She gathered her strength to make a counterpoint. “I can’t imagine I will be any good for anyone on a mission like this,” she told Nathan. “I can’t focus or think about anything else.”
She looked into the monitor, but Nathan remained silent, and the wheels in his head seemed to be turning to try and talk her into the commitment.
“Mara, we’re about out of time to give you. We know you’ve been through a lot; we all have. Maybe a long trip away from all of this would be good for you. Try to see it in a positive way,” he suggested.
“We’ve postponed several launches. It’s time to begin making plans for a future,” he said. “We’ve got a top-notch doctor, Dr. Aman, who will be acting as the mission physician and psychologist. You’ll have him to consult with,” Nathan continued. “He’ll pay special attention to you and your situation. You should at least come meet him,” he told her.
Mara wouldn’t respond. Her eyes had gone down to George. Her hand held his, and she was leaning over his bed, unable to face Nathan while he waited for her answer. She knew the pressure he was under and the difficulty she was causing.
“I just don’t think I can do it, Nathan,” she said. “I can barely eat or sleep. I am not at my best. I would be a bad crewmate. I am not even a good scientist right now. I am not myself; I’m too emotional. I don’t see how I could be any good to you or the crew,” she told him.
There was nothing but silence from the monitor.
Mara felt the pressure upon her to agree to the mission she had committed to, and she knew it was causing immense issues for the entire crew and team.
“Mara, I’m trying to be sensitive, but you are the only person we can send in the time frame we have. We have postponed this mission for nearly three years with the belief you would be available. I am trying to understand, but we have waited as long as we can.” Nathan lowered his head, praying for the response that he knew he would not get.
Mara waited a tortuous minute without saying anything to him, and he seemed to know his answer with the silence. There was an uncomfortable minute.
“George, I wish you the best,” Nathan finally said. “I pray for you. And take care of yourself, Mara.” He appeared ready to end the call, but he stayed on screen, lingering.
He made a deep sigh. “I would think you should be ready to move on, Mara. Something like this could be good for you, don’t you think? Don’t you think a little adventure would be good? To get away from this?” he asked her.
Mara felt her jaw clench tight. She wouldn’t answer, then she heard the monitor turn off. Her eyes stayed on George. He was alert, but suffering the ravages of the disease to nearly their full extent now.
He looked up at Mara, and she sensed him hoping that she would change her mind. His dream was one of exploration and adventure, discovery, and science, and she could feel him bestowing that responsibility onto her.
The only presence in the room was the breathing apparatus as they looked at each other silently. The machines seemed to mock them with its whirring mechanical sounds. Hope, it seemed, had left with Nathan and the mission to Jupiter, replaced by the cold mechanics of the machines keeping George alive.
He began to say something. “Mara, you need to go,” he told her. “I want you to go. Do it for me. Please.”
She looked into his eyes. “The world was a cruel place to do this to a person, to her, to their lives,” she thought. She still hadn’t accepted that it was happening. She had clung to the minor victories, while the war that was raging in his body was being lost.
“I’m the one that talked you into this. I haven’t forgotten that,” George said with a weak voice.
“You didn’t talk me into the mission,” she said.
George smiled. “I’m talking about us,” he answered.
Mara let out a breath. She continued to listen for George, but the machines churned in the background, creating the only noise in the room.
“You wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for me,” he told her. “I asked you to change your life for me, and it’s not fair that you to have to be here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, George,” she told him. “As if this is your fault.”
George seemed at peace on the bed. He looked up at her with caring eyes. “There is something I need to ask you,” he said. “I want you to go back to what you were doing. You wanted to focus on your career… so go do it. Go into space, with all the limitless things to discover there. I know It will be good for you. I want you to call Nathan and tell him you are going.”
Mara felt her eyes swell while George spoke. The thought of leaving him was impossible to imagine. She had no idea how she could leave in just a couple of months while he was still sick. She would never forgive herself.
“Mara, listen to me,” he said, interrupting her thoughts. “You are going. Something good will come of it. We’ve been trying so hard to make me better that we forgot that you will need to get better too. Trust me,” he said. George was struggling with his voice, weak and raspy, but he seemed more determined than ever to say this to her.
She stared into his eyes, and he focused his gaze upon her. He was too weak to speak, but his eyes were saying what he couldn’t. He wanted her to go on the mission. Without saying a word he told her he was not backing down. Emotions were shared through strained expressions. Conversations were had without words. Mara realized a profound desire to give in to him. It was clear this would be his last wish; and she would not be able to deny him.
The evening had wound to an end and George had gone asleep, and Mara punched the buttons on the monitor and depressed the number for a call. Her hands were wet from wiping her tears away. She could taste the salt on her wetted lips. There was no need to compose herself for the call. Her fingers shook as she pressed the buttons and waited for an answer.
“Nathan,” she said into the screen, “It’s me again. I’m ready
to talk.”
SECTION 3
CHAPTER 16
Sol 15; Mission time - 21:19
“I wanted you all here to see this,” Dr. Aman said. “Despite the situation we find ourselves in we have continued with our work, and I have some extraordinary news.” He paused to shuffle his crew in front of the monitors in the tightly packed room.
“Before me is a demonstration of the potential these discoveries may have for us. There are more tests and experiments to run, but… Well, you will see in a minute.”
Dr. Aman walked to the controls and began dimming the lights. He shifted his equipment and checked more of the samples. Satisfied with the arrangement, he redirected attention toward himself. “I want to make sure the monitors are visible to each of you,” he said, flipping the lights off. The crew’s faces suddenly glowed blue with the light from the monitors.
He began flipping through slides. “This demonstration is a result of the sample taken from Mara’s specimen. I have the remainder of that sample here in the room with us, and I will perform a series of tests to check the validity of these results. But you will see they are already promising. Mara, you will particularly want to see this latest test,” he told her. “Just watch.” He flipped through more graphics.
On the monitors were nerve cells, human nerve cells. Mara could see they were damaged. It was a familiar and painful image. Memories from only a few years ago resurfaced. They were unhappy memories; some she hoped to forget. She noticed the axons at the end of the nerves were frayed; damaged and unusable. She knew they would be ineffective from her experience with similar images. They reminded her of the doctor appointments, medical charts, and terrible irreversible news from her past. She felt a lump growing in her throat as she had anticipated where the doctor was going.
“Now consider these damaged nerve cells, intentionally destroyed by me with a chemical solution,” he said, looking at the monitors. “I have rendered the sensitive end of the cells,
the axon, ineffective. Now, I will expose the damaged nerve cells to the enzyme from our wonderful specimen, provided by Dr. Parrish.”
Two drops of the enzyme were placed on the microscopic slide. It was a fuchsia color, purposefully died by the doctor. The color suddenly moved across the monitors on the wall, and the room turned pink and purple as the light from the die permeated their screens. The guests faces turned pink as they stared into the monitors. The dye enveloped the damaged cells, and the image remained static and unchanged, aside from the wash of color. There was nothing else. No movement, no reaction, no response…
“I don’t see anything,” Mara commented.
“I told you to watch,” the doctor said. The room held still as the scientists did as they were told. Dr. Aman remained fixated on the monitor. “Keep watching,” he reminded them. His hand was in the air, waiting.
Then the cells, all of them, suddenly transformed. They repaired themselves to their original state, unblemished and undamaged. They had been completely repaired.
Mara gasped. She knew immediately what this discovery meant. A bolt of electricity shot through her extremities, and her eyes began to water. She wanted to discredit what she was seeing, unwilling to believe it. She took a step backward, processing the discovery and double-checking the monitors. Suddenly everything; the voyage, the danger, the risks and sacrifices she had taken — they flashed before her in a rush of emotions.
She was breathing heavy. Her emotions were overwhelming her ability to think or speak. She had to work the words out of her mouth that she wanted to say. “Julian… You said the recipe for this enzyme is… it is imprinted on the crystals… digitized? she asked.
“That’s mostly correct,” he said.
“We could send the recipe for this enzyme to Earth right now?”
“Yes,” Julian confirmed, looking down to the floor, aware of the implications it had for her.
Mara’s legs went weak, and her lips quivered. She rushed out and left the room. Only Dr. Aman tried to stop her.
“Mara,” he said as she walked briskly by. Her head was down and her hand was over her mouth. “Mara, come back,” he shouted, “this is good news!” he yelled, but she stormed to the end of the hall and slammed her door.
Dr. Aman began to follow her, but Reese stepped in his way.
When Mara arrived at her bunk she collapsed on her bed. She knew immediately what this meant. It was something she had prayed for a thousand times. But she was too late. She was too late to save him. She had traded her time to be with George as he was dying, when she could have left on the mission and found the cure to his disease.
It was an awful realization; she had missed her chance. It had been there in front of her the entire time, and she had not taken it. She hadn’t listened to George or Nathan Bergman or anybody. Her stubbornness, her determination, had worked against her. She was realizing George did not have to die… It was her resistance to accept what was happening and to move on that had worked against her, and him. It was all her fault.
The grief pounded into her chest and she willingly submitted to it. She felt the weight of her breath and the air within her. Her heart twisted out of her body. She felt not of her self, but out of her conscious being, unable to deal with the regret and guilt. This final, cruel realization had knocked her into a spiral of self-pity and hopelessness. Her world was spinning out of control. She had let him down. All the time she had spent caring for George, and she had let him down.
She turned away from his picture, unable to look at it. Her guilt pinned her to a spot upon her bed, pressed her head into her pillow, and soaked the fabric she lay on. She was on her way to a dark place. A place where she could blame herself, blame life, fate, God, or any other powers that she could direct her anger towards. She had enough anger for every one of them.
Through her window and her blurry vision, she saw the icy plains outside her room. The barren ice offered no solace and no condolences. It mocked her with indifference. She felt the cold sting of knowing a truth as blatant and obvious as the ice outside was white; she had missed the chance to save George.
She was certain she could never be happy again. Languishing in her memories, soaking herself in them and surrendering to them, they engulfed her and pulled her below the ice where she belonged. She was sinking through the dark sky above and into the haze in between, through the white ice, the ocean below, and into the deepest crevices that lay below all of them.
She was deep into her self-pity, content to be there, when there was a soft knock on the door.
“Go away!” she said, yelling at the visitor.
Another soft knock.
“Leave me alone, Dr. Aman,” she insisted. But there was nothing. No response. She expected to hear footsteps walking away. Still nothing. There was no indication the person was leaving. She heard herself crying while she listened for the person to leave.
“Mara…?” a voice said. “Can I come in?”
She realized quickly it was not Dr. Aman. Turning on her bed to look, she was surprised to see Hanson opening her door. It creaked slowly as his head showed through. His concerned face suddenly appeared around the corner, and his presence had immediately made her uncomfortable.
“This is a breach of privacy,” she thought. She turned to face him and tried to gather herself, embarrassed at her condition, and angry that he would have been let into her private quarters.
“What are you doing here?” she asked while she tried to compose herself.
“Reese sent me a message,” he said. He lifted his eyebrows and took a step into the room, and when he saw her, a concerned look crossed his face. He walked and sat uncomfortably near the foot of her bed.
Mara adjusted herself into a defensive ball, and her head rested upon her knees.
Hanson’s hands were behind him propping himself on the bed. He looked uncomfortable. He observed everything he could about her room, studied it, and as he did the tension began to subside. Mara started to feel like she was back in the ice shelter, waiting for the radiation storm to wane. She was reminded of their talk there.
He looked at her desk. Her notes and reports were scattered around on the table. He saw drawings and still frames of the structures. He noticed the picture of George. He looked at him and then at her. Then he turned to her, bowing his head in reverence, and he began to speak.
“You know, I’ve seen a lot of young men lose their lives in this line of work. They come out here looking for a better future. Some of them make it happen, and some of them… don’t,” he said, pausing for a moment. “All I can tell you is it never makes any sense, but it does get better.”
Mara listened, and she could sense a gravity in his words. He was passing his experiences, his knowledge of life and death, and loss — to her. She knew it was more than his years would indicate.
“I thought at first it was all glory and fame for you being here. News headlines and magazines. But, now I see that you are just curious. You genuinely want to learn… and share what you find. Maybe it even makes things better for people. I’ve never met anyone like that before,” he told her. “Not out here.”
Mara was capitulating inside as he spoke. Deep within she appreciated his kind words. She saw that they came from his years of experience working in a dangerous field. She managed to catch her breath while Hanson leaned back on her bed. She wanted to say something, and her lips quivered. She said the only words she could think of.
“I could have saved him,” she said, shaking, trying not to cry. “I could have gone on the mission when he asked me to, and I could have saved him. I watched him get worse and worse… and I didn’t do a thing to help him.”
Hanson listened carefully. With a heavy heart he stayed on her bed and let her finish.
It took a minute for Mara to continue. “I thought if I stayed with him, I could help him. I thought we could beat it togethe
r. I don’t know why I thought that…”
Hanson carefully considered his words. “You were there for him. He needed you,” he said, as if it were obvious. “You’re finding a way to blame yourself, but you shouldn’t.”
“No… If I had gone on the mission when he asked me to, I would have been able to save him,” she repeated.
“You don’t know that,” he said. “You don’t even know that right now.” After allowing a minute to pass he continued.
“You know, when I lost my friends in the accident, I was hard on myself for years. You can ask Johan how bad I was. I drank, did stupid things at the colony, took dumb chances. I was young and full of… anger… rage. I could have easily killed myself doing a number of stupid things,” he told her. “I didn’t give a shit about anything. And I did what you are doing right now. I ran alternate scenarios in my mind all the time. But mostly, I blamed myself for what happened.”
“I would think to myself… What if I’d stayed where I was? What if it was me who led the group into the cave? I asked myself if I would have had time to call them on the comms… and why I didn’t even try? I blamed myself about every way possible, but there are a million things that could have happened differently.”
“Then one day I realized — you can’t keep wondering how things could have been, and you can’t blame yourself for things you have no control over. When I realized that, I decided I had to make things better. I had to make myself better, and I knew my friends wouldn’t have wanted anything else for me.
“I got my shit together for them. I cleaned myself up and I started working towards getting my own rig. It became my way to honor them. Johan helped keep me in line too, I’m telling you…” he said with a laugh. “He was more like a father than a boss. More like a father than my real one on Earth.”
Mara listened quietly. She was wondering if what he had been through was anything like she had experienced. She spent a minute trying to imagine herself being able to move on like he had. She wasn’t sure it was even possible. She had been in love with George. “It was a lot different than losing friends,” she thought. She spent some time thinking about what Hanson had said. Then she caught herself looking at her photo of George.
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