Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  The scene he saw outside the capsule’s one thick window looked identical to the impressions of many lost autumns that swam up from his fogged memory. Outside, there were no houses visible, no roads or paths or any other signs of humanity; only leaves above and leaves mirrored below, bridged by dark tree trunks. The carpet of leaves that had already fallen was more uniformly orange, with an undertone of brown, but the canopy of foliage supported by the receding columns of trunks was more varied in its hues. A conflagration of orange, yellow, red, with teasing contrasts of green woven throughout like the last of the summer leaves the inferno was consuming. Though not a speck of sky showed through the dense ceiling, the glow that seemed to emanate from the leaves themselves suggested the light of late afternoon burned behind and through them. In fact, the interior of the tiny capsule was awash in subtly shifting lattices of projected orange and yellow light, as if the air inside swarmed with ghostly koi fish. This mottled golden light played across the darkened instrument panels and blank, black monitor screens, and across his gloved hands, and his legs encased in the thickly padded, single-piece white suit he wore.

  The instruments were not entirely dark. Here and there a tiny red ruby of light burned, or blinked in silent code. One small readout screen, though its message jiggled and jumped in place, displayed the glowing red letters: EMERGENCY POWER ENGAGED.

  Some of the toggle switches, big clunky buttons, and knobs were labeled or numbered, but so many were not, and control panels thick with them encroached on him from all sides. Keyboards mostly just had their keys labeled with letters.

  He might have panicked in his helplessness, in the face of all these incomprehensible controls, had no air been coming into his helmet, but this was not the case. He tested this by taking some deep breaths, and his lungs filled reassuringly. He looked down at his front, and saw three segmented tubes ran out from under the chair he was strapped into, plugged like umbilical cords into ports in his suit: one just below the edge of his helmet, another down near his abdomen, and a third at his groin. His guess was this third tube disposed of his urine. So, he had air, and apparently he needn’t worry about relieving his bladder. But surely he couldn’t sit here forever. The air might still run out, and though it might take a while, he would eventually die of thirst, even before he died of hunger.

  It must be safe to go outside. Look at those trees: he most certainly had to be home. But was he? Something about the shapes of some of the leaves out there seemed subtly wrong. Nature loves symmetry, but one type of leaf in particular appeared oddly asymmetrical to him, with four small lobes on one side and one larger lobe on the opposite side, like the crude outline of a human hand. But how could he really tell from here? And even if this wasn’t home, it was home-like in the extreme, wasn’t it?

  Still, home-like might not be good enough. Even a relatively minor difference in the atmosphere might prove fatal to him if he ventured outside and removed his helmet.

  Ultimately, he might not have any choice. Still, he needn’t be rash. For right now, escaping the security of the capsule should be a last resort. A retrieval party could be on the way even now, having tracked the capsule’s descent.

  Or… might an enemy of some type be on the way, if he was a stranger here, in the wrong country? On the wrong planet?

  How long was it safe to wait?

  What if a fire should start in the capsule, from some damage sustained in its fall?

  Was it a capsule, or a lifeboat? Had he fled from a dangerous situation aboard some larger ship still in orbit? Or maybe a space station… a space prison? Was he a criminal? Had he been a prisoner of war, who had escaped and stolen a small craft?

  Maybe… perhaps. All these what ifs sadistically goaded him to panic, to flee from this claustrophobic cockpit before it became a deathtrap.

  But even if he were to give in to such panic, there was the question of how to get outside, when he couldn’t readily decipher the staggering amount of controls crowded around his chair and the window.

  Unfastening and throwing off the safety harness that had strapped him to his seat was easy enough to figure out, and relieved at least some of his feeling of helplessness. He then returned his attention to the instruments, trying to narrow his focus so as not to be so overwhelmed. He shifted his attention here, then there. If anything, the instruments seemed to be growing darker, blending together even more confusingly, until at last he realized why. He looked up sharply, out the window again.

  The late-afternoon light glowing through the ceiling of leaves had become dim, waning like a dying bonfire. Evening was coming in like a tide. Somewhere behind all the leaves, the sun (his sun?) was setting.

  So, there would be no escaping the capsule tonight, even if he identified the means to do so. He was apparently in the middle of a dense forest, perhaps miles from civilization. Perhaps with no civilization to be found at all. He might walk right off a cliff edge in the darkness. There might be dangerous people out there. Dangerous animals.

  He would wait, yes; there was now no question. Maybe he would sleep, to conserve his energy. But was that wise? What if his air ran out while he slept, or enemies surrounded the craft, or that imagined fire spread to the inside of the cockpit? He must stay vigilant through the night. He only hoped it was a terrestrial night… not some alien night of hours beyond counting.

  The world outside purpled. The fire of the leaves went out and left only its negative afterimage. He watched, as if expecting a figure to emerge ghost-like from the gloomy trees. Watched, as the purple deepened, as if he expected to see the glowing eyes of a predatory animal lurking out there. He listened, but heard only his breathing inside the helmet, and now as the black of night arrived in its fullness he was confronted with pure nothingness. Even space, with its stars, could not be this black, though he couldn’t recall being in space. There were no impressions like those he had of boyhood’s autumns. Had he regained consciousness at this point, instead of several hours earlier, he might have believed himself to be in a bathysphere at the far, icy bottom of a sea.

  Only the tiny ruby lights scattered across the control panels, brighter for the contrast of darkness—all he had in lieu of stars, red as dying suns—prevented him from feeling as though he were locked in a vault. Confined in a coffin. Already dead.

  To force himself to stay awake, he tried thinking of how many words he could make from the stuttering red letters of EMERGENCY POWER ENGAGED. MEN. EMERGE. COWER. ENRAGED. But though he had vowed not to, at some point in this game he fell asleep.

  He dreamed of plummeting through space, with star-bejeweled blackness looming at his back, and below him the vast cloud-swirled curve of a planet, its oceans blue, its land masses—aside from the ice caps—entirely orange-yellow, as if it was a world where autumn reigned completely and eternally. He wasn’t plunging toward the planet in his capsule, however, but merely in his space suit and helmet, his three umbilical cords trailing out behind him. Soon he would be entering the glow of the planet’s atmosphere, and as it filled his vision he spread his arms out wide, waiting for them to catch fire and burn up like the wings of a falling angel.

  Silhouetted against the fiery continents below he noticed several drifting black shapes. They were triangular. Were they satellites, or spacecrafts in orbit? Was this what his capsule looked like from the outside? It was hard for him to guess at their scale, but he had the impression these remote shapes would be much larger than his capsule. As he continued to plummet, he thought he could make out a tangled mass of black cords hanging from the bottom of one of the triangular forms, passing directly below him, as if it were a balloon-type object and its mooring lines had torn free.

  These black triangles gliding slowly above the autumnal land masses filled him with an inexplicable dread, where the expectation of burning up in the atmosphere like a meteor had not. He was suddenly desperate to arrest his fall, but of course he could not. All he could do to escape was…

  …wake up, and he awoke with a jolt, to s
ee that a bluish pre-dawn glow had illumined the forest spectrally, and that a person was just outside the curved capsule window peering in at him. He couldn’t make out this person’s features, however, because they wore a space helmet as he did, and from the outside its face shield was an opaque metallic gold.

  His first impression was that the helmeted figure was his own reflection in the glass, but when the person saw that he had awakened they turned abruptly and darted away, running off toward the distant trees as quickly as they could in that cumbersome space suit. He sat there in his chair paralyzed with fear, until the white figure was swallowed up in the trees and the misty blue light, and gone like a hallucination.

  He would not have felt fear if the individual had signaled to him reassuringly… had made an attempt to get the capsule open in a manner that did not seem threatening. But the person’s startled flight was not at all reassuring. It mystified him, and that made him frightened.

  Someone who was afraid of him might want to hurt him. They might come back with others to hurt him.

  He couldn’t allow himself to remain trapped and vulnerable any longer.

  A mad crowd of what ifs prodded him toward the cliff edge of panic again, but his desperation lent a fresh keenness to his reexamination of the controls around him. He had noticed yesterday a lever switch with a red handle set into the underside of the panel directly in front of him, near his right knee. An identical lever was set in the base of his chair, within easy reach of his right hand. The two switches were not labeled, but their size and bright color made them stand out. They were extra-important.

  He considered that the switch in the chair might be the release for an ejector seat, to propel him and the chair (assuming he was still safely strapped into it) out of the capsule, with a parachute then opening to break his fall. Yes, that seemed very plausible to him, but then the switch near his knee? Could it be the release for the capsule’s door or hatch? But where was that, anyway? He twisted around to look to his right, then to his left, then twisted more to look behind him. No outline of a hatch was apparent, but if this lever did in fact unseal one, it would soon make its presence known.

  He reached to the handle in front of him and closed his fist around it. Hesitated. He put a little pressure on it. It wouldn’t budge. He realized he had to simultaneously depress a button in one end of the handle to release it. Holding down this button with his thumb, he drew in a deep breath, then dragged the red switch down through its slot.

  With a muffled, propulsive boom, the curved window in front of him was catapulted outward, spinning in the air several times until it crashed against the trunk of a tree and fell to the ground, where it lay rocking. The impact with the tree caused a cascade of yellow leaves to flutter down, joining those that already drifted earthward intermittently from above.

  If that other person in the space suit, somewhere out there, hadn’t already known he was here, they would have realized it now.

  When his heartbeat slowed and his thoughts staggered forward again, with his gloved fingers he explored the coupling of the tube that ran into the socket at his abdomen. Though he had only seen the figure outside briefly, he had recognized it wore a suit just like his own, and he didn’t recall seeing any tubes connected to the ports in it. If it was safe for them, it would be safe for him.

  He pulled back on the rim of the tube’s end, while also shifting aside a little switch with his thumb, and the hose came free of the port. The ear speakers inside his helmet permitted him to hear a brief hiss drain from the end of the tube, but the pressure change inside his suit was all but imperceptible. Next he undid the tube connected at his crotch, and when it came away he felt a subtle, odd sensation as if his penis had been released from a mild suction he hadn’t been conscious of previously. Lastly, the tube at the base of his helmet. He hesitated, but reminded himself of the stranger who had been spying on him, their suit without tubes, and anyway what choice did he have any longer? He unplugged the last hose, and drew a breath into his helmet through the open port at his collar.

  Crisp air flowed into his helmet, down his throat like cool water. It tasted of the autumn leaves above and the leaf litter below. The breath he drew into him was earthy, with a touch of dampness, and it almost brought those elusive boyhood memories into sharper focus but they resisted beguilingly. It was a good smell. It was good air.

  Before climbing out of the cockpit he looked around for anything he might make use of, take with him. (Take with him where? Well, he’d address that question shortly. One thing at a time.) Set into a recess in the back of his chair he discovered a backpack in the form of a hard, white shell. A mobile air tank? He disconnected this backpack, rested it on the floor, and opened its catches. Fitted inside were a variety of survival items. A first-aid kit. A red flare gun. A small water purification unit. A container for water (filled). A tube of concentrated paste. (He unscrewed its cap and held the tube close to the port at his collar. A smell like peanut butter.) A fire-starting instrument. A flashlight. A multi-tool with an unfolding knife blade and various other unfolding heads. And a semiautomatic pistol with one spare magazine of cartridges.

  He removed the gun, checked its magazine, chambered the first round, and set the safety. Then he slipped his arms through the backpack’s straps and buckled them across his chest.

  He stepped up on the edge of the control panel that faced his vacated chair, and—careful not to depress any buttons or trip any switches with his feet—boosted himself up. He placed a foot on the edge of the blown-out window, then hopped out onto the ground.

  He looked this way and that warily, turning his whole body because of his fitted helmet. If he had a gun in hand, the other space-suited figure might, too. No sign of that person, as yet. He switched his attention to the capsule.

  Leaves that had drifted down during the night, or perhaps come loose when the craft had shattered through the treetops, plastered its white surface like scales, as if to camouflage the capsule, showing either their bright upper sides or their paler bottom sides. There was still a torn gap in the thick foliage directly above, exposing a tease of crystalline blue sky that he hadn’t been able to see while within.

  A name was stenciled in large black letters on the craft’s outer hull. UCSS FETCH.

  U had to be United. SS might be Space Ship. But was the C for Countries? Colonies? Cosmos? Was this the name of the capsule itself, or a larger craft the capsule might have belonged to, or been a segment of?

  Spread across the ground behind the capsule was a blue parachute, still attached by lines. He tucked his handgun under a strap of his backpack, and gathered the heavy parachute in his hands and dragged it back to the capsule, then set about shrouding the craft with the material to cover the opening left by the ejected window, if only to keep out rain and small animals (if any existed) in case he needed to make use of the capsule again. Certainly, this makeshift tarp wouldn’t keep out that stranger should they return. He weighed the edges of the chute down with rocks he dug with his fingers out of the black, moist soil beneath the thick layer of leaf litter.

  As he worked, he paused frequently to look around him at the woods, as they came alive again gradually with the dawn-ignited colors of autumn.

  * * *

  He set off in the direction opposite to that in which the stranger had fled. If the stranger thought it best to avoid him, it was best he avoid them, too… at least for now. He needed to find out more about where he was. What was around.

  To mark his trail, every so often he made a configuration of three stones at the base of a tree: a second rock atop the first, then a third rock against the left side of the first as a kind of arrow pointing the way back toward the capsule.

  The ground dipped or rose a little sometimes, gently, but finally he came to a steeper slope and he climbed it, at times having to hold onto tree trunks so as not to lose his footing on the slippery leaves. He reached the crest of this hill and looked down ahead of him to see only more of the same autumnal
forest, seemingly extending unto infinity. The only difference up ahead was that there were boulders scattered here and there, some split as if cleaved by the axes of gods, and coated unevenly with brilliant green moss.

  He slid off his backpack and sat down atop the hill, his back propped against a trunk, and at last unfastened and removed his helmet. He got his gloves off and ran his hands back across his short hair, which bristled wetly with perspiration. He gulped in the refreshing air and the rich scent of the woods. He drank some water—fighting to keep it to just a few swallows—and squeezed a little bit of the concentrated food paste between his lips.

  After this bit of rest he descended the other side of the hill and walked on, pistol in one hand and helmet in the other. He didn’t like how it bumped against his leg but he liked having his head free, being able to look around by turning his neck, the cool breeze against his face.

  The mild breeze rustled through the treetops. Leaves fell, rocking, as if in slow motion, adding to the carpet on the forest floor.

  The noon sun arced overhead, splintered through the foliage into glinting coppery shards. He paused again, set down his helmet with the gun inside it, to build another marker of stones. Paused again, to drink some more water, eat some more protein paste.

  Still, he had come across no roads, no habitations, no sign at all of humanity or anything approximating humanity.

  He walked on, and the sun started on its descent toward late afternoon and evening beyond.

  Was it safe to rest somewhere for the night? But he must rest somewhere for the night.

  He came to a boulder that had been cleft into two halves, and a tree had grown between them, perhaps having wedged them further apart over the years. The gap was enough for him to squeeze into and lie down in. So he did this, crawling in all the way to the tree trunk, pushing his backpack in ahead of him. He lay his helmet on top of it. He propped his head on his bent arm and, gun in hand, watched through the crack in the stone as twilight again fell upon the forest. Purple… more purple… blackness.