The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  ‘Done,’ the me outside says over the speakers.

  ‘Doesn’t work,’ Quinn says. He’s standing by the console outside the airlock.

  ‘I’ll come back in, then,’ I say. ‘You should try, maybe. I don’t really know what I’m doing.’ I sound disappointed. I really wanted to help save the day. Quinn doesn’t say anything. He starts to key in his security code, and I watch for Emmy to make her move but she doesn’t. She stays totally still, shaking, crying. He looks at her.

  ‘This is the right thing to do,’ he says, not a question, an affirmation, but she nods anyway, giving him permission. It’s not her: it’s me. I’m all that’s left. And if I’m not, this will reset, and the next me will know, somehow. I kick open the wall and run, and in a second I’m in the hallway, charging into Quinn, my hundred-something pounds of frail, worn body thudding into his muscles, his brawn, and he would have been able to overpower me if I didn’t push his head with my hand, take him so completely by surprise, slam his skull against the wall so hard that it sounds like the slamming of a door.

  That’s all it takes; his skull cracks, and he slides down, collapses under my pathetic weight. Against the white panelling, he leaves a red trail, a streak down to the ground. The blood starts to puddle as Emmy screams. I look at her and she takes me in, and her face looks like she’s seen death, but she can’t comprehend it, not properly, and then I hear the me that was outside clambering into the airlock, hear the doors start to shut, their mechanics making the whole ship rumble. I have to go, I realize, so I do, back into the walls, but Emmy doesn’t see that because she’s too busy staring at the nowcorpse of Quinn on the floor, too busy screaming. I listen as the me takes his helmet off, asks her what’s wrong before he’s seen it, then sees the body and tells her that he’s sorry, asks her what happened, but he’s talking too fast and it almost all sounds like gibberish, like blabbering, so he does what he thinks he should, what he thinks is appropriate, and he puts his arms around her to console her but that only makes her scream louder, so he thinks she’s reacting to the death and he restrains her with his arms, holds her as she beats at him, tries to fight him off, her hands leaving blood prints on his suit from where she had grabbed at Quinn to check his pulse, to see if she could save him.

  ‘Shh,’ the me says to her. ‘It’ll be all right. Honestly, it’ll be all right.’

  He takes her to the main cabin, tries to get her to sit down but she won’t. She screams at him.

  ‘How did you do that?’ she asks. ‘You killed him! How did you do that?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ the me says. He is honest, genuine in his confusion. She takes it as a lie.

  ‘Get away from me,’ she says, ‘you’re a fucking murderer.’ She spits it, and I’m the villain. My face is hurt and shock. I remember thinking, She’s lost it. Quinn’s death was the end. I remember thinking, I wonder if she killed him, because that was a natural reaction, just a quick thought, and I dismissed it, because I knew she would never be capable of it.

  ‘We’ve only got an hour of life support left,’ I say, because we used so much of the battery operating the airlocks, changing the suits. ‘We have to start the engines.’ I go and clean up the blood first, from the puddles around Quinn’s head, sucking it up into a smaller liquid-hoover. I can’t imagine anything worse than blood in zero gravity, I remember thinking. Poor Quinn. I press the button for the first time that trip (and she doesn’t try to stop me, though from the lining I can see her flinch, as if she’s considering it). It’s the first time I note how much fuel is left.

  ‘57%,’ I say to her. ‘We’ll be turning around soon enough.’ She ignores me, her eyes dismayed and reddened. ‘We’ll be okay,’ I tell her.

  ‘How could you do this?’ she asks, but it’s a rhetorical question, because – then, at that point – I don’t know what it is that I’ve supposedly done. I remember even wondering if it wasn’t her that did it, that killed Quinn, or pushed him by accident, or something. Now, remembering that, I can only feel guilty for ever having doubted her.

  The me pulls Quinn’s body down the corridor, clumsily (because Emmy won’t help), his limbs hitting the walls, his leg dragging on the floor as if it’s somehow heavier than the rest of him: which it isn’t, it’s just luck that it looks that way; or a better word, chance. He puts him into his bed and does the straps up.

  ‘We should say something,’ he says, which nobody did for Guy, but he’s trying to be nice, trying to be considerate of Emmy’s feelings. She obviously cared about him. ‘Do you want to say anything?’ She doesn’t reply. He turns on the computer screen, the camera. ‘We’ll tape this, so we’ve got something to show when we get home.’ The blunt insistence that we’ll be saved, that the technology will work. Everything should have told him that this was a folly. He endeavours. ‘We should say stuff about him, like we did for the others. I’ll start, if it’s too hard.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ Emmy tells him. He looks hurt.

  ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘I’ll write something.’ He leaves her at the table, strapped in – where he did the straps himself, to keep her in one place, to let her calm down – and sits at the computer, starts to type. He opens a new file, and I remember this: he writes an update, talking sadly about the accidental death of Quinn. He leaves out any suspicion that Emmy might have been involved, because he can’t bear to imagine that she would have anything to do with it. He thinks too highly of her.

  This was my last day with any of the rest of the crew, because tomorrow he’ll sedate Emmy permanently, sealing her bed, putting her in the equivalent of a coma until they get home, because she can’t be trusted, because she’s too far gone. I’ll bet that if I read it, that last piece of writing still has something resembling hope in it. Tomorrow, that will be all but gone.

  He asks Emmy if she wants to eat, but she doesn’t, and when he lifts his own bar to his mouth she swipes at it, scratching his face. It’s not hard enough to break the skin, but it’s an attempt. She unbuckles herself, pushes off the wall towards the computer, then down the hallway. The me follows her, stuffing his meal bar into his pocket, and I mirror him as he drifts down the corridor.

  ‘Emmy,’ he says, ‘why are you doing this?’ She gets to one of the engine room and shuts the door behind her. He doesn’t try to force it open. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks again, as if her answer might suddenly change. She doesn’t say a word, so he gives up, floats outside the door and then returns to the cabin and stares at the faces of his dead crewmates.

  I always wondered if the DARPA people listened into our conversations. When we got into the training facilities, there were always faceless, personality-free rooms that we were given to stand around in, to make cups of coffee and talk about ourselves. The morning that I found out I had made the cut – over Terri, noxious Terri and her over-eager ways – was the morning that I told my future crewmates that Elena and I had argued, and that she had left me. She had taken a bag, packed it with her best clothes – the stuff she wore when she had important meetings, when she wanted to impress somebody – and left. She smashed my mobile phone, throwing it into the bath (which was empty, but a hard porcelain, and the phone screen smashed all over the plughole); she tore at my shirts when she filtered through for hers, pulling them off hangers, tearing the occasional seam; she took the car, and didn’t tell me where she was going. I got a phone call – to the house phone, which barely ever rang – telling me that she was leaving me and never coming back.

  ‘Every single thing you have done the past year tells me exactly what I need to know about you,’ she stammered, ‘what sort of man you are.’ She sounded as if she had written this down and was reading it out. I could almost hear her mother standing behind her, egging her on. We had never seen eye to eye. ‘You have proven that you’re unwilling to make this work, and have betrayed my trust in the gravest way. What’s done can’t be undone.’ I could see her mother bent over, scribbling the words onto the page. ‘When you leave our home, please don’t expect
to come back. Don’t call me.’ I could see her mother calling the lawyers, telling them what an awful person I was.

  When I got into the waiting room – that’s what we called it – I told the rest of them about what happened.

  ‘She’ll come around,’ Arlen said.

  ‘She won’t,’ Guy said. ‘Lovers never come back when they’ve gone insane. I’ve seen it happen.’ I didn’t tell them about Emmy, about that being the reason. I just said Elena couldn’t deal with the trip. It was always about the trip.

  ‘Maybe you won’t get onto the final list; then you can go back to her,’ Terri said. Two hours later they called us both into an office and delivered the news: that I had been chosen, and Terri was thanked for her time, reminded that she had signed non-disclosure agreements, and then told that she would receive her final pay cheque at the end of the month.

  ‘Congratulations, Mr Easton,’ they said to me, and then sent me back to the waiting room, where they then appeared with bottles of champagne. We cheered and clapped and were happy. That afternoon they did the announcement, a television press conference for the world. They introduced us one by one, said what we were going to be doing, and then we answered questions. Somebody from a tabloid asked us how our families felt about it, about us going. None of us really had very much to say. When the press conference was over I tried to call Elena, first on her mobile, then calling her mother’s house. There was no answer either time. I don’t know if she was watching.

  I wait until night-time, when the me goes to sleep in his bed, next to all the other bodies. Emmy is still in the engine room – I listen against the door and she’s snoring gently, asleep, passed out, probably. I sneak out, again, to the computer, grabbing food on the way, wolfing it down, stuffing it into my mouth, three or four of the bars, enough to make me feel sick even as I’m eating them. I look at that thing that the earlier version of me wrote, and it’s cloying and tacky. I delete it, and write something else, something new; part eulogy, part tribute, part statement. It’s nice. It feels like something I would do, something I would have written, at my best. It’s truthful. When I’m done I press the button to send it, and I sit back and watch as it struggles to make contact. It times out, saying that it’s been sent, but I can’t be sure. The message could end up anywhere. It could be our last words, or it could be nowhere, floating in the ether. Or it could have stayed on the hard-drive, and it’ll never be read.

  I try to sleep, but I can’t. An hour, maybe two, broken up over the night. I keep leaving the lining and looking at the reflection of myself, trying to see the real differences. I can feel another tooth loose, so I work it out, giving me mirrored gaps: both canines gone, the inverted vampire. I clean the ones I’ve got left – I forgot what it was like to have them clean – and I shower myself. The water pressure is almost so strong it hurts, burning the skin that barely coats my ribs. It washes away the sweat, though, and I realize that I barely thought about the shakes, about the tablets over the last day; watching Quinn die took all my attention.

  I can’t warn myself how I’ll be woken up, so I’m forced to watch as Emmy gets up first, unrestrained, untied, unsedated, because the me trusts her, foolishly; trusts that she’ll see sense and realize that he’s not the devil she thinks he is. She rushes to the medicine cabinet and fiddles with the lock, entering the code, then pulls the door open. (My heart skips as I watch it open, a box of treasures shining yellow light on the face of the opener.) She’s after a syringe, one of those mechanical injectors, and she finds one, her hands still fumbling, and slides the needle into a bottle of something viscous and transparent, like egg white in a bottle, and then turns to face me. She leaves the medicine drawer open and the contents start to drift upwards, but she doesn’t care, because she’s headed for my bed where the me sleeps still. She opens the door and holds onto the lip, and then waits, about to inject me, but she can’t do it. Her hand is poised, ready to strike, wavering slightly even here, even this close, but she can’t do anything with it. He wakes up and shouts something, sees her there, grabs her hand, and then she decides that she wants to do it, tenses her arm muscles and tries to jab the needle forward, aimed right at my neck. The me swings her around.

  ‘Stop it,’ he says, trying to stay calm – he’s a good man, I realize, he’s trying to do this right, and if I ever had any doubts about him I don’t right now – but Emmy is insistent. ‘I’ll sedate you, he says, and she hears it as a threat. He can’t win, whatever happens, even if he doesn’t quite know it yet, so he squeezes her wrist and takes the syringe as she drops it and it drifts, and he puts it into her arm because he’s already got a hold of it, and he presses the booster, to inject the contents and she slumps almost immediately; either it’s taken hold, or she’s given up.

  He straps her back into her bed, fastens the straps harder than before to make sure she stays where she is, and then starts collecting the loose medicines. When they go back into the drawers he doesn’t lock it, and I decide that I’m already off the wagon, that I’m already contemplating when I can get to the pills. I would stay strong, but I know that I don’t, because when I wake up next time around I’m already addicted, and my leg – I had forgotten all about my leg, which is healed, totally, has been for God knows how long – I’ll think that my leg is in pain but it’ll actually be the addiction. It’s so easy to mistake the two.

  He talks to Emmy as he straps her in.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘for everything.’ He feels guilt that he shouldn’t – as if, by even coming on this trip he’s somehow cursed them all, opened a well to God-knows-what, but he hasn’t. He apologizes, nonetheless. ‘For what happened between us, as well,’ he says, ‘and because you lost Quinn. He was a good guy.’ He means it. This Cormac bears no ill will. He sits at the computer and writes, to keep this all in check, to make sure that, when they get home, it all makes sense to Ground Control. From here, he knows, he’ll just sit tight, twiddle his thumbs. He’s got an excess of food, he’s got reading materials on the computers, he’s got company – because Emmy will calm down, she has to, and they always got on so well – and he’ll just sit it out until they start their descent, and then he’ll worry about the landing when it becomes an issue. He’s sure that, as soon as they’re back within contact radius of home they’ll be able to talk him through it. He sits in the cockpit, in the pilot’s chair – Arlen’s chair – and he looks at the buttons and wonders, for the first time, what it would be like to be a pilot, a childhood dream suddenly realized, one he didn’t even know that he had.

  When he’s done fantasizing he goes to the computer and calls up his pictures, and from here I can see him, so attached to Elena still, even after this gulf of time and space, even after everything that happened.

  The last time I spoke to Elena was the day before we left. From announcement to launch was only a period of days, a frantic week where we were paraded, hailed, the press barely given time to breathe. The world got to know us in one quick, brutal burst, on the covers of their magazines and the front pages of their newspapers. We were everywhere for that week, because DARPA said these things worked best if it was like reality TV.

  ‘People get bored,’ they said, ‘so we put you everywhere and they’ll really care. They’ll care enough to follow every tiny part of your journey. They’ll really want you to succeed.’ We did everything we needed to – all the final health checks, all the final training – but so much of it had been covered in the preceding year, in our groups. ‘We’ve made everything so simple that you’ll barely need to think,’ DARPA said. ‘Press the button, get there, come back. Simple as that.’ Guy was the wild card, because he had been working on the project with them for years – his entire adult life, as it turned out – and because (though we didn’t know it until that last day, when something was in one of the papers about it) there was never a chance that he wasn’t coming on the trip with whichever other crewmates made the cut. That final week was insane, and we barely breathed. I kept trying to ca
ll Elena every day, when I woke up, but she never answered. Then, one morning, the hotel woke me with a call in the middle of the night.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Cormac,’ she said, ‘it’s me.’ She told me that she was in Greece with her mother and her uncle, and that they weren’t sure when they were coming back.

  ‘Can you get work there?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure if I want to,’ she said.

  ‘So you’re never coming back?’

  ‘Are you?’ she asked, and I said that I was, of course I was. It was one trip – the trip of a lifetime, the best opportunity I’d ever have – and then I would be home, in London, and I’d work there for the rest of my life.

  ‘I miss you,’ I said.

  ‘I miss you too,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘No, you’re not.’ She hung up the phone, and I realized that I was apologizing for Emmy, for having slept with her, breaking Elena’s trust; and she thought I was apologizing for the job, for being a part of the space trip. I tried to find out the number she was calling from, call her back, but it was blocked, so I sat by the phone for the rest of the night and didn’t sleep.

  In the morning, Guy joked that I looked so tired I must have been up all night.

  ‘Nervous?’ he asked, and I said that I wasn’t, and he laughed, and called me a liar.

  It has been hours, and he does nothing, and Emmy stays asleep. I don’t know how long it is because I can’t see a clock, but it’s hours and hours, and he’s already starting to look bored. You’ve got weeks to go, I think. We’ve got weeks to go.