Sometimes Doug considered the alternative. A cook for good food, a woman just for sex? Would this have worked in the long run? These days he could not even imagine it. He must have been really stupid back then.
He wiped his mouth with his left hand. Eating buckwheat porridge in zero gravity wasn’t exactly easy. In the beginning he often distributed the content of the spoon across his face. By now, he had mastered the method. He always had to hold the spoon vertically towards the direction of the acceleration vector. Doug wasn’t exactly a math wizard, but he knew the acceleration vector, the arrow pointing in the direction of the change in velocity, because he was a pilot. Once he realized this, eating in microgravity was no longer a problem. Neither was sex. Doug smiled to himself pensively.
“Shit!” he yelled. A stream of warm liquid hit his cheek. For one second he had not paid attention. Maria and Sebastiano were laughing.
“What are you thinking of today?” she asked, handing him a cloth napkin.
“I don’t know… Thanks.”
“It must be because of the date!” said Sebastiano, rising from his chair. “In case you forgot, a new year starts today! I’ve got a surprise for both of you.” He reached under the table and pulled up a bottle that must have been floating there for a while.
“You’ve got what?” Maria gazed at the bottle with her mouth open. Sebastiano gave it a slight push, and the bottle floated toward Maria.
“Genuine ‘Crimean Champagne.’ Read the label yourself. This wasn’t easy to get.”
“Yeah, there just aren’t enough supermarkets out here,” Doug replied.
“I acquired it back on Earth. They were christening a ship on the launch pad next to Kiska. So I went over there in my wheelchair, and no one can deny anything to a cripple,” he said, pointing at his legs.
“You are the greatest,” Doug said.
“You could have enjoyed the bottle all on your own,” Maria said. “And you still can do so, if you want to.”
“Out of the question,” Sebastiano replied. “I wouldn’t keep a bottle for over two years and then drink it myself. You do that with friends, and as we have almost reached the halfway mark, today is the perfect opportunity.”
“Fine,” Maria said. Doug saw such sincere joy on her face, it almost made him cry. Maria could be happy in a way that he envied.
“But how do you open a bottle of bubbly in zero gravity?” Sebastiano asked.
“You are the cook, my friend,” Doug replied.
“A cook isn’t a waiter.”
“What are you worried about?” Maria asked. “We’ve got perfectly normal air pressure in here. If we remove the cork slowly, so the pressure in the bottle gradually decreases, everything should be fine.”
“And how do you know this?”
“In The Man on the Moon they once had a bottle of wheat beer.”
“Wasn’t that the series taking place at a moon base?” Doug asked.
“Yeah, with the tall blond guy in the main role, the one who always made such funny faces.”
“And the short black guy who joked about it?”
“You are making fun of me. That’s not nice,” Maria said, pouting.
“You are right. To make up for it, I will offer myself as a test subject for Operation Crimean Champagne. If something goes wrong, you can laugh about me.”
“Me, too?”
“Yes, you too, Sebastiano.”
The Italian nodded. “Well, then get started. Or should I explain first how to work the cork?”
“No, thanks.” Doug grabbed the bottle and pulled it toward him. Then he sat down in his chair. If the cork shot out under high pressure, he wanted to spare himself the embarrassment of being launched in the opposite direction. But Maria was probably right. Lately, producers of TV series have been researching their facts well, Doug thought. He looked for the wire he had to untwist from around the neck of the bottle. He found the loop, lifted it upward, and started moving it counterclockwise.
Suddenly a shrill sound interrupted him, one he had only heard once during the last two years—and then it had been a false alarm.
“Proximity alert,” the computer voice reported. “Unidentified object within radar range.”
Doug carefully let go of the champagne bottle. It floated gently inside the room.
“Computer, is there a danger for the station?”
“This cannot be assumed.”
“Why was there a general alert then?”
“My programming requires triggering an alert under certain circumstances.”
“And what kind of circumstances are those, if you please?”
“The object does not seem to be of natural origin.”
January 1, 2072, Pico del Teide, Tenerife
Maribel stopped her SEAT in front of the barrier and honked the horn. The guard stationed in the small shed seemed to be soundly asleep. In a way she felt sympathy for him. On the other hand, it was his job, and he had to do it. She too had partied late into the previous evening—no, actually, until this morning. And then her boyfriend broke up with her, of all things, because she worked too much! He in fact spent more time in the office than she did, but his place of work wasn’t even five minutes away from the apartment they shared. Hers, though, was at an altitude of 2,400 meters on Pico del Teide, the largest volcano on the island of Tenerife. What an idiot—he didn’t really deserve her. Okay, then, it was over! She would look for another apartment, as soon as she finished today’s shift.
She angrily honked again, but the barrier remained closed. Damn! She stopped the engine, activated the emergency brake, grabbed her scarf from the passenger seat, and got out. The ice-cold wind hit her right in the face. Suddenly she felt sober like never before, as if last night’s New Year’s Eve party had never happened.
She walked around the car, toward the window of the guard’s shed, and knocked hard against it. Nothing. Then she walked around the wooden structure to the door that was at the back. She pushed the door handle and the door opened. Where is this guy? To the right of her was another door, partially ajar. She cautiously opened it, and there indeed was the guard, lying on a cot, snoring loudly. Maribel wondered if she should simply push the button to open the barrier and then disappear? But if her boss found the guard in this state, the man would surely lose his job. She knew he had three children. Her boss was unfair, an asshole who never forgave anyone a single mistake.
She could not leave the man lying here like this. Maribel briskly left the wooden shed through the back door. She noticed a few piles of snow by the side of the road. There wasn’t much snow this year, but it should be sufficient for her purpose. She picked up as much snow as she could carry in her two hands. Then she walked through the open back door into the room with the cot and dumped the snow on the sleeping guard’s face. She left the room quickly, pushed the button for the barrier and ran outside. He deserves a bit of punishment!
The car was still warm, but Maribel still kept her scarf on. She started the engine, pressed the clutch down while slightly pressing down the accelerator at the same time, and then deactivated the emergency brake. Ten meters behind her there was a thousand-meter drop. She had been working here for three months, but starting the car on an incline still made her feel uneasy. Why had her father given her such an old car? While the SEAT looked cute, and she liked to drive it, an automatic transmission would have been nice, particularly as she was not allowed to use the highway at rush hour, when it was reserved for self-driving cars. The law did not make an exception for 50-year-old rattletraps.
The narrow road twisted and turned through the landscape. Maribel passed the TCS, the first reflector telescope of the observatory, which celebrated its centennial this year. To the right she recognized the French solar telescope Themis, which was also quite old. Her destination was the visitor center, located behind the brand-new OGS 2, which the European Space Agency had opened two years ago. The road in front of it had been partially dug up to make room for a few more ca
bles that had to be laid. The cables had already been installed for a while now, but the hole in the road seemed to be an eternal fixture. Maribel would not mind this so much if she didn’t have to listen to her boss griping about it all the time.
Directly adjacent to the visitors center there was a parking lot with charging stations. Even though she was prepared for the cold, she shivered when she left the car. Just an hour ago she had left La Laguna where it had been 18 degrees Celsius! She wasn’t that sensitive to cold—otherwise she would never have studied astrophysics—but she had a hard time with the wide temperature differences here.
She had to connect the old SEAT by hand to a charger, because her old car could not even do that automatically. She walked around the vehicle. Of all things! The charging station was locked. Who would lock the charging stations in an area that was enclosed and guarded? Did someone really expect people to drive up to an altitude of 2,400 meters in order to steal electricity? Maribel made a gruff face. She saw herself in the pane of the passenger window and had to laugh. It wasn’t all that bad. The battery still held enough charge for the return trip.
Inside the visitor center it was cold. Maribel opened the control panel next to the entrance and turned on the lights and heating. The first batch of visitors—an English group—would arrive in two hours. As the newest employee, it was her job to lead paying tourists through the facility. The official reason for this was, it would help her in becoming familiar with the entire observatory. In reality, these guided tours were only an annoying chore. Public relations were important, but people who were allowed to work here, one of the top three astronomy sites worldwide, did not want to explain to fat Englishmen or know-it-all Germans what an exoplanet was. No, they wanted to do research, prove themselves, and answer questions no scientist had managed to answer before.
There. She had started daydreaming again. Top research. What a joke! Maribel had struggled to earn excellent grades through five years of physics at college, all so she could apply at the best observatories in the world. And then her boss made her do what was essentially an intern’s job. Just the fact that she had to appear as the first employee at 9 a. m. on New Year’s Day and turn on the heating for the tourists was an outrage. She really should tell this to her boss, but would she do it? No.
Maribel leaned against the radiator unit integrated into the wall. Comforting warmth reached her back. She looked around the single room of the visitor center, which measured seven by seven meters. The tourists were going to see a short introductory video on the monitor screen. Then the infrared camera would be used—another museum piece, even older than her SEAT.
The camera saw the heat radiated by people—red for warm and blue for cold. The camera image appeared on the screen and would seem like a miracle to the tourists. They would wave at each other like little kids and then grimace, just because they were seeing something they had never seen before, even though it had always existed and they were constantly carrying it around—their own thermal radiation. It was really easy to get people excited. Then when you explained to them that they were blind to 99 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum, an awed silence would usually descend upon the group.
Maribel wondered how it had all started for her, her interest in the stars. Why did she stand in the cold, night after night? Why did she suffer the temper of her boss? It was probably the fault of Amy Michaels, the commander of the legendary mission to Enceladus. Maribel was 12 when she met Amy at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where her father had booked a family tour accompanied by an astronaut. Amy, as she introduced herself to them, made a deep impression on Maribel. The former commander was already a legend, but did not think herself too good to lead curious tourists through the NASA complex. She even seemed to have fun doing it. Maribel felt guilty at this memory, because she herself did not really look forward to the tourists.
Since that event she had always stated that she wanted to become an astronomer, a decision she stuck with over the years. Flying into space herself had not seemed efficient to her. Sure, some things could be only solved through personal observation. But traveling for several years inside a tin can in order to do research for a few weeks required a certain type of personality. Luckily, she had not known that she first would have to spend endless days leading visitors through the observatory before finally being allowed to do astronomical research.
Maribel sighed and turned off the light. She had already performed her second-most-important task of the day. If nothing changed, she would have to apply for another job soon. She was mad at herself, because she should have foreseen this situation: Among top researchers, four out of five being men, she as the newcomer was considered barely more than an intern. At least her boss had not yet asked her to make coffee.
She squinted while she walked across the field to the building of OGS 2. She followed a dirt track, the ground a greyish-black. Due to the constant wind, the only snow left was behind the larger volcanic rocks scattered across the area. From outside, the OGS 2 looked like a typical telescope—a white revolving dome on a round platform, which in turn sat on a square foundation. Yet the visitors were always amazed when she told them this was a kind of high-rise building, since it had twenty floors. Most were subterranean, and on level nine was the office she shared with her boss.
A voice greeted her from the loudspeaker beside the door. “Good morning, Maribel.” The surveillance camera must have recognized her from afar, even though she had pulled her scarf up to her nose.
Access to the telescope, which was worth many million euros, was strictly regulated. Maribel deliberately frowned at the camera. She entered an anteroom where she had to wait for a few seconds, and then the door opened inward. The corridor led directly to an elevator. Even two years after the opening of the facility, everything still smelled new. The elevator door opened as if by magic. There was no control panel inside the cab—the building already knew she wanted to go to the ninth floor, since she had no business going elsewhere. Therefore, the elevator automatically stopped on the ninth floor without her even mentioning her intended destination. If she were to change her mind, she would have to give an order to the building AI. So far, the elevator wasn’t able to read her mind, but this wasn’t a technical problem. It was just that laws in most countries worldwide prohibited a mental mind-machine interaction in public spaces.
The corridor down here looked just as unremarkable as the one on the ground floor. If not for the space Muzak playing in the background, one might mistake this for an office building belonging to a bank. At the end of the corridor were two doors on each side. They displayed large numbers and letters. Maribel reached 9D and almost crashed into the white surface with its artificial woodgrain pattern. Why didn’t the damned door open automatically? The building AI knew exactly where she wanted to go. Then she remembered—the doors did not open automatically if there was someone already inside the room. This was meant to protect the occupant’s privacy, and because she shared the office with her boss, this must mean he was already sitting at his desk. On New Year’s Day, shortly after 9 o’clock in the morning! Hadn’t he recently told her he was going to spend New Year’s Eve in Germany? How had he made it back to the office so quickly?
Maribel pressed the large white button next to the door. Now the building AI would ask the person in the room whether he agreed to let Ms. Maribel Pedreira enter. Why is it taking so long? Maribel took a deep breath and exhaled. She was sweating and wanted to get rid of her thick jacket. The fact that her boss was here before she was did not bode well.
Then the door finally opened. Her boss looked up and smiled at her when she entered. Not just that, he even got up and helped her take off her jacket... and hung it on a hook next to the door.
“And a very good New Year to you,” he said, this time in almost accent-free Spanish, and formally extended his hand.
“Thanks, the same to you, Mr. Zetschewitz.” She had a hard time pronouncing the German consonants. She was annoyed with hersel
f but tried to hide this with a smile.
“We agreed on using first names, Maribel,” her boss said.
“Yes, sure, Happy New Year, Dieter. How come you are...”
“Oh well, spending time with family can be pretty exhausting,” he said, interrupting her. “You probably know that. I am really glad to be back in the office. This also gives me the opportunity to talk to you about something I have wanted to mention for a while. Are you going to be busy today?”
“The tour starts at 11 o’clock.”
“Good. This won’t take that long. Do sit down, Maribel.”
She followed his request and tried not to stare too inquisitively at her boss in the meantime.
“When new hires were discussed last August I pushed very hard to get you onto my team. Have I ever mentioned this to you?”
Maribel shook her head. Did he just use the word ‘team?’ Dieter Zetschewitz of all people? The man was a brilliant scientist, but it was well known he liked to work on his own.
“No? Well, for better or worse, now you know it. I think you have settled in well, so far, haven’t you?”
“Yes, very well,” she said. So well that I really would like to do some actual work. Her mind was working now, but she remained silent.
“I am glad to hear that. Now would be the time to get you involved in some serious research.”
Maribel could not suppress a joyful smile. It certainly was about time! Her boss recently published quite a bit about the dynamics of spiral galaxies. There is still the issue of the missing...
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