The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  “E., you’ve outdone yourself.”

  “This is great, really wonderful. Like Baskin-Robbins. Have you got the other thirty flavors lined up for us?”

  “And that chili, wow—it had a bite to it. Any of the hot peppers left or is that it?”

  This was the sort of thing I was hearing as I bused the table and stacked the dishes on the counter preparatory to loading them into the dishwasher, and I have to admit I was feeding on the praise, murmuring “Thanks” and “It’s nothing,” and finally just “Aw, shucks” delivered with a sardonic enough-is-enough grin. And then T.T., who’d gone off to do his post-prandial CO2 analysis, Popsicle swelling his cheek and a spatter of something on his shirt, came humping back up the stairs, looking spooked. Or surprised, I guess, would be more accurate. “E.,” he announced, “you’ve got a visitor.”

  The room stood still. Everyone looked first to Troy, then to me. “A visitor?” I echoed, completely at a loss. How could I have a visitor when we were sealed in? I had a quick fleeting vision of somebody breaking through the glass, a hyper-inflated fan, a stalker or gang member or one of the legion of yahoos sending us hate mail, and then I understood. “You mean at the window?”

  All eyes were on me as I went down the stairs, the crew, as one, rising from the table to lean over the balcony and watch me skirt the ag biome and animal pens until I disappeared from sight beneath them. It was gloomy inside and out, our lighting kept to a minimum after dark, and as I made my way across the floor to the airlock and the window built into the wall beside it, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing in the convocation of shadows that engulfed the entryway. There was a figure at the window, too tall to be Linda—or my mother, though why I should imagine her there I couldn’t say except that in situations like that you always expect bad news, It’s your father, dear, his heart, lungs, liver, or some such. Of course, that was another factor Mission Control had taken into account in their endless scrutiny of us—family history. I remember G.C. and Judy, notepads propped up in their laps, trading off during the initial round of interviews: Any illnesses in the family? Your parents alive still? How’s their health?

  But this wasn’t my parents or Linda or a stranger either: it was Johnny.

  The outside light—it must have been a twenty-five-watt bulb, as if to make a feint at saving on electricity when the technosphere was burning through how many thousands of kilowatt hours a day I couldn’t even begin to guess—shone weakly on his face. He was wearing his leather jacket, collar up, and a cowboy shirt he knew I liked, sapphire blue with cream piping around the breast pockets. I could see his breath hanging in the air and that was the strangest thing, to think it was cold out there when it was habitually warm if not hot in here, muggy, dense, tropical, the way an ideal world should be. Nobody wanted to put a temperate climate under glass, let alone a Nordic one, but outside E2 the elevation was four thousand feet, the month was March, and the temperatures could drop below freezing at night. I picked up the phone in the very instant he did, as if our motions were coordinated, hand to receiver, receiver to ear.

  “Hey, babe,” he said, his voice scraping bottom, “how’s it? You getting enough to eat?”

  I said, “Hi,” but beyond that I couldn’t think of what to say, and that was unusual for me. Normally I would have had a snappy comeback, especially because this last implied that we couldn’t take care of ourselves inside, that we were weak, that the whole thing was nothing more than an elaborate joke. But no, no—he had a sense of humor, that was all, and this was just a routine, not a criticism. He was trying to cheer me, trying to be lighthearted, and he was here, that was the thing, here to show me he cared. Call it shock, surprise, the intrusion of his world on mine, but I just couldn’t respond, the double-paned glass hanging there between us like a picture frame. I watched his breath condense in the frigid air, drift away and dissipate.

  “What’s the matter,” he said, “cat got your tongue? But wait a minute, there are no cats in there, are there? Just, what, galagos? And by the way, what exactly is a galago anyway?”

  “A primate,” I said, and the spell was broken. “Aka bush baby. Big eyes, big ears, furry tail. Like a monkey, only it’s not.”

  “The cuteness factor. Like something out of Star Wars—the Ewoks, right? Can’t build your own world without tossing a little dollop of cuteness in . . . by the way, you’re looking pretty cute yourself. A trifle thin, maybe, but—”

  “Come on, Johnny,” I said, but it was nice, this little interlude. Nice to banter. Nice to see him. Nice to know he hadn’t forgotten about me. “I thought you would have forgotten about me by now,” I said. “I mean, it’s been a week.”

  He gave me a smile, though in the dim light and the way it angled in from overhead, it almost looked like a grimace. “Give me some credit,” he said. He was lean and tall and graceful. He wore his hair long. Strands of it hung in his eyes, beautiful eyes, sparking green where they caught the light. “You know,” he said, “I would have brought you a pizza, but I figured that’d only be like torture, unless you could experience it vicariously—I mean, if you want, I’d be happy to go get a double-cheese pepperoni from Alfano’s and eat it slowly, slice by slice, so you can see my tongue and teeth and watch my Adam’s apple when I swallow—”

  “Come on, Johnny.”

  We were silent for a moment then and his face changed. “So what are we supposed to do,” he said. “Hump the glass?”

  There were smears on the surface where one of the crew had entertained a visitor with what we would come to call the Ecospherian handshake, left hand to right, the touch of the glass, outside and in. I gave him a smile. “If that’s what gets you off.”

  “It’s not what gets me off—it’s what gets you off. You’re the one locked away like Rapunzel, so let down your hair.”

  My hands instinctively went to my hair. Which was dirty. I was dirty. Dirt was our way of life. I wore no makeup, not even lipstick. My T-shirt could have been cleaner. My shorts too. I raised my arms, fluffed out my hair and let it fall to my shoulders.

  “Yeah.” He breathed, and his voice went through me in an electric shiver. “That’s better. Now how about, I don’t know, how about showing some tit?”

  I couldn’t say Come on, Johnny one more time because that admonition wasn’t real but only a kind of child’s play, and this was different. We were bantering, we were lovers, and he could say that, say How about showing some tit? without stepping over the line because it was a joke and at the same time it wasn’t. “Is this an obscene phone call?” I said.

  He was leaning into the glass now so that his breath fogged the window, the phone pinched to one ear. “You bet it is.”

  I looked round me, looked over both shoulders and off into the shadows of the darkened biomes. I heard the coquis, the galagos. A moth flitted against the inside of the glass, attracted to the light that shone down on Johnny, who was right there now, inches away. Very slowly, as if I had all the time in the world—and I did—I slipped the T-shirt up over my head, then reached back to unfasten my bra.

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  It was dark, I couldn’t really see all that clearly, and if I had second thoughts about spying on one of my crewmates, I stifled them. The whole thing was almost innocent, if you want to know the truth, because I’d gone down to check on the water flows in the fish ponds maybe ten minutes after Troy announced that E. had a visitor, which I’d forgotten entirely about because the conversation had veered off in some other direction altogether, and I was just strolling along minding my own business when I saw movement off to my right and there she was at the window, her shoulders bare and her back too, bare down to the waist. She seemed to be rotating her hips, gyrating against the glass, and I could make out the shifting form of her boyfriend—Johnny, his name was—looming in and out of the weak sepia light like a big fluttering vampire bat in one of the Dracula movies. It took me a minute to realize what was happening, and it wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen E. topless before—botto
mless, for that matter—through the course of one team skinny-dipping episode or another, but this was different, this was E. like I’d never seen her, doing what? Simulating sex with a man who might or might not have had his penis in his hand while the shadows elongated and fell back again and E.’s hips went in and out and up and down in sync with his. It gave me a jolt. It did. And if I eased off my shoes and slipped in along the side of the animal pens so I could get a better look, I really had no choice in the matter. Call me a voyeur, but anybody in my position would have done the same.

  Case in point: I’d had a call from my college roommate a week or so before closure. Jason. Jason Fourier. We’d kept in touch sporadically over the years, but he was calling now to reconnect because he’d seen my face on TV or maybe in the newspaper, and the first thing he said over the line, before even identifying himself, was You’re like a pig in shit. And I said, Jason? And he said, You’re not fooling anybody, you dog. The blonde is hot. And that redhead, wow, scorching, man, just scorching.

  I can’t say whether Jason’s reaction was in any way representative of the larger response, but I have to give G.C., Judy and Dennis credit because here came the hook again, the irresistible fantasy of sex under glass. That was all the public cared about. Living arrangements. Bedrooms. Terranauts going at it like fauns and satyrs splayed out in the high grass under a mango tree. I was caught up in it too—how could I not be? Yes, we were doing science, yes, we were committed, but the human factor had to be front and center no matter what anybody says. You want a space colony? You can fill it with all the species you can manage to net, trap or dig up and you can balance out the O2/CO2 ratio to a nice clean earth-friendly 20.9 percent to .03 percent, but if the humans don’t mate, don’t reproduce, what good is it? The Bible might be sketchy on all this, Adam and Eve hunkering down to generate two sons and then another son to replace the murdered one, two more sons after that and a pair of daughters as well, leaving open the question of where the sons’ wives had come from (unless God approved of incest or they found some other bright-eyed scampering hominid to trade genes with), but in the worlds we were projecting, sex and genetic diversity were key, for our species and all the others too. If E2’s raft of creatures failed to reproduce, then the whole thing was a bust.

  I’m not trying to justify what I did that night. I’m just saying that if you put yourself in an overheated environment with a girl like E. and then witness something like that you’d have to be beyond all hope not to find it at least interesting. I don’t know how long I stood there watching, hard as a brick, my shorts damp with pre-ejaculate and the breath catching in my throat, but the mosquitoes brought me back to earth, or E2’s earth, and I slunk away feeling guilty, feeling tainted, but wasn’t that the way it always was when you watched porno?

  There were some two thousand sensors distributed throughout E2, gauging everything from soil respiration to ocean salinity levels and systems functions, and cameras just about everywhere. Beyond that—and this was especially true in those first few months—every time you glanced up you were staring into the face of a family of tourists, Dad, Mom, Junior and Sis, clicking away with their Kodak Fun Savers. Or a journalist riffling through his notebook. Girl Scouts, Trekkies, bird-watchers or one clutch or another of non-specified enthusiasts who fixated on the Terranaut narrative as if it was the sole path in life. That first Halloween a whole mob of people appeared outside the airlock dressed as scientists, galagos, cockroaches and Terranauts, one group of eight tricked out in crimson jumpsuits and featuring a girl with her right hand bandaged in commemoration of the accident that brought down Mission One. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is, there was precious little privacy under the glass unless you knew where to look—and you had to be aware not only of your surroundings but also of the eyes fixed on you pretty much all the time.

  An example. Just days after I’d happened to observe Dawn in her private moment there at the visitors’ window, I was in the pigpen with her performing my morning’s ag duty, thinking of nothing beyond going through the motions at hand and getting on with my day, which was to include a PicTel conference with an auditorium full of high-schoolers from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (Yoopers, they call themselves, in case you’re interested), maintenance on the fish ponds and settling tanks and a video hookup with G.C., Judy and Dennis to take instruction and reveal, as discreetly as possible, any quirks or deviant tendencies—actual or in potentia—arising among my fellow Terranauts (for which, in time, I would be labeled a spy, a snitch, a traitor and worse). Anyway, there we were, Dawn and I, equipped with shovels, buckets and brooms, our bodies decaffeinated and already on the way to being undernourished, slinging shit. We chatted collegially as we bent to it, our conversation peppered with in-jokes, gossip about the six of us who didn’t happen to be present, work-related issues, that sort of thing.

  E.’s hair had broken free of the ponytail she’d been wearing earlier and now it was a wild sweat-slicked mass obscuring her face every time she leaned into the shovel. Her arms were bare, flecked with mud. It came to me that she was totally at home here, and for some reason I flashed on Thomas Hardy, though I hadn’t given him a thought or glanced at a single line of his since college. What came to me was the pivotal scene in Jude the Obscure in which Arabella Donn, the lusty farmer’s daughter, attracts Jude Fawley’s attention by flinging a pig’s genitalia at him. And, if I was remembering rightly, scoring a strike right down the middle of the plate.

  “You know what you remind me of?” I glanced up from the bucket I was steadying with both hands as she made a wide slashing deposit in its depths.

  “No, what?”

  “I mean who, who you remind me of?”

  She shrugged, the shovel backing away from the mouth of the bucket to rasp against the concrete floor. Behind her, the pigs—two sows, a boar and a pair of piglets—poked their snouts through the gate separating the back portion of the pen from the front, which we crewmates were in the process of slopping out. “I don’t know, who?”

  The smell—that perfume pigs create as their highest achievement, a mix of sour milk, putrefying blood, shit, urine, vomit and some other unidentifiable element that binds it all together so it hits you like a club, over and over—had us breathing shallowly and through our mouths only. “Arabella Donn,” I said.

  She stopped what she was doing, put one hand on her hip. She was amused, I could see that. “Who?”

  “From Jude the Obscure? She was the farm girl, the pig girl, actually.”

  “I wouldn’t know—you were the lit major, not me. I remember the movie Tess, though—”

  “Polanski. What did you think?”

  “It was all right. I guess I didn’t know they wore so much eye shadow then, back on the farm, I mean—”

  “Right, me either.”

  “But that’s what I’ve been reduced to, huh? The pig girl? Or wench. Wouldn’t they have called her a wench?”

  “You’re more than that to me, E., a whole lot more. You’re the goat girl too, and what—the eggmonger. The shit-slinger, the—”

  “Very funny,” she said, and made a playful gesture, as if to snatch up a handful of that very substance and fling it at me, but of course I don’t have to tell you how slippery this medium is, how quickly it can shift underfoot so that someone clowning around in a pair of pink rubber galoshes while standing ankle-deep in it can lose her balance in a heartbeat. Which was just what happened. Looking surprised—and apologetic, that too—she went down hard on her backside, right in the thick of it, and what did I do? What could I do? I laughed.

  The pigs, incidentally, were a semi-domesticated variety shipped in from Ossabaw Island, off the Georgia coast. This was a population bred out of a feral remnant stocked on the island by Spanish explorers in the early sixteenth century and they’d evolved to suit their limited environment through the dwarfism many island species exhibit, as E.O. Wilson, whom I mentioned earlier, theorized in positing some of the principles of island biogeog
raphy back in the 1970s. As a dwarf variety, Ossabaw hogs were perfect for our purposes, the boar no taller than maybe twenty inches at the shoulder and weighing in at well under two hundred pounds. The idea here was to provide meat, of course, as on any farm, but the complicating factor, as the Mission One crew discovered the hard way, was in finding enough fodder to keep the animals growing into the promise of their chops, hams and spare ribs. (Initially, G.C. had proposed using Vietnamese potbellied pigs, but word got out to the public and there was a howl of protest from hundreds of people who kept them as pets, because if you recall, it was around then that they were, very briefly, all the rage. I remember one overwrought newspaper editorial comparing us to dog eaters, as in, Would you slaughter, skin and bake the family dog? No, I said—privately, of course—we wouldn’t. We’d fricassee it.)