by Samuel Best
He gave the pouch back to Merritt.
“Scientists have been trying to get Earth crops to grow in fake Galena soil for years,” Merritt said. “How is this different?”
“They never asked me,” Marty replied.
Outside the building, Merritt turned up the collar of his coat against the rain. In one pocket, he held the leather seed pouch Emily had given him. In the other, he rubbed his thumb over the plastic half of her hellocard.
Wind whipped his jacket and rain pelted his back as he walked through dirty puddles, heading for the police station.
Galena had always been Emily’s dream, not his. Losing his job had heaped mass quantities of stress on an already stressful life, but there were always options that didn’t involve taking his son through a rip in space to an unexplored planet on the other part of the galaxy.
Inside the police station, Merritt stood dripping water from his clothes as he watched Gavin and two other boys through a wide window. The two boys sat near each other at a long table, chowing down plates of soy mush squirted from a food dispenser in the wall.
Gavin sat alone, half the size of the other boys his age. He poked at the gray, gelatinous mass with a fork. Then he looked up, saw his father, and smiled.
In that moment, Merritt’s decision was made for him. He squeezed Emily’s hellocard tightly, feeling its sharp edges dig into his palm.
He and Gavin were going to Galena.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MERRITT
He stood before Gavin’s hypergel tank, hands in the pockets of his faded blue coveralls. The boy was turned sideways, curled up in a fetal position, the overlarge oxygen mask swallowing his small face. Merritt had needed to make adjustments to the boy’s neoprene body suit so it wouldn’t slip off his slim frame. The ankle and wrist cuffs were still loose — wrinkled folds of fabric pressed against Gavin’s skin by the pink gel.
Every day for the past two months, Merritt had come down to the stasis room on Deck 6 to check on his son. Ostensibly, he went there to perform routine maintenance on the hypergel tanks. He became familiar with the data stream continuously ticking up the info screen on the side of Gavin’s tank, learning how to identify the shorthand code for his heart rate, breathing patterns, and REM cycles.
Apparently, one still dreamed while in the tank.
The times in between those dreams were spent in a shallow sleep, artificially induced by the gel that had seeped into the occupant’s body.
Merritt rubbed his sternum, remembering when, two months ago, he had forcefully pushed Gavin into the mass of thick pink gel. His son had kicked him square in the chest with surprising strength as he fought to stay out of the tank. When they first approached the looming cylinder of goop, Gavin had taken one look at it and tried to pull away from his father. Merritt had to push the boy into the thick pink gel, kicking and scratching in silence, sinking his own arms into the gel up to his armpits while whispering apology after apology.
After Gavin calmed down within the tank, his arms and legs slowly contracted, tucking close to his body as he drifted to sleep.
Aside from his visits to the stasis room, the rest of Merritt’s time on the ship was spent working. He structured his schedule to leave as few quiet moments as possible, knowing they would inevitably fill with dark thoughts of loneliness.
A heavy metal wrench fell onto the grated floor by his feet, the clang echoing loudly down the long stasis room.
“Look out below!” a voice called from above.
Another workman clung to the side of a thick stasis tube, the one right next to Gavin’s, ten meters off the floor. He pulled a smokeless cigarette from his thin lips and saluted as Merritt shot him a rude gesture. A safety harness hung loose around the man’s thin waist, secured to a track that ran the length of the tube, from the hypergel tank at the bottom, to its terminus at the ceiling twenty meters above.
The workman shut the cover of a large electrical box and climbed down the rust-brown ladder rungs bolted to the side of the tube.
“Loose temperature regulator,” he said with the voice of a smoker, his gangling form carried down the tube by bony limbs.
He hopped down to the grated floor next to Merritt, scooped up his wrench, and brushed straight brown hair from his eyes. After relighting his smokeless cigarette, he offered it to Merritt with black-stained fingertips. Merritt refused.
At first glance, Skip’s weathered face, salted brown face stubble, and brittle hair made him appear older than Merritt, yet he was ten years younger. Skip acknowledged this, and attributed his “wizened visage” to a youth of hard smoking and drinking, a period of his life he steadfastly refused to regret.
He emerged from this personal epoch as a true man, he claimed, with three sons and three daughters to prove it.
Skip slapped Merritt’s shoulder and walked away.
“Your boy’s lookin’ alright, chief,” he said. “Let’s go see about them rad-deflectors. Willef’ll birth a cow if it don’t happen this shift.”
Merritt followed him toward the exit of the stasis room, their boots thudding on the metal, grated floor.
Steam hissed from a pipe in the wall opposite the row of hypergel tanks.
“Ho, now!” said Skip.
He hefted his wrench and dodged the steam to get closer to the pipe. With a quick turn of his wrench, he tightened a fist-sized bolt, and the steam vanished.
“One more reason they should give me an extra hectare on Galena,” Skip said as he slid his wrench into a fabric loop of his coveralls. He sucked on his cigarette as they continued walking. “I swear, if it weren’t for you and me, this whole ship would implode.” He made a detonation sound and brought his hands together like he was crumpling a large ball.
“Two hectares is enough,” said Merritt.
“Maybe for you, chief. You only got one kid. I got six of ‘em, and the missus.” He shook his head. “She ain’t gonna be happy with just two No, sir.”
In their short time working together, Merritt had learned more than he cared to admit about Skip’s life on Earth. His family would depart on the next Halcyon voyage, arriving at Galena after Skip established a working farm.
The government had come knocking on Skip’s door after his wife gave birth to their second child. After the sixth, they were throwing so much money at the family for permission to study her fertility that, according to Skip, it was better than winning the lottery.
Instead of opting for a suite atop one of the twin cities on the moon, he would quit his job and move the family to Galena, where, he boasted, he would quickly build the largest farm that side of the Milky Way. He had already ordered the ready-to-build packages of two Pioneer Lodges to be delivered to his site.
When Merritt asked him why he wasn’t participating in the farming classes, Skip looked offended. He shot back, “Would you try teaching Mozart how to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?!”
Down the hall from the stasis room, Merritt and Skip passed through a series of restricted blast doors, ending up in a brightly-lit, spherical airlock. Two types of spacesuits hung on the wall: all-purpose, bright orange Constellation Mark VI’s, and the workhorse of the Halcyon’s EVA teams: the gray, heavy-duty Magellan space suit. Unlike the streamlined Constellation suits, the Magellan suits came equipped with a pair of robotic arms folded into two cubes, one to each side of the occupant’s waist, which extended their range of manipulation by three meters.
Merritt shed his coveralls and stuffed them into a wall receptacle. Emily’s hellocard dangled from a chain around his neck, a hole drilled through the metal grip. He tucked it into his shirt. The linked bank account was empty, but he didn’t trust leaving the card tucked into his sleeping bag, as he was forced to do with his wife’s brochure for the Galena Farming Initiative.
He backed into one of the two Magellan suits while Skip did the same. After donning their suits, they helped each other button up, triple-checking seal integrity. Merritt pulled on his bulbous, full-pressure polycarb
onate helmet and clicked the sliding seal under his neck into place.
He activated his suit’s wristpad, pawing at it with thick, gloved fingers. After syncing it with the ship’s mainframe, he called up a diagram of the ship and navigated to the section awaiting him and Skip beyond the airlock door.
“Panel Y-27 is flashing again,” he said over the helmet intercom system. He tapped the blinking red light on his wristpad. ALIGNMENT ERROR flashed across the small screen.
“It’s always Y-27,” said Skip, shaking his head.
His narrow frame swam in the large spacesuit, triggering Merritt’s memory of the time he walked into his bedroom to find four-year-old Gavin wearing his father’s shirt and pants.
“Ready?” Skip asked.
Without waiting for a reply, he turned a switch and slapped a yellow button on the wall. The GravGen under the floor cut off, and the two of them lifted gently into the air.
“I hate it when you do that,” said Merritt.
“I hear that a lot.”
The hatch in front of them rotated in its setting, as if being turned from the other side. It slid toward them a few inches, then slowly opened inward to bump silently against the inner airlock wall.
Skip said, “After you, chief,” and cackled with laughter as he fired a burst of nitrogen from his pack, zooming through the open hatch.
Merritt shook his head, half-smiling, as he followed after him.
He emerged into the dark, vast, empty chamber surrounding the innermost shell of the Halcyon.
Worklights flicked on in the darkness — piercing halogen beams that painted the chamber with swaths of bright light.
Behind Merritt, the hull of the habitable portion of the ship disappeared into the distance at his left and right. Above and below, it curved out of sight at a noticeable angle. He felt as if he were floating in mid-air next to a mile-long submarine.
Thick support struts connected the innermost hull with the next one at a distance of roughly twenty meters.
Halfway between the hulls, ten meters from each, was another wall. This one was more akin to a fence, comprised of five-meter-tall rectangular slats which could be turned independently of the whole, all of them suspended by an airy support lattice which encapsulated the innermost hull.
“I know you like to keep to yourself,” Skip said as they floated toward the lattice, “but me’n the boys are gettin’ together tonight fer the passage. We wanna be blackout drunk in case the ship explodes. Sort of a tradition. I’m callin’ it ‘Get Ripped in the Rip’. You should come.”
Merritt had planned on spending the Halcyon’s passage through the Rip tucked up in his sleeping bag, listening to a recorded loop of wind rustling tall grass.
“They’re gonna put it up on the big screen in the observation lounge,” Skip went on. “I ain’t ever been sober enough to see what happens, but it’s supposed to be quite the show.”
“Maybe,” said Merritt. Then he added, “Thanks.”
He bumped against one of the monolithic panels and drifted gently to its edge, grabbing hold of the thick lattice which connected the panel to all the others. A white label on the side of the panel identified it as W-15.
“Two down,” he said.
He and Skip descended two horizontal rows and moved twelve panels to the right, to Y-27.
Merritt checked the rad-meter on his suit’s wristpad. A small red line wavered just above nominal, rising noticeably higher when he moved around to the other side of the panel.
“Surface integrity looks good,” he said, running a gloved hand over the ribbed exterior. “No visible damage.”
“Gotta be the tracking servos,” said Skip. “I’d bet my grammy’s wooden teeth.”
“What?”
“Grammy’s wooden teeth,” he repeated. “They don’t have that expression where you’re from?”
“No one has that expression.”
Skip huffed. “And you call yourself cultured.”
Merritt activated the info screen near one corner of Y-27, waiting as the system ran through its internal diagnostics checks.
Each thick panel contained a complex series of servos which, when activated, adjusted the panel’s angle relative to the lattice, keeping the phalanx mostly parallel with the two nearby hulls. As the Halcyon passed through the Rip — or close to any other celestial body— tracking servos in the panels worked to keep their surfaces facing the object, deflecting the brunt of the radiation that burrowed past the ship’s outer hulls.
After a few moments, the screen spit back an error code.
“Looks like your grammy keeps her teeth,” said Merritt.
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s the tracking servos.”
“I’d be more excited if I didn’t know what that meant.”
“Me, too.”
Y-27 had been hiccuping the entire voyage. At first, it was blinking in and out of active status, even though its servos were fully operational. Then the servos truly did begun to fail, and Merritt had been forced to shut down half of them. As a result, the panel could still track a celestial object along with the others, but it lagged behind while doing so.
Now, the error told him the other servos had failed.
“We’ll have to aim it manually,” he said.
“We can’t be in here when we pass through the Rip, chief. This whole chamber’s gonna be flooded with radiation.”
“I know that,” said Merritt. “We’ll do it now, then toss up some extra shielding inside the habitable section. Adjusting it manually will at least provide some initial protection. The panel won’t track with the others, but it’s better than nothing. Best we can do.”
“Willef won’t like it.”
“I don’t like it, either. This bank of panels deflects most of the radiation that would hit the stasis room.”
“Aw, chief, don’t worry about that,” said Skip. “The goop can absorb more rads than the hull. Your boy’s gonna be just fine. I still can’t believe the ship has to stay in orbit for a year while it sheds all those rads! What a waste of time.”
“Otherwise it would go right through to the passenger section.”
“At least on Earth they can do them dinner cruises while it sheds. Out here, it’s a whole bunch of nothin’.”
Merritt checked his wristpad. The radiation indicator was slowly but gradually going up.
“Let’s get it done fast,” he said. “This place is already starting to cook.”
After his shift, Merritt showered and put on the only set of clothes he owned, provided by his employer: a pair of gray slacks and a blue T-shirt with the stylized astrolabe logo of Cygnus Corporation printed on the chest. Having no other option, he pulled on his scuffed work boots over threadbare socks.
The observation lounge was only open to passengers and crew on special occasions, such as arrivals and departures, and, of course, passage through the Rip.
As the doors whooshed open before him, Merritt hesitated, hands clasped behind his back. Pockets of soft light bloomed in the dark lounge, revealing passengers involved in deep conversation, others laughing uproariously over tables full of cocktails, and still others sitting alone, staring at the wall-sized viewscreen opposite the bar.
The room itself curved away from the entrance in a half-moon arc, the long bar on one side, opposite the viewscreen. For now, all that was visible in the vast reaches of space were the pinpoint brilliance of distant stars.
Merritt entered the lounge and the doors whooshed shut behind him. It took him a moment to pick Skip out of the crowd. He sat on a low stool with his back to the door, at a round table with four other workman, some still wearing their coveralls. They raised small glasses filled with blue liquid, shouted something in unison, then downed their drinks and pounded the table three times. They pointed and hooted with laughter at the man who finished last. He grinned sheepishly as he wiped droplets from his chin.
Skip looked around and saw Merritt. With a flailing, drunken wave, he c
alled him over.
“Guys!” he said with half-closed eyelids as Merritt stood next to the table. “Guys, this is Gavnnn…this is Gavvvv…Gavvvon...”
“I’m Merritt,” he said, though he knew all of the men sitting at the table.
They brushed off Skip’s behavior with laughter and pulled over an empty stool. Merritt sat, then accepted a glass brimming with clear blue liquid.
“To my health!” Skip shouted.
They drank, they hooted, they pounded the table. For the first time since he left Earth, Merritt was under a very real threat of enjoying himself.
After several rounds of drink-and-thump, there was a collective gasp from the lounge.
Merritt turned on his stool and squinted at the other passengers, drunkenly trying to figure out why they were so excited.
He noticed Tulliver sitting alone at a table, facing the screen. The large man had chosen the only table in the lounge not lit by a dim overhead lamp. He sat in darkness, clasping a thin chain in one fist as he stared at the projection of space. Behind him, tucked into the shadows, Ivan leaned against the wall near the bar, his eyes glinting as they found Merritt’s. He looked away quickly.
A table of four elderly women, dressed in their finest clothes and wearing jewelry worth more than the cost of ten tickets to Galena, played Tah-Go, setting down shimmering tiles with loud clicks. One of them pointed at the wall screen.
The Rip had come into view.
It gradually increased in size, its electric green and purple torn edge rippling against the void. Its center was deep gray, the color of heavy smog, and through it, a single blue star was barely visible.
Someone shouted, “Aegea!” and all the passengers cheered.
Merritt stood up, swaying in place, attempting to regain his sense of balance. He stumbled forward and slumped into a chair at an empty table, closer to the wall screen.
The Rip now filled the screen from floor to ceiling, its mouth ever-widening like the maw of some great space creature.