Previously, they had the bed between them. Now, there was nothing but a short stretch of rubber flooring.
“I,” said Johnson, looking at the ladder where it went down towards engineering, up to the flight deck, across to cradle four where Yussef slept. Anywhere but the man’s round-cheeked seriousness. “We’ll have to do it later. I’ve got work to do.”
He stepped out over the long drop to the engines and scaled the first ladder to the ceiling, pausing briefly at the bulkhead to clear his closing throat and blink away the tears. Looking down at the old man looking up, he swallowed against the lump and carried on climbing.
McMasters was looking at the latest feed from the orbiter, played out on a hand-held screen so close to his nose that made it difficult for him to tell one pixel from another. Malinska was scrolling through a screed of coding on the main console – a page, a pause, another page. Johnson thought she couldn’t be reading more than a single line at a time.
She glanced over her shoulder from the acceleration chair, while her fingers kept dabbing at the touch pad, spinning through the lines of regular expressions to the one Johnson wore on his face. “Bradbury?” she asked. “What did he say?”
Johnson pulled his own tablet from its dock, and opened up the list of alerts. One had been active, and in the time he’d taken to get up, get dressed and climb to the flight deck, there’d been another four. Somewhere on the ship, Halliwell would be fixing something.
“We all know it’s not really him, that he’s something I’ve made up. Having a conversation with him is just talking to myself.”
Malinska was still speaking, but he missed what she said, distracted by the number of messages sent from Mission Control, now well over a light-minute away.
“It’s not like I ever met him,” he said, continuing his own point. “I don’t even know why it’s some dead white guy. Why not my mother?”
“Atavism,” she said, “a case of exaptation co-opting your memories of his stories to construct a mentor figure.”
He deleted all the messages without watching them. “Not everything can be explained by evolutionary biology,” he murmured.
“Wash your mouth out, young man.” She turned back to her screen: she expressed no surprise or concern that the code she was now reading was several thousand lines later.
“How’s it going?” he asked, nodding at her fast-moving fingers.
“I’ll keep looking. It has to be there somewhere.” Scroll, scroll, scroll.
Johnson tucked his tablet in the elastic strap on his leg. He frowned at the shapes on McMasters’ screen, those he could see behind the man’s thumbs and head: petaloid shadows, fuzzy with distance and surface dust, and black beetle things crawling around on the Abalos Undae, presumably mining the subsurface ice.
“Abe? You okay?”
“They’re spelling out words,” said the man with his nose pressed against the screen. “They’re sending us a message.”
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know.” He was trying to open up a conduit from the images direct to his brain. “It’s not in any language I know yet. But I’m learning, Leroy. I’m learning.”
Johnson patted McMasters’ shoulder, right on the mission patch of Mars-and-crosshairs. “If anyone can do it, it’s you, Abe.”
Time to check on Halliwell. He took the single step back to the ladder, and started carefully down. It was easy to make mistakes in the slight gravity generated by the drive: too little pull to momentarily forget he wasn’t weightless, just enough to break something important if he fell.
All that way, all that time. Imagine screwing up by doing something stupid.
Bradbury was still there, head craned back to watch Johnson descend, pillowy stomach straining the buttons of his shirt. Johnson kept going past him, down though to the next deck. When he looked up, he could see the pile of thick white hair, the reflection from the glasses, the tight mouth above the double-chin made more prominent by his posture. He hated it when Bradbury looked sad.
The engine wasn’t louder at the back end of the ship, but he could feel it more distinctly, like a phone vibrating in his pocket. Halliwell was waist deep behind a panel, her legs bent to brace her movements.
“Judi? Just checking up on you.”
“I’m fine,” she said, her voice both hollow and muffled, as if there was a mattress over an open well. “I need to fix this valve like I need to scratch, you know.”
Her hand snaked out and unerringly found the replacement solenoid resting on the loose panel cover, her palm dropping the faulty one even as she scooped the new one up. As she moved, she released a puff of the sharp sweat stink she carried.
“Why don’t you cut yourself a deal, Judi?” Johnson eased her tablet out from between her knees, where it was inevitably open on the faults list. “Why don’t you do this one, and the tell-tale on the tertiary radiator pump, then go and get something to eat? Maybe get yourself in the head and freshen yourself up?”
“Leroy, these things won’t fix themselves. While I’ve been in here, there’s been another four faults flagged. Got to get them all.” She grunted with the effort of fitting a tiny widget in a small space.
“Do I get to order you?” he said.
“Geez, commander. Why don’t you find me a tube of something, and leave it here?”
“Fair enough. Cereal bar and a bulb of coffee?”
“Whatever’s easiest,” she said, distracted. She didn’t want him to be there, and he’d done his duty. The screen blooped and slipped in another fault. By the time she’d done those five, there’d be others. A never-ending cycle of breakdown and repair, and no one to tell her to stop. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her so happy.
The kitchen was the next level up, so he climbed easily and started to busy himself collecting breakfast not just for Halliwell, but for Malinska and McMasters. Bradbury was there, sitting sideways at the tiny fold down table on a pop-up chair. Johnson had never seen him go up or down the ladder, so Bradbury just appeared around the ship without ever taking a step or climbing a rung.
“Shall we try that again? Good morning, Leroy,” said Bradbury.
“Okay.” He filled a coffee bulb with hot water from the spigot and snapped the lid shut: zero-g training right there. “Morning, Mr. Bradbury.”
“You can call me Ray, son. Mr. Bradbury’s awfully formal.”
“I’d like to stick with Mr. Bradbury, if that’s okay.”
“Sure. That coffee smells good, Leroy. You know that means ‘the king’ in French, don’t you?” Bradbury smiled up with his crooked teeth on show.
“If I gave you a coffee, how would you drink it? You being a, a whatever it is you are.”
“Ghost? No shame in being a ghost, Leroy. Even when I was alive, some of my best friends were ghosts.” He gave a little chuckle and his belly jiggled in waves. “Why don’t you leave that for a moment and sit down with me?”
Johnson carried the coffee bulb over and perched at the very edge of the seat opposite. He bowed his head and listened to the thrumming of the engines and the rustling of the air.
“You’re almost there. Final breaking manoeuvres for orbit. Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”
“I... no.”
Bradbury took off his glasses and peered the wrong way through the immense lenses. “You didn’t put up much of a fight when the others mutinied.”
“You were right: there didn’t seem much point in making them push me out of the airlock.” Johnson squirted some coffee into his mouth, and pulled a face. It hadn’t been properly hot when he’d made it: the cabin pressure didn’t allow it. “Does that mean you’ve changed your mind? Do you think I should have? Fought them, that is.”
“I don’t think there was much fight in you in the first place. The whole mission is well, unpalatable, and as for dying for it?” He rubbed his glasses on his jacket cuff and slid them back on his face. “I’ve been showing people the way to Mars for the better p
art of a century, and because you decided to live, I finally get to go myself.”
Johnson swilled the coffee around in its translucent bulb, seeing how the vortex caught the light. “You realise they’re never going to let another black man so much as drive a bus again, let alone command a spaceship?”
“Oh, Leroy. How do you know what they’re going to do? It’s not as if you’re talking to Earth, are you?”
“Abe thinks the aliens are trying to talk to him through their tyre tracks. Rusa spends all her time searching the software for backdoor exploits that’ll let Mission Control retake the ship, I’m convinced the computer is inventing problems for Judi to fix, and Mo? He’s turned sleeping into an Olympic sport.” He didn’t want the coffee any more, and put the bulb down between them. Its high-tack base stuck it to the tabletop.
“You missed yourself out,” said Bradbury.
Johnson pressed his fingertips together hard enough to make his nailbeds turn pale. “I know what my particular problem is. However you want to explain it, it all adds up to a whole pile of nothing to say to the people back home.”
Bradbury had stopped smiling. “Why don’t we talk about the missiles, Leroy?”
“Do we have to?”
“For Christ’s sake, they’re parked right outside on the hull. Pretending they’re not there is unworthy of you.” He leaned across the table, making the plastic creak. “You can prevent this catastrophe, you know.”
Johnson felt sick. “I’m not comfortable –”
“Good God, man. You’re not comfortable? Imagine how I feel? I warned you before about hubris, and yet you’re making all the same mistakes.”
“You warned me?”
“Those stories of mine weren’t just pleasant diversions for half an hour, and I know you didn’t take them like that when you read them. I’d hoped I was training your mind to reject this lethal brinkmanship, but clearly not.” Bradbury sat back and folded his arms, looking belligerent. “That’s why I’m here now – to make you listen to sweet reason.”
“Mars is ours,” said Johnson, making the old man snort in derision.
“We’ve ignored it, with a few notable exceptions, ever since Lowell trained his telescope on it and thought he could see canals.”
“But it’s still ours. It’s our backyard.”
“Take a look at your screen, Leroy. Pull it out and spool up those pictures your colleague McMasters is looking at.”
Johnson reluctantly slipped the tablet from his thigh and accessed the video. “These ones?”
“Those exact ones. What do you suppose they’re doing, crawling around in that red dust? What do you suppose they’re saying to each other while they’re doing it?” He dabbed his thick finger at the surface, of the screen, of Mars. “Whose yard does this look like?”
Bradbury had a point. He knew he had a point because Bradbury wouldn’t have a point without him thinking it too. “It, it looks like their yard,” conceded Johnson. “I’m conflicted.”
“Sure you are. You’ve got braid on your arm because you were smart and followed orders. You feel obligated to the suits and the hats because they put you where you are. Where are you, Leroy?”
“I’m on the first manned spaceship to orbit Mars, to meet the first aliens we’ve ever known.”
“Then why are you so miserable about it?” Bradbury’s face broke into a wide smile, and he banged the table with the flat of hand hard enough to make Johnson jump. “I’d have sold my soul to be here in the flesh. What an incredible, startling opportunity, what an unexpected, unlooked-for gift! You should be happy and excited: if it was me, I’d be going to the bathroom every five minutes.”
Johnson felt so sick he started looking around the cabin for a barf-bag. “You know my orders.”
“Screw your orders,” he yelled, still grinning. “Whose goddamn story is this?”
“Yours?”
“You’d better hope not. Or one of Bob’s, either: he’d have had you in a five-way marriage and running around the ship naked by now.” Bradbury reached out and punched Johnson’s shoulder. “It’s your story, Leroy. Only you can write the ending.”
Johnson rubbed his arm. He’d felt it properly, the impact, the way it rocked him off his axis. He looked first at the little beetle things crawling over the face of Mars, the tracks radiating from the five-petalled flower of their base. It looked tiny but it covered a couple of city blocks’ worth of soil. The beetles were as big as submarines.
Then he looked at Bradbury’s solemn, hopeful face. He’d seen that exact same expression staring out at him from the back cover of an ancient copy of The Illustrated Man, lit by flickering torchlight under the warm tent of his blankets.
“Right.” Johnson stood up, too quickly. He bounced across the kitchen and into the lockers opposite. He barely got his hands up in time to ward off the stinging blow, and ended up settled on his back against the central ladder.
“You okay, son?”
“I’ll be just fine.” He pulled himself upright and shook himself down. He started climbing. “Thanks, Mr Bradbury.”
“Don’t mention it, son.”
He was outside the Pacific, tethered to a loading point, lights from his helmet making bright circles on the white-grey of the hull, while behind him, was Mars. It was so close he could reach out and touch it: its smooth white cap, its soft rust plains, its mountain-high volcanoes. It had translucent pearl clouds and storms of pink, and as the terminator swept across its surface it was softened with dusk. It was huge, and in the shadow of the great black radiator fin, it gave him light and hope.
His regulator made little noises, gentle gasps and sighs, and his earpieces a regular two-second tick to show he was still connected. His radio popped and spiked with radiation as he worked the electric screwdriver, undogging the panel on the side of the stubby launch tube.
He’d been trained to do that kind of finger-delicate and methodical work by the very people he was now betraying. The heavy weight of irony was right there: he wasn’t a space-walk virgin, banging around with a wrench and pliers, hoping to get lucky. He knew exactly what he was doing, hard though it was.
Harder than it needed to be, too, because his co-pilot refused to come out of his cradle. Every time Johnson had dragged it blinking into the light, Yussef had just cranked it back closed with him still inside it. So while he really needed the human finesse on the attitude jets to keep him in sunlight, he’d had to cope with gross control from a computer that sometimes wouldn’t quite catch his meaning.
He’d been outside for almost three hours, and he’d disabled three of the four missiles: nothing fancy, he left the warheads alone, and instead opened up the casing to access the rocket motors. They were solid fuel: no pumps to damage or tanks to bleed, but the propellant still needed a spark to ignite it. Sabotage was nothing more than cutting out a finger-length of wire and bending the ends on themselves. Six times he’d done that, twice per two-stage missile, and he was on the last launcher.
He put each bolt on a magnetic pad as he unwound it, and tagged the panel to stop it from drifting away.
“Hey, Leroy? How’s it going?”
His head rang. “Mr Bradbury. Not so loud.”
“Sorry, son. How does Mars look now?”
“Same as before.” Johnson adjusted his position astride the launch tube so he could turn from the waist: his neck ring wasn’t that flexible and the bulky life-support pack restricted his movements further. “Big. Red,” he said.
“Come on, Leroy, don’t let me down.”
“I’m alone, in a space suit, trying to disable four nuclear-armed rockets strapped to the outside of a spaceship in orbit around another planet. You wanting me to play tourist isn’t making this any easier.”
“Humour an old man. What can you see?”
“One last one, then you leave me alone.” He swung his leg slowly up and over the launcher tube while holding on to the open hatch. “Mars is huge, takes up almost half the sky. I can almos
t see the underside of the polar clouds, and it’s sunrise on the summit of Olympus Mons. I can cover Phobos with my fist, but it’s coming up fast, and it’s going to be right overhead in an hour. I should be inside by then, because that’ll scare the crap out of me otherwise.”
“You’re a fortunate man, Leroy Johnson. No one alive has seen the sights you have. We can send all the robots we like, but it takes humanity to put the soul into exploration.”
“Okay, Mr Bradbury, that’s enough. I’ve got to get back to work.” He wondered what the others made of it, him talking to himself like that. But maybe they hadn’t heard him. Maybe Abe was too busy trying to decypher the alien language, and Rusa concentrating too hard on debugging the code, and Judi had her head in some compartment somewhere focussing on fixing rather than listening. And Yussef wouldn’t hear him while he was asleep.
Perhaps Bradbury was the only one he could talk to. Perhaps that had always been true.
He turned back to the launcher, and the crouching missile it shrouded.
Johnson cycled the airlock. From feeling the door lock behind him and the floor shiver, to hearing the chug of the pumps only took a minute. The red tell-tale stayed on until ship pressure had been achieved, but as soon as his space suit retreated from balloon-like stiffness, he started to open it up.
Air hissed out as he broke the seal and misted the airlock with moisture. He could smell the cold, sweet welding-smoke scent that clung to the white cover of the suit.
The tell-tale on the inner door stayed stubbornly red.
He scowled, the deep, tired lines between his brows deepening. He spoke into his suit microphone.
“Hey. Judi? The airlock seems to be stuck. Can you come and check it out?”
No answer.
“Judi? Abe? Rusa?”
No answer.
“Mo? Wake up, Mo.”
No answer.
“Computer, locate the crew.”
McMasters and Malinska are on the flight deck. Halliwell is in the tertiary radiator exchange. Yussef is dead in cradle four.
“I... what?”
Clarify the nature of your question.
The Lowest Heaven Page 14