The Echo

by James Smythe

  ‘Nearly got them,’ Wallace says, of the cables, but then they stop dead: stuck on something, jarring. ‘What the fuck?’ he asks, and there’s an absolute desperation in his voice. It cracks, and he’s suddenly crying. ‘Fuck, please,’ he says. His voice breaks through the tears, and I don’t know what to do.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Tomas asks, over the intercom. ‘Is everything all right?’ That almost makes me laugh. In another time, it would have made me laugh.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Everything is not all right.’ I wait for the reply as Wallace rushes to try and manually pull the cables, but there is no hand crank, and he will never get purchase. That’s not how they are designed.

  ‘Look on the cameras,’ Wallace yells at me. ‘They’re not moving. They’re stuck on something. Try and get a camera angle we can see them better.’ I press buttons, cycling the exterior cameras on the ship. It turns my stomach: the possibilities of what I could see out there if I catch this at the right angle, the right magnification. What if I see cracks in their helmets or tears in their suits? They’re meant to be fireproof, untearable, but nothing is actually those things. It’s all scales of what can be tested in a lab. Heat anything up enough and it will burn, or melt, or both. Put enough pressure on something – the pressure of the Ishiguro’s engines, say, which I’m betting hasn’t been tested – and anything will crumble and bend. What if I see them dead: burst, burned, ruined inside their helmets? Hikaru calls to us as I’m trying to get a decent picture – yet, honestly, I’m looking but not seeing, because this is all too much – and I panic and shake and leave what I am doing and pull myself through the corridor and to the cockpit trying to forget for a second our teammates who are somehow seemingly snagged on nothing at all, and on his screens I see the Ishiguro off in the distance, screaming forward, engines fit to burst, shuddering with how fast it is going; and then it starts to peel itself apart, like one of those videos of cars hitting walls, the dummies that were proxy flying through windscreens or hurling themselves around the interior. This was the self-destruct sequence. It was designed to break apart if it needed to, on re-entry: separating cleverly so that the seating area, fitted with a parachute, could complete the rest of the descent by itself. But why destroy themselves? Why here, and now? Shards seem to splinter off first, and then whole chunks, spinning off from the bulk of the ship with force, all of them propelled away from it. What’s left of the ship scatters them in its wake. I can, from here, see inside the ship: it’s not illuminated, but there they are, the insides of the ship. I have studied it: watched videos of it before the launch, seeing all the crew in their positions, narrated by their very own journalist; seen pictures of it; seen scale models; used it as research for our own craft, both in terms of what to do, and what not. And here it is now, in the flesh. It is so close that I could almost touch it.

  Then I see them: two of the Ishiguro’s crew members floating away from their craft into the darkness. One in a chair; the other clutched to the first, spinning away from the remains of their ship. That’s all they have, and there’s no way that we can save them. We’re too far away, and they are moving too quickly. Not towards us, but towards nothingness, deeper and deeper into space, or the anomaly, whatever it is.

  But now, we have our own problems. Maybe there are things more important than answers.

  In the airlock, Wallace types furiously to try and get the safety lines to work harder. I look outside, and I see them pressed up against something: their suits flattened. ‘It’s the anomaly,’ I say. ‘They are trapped inside the anomaly.’ Wallace looks as I pull up overlays, and they are: it’s where they crossed, that’s where they are trapped. They have been able to pass through it, but cannot pass back. Perhaps this explains why the Ishiguro never came home. ‘Stop,’ I tell Wallace, so he does. He is drenched with his own tears, and it’s so curious to see them: out of his eyes, onto his cheeks, peeling away and drifting into the air between us. ‘How much air have they got?’

  ‘If they’re still alive?’ He looks at me as if this is my fault, and his. We are mutually responsible. ‘A couple of hours, minus however long they’ve been out there,’ he says. I suck in air through my teeth. I have to keep this together.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Hikaru asks.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ I say. When they’re not looking I take a stim, and I cling to the safety rails, and I tell Tomas to contribute anything, if he has any ideas. The delay feels even longer than usual. Maybe he’s choosing to not answer.

  ‘Okay,’ he finally says.

  I have never felt as useless as I do right now. As I look at them out there, and I wonder what we can do. And I talk to Tomas, who says that he cannot do anything. He says, ‘Mira, this is on you. You are the one up there,’ and it feels as if he is removing himself from the blame. I wonder what he is doing down there. I wonder what they are all doing: scrutinizing their low-quality versions of our camera feeds, wondering which of the crew are dead. Maybe they all are.

  We get confirmation of one before they do, because of the lag. I am watching the screens on my own. I don’t know where Wallace is, because he left me here by myself, and Hikaru is in the cockpit, scanning to see what caused the Ishiguro to blow up. I am by myself when one of the cables slackens, slightly; and the one of them closest to us on it, Lennox, begins to drift back towards us, pulled by the tension. It is only him, the other two are still against the anomaly wall; I shout for Wallace and Hikaru to come and help get him in, amazed that Lennox somehow made it out of the anomaly, but the others do not come. I am alone when Lennox reaches the airlock: and he drifts towards the camera, and I see his face, and I just know.

  8

  Lennox’s body is inside the hatch, and I can drift down to floor level and see it: his eyes shut, as if this was peaceful for him. This was nothing. A dream of death: going to sleep and never waking up.

  ‘We can’t bring him in until the others are through,’ Wallace says, when he finally arrives. He doesn’t seem surprised that Lennox is dead; he is cold to it. The tether wire blocks the outer door, so it can’t happen. I wonder if it matters. Lennox is okay here: his body crumbled, pressed up, but peaceful, and at least he’s here. We can do something with him after all of this. He can have a funeral, when we get home. ‘I said that he should go,’ Wallace tells me, but he says it with no pain in his voice: a blunt statement. No more tears; this is, I think, his way of focusing on the task at hand; at what needs to be done. ‘I said that he would be good out there.’ We are not to blame. I wonder if I should say that, or if this is okay: leaving it as a guilt that we may always feel. I do not know the best way to grieve when you are implicit. He pushes himself to the doorway. ‘Why are they still there?’ he asks, but he knows the answer, as much as makes sense. He wants me to say it.

  ‘I do not know,’ I say.

  ‘Do you think they’re alive?’ He makes eye contact. He’s taken a stim, I can see: his eyes are focused, not twitching. Totally still as they stare at mine.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I think that they might still be alive.’ We both know what that means, even as we cannot explain it.

  ‘Okay.’ He nods his head, processing this. ‘I want gravity,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I say, a snap reaction.

  ‘I need it.’ He doesn’t look at me, and he doesn’t actually sound angry in his voice; but I know that there will be no arguing with him about this. He brings up a console. ‘Hang on to something,’ he says. I reach out for the rail on the wall, but I am too slow.

  We fall, collectively.

  My feet touch the ground, and they try to take the weight, as they are used to doing; as they have been trained, over years and years, to do. They are shaky, desperately so. We haven’t been here long enough to do permanent damage, but there will always be an initial weakness. If you spend a week lying down, you can barely walk for a few hours. Now I shake and lurch for the rail, and my whole self feels implausibly heavy. Another time and place this might be funny: I nee
d the safety bars when there is no gravity; we put the gravity on and I still need them. I am useless, I think. I am in need of assistance in everything. Wallace massages his calves, and he moves forward slowly and clumsily, but better than I. We were meant to be doing exercises, but I have ignored them the entire time. I wonder if he’s been doing them: when he goes back to his engine rooms, grabbing the bars and forcing himself to squat against the wall, pulling himself towards it to work the legs and arms as best he can.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘We work out how to get Tobi and Inna back now.’ Force, defiance in his voice. He is driven.

  ‘If we could have done this differently,’ I say. I don’t know how I’m intending on finishing the thought. We wouldn’t. This would have always gone this way. I stagger to the cockpit in his wake, and he sits next to Hikaru. I am left behind them, clinging to the rail. My legs cramp. I cannot moan. I cannot cry about this. I tell myself: this could be so much worse. The three of us discuss the options as if this is the most natural thing in the world. We are cold about it, no emotion here. We do not allow ourselves to panic. There is a timer on one of the screens, I see: a countdown of the air that they have left. Hikaru must have set it, and while it’s only approximate, it’s terrifying. I cannot stop looking at it as we talk, and for brief moments I lose attention and I picture Inna. I picture her coughing for air, struggling. I wonder if she will know what is happening; if it will hurt.

  We have options.

  We go in there, to rescue the two of them.

  We force them through the anomaly, using the winch. Wallace does something that might make it more powerful, and we exert that force on their bodies, whatever the cost. We get them back one way or another.

  We accept that they are a loss. We say goodbye. We watch them die, because we are scared, and we want to save ourselves. This is not a real option.

  As we discuss, we all try to not shout. Wallace doesn’t speak as Hikaru, myself and Tomas offer our suggestions. The conversation is stilted, stopping and starting with abandoned ideas. We argue inside ourselves, none of us sure what the anomaly is still. I wonder whether we shouldn’t have concentrated on it, rather than the Ishiguro. We could have spent our time examining what would happen if we passed through. But we – Tomas, myself, all of us, really – are scientists. We are here to discover. If you do not discover, you are nothing. You solve questions, and the question that was most immediate was about the Ishiguro: its crew, how it was here, what it was doing.

  Tobi’s line goes slack as we are talking, and the slight recoil pulls her towards us. We pray that she is somehow free; but she doesn’t answer her radio, and her body is limp in the darkness, bent in the middle as if she is being carried by something, as if she draped across some unknown person’s arms. Wallace runs and retracts the cable, and brings her in. Her helmet is melted; her face the same. I turn off the camera as soon as I see her. We do not need to see this.

  It is more evidence. Somehow, Inna is on the other side of the anomaly because she is alive. Somehow, because they have died, Tobi and Lennox’s bodies are back with us.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Tomas asks. None of us answer. Wallace presses his hands against the internal airlock door, and he cries. I swear I can hear the beep you hear in a hospital when somebody dies, even though there is no beep at all.

  According to Hikaru’s clock, Inna has maybe an hour of air left. She is left floating there, still presumably unconscious. There is no reason for her to wake up. The suit will regulate her temperature: she will be neither hot nor cold, and then she will just die. Maybe she will wake up when she runs out of oxygen. Maybe she’ll look at us, desperate, and then work out what has happened. We have abandoned her, she’ll think. We’ve let her die in there.

  I think about her as we stand around and wait for her time to run out, and I imagine what might have been. I don’t know, and I don’t know if I am right, but I imagine that maybe we could have had something. I have never had a relationship. I am my age, and I have never had this, or anything.

  ‘Look,’ Hikaru says, and I expect Inna’s body to be creeping towards us, her limbs slackened and dead; but instead she is shaking, and she is awake, and her eyes are open.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asks, in a tiny, terrified voice. ‘Please god, what’s happening?’

  She’s alive.

  I think that I have been in love, but know that it has never been reciprocated. I have loved women, and I have idolized them. I have met them and learned their names, and I have thought, I could be with you. We have had common interests and beliefs, and they have wanted to know about my work. They have asked me if I can see a future with them, and I have wondered. I have wanted them; but now, with Inna, this is something different.

  I cannot explain it better than that.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ I ask, and she screams, so I tell her to calm down. ‘Please, Inna,’ I say. ‘We want to help you, but you have to listen to me. You have to answer me.’ She stops.

  ‘It hurts,’ she says.

  ‘Can you move?’ I ask her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘Do you know what’s happened?’

  ‘I can’t move. No,’ she says.

  ‘Tell her to not try, then,’ Wallace says. He is watching, sitting on the floor behind me, back against the wall. ‘Tell her to save her energy.’ He knows what I know, or what I have posited: that she is here until she runs out of air, and then she will die. I wonder if I should just be making her comfortable, trying to make this easier on her. That is what you do when it is inevitable.

  ‘Listen,’ I tell her, ‘try to stay still. We are doing everything that we can to get you back here.’

  ‘Why can’t you come and get me?’ she asks. She is asking me, I think: not the rest of the ship. Why can’t I. ‘Please, Mira.’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I say. ‘There is a problem, with the anomaly. I need you to see if you can move, and to check that you’re okay. Check that you’re fine.’ I watch her move her hands, flexing them, and her arms. She flexes and looks around.

  ‘Where are they?’ she asks. ‘Lennox and Tobi, where are they?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ I say. ‘Do you remember what happened?’

  ‘The ship started,’ she says. ‘The ship started, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘I can barely see you through this,’ she says. ‘Please, turn the lights brighter.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. Wallace does it, and the relief on her face is immediately visible. I look through her camera myself: it’s better, but she’s right. This is like looking through the murk of dark ink.

  ‘Tell her to push the anomaly. To see what she can do. Maybe she can find a way through it or something.’ Wallace speaks quietly. I tell Inna to do it, and I watch as she presses the wall in front of her. From here, it is as if she is trapped behind glass: a prisoner, desperately pawing to get out. Her hands move against it, as if she is a mime; as if this is all an act.

  ‘What is happening?’ she asks, and she sounds desperate. She breathes quickly, gasping air in, and Wallace pushes himself to standing. He doesn’t look up; he stays hunched at the side.

  ‘She needs to calm down. She doesn’t have enough air to start panicking.’ He rubs his side, with his hands; and then moves one hand to his neck, and rubs that. He is breaking, I know, but I need him to hold it together. I don’t know if this is something I should say to him or not; if that might risk pushing him over an edge of whatever he is facing. ‘You need to get her to calm down.’

  ‘Can we get her more air?’ I ask.

  ‘We can’t open the airlock until she is back or we cut her safety cord. We can cut the cord, if you want.’

  ‘But she can’t come back until she’s dead.’ We stand and watch her panic: from here, even, I can see her breath fogging up her helmet.

  ‘Can’t she use Tobi’s?’ Tomas asks, and we realize that he’s right.

  ‘She would nee
d to get the body back,’ Wallace says, ‘and she’d need to unclip hers, plug the spare in. That’s assuming it’s intact.’ He bends down to look at their bodies in the airlock, and he tries to examine the packs. ‘Lennox’s is gone. Burned out, looks too melted. Tobi’s … It might be okay.’ Her helmet is cracked: her face behind it pale and dead. She was so worried about her eye, but did it matter? In the end, the time she spent concerned about it? Was it worth it? ‘I can talk her through it,’ Wallace says.

  ‘How long will she have to do the changeover?’

  ‘Seconds. If she doesn’t panic, stays calm, it should be fine. Tough part is the seal, because that’s behind her head. You can’t see that. The suits weren’t designed for this.’

  ‘Let’s do it,’ I say. I make the decision. One way or another, I seal her fate. Wallace leaves, to get one of the spare suits and to practise himself, so that he can talk her through it. I stay, and I talk to Inna. I explain to her what happened to Tobi, and to Lennox. I tell her that they are dead, and that she needs to pull Tobi’s body towards her to take her air supply or she will die as well. She cries, because it’s too much to take, but she does it: I watch Tobi’s body slink through space towards her, and I watch Inna pull the body closer, facing away from her; and then she holds it there, so that it cannot turn. She doesn’t want to see her face. She must have seen the faces of so many bodies; now, she is choosing not to.

  ‘What do I do now?’ she asks.

  ‘Just wait,’ I say. ‘Not for long.’ I watch Wallace doing the manoeuvre; he can barely get it right first time. He tries again, and again. At least he doesn’t look upset, now. He looks like he has something to preoccupy him. Keeping busy: it feels like a way past this tragedy.

  Wallace stands at the glass and talks her through it. He holds the suit in front of him to make this easier. She has twenty minutes, and then she’s dead, and this has all been for nothing. The anomaly; the Ishiguro; Inna, Tobi, Lennox. Hikaru and I watch as Wallace talks to her.