The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ I say, meaning it; wanting to reassure her, and myself.

  ‘You should go back to bed,’ she tells me, wanting me to leave her alone. ‘Big day tomorrow. Aren’t you going to get to walk?’ I had forgotten that: I was going to get a chance to go out there, after she was finished with the diagnostic checks. I’d forgotten that, when she died, one of the things I felt was disappointment, selfish disappointment. ‘Goodnight,’ I say, and I push backwards, away from her, down towards the cabin. When she’s not looking I duck into one of the fuel rooms and wait until she gets up and leaves, sliding the door shut behind her, going back to her bed. The me she thought I was is already there; the me that she actually spoke to rushes back to the hole in the wall, opens it up, gets inside. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness now, and there’s no chance of me sleeping. I take another pain pill and move to the changing room, and watch the suits to make sure that nothing can possibly happen to them.

  The crew wake up at the same time, because there’s an alarm been set. Guy tells everybody to brace, which they do, and then he presses the button, and the ship stops moving as fast as it was, begins to rely solely on momentum – which, we were told in training, could take us a long way in space. When there’s nothing pushing you backwards, nothing to force you to stop, you can keep going forward, a car with no brakes barrelling down a hill. Gravity falls, and I find myself steady. I’m doing less exercise than I was first time around, and this is harder, much harder, because my legs aren’t feeling nearly as strong, and whatever I did to my leg before, it’s not what it was, even with the painkillers, and even though it’s not as bad as I remember it being. The crew gather around and greet home, and everybody grins and smiles and updates them, lets them know that we’re happy and fine, that everything is going to plan. When they’re gone it’s back to business, and Wanda shakes slightly at the side, testing her legs, almost, as she leans against the table.

  ‘Wanda, you’re up,’ Guy says after a few minutes. She doesn’t say anything, but leaves the cabin. I scurry along inside the walls to follow her: she goes to the bathroom first, washes her hands and face, splashes water onto her cheeks, rubs them. (That was something that Guy recommended to us during training. ‘It’s a survival mechanism,’ he told us, when we asked him why he did it – this was in the final stages of training, when we were taken up in a modified jet to the stratosphere. ‘Humans have got this thing built into them, where water, on their faces, wakes them up, kicks adrenalin in. It’s to stop us from drowning, something that we’ve evolved to do.’ He always splashed the water, he said, because it helped him to think clearly.) From there she strips to her underwear, a vest and pants, and then walks to the changing room and pulls her suit on. It’s the same suit that I checked last night, checked and found to be fine. She takes her time, following all the protocols, and then, when it’s pulled up and fastened, takes a helmet down, puts it on, locks it in place. Guy comes in, checks it for her. ‘You ready?’ he asks, and she nods. He tests her oxygen, that the seal is okay, and then puts his hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re feeling better?’ he asks, and she nods.

  ‘Much,’ she says, but I can barely hear it through the helmet. He takes the safety cable, clips it to her back, and the proxy cable, in case of failure.

  ‘Good girl. See you in a few.’ Guy backs out of the room, heaves the door closed and instigates the airlock process. He waves to her through the windows, like a little salute. She doesn’t return the salute: she suddenly flashes a glint of something sharp and metal, and jabs it into the seal between her suit and her helmet, which is only a thin rubber thing, and the door behind her opens, and she plunges backwards, like she’s falling from a diving board. She doesn’t squirm or wriggle; it’s graceful, peaceful, almost. Guy doesn’t scream – the rest of the crew don’t hear anything – but his face falls, and he realizes what she’s done. His decision flashes over his face, and he decides to keep what happened a secret. He watches what I can’t, because I can’t see out of the ship, but I remember what she looked like when she came back; burst, swollen. None of us knew that Guy saw it when it happened; he didn’t say a word.

  I wait and listen as everything plays out like it did before: Guy tells the crew that something’s wrong, that he’s bringing Wanda back – and he calls her Wanda, not Dogsbody, even though she can’t possibly hear him use the name that he first birthed for her – and Emmy rushes down to her, tearing off her helmet as soon as the airlock finishes its cycle and we could get past the door. She feels for a pulse but there’s nothing, so she pumps at her chest as Quinn rushes to get the bumpers, but then she calls to him, tells him to stop, that Wanda’s gone, that there’s no chance. We all stop and bow our heads, because she’s the second to go, and because it’s a tragedy, and because we’re all wondering what this means for us, as a trip, as individuals. Guy steps onto whatever it was that Wanda was holding, and as soon as he gets the chance, he grabs it from the floor and slips it into his pocket.

  ‘We need to move her,’ Emmy says, so we do, myself and Quinn and Guy, like pallbearers, shuffling down the corridor with her, trying to not drop her or spill any of the blood that’s pooled around in the folds of her suit. We put her body on the table and Emmy stands at her feet and sighs. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she says. ‘She should maybe have an autopsy, to check what happened.’

  ‘It was a seal,’ Guy says.‘Something must have gone wrong, or not been checked properly. This is what happens when there’s a leak in the suit; this is how you die.’

  ‘Put her in her bed,’ Quinn says. ‘I’ll get a connection to Ground Control, see what they say.’ He looks at all of us, in turn. ‘This is too much now, right?’ Myself and Guy move Wanda’s body again, after Emmy has used tissue to soak up the blood from the suit, wiped it from her neck and face. It’s still around her eyes, and we put her in the bed and seal it as fast as we can, put her in stasis.

  ‘This uses energy,’ Guy says, meekly. He’s not complaining; just stating a fact. We listen as Quinn establishes his link, and then wipe down the table as he leaps through the security protocols. When he’s finished we’re all seated and waiting to be told to come home, but Guy knows what they’ll say.

  ‘The mission is too important,’ Guy says. Emmy fights, Quinn fights, I stay out of it. ‘We’ve come so far,’ he says. ‘And this is important.’ From the lining, now, I don’t believe him. ‘Wanda shouldn’t have died like this,’ he says, ‘but the mission prevails.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Quinn says, then tells Ground Control we’ll stay where we are and wait for an official response. He severs the connection and nobody says anything.

  Emmy says that she needs some air – which isn’t literal – so she goes to the back of the ship, towards the storerooms. Quinn follows her, and Guy snorts.

  ‘They’re fucking,’ he says to the me that’s in the cabin with him, ‘I’m sure of it.’ I watch as I ignore him, because I’m not sure that I want to know. ‘Can I have two minutes with her? I want to say goodbye.’ I nod, pick up the camera from the fixtures on the desk and leave. I remember: I went to the airlock and filmed it, silently, suddenly some sort of auteur, thinking that a poignant shot of the room – cold, empty, sparse in every single way apart from the hoses and safety cords lying bundled on the floor – might make a good part of the story of this trip. Now, here, I watch Guy. He stands in front of Wanda’s bed, making a fist, gritting his teeth. I worry that he’s going to punch the glass, but he doesn’t. He shakes it, and he stares at her. He tries to breathe but finds it hard; instead, he makes these small gasps, quick draws of breath. He swears quietly, under his breath, and he shakes, and he holds the door of Wanda’s bed. His hand creeps down towards the catch, but he doesn’t open it. He isn’t crying. He isn’t furious. He just stares at her shut eyes and scowls.

  The signal that we’re being hailed crackles to life and we assemble in the cabin.

  ‘You’re moving onwards,’ Ground Control say. ‘Miss Kha
n – Wanda – will be honoured with a full state funeral upon your return. For now, please continue with your mission.’ It’s not a conversation; it’s an order. Guy moves over, presses the button, and none of the rest of the crew look at him as we drift upwards, and the ship starts moving again.

  I got the telephone call telling me that I had been selected for the final stage of the selection process – selected to be selected – one night at home, just after Christmas. We had the family with us, because Elena’s parents were back in Greece and we couldn’t afford to go and see them, so her sister stayed at ours and we invited my mother along (and it would be her last, but we didn’t know that then), along with a few of the cousins I had who lived in London but never saw. I cooked a goose, because none of us actually liked turkey, and my mum and Elena split the vegetables between them, each on a half of the hob, each with their own knives and chopping boards.

  ‘My girls,’ I called them as I rushed around doing the meat, mixing the stuffing, ladling spoons of gravy juice over the skin to make it crackle and crisp and pop itself open. Neither of them laughed, because they didn’t get on that well – my mother was a classic case of the matriarch, and Elena liked attention far more than my mother was willing to pour upon her, so – but we tried, and Christmas was happy. We had eaten, and then we watched television, and then we slept. It was the next morning, sometime that it was still dark outside, that the phone rang. We didn’t have one in the bedroom so I had to run downstairs, because Elena’s sister was sleeping in the office, and I took the call from the DARPA people there in the hallway, standing in my underpants.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Easton,’ they said. ‘We’re thrilled to be able to tell you…’ It didn’t kick in immediately; I went back to bed, lay next to Elena, draped my arm across her and rocked her gently, hoping that she’d wake up and not realize that I had done it; and then I drifted off again, only a bit, but it was her getting out of bed hours later that dragged me back.

  ‘Did you sleep okay?’ she asked, because she could see something in my face, I suppose.

  ‘I got in,’ I said.

  ‘In?’ She thought that I was making a joke, a vulgar joke, because that’s what I did with her; that’s what she expected of me.

  ‘To the space thing. I’ve got a shot at being on the team.’ She acted happy for me, hugged me, told me that she was proud of me, and we went downstairs, where my mother had already made breakfast. (‘So that I couldn’t get around to it,’ Elena told me later, ‘because that’s her proving a point, that’s she’s still in charge. Oh my gosh, I hate it when she does that.’)

  We didn’t say anything until we were all sitting around, and then I said, ‘You’re all going to have to wish me luck, I think.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ my mother asked, immediately suspicious.

  ‘He’s going into space,’ Elena said, jumping the gun. She put her hand on my arm, squeezed it as if she was proud, and everybody around the table cooed. None of them knew anything about the training, about the process – it had been ten months in the making, ten months of me getting fewer bylines, doing less small stories because of the time spent working on application forms and proof of concept documents, ten months where I’d been lying to people slightly, telling them that I was working on one big story when the story hadn’t even begun yet, not really. They all asked me what I could tell them: where I was going, when I was going, why didn’t the public know about it yet, and I told them that it was being announced that day, that the details were things that even I wasn’t sure of yet. That afternoon we sat in the living room and watched the television as they announced it live on the news, a press conference first thing in the morning in New York on Boxing Day, beamed live around the world. They didn’t say our names – there would be another press conference in the New Year to discuss the crew, they said, who were about to start a rigorous training process – but they said that the trip was privately funded, a worldwide initiative, the finest minds from every country working on something together, working to further ourselves as a race of people, one solitary race. We were going to travel further into space than man had ever travelled, and that was the point. There’s so much that can be seen with telescopes, with probes and satellites, much as sailors used to be able to stand on shorelines and watch horizons disappear, seeing landmasses so far away that they were barely blips, and they would wonder what they were, then travel to them. In the living room, Elena’s sister asked me to explain it to her.

  ‘They used to just go, and see what was out there, just because they could. They had a ship, they knew that there was something there, so they went. And it inspired people; it made others do the same, and that led to countries being discovered, populated. After that we went into the seas, sure, and we went to the Arctic Circle and up mountains, but after we made it to the Moon we decided that, what, that was enough? It can’t be. This is about man, and what we’ll find out there. It might be nothing, but it’s worth finding out, surely?’ I didn’t tell them about the tests we were doing – that we had a scientific reason, because this was never going to be a waste of money, even if anybody objected to private money being spent on something that didn’t impact them in any negative way – because that was the part of the trip that even I didn’t understand. We were to travel outwards and then plot some map or other, something that Guy was invested in – his life’s work, he told us – and then return, and those results would finally enable humanity to map dark matter, to place it in the universe. I left that out, because it was so secondary, such a negligible thing; a discovery that would mean nothing to anybody. Our potential journey was to be an inspiration; that should have been enough.

  Elena acted as if she was proud, but she was crushed.

  ‘Do you really want to go?’ she asked that evening, as we lay in bed.

  ‘I have to,’ I told her. ‘Even if I never do anything else, this would be my stamp.’ She went to sleep straight away, facing away from me, and I got my laptop out and began to write.

  Space is meant to be what we aspire to. We are, by our very nature, a people who explore. It’s in our blood. We go back to the times before maps and we just explored whatever we could, in search of something better – better land, better food, better shelter. We follow that line to nomadic peoples, to Vikings, to the Romans, and we explore everything. We discover America, and find that it’s already been discovered; we travel the globe and we plot maps that prove there’s no edge to fall off, no horizon carved with a blunt knife. We went to the Moon to prove that we could, and we did it as soon as we were able to. We watched ourselves from up there, and we saw that we were exactly who we thought; a people overreaching, stretching ourselves. We explore, and we stretch what we’re capable of. It’s in our nature. We take steroids to push our bodies; we develop technology to enhance ourselves. With space, we tried before we were ready. The Indian mission went wrong because they weren’t prepared. They were barely past the technology of the 1970s, and they decided that it was enough to travel to the Moon faster, to stay there for longer, to orbit it, showing off before they returned. They were wrong, and they paid the price. We watched them – we, the rest of the world – and we knew that they made their mistakes. I remember talking about it in school the next day and everybody being devastated, but then we got over it. And this mission; we’re a prelude, a lead-in, a trial run. We’re those first people in their boats trying to find something that might not be there; we’re guinea pigs being sold as explorers.

  Elena stirred and asked what I was writing. I told her that it was an email, that she should go back to sleep. She did, because she had no reason to think that I would lie to her. I had never lied to her before.

  5

  What passes for a funeral for Wanda is tragic. Emmy says something, because we collectively decide that she knew her best, because she’s a woman as well; she’s the de facto best friend. With Arlen we were flooded with platitudes and well-wishes and kind memories, because he was the father figure,
the bearded joker who we all respected and looked up to. Wanda was something else, something quieter; the girl who sat at the back of class and kept to herself. When Emmy finishes her short speech – which isn’t much more than a recanting of things that Wanda had told us herself, about her family, about what she wanted to get out of the trip – she asks if any of the rest of us want to say anything. We had filmed Arlen’s eulogy, because we thought it would be nice for his family to watch; with Wanda’s we don’t bother, because we worry that it’ll seem insensitive, or like we somehow care less. Emmy looks at me pleadingly, nods at me that I should say something, but the me that’s in the cabin is clueless, doesn’t know what Wanda did or why she did it, doesn’t know the pain that she was in, how alone she was, how lost. I sympathize, I wish I could have told her: I know your pain, because I’m alone here as well. I’m just as lost, just as trapped, only I don’t have the comfort of the others to talk to; I have the lining and the darkness, and the confusion of my situation, the terrifying, bleeding confusion of where I am, how I’m here, and I know what’s going to happen as you all die, one by one, and then I’m left alone until this all ends for the second time, and I get to watch it in slow motion, from behind a curtain that nobody even realizes exists. The me doesn’t say anything, so Emmy asks again if anybody else wants to. Guy steps forward.

  ‘She died an explorer,’ he said, ‘an inspiration, right? When they ask us, on the broadcast home, to talk about what happened, we all say that she was a total fucking inspiration.’ Only Guy – and now me, as well – is in on the lie he tells; that she was actually just a terrified girl, that she was selfish; that she was burned, just like us all.

  When the time comes to speak to Ground Control, for an address that will be beamed across the globe, we discuss the second of our crewmates to die. We sit around the table, strapped in, and we bow our heads, and we explain that she was on a routine walk, one of the many scheduled walks, and something malfunctioned in her suit, could have happened to anybody anywhere anytime. We explain, one by one, that she was a wonderful girl, that everybody who knew her should be proud; that her country should be proud; that her mother, who she is survived by, and will be mourning her today and for the rest of her life, should be immeasurably proud of her daughter.