Pluto's Ghost- Encounter Edition

by B. C. CHASE

  Katia covers her mouth with her hand to hide her laugh.

  Commander Tomlinson sighs and continues, “The point is that the mice have been successfully giving birth. They’re healthy. So that bodes well for Nari’s situation.”

  Shiro says, “This tells us mice can give birth in space. It has nothing to do with Nari. And it doesn’t solve the problem of what happens with the child in the future. There is no telling what they—”

  Tim suddenly interrupts with absolute clarity and force, “This is Nari’s and Josh’s baby. They want to keep it. I support that decision. What kind of people would we be if we forced her to have an operation like that? And entirely against her will?”

  We are all staring at Tim in stunned silence. He is the last person I would expect to be supportive of Nari and Josh. And, for that reason, his opinion seems to carry especially strong weight.

  Commander Sykes says, “You’re right, Tim. We can’t allow fear of the unknown to master us.” Suddenly he grips the nearest blue handlebar, his face contorting. Without warning, he retches, the vomit spewing out from his mouth and nose in all directions, but landing mostly on Katia, who was across from him. Shelby speedily extracts several paper towels from a dispenser on the ceiling and rushes to his aid, helping him cover his mouth. He keels over, vomiting again. And again. It won’t stop. He struggles to catch his breath as his body fights to expel every last drop of liquid from his stomach. While Shelby and Tim move Commander Sykes through the exit of the Japanese Lab and a right in Node 2 to the European Lab, I grab some towels to help Katia clean up. But when I approach her, she shakes her head, “I’ll just go take a shower.”

  “But, Katia, the centrifuge… It could kill you.”

  She stares into my eyes and says plainly, “This is still my last day. I want a shower.”

  I ask Tim, “Is there any way to turn the centrifuge off if it starts going haywire?”

  “Only by unplugging the power connector on the outside.” To Katia, he says, “Jim is right, you shouldn’t use it.”

  “Don’t worry, guys,” Katia says. “I’ll be okay.”

  But that’s just the thing, I think. She won’t be okay. The effects of the radiation are still threatening her life even if the centrifuge doesn’t.

  While Katia is showering, I go back to the lab with my cleanup kit. Commander Sykes is not retching anymore, but he looks awful. He’s violently shivering and he has an odd look in his eyes as if he doesn’t recognize me. I hurry to clean up the bile from everywhere it has landed.

  Shelby says, “I can’t keep his fever down and his blood pressure is low.” She meets my eyes, “He’s asking for his daughters. I don’t think he knows where he is.”

  “The radiation is affecting his mind?”

  “Yes. That’s the last thing I would want to see.”

  “Is there anything you can do to help him?”

  She says sharply, “Comfort care, Jim. That’s all I can do.”

  I know what that means. She will be trying to make him as comfortable as she can while he passes. “How long?”

  “Probably days. Maybe weeks.”

  Thirty-five

  I head to my horticulture module to have some quality time with my worms and to feed my plants. My module is across from the centrifuge so I should hear it when Katia opens the hatch.

  Seeing the greenery and inhaling the more humid, oxygenated air usually makes me feel better. This time, I don’t feel any better at all. Even the buzzing bees don’t make me feel better. I’ve been dealing with the possibility of Katia’s and Commander Sykes’ deaths for two days, now, and it is wearing me down. I feel like my age. I am tired and I feel like I’ve got a heavy cast iron stove in my chest instead of a heart. But I’m also angry. First, they took my daughter from me. Now this ill-conceived mission to meet them is taking Katia and Commander Sykes, among all the others we’ve already lost. I hate the aliens now more than ever.

  The time drags on to thirty minutes with no sign of Katia finishing her shower. I pause my work to go check on the centrifuge. The readout still says 9.01, so I know she’s okay in there. But she’s certainly pushing her luck lingering so long.

  My little worms are healthy and, although I can’t read their emotions, they seem happy. At least they wiggle quite a bit when I touch them. I consider that to be equivalent to a tail wag. (I don’t anthropomorphize my worms: I canine-ize them.) You might think the soil would fly everywhere in this environment, but I have found that if I make it sufficiently moist, it clings together well enough that I can touch my worms with my fingers instead of through the plastic gloves and container covers that NASA provided. The worms have been multiplying nicely, and even now in this container alone I count a dozen cocoons full of baby worms. I have only found three worm corpses in the whole time I’ve been in the station. Aside from those, each of the worms NASA sent me with is still alive, and should be for many years to come, assuming someone is still around to take care of them. It’s kind of odd for me to think that an Earthworm has a longer lifespan than a mouse.

  I’m not troubled by my affectionate relationship with my worms. No, I’m not worried that I’m going crazy. What is worrying me is that if I make it back to Earth and take a pole out to a pond, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stick one of the poor little suckers on a hook. I’ll have to resort to those gosh-awful synthetic baits.

  I hear a hatch opening and, after closing the container I am filling with fresh soil, I kick off for the tunnel. Katia has emerged from the centrifuge and is facing Tim, who appears to have been on his way to the habitation module. Katia’s hair is still saturated with water and sticking out in all directions like a sea anemone.

  “I’m glad the centrifuge didn’t malfunction on you,” Tim is saying.

  “So am I,” Katia says.

  When I float out of the hatch to my horticulture module, Katia says, “Jimmy! You never have used the golf simulator since we came, have you?”

  “No,” I reply. “Broken arm first, then broken centrifuge.”

  “Why don’t we do it together, now?”

  Tim says, “Don’t you think you’ve tempted fate enough for one day?”

  “It’s okay. I did a couple experiments. If it starts to spin too fast, all we have to do is jump to the center and we’ll be weightless. Then we can shut it down by floating to one of the control panels.”

  “Hmm,” Tim says, frowning.

  Katia is staring at us hopefully with a childlike quality that makes denying her difficult. I certainly have wanted to use the golf simulator. “Oh, what the heck,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

  She smiles broadly. To Tim she says, “Are you in?”

  He grins, “I’m in.”

  The centrifuge, like all the modules that were added for our mission, is shaped like a giant barrel. The entrance is a round hole in the center of the top of the barrel. Inside is a central tunnel with entrances to the various rooms that occupy the cylinder of the module. One of the entrances leads to the shower. One leads to the room with the bed. Another leads to the exercise room. We have been using the station’s old equipment ever since the centrifuge went off-limits, but I wouldn’t mind hopping on an actual exercise bicycle again, or even giving these supple, old muscles a run for their money by lifting some weights. The back of the centrifuge houses the recreation room where there’s a table for playing cards or having drinks, the ping pong table, billiards, and the infamous-but-as-of-yet-never used golf simulator. We enter the recreation room, which is warm and inviting, like a lounge at a hotel. Because it takes up the entire back fifteen feet of the module, it is open and airy. The game tables, golf simulator, and several chairs are affixed to the floor all the way around the inside of the cylinder. Katia floats to the control panel which is in the center of the back wall and starts the centrifuge. It runs on a timer, which she sets for one hour.

  The control panel begins a countdown of twenty seconds before it starts. We hurry down to sit in the chairs and wait a
s the room begins to spin. When it does, I feel the blood falling from my head. It is a strange, dizzying sensation and for a moment I fear I will feel very sick. The last time I used the centrifuge was 132 days ago. That counts as an extraordinarily long-duration mission by NASA’s standards. Maybe using the centrifuge wasn’t the best idea, after all, unless I can lie on the bed and catch some shut-eye.

  As the full force of the artificial gravity weighs me down, I find that I don’t feel sick, but I do feel heavy. I am disconcerted by how flappy my upper arms appear and how I can sense the skin sagging on my face.

  Katia rises from her seat, followed by Tim, who unsteadily puts a hand on Katia to stabilize himself. I am afraid to try to stand because I’m pretty sure I can’t. I feel incredibly weak.

  Once Tim is stable, the two of them walk across the convexly curving floor and offer to help me up. As I stand, I feel that I am supporting the weight of an ox.

  As Katia and Tim release me to steady myself, I quip, “Did we bring a walker on this mission?” I start to lean and fall, but Katia catches me, glancing up at Tim with concern.

  “We can stop the centrifuge,” says Tim. “This might be too much for you too quickly.”

  “No, no,” I insist. “I’ll be fine. Give me a minute to get my land-legs.” We seniors are like toddlers: we’re decidedly ambitious when it comes to doing things people expect we can’t do.

  After a few minutes, I start to feel like walking to the golf simulator won’t be like hiking Mount Everest, after all. I take my first step, and it’s a doozy. I wobble and my legs almost buckle underneath me, but I right myself and take another in short order. Before long I’m standing in front of the simulator with one thumb tucked behind my belt and waving the other hand saying, “Will you whippersnappers hurry up to the fairway? I can’t wait to win.”

  Katia laughs, “You can’t wait to try to stay on your feet, you mean.”

  “If you’re afraid, you can serve as my caddie while I show Tim how it’s done. Where’re my clubs?”

  As I take my first swing, I lose my balance on the upswing and have to replant my feet.

  Katia snickers.

  “Just showing you what not to do so you don’t feel ashamed,” I say, adjusting my stance. I strike the ball and it loudly hits the projector screen and drops to the floor, an odd sight since my brain has adjusted its expectations to zero gravity. “A magnificent shot!” I proclaim. In reality, according to the computer the ball traveled a paltry 120 yards. I hold the club out from my body and release it near the wall and am surprised when, instead of floating, it falls to the floor. Old habits die hard, apparently.

  None of us seem to have the stamina to hit a full eighteen holes, so at hole four we agree to go only to nine. My shots improve with every strike of the ball until I really have Katia and Tim on the ropes. When we finish, I have beaten them soundly. So soundly, in fact, that it irks me. When I was on Earth, I played okay but not great. This has been my best game ever, by far. I find it hard to believe my performance is that good, so I don’t trust this simulator. I wish it was more accurate because I would have liked to have gotten a better idea of how bad a shape I’m really in. Nevertheless, it was fun. And for a few moments, the dread of Katia’s and Commander Sykes’ situation almost passed from my mind.

  “Now, watch this,” Katia says. She squats and kicks with all the force she can muster, flying up into the middle of the room where she floats, spinning end over end with increasing speed. Of course, she’s not really spinning. Tim and I are spinning around her at a rate of nine times a minute. She looks like she’s going faster because she’s losing momentum compared to us.

  “Once you do that,” Tim remarks, “you can’t really come back down without hurting yourself, can you?”

  “Probably not,” she smiles.

  Tim says, “You’d think they’d have put a switch in every room near the floor so we could easily turn it off whenever we wanted to instead of putting it on a timer.”

  “Something tells me they didn’t have time to build it that way. The timer was probably the best solution they could come up with in the time they had.”

  She jumped up close enough to the wall that she is able to reach out and push the button to stop the centrifuge. After she does, she looks like she is spinning less and less quickly until we catch up with her. As this happens, I feel less and less planted on the floor. Tim starts hopping along, looking a lot like Armstrong bouncing on the moon. He hops one time too many, however, and flies high up. “Watch out!” Tim shouts as he gently collides with Katia, to which she giggles. They roll back to the floor, which has now slowed to a stop. Katia holds onto Tim and he grips her with one arm while pushing them off the floor with his other hand, Katia underneath him. He grips a chair leg to stabilize them, laughing, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to do that.”

  “It’s space ballet!” Katia laughs. “I used to do ballet, when I was a girl, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” says Tim.

  “Spin me.”

  “What?”

  “Spin me, you know, a pirouette!” She touches her fingers together in front of her abdomen.

  “Okay,” Tim says, obliging.

  “Faster!” she cries, giggling.

  Tim uses both hands to spin her more and more quickly. The smile on her face is the broadest I’ve ever seen her make, and that’s saying something for Katia. She is like a carefree little girl having her last day of innocent life before the darkness comes. The sight moves me deeply. Tim meets my eyes and it is obvious he is feeling exactly how I am.

  She giggles, “Faster!”

  Thirty-six

  They say you’re supposed to be thankful for the good times and the bad. I’m having a hard time with that. This is one of those times when the whys of the universe really get to a man.

  It’s been thirty days since we played golf in the centrifuge. I’ll never forget that. I’d bet my bottom dollar neither will Tim. I don’t understand why she was well for that one day and one day only, but I’m grateful for that day.

  The time is 3:26 a.m. I should be sleeping, but I can’t sleep. From my lonely post by the expansive window of the habitation module, I stare out into space. An albatross can wander out over the featureless ocean for ten years at a time—or so I’ve heard. A man, well he’d go mad doing that. Men need something to fix their eyes on at least once in a while. Out here, I see nothing but the empty void of distant stars I could never possibly reach and a galaxy so large that its beginning and end are beyond my comprehension to grasp.

  I am increasingly disheartened by the fact that no matter how long I stare through this cold glass, the hopeful rays of a sunrise will never come. We are in endless, utter darkness, and now even Katia can no longer light it up with her smile.

  I decide that since I’m awake, I might as well be productive, so I drift on over towards my horticulture module. The green nighttime glow of the tunnels and the ceaseless hum of the equipment has become almost comforting in some strange way. Familiarity will do that, I guess. This station is like an incubator and we are the little infants trapped inside, incubating. We love our incubator station just like a child loves an indifferent mother. She’s our mother. She’s all we’ve got and we don’t know any better.

  As I pass one of the other horticulture modules, movement inside catches my eye. The hatch is open, which is strange. We are supposed to keep the hatches closed. Curiosity killed the cat, I think to myself. The last time I paused to peep at movement inside a horticulture module I got an eyeful that I didn’t want. Still, though, if somebody else is up at this ungodly hour, I wouldn’t mind having the company, so I grab a handlebar and crane my neck.

  At first, I don’t see anyone. But between plants I glimpse two red lights that are moving up an aisle. The hazy fuchsia light absorbs details, so it’s hard to make out the shapes that are attached to the red points. They are moving farther back into the module. If I want to see what’s going on in there, I’ll ne
ed to go inside. I have the sneaking suspicion that I’d be better off minding my own business. But any business that I don’t mind in this station is bound to turn into my business at some point, so I might as well find out sooner rather than later what the heck might be going on.

  I carefully slip through the hatch into the module. It’s Commander Tomlinson’s. The first thing I notice is how big his plants are. I had kind of assumed that because I grew up on a dairy farm in Kansas I would have the leg up on these wannabes. My assumption was apparently dead wrong because it’s like the Garden of Eden in here. Everything is impressively lush, and the leaves are sizeable. That’s funny because I don’t remember Commander Tomlinson seeming like he was particularly busy with his horticultural duties. In fact, quite the contrary.

  I make a point of keeping myself as concealed and quiet as possible as I float towards the back of the module where the spots of light headed. The lights went out, but I can still make out the shapes. Some little metallic noises are coming from them. Through the leaves, I see that it is two SPHERES with their backs to me. They are hovering over a plant and seem to be laser-focused on some task. What that task is, I can’t tell until I get close enough.

  They are harvesting. One of them is precisely snipping each bean pod off the stem and thrusting it into the bag that the other is holding. They are working fast—much faster than any humans could. Their work is silent except for the efficient clip of the shears.

  Sometimes when a person gets a shock it takes him a little more time than it should for his gears to engage. In this case, my powers of deduction aren’t working at their maximum capacity, for sure. My first thought is shame on Commander Tomlinson for keeping these SPHERES to himself when they could have been helping all of us with our horticulture duties. My second thought is shame on NASA for not telling us how capable the SPHERES are. Finally, I come to the inevitable conclusion that NASA didn’t tell us because NASA didn’t know.