by Jon Scieszka
The clock tower ticked down the seconds. Cheers erupted as the external cameras tracked the great sail deploying and stretching taut, filled with the solar wind. Now a new countdown began. Three weeks until T-Bin achieved orbit around Primordius. Ahead of them in the crowd, Tanner could see Ocean and his family hugging one another, filled with über-joy for their über-future. Tanner wanted to feel his own joyful anticipation—after all, once they left this tin can, he’d finally have the space to put some distance between himself and these people. Yet Tanner found himself filled instead with a prescient dread as wide and swollen as the great solar sail.
“From now until the day we arrive on the new world, our studies will be about preparing us for the transition.”
Mrs. March, Tanner’s teacher, wrote the word “colonists” on the board.
“We have called ourselves colonists all these years, but we won’t truly be colonists until we arrive—and our new home will require us to give the very best of ourselves.”
Tanner noticed that she held eye contact with him as she said it—as if warning him he’d better get with the program. Tanner glanced away and around the school room. With fewer than a hundred school-age children, kids of various ages were grouped together into four classrooms. The younger kids in his class looked terrified, the older kids confident. The goof-offs cracked jokes under their breath, and the studious kids actually took notes as if there would be a test after they disembarked.
“The planet will have weather.” Mrs. March wrote the word on the board. A lot of the kids looked confused, but no one admitted aloud that they had no idea what weather was. “Storms, and winds, and rain—which is beads of water falling from the sky. There may be extremes of heat and cold as well.”
Something’s wrong about this. The feeling pounded as powerfully as Tanner’s heartbeat, but he couldn’t figure out why he was so unsettled. It reminded him of when he used to play chess with his father. He would sense his loss three or four moves before it happened. He couldn’t see all the moves that would lead him there—it was as if his brain saw something his conscious mind had yet to grasp. And everything about their arrival on Primordius screamed “checkmate.”
“Fields will be rocky and hard to plant,” continued Mrs. March, “and the only shelter will be shelter we find or build.”
Then Ocean, slouching back in his chair, called out, “Will there be water enough for Tanner to take a bath?”
Snickers all around, and so Tanner said, “Will there be a cliff high enough for me to throw Ocean off?”
This time the only laugh came from Morena.
“Gentlemen, please,” said Mrs. March. “Disparagement is not our friend.” Then she paused and said. “But yes, there will be mountains, and yes, there will be water. A full half of the planet is water—not quite as much as Earth, but more than enough for us.”
A younger child asked if there would be “things” in the water, and Mrs. March quieted his fears. “Primordius is a lifeless world, but its air is oxygen-rich, and ready for life. We are bringing that life—which is why Governor Bainbridge called us ‘precious cargo.’” Then she smiled. “And all of you are the most precious of all—for you will be the first generation to grow up as Primordians.”
That’s the moment when one small piece of the puzzle presented itself to Tanner. He raised his hand, and Mrs. March took a deep breath before she called on him. “Yes, Tanner?”
“Why no animals?” he asked.
The question threw her off kilter. “Excuse me?”
“In Earth studies, we were always learning about animals. Pets and stuff that we don’t eat, as well as animals that we do—but we didn’t bring any. Why?”
“Ooh—I can answer that!” said Mary Wilcox, hurling her hand into the air so fast Tanner imagined her fingers flying off and embedding in the ceiling. “Animals eat too much, so if we brought them, we’d have to bring fewer people. So the builders decided we’d all be vegetarians, and there could be more of us on board.”
“But if the mission is to spread life—” Tanner tried to point out, but Mrs. March cut him off.
“Mr. Burgess, I believe your question has been answered.” Then she turned to the board and wrote the number 1.15. “Gravity on Primordius will be 1.15 times stronger than the centrifugal gravity we experience here. That might not seem like much, but it will make the physical demands on all of us very difficult.”
Tanner’s hand flew up again, and he spoke without waiting to be called on. “Then why didn’t the builders slowly increase the spin of T-Bin, so we’d be accustomed to the new gravity by the time we got there?”
“The builders couldn’t think of everything, Mr. Burgess.”
“But they did!” called out Morena. “The builders planned out everything in T-Bin—it doesn’t make sense they’d skip something so important.”
“I’m sure they had their reasons,” said Mrs. March. “Now please, we have a lot to cover in a limited amount of time. I will entertain no more questions today.”
Day after day it was the same. Tanner would point out what appeared to be flaws in the builders’ plans, only to be shut down by other students, or by Mrs. March.
“I think you’re making some good points,” Morena told him, “but maybe Mrs. March is right. The builders had their reasons. I mean, they only had two jobs. Build this place, and get us down to the planet safely. You’d think they’d get it right.”
“Yeah, you’d think,” Tanner told her. “And you’d also think that water wouldn’t vanish into thin air.”
With one week to Primordius, the entire school was taken on a field trip to an area of T-Bin that had been off limits for sixty-seven years. The “delivery ship” hangar. Within the massive hangar was a winged ship capable of carrying 400 people.
“The builders anticipated everything,” explained Principal Hammond, who had taken charge of the tour. “Population growth was regulated to make sure there were precisely the same amount of colonists at the end of the journey as when the journey began. There’s a seat for everyone.”
“Where are the engines?” Tanner asked, and felt the communal groan of frustration from his classmates.
Principal Hammond, who was also seeing the delivery ship for the first time, looked it over, then said, “Well, clearly it’s a glider.”
“With no landing gear?” Morena asked, throwing a wink at Tanner.
“Obviously,” said Principal Hammond, with increasing exasperation. “This craft was designed to land on water, which the autopilot will find. Believe me—nothing here has been left to chance. Nothing.”
Two days and counting. Classes had ended. Anything they needed to learn either they already knew, or they would learn once they reached Primordius.
The T-Bin Council was in session nonstop, and a slow leak of rumors had people on edge. Rumors that T-Bin was not heading into geosynchronous orbit as expected. Rumors that the cargo bay of the delivery ship wasn’t large enough to haul the farming equipment they would most certainly need. Rumors that the builders were not quite as visionary as everyone believed.
“So what?” Ocean Klingsmith was heard to say. “So we’ll face a little hardship—it’ll be good for us. And in the end, we’ll conquer Primordius and live like kings. Or at least some of us will.”
It was officially announced that there had been a slight miscalcuation, and T-Bin was not heading into any sort of orbit at all but was going to crash on Primordius instead.
“Not a problem,” Governor Bainbridge told everyone. “We’ll have left in the delivery ship long before it happens, and our departure is still on schedule.”
On the last night, Morena showed up at Tanner’s farm. Tanner had spent most of the day sorting and resorting the things he cared about into piles of things he needed to take with him versus the things that he wanted to take. He kept trying to whittle down his piles so that it would all fit into his backpack, but he simply couldn’t do it. In the end, he realized, if he wanted to survive, he co
uld take nothing but food and water. When Morena arrived it was a welcome relief, until he saw the tears in her eyes.
“You have to come!” Morena told him. “It’s my grandfather! I called the doctor, but he wouldn’t come! He wouldn’t! He doesn’t even care.”
They ran all the way to the Beausoleil homestead to find Mr. Beausoleil looking so cadaverous in his bed, Tanner thought he might already be dead. But then he slowly opened his eyes.
“Glad,” he wheezed. “Glad not to see it. Glad to die before we get there. Before it happens.”
“Don’t say that, Grandpa!” Morena took his hand. “You’ll be on the ship with the rest of us. It’s just one more day. You can hold on for one more day.”
“Sorry . . .” he said. “So sorry for you, Morena. And for you, Tanner.”
For a moment his rheumy eyes seemed to clear, and he held Tanner’s gaze.
“You know something, don’t you?” Tanner realized.
“Didn’t know, but I suspected,” the old man said. “So I did a little poking in the computer. There’s a lot that’s classified, but you can piece things together from the things that aren’t classified.” He grimaced. Shifted. He took a deep breath to ward off the pain, then closed his eyes, too weak to keep them open. “The storage silos,” he said. “They’re all sealed behind the aft wall of the T-Bin drum. Off limits. Computer controlled.”
Tanner knew about the storage silos. They contained grains, chemical fertilizer, liquid oxygen—all the things that the colonists would need for a sixty-seven-year journey. No one had ever seen the storage area that held the silos, but everyone knew they were there. It was one more system that the builders had designed to work without any human interference.
“The silos should be empty. All used up,” Mr. Beausoleil said. “But every container is full.”
Morena shook her head. “You must have misread it, Grandpa.”
“But if it’s true,” Tanner said, “and we used up all the stuff in those silos . . . then what’s in there now?”
Mr. Beausoleil’s bony knuckles went white as he gripped Morena’s hand tighter. “So, so sorry, Morena,” he said, and then, before he released his final breath and let death take him, he hissed out one final prophecy.
“We are not the precious cargo. . . .”
Like the top and bottom of any tin can, there were two ends of the T-Bin drum. The colonists called the forward end “the lid,” although it didn’t open. Built into the steel face of the lid were the school, the medical center, the market, and various offices. At the other end of the drum was “the boot,” and while the lid was designed to be aesthetically pleasing, with murals and mosaics layered into the steel, the boot was utilitarian and ugly. It held the physical plant that recycled water and reoxygenated the air when the plant life couldn’t do it alone. It held the reactor that powered the lights and kept T-Bin from freezing in the icy depths of space—but the largest part of the boot was dedicated to the storage silos. Pipes went in, pipes went out, and the automated system worked so efficiently, there was no need for anyone to bother themselves with what was behind the great steel wall.
There was a hatch on that wall as intimidating as a vault door that allowed entrance into the massive silo hold, but it had an angry red sign on it that read, Authorized Personnel Only. Apparently no one in T-Bin was authorized, for the door had never been opened.
On that last morning, with only a few hours left until the delivery ships launched, Morena and Tanner buried Mr. Beausoleil right in the heart of his farm. There were regulations against such things, but like always, no one cared enough about their comings and goings to stop them. Folks were too busy preparing for their future to worry themselves over the last rites of the only original colonist, or the troubles of two unclean orphans.
As soon as Tanner and Morena were done, and the requisite prayers had been said, they went straight to the silo hold.
The steel hatch had a security panel, and it required a password to be punched in. Tanner had never met a computer he couldn’t hack—but this didn’t even have an interface beyond the keypad. The only way to break in was to break the code.
While the rest of the colonists had a huge “Friendship Brunch,” to gorge themselves on all the food they couldn’t take with them, Tanner and Morena stood at the silo hold hatch and tried dozens upon dozens of passwords that failed.
Tanner kicked the door, which succeeded in doing nothing but bruise his toes. “I refuse to be defeated by a lousy password!”
“There’s less than six hours until the delivery craft leaves, Tanner. Maybe we should forget this and start getting ready.”
“No! Your grandfather was on to something.” Tanner didn’t care how limited the time was. That instinct that knew things three moves ahead was telling him that this was important. More than important, it was crucial.
“Look up there.” He pointed to a brass plate above the door. It was a star chart that featured the area of space they were sailing into—or at least, how that area of space appeared from Earth. Seven stars in a pattern that had become familiar to everyone on T-Bin. “Where have you seen that before?”
“Everywhere,” Morena said. “It’s on the mural in our school, it’s on the T-Bin flag—”
“No—I mean that exact brass plaque. I know I’ve seen it.”
Morena squinted as she looked at it and said, “Town square. There’s one just like it on the builders’ monument.”
“Bingo! Let’s go.”
They hurried to town square. In the center of the square was the statue, and at its base was a lofty dedication carved in stone. Beside the dedication was the brass plaque of seven stars.
“I think you’re right,” Morena said. “There must be some connection.”
Tanner stared at it, trying to put himself in the builders’ places. Trying to think like them. Far away there was laughter from the Friendship Brunch, as if he was being mocked from a distance.
Morena did not have his patience. “Staring at that thing until your eyes cross isn’t going to solve anything.”
And then she gasped. When Tanner looked to her, her eyes looked odd somehow, and she was just a little bit pale.
“What is it?”
“Look at it again, Tanner—only this time cross your eyes!”
When he did, the stars were superimposed over the dedication, highlighting certain letters.
THIS MONUMENT IS DEDICATED TO THE
VISIONARY DESIGNERS AND THE DARING
SOULS WHO JOINED IN THIS GLORIOUS
PARTNERSHIP TO BRING LIFE TO THE
STARS. THE INTREPID AND THE BRAVE,
WE COMMEND YOU!
What the stars spelled out was unmistakable.
DARWIN C.
Could it be that simple? Tanner and Morena rushed back to the silo hold door and, taking a deep breath, Tanner entered D-A-R-W-I-N-C.
Nothing at first. Then a clanging of bolts pulling back. The huge door began to open, and they were hit by a stink so overpowering it made them weak at the knees.
“Oh my God! What is that?” Morena covered her face and turned away.
The smell was so awful it took all of Tanner’s will to step over the threshold. Inside, he saw the silo hold—row after row of steel tanks a hundred feet high. They were swollen to bursting—and all of them were oozing foul-smelling gunk. They were no longer full of grain, or whatever else they had once been carrying. One look at what oozed out of them and Tanner knew.
The silos were full of sewage.
A million flushes from sixty-seven years in space.
“I don’t understand,” said Morena, still covering her nose and mouth. “Waste water is recycled. And what can’t be recycled is ejected into space.”
“Apparently not.”
This explained the missing water. Perhaps some of the water was recycled, but the rest was pumped right back into these vats of human waste.
“What were the builders thinking?” Morena wailed.
; Tanner couldn’t stand the stench for a moment more. He stumbled out with Morena, back into the fresh air of the T-Bin farmlands. As he caught his breath, it all fell into place, and he understood. He saw the minds of the builders, and he knew the truth. If your goal is to bring life to the stars, you don’t start with the highest life-form. You start with the lowest.
“It was never the builders’ plan to start a human colony!” Tanner told Morena. “Our sole purpose on T-Bin was to create sixty-seven years of bacteria. We are not the precious cargo. Our crap is!”
But before they could even process this woeful bit of news, T-Bin’s spin-quake sirens began to blare—and this time it wasn’t Tanner’s doing.
There had only been one spin-quake in T-Bin’s history. A meteor had clipped it and thrown the spinning drum several degrees off kilter. The force of the meteor strike had killed anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time, including Morena’s parents. The hull wasn’t breached, though, and ultimately the ball bearings that filled T-Bin’s outer shell had done their job, flowing to where they needed to be, balancing the ship, and bringing its spin back under control.
However, this spin-quake was of a completely different nature. There was nothing in the ship’s design to compensate for the gravitational pull of Primordius. T-Bin’s smooth constant spin became a wobble growing more violent by the minute. It meant the timing of their departure was hours off—they were going to hit the planet much sooner than expected.
People left the Friendship Brunch in a panic, racing home to grab their belongings, if they lived close enough, or racing straight to the delivery craft hangar. The ground shifted beneath everyone’s feet like a funhouse floor, the artificial gravity no longer pulling in a consistent direction.
On the main road, Tanner and Morena stopped people—trying to tell them what they knew, trying to warn them, but no one would listen. Finally they encountered Ocean Klingsmith.
“What the hell is wrong with the two of you?” he yelled. “Don’t just stand there—get to the delivery ship.”