by James Smythe
Quinn marches back into the ship, throws his tool – the manual version of the tool that Guy hurled into the darkness, which is now probably a satellite, far out and orbiting something somewhere – and he shouts at nobody in particular. I remember being out there with him, struggling to open the holes, looking at the damage, not having a clue what to do. Or, rather, he knew what it should have looked like, but it didn’t, because Guy had made it so. In the ship, I watch as Quinn opens the comms app again.
‘We can try emergency frequencies,’ he says, ‘they should be monitoring them, so they’ll pick those up.’
‘We stay here?’ Emmy asks him from her vantage point in the cockpit.
‘We don’t move a fucking muscle.’ I can’t see the screen that says how much oxygen we’ve got left, but I remember that we were moving when Quinn died, so I know it can’t be long, because he’s on his penultimate day. As Guy died, so too comes the tragedy of Quinn’s impending death, because this is a constant and I can’t change it.
Quinn spends the rest of the day trying the emergency band, but there’s no answer there either. We don’t even have static on this system: if you don’t make contact it’s just silent, totally black. There are no frequencies to shift between, no manual toggle, no choice. There’s Ground Control and then there’s emergency, and there’s a button toggle for each. I can’t tell Quinn that it’s all in vain, whichever one he chooses, but as I watch him press alternating buttons and repeat the same message over and over – ‘Come in, Ground Control, anybody, this is the Ishiguro’ – I think he already knows. My telling him wouldn’t actually change a thing: he would still be there, hammering at the screen, trying to get it to suddenly understand what he wants it to do. Eventually Emmy and I go to other rooms – her to the changing room, the me to the corridors, where I walk up and down – just to get away from the noise of Quinn’s tapping. From the lining I watch him as he sits in front of the screen, sitting too close, focused, intent, driven, working.
They sleep with the gravity on, no longer drifting. I wonder how long it takes for the momentum to die out here; if we’re endlessly moving, no matter what we try to do. The speed we have behind us when the engines are on, I wouldn’t be surprised, even with the slight reverse thrust given when we go to full-stop. I wonder how long it takes us to reach terminal velocity; and when you reach it, if nothing presses against you to stop it, do you ever stop? What is the resistance of space?
I have to creep, because suddenly I have footfalls. I leave my boots in the lining and tiptoe through the house, wary of waking anybody. Every single noise in the ship makes me think that somebody’s watching me: that the ghosts of those who have died are here. Guy, Wanda, Arlen: they’re peering at me as I sneak. I feel another tooth move, and I scratch at my stubble, and I ache in every single one of my ribs. The tool that Quinn threw is on the floor; I take it, latch it onto my belt. Inside the changing room, I pull on a suit, and then I head to the airlock. I shut the outer door totally silently, or as silently as I can, and I free myself from the airlock with a press of the button. I’ve tied the safety line myself: I’m in control. I drift out onto the ship and cling on, clambering around the hull. My gut burns, telling me I shouldn’t do this. I do anyway. I haven’t changed anything yet. I move to both panels that Guy opened, open them again, and I look at what he did. I can’t see anything. There are wires inside the panels, and some of them are attached, some of them cut, some of them loose. I can’t tell what he did. I push the wires to one side, try to see if there’s a picture on the underside – like underneath the hood of a car, where the oil and water are marked with graphic representations – but there’s nothing. The wires are loose, and then I push them back, and they look different. One of them is looser, as well; a pink one, thick and taut like strawberry liquorice. It hangs loose, drifting, but looks like it’s meant to be a part of something, like it has a purpose. I think about plugging it in but my gut tells me not to. It’s the strongest feeling yet, from my head, my belly, telling me to leave it as it is. I don’t know what happens if I do plug it in. I don’t think I want to know. I don’t even know which plug it was attached to, so I can’t put it back, I tell myself. Anything would be futile. I shut the panel and move to the next. Again, I don’t know what I’m looking for. I was hoping for sparks, or for scratches, or badly cut wiring. There’s nothing. Whatever Guy did, it was meant to be done, or could be easily hidden. I can’t fix anything. I head back to the airlock, and the wheezing in my belly subsides, putting me back on track.
As I stand in the changing room and put the suit back where I found it, I wonder if I’ve missed my birthday; what happens to dates, things like that, when you’re time travelling.
Quinn is first up. He hammers on the frontage of the me’s bed, calls for me to get up. No answer. He shouts at me to get up.
‘What about Emmy?’ the me asks.
‘Let her sleep,’ he says. We sit in the living room together and he asks the me if I’ve got any ideas what Guy did. ‘Anything at all?’
‘Nothing,’ the me says. ‘Sorry.’ He’s going on a walk, he says, and I remind him that he shouldn’t go by himself, but he ignores me.
‘That’s what I’ll have to do,’ he says. ‘I need you to tell me if the computer changes. All you need to do is hit return every time I tell you? Okay?’ He patches his helmet microphone into the computer headset loop, which the me puts on, and he enters the airlock. We can’t hear anything inside here. Every so often the me reacts to him, presses the single key on the computer but nothing happens. Occasionally Quinn shouts into the microphone, swears, hammers on the hull. Sometimes I think we can nearly hear it. When he comes back in he’s frowning, and he heads to the engines. He shuts the doors after him; the me sits and types at his computer, and stares idly at space, at everything around us. He doesn’t have a clue. Half an hour later, Emmy wakes up. ‘Where’s Quinn?’ she asks the me, and he tells her. She sits down near him, asks what he’s doing.
‘He wanted to find a way to turn us around. Maybe he thinks there’s something in the engines that he can do.’
‘Oh,’ she says. I watch us not talk, and I wonder what happened between us, because I don’t remember how it got like this. I just don’t remember it being this bad between us. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks the me, and he/I turns and smiles at her.
‘Fine,’ he says. He shrugs, and she looks away.
‘I should find Quinn,’ she says, and then he reappears and waves to us, down the corridor. From here, I can see that he’s acting suspiciously.
Elena never stopped asking me to pull out of the programme, even when the names of the final choices leaked to the press – nothing to do with me, or any of us, and we speculated that it was in fact a strategic thing, a calculated leak – and the press seemed firmly behind me over Terri, the other journalist. We were the last two to be picked between. Emmy, Arlen, Guy and Quinn’s places were secured, and Wanda’s, and it was just myself and Terri vying for that final place. They interviewed everybody else, asking them who they would rather have on the trip.
‘Camaraderie is of utmost importance,’ they told the crew, and asked them to answer honestly. They all told me that they picked me, even Emmy, even though we had barely spoken since our night together. She pulled me aside and said that she hoped we could move past it.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘we got on really well, and this is just stupid. We should get over it, right? It happens all the time and other people deal with it, and I would far rather spend months in a tin can with you than her. So, what do you say?’ She held out her hand for me to shake, but I hugged her instead.
‘I missed you,’ I told her, and I meant it. She folded herself into me and put her head on my chest. It was still too familiar, but I didn’t say anything.
That evening I told Elena that I was down to the last two. ‘There’s only me and this woman, and she’s not much cop.’ She acted as if she wasn’t listening, pushed her food around her plate, into her mouth
as I waited for her to reply. ‘The rest of the crew all want me to go, and they told the bosses that. Hopefully I’ll get to go,’ I said.‘Can you imagine?’ I never said it, but I hoped she’d suddenly come around, tell me that she was proud of me, that she wanted me to go. She would tell me that she understood, but that it hurt, that she would miss me, that we would pick up where we left off when I returned because I mattered to her.
‘Don’t go,’ she said, which was all she managed before she collapsed. I took her away from the table, put her on her back, checked she was okay – breathing, which she was – and then carried her to the bedroom. When she woke up she told me that I was the worst person in the world, that if I loved her I would never go. The argument began, and grew. She threw something at me – a book? – and it hit my head, next to my ear. I didn’t throw anything back. She carried on, circling the bed like I was going to pounce for her, when all I wanted was for her to calm down.
‘Don’t do this,’ I said to her.
‘This is your fault,’ she said. ‘This is the worst thing that you could ever do. You would leave me when we’re so happy? Why would you do this to us?’
Then, because I wanted to hurt her, but I had no other weapons, nothing I could use, I told her about Emmy, and about our night in the hotel.
‘This is so fucking stupid,’ Quinn says. We’re eating lunch – which makes me, now, in the lining, hungry, because I’ve been so intent on watching, so intent on seeing this through, not missing a single second (in case it’s important, something that I need to pass on to a future version of me to help him complete this), and I haven’t eaten a thing in a while – and trying to work out what’s wrong with the ship. I could be the curtain drawing back, the reveal, dropping down from the vent and shouting about Guy’s misdeeds, about the rogues and vagabonds at DARPA who decided that we were arbitrary sacrifices in the name of human endeavour; but I don’t. I don’t need dreams (echoes?) to tell me that that won’t work, that I’ll be reset before I can finish my story, wildly spouting conspiracy theories to people too terrified to listen properly. Emmy asks if Guy might not have done something, and Quinn defends him, slightly.
‘He said there was a problem and he was trying to fix it,’ he says, but from here I can hear the doubt in his voice.
‘That’s what he said,’ Emmy replies. ‘Doesn’t mean it was true.’
‘What are we going to do?’ the me asks.
‘There’s other stuff we can work on,’ Quinn says, ‘but I’ll need to be writing code.’ He thinks for a second. ‘You could go out, do the stuff outside. You’ve seen the panels, right? Inside them?’
‘Yes,’ the me says, ‘once.’
‘Okay. I can tell you what to do, and you can do it, right?’ He’s all affirmation, enforcing my self-belief. My skills are up to this, he tells me with his words. You, Cormac, are capable. He stands up, heads to the computer, pulls up schematics, shows me the wires, how they should look. ‘Some of the connections seem to be severed,’ he says, ‘so they need to be reconnected, rejoined, but I don’t know which exact ones. So you go out there, try changing them around – you know how to strip a wire? Use the solder clips to attach it to another one? – and I can try running code here while you do it. You tell me every time you’ve done a different wire, I work on that code.’ He sees something in my face. ‘Don’t be nervous,’ he says. ‘You’ll be on the safety cable, I’ll get out there if you have any problems, and you won’t be out there long. Hour at most.’ He tells me to go and suit up, and I do, walking down the corridor slowly.
‘Will he be okay?’ Emmy asks, and Quinn nods. He’s gone quiet. Something’s wrong. I didn’t see this in him before; either because I missed it, or because I wasn’t here. It feels private, secretive, but I watch anyway. He follows the me, watches me dress, talks me through more of the details, and then tells me that he’ll fasten the safety cable for me. He does, and it’s secure; and then he says that he’ll work the airlock. I remember standing there, terrified at being on my own, and Quinn telling me that I would be fine, reassuring me, totally confident; then pressing the button, and then I was gone for that second. I listen now to the sealing of the airlock door, but can’t see myself sucked out, suddenly free again. I don’t need to, because I remember it like it was yesterday.
I remember feeling totally alone for those first few minutes, so alone, more alone than ever before, because there was just me and the metal and the stars. I remember thinking about what happened if I cut the cord; if I let myself off, to drift, to plough onwards on my own, a one-man satellite, a moon, a comet. There’s that story about the astronaut who wasn’t Armstrong or Aldrin; how he spent half an hour on the dark side of the Moon, away from any communications, cut off from everybody. He said he felt alone, but that it was great. You’re at one with the universe. That was what the trip was all about in the first place: achieving greatness. I could drift off and try to find God until my oxygen ran out, and then I would die, but I would be content, maybe. I remember pulling myself along the cord to the ship, moving to the navigation panels and starting the long process of unscrewing them.
In the ship, I watch as Quinn goes back to Emmy in the cabin.
‘It was Cormac,’ he says, ‘not Guy. Guy said he was out there with him, right? And Cormac denied it, said he was in the shower, but I checked the tapes, and he was outside, just like Guy said.’ We recorded everything that happened to the hull. I forgot. There was a camera on the outside of the ship, pointed behind us, recording everything, because if something physically broke, it was the easiest way of the engineers back home seeing exactly what went wrong. ‘I watched the tape, and he was there. He was out there with Guy, helping Guy, just like he said. And get this: he walked again last night, while we were asleep, and he opened panels – and why the fuck would he be opening panels? What was he doing to them? I think he’s… I think he’s sabotaged us. I can’t say for sure, but he’s got something to do with this, with our situation.’
‘Cormac wouldn’t do that,’ Emmy says. She has faith in me. It’s warranted, I suppose. ‘He wouldn’t lie like that.’
‘Don’t defend him. He’s been lying about his wife,’ Quinn says, ‘and that’s pretty big, right? He lied about that, he might be lying about everything. What’s he got to live for, now, anyway? He’s unhinged.’
‘He’s not unhinged.’
‘Oh, come on, Emmy. You know. You know him better than any of us, from the psych stuff, from being with him before.’ It stings her, you can see. I didn’t know that Quinn knew. Emmy must have told him. ‘He’s not right in the head. Why bother to lie to us? What’s the point in it?’
‘Don’t.’
‘He’s sabotaged this, him and Guy. They must have done it together. He wants… I don’t know what he wants. He wants us dead.’ His chin shakes, and he balls his hands, and Emmy keeps gasping, as if the shock hits her every few seconds, as if she can’t comprehend it all. Here, in the lining, I know how she feels. I didn’t know that any of this happened. I didn’t have a clue.
‘What do we do?’ she asks, seemingly having decided that he’s right, swayed suddenly, persuaded.
‘I don’t know,’ Quinn says, and then the me that’s on the hull, the guilty before being proven innocent, asks Quinn over the speakers what he should do.
‘The panel is open,’ he says, ‘and I can see the wires. Which one shall I join first?’
‘Start from the left,’ Quinn says. ‘Let me know when it’s done.’ He doesn’t stand by the computer; there are no tests to be run, no equations or codes to be rewritten or altered. He thinks I’ve already been out there once, that I already know what I’m doing. He’s just buying himself time to think, time to work out how to deal with me. I already know that he won’t get the chance.
I watch as they pace, as they discuss it. Emmy favours tying me up, leaving me in the storeroom – ‘Nobody goes in there,’ she says, and I stifle a laugh at that – but Quinn keeps his cards to his chest. I know wha
t he’s thinking before he says it, and when it’s out there, he can’t take it back.
‘We could just shut the airlock,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’ Emmy asks, but she knows exactly what he means. If she pretends that she doesn’t, if she plays dumb, then she can act as if the thought has never crossed her mind. The idea was all Quinn’s, she can say, to herself, or to whatever tribunal she might still hope they get to face when they’re rescued.
‘We shut the outer door. It’ll sever the safety cord.’ He doesn’t look at her as he says it. She doesn’t look at him as she processes it.
‘He’ll die,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
‘You think we should kill him? You think he deserves that? He’s not a murderer.’
‘Yes, he is. He’s tried to stop us getting home, Emmy. We’ll die if we don’t get home. We’ll drift and drift, and we’ll die, because we’ll run out of food or oxygen, and that’ll be it. Besides,’ he says, ‘maybe he was the one who tampered with Wanda’s suit.’ It’s founded on nothing, because that was an accident, but it’s enough. A line can be drawn between all my actions, my guilt proven. Outside the ship, the me has completed his second-to-last connection. He tells Quinn, and Quinn tells him that it hasn’t worked. ‘Keep trying,’ he says.
‘Okay,’ my voice says. ‘Last one now. I’ll tell you when it’s done.’
‘We’ve only got a couple of minutes,’ Quinn says. ‘I’m going to do it.’ He stands up, walks down the corridor towards the airlock. Emmy runs after him, begging him to stop, even though I can’t tell if she means it in her voice, not really.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘stop.’ I shake. I shake, and I ache, and my gut is tired and hungry and hurting, and my head hurts, but this didn’t happen. I didn’t die out there. I came back in and Quinn was dead. Emmy’s going to kill him. She’s going to kill him, for me. To save me. I follow them down the corridor towards the airlock, not worrying how much noise I make, because they’re lost already, stuck in their own world of murder and tears and the speculative insanity of Cormac Easton.
