Tal had been overjoyed with the precise challenge of setting down the landing modules on Callisto and Ganymede, then the ship’s slingshot around Jupiter, but as their trajectory back to Earth evened out and the silence from Mission Control wore on, he became despondent and irritable. Without the periodic uplinks from his young family back in Houston, his mood deteriorated. He began to channel his distress into video games. The various controllers—the joysticks, gamepads, guns, steering wheels, flight simulators—took the brunt of his anguish. Games inevitably ended with some piece of plastic equipment flying across Little Earth and an unquenchable stream of curses, a mixture of Hebrew and English, echoing around the centrifuge.
After a particularly violent outburst, Sully watched him slouch in front of the gaming console like an old helium balloon. The levity that had been so charming, so magnetic, that had filled Tal with so much buoyancy, had dissipated into the recycled air. Eventually he crossed the centrifuge to collect the shattered steering wheel he had hurled against the wall. After silently gathering the pieces, he pooled them on the table, where he tried to put them back together. It was a futile project, but he worked on it for the rest of the day: gluing plastic to plastic, fiddling with wires, testing buttons. He just needed something to do. He didn’t give up until Thebes laid a hand on his back.
“Leave it,” Thebes said. “I need your help on the control deck.”
Tal let Thebes distract him with work, but he was back in front of the gaming console the next day. Sully couldn’t tell whether it was the games themselves that soothed him, the repetition of music and sound effects and graphics, or the excuse to emote so wildly at the end that kept him playing, again and again: win, lose, win, win, win, lose—the numbness of concentration followed by the quick release.
Devi, the youngest crewmember and unquestionably the most brilliant of them, struggled silently. While Tal and Ivanov seemed to take up more space than ever, their wild emotions overflowing their bodies, Devi seemed to shrink. She’d always been more engaged with the machines than with her colleagues, which was part of what made her such an exceptional engineer. But as the silence from Earth lengthened, she disengaged from both machines and humans. Nothing could hold her interest. She began to drift, untethered to the crew or to the mechanics of the ship itself.
Thebes noticed the lapses in Devi’s repairs—she was missing obvious problems, didn’t hear troubling sounds, passed over malfunctioning components, as if she were sleepwalking. He confided in Sully one afternoon, coming to visit her in the comm. pod while she worked through the probe data.
“Have you noticed anything amiss with Devi?” he asked.
Sully was unsurprised. She had been trying not to notice the growing shift in all her colleagues, but the changes in each of them were unmistakable. The crew was unraveling—slowly, one thread at a time.
“I’ve noticed,” she said.
Together they tried to pull Devi back to them, back to their ship. Thebes worked alongside Devi, although it meant twice as much work for him, and he told her stories about being recruited into the South African space program, decades ago, when he was a young man and the program was barely a few years old. Sully kept her company during their off hours—she tried to make sure that Devi did the required amount of exercise, that she ate and slept regularly. She asked Devi about her family, about her childhood. They tried their best, but Thebes and Sully could do only so much. None of them was immune to the growing rift between Aether and Earth. The closer they got, the wider it became, and as the silence wore on it grew cacophonous.
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, after dinner and the recreation hour, Harper called the crew together. Ivanov was the last to arrive, having skipped both dinner and recreation in favor of staying in the lab, cataloging moon rock samples. He went straight to the treadmill and began jogging in the corner, casting a glare in the direction of Tal, who was lifting weights.
“Did you want to use these?” Tal asked with mock politeness. Ivanov punched up the speed on the treadmill and ignored him.
“Now that we’re all here,” Harper began, “I think we should touch base about the blackout.”
Thebes was at the table, reading the old Arthur C. Clarke novel Childhood’s End. He dog-eared his page and joined Harper on the couch, folding his hands on the book in his lap. Devi got out of her bunk and went to sit next to Thebes, while Tal put down the weights and stayed where he was. Sully left her bunk and leaned against the lavatory door, facing the couch and the exercise area beyond it. Ivanov kept jogging, indifferent.
“I want to go over a few things,” Harper continued. “I know we’re all aware of the situation, but bear with me. At this point we’ve been out of contact with Mission Control for almost three weeks. And we’re not sure why.” He looked around at them as if for confirmation. Sully nodded. Tal began to chew on his lower lip. Thebes and Devi listened without expression. Ivanov kept jogging.
“Our comm. pod is functioning properly. Telemetry from the probes is coming in, commands to the probes are going out. Devi and Thebes are ninety-nine point nine percent certain the failure did not originate with us.” He paused again and looked to the engineers on the couch for confirmation. Thebes bobbed his head.
“We do not think it is Aether’s error,” Thebes said, enunciating each word, each syllable, so perfectly it was difficult to doubt his diligence.
“Which leaves us with some unattractive possibilities,” Harper said.
From the treadmill Ivanov snorted and hit the Cancel button. The belt slowed and stopped. “Unattractive,” he muttered under his breath, then added a few more words in Russian. He raked his fingers through his hair, which was still bouncy from being in zero G all day. Sully didn’t have to understand Russian to get the drift of his mutterings.
Harper ignored him and continued. “In every instance I can think of, we’re looking at a worldwide problem. Clearly all three of the DSN telescopes are down. The way I see it, either the equipment has failed, or the personnel has failed—or both. Other ideas?”
There was a pause. The centrifuge hummed on its axis and the life support ducts breathed. Somewhere in the zero-G section they could hear the hull of the ship groaning softly.
“It could be,” Sully offered after a minute, “that there’s an atmospheric problem. Some kind of RF pollution, a geomagnetic storm maybe—but to cause a blackout like this it would have to be one hell of a storm. Historically something like this would be brief, correlating with a solar event, but…I don’t know, it could be.”
Harper looked thoughtful. “Has that happened on this scale before?”
Ivanov threw up his hands in frustration. “A geomagnetic storm? Don’t be ridiculous, Sullivan, it couldn’t possibly last this long.”
Sully continued, “I…don’t think so. Years ago a magnetic storm upset the power grid in Canada and caused aurora borealis as far south as Texas, but Ivanov’s right, nothing I’ve ever heard of would last this long and disrupt both hemispheres. It could be something nuclear—there’ve been experiments on how nukes might affect the atmosphere in the past, but I’m not sure there’s been any hard data on it, mostly just supposition.” Sully fiddled with her clipboard as she ticked off the possibilities, vaguely aware of the chill that settled over the centrifuge as she uttered the word nuclear. “I guess it could be airborne debris, which could come from either an asteroid impact or a massive detonation. But really—the instruments we have on board should have picked up on anything like that, and there’s nothing unusual about Earth’s energy signature. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Basically we’re fucked and we have no idea why,” Ivanov interjected. He brushed past Sully and disappeared into the lavatory, shutting the door behind him.
Tal sighed. “He’s right, isn’t he? Barring the point zero one possibility that it’s our mistake.” He rubbed his face with his hands as if he were trying to wake himself up from a bad dream. It was hard to tell whether Tal was more upset that Ivanov was right or tha
t their planet seemed doomed. No one spoke for a long moment, listening to Ivanov opening and shutting the door to the communal medicine cabinet in the lavatory.
“I just don’t get it,” Tal continued. “If we’re talking nuclear war—we would know. If we’re talking asteroid—we would know. And if we’re talking worldwide epidemic—well, fuck, I’m no epidemiologist, but I hardly think things would be fine one day, everyone dead the next.”
Devi shivered but said nothing.
“So what now?” Thebes asked. He was looking at Harper. They were all looking at Harper, their commander, who raised his palms in defeat.
“There’s no…precedent. They didn’t cover this in the training manual. I think we have to continue as planned and hope that as we get closer to home we can initiate some kind of contact. There’s not much else we can do in the interim. Unless someone has a different idea.” The four other crewmembers slowly shook their heads. “Okay, so I guess we can agree that the next step is to stay the course and see how the situation develops.” He paused. “Ivanov!” Harper shouted. “Agreed?”
The door to the lavatory slid open and Ivanov took his toothbrush from his mouth. “If it makes you feel better pretending there is some other option, that we are actually making a choice, okay, great—agreed.” Then he shut the door again.
Tal rolled his eyes and muttered asshole to no one in particular.
Thebes gave Devi a paternal pat on the back and she let her head rest on his shoulder, just for a second, then got up and climbed back into her bunk. She shut the curtain and the glow of her light was extinguished a moment later. The crew disbanded silently, defeated. There was nothing else to say. Thebes took his book and went to bed. Tal did one more set with the weights, then put them away. Inside her little compartment Sully let her gaze linger on the photo of her daughter. She closed her eyes and listened: there was the murmur of Devi’s Hindi prayer, the shrill music of Tal’s handheld videogame, the scratch of Harper’s pencil on paper, the rustle of Thebes turning pages, and the hum of the ship beneath it all. Ivanov was cursing under his breath as he left the lavatory, but later, as she drifted off to sleep, she thought she heard his muffled sobs.
THE NEXT MORNING, Sully opened her eyes a few minutes before the alarm buzzed at 0700. She turned it off, staring at the stiff ripples of the curtain, then she let her eyelids flutter back down. The prospect of returning to work in the comm. pod seemed like an unhappy chore. It was difficult to see the point of it now. She didn’t care about the data rushing into her machines anymore, or the groundbreaking conclusions she might draw from all the brand-new information, the fresh discoveries that lay at her fingertips. She didn’t want to leave the centrifuge at all. She wanted gravity to go on holding her.
Her dreams that night had taken her back to the surface of Callisto, where she had stood not so long ago, watching the fawn-colored stripes of Jupiter whirling, the Great Red Spot churning. Beyond the curtain, first light began to strengthen, but she didn’t rouse herself to see it. Not today. It was as real as her dream and nowhere near as beautiful. She went back to sleep, back to Jupiter’s moon, and let the artificial sunrise go unobserved.
THREE
ONE DARK AFTERNOON, after the sun had gone down but before the sky had erased all its evidence, Augustine and Iris headed out to the hangar. Iris wanted to go for a walk—a long walk, she said—and the hangar seemed like a new and interesting destination. Augie hadn’t been there in a long time—not since his last flight in, the previous summer—but the eerie blue twilight, casting shadows on the snow, stirred his sense of adventure. They would be far from the observatory when the deep darkness of early evening fell, but they took a flashlight, and at the last minute Augustine swung a rifle across his back and made sure the chamber was full. The weight of the gun barrel against his shoulder blade and the thick yellow beam of light swinging across the blue snow in front of him quenched his apprehension.
He carried the flashlight in one hand and steadied himself with a ski pole in the other. Navigating the shifting snowdrifts on foot was difficult—his arthritis was getting worse. Iris skidded fearlessly down the mountain, running out in front of the flashlight’s reach, turning occasionally to see what was taking him so long. He was out of breath before they were halfway there, and his knees had already begun to ache, the muscles in his thighs to burn. He should’ve taken the skis, but they were too big for Iris, and it didn’t seem fair to make her walk while he sliced through the drifts. After almost an hour of walking, the roof of the hangar came into view, a glint of corrugated metal against the endless snow. Iris began to move even faster, wading through the soft drifts on her short but determined legs.
As they came closer, he noticed that the long sliding doors of the hangar were wide open. Snow had begun to accumulate inside. Where the floor was bare he could see dark oil stains soaked into the concrete. It was the scene of a hurried departure. A set of ratchet wrench sockets lay scattered across the concrete like hexagonal stars in an earthbound constellation, the empty case tossed nearby. Augustine closed his eyes and imagined the plane on the tarmac, researchers on board, luggage stowed, and one last military mechanic rushing to collect his things, picking up the case without latching it and watching the wrench sockets spin across the floor. Augustine had heard the Herc take off from the observatory, then watched it climb into the sky from afar. Here, he couldn’t help but fill the long, white runway with an imaginary plane. Augustine pictured the copilot hanging his head out the hatch, shouting Come on, while the mechanic decided to let the fallen pieces lie where they were, throwing the empty case down with them and running to board the waiting plane, climbing the rickety staircase, then kicking the stairs away and swinging the hatch shut. The plane thundering down the white runway, lifting up nose-first into the sky. Returning to a world Augustine no longer had access to.
Where the plane might have idled was the empty, derelict runway: the plastic glimmer of unlit LEDs, orange flags half-buried in the snow. The staircase was still there, knocked on its side, one loose wheel spinning in lazy circles in the wind. Augustine held one of the wrench sockets in the padded palm of his mitten, then let it fall to the ground with a hollow clatter. It reminded him of his father—the smell of stale grease, the tools and machine parts scattered around the hangar. Augustine used to watch his father sleep, feet propped up on the recliner, mouth half-open, a ragged snore erupting from deep in his throat. And the smell—that thick, oily smell that wafted off his father’s clothes like an unlit fire or the underbelly of a diesel truck. The television would be flickering in the background, his mother either working in the kitchen or lying down in their bedroom, and Augie would kneel on the carpet, feeling the rough polyester fibers pressing into his shins, pretending to watch the television but watching his father instead.
Augustine brushed the snow off a large stainless steel toolbox in the hangar and forced open the top drawer. A jumble of drill bits and screwdrivers stared back at him, a tangled spool of wire, an assortment of thick bolts. He shut the drawer. Something moved in the corner of his eye and he turned toward the runway outside to see Iris climbing on the fallen staircase like a jungle gym.
“Careful,” he called to her, and she raised her arms above her head in a defiant no hands gesture. She edged along the thin metal framework like a balance beam. He continued investigating the hangar, shining the flashlight into the dim corner and kicking snow off mysterious shapes buried beneath the drifts. A few limp, frozen piles of cardboard, more toolboxes, a stack of tires. Augustine arrived at a sizable mound covered with a stiff green tarp and fastened with bungee cords. He unhooked the cords and drew back the tarp to find a pair of snowmobiles. Of course, he thought. He, along with his luggage, had been shuttled to and from the runway on his various arrivals and departures from the observatory via these snowmobiles. In previous years, Augie had left the observatory during the summer months, when the precipitation from the melting snow clouded the atmosphere and thin blankets of fog rolled
off the Arctic sea, up into the mountains, stretching over the sky like a scrim that prevented him from doing his work. He would go somewhere warm on his escapes from the Arctic: the Caribbean, Indonesia, Hawaii, a different world entirely. Staying at extravagant resorts, eating nothing but shrimp cocktail and raw oysters, drinking gin at noon and then passing out on the pool furniture and burning to a crackling red crisp. What I wouldn’t do for a few liters of gin right about now, he thought.
Augustine ran his mittened hands over the sleek machines. The keys were still slotted into the ignitions. He turned the nearest one to the On position and pulled out the choke, then gave the start cord a pull. The engine made a halfhearted groan but didn’t catch. Augustine kept pulling the cord, as hard as he could, until finally the engine turned over and the pistons started pumping on their own. Oily smoke billowed from underneath the hood, and the engine settled into a hesitant but steady beat. The smoke thinned and Augie gave the machine an affectionate pat on its shiny black haunch. There wasn’t anywhere in particular he wanted to go, but it was good to have an engine at his command. Perhaps they would ride back to the observatory. Augie grinned at the idea and wondered if Iris’s limbs were long enough to ride the other one, but when he saw her, he immediately forgot about the snowmobiles. The cold engine sputtered and died, and he barely heard it.
There was another shape on the runway. Augie squinted to make out its silhouette against the luminous blue of the snow in the fading light. It was on four legs, a grayish-white color that almost disappeared into the background. If Iris hadn’t been so entranced by it, Augie might not even have noticed. Iris moved toward the figure, scooting along the thin metal poles of the fallen staircase and cooing, singing that strange, guttural song he had grown accustomed to. The figure cocked its head. It was a wolf.
Good Morning, Midnight Page 4