by Samuel Best
“Chapter Eight,” he mumbled. “Realizing the New Me.”
This should be good, he thought, settling deeper into his seat.
The plane hit a small pocket of turbulence and the walls shook slightly. Empty glasses clinked together on a drink cart in the rear section. Carol had suggested Noah hold on to his martini, just in case. He didn’t drink. Alcohol seemed to have the opposite effect on him that it had on most people. It made him feel anxious and sick to his stomach. His brain became a clouded mess even after one light cocktail.
Oddly, he never regretted his abstinence. He still threw one hell of a party, and of course booze was always present. He didn’t feel like he was missing anything without it, so he listened to his body and avoided it. Noah was struggling to adopt that policy with more aspects of his life, especially his business. He was now so successful that he could afford to follow his gut more than his financial planners.
It seemed to be paying off with the mission to Titan. Four out of five of his closest advisers had warned him not to go. Regardless of the long-term possibilities, they saw the mission as a financial black hole from which Noah would not be able to escape once he launched the rocket.
He could not tell his advisors about the object, of course. There were so few people who knew, and it wasn’t as if he could squeeze it into one of the company’s projected earnings charts without alerting the world to its existence.
Noah wasn’t even sure there would be any monetary gain as far as the object was concerned. He felt like there would be – he felt it in his gut. And so, he had taken a leap and continued to fund Explorer I.
He pushed those thoughts from his mind as he lifted his book and began to read.
“Mr. Bell?” one of his assistants, Trevor, asked from behind.
Noah lowered his book slowly. “Yes?”
“I just received a call from the plant manager in Illinois.”
“Chicago?”
“Freeport,” Trevor replied.
Industrial venting systems, thought Noah.
“And?” he prompted.
“There’s been another accident.”
Noah closed his book and set it on the empty drink table next to his chair.
“How bad?” he asked.
“A worker’s hands were caught in one of the aluminum cutters. He’s expected to lose everything up to both of his elbows.”
Noah frowned and shook his head. It was the third major accident in as many months at that factory. They coincided with the major equipment overhaul. Some of the older machines had been updated, but most had been scrapped and replaced with brand new models built by a company just outside of Los Angeles. Apparently, they had sold Diamond Aerospace several trucks’ worth of faulty equipment. And now his employees were paying the price.
“Shut it down,” said Noah.
“The machine, sir?” asked Trevor.
“The factory. I want every piece of new equipment loaded onto cargo trucks and sent back to Bulowski’s factory in Los Angeles. Call our lawyers in California and have them meet me there after I’m finished in Dubai. Pay the workers their normal wages during the next overhaul.”
Trevor cleared his throat. “Sir, I already had the financial advisors run the numbers for shutting down the Freeport plant. We would be operating at a loss of one-point-seven million per day until operations were up and running again, in addition to new equipment costs.”
“You had them run the numbers,” Noah repeated.
“Yes, sir.”
“And what do you think we should do, Trevor?”
“Sir?”
“What would you do if you were in my shoes?”
He thought about it for a moment. “I would keep the factory running and settle the inevitable lawsuit out of court. Long-term profit will outweigh any potential lawsuits.”
“I see. Keeping your eye on the bottom line at all times. What’s his name?”
“Whose name, Mr. Bell?”
“The man who lost his hands.”
Trevor paused while he checked his notes. “Lewis Carter.”
“Send him ten million dollars, in addition to a promise that he won’t ever have to worry about medical bills ever again. Shut down the Freeport plant. Send back the equipment. Contact my lawyers.”
And you’re fired, he thought. That would come later, Noah decided. After this trip to New York.
“Yes, sir,” Trevor said reluctantly as he retreated to the rear section.
Noah gazed out the window at the vast blue ocean below, lamenting that he wouldn’t have time to call on Elena Riley while he was in New York. He genuinely felt there had been a spark between them – a spark he would one day like to coax into a towering bonfire.
He looked down at his hands, and shuddered at the thought of losing them the way Lewis Carter had lost his. Some days he hated his own success. It afforded him the frequently brazen opportunity to take a risk that occasionally got other people hurt.
Yet he still took the risk, every time. He had to. He needed to keep going, to keep pushing farther. It was the only way to reach a place like Titan before anyone else. If he didn’t take the risks, someone else would, and Noah couldn’t stomach the idea of sitting out the next big phase of humanity’s history.
The microwave-sized rehydrator hummed softly while it suffused Jeff’s beef cubes with enough moisture to be technically qualified as edible. There was a block of mashed potatoes in the packet as well, but no green vegetables. Those remained in the vacuum-sealed pouch in the latched cabinet above the rehydrator, along with enough other meal pouches to get the crew to Titan. Food for the return journey was stowed in the six-meter-long cargo hold behind the crew module. Radiation shielding lined the cargo hold – enough to deflect the small amount of residual gamma ejecta from the antimatter drive that wasn’t funneled into the ship’s wake by the cone-shaped engine-wash shield on the tail-end of Explorer.
The dining area and kitchen were in the narrowest sectional ring of the centrifuge, just after the crew quarters. The kitchen was a small cubby between two section walls, with barely more than half a meter on one side to slip past. Besides the food rehydrator, there was a water station for filling plastic bottles and a supply cabinet for moist towelettes and disposable plates. No oven. No microwave. All of the food was pre-cooked for the journey and had to be kept at ambient temperature for the duration, which meant it was always cold.
The crew were going to be helping themselves to the perishables first: the meat and potatoes, so to speak. They expected the meals to become less appetizing as the mission progressed.
Jeff chose to defer the veggies until his dinner – partly because he could, and partly because their consistency favored packing foam. The mashed potatoes were barely better. What they lacked in flavor, they made up for in structural integrity: they never lost their boxy, pre-packaged shape, even with the three-quarters Earth’s gravity generated by the spinning centrifuge.
Resilient to the end, those spuds, Jeff thought.
The rehydrator beeped and he removed his food packet. He emptied the contents onto a square disposable plate and plucked a square, reusable fork from the utensil pouch stuck to the side of the rehydrator.
He looked down at the literal square meal he’d just prepared. Every meal aboard Explorer I was a little too symmetrical for his taste. It lacked the ordered chaos of an organically-prepared dish – a meal with just enough of the haphazard, characteristically human element that proved you made it naturally, with your own hands.
The lessened gravity slowed his walk as he followed the wall of the centrifuge – or the floor, as it became when the cylindrical component was spinning.
It helped for Jeff to think of the crew module centrifuge as a series of sectional rings aligned from the vessel’s nose to its tail. Each ring was separated from the others by a low wall. The first ring held the crew quarters – four claustrophobic bunks tucked head-to-foot against the forward centrifuge wall. Each bunk had a small reading lig
ht and a privacy screen. They were all empty at the moment.
The remaining floor space in the first sectional ring was dedicated to a hygiene compartment, which was more or less the size of a cramped phone booth with a drip shower, a ream of moist towelettes, and a mirror.
The next sectional ring contained the kitchen. Along the curved floor of the centrifuge next to the kitchen cubby was a small, bolted-down table. Four undersized, bolted-down metal seats, like insufficient barstools, surrounded it. Gabriel occupied one of them. Dark circles hung under his eyes and he looked about ten seconds away from falling asleep sitting up. He sipped from a packet of apple juice as Jeff walked over.
At three-quarters of Earth’s gravity, walking in the centrifuge added a slight bounce to his step. The sensation was reminiscent of being just barely weighted enough to walk on the ocean floor, but without the water resisting any movements.
“Eventually we’ll be eating insulation painted to look like a pork loin,” Gabriel said as Jeff sat down next to him.
His empty plate was secured to the table by one of the four elastic loops on its surface. He took one last sip of his apple juice and let the packet fall from his lips. It dropped more slowly than it would have on Earth. Instead of catching it, he batted it up toward the central pillar which ran through the core of the centrifuge.
The packet slowed at the peak of its arc, as if it were preparing to drop back down. Instead, it crossed the gravitational boundary near the pillar and hung there, spinning in place.
Gabriel watched it while Jeff chewed his beef cubes, wishing for all the world that the folks in the nutritional department at Diamond Aerospace had dumped more beef flavor into the cooking vat.
“Ming still up front with Riley?” Jeff asked between chews.
Gabriel nodded. “Prepping for a microburn.”
“Another one? We just burned this morning.”
“Order came through while you had your head stuck in the wall.”
Jeff had just finished maintenance checks on the oxygen filters lining a cylindrical, closet-sized tube in the wall at the back of the crew module, just past the centrifuge. It was the last crew-accessible area inside Explorer I without going EVA. The tube was aligned with the central pillar, and there was no gravity within. Part of Jeff’s job was to float in that tube for three hours every other morning while he checked the oxygen filters and dependent systems.
“How’s that lima bean coming along?” Jeff asked.
Gabriel grinned tiredly. “For now, it’s just a seed in the soil. But it’s a strong seed. The problem up here will be the root system in such a narrow pot.”
“Lucky it has you,” said Jeff. He took a bite of mashed potatoes and instantly regretted it. “I didn’t think the root system was something you had to worry about. Plants have been grown in space for decades.”
Gabriel shrugged. “No one’s ever tried it around Titan before. Gravitropism doesn’t function as a universal constant up here. The bean would be a nice present for the first crew of the orbital space station, but I’d rather not gift them something with a root system that will siphon nutrients from more necessary plants. The seeds we brought were modified to have less-invasive root structures so they could be planted closer together, in smaller pots.”
“Well, even if the root system doesn’t end up cooperating, you’re still giving them a greenhouse that produces oxygen and a replenishable food source.”
“And maybe lima beans.”
Jeff chuckled. Gabriel tucked his empty tray into a garbage pouch attached to the low wall next to the table. Later those bags would be collected and emptied into a small trash compactor. The compactor would crush the trash into half-meter cubes, which would be jettisoned toward the sun when Explorer I reached Titan.
“Well,” Gabriel said with a sigh. “I’m going to grab some shut-eye.”
“You want to wait until after the burn?”
“I could sleep through anything right now.” He wiped his fork down with a moist towelette and put it in his personal cubby within the small kitchen. “See you in a few hours.”
“See you.”
Jeff heard Gabriel brushing his teeth in the hygiene compartment. There wasn’t a whole lot of privacy on the ship, unless you happened to be alone in one of the modules. There were no real walls in the crew module, just flimsy screens on the bunks that couldn’t do anything to keep out the sound.
That’s why music was such an important part of the journey, at least for Jeff. His headphones helped to block out the others’ noise. Sometimes he even managed to successfully pretend he was by himself on Explorer, sailing the cosmos on some grand solo mission.
Then he would think about Kate, and it would become impossible to imagine anything other than the warmth of her body pressed against his. He was glad Explorer would only be gone a few days shy of a year. Before he left Earth, in the quieter moments when there hadn’t been much else to think about, Jeff worried that Kate would forget about him.
Nothing like a few hundred million kilometers between people to make them realize their true feelings, he thought.
He tucked his empty plate into the garbage pouch next to the table and wiped down his fork. Unlike Gabriel, whose shift had just ended, Jeff’s was only halfway finished. He still had a nice, long list of maintenance checks and systems analysis to work through before he could get some sleep.
A low hum filled the crew module – the microburn. Jeff felt no apparent change in velocity, just a gentle rumble in the floor of the centrifuge. A few seconds later, the floor was still again. Small retrorockets would have fired during the burn if necessary, keeping Explorer I on the proper trajectory toward Titan, but these adjustments were made automatically and would have been undetectable by the crew.
Jeff went over his work list in his mind. Checking the vehicle monitoring systems at the various stations in the next section of the centrifuge wasn’t scheduled until just before dinner, but he decided to bump it up because of the burn.
One of the good things about being so far from company headquarters, he decided, was not having numerous bosses constantly looking over his shoulder.
Frank stood right behind Kate’s chair, watching her workstation monitors while she cycled through the data feeds from Explorer I. He was an annoyingly heavy breather, and he would occasionally click a silver pen that he fondled whenever he was thinking. Each successive click was like a hammer tap on her spine, making her wince. Sometimes when she was very tired, sharp sounds gave her a massive headache.
Click.
Kate spun around in her chair to face him. “Everything’s looking good,” she said, trying to hurry him along. She glanced longingly at Rick’s empty chair, wishing he was around to run interference so she could focus.
“Mmm,” said Frank. He didn’t seem to be in any kind of a rush. “Why is that graph spiking?” he asked, pointing to the crew biometric readout on the display wall. There were four thin lines on the graph, each one like the silhouette of a unique, jagged mountain range.
“Riley’s probably exercising,” Kate said, turning back to look at the screen. “Yep, he’s on the treadmill. Gabriel’s asleep, and Ming and Jeff are wide awake. She’s in the command module and he’s near vehicle monitoring systems.”
She frowned and picked up a clipboard, studying the daily schedule.
“Jeff isn’t supposed to check vehicle systems for three more hours.”
“I’ll have a little chat with him about that when he gets back,” said Frank.
“Ha, ha,” she said flatly.
Frank let out a tired whoof of air as he sat in Rick’s seat, clearly not intent on leaving her alone anytime soon.
“How’s the secondary fuel line?”
“No change,” said Kate.
“Nothing peaking on any of the nearby sensors?”
She shook her head. “Nada. If I see it, you’ll see it.”
Frank and Noah were linked into the data stream with their cell phones. Any anoma
lies came through instantly as alerts containing a coded description of the problem.
“Just kicking the tires,” Frank said soothingly. “Making sure we don’t have a leak.” He grunted as he wheeled Rick’s chair a little closer to her. “I heard you had a visitor a couple weeks back.”
“Visitor?” she asked, momentarily confused. “Oh, you mean the creeper on my front porch. That was just some space wacko trying to get his story in the news. He sounded even more paranoid than Rick.” Her brow furrowed. “How did you know about that?”
He shrugged nonchalantly. “My daughter is dating a guy from the Sheriff’s Department. I’ve discovered it can be very beneficial to cozy up to his commanding officer.”
“You’re keeping tabs on your daughter’s boyfriend through his boss?”
“It helps to know if she’s headed in the wrong direction before she gets there.”
“Isn’t that something she should figure out on her own?” Kate asked.
“I’ll never stop worrying about her, even after she gets married. If I can soften any emotional blow that’s headed her way, I will.”
“So the commanding officer told you about my midnight visitor.”
“Correct.”
“Isn’t that private information? I didn’t sign any information release waivers.”
“We were having a simple discussion over drinks.”
She eyed him skeptically. “And it just came up.”
“He knows what I do and where I work. It was casual conversation. You know, Kate, if you ever feel unsafe, the company can have someone watch your house. I’ve spoken with Noah about it.”
“No,” she said, a little too quick and forcefully. “Thank you, Frank. I’ll be fine. I’d just like to wrap up my paperwork so I can go home and get some sleep.”
He held up his hands in concession. “Fair enough,” he said. “Just thought I’d ask.”
She shook her head as he walked away, offended that he had stuck his pointy nose so far into her personal business. Still, he was just an employer looking out for his employee, right? He was just being a little overprotective, that was all.
