The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Part of my problem is that I’ve been awake since three, too worked up to sleep. It had been one of those nights where you lie there in bed willing yourself into unconsciousness but every time you drift off the twisted sick catastrophe of what’s happening to you in the here and now surges up like a rogue wave and snaps you back to attention. That’s me. That’s my problem. I’m beat. Exhausted. Not to mention sick at heart. At five, as prearranged, I’d walked over to Dawn’s apartment in Residence 1 from my own place in Residence 2, and I’d been irritated to see shapes drifting and melding in the pre-dawn shadows of the campus, people already gathering on the grounds as if this was the Fourth of July and they were staking out places along the parade route.

  Let me tell you, Dawn was in a state. She hadn’t slept either, I could see that the minute she jerked open the door. She was in her robe and slippers, fresh from the shower, hair dryer in one hand, a bundle of wet towels balled up in the other. “Jesus,” she said, and just turned her back on me to trot across the room and dump the towels on the floor beside the sheets and pillowcases she’d stripped from her bed. I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me.

  “How you feeling?” I asked.

  “I’m so nervous I could scream. What time is it anyway?”

  “Five. Like we arranged.”

  “Jesus,” she said again, and then, trailing the cord of the hair dryer, she was at the counter, fussing over two overstuffed paper bags. “Help me out here, will you?”

  I crossed the room and she set down the hair dryer to lift both bags from the counter and hand them to me. “What’s all this?” I asked.

  “Odds and ends. For you. Like some perfume, shampoo, conditioner, anything with a scent to it—” This was a reference to the fact that nothing artificially scented was allowed inside for the simple reason that any chemical whatever would constitute a recycling poison in a closed system. The Mission One crew had kept getting skewed readings for trace gases until somebody discovered an open tube of silicone sealant in the machine shop which another somebody had been using, pre-closure, to seal tiny pinprick holes in the seams of the spaceframe—that’s how sensitive it was inside. You breathe poison on the outside and maybe it disperses when you breathe out or maybe it accumulates in your body tissues and when you’re seventy you get cancer or not, but on the inside poison is poison and its effects are immediate—one day you’re wearing Dune or Angel and the next day you’re eating it.

  I looked in the bag. There was nothing I wanted. I was particular about my shampoo and conditioner and I didn’t use perfume. Before I could say anything—and why bother when I could just toss it all in the trash as soon as the ceremony was over?—she thrust another bag at me, this one stuffed to the rigid top with the leftovers from her refrigerator. I saw half a two-quart plastic container of full-fat milk, a stick of butter, jars of pickles, jam, mustard. Three cucumbers in a produce bag, and what was that—zucchini?

  Her face was pained. “I just thought you could use it, and, I don’t know, if not you can just dump it. But what were you supposed to remind me?”

  I didn’t have a clue. It was five-oh-five in the morning and I hadn’t slept or eaten and the actualization of my worst nightmare was just two hours and fifty-five minutes away. “I don’t know. What?”

  “The rim.”

  “What rim?”

  “Shit,” she said, and she had the hair dryer in her hand again, though she hadn’t plugged it in or switched it on yet, “I can’t believe you. Remember, you’re supposed to remind me not to trip over the rim of the airlock? So I don’t go head over heels while CBS broadcasts it to the nation?”

  The airlock had come from a decommissioned submarine and it consisted of two doors sealing off an entry chamber. They were made of steel, with rounded corners for an airtight fit. Each featured a circular window at eye level and a threshold that was a good twelve inches off the ground so that you had to step up and over it. I’d tripped on both of them a dozen times myself till finally I developed some sort of autonomous muscular response. Same with Dawn. All of us. I didn’t know what she was so worried about, but then I did. “Okay,” I said, “I’m reminding you. Don’t trip.”

  “Thanks,” she said, her tone caustic, but she gave me a weak smile. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m just so worked up. Look, look at my hand.” She held out her left hand, the free one, and she couldn’t manage to keep it steady.

  This was my cue to say something reassuring, like It’ll go great, you’ll be great, no worries, but I couldn’t. She was giving me her scraps, her leftovers, turning the key in the lock. “Okay,” I said, “look, let me just set these bags down by the door, okay? I won’t forget them, I promise. And what do you want with the laundry? You want me to wash the stuff and save it for you, for when you—you’re going to need sheets when you come back.”

  She nodded, her eyes frantic, turned away, plugged in the hair dryer, flipped it on and flipped it off again. “Here,” she said, darting into the bedroom and back out, something in her hand—a scarf, a silk scarf flowing on the breeze she was generating. “For you. My parents got it for me in Vienna last year—Klimt, it’s a Klimt design.” She held it up to the light so that the pattern—circles within circles, a cluster of interlocking blocks, in black, white and gold—stood out. “I want you to have it. I only wore it once—”

  “I don’t want this,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “no, really—take it.”

  We stood there a moment, all the rush, all the unfinished business between us stuck in gear. She saw me then, I think, for the first time since I’d stepped through the door, saw what was in my eyes, and it wasn’t pretty. “You’re not hearing me,” I said in the coldest voice I could manage. “I don’t want it—or any of this other shit either. Your what, your leavings! Your trash?”

  She wasn’t going to go there. It was too late for that. “But it’s nice,” she insisted. “It’ll look great on you, it’ll go with that velour jacket you always wear, the black one—?”

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  Angry now, her mouth clamped shut and her eyes like two glass balls, she just brushed by me and stuffed the scarf in the bag of cosmetics as if that put an end to it. “Don’t do this to me,” she said, swinging round and holding her palms out in extenuation.

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t make this hard on me.”

  “Hard on you? What about me?”

  “Jesus, Linda,” she said, already starting across the room to shut herself in the bathroom with her hair dryer and her lipstick and scent-free foundation, “I can’t believe you, I really can’t.”

  So we didn’t make up, not really, but that was on me, as I’ve said. The minutes ticked down. Dawn went her way and I went mine, and while I did take the three overstuffed paper bags with me, I went straight to the dumpster with them, because that was how I felt. Samuel Beckett, another of G.C.’s favorites, said it best: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” I dressed in peasant brown. My hair kinked out. I sat there in a folding chair and listened to the shouts and whistles and the full-throated ecstasy of the horns as my former crewmates filed into the airlock, one by one, and if it all came to a head and I cried out “Dawn!” just as she went to lift her right foot—not tripping, not this time—nobody really heard it in all that tumult of the crowd and the steady heart-seizing thump of the big bass drum.

  Part II

  CLOSURE, YEAR ONE

  Dawn Chapman

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like it. One minute I was outside in the world and the next I was a living part of E2, waving mindlessly through the glass at a sea of faces while Gyro pulled the hatch shut. It’s hard to describe. I’d been through that portal countless times over the course of the past five months—it was our worksite, after all—and I knew the smells, sounds and configuration of E2 as well as I knew the suburban house I’d grown up in, but this was different. I suppose I’d be lying to myself if I said the ceremony di
dn’t have something to do with it, the band playing, cameras flashing, people cheering, and yet it wasn’t that so much as the hatch clanking shut and the lever locking in place that made the emotion overwhelm me till the tears started up in my eyes—tears of joy, yes, tears of relief, but of something else too. Anxiety, I guess you’d have to call it. Or maybe uncertainty, maybe that would be more accurate. This really was a new world. And now I was in it and there was no going back.

  I think we all felt it, felt it as a team, the atmosphere literally shifting around us. There was a dense green living aura to the air inside that was utterly unlike the thin stingy air of the desert surrounding us. The minute you were inside, there it was, in your nostrils. You smelled mold, spores, damp earth, process, the ants and termites and microbes in the soil breaking things down even as the fronds of the banana trees loomed overhead and the palms reached to the sun-shot lattice of our sky. It was air you could taste. Air that went in and out of your pores as if your whole body was a pair of lungs. And over it all, the great roar of the fans and blowers of the technosphere that kept it all going, our life support kicking in and running as steadily as a heartbeat day and night. That was what it was like inside, that was what hit you—hit me—in those first few moments of closure. And not just that but the wildness of it too, the unpredictability of a self-generating ecosphere, the coqui frogs rattling away at their two-note song and the galagos hooting from the trees as if evolution were running in high gear and there was no end to what could happen here.

  “Wow, can you believe it?” It was Stevie, standing right beside me, her face so close to mine I could make out the shallow pit of a childhood scar at the corner of her mouth, an indentation there I’d never noticed before. It was a flaw, the only flaw in that perfect face, and it humanized her, gave her character, Stevie, the real-world person who was capable of suffering and hurt just like anybody else. She’d turned to me, still waving to the glassed-out crowd, her eyes in soft focus. “Can you?”

  “No, it’s incredible, isn’t it?”

  We were all jammed there at the window just inside the entrance, where on one side a staircase led up to our living quarters and on the other a mud-spattered plank led to the animal pens and the IAB, and we were all keyed up and flapping our arms so hard it must have looked as if we were trying to sprout wings and fly up into the rafters. One of the men started hooting in imitation of the galagos that were just about to go to sleep for the day and in the next moment we all took it up, filling the place with the ecstatic full-throated cries of another kind of primate, the apex predator of E2, its nurturer and winnower, its gods under glass, going ape. We hooted our lungs raw, then dissolved in laughter, team laughter, and though we didn’t know it at the time, this was about as united as we’d ever be, our eight spirits wedded in one. I don’t want to get too mystical here, but there was something very special about the moment, and I won’t compare it to the first moonwalk, or even the second, but we all felt the pride of accomplishment and the deepening of our bond in this place that was familiar and alien all at once. Of course, the exhilaration didn’t last long—Mission Control was big on proportion, as in all things have their time and place, and in our final briefing earlier that morning G.C. had emphasized how important it was that we should disperse and go about our duties as soon as the ceremony was over. This wasn’t an amusement park. It was a going concern. And while it was fine—necessary—to put on a show for the press and the friends of the mission, the bottom line was that we were there to work.

  So the glow of the moment faded and with a last look over our shoulders we went off to our rooms in the Human Habitat to change into our work clothes and get down to it. For my part, I had to milk and feed the goats, then feed the ducks, chickens and pigs and muck out their stalls before putting in a full day in the IAB, weeding and tending and trying to keep the various known and unknown plant pests from decimating the crops. Diane (Meadowlark or just Lark for short, though for her, as crew captain, this was anything but a lark) would work beside me, and starting tomorrow all the others but Gyro, who was on call all day every day, would be expected to do two hours of ag work after breakfast, five days a week. The truth was, when you boiled away the layers of our scientific accomplishments and our mission goals and all the rest, we were essentially subsistence farmers, albeit high-tech, well-funded and sealed-in representatives of the bony tribe that crouched over cookfires and scratched at the dirt of the wider world. That portion of humanity got its energy and weather gratis via the sun and atmosphere of E1, while it was the technosphere—the three-acre basement whirring with machinery and the external heating plant and cooling towers that circulated water through a series of closed-circuit pipes for temperature control—that gave us ours, plus what we got from the sun, of course. More than once Richard had referred to E2 as the Garden of Eden set down on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

  My room (Mission Control had chosen for us, and how could I ever have imagined anything different?) was second in line along the mezzanine overlooking the ag sector and the animal pens, which were tucked underneath. Richard was on one side of me, Gyro on the other, followed by Diane, Troy, Gretchen, Ramsay and Stevie, everyone in a boy/girl arrangement that had us wondering over Mission Control’s intentions. Was this a kind of Ecospherian spin the bottle or were they just trying to keep us from falling into male/female comfort zones? We couldn’t help second-guessing—why put me between Richard and Gyro, as opposed to say, Ramsay and Troy? Or Troy between Diane and Gretchen and Stevie at the far end? Had Mission Control drawn lots? Not likely. G.C. had his hands in everything, and so did Judy. And, for that matter, Dennis. Wheels within wheels.

  As for the rooms themselves, they were identical, except that the first four looked out into the enclosure while the others had outside views of the desert and mountains beyond. We called them rooms, though they were actually mini-apartments, on two levels, sitting room below, mezzanine bedroom above, 350 square feet in all. Each was equipped with an oak bookcase, couch, armchair, coffee table and combination radio/CD player, in addition to a queen-sized bed, dresser and nightstand upstairs, and each had access to the balcony that ran the length of the floor, as well as to the inner hallway, where our front doors were. There were four bathrooms, one for each pair of rooms, and they featured a shower, sink and toilet, the toilet making use of a bidet-style hose so as to eliminate the need for toilet paper. Food preparation and meals were communal and we all had 24/7 access to the big state-of-the-art kitchen, with its gleaming black-and-white tiled floor, industrial-sized refrigerator/freezer and Viking range.

  We’d been allowed to move our things in the previous day—books, CDs, clothes, cosmetics, a clarinet in the case of Gyro, a guitar for Vodge, sketchbooks and paints for some of the rest of us—but everything had to be confined, strictly, to two standard-sized suitcases. And everything, no exceptions, had been laid out for inspection by Mission Control and a few select representatives of the press. Was this an invasion of privacy? Did we all resent it? Of course it was and of course we did. But Mission Control wasn’t going to make the mistakes it had with the first mission and they wanted to demonstrate to the world that the Mission Two crew was going in with the basics only and that nothing beyond that would be allowed, though there were skeptics who pointed out that we could have smuggled just about anything in during the previous five-plus months when we were in and out practically every day. No matter: this was theater. And it was designed to show the world that we were dead serious about absolute closure and living with the basics—Mars, we were going to Mars, and we wouldn’t need a whole lot of baggage along the way.

  Like the others, I’d unpacked the day before, adding a few personal touches to the space the Mission One medical officer had inhabited for the duration of his two-year closure, the sole traces of which were a couple of thumbtack holes in the wall over the sofa and a faint discoloration between them where he’d hung a picture—of what I couldn’t say. Though I speculated. When you’re insid
e, self-contained, you hunger for some reminder of the outside world, a photo of a waterfall or the moon emerging from the black rim of the ocean (though we had our own waterfall and our own ocean too) or maybe of family members, whom you’d get to see only through the three-by-five-foot visitors’ window located just to the left of the airlock. If they bothered to make the journey, that is. My parents, who lived all the way across the country in Yorktown Heights, New York, would manage it only once during my closure—midway through the second year, when things got difficult for me. As for Johnny, he did what he could, but that wasn’t much, especially as time wore on.

  We were isolated, that was the long and short of it, and Mission Control, having learned their lesson the first time around vis-à-vis press leaks, unflattering characterizations and even diatribes delivered to family and friends that somehow wound up becoming press leaks themselves, had denied us phones as well as connections to the fledgling internet of the time. For communication within the structure, which could seem surprisingly vast given the tangle of hallways, stairways, tunnels and paths not only through the biomes but in the technosphere and the two big football field–sized lungs that kept the dome from either exploding or imploding depending on the outside temperature, we were given walkie-talkies. Outside communication was limited to the Picture-Tel video system with which Mission Control relayed questions, strategies and commands to us and a single telephone line, which might or might not have been monitored by someone on the support staff. Beyond that, there was the visitors’ window, where we could meet with anyone we liked and speak to them via in-house phone, just as if we were in prison—and don’t think we didn’t joke about it, good-naturedly at first, and then, increasingly and inevitably, with a kind of bitterness none of us could have imagined at the outset.