil calls out. His voice disappears into the silence without a hint of echo.
I feel you.
The darkness surrounds Cecil. He feels as if his body is neither hot nor cold, like he is suspended in space. The hauntingly familiar voice reverberates loudly in his skull.
I feel you. You are here. Come to me, Cecil.
“What do you want? You’ve had your fun with me. Get out of my head.”
Cecil. Our connection still exists. I still feel you. You’re weak, far. Don’t allow this connection to wane any farther. Come back to me, Cecil.
The voice rings in Cecil’s ears. He attempts to shift his body, but he cannot latch onto anything tangible. There is no point of reference, only darkness. Humming in his ears invades his consciousness.
Cecil.
“Cecil.” The furious shaking awakes him. Alika is kneeled down next to him on the floor. “You were talking in your sleep, you kept saying mother, mother. What’s up, what did you see? What did you hear?”
Cecil props himself up on the arm rest. The room is still cold, and the daylight outside still was floating in through the blinds. “It was that familiar voice in the back of my head. The voice I heard on Mars... the one that spoke to me.”
“What does that mean? Who’s voice?” Alika asks, curious.
“I mentioned it before. I called her… it, mother. It seemed to be a part of the planet. Down there inside the planet is where I had my accident. After I woke up, I could feel some force trying to contact me. When I went back there… it finally did. I don’t understand what it was or how it communicated with me, but it had something to do with the pool of water. It’s like it resonated with the planet.”
“And nobody else noticed this voice?” Alika squints at him in the dim light.
“They tried to look into the seismographic readings to try to find some pattern. They interrogated me about how I was communicating with it. Nobody else but I could hear it. It was both a voice of reason, and a voice of insanity.”
“But you heard it in your dream just now, no? Could it have really just been the workings of your mind?” Alika stands up, pulling open the blinds. The bright noon sunlight pierces the dimness.
“I’ve considered that… that the voice was just the echoes of my mind. At one point, I wanted to believe it was real so bad that I might have lead myself into a cognitive loop… believing that its real because I kept hearing it… because I believed so. Even now. The thing that kept me going… kept me coming back to it… was that it carried me through my darkest times there, when I felt like I could do nothing. I feel as if at one point, I had figured out how it worked… but it still was strange.”
“Cecil, people have been on Mars for almost three decades now, longer even. If there was some alien life form or some other mysterious force that was there, they would have found it.”
“Perhaps, but if they did… do you think they would make that public?” Cecil climbs out of the bed to stare out the window.
“What are you saying? Well, I mean, they’re not completely transparent with everything they do.” Alika admits. “They haven’t been, for a long time. Manases said it himself… this ordeal with cryo sleep causing issues… the whole thing would just be ignored by them if the idea caught wind. Even your accident… they wouldn’t make news of that public. But alien life or something? Even if they did come and release information, I can’t say I would believe that, myself.”
“Humor me. You don’t know what they could be hiding, what we could turn up if we did some digging. Even if this seems crazy, about the voice… perhaps I’m not the only one to find something weird on the planet. You know they have that huge library there inside the space center, probably full of records that have hardly been touched. Would you care to take me there?” Cecil sits up to better face Alika.
“You know that’s the least I can do. But let’s go tomorrow, I’m exhausted.” Alika pats Cecil on the shoulder.
Chapter 12
Johnson Space Center; Cecil reads the sign as they pass the visitor’s center. Looming in the distance is the chain link fence that marks the end of public access to the grounds. Alika rolls down his window, hanging his badge outside as they drive up to the gate.
“Reason for your visit today?” The serious-looking guard peers down into the car window, studying Alika and Cecil in the passenger’s seat. Cecil attempts to flash him a weak smile.
“Checking out the library.” Alika responds in his most innocent, pleasant tone he could muster. The guard motions back to th
e booth, and the gate slides open smoothly, waving them through.
The buildings of the space center block out most of the horizon from view. In the distance is the hangar where the less up-to-date spacecraft remain stationed, used mostly for spare parts. Anything older than those models were already completely disassembled, left out to dry, or vainly put on display at the visitor’s center.
The lab building, their destination, is closer to the entrance. The building seems much less intimidating than the towering facades of the others. Walking through the front doors reveals a barely welcoming hallway, stretching off to various stairways and doors to who knows where. Following the cold, shiny tiles and framed prints of various planetary scenes along the walls, they find their way to the empty visitor’s desk. Studying the area, the humble black signs mounted to the wall display the layout of the building.
The bottom floor contains one of the crew mess halls. “I guess scientists can subsist on more than just coffee.” Alika quips. Cecil ignores him, studying the next sign up which reads library; second and third floors.
“I remember this place.” Cecil notes. “I visited here once before, right after being enlisted. Well, I remember mostly the shelves upon shelves of patent drawings and technical manuals listing various machinery I would have never been able to imagine. One blueprint I managed to stumble upon was the turbine that I had to service, blind, up there on Mars with a bunch of other guys.”
“You’re kidding.” Alika looks over to him in amazement.
“The machine was frozen up from sitting in our storage bay for probably months. They probably have more built by now, too. Hopefully they are doing good without me…”
“I get it, you were the know-it-all.” Alika says sarcastically. “Now, you don’t want to be here all day, do you?”
Cecil purses his lips, suddenly, serious. “I’ll be here as long as it takes. You don’t have to stick around.”
“You don’t need to exhaust yourself on a wild goose chase. What do you expect to find?” Alika starts heading towards the winding concrete stairs leading up the wall. Cecil follows.
“Well, you said it yourself that down here you never hear anything about what goes on up there. There’s almost nothing. If people could only know a fraction of what goes on up there… I know personally that people give more than one-hundred percent every day, exhausting themselves. The average person down here couldn’t care less. Do you think if someone was hurt, even killed, they would even give the slightest reportage of that to the public? Something like that can happen at any moment in space. It happened to me.”
Reaching the second floor, Alika pushes open the swinging doors. The smell of musty books and old leather hits them. The air is silent. Cecil follows the walls of book cases as they make their way to a table. “I remember one of the required books we had to read back when I enlisted in the program.” Cecil reminisces. “‘The Dangers of Space.’ That thing is decades old, but the opening of that book always has stuck with me, because it still very much applies:
‘There are many things that can go wrong in space. In fact, this book would be shorter if I listed the things that wouldn’t go wrong. Since space is a vacuum, you would assume that there’s nothing out there that can hurt you. On the contrary, it opens up an infinite universe of things that can and will hurt you.
Earth is the sole place in the universe we know of that can naturally support our particular type of lifeform. Yet, there are forces of nature that can still harm us. Weather, volcanoes, earthquakes. The ocean is deeper than the tallest mountain and would be untraversable by even the most fortuitous of men. On Earth, the number of people who have lived and died in the entirety of history outnumbers the number of people living right now. Yet, the Earth is still infinitely safer than space. The Earth is our caretaker, keeping us safe from the dangers that exist outside our atmosphere.
In order to be prepared for space, you must expect the unexpected. If something can go wrong, it will. You have to know how to fix it, because if you hesitate and expect someone else will be able to fix it, it will already be too late…’” Cecil’s scripted-sounding monologue trails off. He looks at Alika with a smirk. “After that, it gets very dry though.”
“Well done.” Alika nods his head emphatically. “My grandfather told me about how they used to televise everything about the space race all those decades ago. He told me how one of the old-model space shuttles, the big white ones, burned up in our atmosphere in a giant fireball. The Columbia. All seven crew members died.”
“Back then NASA was in the public eye… everyone was in it for the knowledge, and they did so on a relatively more manageable budget. In the last decades, I imagine they’ve had to spend more and more money to keep up, the make sure that their endeavors go to plan. They probably don’t tell anyone anything, because then the public can only believe that everything is going A-Okay. Tell me, does anybody hear about problems, accidents, anymore? In particular… mine?” Cecil points at his face.
“No. Not a thing.” Alika avoids his gaze. Cecil and Alika look at each other from across the table. Apart from the few others shuffling around the library, it is now silent.
“What do you suppose you’ll find here?” Alika shifts his eyes around the room, still posed in the same position. The sections in the room had been poorly marked. The bottom floor was mostly technical manuals, copies from as far back as the 1960s. The contents were hardly more than works of interest. Computers were littered around the room to allow access to the same materials, digitized and put into 3D modeling programs so people could examine the antique spacecraft and their inner workings.
“I suppose… we’ll just look for whatever.” Cecil and Alika get up and pace around the room for a bit, examining spines and yellowing labels shoved into ring binders and bound folders. Feeling fed up, Cecil motions to Alika he is going to take the stairs up to the upper floor.
The second level is made up of textbooks and history books, both from inside and outside the program. It contains everything anyone would need to know, especially if they didn’t know what they needed. Many of these books were never digitized and put on the internet, nor the intranet of the compound.
Cecil surveys the level. It is labyrinthian, divided into smaller areas by towering bookshelves in the middle of the floor. Entire cases were dedicated to the science behind jet propulsion. Cecil examines some of the peculiar titles. Necessities of a Space Suit. The Unseen Secrets of the Solar System. The Soviet Space Race. The Rise of the Chinese Space Program. The Grand Age of NASA.
A flickering light in the back catches Cecil’s attention. The carpet on the floor looks like it is not as old and trodden on as the other parts of the library. The odd smell is more distinct, fresh as if the books hadn’t had time to age and mold. A hard cover catches his eye, decorated in a familiar image, the red landscape of Mars. Pulling it off the shelf, he flips it over to the cover. “The Brief History of Humans on Mars.” He reads under his breath.
The tables in the area are empty, and any hint of others on this level are few and far away. Taking the book, he places it down on the nearest table, and goes back the shelves. The contents of the shelf are made up of nothing but books about Mars.
Cecil examines each of the spines in much detail. Going over them, he slowly gathers an armful before depositing them on the table. Alika appears from behind a series of shelves. “Ah, Cecil. You’ve found the Mars section on your own I guess. I went and found a librarian to ask if they had such a thing. You were faster than me, though.” He walks to the desk and begins shifting the books around. “Are you going to try and go through all of these?”
Cecil returns with another couple books, adding them to the pile. “I remember some of these. Every night during my training, back in my dorm I would read books about Mars, about the ships that went there and back, about the technology and machinery they were developing for use there. I read about the possible dangers, what they did in the past, how people were ‘investing’ in t
he planet. Do you know how many of those authors actually went to Mars?”
“Probably none of them.” Alika says plainly, looking up from the books newly added by Cecil.
“I would say the same. Everything changes when you get there. Everything that you had taken months to learn suddenly means nothing.
When I got out of Cryo, I knew immediately I was in a different world. I was surrounded by strangers, but that wasn’t even the beginning. I could feel it in the air, in the way my body felt. This was not Earth. I was weak and disoriented from months of being in the freezer, but something about knowing I had arrived was invigorating. Even though my muscles had lost some mass, the gravity is not as strong, as you know. I got back on my feet like that. I was evaluated as being healthy, and was sent to get orientated with the others who arrived.
The station doesn’t really have many windows, for simplicity’s sake. However, there was a big hangar and airlock that looked out onto the Martian landscape. During the day, the sky is just a dull muddy brown. It isn’t anything special. However, you get the feeling you’re just absolutely isolated. There is nobody else on the planet aside from those inside the station, and only other place to find civilization is millions of miles away otherwise.
After the wonderment passed, it felt as if my body was refusing to work properly. Food didn’t sit right in my stomach. I had indigestion. My head felt light, and my body kind of moved in slow motion. The first night I tried to go to sleep, I couldn’t. I was exhausted, but I just couldn’t. It wasn’t a sudden feeling of homesickness, or a feeling of being lost, or just the other random thoughts in my head keeping me awake. My body didn’t feel right. The covers didn’t lay down in the right way either. My head didn’t feel like it wanted to make contact with the pillow.
