by E. R. Mason
Chapter 4
For the first time, the impersonal gray walls of my stateroom looked warm and inviting. Six hours of grueling debriefing, replay after replay of every possible helmet-cam view, and the telling and retelling of a chain of events that seemed like a bad dream had bottomed out my resolve. My mind had turned to putty.
They had not been vindictive or accusing. I was surprised by that. Even more surprising, they'd been sympathetic and restrained. "You handled it well, Adrian. It could have been a lot worse, Adrian. Good thing you were close by, Adrian."
The only consolation of it all was that my presence at the inquiry put me at the receiving end of the Captain's direct line to the med-lab. Both Nira and Frank were reportedly doing very well. They would be okay.
Somehow, I had remained calm and collected through it all. Inquisitions that come about as a result of a serious near-miss can be intimidating, intense affairs. It wasn't until my stateroom door had swished closed behind me that I finally let out the backlog of tension. Leaning against the door I stooped over, stood brainless for a minute or two, and then finally slapped at the sleep key on the wall by my sofa. Slumped over and morose, I stared blankly as the hum from some hidden little motor came to life and the spongy orange couch flattened itself out into a bed. There’s a special kind of desperate fear that waits for you to be alone when you’ve almost lost someone.
I sat on the edge in the thinking man pose then, with the slow, deliberate march of a water buffalo chasing away an intruding male, I went to the bathroom, knelt nobly beside the toilet, and threw up everything in my stomach. The byproducts of too many cups of black coffee left dingy-black splatter marks which I promptly flushed away for fear someone might inadvertently notice them and realize how human I was after all. A quick swish of mouthwash and a repulsive swallow of Dismal liquid and I was ready for the bourbon. On the way to the bed I fished the bottle from the desk drawer, then plunked down against the soft pillows, unzipped my clean gray coveralls to the chest, and began to unscrew the cap when the door chime made its untimely 'ting'. I stuffed the bottle between two cushions but held onto it for psychological comfort.
"Yes?"
The door popped open and R.J. barged in. He flopped down into the black, high-back seat by the desk and walked it around to face me. He'd changed into a blue, collared dress shirt which was old and frayed. An antique pair of bifocals hung at his chest from a black nylon cord around his neck. His stretch jeans were ancient and he wore white deck shoes with no socks. He was tapping the eraser of a mechanical pencil against a crossword puzzle taped to the back of an ultrathin e-reader. He smiled incorrigibly as he spoke. "Well, that was fun. What'd ya wanna do now?"
"Have a stiff drink?"
"Well, I wish I could help you with that one. I really do."
"You can if you'll go into the bathroom and get two plastic cups half full of cold water."
R.J.'s eyes lit up. He slapped his pencil and reader down on the desk top, jumped up and returned a moment later with the requested items. I poured the necessary additive and he sat back in his seat and stared thoughtfully. "So, you appear no worse for the wear, kemosabe."
"I have felt better."
"Things could've been much worse."
"So I've been told."
"What went wrong?"
"All things possible."
"They say Nira and Frank are both going to be okay."
"Physiologically at least."
R.J. paused to sip from his cup. He eyed me appraisingly. "It was quite a strange place over there, wouldn't you say?"
"I understood very little of it. I would not apply for a tour of duty. Have they come up with anything from the data we brought back?"
"Oh yeah, the hand scanners did pick some things. They're still arguing whether it is corrupted data or an actual language. This is all privileged, by the way."
"What about the crap on the lower deck?"
"You mean the amazing goop? Well, this will get you. The scanners picked up intense levels of etheric, beta, and mu energy. Plus some other unexpected stuff. Gobs of it, in fact, no pun intended."
"What are you talking about? You're saying they picked up brain waves down there for Christ's sake?"
"Not brain waves, just high nueronic energy levels. No patterns. Just flat-line levels of wave length. The analysis group is working on it furiously. Brandon is behaving like a kid in a candy store. That's really all I've heard. What about you? Anything happen over there I haven't heard about?"
"Just one thing. You remember suiting me up in the airlock?"
"Yeah...."
"I don't."
"What do you mean?" R.J. looked as though he expected a punch line.
"I don't remember entering the airlock and I don't remember leaving it. I take it you'll vouch for my having been there."
"What are you talking about, Adrian? You were Mr. Solemn and Serious as usual. All business, no fun. You paraded around in there like Sergeant York. You even barked at me a few times. I rejoiced when the helmet finally went over your head. You don't remember any of that?"
"Not a thing."
"Have you been checked out by the Doctor?"
"Who can find the time?"
"This is no joke, Adrian. You've got to get checked out by the Doctor."
"He was just a tad busy with the mortally wounded and all, R.J."
"Does the Captain know?"
"It came up at the debriefing but it seemed incidental at the time."
"What did they say?"
"They said report to sickbay at the first opportunity. I thought I'd go in the morning. I'd guess they're still pretty busy down there."
R.J. sat back disconcertedly and took a drink. The irreverent smirk abruptly returned to his face. "Well, I've always said you were losing your mind."
"Oh right, that, coming from someone who had to marry a psychologist."
R.J. slumped back further and drolled, "Yep, she called it justifiable matrimony. She got to know me better than I knew myself, so I figured I'd better marry her and find out what the hell I was gonna do next."
I choked a little on my drink. "R.J. if anyone around here is losing their mind, it's you. You come in here with an ancient pair of polished lenses hanging around your neck when you know perfectly well any reputable eye surgeon would gladly replace the lenses in your eyes."
"What? Do you think I want to be pasted and glued together like you, oh scarred one? I'll bet if you ran naked through the commissary someone would yell 'It's alive!'"
"And not only that, you have an electronic reader there which can display a thousand crossword puzzles that can be done simply by touch, and yet you insist on going to the trouble of printing one out and pasting it to the back of the thing. You then proceed to solve it by wearing out erasers and pencils and when it’s done, you unceremoniously throw it away. Why do you do these things, R.J.?"
He was not swayed. He finished his drink and stared righteously off into the distance. "Ah, yes... there are some things, my friend, which will never lend themselves to the compiled, synthetic, emulated, compressed world of artificiality. This featherweight electronic clipboard you refer to cannot display all the clues at once and still show the puzzle. You cannot scribble words in the margins and spaces very well, or write your uncertainties in the spaces lightly for consideration with the alternate rows. I insist on tradition. I refuse to be digitized. It is my own personal testament to human idiosyncrasy. We must not forget our struggle from the primordial soup from which we slithered. What if we suddenly no longer had access to the monuments of progress we so worship? What if we no longer had cyberspace, or computers, or automation, or farmbots or even the omnipotent god, electricity itself? Could you survive, my presumptuous friend? Have you ever read Burke? Could you operate the simplest of life-sustaining tools, the plow? Do you know anything of soil, or grain, or planting, oh misguided spaceman?"
> "For Pete’s sake, R.J., I was raised on a horse ranch. I spent my share of hours shoveling manure. I never expected that when I got 20,000 light years away from the ranch I'd have to listen to it."
"Horse ranch? A horse ranch, you say? I'd forgotten that. Perhaps I've chosen the wrong discourse here. By the way, do you have a ten letter word for givers of pain and pleasure"?
"Commanders."
His eyes lit up. "It fits. I thought it was prostitutes, but it can't be. You'd think it had to be something to do with women."
"And if you were a woman, you would be insisting no doubt it must be something to do with men."
He smirked. "You are grumpy. I will take my leave of you. In the morning things will look better to you. Hopefully you will look better yourself."
R.J. jerked up out of his seat, plunked his empty cup down on the desk and nearly walked into the sliding doors before they could open. He turned in the open door, became momentarily solemn, and said, "Good job out there, by the way," and disappeared behind the automatic doors.
The bourbon was beginning to have a mildly pleasant effect. I sank deeper into the pillows and considered the glaring little blank spot inside my head, a minor gap in the perpetual recording of my life. It was a constant nag, like the old friend's name you can't quite remember, or the 'where you were when' nemesis. There was one particular aspect of it that bothered me the most. No matter how many times you venture outside a spacecraft there is a certain, common, unforgettable moment that takes place when you take that first step. For me it’s usually just after I have closed the outer door of the airlock and the strict disciplines of procedure have eased slightly. You turn and stare out into the stars, into the unfathomable endlessness of it, and your heart misses a beat. It is like stepping into God's stare. It leaves a timeless impression.
I briefly looked over in the direction of the shower and finished my drink. I debated sleep or shower. Sleep was winning. A gentle haze of drowsiness began to seep into my fractured mind. My hands rested on my chest with the empty cup tipped sideways in them. My head rolled involuntarily to the left in the caress of the pillow cushion.
The door chime went ‘tong’.
"Yes?"
When the gray doors hissed open, I couldn't help the double take. From 'blank stare' to 'can't be' to 'damn it is' to 'my God, how can it be'. Maybe that's a double-double take. Frank Parker stood out in the corridor with a pinched expression and evasive eyes. He wore a fresh pair of light blue coveralls, unzipped at the top with a dark blue turtleneck underneath. He tapped nervously with his right hand at the side of his leg. He looked like a man standing on an ant hill.
"Frank, what the hell are you doing out of sickbay?"
He started to answer, then suddenly stopped, then started again, and stopped again.
I straightened up and leaned back against the wall, still holding the empty plastic cup. "Come in here and shut the door, for Christ's sake."
He started to speak and stopped again. He forced himself in. The double doors swished shut behind him.
"What are you doing out of sickbay? How'd you get past the staff?"
"I'm sorry, Adrian. I shouldn't be here. It's late. It's been a long god-damned day. I'll just go and come back at some better time."
"Sit down."
He began to pace back and forth in front of me in the small space of my cabin. He was having trouble finding words. "I don't get it, Adrian. I've gone over it a hundred times in my head. Nothing makes any sense at all. It was a fuck-up, pure and simple. It's got me all corrupted in the head. I can't sort it out. What the hell happened?"
"You tell me."
"I forgot to scan that container. How could I do that? If I had, they say it would've measured intense radiant energy. All kinds of unknowns. I wouldn't have opened it. It was hands off, anyway. What the hell was I thinking? I don't break EVA rules. I never break EVA rules. I know better."
"Sounds to me like you know what happened."
He looked at me defensively, but guilt gave way to regret. "Jesus, I caused a suit tear. It's a miracle she's still alive. I just thought it should start with you, I mean, the long apology. The one that lasts a lifetime. You'll probably never want to work with me again."
"Well, maybe I would now."
He looked at me as though it was a cruel remark. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying you'll never make those same mistakes again. There's nothing like cutting it close to make the soul remember, is there?"
The first glimmer of gratitude slipped from the windows in his eyes. He tried to hide it with words. "How will I ever make this right?"
"Well, for me personally there is one thing you can do right this moment."
"Name it."
"Go into the bathroom and get two of those aggravating little plastic cups and half-fill them with cold water."
He didn't understand, but he did it anyway. When he returned, he quickly spied the bottle in my hand and almost withdrew at the thought of breaking still another rule. He held the cups out for me to fill. With a questioning look for approval, he sat down and faced me. We sipped and stared at each other.
"Now tell me how you managed to get out of sickbay without them seeing you."
"Oh yeah, that's another thing. Talk about insult on injury. You know what they said? They said I hyperventilated. That's it... That's all. No injuries at all. Saw spots for about three hours. They did every optical brain scan in the book. Found nothing. That fucking Bell Standard suit got the shit beat out it and still held. They said the auto-tint on the helmet visor cut in fast enough to filter most of the harmful shit. They said it was the equivalent of looking at a solar eclipse on a hazy day, not long enough to do permanent damage. It fried the suit good, but they insist nothing's wrong with me. Hyperventilated? An EVA specialist? I don't think so." He nervously took a drink and hoped I would agree.
"So they just released you?"
"I go back twice a day for follow-ups. Suspended from duty until further notice. Debriefing after the good night's sleep I'm not going to get. Screw the pills."
He paused and gazed into his drink. He swirled it in his right hand and then suddenly downed it in a single slug. He hesitated and then held out the empty cup for me to refill, which I gladly did. He got up and disappeared for a moment into the restroom and came back stirring his mix with one finger. He sat back down and quietly took another drink, a sip this time.
"I know I could have taken out the whole team, but you know, that's not what bothers me the most. It's the suit tear. They let me see one camera view of the whole bastard affair. Said that was enough for now. It was enough, I'll tell you that much. God, Adrian, you were like a cat pouncing on a helpless bird. It was so fast they had to slow it down to keep track of what you were doing. Imagine if you hadn't contained it?"
"I try not to."
"We've both rehearsed suit failures in the simulators. It's got to be the worst. Did you know I started out as a rock-jock like you? Your father's a flyer too, isn't he?"
"TransOceanic, forty years seniority."
"Forty years? How old is he?"
"He's ninety-one come December. Has no plan of retiring, nor are they asking him to."
"God, that's great. How come you didn't follow in his footsteps?"
"Can't stand being ground-bound."
"Ground-bound? Are you kidding? If he's flying TransOceanic that's carrying passengers sub-orbital. How the hell do you get ground-bound out of that?"
"Hey, when below the umbra, what goes up must come down."
Frank smirked and then found himself surprised by it. He sipped his drink and immediately became morose again. "I was at Edwards for quite a while. We were on this project testing a new low altitude pulse-jet engine. The thing was a bear to fly, almost no wing to it at all, little stubby things. Big expandable tail to keep it straight and honest. So one day this buddy of mine, Jix was his call sign, he's bringin' the thing back in and lo
ses part of the heat shield. Some of the fiber lines under the belly get melted real good. All of a sudden he's got intermittent control surfaces. He brings it by the airfield at five thousand and it looks like he's doin' stunts, but it's all he can do to keep it from doing the lawn dart trick. So everybody agrees he's got to nurse it back around and do a controlled ejection over the field. So he dares it down to three thousand and gets as slow as he can go and comes right over us. The canopy comes off just fine, and the seat rockets out just beautifully. The five of us are standin' there waitin' for the chute to pop, and it's not happenin'.”
“Ole Jix, he's right on the money, directly over the runway. All the way down we've got direct eye contact with him. He knows there isn't gonna be a chute, and we know it too, but there's not one god-damn thing any of us can do about it. Just ride it down with him." Frank paused and took more than a sip. "You know what the worst part was, Adrian? Not the impact. The ride down. Knowin' what was gonna happen and not bein' able to do anything about it. It's the same way a bad suit makes you feel. I never want to be a part of anybody cashin' in that way, ever."
It was time to change the subject. "Tell me this, Frank, what were you thinking when you were about to open that box? It just doesn't seem like something anybody would do."
"Hey, I'll buy into that theory real fast. The whole thing's a blur. I'd swear it wasn't me. The whole thing's noisy confusion in my head. I still don't have a handle on it. Check my record, Adrian. I haven't got that many hours, but I've worked my share of challenges. I just don't get it."
"But you do remember doing it, don't you?"
"Well...Yeah...I guess. It’s such a hard thing to sort out. I mean, it would be cowardly to say you couldn't remember doing it, right? I mean I saw the video. Evil villain, me."
Six drinks later, Frank had battered himself down into that little black hole; the only one available to someone under such guilted circumstances, that nasty little place where you continue to punish yourself while promising to make up for the mistake in every way possible. It can only happen to the good ones, the ones who give a damn. I have been there more than once, and so have most of the best people I know. It must be a current life requirement that individuals who wish desperately not to screw up must do so from time to time to remind them of that fact. Things like bourbon have been provided so we may sleep under such duress.
Frank would sleep tonight, but there would be bad dreams. Frank's mean little story had measured pretty high on the Tarn scale, but I could've taken him on one-on-one, story-for-story and put him away cleanly. I could have told him about the other time I had learned about suit tears in real space. It was the low orbit time. A late separating nose faring had damaged a satellite’s solar collector panel arm. The damn fool engineer I was working with was supposed to know you didn't do a manual release on a broken panel mechanism like that. The bend had coiled the release spring up so tight it was ready to go off like a bomb. Only half the solar array was left intact: a jagged glass edge shaped like a samurai sword. I hadn't been looking when he hit the release handle. The blade edge jerked over sideways, wiped up under his armpit, and cut a seven-inch swath through the shoulder of his spacesuit no one could repair.
Yes, Frank, I could have told you what it's like to be halfway to the airlock and know you're not going to make it. How it is to feel your own suit sagging under your partner's leak so bad you know if you don't unplug the octopus from his backpack right then, you will die with him just as if the tear was your own. So at the last possible moment you uncouple and right then you both know he's about to die in your arms, and even that's not the worst of it. When the pressure's gone the little bodily explosions start and you can feel them through the baggy suit, but you can't let go, you can't turn your friend loose to space. So you carry the eruptions with you, and when you do reach the airlock door you pick up the fringe of artificial gravity just outside it. What's left of your friend begins to get heavy, and by the time you’re in the airlock, you have a weighty, sloppy garment that's more a bag than a suit. The little bits of freezing, escaped body tissues drift down into the airlock and stick to the floor as the outer door slowly closes. You stand around the crumpled bag with the helpless med-team members, wondering what the right procedure is to handle a soggy spacesuit full of death, though you can't do a thing anyway until the damn airlock pressurizes. So you wait in total vacuum, inside and out. Yes, Frank, we all have our crosses to bear, but I think mine are worse than yours. Maybe we all think that.
I had kept my own service to two drinks. I downed the rest of the one in my hand. The shower had somehow become mandatory. At least one good thing had come out of it all. I had suddenly discovered I liked Frank Parker. His vagueness about being able to remember the accident made me wonder, but there was not enough to go on. I stripped off my coveralls and escaped to the mercy of a hot shower.