by Bobby Adair
“Sounds like good advice.”
Chapter 39
We arrive at the shack, the remains of it, anyway. It’s been smashed. A gouge a hundred meters long runs across the ground and through its remains. Half the shack is just gone, ripped away, and who the hell knows where any of it is? The half still on the ground is crumpled flat.
Equipment that had been inside is broken and scattered, some on the surface, some floating. Other pieces drift slowly into space.
Brice, not fazed by the destruction, drops to his knees, and starts rifling through the debris. “Let’s hope the Potato didn’t take it this bad.” He glances up at me with a silent request to affirm or rebut his hope for our soldiers back there.
I’m at a loss. If thoughts of the Potato’s destruction have been bubbling through Brice’s gray matter during our hike around this little rock, he’s way ahead of me. I was too focused on our problems to think of them. Now, newbie to this set of fears, that they all might be dead, that the station might be destroyed, that the smudge of brownish-gray I saw in the distance might have suffered its own collision and might be careening so fast away from us we’ll never catch it…
Oh, fuck it!
Any combination of a thousand terrible outcomes might have befallen bitchy Blair and the soldiers we left at the mining colony, and I don’t know what to feel about any of that.
“You gonna help me?” Brice asks. “Or watch?”
“Watching is good.”
“Yes, Major.” Brice tugs at a sheet of metal once part of a flimsy wall.
I step over to help while I piece my composure together with the glue of our desperate situation. By all rights, we shouldn’t have lived this long, and we shouldn’t have any long-term aspirations in the realm of continued existence. Death is sure to wrap its bony fingers around our necks soon.
“Just kidding, man.” I bend over and grab the piece of metal Brice is tugging at. Our combined strength is enough to yank it free.
Brice crawls inside the wreckage, and I heave the sheet of metal into space, sending it into orbit around the asteroid. When I turn back toward Brice, he’s working through the jumbled mess, busy and quick, thankfully not desperate.
“H packs?” I ask, still working through my sudden dance with distress. “Any luck?”
“Looking.” He shoves junked equipment and digs through the smaller pieces, creating a cloud of metal and other materials—all sizes, all weights.
I scan the area, looking for cartridges. Could they have all been blown off into space? I look across our rugged, curving landscape. I look in the sky. How far away could those little white bottles go and still be visible? Would a hundred meters be too far? Two hundred? And what about our rotation and translational velocity?
Deep breath.
I’m not prone to panic, yet I feel like I slipped on some kind of mental banana and I’m having trouble finding my feet.
“Jackpot!” Brice could have said ‘hemorrhoid,’ and if he’d said it with that much excitement, the syllables wouldn’t have mattered. His tone told me what I needed so desperately to hear. He’s found H.
“A lot of them?”
“A collapsed cabinet.” He’s up on his feet, legs bent, straining to drag something free. “A wire cage thing.” He gasps with the effort. “Fifty, sixty bottles in here.”
“H?” I ask, “Or C?”
“Both, looks like.”
I’m beside him in a heartbeat, helping pull the deformed wire box free, looking at it with a love only someone who has starved or thirsted can understand.
“Looks like Trog stuff.”
“H is H,” I tell him. “Hydrogen has the same recipe everywhere.”
Brice doesn’t laugh.
I thought it was funny.
“Trog cal packs.” Brice isn’t happy about that. He steps backward, dragging the metal cage free.
“Can we use their cal packs?” I ask, concerned maybe their food might be poisonous to humans.
“Can.” Brice straightens up and admires his work. “Tastes like grapefruit rind purée. Disgusting stuff. It’ll keep you alive, though.”
“Wonderful.”
“And once you plug one into your suit,” Brice grimaces, “that shit stays in your system and makes all your cal packs taste like shit for two or three months. The only way to get it out is to have the techs do an overhaul.”
“I take it you’ve had it before.”
Brice nods. “Back on Ceres. At the end, we were scavenging them off dead Trogs.” Brice drops to his knees, then bends the cage’s doorframe to open it up.
“You’ve had some experiences out here, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
I sit down on a hunk of stone and stare up at Jupiter rising again over the asteroid’s horizon. “When you came up, is any of this what you expected? I mean, I’ve seen some crazy shit, and it’s only been a few days for me. I can’t start to guess all you’ve been through.”
Brice laughs with the giddiness of a man who just earned a long extension on life. “I gotta be honest, things are more interesting since you arrived.”
“You mean space was just another boring version of earth?”
“No, nothing like that.” Brice seats himself cross-legged beside his prize. “If you think these past few days are par for the course, they aren’t. I think guys with lives this interesting don’t tend to live long enough to tell their friends about it.”
Still staring at Jupiter’s red spot with fascination, I ask, “You were in construction at first, right? Why’d you come up? You had to know back then that life expectancy was short for construction workers up here.”
“I did,” says Brice as he pulls an H pack out of the crunched cabinet. He shakes it and listens, definitely a habit left over from his life back on earth. There’s no way he can hear the liquid hydrogen splashing inside the bottle. That’s when I get it. He can feel the hydrogen moving inside. He tosses the H to me.
I press a small button along the top edge of the bottle, and a band of green lights flashes bright to tell me it’s full. That’s a relief. I wrap the bottle in the Velcro straps on my right thigh and breathe a well-deserved sigh.
Brice is putting a full bottle on his thigh as well. “Feels good knowing you’re going to live three more days. Right?”
I agree, of course. “It’s a funny thing knowing your life expires as soon as that little bottle runs dry. I never thought about it when I was back on earth. I never thought about the details of life out here, how it was so different.”
“You mean the null g?”
“No,” I say, “everybody thinks about that. You know, when you’re a kid and dreaming of coming into space, it’s all about zero-g, and rockets blasting, and space battles with aliens. Stupid shit like that. No, I mean the details.”
Brice laughs loudly. “We’ve done some of that, right? So you’re not far off. But you’re right, life out here isn’t what you think it’s going to be when you’re sitting on the farm dreaming about rocketing into the void.”
“Is that why you came up?” I dig. “To escape the farm?”
“Of course,” says Brice. “Some people were made for Nebraska life, living in an endless sea of wheat, rolling hills to the horizon, peace and quiet under blue skies. My parents loved it. They were the right people for that kind of living. I hated it. At least I thought I did.”
“So you weren’t drafted into the construction crews, you volunteered?”
“I’m a genius like that.”
Chapter 40
The mangled shelf containing the H and C packs turns out to be the best container we have available. With one of several carabiners attached to my suit’s belt, I connect to one end of the shelf. Brice connects to the other. It’ll make for awkward going, however, staying connected once we’re out in the void will be worth any imposition.
We talk. We weigh the pros and cons. We do it quickly. We’re both pragmatic. W
e both know the longer we stay on our spinning rock, the more likely we’ll die.
And then we wait.
Jupiter sinks below the horizon, and the sun’s tiny bright sparkle rises above the other.
“I don’t see the Potato,” says Brice, peering into the blackness.
“Give it a minute.” I’m looking toward the horizon as well, trying to remember where we last saw the asteroid colony with respect to the position of the sun. I point to a spot in the sky. “Maybe around ten o’clock asteroid time.” I’m so clever. “I think that’s when we’ll see it come up.”
Brice looks. “When was the last time you did see it?”
“Before we started digging this shelf out of the collapsed shack.”
“An hour?” Brice asks.
“Sure, I guess.”
“How much farther away are we, do you think?”
I shrug. “I don’t have any clue how fast we’re moving.”
We watch and wait as the sun climbs in our sky. I begin to think maybe I was wrong, and begin to wonder about other possibilities. Taking all I don’t know about orbital mechanics into consideration, the possibilities of where my thinking and planning went wrong are too far beyond my educational level to even guess at.
Still, I scan the sky, trying to find that grayish-brown smudge of hope. “You know there’s something I always wondered about?”
“What’s that?” asks Brice, his eyes riveted to the sky.
“The people in Breckenridge, up near the spaceport—we had this image of farmers, like they always had plenty to eat because they had farms.”
“Like Phil had plenty to eat?”
“We talked about Phil’s problem.”
“Sorry,” says Brice. “I couldn’t help myself.”
“That’s okay. I know you don’t like him.”
Brice takes a moment before putting together a real response. “You know the MSS has an office in every farm county, right?”
“I didn’t know that, exactly.” It makes sense, though. “Phil’s wife, remember her?”
Brice’s smile looks a little too lascivious.
I’m pretty sure it’s a dig at me for my indiscretions. “Sydney, she worked as an auditor for the Farm Bureau. MSS, right?”
“They have to be in charge of every detail.” Brice scans the heavens for a few more silent moments. “When I was a kid, there was this family that lived out east of town. I didn’t know them well. I saw the kid in school. He was a few grades ahead of me and kind of a bully. A chunky kid. Phil reminds me of him a little bit.”
“Because he was chunky?” I guess.
“Maybe,” admits Brice. “Not a lot of people around who can afford the luxury of a few extra pounds.”
Truer by the day on an earth ruled by twiggy Gray bastards.
“What happened to the kid?” I ask.
“I was pretty young. Maybe second grade, so I didn’t really understand it. The MSS arrested the kid’s family, him, his two sisters, and the parents. Hung them all from some gallows they had the farmers build on the lawn in front of the courthouse. Said they were hoarders.”
“Food hoarders?” I’m angered, but not surprised. It’s a common story. It seems anytime the MSS is too lazy to beat the hell out of someone, they have them hanged instead.
“I didn’t understand what that meant,” says Brice. “‘Hoarders’ is all everyone called them after that. The MSS officer stood them on dining room chairs under a beam with nooses on their necks. He screamed at them for a long time, you know the way they do, all red-faced and spit dribbling. When he ran out of breath, another one walked down the line and knocked the chairs out from under their feet. They kicked and wiggled while their faces twisted and turned purple and their eyes bulged out. It gave me nightmares.”
“Why do you think your parents made you watch?”
“Everybody in town had to be there,” answers Brice. “That’s the way the MSS wanted it. You know how they are.”
“Yeah.” I’ve got nothing but dark thoughts for those fuckers.
Brice looks up at the sun and then scans across the horizon again. “Should we see it by now?”
I nod, but don’t say anything.
“After that,” says Brice. “No more chunky kids in school. As a matter of fact, I never saw another overweight person who wasn’t MSS until I met Phil.”
“Yeah, the MSS is never short on food.”
Brice points at the sky. “I think we waited too long.” He turns to look at the H and C packs in the deformed cage linking us together.
I extend an arm and point it at the sun. I jab another downward, in the direction I think Jupiter is currently orbiting. Rotating one arm around to point at nothing apparent, I say, “The Potato should be that way. We can’t see it because it’s small and doesn’t reflect any light.”
“What does your bug say?”
“I wish something more. I’m sensing masses all through the darkness out there. Probably pieces of the ship. Maybe other asteroids.”
Brice laughs. “Are you saying we head out in that direction and pray we run into it?”
I pat the wire cage holding our provisions. “We have enough hydro to last us for months, so we can stay here and hope somebody happens upon us, or we can go. The longer we wait, the less likely we are to find the Potato.”
“I’m not sure we’re at all likely to find it now.”
Looking into the blackness for any hint as to the location of the asteroid, I admit, “You’re right, but we both know that staying is choosing to die.” I look around. “Though we will miss out on all the modern conveniences and great views.”
“I’m not arguing.” Brice sighs. “I don’t want to spend the last weeks of my life picking out the best hole for you to bury me in. Better to take our chances out there.”
I look up at the stars to find my bearings. “I think I know the direction. If you want to relax, I’ll handle the grav in both suits.”
“Fine by me. Just say the word.”
“Hold onto the cage,” I tell him. “For stability. No point in putting all of our trust in me or that carabiner.” I gently apply the grav, and we lift off the asteroid’s surface. “I’ll accelerate for thirty minutes or so, and then we’ll coast and see what we see.”
“You’re the pilot.”
Chapter 41
The only gauge I have for our speed is the rapidity with which the asteroid we left shrinks behind us, and that tells me just about nothing. We might be moving at two hundred miles an hour or five thousand.
And direction?
What the hell was I even thinking when I jumped off our rocky little home trying to eyeball-navigate across the solar system? The smaller that asteroid shrinks, the more folly this seems.
Sure, Jupiter is behind me. The sun is to my left. Brice and I are streaking toward the asteroid belt, going pretty much in the direction of the Potato, but I know that if the asteroid is a little farther away than I hoped, if we’re a few degrees off, we might zip on past it, missing it by fifty or a hundred thousand miles and never know.
Maybe that’s the worst part, I don’t know how far away we were when we started, and I don’t know how close we need to be to see it. Maybe every part is the worst part, right down to staying put on the asteroid and waiting to die.
“They left them there,” says Brice.
I look back at him. “What are we talking about?”
“Those people they hanged.”
I chuckle, and then apologize. “I’m not laughing about the hoarders. I just didn’t know we were still having that conversation.”
“Better than staring at the black and thinking about what dying out here will feel like. Nothing to touch. No grav. No heat or cold. Nothing to feel at all. How long before you think a person would go insane out here?”
I don’t want to talk about any of that, so I change back to the subject Brice was hoping to keep his mind busy with. �
�How long did the MSS leave them hanging in front of the courthouse?”
“Months,” he answers. “Birds would sit on them and pick at their skin. Coyotes came around at night and chewed at their feet. We didn’t come into town but maybe once a week, sometimes twice a month. There was less and less of them each trip. Then they just disappeared. Nothing left but ragged ropes and dark spots in the grass. At least the spots went away in the spring when the green grass grew in.”
“The MSS left the ropes and the gallows there?”
“Might still be there,” says Brice. “They wanted the farmers to know they were serious about food theft.”
“Did it work?” I ask. “Or did people just hide it better?”
“That’s an odd question.”
“How so?” It doesn’t seem odd to me. “We’ve all lived under the North Korean tyranny. We’ve all broken the law. Everybody becomes good at it, right? At least the ones of us who stayed alive.”
“You sound like my dad.”
“I think you and I are about the same age.” I look him up and down. “Don’t pull that dad shit with me.” I smile.
“The summer after the hanging,” says Brice, sounding particularly guilty, “I pilfered some corn from the harvest. I stashed it in the barn, back in the loft, a couple of bushels. It was enough so I’d be able to sneak in every day or so and eat some. I was always hungry.”
“You got away with it.” An easy deduction since I see Brice has lived to experience the good fortune of our current situation. “No big deal, right?”
Brice disagrees.
I decide at that moment all of his stories must have shitty endings.
“My dad followed me into the barn one day and caught me.”
“What’d he do?”
“He beat the hell out of me.”
Trying for some happiness in it, I say, “He was looking out for you.”
“Not in the way you think,” says Brice. “When he was done, he didn’t take the corn. He didn’t tell me to turn it in. He told me to get better at hiding it. If he could find it, so could the MSS. Then he went back to the house and left me in the barn.”