The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  Everybody seemed to swell up then till they were twice their size, blow-up dolls, puppets, monsters of ego. Gyro applauded. Troy said, “Shit yeah!” What followed, aside from Eve’s punctuating the dialogue—or harangue, or whatever you want to call it—by snatching at my water glass and sending it crashing to the floor, was a shouting session that ended only after Diane fetched the breadboard from the counter and slammed it down on the table so hard the whole foundation seemed to shake. “Enough,” she said. “You’re all out of order.” She had a glare for everybody, but me especially, as if I was the one who’d abandoned the rules and spoken out of turn.

  “We’re still a team,” she said, her shoulders rigid, the breadboard lying there flat on the table like something she’d choked to death with her own two hands. “And what does a team do?” I reached for Vodge’s hand and gave it a squeeze, but he wouldn’t look at me. “A team treats everybody with respect. Dawn says she wants to stay inside, as incredible as that may seem, and I say we put it to a vote. Show of hands, people—how many say ‘aye’?”

  Not a single hand went up but mine, not even Vodge’s.

  After the meeting we all went our separate ways, except Gretchen, who followed me down the hall haranguing me till I ducked into my room and slammed the door in her face. Eve wasn’t hungry—she’d just been fed—but to calm myself I put her to my breast anyway, at which point she promptly fell off to sleep, and I was left alone to sort things out on my own. All I could think about was them overpowering me, main strength, six against two (that is, assuming Vodge would stand up for me), but it wouldn’t be just six—there’d be eight new Terranauts coming through that airlock too, none of whom would be all that thrilled to see me staying on. They were a team, same as we were, and all I had to do was summon the look of disbelief shading into outrage on Linda’s face to get that straight. But then this was going to hit Linda hardest, of course—if I stayed inside, Linda was the odd one out. And even if we converted some of the savanna to food production, as planned, there was no way E2 could support nine—ten, if you included Eve. There was the oxygen question too. While the O2 levels had miraculously risen to stabilize at around sixteen percent (perceptibly shorter nights, a run of three weeks of sun-drenched days), getting enough air to breathe was going to be a continuing problem no matter how many Terranauts there were. Believe me, I wasn’t entering into this lightly—for one thing, it would mean the end of my friendship with Linda, and for another, it would involve my convincing Vodge too, and that wasn’t going to be easy.

  I was late that day getting back out into the IAB, where Diane, Vodge, Gyro, Gretchen and I were putting in the spring crops as diligently as we could, given the declining seed stocks, determined to leave things in the best possible condition for the incoming crew. After setting Eve down in her basket, I took my place beside Vodge, helping him plant our barley crop in the way of the ages—the stick, the hole, the seed—while the others turned over the soil in the vegetable beds. Nobody had much to say, even Vodge, who was clearly angry with me, and that would have hurt me even beyond what the morning had already wrought, except that while I’d been sitting there in my room with Eve, I’d seen a way clear of all this. I was determined to stay; they were just as determined that it wasn’t going to happen. That was the reality I was up against, but what they weren’t taking into account, atheists all, was that there was a God in our universe and He had the final say.

  At lunch break, though Vodge was being sweet to me by way of making up (and, I knew, trying to maneuver me into doing what he wanted me to do) and Richard plunked himself down next to me to try and reason with me, I took my plate—and Eve—up the flight of stairs to the command center and sat down at the desk where the phone was. Now, as I’ve already stated here, the phone was tightly regulated, as was the computer, which had no outside access beyond Mission Control, but we could pick up the receiver, dial “0” and get through to Josie Muller instantaneously. Which was what I did now.

  Josie, in her official tones, said, “Mission Control,” as if she were broadcasting to the nation, though, of course, there was no need since it could only have been one of us eight calling.

  “Hi, Josie. It’s me, Dawn. I just wondered if Jeremiah’s around?”

  “Jeremiah?” she echoed, as if she’d never heard of him.

  “Yeah, I need to talk to him. It’s urgent. Or no, it’s an emergency, really—is he there?”

  He wasn’t. He’d been in earlier but he’d gone home for lunch. She could try him at home, but he really didn’t like to be disturbed once he left the office . . .

  I could feel my heart going. It was as if my life depended on this (and from where I sat that morning, I really felt it did). “Please, Josie, I’m telling you, this is an emergency—I have to speak with him, I have to.”

  “Could I have him call you back?”

  “Yes, please—”

  “You’ll be there?”

  “I’m not going to move a muscle. But please, hurry.”

  The phone rang five minutes later and G.C. was on the line, sounding not peeved (we just didn’t call him directly; no one did), but friendly, cheerful, as if he’d been waiting for the past twenty-three months for me to interrupt his lunch and invade his privacy at home. “What’s up, E.?” he asked. “Everything okay in there?”

  “Yes,” I said, too quickly. “Or, actually, no. There’s something I want to ask you—or propose, really. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time now—”

  Would any of the others have gotten away with this? Vodge, maybe. Maybe Diane. But I had special status now, and if the others wouldn’t let me forget it, I wasn’t about to forget it either. I don’t remember what I said to him, not exactly, though I suppose I should have at least jotted down some notes, just for the record, but you already know my argument, which had all to do with practicality, continuity and, most of all, publicity. G.C., give him credit, heard me out (and of course, like the others he’d have to have assumed that the seven-to-one vote had put the matter to rest, if not buried it altogether). I waited, all tensed up, and listened to his breathing on the far end of the line. And then, as if musing to himself, he murmured, “Linda Ryu’s not going to like it—it’s really not fair to her, not at all, or Malcolm either—”

  “No,” I said, “no—and she’s my best friend. I hate to do it, but just think of what this’ll mean for E2, for the mission—and the mission after that. Think of it, Eve growing up inside, the first child born off-planet in the history of—”

  “What about Vodge,” he said, cutting me off. “He on board with this?”

  So I had to go and get Vodge and we had to share the phone while G.C. thought out loud and it was just like the time at the glass when he’d dictated the terms of our marriage to us, only this time his voice alone had to carry all the freight of what he was saying, and it changed during the course of it, changed radically, from the open cheerfulness he’d begun with to the kind of hectoring tone you’d expect from Judy, but that was all right because it meant he was taking me seriously, and, as it turned out, had been anticipating some version of this ever since Eve had been born. But he was afraid too, afraid of things going wrong with the other crewmembers, with Linda, but most of all with Vodge.

  “You behind her?” he demanded.

  Vodge mumbled something neither of us caught.

  “Speak up—I’m asking if you’re on board with this, because the complications here . . . I don’t have to tell you. But the way I read you is you’re as hot to get out of there as anybody, or am I wrong?”

  Vodge looked straight at me. Eve would have been snatching at the cord, making her little noises, smiling maybe—she was a serial smiler at this juncture—and I must have looked scared, because there was no going back from this. “Truthfully? I can’t really say. I mean this is taking me by surprise as much as you—”

  “Don’t presume, my friend, because I could see this coming a mile off, and it’s something I didn’t dar
e hope for, but just think of it, think what this is going to do for revenues—it’s a sensation, it really is, and I’ve got to give you the credit, E. E.? You there?”

  I whispered into the phone, two little words—“I’m here”—but there were marching bands parading inside of me, flags waving, the sun bursting over hills. Could it really be this easy?

  Vodge, staring at me still, never wavering, his eyes locked on mine, murmured, “Can I at least have some time to think it through?”

  “Yeah,” G.C. said, “sure, think all you want. But I don’t have to remind you the time’s getting short, and, of course, we’re going to have to make a few adjustments since we’ve already named the Mission Three crew, but it can be done, anything can be done . . . So what I’m saying? Think fast.”

  If anything, the day of reentry—March 6, 1996—was an even bigger production than all the hoopla of the closure ceremony two years before. G.C. trotted out his celebrities, the TV cameras, the Girl Scouts and the bands, and he, Judy, Dennis and Vodge had been busy priming the pumps of public awareness, but this time there was to be a black-tie event too, as well as a speech by Martin Rodbell, the biochemist who’d co-won the Nobel two years earlier for his discovery of G-proteins and their role in signal transduction in cells. And, of course, there was the irresistible draw of watching the Terranauts dig into their first outside meal in 730 days, and we’d each already submitted our first choices to Mission Control, which ranged from Richard’s lobster tail to Troy’s pepperoni pizza and Gretchen’s butterscotch sundae to my shrimp scampi with angel hair pasta, though what no one knew—yet—was that I wasn’t coming out, so the Girl Scouts or reporters or Judy herself would have to polish it off in my stead.

  What we’d decided, privately, quietly, just G.C., Vodge and I, was to time the announcement to coincide with reentry—to make it a surprise, a shock, the sort of thing that would galvanize the public and all but assure us of being the lead story of the day on all three major networks. Vodge and I would don our red jumpsuits along with the others, looking for all the world as if we were about to parade through the airlock and wave and whistle and sink our teeth into our favorites for the cameras (he was going for the calories, Big Mac, fries, large Coke), but there was the kicker, there was the hook, as he called it: we weren’t going back out into the world. Or, actually, he was, but just for the two hours of the ceremony while staff members positioned the Mission Three supplies and livestock just outside the airlock so that when the new crew came in they could bring it all with them in a matter of minutes, minimizing any transference of gases between E2 and the outside world. I was to stay inside. That was my choice.

  In the aftermath, people said I was too hard-core, that I was really overdoing it, but as far as I’m concerned you just don’t bend your principles or what’s the worth of them anyway? I didn’t want to have to take a single breath of E1 air, which would defeat the whole purpose of continuous closure. If I was going to stay inside, to break the record for the most consecutive days anyone had ever spent in an enclosed self-sustaining system—and keep on breaking it with every minute of every day of the next two years—then it would be beyond ridiculous to throw it all away for a plate of shrimp scampi, wouldn’t it? I was famous, yes, but famous for what? For this. Only this. And now I truly was going where no woman—or man—had ever gone before.

  Vodge wasn’t so scrupulous. He wanted the outside world, needed it in a way I didn’t and didn’t think I ever would again. He might have been the most committed among us in terms of keeping the purity of the mission intact through our various crises, fighting with everything he had to keep that airlock inviolate, but now the mission was over and he wanted out. I didn’t blame him. Who could? It took a full three days of badgering from me and G.C. before he finally caved into the pressure, before he said, “Yes, okay, for the sake of E2 and for both of you, for you E., and Eve too, I’ll sign on or re-up or whatever you want to call it, but you’ve got to give me this. No joke, but I really think I’ll go out of my mind if I can’t at least walk through that airlock with the others.”

  All right. I understood that, I gave him that. And I understood what a sacrifice he was making, and so did G.C., who kept insisting he had to stay on if I did because he was the father of Eve and we were a family and it would have been awkward in the extreme to explain to the public just why he was turning his back not only on the project but his own wife and daughter into the bargain. So Vodge was going to go out and raise his arms in triumph, give his speech and eat his Big Mac and reap his portion of the glory, which to his mind, and I’m sorry to have to say this, was spelled m-o-n-e-y down the road, and then he was going to come back inside. With me. And Eve.

  That was the plan. And as a hint to the press and the larger world they served, a delicious little clue to our intentions, only six of the Mission Three crew showed up that day in red—the other two, Linda and Malcolm, were right there, front and center, but they were in brown, turd-brown, as Linda put it. Why? everyone wondered. Had they run out of red cloth? Or . . . was this a signal that something was up? Something outrageous, something that was going to turn the whole world of E2 on its head? The cameras zeroed in. Every face in the audience turned to G.C. This was the moment.

  Inside, as the minutes counted down to reentry and we lined up at the airlock, boy/girl, boy/girl, everybody was so excited they could barely stand in place. Gyro, especially. He was always squirrely, the gangling hyperactive nerd with the too-big nose and too-small head, but he was our nerd, my nerd, the one who’d plied me with M&M’s and worn his heart on his sleeve, and I was going to miss him. Richard too, Richard who’d coached me through my crisis and tucked my daughter into my arms. A sadness so vast came over me I thought it was going to engulf me like a shroud, like an eight-foot-deep hole and all the dirt it would take to fill it back up again. I was going to miss them, miss them all (except maybe Troy and Stevie, and, I’m sorry to have to say it, Gretchen, sour Gretchen), because despite our differences and the feuds and hostilities that inevitably emerged, we’d been through something together no one else but the Mission One crew and a handful of astronauts ever had. That was bonding, true bonding, the kind you could never get from all the exercises and research voyages there ever were.

  I was in tears as G.C. stood poised outside the airlock, microphone in hand, counting down the final sixty seconds—all the pictures from that day captured me with a crumpled face, my eyes glistening, my nose red and my cheeks wet, looking for all the world like a mourner at a funeral. I couldn’t help myself. The fact that this was the end of something just seemed to overwhelm me, even though it was the beginning of something too, something unprecedented and joyful to the highest degree and no matter the sacrifice I was getting exactly what I wanted. I was inside now, inside for good.

  What else? My crewmates were in the dark, totally, as to what was to come. They assumed, to a man and woman, that the vote had settled everything, thought that G.C. was on their side, that team order took precedence over everything. If I had to fight Diane over my place in line—“Last? Why would you want to be last?”—she wound up accommodating me (just to make sure, I’d gone behind her back to G.C. so he could weigh in if need be). It only made sense that the stars of this enterprise—Vodge, Eve and me—would be the last ones out of the airlock, just like any other stage act. I hate to put it this way, but really, we were the headliners. The rest of them didn’t like it, but they didn’t suspect a thing either—the truth of it is they were too concentrated on themselves, their lives outside, escaping, to really focus on what was going on here.

  So we lined up. And G.C. counted down, “Five, four, three, two, one,” and the airlock was breached and for the first time in two years the atmosphere of E1 comingled with the atmosphere of E2. And seven Terranauts, in their bold bright designer uniforms, marched through the open door and into the arms of the crowd, and one stayed behind.

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  Hello, world! Wow! I stepped through the
wide-open mouth of that airlock and all the smells of the planet hit me in the face as if I were a bloodhound hanging my head out the window of a pickup truck doing ninety-five down a country road. It was a rush. And the oxygen! Jesus! It was like crack cocaine—three breaths and I was delirious, four and I was as high as I’ve ever been in my life. Add to this the roar of the crowd, the crush of the cameras, the real and actual sun on my face and women everywhere, women in skimpy tops and short skirts, stockings, heels, and you can begin to imagine what it was like in those first few skyrocketing moments. The Christians say they’ve been born again, but that’s a metaphor—this was literal. All right, not technically, not exactly, but you know what I mean. You want a metaphor? E2 was my womb and the airlock the birth canal itself. There was nothing of the old me left behind, nothing.

  I wasn’t actually prancing as I marched out the door with my fellow Terranauts and up onto the dais, as one report had it, but I might as well have been—that was what it felt like anyway. The point is, there was no time to adjust. Out we came, the sun blinded us, the air injected us, and before we could think we were mounting the dais to sustained applause, an avalanche of applause, my fellow Terranauts preceding me into G.C.’s congratulatory grasp, one by one, and then we were raising our arms high over our heads and making the victory sign with both exultant hands. Did I see Judy first thing? Yes, Judy, with her greedy eyes and perfect legs, in red, of course, seated right there on the dais beside Little Jesus and the Nobel winner, but it was only a snapshot because I was blinking still, still trying to figure out how to breathe without turning my lungs inside out, and the crowd was going wild. I remember how the cameras seemed to snatch at our faces. How the sun just exploded in the sky. How I knew exactly where I was but at the same time felt as lost as I’d ever been in my life.