Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

by Temi Oh

  They were accelerating every second, and in eight months they would be the first humans to see the planet and its giant moons close up. But the thought of reaching it frightened Jesse a little. He’d once heard Sheppard refer to it as ‘the Rubicon’ – the point of no return. Once they approached the planet, Igor would launch the gravity-assist drive. An engine that would push them through the gravitational field of Saturn at the right trajectory to pick up some of its gravitational energy. They would begin to travel at about one seventh the speed of light, fast enough to soar into interstellar space and towards James Dalton’s binary stars. Once they’d reached their neighbouring solar system, they would swing by the planets in the opposite direction, at the right angles, to slow their speed and allow the Damocles to finally be captured in the orbit of Terra-Two. By then, both Eliot and Harry would be in their forties, skilled enough to steer the ship and perform the engine burn entirely without the senior crew. And Igor would not be there to see it.

  It was this fact that upset Jesse the most. Igor would never see Terra-Two. Finally, one evening, Jesse mustered the courage to talk to the old man about it. ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ he asked, lingering behind in the kitchen once their group lesson was over for that afternoon. ‘I heard that the reason you defected from the USSR, the reason you agreed to work on this mission, was because you knew you would be old by the time the project was over but the UK Space Agency promised that no matter what, you could fly with us.’

  ‘You heard right,’ Igor said.

  ‘But I don’t understand why,’ Jesse said, ‘when you . . .’ He didn’t want to say it out loud. He looked down and fiddled with a loose thread on his overalls.

  ‘I will have completed my own mission,’ Igor said. ‘We all have a different mission, Jesse. We’re all compelled by different gods, fleeing different demons. Shall I tell you something?’

  Jesse leant across the table and nodded.

  ‘You know, I was one of the first men to set foot on Mars.’ Jesse nodded again. Everyone had seen the historic picture of the Soviets pushing their flag into the surface of Mars. Four astronauts. Igor had been the youngest man on the team. ‘I returned like a man in love,’ Igor said. ‘Once I was back on Earth, I longed for the flight, for the sight of my planet from a vast distance, for a vision of the stars unobscured by atmosphere, for the sensation of weightlessness that was so natural to me it was as if I’d been waiting for flight the entirety of my life.’

  He spoke with such fervour his eyes lit up. He spoke about how he’d gone on to serve longer and longer missions in spartan hab-labs on the surface of the red planet, digging trenches to shelter from solar storms, performing experiments and broadcasting his results back to Earth. It was not an easy or glamorous life, but it was everything he had ever wanted. When Earthbound, he’d slump into a depression, slip out of the bed where his wife slept, pass his children’s bedrooms to stand outside and behold the sky. Aching like a lovesick mariner.

  ‘When I learned about my sickness,’ Igor said, touching the bony hollow of his chest, ‘I knew what I had to do.’ He left his wife, his children and grandchildren behind in Norilsk and smuggled with him the plans for the gravity-assist drive — the key to interstellar travel.

  ‘So,’ he said to Jesse, ‘I try my best. I kept myself healthy as possible until launch. When we reach Saturn, my work will be done.’

  His wish was for his body to be launched naked into the vacuum of space, where his cells would not decay and he’d drift for eternity by icy moons and elliptic galaxies, the Eagle Nebulae and the Pillars of Creation, by star nurseries and the resplendent remnants of supernovae. Some part of him would be an eternal witness to the collapse and creation.

  ‘There are worse things,’ he told Jesse, ‘than death.’ And, for the first time, Jesse believed it.

  JESSE

  07.02.13

  A NEW DATE FOR the Orlando mission was selected by the NASA and UKSA directors in London and Houston. This time, it happened to fall on Jesse’s twentieth birthday.

  The morning of the mission, piano music skittered into his dreams, and Jesse ascended into consciousness picturing David Bowie’s mismatched eyes. ‘You know how it goes,’ Eliot said with a smile, turning the volume dial up on his speakers. “ ‘Is there life on Maaaaaaars?’ ” he shouted as the cellos began to play. Jesse laughed, rolling out of bed and rubbing his eyes. Eliot was already dressed in his flight suit, although a dried crust of toothpaste flaked around the left side of his mouth.

  ‘You must know the song?’ he said as the strings reached their first buzzy crescendo.

  ‘Of course I know the song,’ Jesse said, getting to his feet. And they caught the chorus again; this time they shouted it.

  ‘Happy birthday, man.’ Harry said, clapping Jesse on the shoulder. ‘Old man.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jesse couldn’t help but remember waking up in his bedroom one year ago. It had been a miserable day, overcast and threatening snow. He’d just returned from months of training for the backup crew and abandoned all hope that he would ever set foot on this ship.

  They all sang the chorus again, one final time, at the top of their lungs. Jesse was so happy to be alive, to be on the Damocles, with these people that he almost cried.

  ‘Do you feel any older?’ Eliot asked as the string arrangement began its glissando slide into the song’s finale.

  ‘I feel years older,’ he said. And then there was silence.

  ‘Hey,’ Harry said, and raised his eyes to the window, ‘look.’

  Europa loomed large in their view. Jesse had seen the moon so many times in the piloting simulation that the sight of it gave him an odd sense of homecoming. He had sacrificed two weeks of nights to level eight on the simulator, trying to lock a new module onto a docking port. A Sisyphean task that required the most delicate manoeuvres he had ever mastered, shifting the module an inch a minute, only to crash at the final moment when the muscles in his wrist seized with cramp.

  In the window, that morning, Europa’s surface looked brittle and delicate as the edge of an egg, shining with so much reflected light.

  Suddenly, Jesse gleaned something of the enormity of the Orlando mission. The American crew were hoping to make the moon habitable. It had an oxygen atmosphere, and an ocean roiled metres beneath the frozen crust of the planet, two ingredients necessary for life. But it was still far from hospitable. It was around -160°C at the equator, a temperature at which cell membranes crystallize and fracture. It was pelted daily by radiation and nothing could grow. The Orlando’s crew had nevertheless progressed in leaps and bounds, engineering single-celled organisms that were now able to multiply in sub-zero temperatures. Their hope was to eventually terraform the planet. Atom by atom, they planned to bend it into submission. To cover the crust with mutant lichen and moss, to one day fill the sea with alien plants. It would be decades before Europa was terraformed, if ever. Long before that happened, Jesse and his crew would be on Terra-Two, breathing the temperate air and leaping into lagoons.

  When he was dressed, Jesse stepped into the crew module to a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ from the crew. Commander Solomon told him that as a reward for gaining such a high score on the simulator – and because Eliot’s injured hand had still not healed – Jesse would be joining them in the shuttle. Jesse was so overjoyed to hear it that he shouted and punched the air.

  The crew on Orlando had also recorded a message.

  ‘Happy birthday!’ yelled Dr Sie Yan.

  ‘We’re wishing Jesse Solloway of the Damocles a very happy birthday,’ said her husband, Captain Omar Briggs, by her side. ‘We’re looking forward to seeing you folks soon, and eating dinner with you on the Damocles.’

  In five hours, Poppy, Harry and Jesse would accompany Sheppard as he docked their shuttle onto the Orlando and met this couple who’d lived in Jupiter’s orbit for a decade. And in just over twenty-four hours, they would ferry them and the rest of the Orlando’s crew to the Damocles for dinner.
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  Jesse tried to imagine five other people in their kitchen, seated around the table, passing on gifts and letters from Earth and tucking into a meal. How different would it feel? Five other people who also knew what it took to build a life under LED lamps. He was looking forward to the week they would spend together, and felt as if he knew them already, especially the three younger astronauts: sullen but brilliant Kennedy, the xenobiologist, who liked the same synth-heavy glam-rock as Eliot; Cal and James, who looked as if they could be Harry’s brothers. Both MIT graduates, engineers, boisterous and competitive but friendly, their laughter booming down the hall whenever they greeted the others on the video calls. Kennedy, James and Cal had trained at the Armstrong Astronaut Academy in Houston, an imposing rival of Dalton. At the age of twenty, the three of them had left the Earth to join Omar and his wife on the Orlando, and they would not return until the year 2020.

  Because of their age, Jesse felt that the Beta had the most in common with these three astronauts, but he knew that Commander Sheppard and Captain Omar were old friends. Omar was the godfather of Solomon’s son, and even though he had never met the boy in person he downlinked videos of himself reading bedtime stories, all the way to Earth.

  ‘Can you see us?’ Jesse asked over the video feed.

  ‘Of course we can,’ Captain Briggs said. ‘I could spot the Damocles a lightyear away. She’s a real beauty.’

  ‘We should be docking with Orlando in ten hours,’ said Solomon.

  A shiver ran down Jesse’s spine. That morning he attributed it to excitement.

  THEY DEPARTED FOR THE Orlando with an air of jubilation, jostling and bouncing in their seats like children on a school trip. It was strange to find themselves in the shuttle again, the same vehicle in which they had left Earth months ago. Only this goodbye had been through an airlock, with no cheering crowds. Before she’d said goodbye, Juno had kissed Jesse. Strapped in the cramped shuttle, he was distracted by the thought of her – he could still taste the sweetness of her in the corner of his mouth.

  As they sped towards the Orlando and away from the Damocles’ gravity, Jesse could feel every metre by the lightness in his stomach. He had always enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness.

  ‘I want you to remember,’ Commander Sheppard said from his chair beside Harry in front of the control panel, ‘that this is a lesson as well as a mission. It’s the first time you three will have to practise a real-life scenario that you have been training for. Different equipment, a smaller environment than the Damocles. I’m looking forward to taking a back seat. You’ve all been working hard, and I’m proud of you.’

  Poppy lifted up her camera and handed it to Jesse. ‘Press this button to start recording,’ she instructed, and he did what she asked. A minute later she was smiling at the screen. ‘Dobriy den, Bon soir, or good afternoon to you all. Welcome aboard the Congreve,’ she said voice taut with excitement. ‘It’s about 1 p.m. here and we’ve finally set off for the Orlando, orbiting Europa – Jesse, hold it up a little higher – my job is to work on the communication. On a mission like this it’s vital that we remain in constant contact—’ she indicated the mass of wires and monitors behind her, and pointed to where Commander Sheppard and Harry were strapped into the pilot seats, ‘—with the crew on Orlando station and the crew back on the Damocles. Information and readouts about Orlando and the position of the shuttle will be downlinked to me on these computers. Which is important for us as we dock, a very delicate operation.’

  ‘And how’s it going now?’ Jesse had been instructed to ask.

  ‘I can happily say that all systems are nominal.’ She winked at the camera. ‘Which is space jargon for “operating as planned”.’

  Could she imagine the people watching? The young students from Dalton, or in classrooms in Shanghai, the constant replay on the Space Channel. All those distant eyes on her.

  Poppy took the camera and turned it on Jesse, who saw his own black eyes reflected in the lens.

  ‘Can you briefly explain your job on this mission?’ Jesse hated this part, reciting, in a chipper voice, a watered-down version of their various responsibilities.

  ‘I’m acting in place of the ship’s usual engineer, Igor Bovarin, and Junior Flight engineer Eliot Liston, who unfortunately is still recovering from his minor hand injury.’

  ‘Most of your job doesn’t really start until we get close to Orlando, right?’ Poppy pushed.

  ‘Right.’ Jesse pointed to the computer in front of him, which displayed a digital image from the shuttle’s external camera with a grid overlaid. ‘This system uses radar and information from the Damocles to determine exactly where Orlando is. If we looked out the window right now, we couldn’t tell it from another star in the sky. But, in an hour or two, when we get closer, the system will spot it, lock on and we’ll know we’re getting close.’

  ‘That’s when your job really begins,’ Poppy encouraged. ‘Can you explain it?’

  Jesse shifted in his seat; the force of gravity was halving every minute and he was beginning to feel the stretch in his spine. Astronauts grew a few inches in microgravity – a change that was accompanied, at least in Jesse’s case, by almost constant back pain.

  ‘Orlando is in a very low orbit above Europa. Every ninety minutes it does one rotation of the moon – which means it’s actually moving quite fast. Our job is to catch up with it and dock with it while we’re both moving.’

  ‘Well, actually – that’s my job.’ Harry’s sharp eyes appeared in the lens and he waved for the camera. ‘I’m the pilot for this mission. I . . .’

  Jesse leant back as he listened to Harry continue. It was difficult to watch him in the pilot’s seat. Jesse’s fingers tingled with longing. He wanted to be seated before the controls. He wanted to feel the hum of them beneath his palms.

  As most of his job began when they got close to station, so he had several hours yet to sit and twiddle his thumbs. Every time he looked out the window his home, the Damocles, was smaller. It looked like a beetle, the command module a glassy head bolted to the fat steel thorax of the living modules, the kitchen and bedrooms. Most spectacular was the enormous vaulted abdomen of the greenhouse, a space garden reflecting the stars. Jesse imagined Cai watching them depart in his lab, amongst the long grass. Was Juno watching him too? Were the other young astronauts, Kennedy, Cal and James on the Orlando, watching them approach? Perhaps they were sitting on a sofa in their own living modules, their feet tucked under them, searching the sky for the shuttle.

  After an hour of flying he didn’t need to look out the small porthole of a window to know how far they had come. The Damocles was only a round speck in the sky and they were in microgravity. Jesse’s face had begun to swell and his back ached.

  ‘You’re moon-faced,’ Poppy said, her auburn hair floating up around her ears, her cheeks doughy and pink, the veins in her neck bulging. She unstrapped her seatbelt and grabbed her knees, turning a slow somersault in the cramped space of the shuttle. She finished upside-down and waved to the camera with a swollen grin. Jesse swallowed an anti-nausea pill, tightened his seatbelt and tried to sleep.

  4 P.M.

  HIS COMPUTER WOKE HIM when it detected the station. The words ‘LOCKED ON’ flashed in red letters in the corner of his screen. From this distance, Orlando was like a white spider in the sky, although it looked larger on his display.

  The space station resembled the Damocles – a hulking mass of solar panels, pressurized modules and trusses, assembled in space. The American flag painted on its side spanned ten metres. It was far more spacious than Damocles, built for circling in low orbit over the pale moon and not for interstellar travel. At the time, the Orlando was the single most expensive item ever constructed in human history – that was before the Off-World Colonization Programme.

  ‘Can you hear me Damocles? Congreve? Comm check.’

  It was Juno’s voice in his headset, and it startled him into alertness.

  ‘I’m here,’ Jesse told her.


  ‘Is it beautiful?’ she asked, breathless. Jesse nodded at the internal camera feeding back to the ship. He was captivated by the prospect, the lovely light radiating off the frozen moon. The orbiting station looked small in comparison.

  ‘All right,’ came Igor’s gruff voice through the line. ‘Plenty of time for daydreaming and chit-chat when we’re all on station. Now it’s time for the real work to begin. Jesse, are you ready?’

  It was a game of cat and mouse. As their shuttle slowed they would enter into Europa’s orbit, just above the station in what was called a ‘phasing orbit’. Jesse’s job was to monitor the engine burn as they made their first orbital transfer. Suddenly the Congreve was a hive of activity, Harry and Commander Sheppard issuing commands and talking into their headsets with Omar Briggs, while Igor instructed Jesse over the headset and Poppy kept the channels operating. Jesse could see Captain Briggs’ face on the screen, examining the incoming data from the Damocles.

  ‘All systems nominal,’ Commander Sheppard said over the intercom.

  ‘I didn’t catch that?’ came the captain’s voice. Commander Sheppard groaned and unlatched his helmet, fiddled for a moment with his mic. ‘Can you hear me now?’

  ‘Loud and clear,’ Omar confirmed.

  ‘Having a bit of trouble with my helmet and mic.’ Sheppard exhaled. ‘Ready for rendezvous in ninety minutes. Harry, issue the command for docking probe extension.’

  They were close, and it was a great feeling. Jesse had watched the videos of docking procedures, seen the probe lock onto the port on a space station and then, once the hatch opened, all the hugs and laughter as the crew on the shuttle greeted the crew on the station. He remembered the air of exhilaration. After the long journey, to be united. The crew on one station had lined the walls with banners and balloons. It had been like a party. That was what awaited them in under two hours.