Eventually she accepted that there would never be a better answer than that. Nathan was rootless and without a great deal of direction. She had noticed it in college. It was always her that made the decisions, from what they ate to when they had decided to move in together.
It wasn’t that she was a control freak, more that he simply didn’t seem to care. He never objected, never argued.
Her mother, who had passed last year had said, “He’s perfect, he would do anything for you. What more could you ask for?”
And she had listened to her mother, who had said the same thing about Jennifer’s father, especially when he died the year after she graduated from college.
That was what a good husband was, right? Jennifer couldn’t help wondering though; just what it was that moved Nathan. It was as if he hadn’t discovered his passion yet and was settled on helping her find hers. In the end, without any evidence of him having other wishes or needs, she was happy that he was willing to follow her lead.
The four weeks of training and evaluation went well. At the end of it, Nathan and Jennifer Zradce were notified of their official acceptance to the Gliese mission. They were going to Zarmina’s World.
Dark News Indeed
“For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves...This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise.” – Carl Sagan
Date: 01.16.2102
Calypso Colony Ship
Daniel listened to the transmission twice, then a third time. He felt lightheaded and sick to his stomach. A rushing in his ears grew until he could hear nothing else – not the quiet movements of others on the deck, nor the steady hum of the ship. This simply could not be happening; it could not be true.
There were thousands of transmissions to go through. Now that Calypso had dropped out of warp and back into normal space, the ship could now retrieve the seemingly endless transmission packets that had been sent while Calypso’s drives folded space and shot past decades of space travel in just a handful of years. Soon they would fire the engines in reverse, similar to how airplanes performed at the beginning of the century, using them to slow the massive ship and eventually slow them enough to place them in an orbit around their new home.
Daniel and his counterpart, Kevin Edmonds, who still looked as if he were suffering from the side effects of his long stasis in Cryo, were tasked with the handling of the high-priority messages. These were messages encrypted and sent from Mission Control, not just any run-of-the-mill “urgent” transmission from someone’s grandmother.
Daniel pulled the headset off his head as it began to repeat a fourth time, twisting the thin wire in his hands. Beside him, Kevin was typing furiously. Daniel leaned over to read the words on the screen. It was the newest research on the subject of genetic alterations of beets. He remembered Sam mentioning it when he helped her out in ‘Ponics. Several teams of scientists back on Earth had been working on the problem. They were trying to hybridize plants to grow in the limited spectrum of light a red dwarf star would provide.
Kevin was completely absorbed in the transmission he was transcribing. It ended a few minutes later and he looked up, took in Daniel’s white, shocked expression, and immediately hit stop.
“You okay, son?”
Daniel just stared for a moment. The only thing he could feel was his stomach and it was threatening to hurl the contents of his breakfast, black coffee and toast, at any moment. He shook his head. He could not find the words.
Mystified, Kevin pulled the headset from Daniel’s limp fingers, slid it over his head and hit the Replay button. Daniel watched as the older man’s eyes widened and his face slowly drained of color. Kevin played it again, and then a third time, just as Daniel had. Finally, he slipped the headset off and handed it back.
He sat there for a minute, not saying anything, slowly digesting what he had heard.
“It can’t be right,” He said finally, “What’s the date on that?”
Daniel found his voice, it sounded abnormally calm.
“October 24th, 2099.”
Kevin shook his head, “That’s what, thirteen months after departure, so that makes it, how long ago? Christ, Cryo fried my brain, what year is it now?”
“It’s 2102, so just over two years ago.”
“But that transmission, it said it had been, what, eight months or so since the initial outbreak? It couldn’t possibly have spread that quickly.”
He ran his hand through his hair. It was jet black with a heavy sprinkling of gray.
“We can’t take this to the Captain without further details. We need to get all of the transmissions regarding this first.”
Daniel nodded, his head spinning as the message replayed word for word in his memory.
“ESH plague now worldwide. All containment measures have failed. Mission parameters have changed. Establish a permanent colony on Zarmina’s World and access A.R.C. for additional genetic heritage. Under no circumstances is Calypso’s crew to return to Earth.”
Every man and woman on board had been fully briefed before shipping out. The chances of something going wrong, the possibility of never returning to Earth, had been discussed. Somehow, it had all seemed like such a remote possibility. The Moon and Mars outposts were going strong, and while Gliese 581 was considerably farther away, the technological advances had made even a 20.3 light year trip a reasonable, if involved, accomplishment. Every person on board knew they had a choice to stay and establish a colony, or return if the planet proved more than they could handle.
“Under no circumstances is Calypso’s crew to return to Earth.”
Reality, at least, a small piece of the many that would follow in the next few days, slammed into Daniel. They were on a one-way trip to an unknown, and possibly uninhabitable, planet.
A tiny, almost hysterical giggle rose in him then. Kevin looked over at him and arched one eyebrow.
“I was thinking about that joke about breakfast and sitting down to bacon and eggs. The hen was involved in supplying the eggs, but the pig was dedicated. I guess, I guess we’re dedicated now too.”
Daniel laughed again. It sounded hollow.
Kevin said nothing, pulled his own headset over his ears and entered a string of words into the search engine.
“Let’s pull up all messages that match this search and divvy them up. When we have a clear picture of what happened, we will bring this to Captain Aaronson and the rest of the crew.”
That had been 1015. The two men worked through lunch and well into the afternoon before stopping. Several times they had switched headsets so that the other could hear a particularly important set of details. Through it all, Kevin’s mouth had tightened, lines appearing on his face, and both men’s faces growing grimmer with each new development. It was now 1645, Daniel’s ears pulsed, his stomach twisted in knots. His mouth was dry and his eyes red and bloodshot. Kevin looked just as bad. They both finished with their individual transmissions and slid the headphones off.
Kevin buried his face in his hands, his words muffled, “I need a drink, some food, and we need to talk to the Captain.”
“We are only up to late 2099,” Daniel objected, “perhaps things turned around.”
Kevin snorted, “Turned around? Turned around? Christ on a stick, son, there’s no turning around from that.” He looked ill, his skin gray with exhaustion. “I have an ex-wife, a grown daughter, both back on Earth.”
Daniel was quiet, thinking of Luke, Janine and Toby.
“Neither of them would talk to me after, well, after the marriage ended and I met Jack. I tried to say goodbye to my daughter before we, when we were...” He shook his head, “I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear this. All of us left someone behind, and this is just, it’s too much.”
Daniel nodded, he felt the same way, “We uh, we need to take this to the Captain.”
“Yeah, we do.”
The Hunger
“The whol
e history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.” – Stephen Hawking
Date: 03.10.2099
Earth – Kansas City, Missouri
A few wispy clouds scudded across the sky, but Mac Dolan barely noticed. Instead, his stomach gurgled with hunger as he crossed the short distance to the store, leaving his autocar parked in the loading lane in front, the door hanging open, engine still running, upon his exit.
He had cleared out the fridge, the pickles, the condiments, even the overly fancy bread his ex-girlfriend had raved about yet left behind when she moved out. She had managed to take two of the bath towels she had claimed to hate but left the bread. How many times had he heard her complain about how rough those towels were on her skin? That had been two months ago. And now that very same bread had developed a small fuzz of mold on one end. He ate it anyway. He had stared at it, sitting there alone in the empty fridge and actually felt his mouth begin to salivate as his stomach screamed for relief.
Seconds after consuming it, his stomach still gurgled, unfazed by the offerings, still aching with hunger. Some part of him was concerned, taken aback by this aberrant behavior. In the back of his mind was a nagging sense of wrongness, but it was overruled by the ravenous hunger he felt. Next he had chugged the Tabasco sauce, hoping against hope that the need for more food would be abated somewhat, distracted possibly, by the burning sensation it made as it flowed from his lips to his tongue and on down his throat. It hadn’t worked, still his stomach demanded more.
And now he was at Hy-Vee, the local supermarket, walking down the aisles, his temperature spiking and his stomach screaming for more food. He had reached the cookie aisle and his hand shook as he grabbed for bags of ginger snaps, knocking several of them onto the floor in his eagerness. He reached for one of them, unable to withstand the screaming, yawning need of his stomach any longer. His fingers tore at the packaging, bits of paper flying. He grabbed a fistful and shoved them into his mouth. Part of the packaging came with it. He swallowed it anyway, the thick paper scraping his throat as it slid past.
He didn’t even notice the woman with her two small children stop and stare at him. He was hungry, so terribly hungry. Sweat rolled down his back, dampening his shirt. He choked on the bits of the dry cookie, the pieces catching in his throat, but did not stop. He filled his mouth with more, manically swallowing, feeling the tear of them as they were forced, some almost whole, down his throat.
“Mama, dat man is eating cookies,” a tiny voice said.
The woman’s oldest child, a little girl of three years with big brown eyes and immaculate pigtails was staring at Mac and pointing at his hand.
“Mama I want some too!”
The child’s mother stood rooted in place at the end of the aisle, mouth open in shock as she watched Mac finish shaking the crumbs from the first bag of cookies and rip open the second one. She stood there, staring, unable to turn away, even as her daughter began to cry.
He didn’t seem to even hear the little girl, or notice that there was anyone else in the world there in the aisle, just him and the ginger snaps. He sat down, next to a shelf filled with Oreos, and began shoving the rough cookies down his throat, not bothering to chew at all now. Every once in a while, he would choke, even retch, as his body struggled to work with the unchewed food.
Mac’s shirt was glued to his body, sweat-soaked and stinking. He hadn’t bathed in two days, and since waking in a cold sweat he had ransacked the freezer of anything even remotely edible. He had barely waited for the food to defrost, gnawing impatiently on the frozen pizza as the peas defrosted in a pot on the stove. The peas had blackened and stuck to the bottom of the pot as he watched; he had forgotten to add water. It had taken an hour to clear the freezer and fridge completely. There hadn’t been a lot, his appetite had been elevated for weeks now and he couldn’t keep up with grocery shopping while working full time and going to school. When the last item had been cleared, even the crumbs wiped off of the shelves, he had walked away from the fridge. He had left his house, the front door wide open and walked out to his autocar.
Mac ignored the growing crowd, reached instead for a third bag. He tore it open, fingers shaking. In the distance, he could hear the manager of the store asking everyone to step out of the way as he and two police officers marched down the aisle.
Nothing really mattered to Mac, except the intense pain in his stomach. It seemed that the food he was cramming down barely touched that horrific need, but the food was what he desperately craved. It was hard to think, hard to get past the hunger. Just a few more bites, just a few, and surely he would feel better.
A tightness had begun to build, starting in his stomach, moving up into his throat, a sense of fullness combined with the desperate hunger. Two conflicting messages in his body. The need to feel something, anything sliding down his esophagus was now at its apex.
He had lost all other focus, and the police officer speaking to him had no effect. He swallowed more Oreos, gagging and choking on the hard cookies.
“Sir, you need to come with us.”
The officer was lean, fit and middle-aged, with a sprinkling of white peppering his dark, short-cropped hair. He pulled the bag of cookies from Mac’s trembling hands and Mac felt a surge of panic. He reached for them and the officer’s partner, a stout, middle-aged woman snapped one side of handcuffs onto his left wrist with a practiced, professional motion.
Mac attempted to speak, but the cookies in his mouth clogged all sound except a muffled gurgle, with pieces flying in a small, soggy shower. He reached again for the bag of cookies, resisting the police now, his body thrashing as both officers tackled him and wrestled him to the ground. There was this terrible shift as if something was giving way inside him. He screamed then, and choked.
A wash of red glazed his vision, he couldn’t breathe, and as the officers raised him to his feet, his hands secured in cuffs behind his back, and Mac’s knees gave way. One of the onlookers screamed at the blood trickling from his mouth, then the convulsions hit, his body flailing, attempting even as his esophagus detached from the bloated, and now perforated remains of the stomach, to empty the body of its excess. It was too late. It was all too late - inside of Mac’s abdomen was a mass of food, stomach acid, and bile.
Mac retched, convulsed, and then lay still, a slow pool of blood and partially digested cookies spreading around him on aisle three.
One Last Hurdle
“To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.” – Stephen Hawking
Date: 02.20.2098
Earth – Cape Canaveral, Florida
Nathan Zradce sat in the chair the psychotherapist had indicated on the first visit and relaxed. This was the third and hopefully final visit. They had run through the required questions the Selection Committee required answers for, then covered his basic history, touched on his three-year marriage to his wife Jennifer, delved into his professional career choices and discussed why he was willing to risk life and limb traveling farther than any human had ever traveled. The therapist was slim, attractive, and efficient.
Angela Di Marco had paused for a moment from reviewing his folder and history, her eyebrows raised and her mouth a moue of surprise, “You are adopted?”
Nathan nodded, “Yes, when I was eight.”
“Eight?”
Nathan nodded, smiling slightly. This always seemed to catch people’s attention, as if there was something that spoke volumes about a person in that age. Not an infant, free of damage, but eight years of living before being taken in by some sacrificing, saintly couple. His adoptive parents had been pretty close to saints, but they had often bragged that he was their easiest foster child turned adoptee.
Angela stared at him, then paged to the end of the folder.
“There is nothing here about your birth parents.”
Nathan
nodded again, “There wouldn’t be. My records were sealed. My mother never told anyone who my father was, and she was committed to a mental institution when I was seven. I went into foster care then. I was one of the lucky ones, my adoptive parents, Hal and Mary were absolutely amazing people. They adopted me just a year into being fostered.”
He smiled, “I had a great childhood.”
Angela shook her head, “So what was your mom like? Your birth mom that is.”
A sudden flash of memory of Natalia Zradce singing to him, and to his brother Immanuel.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep. Don’t lie too close to the edge of the bed. Or little gray wolf will come and grab you by the flank. Drag you into the woods, underneath the willow root.”
He managed to suppress a shudder at the memory of them, huddling in the middle of their beds afterward, legs and arms pulled away from the sides of their narrow twin mattresses, terrified that a wolf would come for them and drag them away to be devoured.
Nathan chose his words carefully, “I don’t really remember much about her. A few snippets here and there, a lullaby maybe?”
Did they know? He didn’t think they did. It was water under the bridge, but the scar on his abdomen gave a slight twinge in response.
During his physical, the doctor had noticed and commented on it.
“Huh, an old-school appendectomy scar. Got you just in time, huh?”
A typical appendectomy was now treated through laparoscopic surgery, but in cases of emergency, where an appendix has burst, a full incision had to be made so that the surgical team could be sure and clean out any contaminants from the abdominal cavity. Nathan hadn’t corrected him. He watched the psychotherapist as she paged through the folder, her brow furrowed.
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