The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  ‘Don’t go,’ Elena asked me, over and over, until it nearly became all that she said. She would wake in the night and throw herself over to me, shake me. ‘I’ve had a dream,’ she would say, ‘a horrific vision, and I saw you dying, not even making it past launch.’ She would cry and lay her head on my chest. ‘Oh Jesus Christ, Cormac, please don’t go. Please.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked her one day, not meaning it to sound the way that it did; or, actually, meaning it to sound that way, but not expecting it to.

  ‘We’ve been through so much, and I can’t stand to be alone,’ she said. She told me anything she could to get me to stay, because she was fragile – snapped – and I didn’t care. She told me that she was pregnant, and I knew that she was lying but played along until I could prove it, until we sat in the doctor’s surgery that I forced her to go to and he told us, in blunt terms, that she wasn’t. She told me that she was ill, which she wasn’t – not in the way that she meant.

  ‘I can’t stand to see you like this,’ I told her.

  ‘Why am I not enough for you?’

  ‘Maybe you should go and stay with your mother for a

  few days.’

  ‘In Greece? You want me in a different country?’

  ‘No. I don’t mean that.’ The launch was happening a

  month after we had that conversation: and she bought a ticket for her flight, and left without telling me, and then called me from Athens, shouting at me down the line.

  ‘This is what you wanted,’ she said, and I sat against the wall in the kitchen and wept, because how could I fix her? Had I done this in the first place? ‘Why are you even with me any more?’ she asked. ‘If you love your fucking job so much, you should just have that. Forget about me. Forget about what we were. Why are we even together?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. She hung up, and when I called back the phone just rang and rang, and I could picture her screaming at her mother to let it ring, because she knew who it was and she didn’t want to talk to me any more.

  Guy grabs the end of the tether rope and pulls me back towards the ship. He looks genuinely concerned; I don’t know if it’s for me, or because now I might expose what’s been going on to the rest of the crew. He pulls me up to him, holding me by the lapels of the suit, staring into my eyes.

  ‘You with me?’ he asks. I’m not sure how he means it. ‘We have to finish this.’ I have the tool in my hand, still; something not unlike a power drill, only with encased parts, a sharp end, like a thick metal knitting needle. I could do this, I realize. I could take him out, throw the tool into his face, rush inside and tell the crew what he tried to do. I think back to my first time here, as Quinn tried to turn the ship around, alter the course but couldn’t, and I realize what Guy’s doing out here: he’s breaking it. He’s breaking the ship, and I can’t do anything about it, because this is what’s meant to happen.

  This is the way that fate occurs: I am out there with Guy, and I hold panels of the ship’s hull for him as he cuts wires and reroutes things, removes plugs, all easily labelled for him so that he, a man with a PhD in both Astrophysics and Engineering can’t fuck it up, that’s how little they trust him; and I pass him the tool when he needs it, letting him seal the sections with their special screws, like you’d find on the back of household technology, underneath the Warranty Void If Broken sticker; and I watch as he declares that he’s finished, and he hangs there, fixed to the hull, and he seems to be thinking about something.

  ‘Do you understand?’ he asks me.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘You’re going to tell Quinn and Emmy, right? It’s okay, I understand. They should know. Maybe I’ll tell them.’

  ‘No,’ I say again. He doesn’t ask why, but I tell him. ‘They shouldn’t know that they’re going to die. Nobody should know that.’ He nods. He has under an hour to live, and it’s so tempting to break my word and tell him, to see how he reacts, but I don’t. It’s in my gut.

  I don’t know how I’m meant to do the next part. I assume that it will all make sense. We pull ourselves along the ship to the airlock and slip inside, and Guy instigates the procedures. When he takes his helmet off he doesn’t look at me. We take the through-door to the changing room and he strips, steps into the shower, facing away from me. He keeps his head down. I hang my suit up and dash back down the corridor, back to the lining, hide myself away. I watch as Guy dries himself, dresses, then heads to the living quarters.

  The me is at the computer, as always, like a fucking corpse already, hunched over that table, barely typing. Emmy and Quinn are eating breakfast.

  ‘Morning,’ Quinn says as Guy walks in.

  ‘Morning,’ Guy mumbles. I watch as he fetches himself a breakfast bar, sits at the bench alongside them and eats, silently. He keeps coughing, as if he’s about to speak, and he cradles his side. Soon, he’ll plummet down that canyon of a hallway. The me ignores him. Emmy ignores him. Quinn starts to make conversation, just as Guy finishes eating, moves to stand up. I watch the players move to their marks: Guy, holding the table, but floating in the centre of the room; Quinn, opposite him, but further back, towards the cockpit; Emmy, seated at the table still; and me, at the computer, craning my head to look at them; and me, here, in the lining.

  I shuffle around to get a better look, pulling myself as close to the grate as I can, my eye pressed against the bars. ‘We can start up again,’ Guy says, and Quinn presses the button.

  The engines roll into action, and the crew latch themselves onto the furniture, so that they don’t drift away. ‘You’ve been out walking?’ Quinn asks. (We always called it that, though you didn’t do anything even close. It was so far from walking that it sounded odd, like the word suddenly had a different meaning.)

  ‘There’s a problem with the comms,’ Guy mumbles. He’s not convincing anybody, but none of us are really listening to what he’s saying. We’re waiting for Quinn to call him on the next part, the part that we discussed when Guy was outside: how he was breaking rules when he walked outside the ship alone, and how we have no confidence in him, so we’re voting to turn the ship around and go home, orders or no. ‘You went out alone,’ Quinn says. ‘You know that’s against protocol.’

  ‘I wasn’t alone,’ Guy replies, ‘Cormac was with me.’ Emmy and Quinn look at the other me for confirmation. He shrugs. ‘I was in the shower,’ he says, then rubs his wet hair as evidence.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Guy asks. ‘You were with me. Tell them!’ He looks at the me in the chair, in front of the computer, begging for confirmation of his story; he doesn’t offer it. He’s clueless, because he genuinely doesn’t know what Guy’s talking about.

  ‘I was getting ready to go with you, like you said. I figured you just decided to go without me,’ Cormac says. Guy’s face goes white; his jaw hangs. He’s second-guessing himself; he’s wondering if his memory of what happened was a complete fantasy or not.

  ‘We’ve all been talking, and we’re turning around,’ Quinn

  says. ‘We don’t care what you say, Gerhardt, because we’re

  sick of this, and we’re going to turn around. Something’s not

  right.’ He’s suddenly the leading man again, all power and

  charisma and charm. If I hadn’t been out there with Guy, he

  might have even persuaded him. ‘Help me or don’t, but we’re

  going home.’

  ‘We can’t,’ Guy whispers. ‘Something’s stopped working,

  in the uh, the uh, the navigations, in the engine.’ He looks at

  the me for help, but my face is blank, because the me doesn’t

  know what he’s talking about. ‘Come on,’ he begs, and he

  rolls his eyes and searches for something he can use, anything

  at all, scanning every corner of the room for proof that he

  isn’t insane: and then he sees me, in the lining, pressed up

  against the grate, a fairy-tale child peering through the froste
d

  glass of his favourite toy shop. He sees me, and our eyes meet,

  and I wonder how he is the only person to have ever seen

  me, the only one to have ever looked up at that exact angle, to have perfectly lined up his vision with the slats of the grate, and I realize that it makes sense: it’s fated to happen, destiny. He was meant to see me, so he does. I am going to cause whatever will happen. He locks onto me, and he instantly recognizes me. You can see it in somebody’s eyes, that recognition, and I see it in Guy’s. He sees me, and he knows. Guy gasps, and clutches at himself, and he has the heart attack I knew he would have, that I had to be here in order to instigate, because this is all about me, all hinges on my being here. He paws at his chest and then lets go of the table and lurches, and that’s when he plunges down the hall. Quinn races for him, Emmy unbuckles herself to do the same. Both versions of me watch as he dies, as they open his suit and try to kick his heart back into play; as he throws his arms around when he gives up, when he knows that he’s fighting a losing battle, and they try to restrain him, but they fail, and he stops moving as they finally manage to, in synchronicity. They aren’t sure if they’ve won or lost. I watch as Emmy cries: not because she liked Guy, but because this is all too much. It’s all too much, all the death and the tragedy and the lack of this being what she expected. She gasps back the tears.

  ‘We’ll turn around and go home,’ Quinn says, making the decision that it will be so. I wish that I could warn him that he can only be disappointed, now. I wish I could, but I don’t, and I can’t.

  7

  Emmy keeps telling Quinn and the me that it’ll be fine. ‘We’ll get home,’ she says, though she doesn’t sound like she believes it. The trip has sliced the crew in half, reduced our number by 50%. We’re being culled, and she knows it.

  ‘It would have happened anyway,’ she says as we put Guy’s body into his bed. ‘This trip puts so much stress on the human body, so much stress. It would have happened anyway.’

  She says it as if she’s consoling us both, but it’s all aimed at Quinn. He was the one in the argument; he’s the one who’ll feel guilt, for shouting at Guy and causing his heart to collapse, to rupture, to fail. I didn’t feel any guilt at the time, because there was none to feel. I had backed them up, but it wasn’t my fight. Now, however, the guilt swarms me. Emmy is trying to be the strong one, but she’s fighting a losing battle. ‘We’ll turn around, and we’ll get home, and we’ll bury them all.’

  She doesn’t even sound like she’s trying to believe it, not really.

  * * * They were down to nine people in the running for the final crew places. Myself, Emmy, Quinn, Guy, Wanda, Arlen; and then another assistant engineer (far more qualified than Wanda, but with so much more arrogance, the sort of dickhead who speaks about themselves in the third person on occasion); another pilot (who could have replaced either Quinn or Arlen, as there was no hierarchy to their roles at that point, but they were slightly more jittery, slightly less at ease with the idea – the possibility – of dying, or of the higher risks involved in something going wrong); and the only other remaining journalist. Her name was Terri, and she was Asian-American. She pointed it out every time somebody referred to her as just one of those ethnicities, correcting whoever said it with her disappointed little squeak of a voice. She was driven, totally and utterly. I managed to never spend any time with her during either the interview or training processes, because we were up for the same job. There was no point in us sharing any experiences together, because that would never happen in real life. Emmy and Guy, they were constants. They were part of every variation at that point. They knew that they had the job, if they wanted it; and they both wanted it. Terri hated Emmy, and Emmy hated her. That made Guy laugh when he spoke about it, when neither of them were around.

  ‘It’s like warring fucking rabbits,’ he said. ‘You ever see rabbits fighting? It’s hilarious, because they don’t even fucking try. It’s lazy viciousness, like they can’t really be bothered but they still want to win. Emmy doesn’t give her the time of day, but when she has to, she does it so fucking snarkily. Like, Fuck you, bitch, but without saying those words.’ That made him laugh. He even sent me a link to a video of rabbits fighting when we were waiting for the final line-up to be announced. Terri had nobody. She was focused on her job, her career. Everything else was just flotsam.

  ‘She’ll be picked,’ I said as we reached the last few days. We knew that the final crew was to be announced a week later, so they only had a few days to decide. ‘She’ll be picked.’ I was so sure. Myself, Emmy, Quinn and Arlen were drinking, even though we had been told to stay off the stuff. We knew that we four – we wanted us on the trip. We would be a good crew, a wholesome, relatable, well-adjusted crew. We would overcome all obstacles, and we would serve as role models. Emmy wouldn’t sit next to me, though. Apart from in the group, we weren’t talking.

  ‘She won’t be picked,’ Quinn said. ‘Have you read her stuff? It’s all gimmick. She won’t be picked.’

  Quinn presses the button and the engines stop, and the gravity comes back. I watch as the me and him pick up Guy and move him to his bed – which we should have done before this, because his body is heavy, mostly muscle, even what we assumed to be a slightly paunchy belly – and we strap him in, fasten him to the bed.

  ‘He didn’t deserve that,’ Quinn says. He did, I think. If you knew what I know. But he doesn’t, and he won’t. He closes the bed, gives it minimal oxygen, lowers the temperature – which actually means not heating the pod, relying on the outside vacuum to keep it cold, keep the body frozen – and seals it. ‘We’re going back,’ he says. It’s not a question, or a debate. ‘We should tell Ground Control, but the mission’s over.’ He asks the me to shut down what I’m working on – one of my blog posts, one of the last few that will get through because of where we are. I do. I watch as I save it, close the program, log out. Quinn opens the comms link, but there’s nothing there, just static. He closes it, opens it again, and still there’s nothing. He asks me to help him, then calls for Emmy – who is in the changing room, crying, trying to hide it from us, but we knew – and we all watch as he shuts it down again, opens it, shouts at the screen, hits the computer with his palm. ‘We’re going home,’ he says. ‘I’m turning us around.’ He spends the next twenty minutes staring at the screen as he types code, as he tries to activate things, but nothing happens. ‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘I can’t get into the fucking systems.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Emmy asks.

  ‘It means we can’t change course.’ He’s shaking, having trouble breathing fully again. (It’s a red herring, his breathing: it’ll never have any effect. He’ll die when his head smacks against a wall. Even now I wonder if I’ll have anything to do with that.)

  ‘Can’t you just turn us around?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t work like that. It needs preset coordinates, and the ship only moves in that direction. Manual control doesn’t kick in until we start to enter descent, when the landing gear’s deployed. This is all automated. It was meant to just work, and if it didn’t, we could hack the system and enter coordinates and…’ He looks white, sick. He asks the me to go with him on a walk. ‘We have to check the comms relay,’ he says. I wonder if I shouldn’t just tell them, save them the trouble, but even as I gently contemplate it, I know that it won’t be happening. This is inexorably set. My gut aches as I even think about the alternatives to the predestined.

  I watch them suit up, and then I watch Emmy, alone, brutally affected. She is a shell. She sits and bites at the flesh around her fingernails, because her fingernails are perfect and manicured, cultivated over months; but that flesh will heal quickly. She doesn’t make it bleed. She only nibbles at the hard part, pressed up against the nail itself. She keeps looking at Guy, before eventually sitting in the seat in the cockpit, too far away for me to see her. I’m shaking, and I’m sweating, wet running up my back, making my top stick to me. This is the sta
rt of my cold turkey. Quinn and the me are outside, only they don’t know what they’re looking for. Neither of them saw what Guy destroyed. I did. If I’m meant to fix it, only I can, now.

  Every part of me aches. Before this, I wouldn’t moan. It wasn’t in my DNA. Elena would take the piss out of me: she would say that I was willing to worry about everything else, but sickness… Sickness was something I liked to pretend I was impervious to.

  ‘It’s like you can’t even begin to admit defeat,’ she said. ‘You can’t accept that it’s okay to just let go.’ She would tease me, because I would plug on and make myself worse. I would have the flu and it would last weeks because I refused to take a sick day, to plant myself under the covers and eat soup and watch TV and stop. For me, the work was the important thing. Having a runny nose wouldn’t stop me writing. If it’s what you want, you persevere. ‘If you had even one day off you’d get better straight away,’ she would tell me, waving vitamins under my nose as she threw them into her mouth every morning. ‘A little vitamin C, you might stop getting these colds, and then you wouldn’t have to pretend that you felt okay all the time.’

  ‘I feel fine,’ I would say, when I didn’t. Now, though, I might be admitting defeat. It’s the shivers: they run through me completely, pushing me to the point where I can hear my own teeth rattling against each other at the back of my mouth, making my jaw grind in my ears; I can feel my elbows and knees on the metallic grating thing that I’m lying on; my clothes are drenched, like when I woke from the sleep pods for the first time, sodden, dripping, gasping for dry air; my head aches from the sheer pain of the vibrations coursing through me. It’s all too much. I shut my eyes and try to sleep, but even now I can barely get there. The rattle of my bones gets too loud inside my ears, and I pray that they’ll put the engines back on soon, just to drown it out, to maybe let me sleep again, or pretend to. They have to. And they’ll run out of air if they’re not careful. That’s the beauty of the ship: if it doesn’t move, the crew die. If it moves, the crew die. It’s a perfect, closed system, just like time itself.