The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  I’m halfway through a percentage-cycle. Dinner tonight is McRib pulled pork flavour bar, dessert a Cadbury’s chocolate cake bar. Later today I will open the cap on a bottle of water and watch it hang like a balloon in the air, and use a straw to try and suck it up as I float around in the chase.

  I look at my beard in the mirror of one of the reflective silver wraps of a meal bar; it reflects me distortedly, like it isn’t really me. I haven’t yet questioned my sanity, though I probably should; but I can see this beard that has started growing, because I haven’t shaved, because I haven’t taken the care of myself that I probably should. I’m still exactly the same. I look at the crew, one by one, to see how they’re different. Arlen’s beard hasn’t grown; they say that it happens after you die, but I’ve frozen him. I’ve frozen them all. We never change, even out here.

  27%, and an all-stop, hitting the big button in time with the tick of the fuel calculator. There’s six hours of backup life support charged in the batteries – but, again that’s based on a full complement of crew, so for me that’s well over a day, maybe even closer to two, two days of just being able to sit here, ebbing about on nothingness. I wonder if I’ll drift over that time? I log onto the computer, open my drive. This is where all my recordings of interviews are. There’s hours and hours of them, all broken down into categories: pre-launch nerves, childhood histories, moments of greatness, thoughts on the crew, thoughts on space, thoughts on each other, the interview process, how they want to be remembered, the problems with space, the problems with the craft, the concept of what it means to be a hero, the concept of what it means to be an explorer. I sort them chronologically and click on the first one. Emmy’s face fills the screen, fills the screens on the bulkheads further down the room, and her voice comes through the speaker in the ceiling, clear, perfect.

  ‘I started off working in a hospital – I did my training in Brisbane and Sydney, then I moved to UCL – and I worked in St Barnabas’ Hospital for the first three years, and then was recruited, I suppose.’ She laughs. ‘Recruited! That’s what they called it. And then there was three years of training before I was even asked if I wanted to go on a mission. We did Zero G triage tests. They have this shuttle that we went up in, hit the atmosphere, and we had to operate on it. Nothing real, only these dummies, but blood bags, so we could watch that stuff floating around. What happens if somebody, I don’t know, needs an amputation of something and we can’t get gravity stabilized? We might have to operate in Zero G, and we needed to know the intricacies of it, how to deal with it. There’s a lot more clamping involved.’

  Just hearing her speak is the best feeling I’ve had in days. On the screens she looks young, pretty, blonde, Australian; like you’d expect her to. Through the stasis bed her blue eyes are pinned open – I forgot to close them, I don’t know why, probably subconscious; I wanted her to keep looking at me, a shrink would say – and staring out in the light of the screens. It’s a trade-off: I decided to take seeing them open and dead in the stasis and alive and on the screen over not seeing them at all.

  ‘I used to work in the Sudan, doing health-check runs – there were a few people who needed surgery, torn ligaments, that sort of thing, but nothing out of the ordinary. For most people it was starvation, hunger. I saw some awful things. And then they asked me if I wanted something bigger, more challenging, more inspirational.’

  I watch the videos until I pass out. She reminds me so much of Elena, and I don’t really know why.

  Elena was of Greek lineage. She was a stereotype: passionate, annoyingly so sometimes, with this huge laugh, like a roar; all bust and arse for the first few minutes, until you get past that – usually with the laugh, the passion; a magnificent cook, which she got from her mother. We met when I was on holiday one year with some friends, and I was the only single one. I had decided that I’d spend the time there taking pictures, trying to make that part of my skill set stronger – that was my excuse, as the rest of my friends all smooshed up against each other and fed each other bits from their plates – and I met her the first day, holidaying by herself, because she really wanted a break from her old life. She ended up tagging along with our group. There’s no great whirlwind romance there: we met, we liked each other, we fell in love, we got married. Sometimes the simple stories are the best ones; the ones that don’t need explanation, that just happen, and that you accept as being The Truth, as being fate. In the movie of this, she would be played by a classic actress, beautiful but believable, dark and mysterious and loving. But, the film is about me here, now, and how I survived as long as I did on my own, in a capsule, just myself for company. Nobody has gone this far before, and people will want to know about this. They’ll queue to see it. They won’t mind who plays Elena, I don’t think.

  I’ve finished my videos of Emmy, and moved on to videos of Quinn. We – the rest of the crew – wondered if they were having a relationship. They probably were; they’re both so good-looking, like models. I still have hours and hours left of backup power, by my reckoning.

  Starting up again by pressing a button is anticlimactic, but it’s a necessity: the air is getting thin, and my headaches have gotten worse. I have stopped complaining about them – they are just there now, just something I can’t really do anything about. I never even asked Emmy if I could take a tablet for them before she died. There’s a cupboard full of medicines if I need them: I’m sure an aspirin won’t do me any harm. The cupboard carries everything, every sort of pill, like a tiny pharmacy, prepared for any eventuality. They didn’t save any of the crew. I press the button and the engines whir into place and we chug off, a steam train. There’s no concept of the speed we’re actually going right now. You can’t look out of the window and see the stars whizzing by. There are no markers or reference points; there’s just the darkness of space.

  3

  I slept heavily last night, and I ache when I wake up. I think that my sleeping patterns are fucked up, that I’m not sleeping at night, or what should be night. The not-day. I don’t actually know if it was night-time, not really. The clocks say something different to what I feel it is anyway. They’re all on Earth time, to acclimatize us, to help for when we made contact. Up here, it’s totally different. Twelve hours can feel like a lifetime. I wake up to the beeping again, 250480, little red light, and it takes me a few minutes (that I spend typing the number into the computer again, hoping that it might suddenly work out what I was asking, searching around it, yawning) to notice the fuel gauge. 25%, a full 2% lower than when I went to bed. I sit and watch the screen again, bringing up the detailed analysis. This can’t be right. Each percentage of fuel has its own smaller percentage, a mini-countdown, and it is ticking swiftly, a percentage point every couple of minutes. Something’s wrong, or more wrong, worse than it was before. We seem to be losing fuel at an accelerated rate. I don’t know why, and it hurts to be this clueless.

  In one of Emmy’s videos she spoke about the worst moment of her career: treating a patient with internal bleeding, trying to save her, but watching the blood failing to congeal even after they had done everything that they could do, closed her wounds, healed her.

  ‘Being a doctor who can’t do their job,’ she said, and then trailed off. I drag myself to the Bubble and try to see as much of the ship as I can, but there’s nothing outside that might be causing this. There’s nothing on the computer, aside from the beeping, but I can’t even tell if that’s related. Sense says that there must be something outside. An engineer would know, a pilot would know. Even Emmy would probably know. I pull myself back to the main cabin and hit the fullstop button. Two hours of life support with the engines off, it says.

  It takes me forty minutes to get out of my clothes and into one of the External Suits, check that the seals are tight, that there’s nothing wrong (because of Wanda’s mishap, and because there’s nobody here to even try to save me). They are incredibly warm, running off some sort of chemical reaction designed to help you out in deep space. I’ve h
ad a couple of microgravity tests in these things, in the hangars on Earth that they set up for us to practise, to log hours; and two actual runs (if you count the one when Quinn died, and I hovered outside, uselessly).

  ‘Make sure you alert the rest of the crew when you do one of these, check that somebody is on the end of your Safe Cable at all times, ready to pull you back in if you need it.’ That was one of the major rules of the suits. They taught us how to work on the outside of the ship, in case we needed to. ‘You won’t need to,’ they said, ‘the ship is perfectly capable of taking good care of itself. But if panelling comes loose, something like that, you may need to assist one of the pilots in repairs.’ I’d give anything to be assisting right now. I float myself down to the back of the ship and step into the Exit booth – there’s a one-man exit, like a revolving door, with depressurized seals, and a door that slides back when you hit a button. It pulls wide to reveal the nothingness. The suit I’m in is fitted with loose magnets over all the limbs, designed to help you stay in an orbit of the craft itself – the scientists were thrilled with how difficult it would be to lose yourself, to float off into space. I cling to the ship like those baby monkeys you see on nature documentaries, and pull myself along on all fours. It’s silent and cold and I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing out here. I don’t even know what I’m looking for: damage, maybe, or an open petrol cap. It’s going to be that simple, I tell myself; you’ll see it, and fix it, and that’ll be that. All the stuff under panels, the broken and bruised parts of the ship’s guts, they’ll be fine. I circle the main body of the ship, never having any sense of which way is up as I cling to the cylinder and I look up and down the panelling, at the clean lines, at the lack of scratches and scuffs, at the perfect cleanliness of the body. There’s nothing. I get back into the ship and change again, and there’s ten minutes on the clock before life support would have run out. I start us up again, and watch the numbers. They have to be wrong.

  Wherever you are, when you’re alone, you feel eyes on you. I sit at the desk and write my entries for Earth – because they could still be listening, maybe these would get there eventually – and as I type, I feel eyes on me. No matter where you are, no matter how alone you are – in the dead of space, in the middle of nowhere – it always feels like you’re being watched.

  22%. Something’s definitely awry, something mechanical. I hoped for a while that it would be the computer maybe, just fucking up. It isn’t. There’s a pattern again, but it isn’t constant: each percentage point seems to be taking less time than the one before it. That means I have three or four days left at most. A few days of flying, moving, whatever, and then, assuming that the piezoelectric batteries charge to full, another day or so of sitting around, waiting for the air to run out, or to be rescued, whatever happens first. Less than a week of my life left. People achieve a lot in a week: in a week you can cure a disease, write a song, create a child.

  Elena and I had spoken about having children. A recurring theme, running around a track passing a baton to each other wherein we make excuses. We tried, two years ago, and she lost it. The worst moments in life come when you are happiest, like the cruellest anvil of irony. We were happy and laughing and in a taxi going to a party to celebrate an award I was getting – to celebrate me! – and she cramped up. Dinner had been asparagus and steamed salmon and dauphinoise, rich and stodgy and hearty, and we were going to the party afterwards – like a real celebrity, an after-party with invites – when she grabbed the headrest of the front passenger seat and wrenched at it.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked her, because she was never one for indigestion or heartburn. (I used to say that she had a stomach made of iron. She would poke her belly – her normal, not-fat belly – and I would clarify that I meant inside, and she would mock-take it as an insult.)

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said,‘must have eaten too much.’ She sounded so convinced that I didn’t worry her while she checked herself; as she puffed to control her breathing, like they would have eventually taught her to do in antenatal classes. I didn’t notice as she reached down to grab at the cramp, to claw it out of her; I only saw what was wrong when her hand came up covered in blood, the front of her dress sodden, the still-cold cream leather of the car – an expensive one, that had its own business card, that we argued was worth it on this Special Occasion – smeared red, and she started crying. I got the driver to pull over and she lost the baby right there at the side of the Uxbridge Road, halfway between a pub and a police station. I took my jumper off and she clutched it to herself to soak up the blood, and we threw it away in the bin when we got to the hospital, an expensive jumper, just like that. I don’t even know if it was big enough that you could call it a baby. I don’t know what you’d call it. We weren’t even sure she was pregnant: we’d been trying for a couple of months, and this was the first period she had missed. It happens, we were told, sometimes; sometimes, it’s best not to get your hopes up at that early stage.

  ‘I said we shouldn’t assume it would be fine,’ I offered during the conversation, and I’m still not sure if that was me consoling or accusing. It took another year before we spoke about it again, and then we agreed to try, but another month. There were bills, or too much work, or the time that it would be born was wrong – we planned everything nine months ahead, verbally positive that nothing would go wrong. And then I got my trip, or the promise of it.

  Here are other things about Elena: she had a temper, but never shouted; she once threw a cup at me across the kitchen, and she hit me square in the forehead and caused this scar, and I mercilessly teased her about having the best throwing arm in the world, saying she should join the London Meteors, help them win some games; and only once more did she throw something at me, a book this time; and she begged me not to go, saying that the time we would be away from each other would be too much. She was right. This is too much, now. I am left with the sterility of space and so much else of nothing.

  19%, and I don’t want to go to sleep. I have been awake now for what feels like hours and hours, and my eyelids are tugging themselves shut, but I don’t want to sleep. I want to watch this tick, in case. I look outside. There’s no sun to keep me awake. I’ve switched all the lights back on: there’s nothing to see but they keep me irritated every time I start to drift off. My headache is here, a comforting neighbour come to borrow a cup of sugar, who stays to have a drink and will Never Fucking Leave. There’s a library of books, films, music, all in the computer, and none of them even slightly fascinate me: I’m in space, and I’m slowly dying.

  17%, and something hits me. What if the message – the numbers, the beep, the light – is coming from aliens? What if something is out there, watching me, hailing me, and this is how it comes through in our system, like an error message in an operating system? We don’t know what’s here. We’ve been here by video, never in person; they might have been waiting for us to get this far.

  ‘Congratulations,’ they would say, ‘you are the first species to get to us. Here are our secrets.’ I spend the next few hours looking at the blackness out of the Bubble, and there’s nothing. No ship, no aliens, no stars. Nothing.

  15%. Another day. No sun rises. I eat a coffee-flavoured protein bar for breakfast – it’s actually coffee ice-cream, but that feels more like a dessert, and I like to act socially acceptable, even when by myself, so tell myself that it’s just coffee – and run the recycling units, get some fresh water. I’ve been drinking stale for days. I should start living like a king. I have food supplies enough to feed a full contingent, including special occasions. We had the resources for a party, for when we reached the halfway point, when the ship turned itself. We were to celebrate and film it, and that would be what they showed on the news. There are a couple of bottles of champagne, hidden here for celebrations – the halfway point of the trip, probably. That was the good intention of them. They’re a good way to celebrate, I suppose. I decide to drink them, to eat the Roast Beef meal bars – the best meal bars, sponso
red by some celebrity chef – for as many meals as I can, then work my way down the list. The Fried Chicken and Pepperoni Pizza bars get to stay in the box, where they can forever taste like the stale crisps that they are. I am no longer rationed. The champagne is loose and crisp, the bubbles almost larger here. If there was anyone else here I would ask them if they actually were larger, if the pressure or the gravity or the speed, whatever, if it made the champagne different. I can feel my headache wilting under the alcohol. I drift up to the Bubble and stare, and feel something rising inside me, a swell. It’s like music: when you hear an orchestra warming up, tapping at their instruments, rolling their snares, cleaning their reeds, checking their tuning. I am swigging from the bottle and trying to remain totally still, pressing my hands against the side of the frame to steady myself, to focus the stars in the distance and see if I can actually watch us move. I drink as I stay there.