A Natural History of Hell: Stories

by Jeffrey Ford

  “ ‘One of those guys designed that thing.’

  “ ‘Will it fly?’

  “ ‘Probably,’ he said.

  “ ‘I’m just thinking of the fifty thousand,’ I told him.

  “ ‘You need to put that in perspective,’ he said. ‘A good space chimp costs at least a hundred and fifty thousand and gets about a hundred hours more training.’ He shook my hand, and as he went out the door he said over his shoulder, ‘Keep doing those push-ups.’

  “The next day I met the other two members of the crew. The musician was a guy who went by the name Owl Parson. He composed for and played the theremin. Small stature and thin limbs, he had a haircut like Moe from The Three Stooges. During our initial conversation he used the word naturally a lot, like he was an expert on everything. Eventually he asked me what I wrote and I told him about Pirsute. He shook his head and said he only read pure science fiction like Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations.’ What could I say? He could read whatever he wanted and strum the air till the cows came home; I just wanted to get paid.

  “Anyway, the painter of our trio, Tracy (she had only one name), was a nice woman—a young divorcée from Kansas. ‘I always had an artistic bent,’ she told me. She showed me some of her paintings. She was a big bony woman with a strict jaw and a sweet face. Her voice had a raspy quality to it—too much dust on the Great Plains. She stood, statuesque, in the middle of her room, holding one after another of her works for me to see. With only a couple of minor adjustments, they were all basically the same thing—a flat background of a solid color, with a bare tree forking and branching upward in straight black. That was it. The kind of thing kids do in fourth grade. Really lousy.

  “The next day we got into the onsite training. They spun me in a chair at a thousand miles an hour or something and I puked. They took us up in a big plane and made us weightless and I puked. They dropped us into a thirty-foot-deep pool in space suits and my claustrophobia kicked in. I was terrified and stood on the bottom like a statue while Parson and Tracy completed the mission of three laps back and forth across the bottom. As far as the technical stuff went, yawl and pitch, zero gravity, what all the lights and levers on the boards meant, I tried to pay attention but most of it went through me. It was clear that the ultimate mission was for us to experience space flight, four days in orbit around the Earth, and I did make an effort to listen when they told us how to use the toilet and also how to eat the brown toothpaste that passed for astronaut food.”

  “How was that stuff?” asked Breelyn.

  “It’d say on the packet something along the lines of Sunday Pot Roast Dinner at Mom’s, but it tasted like you scraped it off your shoe.”

  “Didn’t they care that you did so poorly at all their tasks?” I asked.

  “Nah,” said Werber and laughed to himself. “Everything was smooth as snot on a doorknob. They just told me, ‘We’ll get somebody to clean up the mess. You could have done a lot worse.’ ”

  “That doesn’t sound like NASA,” I said.

  “It wasn’t NASA. They just built the ship. The guys running the tests and teaching the technical stuff were on the Rocket Club’s bankroll.”

  “How did the others do?” asked Breelyn.

  “Parson was a little less hapless than me. Tracy excelled at everything and seemed to understand everything. She should have been an astronaut instead of a painter.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” said Breelyn and pointed at him with her cigarette between two fingers.

  “Let me cut to the chase,” said Werber. “The days passed. I avoided the insufferable Owl Parson and spoke to Tracy when she was free. She was usually busy, though, studying her notes and painting more of her pointless trees. In that time I conceived of an idea for a new book, describing in full the mission we were about to undergo. It was, as far as I knew, the first privately funded project to put astronauts into orbit. What a scoop. I didn’t even have to make it science fiction. I could just tell exactly what happened and make a mint. I daydreamed about that book while the technicians lectured. And then the launch day was there, and they were strapping me into my suit. I woke up, so to speak, in a cold sweat to find the nightmare was real. I was actually going into outer space. It was a shame my old man had passed, ’cause I’d have liked to rub it in.

  “The day of the launch we saw the inside of the Icarus for the first time. They waited till we were all suited up and ready to go. Somewhere there’s a photo of the three of us with those ridiculous fishbowl helmets on. After that they gave us a walk-through. Suffice it to say things were tight, and I presented a major obstruction when in the one long passageway that made up the ship’s center. The cabins were in two parts, half on one side of that main passage and half on the other. Bed and small closet on one side, and across the open expanse a work station. Both the bedroom and work station had round porthole windows. My writing desk had been set up so that when I sat at it I’d be staring into space.

  “Remember now, we were on a ladder. This was prelaunch. The ladder retracted once weightlessness set in. I was seeing everything for the first time at a weird angle. The desk, like everything else welded in place, seemed to be hanging on the wall. They told us that when we were weightless it would all make sense. Parson’s cabin was closest to the back. The only thing beyond it was the crapper. Next came my cabin and after it, Tracy’s. Farther forward there was a storage spot and then the cockpit. They told us to strap into the three seats facing the large, rectangular window. They put Tracy in the middle, so she could handle the controls. All there was to it was a lever—you pushed it forward to go and back to slow down or stop—and a steering wheel that went up and down as well as around. I’d seen more complicated technology on the rides at Coney Island.

  “While we were getting strapped into the chairs, I heard Masterson over my headset. He said, ‘Something a little special for our travelers. I will reveal it now. The red button on the console in front of Tracy fires a laser beam. What space mission would be complete without one?’ His wacky laughter crackled, echoing through my helmet, and I thought, behind him, I heard the rest of the Rocket Club applauding.

  “The last thing the technicians said to us before they left the ship was that for liftoff we didn’t have to do anything. ‘We’ll light the fuse for you,’ one of them said and the others laughed.

  “Parson yelled, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  “ ‘It’s a joke,’ said Tracy, and then we heard the door to the outside clang shut. Instant nausea and trembling. At that moment, I knew the whole thing was a bad idea. Four old codgers with their musty heads full of pulps send a rocket into outer space. I mean, what would they call this in your class? Reality meets fantasy? Something like that? It looked to me like the former was gonna blow the latter to smithereens.”

  “We’d call that the unwilling suspension of disbelief,” said Breelyn.

  “This really happened?” I asked.

  “I’m telling you,” said Werber. “How could I make this shit up? When you get home, look up Project Icarus on the Internet. There’s only two sites that have hearsay info about it. They’re only passing off rumors, but rumors of something that really happened.” Werber pushed his empty glass forward.

  Lifting it, Breelyn said, “This’ll be your third and your last. If I send you stumbling out of here and something happens to you, they’ll shut us down.”

  “Here’s a deal,” he said. “Pour me that third, and I’ll nurse it through the end of the story. If by then I’m not slurring my words too badly and you’ve enjoyed the story, you will pour me one more. What do you say?”

  Breelyn poured his drink and then slid it toward him. “We’ll see,” she said.

  “Prepare for liftoff,” he said, and we all took a drink. “When they hit the switch, it felt like the whole damn thing was blowing up. I saw a flash of
orange outside the window and then smoke. There was a thunderous rumbling, an infernal shaking, and I passed out. When I opened my eyes, all was silent. I looked over, and Tracy and Parson were gone from their chairs. Outside the window I saw stars. I unhooked my safety straps and was weightless. I drifted out of the command cabin and back down the center passage of the ship, floating like a ghost. Every now and then, I’d bump into the wall, and I learned early on to be careful how hard I pushed off.

  “I found my crewmates both back at the crapper, minus their fishbowl helmets unscrewed, taking turns puking into the urination contraption. Upon seeing them, the nausea hit me. In between her bouts, Tracy told us it was SAS, Space Adjustment Syndrome, and it would take a while to get over. I screwed off my helmet and took my turn. We stayed there for an hour straight, and then made our way to our rooms. I was just about able to get out of the space suit and put on my jumpsuit before I had to go back for another round. It was a horrible feeling, like the vertigo I once had from an ear infection, like I’d been on a gin bender for two weeks.

  “It’s hard to breathe in space. Your nose gets totally plugged. So not being able to draw a decent breath and feeling sick as a dog with the claustrophobia ever on the verge of pouncing, I was miserable. I floated into my room and sat at the writing desk. There was a pad of paper affixed to the top, and the yellow pages flapped upward. My writing implement was a pencil. It sat in a special holder that kept it continuously, automatically, sharpened. I looked up and there was Earth, like a peeping Tom in my porthole window. I nearly gasped at the sight of it, and the first notes of the theremin drifted through the rocket—creepy, liquid sound. I wrote nothing.

  “Sometime later, I’m not sure how long, Tracy floated by and said she was going to get dinner. I left my chair and followed her. Parson was right behind me. At the storage area, we divvied up the packets. I had Aunt Jo’s Chicken and Dumplings—baby shit with streaks of carrot. Parson had Paradise Split-Pea Soup with Bacon and Potato—a pale green mess he pronounced to be ‘Pond Scum.’ Tracy chose the Coconut Shrimp, and I begged her not to eat it. ‘My, it’s tasty,’ she said. Parson shook his head.

  “More trips to the crapper followed, to be sure. We got a radio message from mission control, and all gathered in the command cabin to listen in. It was, as far as I could tell, a bunch of static and mumbling. ‘All is well,’ said Tracy. That was it, then they signed off and it was the silence of outer space. Every second, I was thinking, was a second too much. I felt buried alive out there, cramped and wheezing for every breath. The Icarus was a tomb as far as I was concerned. I went to my cabin and lay down with the book I’d brought—The Butterfly Kid. It had been up for a Hugo Award.

  “When I strapped myself in and opened the book, something floated out of it. I grabbed it as it drifted overhead: a green square of paper. Then I remembered it was the fifty I’d gotten from Max. I’d put it in the book as a good-luck token for the trip. I unfolded it and looked at the face. For the first time I noticed that there was writing on it. In a very light ballpoint pen, someone had drawn a word balloon coming out of Grant’s mouth. It contained two words in Max’s handwriting: Suicide Mission.

  “Tracy found me floating in my cabin, hyperventilating. She pulled me down to her cabin and strapped me to the wall. Across from me she secured one of her paintings, a bare black tree on a jade green background, on an easel that was bolted to the cabin. She told me to stare at the painting and breathe steadily. ‘Concentrate on the life of the tree,’ she said. I did. I was in shock and barely moved, but my mind was frantic with thoughts of suffocation and a sense that the walls were about to close in.

  “The inanity of the painting actually brought me back around. Its simplicity was infectious. I eventually calmed down, and when my breathing had returned to normal, Tracy said, ‘If you get scared, just think of the painting.’ I swore to her that I wasn’t scared, and she just gave me a flat midwestern chuckle. All this time, the theremin was playing, and now that I was free of my own fear, I began to notice how annoying the instrument was, like a relentless robot cat in heat with digestion problems.

  “I wondered what Max was up to writing on that fifty. Besides my machinations about that and the yips it gave me, the second biggest problem over the next day and a half was that we were all space slobs. Man, by the second day there was all kinds of crap floating around the rocket ship. Tracy had this glass box they’d designed for her with gloves you put your hands in to work inside the enclosure. Inside, she had paint and a canvas. The thing was a disaster. The paint globbed up and went weightless, and the box was so full of bubbles of color you couldn’t see the painting. The contraption started to leak. Every now and then, a small globe of cadmium yellow or scarlet drifted past my head like a miniature errant world.

  “Other things in the slurry of atmosphere were a pair of Parson’s jockey shorts, my copy of The Butterfly Kid, empty food packets, droplets of water, scraps of paper. At lunch on the second day, while I tongued a packet of Ham and Swiss on Rye, Tracy announced that we needed to police the area. ‘You don’t want to breathe this stuff in while you’re sleeping,’ she said. Parson said, ‘You folks do it, I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.’ We decided to let the cleanup wait till after dinner.

  “Parson’s breakthrough came a little later in the day. I didn’t even notice it at first, as I’d finally gotten into writing something despite how awkward and annoying the process was in outer space. My imagination was hot on the trail of a tale about Pirsute’s young female sidekick, Molly Molly. She was down an alley, her back to the wall, and the Surrogate of Fruition had her cornered with his claws and atom-strangling ray gun, when all of a sudden this noise drew me away. It was Parson and that infernal device. He was playing one single note over and over again. I mean nonstop.

  “My head was being drilled out by that note. Eventually I unstrapped myself from my desk chair and went back to have a word with him. On the work side of his cabin, his feet in the metal shoes bolted down that grounded him to the ship, he was leaning over his electronic box and pinching the air with two fingers at the exact same place in the tone field. He had on an expression like he was passing ground glass, and droplets of sweat were being born and rolling upward off his brow. I called to him but he ignored me. I gave him a minute and then got right into his face and yelled his name. He suddenly looked up, angry, and said, ‘What do you want, Werber?’

  “ ‘How about a different note?’ I said.

  “ ‘Get out,’ he told me. ‘I’ve hit on the universal note of the universe. It’s all there.’

  “ ‘Too bad you’re not,’ I said.

  “He pinched the air again twice, achieving the exact same tone. I shoved him back out of his metal shoes, and he flew into the cabin wall, ricocheting upward. While he floated above me, I pulled the plug on the theremin. ‘From now on hum it to yourself,’ I said. He reached the opposite wall and then pushed off fast at me. We space-wrestled around his cabin, across the ceiling and walls, and wound up out in the core of the ship. On Earth I was a load and a half, but in space I was Bruce Lee. I did a flip, bounced off the wall, and kicked him right in his cold equations. He grimaced, looking back at me, as he flew down the central passage all the way to the control cabin.

  “I pushed off to go after him, and he pushed off to come back at me. We met and tussled outside Tracy’s painting area. She came out red in the face, with her arms folded, and sent us to our cabins, telling Parson to either move on with the music or turn it off, and asking me, ‘How old are you?’ Later, after dinner, I got a chance to apologize to her. We sat together in the control cabin staring out at the universe.

  “ ‘My ex-husband was always fighting,’ she said. ‘And drinking.’

  “ ‘What’d he think of your painting?’ I asked.

  “ ‘He hated me going to the night classes.’

  “ ‘Why do you always paint black t
rees?’

  “ ‘It represents the darkness in my soul growing toward the sunlight,’ she said and stared at me.

  “ ‘They’re nice trees,’ I told her.

  “She smiled, and then things happened fast, in this order—Parson stuck his head into the control cabin and said, ‘The toilet is broken.’ When the last word was out of his mouth, there was a great shuddering throughout the ship, and a siren, like noon at a firehouse, sounded in the cabin. Parson and I looked to Tracy. ‘We’ve been hit by something,’ she said. ‘Get into your space suits.’ I grappled my way back to my cabin and suited up. ‘Put your helmets on,’ called Tracy as I was screwing mine into place. In less than four minutes we were back in the control cabin, and it immediately became clear what the danger was. Fist-size rocks, like a school of fish, were all around us. Very faintly, I could hear them banging off the outside of the Icarus.

  “Parson pushed his way forward and brought his gloved hand down on the laser-beam button. We saw the red beacon flash outward. It took a few seconds to realize that the space rocks weren’t even so much as sizzling. Mr. Universal Note kept banging on the button, though. ‘Don’t you get it?’ I said to him. ‘It’s just a fucking toy.’ Tracy tapped my shoulder, and I heard her voice in my helmet say, ‘Push that blue one over your head.’ I looked up and saw a button above me I’d never noticed before. I hit it. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Abort mission,’ she said.

  “Instantly, I felt the thrust of the boosters and had to hold on. I remembered them telling us that once that button was pushed, the rocket ship would immediately return to Earth. Our sudden speed caused the rocks to hit us with more force, and the ship jerked from side to side and up and down. From what I could see ahead, we seemed to be veering out of the rubble field, and as we did the pummeling eased. From out of that growing calm, a loud screeching noise was heard, and the ride got instantly rougher. ‘We’ve lost a fin,’ said Tracy. She hailed mission control and said, ‘Mayday, Icarus is falling. I repeat, Icarus is falling. We are aborting mission, leaving orbit.’