The Explorer

by James Smythe

  I breathe for the first time, and take stock. I have no idea how I’m here, or why. I feel my chest as I inhale, and I know that this is real.

  I shut my eyes and try to sleep, but every time I’m nearly there – my eyes so heavy I can’t open them to see if the darkness has cleared, the filthy noise of the ship so black in my ears that I feel almost physically sick, even through the blunt ache afforded to me by the painkiller – every time I’m nearly there I start thinking of something, one solid thought that breaks me from sleep.

  This is impossible, I think. This is utterly, utterly impossible.

  3

  When I signed up – at the behest of my agent and my editor, both desperate for me to take my career (such as it was) to the next level – there hadn’t been a manned mission in ten years. In 2010 – I think – NASA (as it was then) announced that they were going to start work on Mars missions. Everybody expected colonization (or something) on the Moon, but that never came. Instead they worked on optimizing launches, ways to break gravity better. It would, they thought, save thousands of dollars in fuel costs. Then, in 2015, there was the Indian launch, and the mistakes that they made – not making it to the Moon, even, and losing their crew. They replayed that footage over and over, of the craft exploding like a firework, and we all watched it in grim fascination. After that, all the governments went back into their shells where space was concerned. We weren’t getting anywhere; it was a waste of taxpayers’ money. Everything suddenly became about the private companies, those heads of industry who established small research teams to send probes into space, to look into ways of making fuel more efficient, to develop new propulsion systems. In the 1960s, the race had been to land a man on the Moon, with all the world’s governments desperate to stake their claim. After that, the companies were racing to get a man onto Mars. They put money into places that the governments didn’t: marketing, publicity, the entertainment business side of space flight.

  And then an unmanned mission to the red planet came back with news, about the landing, the atmosphere, the temperature; about how it would be impossible to put us – I say Us, but I mean humans, our race – down there with the technology that we had. We developed everything in the wrong way. So they shifted tack. We’re launching anyway, they said. We’re just going, a test case to see how far we can get with maximum power, and how much we would need to make it to Mars when we finally did. I had just left school, was just writing, working freelance for newspapers for no money but bags worth of experience, and nobody understood it. I wrote an article about the launch during a week dedicated to it, about how it was important that we knew more. We send probes and cameras, the article said, but we never send our eyes; this way, we’ll be looking back at ourselves from further away than anybody has had the chance to before, and we’ll – hopefully – be able to understand ourselves a bit better because of it. The craft – unmanned, robotic, piloted from a crew planted on the international space station – ended up alongside Mars. They took samples and pictures and watched everything, and then they came home. A flag – featuring every flag of the world, like a blurry collage – was planted in the soil using a mechanical arm from a remote-controlled UAV, and the footage was played for weeks, the triumphant moment that we took our first planet. Then it came out – via leaked video, up on YouTube, never officially released – that the flag fell over seconds after being planted, blew away in some wind, and people started speaking out about it, talking about the lack of achievement in what happened. It wasn’t even comparable to the Moon landings, they said. In the 1960s we conquered something; here, we barely visited. Make it manned next time, or don’t make it at all: that was the resounding message.

  Only, there wasn’t the money to do anything more. The governments of the world were standing as far back as possible, refusing to offer any of their cash. Everything went completely private, and the private companies found that they didn’t have a clue how to raise the funds they actually needed to make it a fully crewed mission. So, they adapted. They hired other companies who knew how to put prices on things, and they branded. Nothing crass, was the rule: only the tasteful and practical. The food on the ship was all going to be branded; the tech we used would all be stamped with the names of the companies, and everybody would know the companies that were providing the jets, the fuel. And, more than that, the private companies funding the mission – under the umbrella of DARPA, now an independent part of the US government – only had the cash for one trip. It was the be-all and end-all. They knew that, if we weren’t going to land somewhere, we had to do something extraordinary, something that inspired. We had to do a feat that nobody had ever done before. Probes had gone millions of miles away from the Earth before, but never a person, and that was where our flight came in. They built our ship to deal with extreme temperatures, made the fuel as compressed as possible, in as great quantities as possible, and they decked us out with recording facilities, cameras, a crew that translated well to screen; likeable, attractive, for the most part. The extraordinary feat would be to hit the realms of classic science fiction films, of pulp novels and comic books, and to stretch ourselves, to travel further than anybody had ever done before. That was how it was sold: a voyage to rival Columbus, to rival the stories of Jules Verne. It would be, DARPA (in association with McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, BP, British Airways and News Corporation) announced, epic.

  It was all done cloak and dagger, more so than most things to do with space, where they were subtly announced years in advance to little fanfare. This was planned and organized and then announced on TV, and everybody watched. Smaller companies from forty-eight different countries were utilized by DARPA, which meant that the whole thing was totally international, no boundaries. It was a big deal. We would run science tests as well: to explore anomalies that we were picking up with the telescopes, stuff that we couldn’t pin down from the ground. I remember that being announced. We were only going to take readings, send reports of stuff, nothing that really required work, but stuff that we could do, as we were out there. The work couldn’t be done with probes: the things that needed to be done had to be done manually, which is where Guy came in. The research was his life and work. The DARPA people told us that they had one shot, because if they could prove that space flight was important – to humanity, to the people of the world as a race, that it inspired, brought people together, united them – the governments might be inclined to reinject funding. That’s what they wanted: a proper space programme again. They wanted the glory days back. The flight was sold and commissioned and divided between corporate partners, and every part of it was to be broadcast and tracked. They ran trailers for the announcement of the first part, where they told the world that they were building a ship, technology, a crew.

  When news went out to the various agencies that they wanted a journalist on the flight, everybody leapt at the chance. We had to audition, first – print and video media were both up for it, so they had to make sure we were all on an even footing – and then they whittled us down. When I told everybody that I was shortlisted – totally breaking the NDA, but it was my closest friends, my family – they threw a party for me, and all night people kept telling me how proud they were of me, that I was going to do something so incredible. I kept saying to Elena that it was amazing, that I was so happy.

  ‘I’m glad for you,’ was all she said.

  In the morning I hear the crew through the walls as they wake up, shout to each other, go about their business. For a second I pretend that I’ve forgotten, and I listen to them as if this is one of those old-style radio plays. The actor playing me is so good in the part, just like the real thing. If you didn’t know, you’d never guess.

  It’s their third day. On the third day we did more interviews, and sent more broadcasts home, and tried to pretend that we weren’t irritating each other. All alone, and still reeling from Arlen’s death, we were bumping heads. We all awoke irritable. I listen to myself snapping at Wanda when she says that she doesn’t w
ant to do another interview – when I remind her that it’s part of her job description, that it’s part of what she agreed to – and I listen as she reels off information for me, curt and blunt. I’d forgotten that she spoke that way because she hated the imposition, not because that’s how she was. I mean, the two were related, but she gets colder on video, with the camera pointed at her face. I ask her to do something, to enact some action for the video, so that the people at home can see what it was like. She picks up a cleaning cloth, floats to the table, scrubs at it.

  ‘None of this is real,’ she says. She’s on the verge of tears, about to break. She clings to the table as I interview her, and I listen as her voice cracks when she speaks. The me that’s talking to her snorts. We don’t get on. I don’t think that Wanda liked any of us. It was so easy, after she died, to rewrite all this. In my reality, she was an unpleasant person. Why did we call her Dogsbody? Because she was slightly irritating, because we were older, better trained, more respected, more knowledgeable. That’s why you give a person a nickname.

  This is exactly the way it happened the first time, and yet, isn’t anything like I actually remember it.

  The lining. That’s what it feels like, being inside the walls: like I’m inside the lining of something far more important. I’m pressed against the electricity, the heat, the water, the source of everything that makes the ship run. It’s dark, apart from cracks of light through the vents: I can navigate with them, though, with the sounds of the voices that come through the air conditioning channels. I can shuffle through almost the entire length of one side of the ship, room to room, until it branches for the engines, where the lining gets too thin for me to slip through. I also can’t get further than the main living quarters; the cockpit is too thin again, and not tall enough. At points – behind the beds, above the table, in the changing area next to the airlock – I can see through the vents and grates in the walls, if I press myself up against the wall and peer downwards. I can see everything, a futuristic version of the peeping Tom, the voyeur. I creep around all day, listening to every conversation, playing them through in my head, trying to remember what happened next in them – if I led, or allowed myself to be led.

  I’m watching through a vent. I can see the table as the crew eat dinner, fastened into their seats. We’ve just sent a broadcast back, led by Quinn – his jaw was made for television, Guy jokes, such a pretty little fucker – and we’re eating branded meals, burgers in the form of compacted bars, drinking from cartons with semi-permeable seals, and we’re talking about home. Wanda starts, because Guy prompts her to.

  ‘My dad died, and my mom went home, back to Korea. She might see this on TV, and then . . . I don’t know, she’ll see it and realize that I made something of myself.’

  ‘You’re doing this to prove a point?’ Quinn asks her. She nods; from my grate I can see her jawline moving, creased up and tense. ‘Because she’ll, what, see this – see you, up here – and think, Oh, she was worth something?’ He sounds almost incredulous when he says it. ‘This is a hell of a long way to go to say Fuck you to your parents.’ He sounds so angry. Emmy coughs, to break the mood, but all I can see is Wanda’s jaw, still gritted. ‘I’m not here to prove a fucking point,’ Quinn says, ‘I’m here to do something good, something worthwhile.’

  ‘So am I,’ Wanda says.

  ‘Right, right, okay.’ I hear him slurp from his drink.

  ‘So how did you get involved with this?’ That’s Guy, diverting, turning his attention to Quinn. He was so hard to pin down; furious and antagonistic one second, single-minded and driven; then a calmer, a leveller, desperate to bring everything back to zero the next. ‘You always been such a pretty-boy pilot?’ He treated every inquisition like it was a joke, like it meant nothing. Answer, don’t answer: Guy’s had his fun either way.

  ‘Started in the Indian air force, then the RAF. Dual citizenship. Then some much smaller, privately funded projects until the big boys grabbed me.’ We told these stories so many times, over and over. ‘My mother wanted me to be a pilot in wartime. She thought that there was a glory in it, because that’s how my father died. He was honoured, and I never was. When she passed away I joined a little project looking at stealth fighters, funded by the US, and got out of the military. I always hated the military.’ We didn’t say anything after that, because Arlen had loved it, and Wanda. They both lived for it, and any conversation that followed that chain would only end in tears.

  ‘So, we’re stopping tomorrow?’ I hear myself ask.

  ‘Yeah; it’s hull-check time.’ It was our first scheduled stop, and we were so excited when it happened we could barely contain ourselves.

  In training, gravity – or, the shift from not having it to it suddenly being there, solid and concrete under our feet – was spoken about only briefly.

  ‘It’ll feel odd,’ we were told, ‘that you didn’t have any weight, even when sleeping, and then suddenly you do.’ They showed us how to brace ourselves before the gravity was switched on, how to plant our feet and anticipate the drift downwards. ‘It’s not like in cartoons,’ they said. ‘There’s not a sudden plummet, you’re not going to hurt yourselves unless you fall badly. Listen to these rules, and you’ll be fine.’ We listened, or pretended that we did, and then disregarded them. They were health and safety rules, like the video you get shown on your first day of work, the warnings that never came to fruition. We would be fine.

  I sleep for the first time in days, but it’s fitful, transient. I manage to wedge myself in between two pipes, rubber-lined hoses the circumference of my arms, the bracket of one against my shoulder to stop me hitting the ceiling. It hurts like hell, but I take more of the painkillers that I found and it’s fine. They help me sleep, in fact, for those fits and bursts, twenty minutes at a time. Every part of me aches. I tell myself to stop moaning about it, because I’m annoying myself, even; but I can’t. Once an ache sets in – once it’s there, niggling away, coursing through with every movement – you can’t shake it.

  The excitement is amazing. The me that’s with the crew is giddy, filming everything, talking so quickly. I listen as I type something, my fingers thickly beating the keyboard into submission – it’s a report, part of my article, the diary that’s going up on Time Magazine’s website to chronicle what we’re doing, all first draft, no editor, my writing at its most raw – and as Emmy and Quinn laugh about something, and as Wanda and Guy prepare the airlock for the walk. When they’re done, Guy speaks to us all.

  ‘We want to be still for as short a time as possible,’ he says. He’s all business at times like this. ‘We stop, do the stuff we’ve got to do, get started again, right?’

  Emmy laughs. ‘Why can’t we stop for longer? It’s not like we’re using fuel or anything.’

  ‘There’s a schedule,’ Guy says. ‘What else do you want? I let you do that, you’ll stop every time you wish you were sitting on a fucking toilet, or have a funny tummy and want to eat food sitting down.’ He’s at that curious halfway point between anger and laughter. ‘There’s a schedule.’ The crew brace. I push myself against the wall, jamming myself as tightly as I can, my feet resting on the floor in an approximation of the pose that we were told to take. Guy asks Quinn to hit the button to bring us to full stop, which he does.

  ‘Feet don’t fail me now,’ he says, and then everything seems to slow. From the cabin I hear the gentle clatter of shoes touching the metal flooring, settling in; inside the lining I slump down. The pressure of my weight on my leg makes me wince, even through the painkillers; I keep it under control. If they heard me, they would tear the walls apart.

  ‘Shit,’ I say, forgetting about my voice. They don’t hear, but my whisper echoes across the pipes, through the lining and into the electrics. I listen as Guy and Wanda head towards the airlock and their suits, as the me that’s part of the crew goes with them, filming them as they go on their first walk. I remember standing outside the airlock, looking through the glass at them; watching as the
door was heaved open by Guy, and as Wanda took her first drift, totally unlike those that we did inside the ship; perfectly smooth and effortless. She went out of the door and disappeared, and the safety ropes went tight, and then she pulled herself back on them, towards the door. I remember filming it all, because it would be brilliant footage for the broadcast home, the footage of her freely drifting. Only four days later she died – will die – and the footage becomes eerily prescient, predictive. Part of me wants to tell her, to stop it happening. Something in my gut tells me that I shouldn’t.

  My leg hurts, so I reach down to my pocket, take another painkiller out, swallow it dry. I realize that my provisions are running low – my water bottle is nearly empty, and I have no food bars left – which means that I’ll have to make a move into the ship again, back to the storage crates and their bounty. In the cabin, Emmy and Quinn talk about Wanda, saying that she’s too high maintenance. It was something that we always moaned about.

  ‘Can’t believe that Dogsbody gets all the fun of the walks,’ Emmy says. ‘She whines all day and then gets to go out there?’

  ‘She’s with Guy,’ Quinn says, ‘it’s not like it’ll be anything resembling actual fun.’ I hear him walking around, coming closer to where I am, to where Emmy is seated at the table – actually sitting down for the first time in what felt like forever, we all said. ‘Besides, you’d rather be in here with me, right?’

  ‘Don’t,’ Emmy says. ‘Just, don’t.’

  Elena and I rowed about my taking part in the testing. This was well before they even came close to announcing that I was part of the crew. We rowed from the day that I applied, but I said that it was important to me, that it might be the most important thing that I ever did. When there were four journalists left – when we were all told that they had to be sure we were made of the right stuff, ready for the hard work that space would take on us – they took us to Florida for a week, a solid week above and beyond the day-to-day that we were doing in New York. We joked and called it space camp, but when I told Elena, she flipped. We had been living in a hotel near to JFK airport, because that’s where the hangar where we underwent most of our training was, and she had been writing reviews from there, going to res-taurants in the city and eating alone, then telling the American branch of her magazine what she thought of their bread rolls, their creamy desserts. When I got back to the hotel room and told her that I was leaving for space camp, she broke down.