The soft patter of hands fades quickly. The woman from before steps up and helps to adjust the microphone to Froestt's height. She covers it with her hand and says, "You're sure you're okay? I can't take your coat? You seem awfully warm."
"Thank you," Froestt says again. The microphone squeals a tiny bit.
He cannot see the audience, but he can feel their stares. The thin trickle of sweat down his ribs is now a steady stream. It soaks into his clothing, and then his coat.
Someone whispers, "The poor man is going to have heatstroke in that coat."
The coat quickly soaks through and turns almost black with moisture.
"The Forgotten Winter Lands," Froestt reads, his voice like a crumbling wall. "Chapter One."
A puddle collects at his feet. Moisture drips from his nose, from the soaking flaps of his hat. His glasses fog with condensation, so he removes them, and holds his pages closer to his face. The paper becomes soggy in his hands, and the ink of his words begins to run, but it is no matter, for he knows the words by heart after all these years.
He puts the paper down on the dais. By now the audience is chattering audibly about the poor man and his condition. Someone says, loudly, "Give the man some water," and another person says, "That's unnatural. Someone should call an ambulance." Froestt hears the words overheated and pass out, but he ignores them, and narrates his story aloud.
"John Frost was a sniper of the highest order," he says. "He is known for taking all of his shots and not missing one. Never even the hardest of them."
Someone groans softly.
"His friend is Martin Jankel, and they have been friends since the beginning," Froestt continues, closing his eyes. He feels his breathing even out, and the words soothe him. His heart, pounding so hard moments before, calms to a patient thump-thump, and each pattern of beats further from the beats before. "Jankel is the spotter in their sniper team, and Frost is the sniper, and they are both quite good. Together and apart, but mostly together."
Froestt's clothing grows saturated with water. It drips from his sleeves, from his dangling hands, from his chin and nose and brow. The puddle around his feet spreads. It leaps and dances with each falling drop from above.
"I have to ask you to stop," says the host, who steps delicately through the widening pool of water and puts a hand over the microphone. "Sir, are you — what is going on? Are you all right?"
"You look terrible," says the girl. "Come, sit down while we call an ambulance."
Froestt shakes his head. "I'm quite all right," he says. "Call an ambulance if you must, but please, let me read until they arrive."
"Sir," the man protests.
Froestt leans back as far as he can, until he can just glimpse the man's eyes.
"Please," Froestt says. "I've truly waited a lifetime for this."
The man looks at the girl, then back at Froestt. Then he raises both of his hands, palms out, as if to say All right, it's not my problem — I tried. He backs away, then says, loudly, "Let's continue."
Froestt nods and turns back to the microphone.
"On the day that it all happened, Frost and Jankel were sent to the hills beyond an enemy post," he reads. "Their task was to assassinate a very evil general. He was the most evil general there was, at least at that moment of the war. This was World War Two."
Another groan from the audience.
Froestt's eyes close as he imagines the words. Sixty years of words — millions of them, stacked carefully in his apartment, unread, unpublished. He is old, he is tired, and he supposes he intends to read here until his novel is finished. He will ad-lib the ending if he must, but the ending cannot be told until — until he knows what it is.
The ambulance arrives at the front of the shop, its turning lights washing the gallery and the shelves in blue and red. Two uniformed men enter, carrying a collapsed stretcher between them.
Froestt doesn't look up, but the host approaches him again. "Okay, sir," he says. "They've arrived. Why don't you come with me —"
"My ending," Froestt says. "Is this it?"
The man says, "Yes, sir, it's time for you to go."
He puts his hand on the dais and reaches for Froestt's arm. Froestt recoils, just a bit, and leans on his cane heavily. The twisted wood makes a cracking sound that reverberates through the shop, and someone gasps, and then the cane shatters like ice. Brown and black shards explode outward like little frozen chips, and Froestt's eyes widen, and he stumbles backward, away from the host.
"Whoa, there —" the host says, and in that moment four people dash towards the dais: the host, the woman who had brought Froestt his water, and the two emergency personnel who have only just arrived, and who drop their stretcher as they run for the old man.
The girl is somehow quicker than them all, and gets one hand behind Froestt as he tumbles, and she feels his heavy wet wool coat go slack as he falls, and then she hears someone scream, and Froestt crumbles into a shining wet pile of clothing and snow, and the gallery falls utterly silent.
The rest of the program is rescheduled for the following day, and the host dismisses all of the guests from the store, and locks the doors. He returns to the dais, which has been moved aside, and watches as the ambulance technicians shuffle around, unsure what to do.
"Lucy," the host says to the girl, who still rests on her knees beside the melting heap of bluish snow.
She looks up at him. "He was real," she says, dazed. "I touched him."
"I think you should let these men talk to you," he says, nodding at the medical team.
"He was real," she repeats.
The men take her out of the store to the ambulance to check her over. When they've left, the host walks over to the damp pile of snow and old clothes and kicks at them with his toe. The old man is gone, as if he had never been there. The snow fades quickly under the shop lights, turning to water and running away in rivulets across the wood floor.
"Huh," he says.
There's little else to say.
He bends over and grabs the collar of the old man's coat and picks it up, shaking out clumps of snow. The collar has a label, and on the label the words J. Froestt are written in black marker. The words are smeary and damp, the ink bleeding deep into the label's threads.
The host folds the coat at the shoulders and lays it over the dais, then sighs and goes to the back of the store and into a closet, and comes back holding a mop, and gets to work.
BLUE PLANET
Like a great beast emerging from a black sea, the blue planet rises over the moon's horizon.
It reminds him of Earth which was.
If he could have chosen a perfect destination, he might have chosen Triton, with this view.
He could even tolerate the Nebulae.
For a view like this, a man could live with almost anything.
Neptune's hazy blue form was nothing like Earth, and yet, if Ansel squinted and looked just past it, his mind would trick him. It worked every time, at least until his eyes grew curious, and turned to stare at the planet directly.
Neptune was no Earth. Neptune was more beautiful.
Gone, the structure of land masses. Gone, the ice caps. Forgotten, the towering mountains. Absent, the thin white wakes of boats on the great blue seas.
Instead, a vaporous orb, periwinkle blue, its skies the texture of crushed chalk.
If you listened, you could almost hear it churning, like the dull, distant roar of a waterfall.
But it was silent, as space tends to be.
Up early, you.
At the sound of this gruff voice, not altogether unexpected, Ansel turns from the viewing deck.
And you as well, he says.
Grant rubs his big, dark eyes. Slept like hell last night, he says. Kept dreaming of a she-demon. She had teeth for eyes, and — well, she had teeth everywhere. Slept like hell, you know.
Sorry to hear it, Ansel says.
Grant waves a hand in dismissal, and starts working on a pot of coffee.
Always can tell I'm gonna find you here, he says. Right here, at that glass. Like the blue has a hold on you.
I like it here.
Rest of the crew thinks you've got a fixation, you know. I had a great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, all kinds of years ago, lived on Earth, worked the fishing boats in Newfoundland. Liked to say that the sea got its gray claws into a man, wouldn't let go. Liked to say it marked a man when it met him. That it would take him one day. It's like that with you and the planet.
Ansel shrugs. I don't mind.
They want to know why you're here, actually. Grant pours a cup of coffee and sits at the long mess table. I'd like to know myself, if you want the truth. You're not our newest addition, you know, but you're the most shut-up-tight one.
Ansel says, That coffee is shit.
Ah, I know, Grant says. But you do with what you've got, you know.
Yes, Ansel says. Yes, I know.
Want one?
Ansel turns from the glass. Yeah, alright.
Crystals?
Black, Ansel says.
Man after my great-great-great-great — ah, whatever the fuck. Man after my grandpa's own heart.
Tell me something, Ansel says, sitting down. How do you know what your ten-times-removed grandpa was saying about the ocean back on the homeworld?
Grant smiles. I'm a bullshitter, or couldn't you tell.
You might say I had a feeling.
I got a feeling about you, too, Mr. Agusti. I got myself a feeling you're up to something. Would that be a right thing to say?
Ansel peers at Grant over his cup of coffee. Captain Karkinnen, he says, that would be a right thing to say about every human being you know.
Grant furrows his brow, then nods in agreement. A right thing to say.
These days, Ansel says.
These days, Grant concurs. These god-be-fucking days.
The Nebulae, like most satellite stations, was never quite finished. The crew quarters are full of exposed wiring and thermal plating and chunks of insulation. The restroom facilities do not have doors, but since the crew is one hundred percent male, few grumblings arise. The mess hall and bridge are the only segments of the station that resemble a finished product, and they are quite nice, with smooth-as-satin floors and transparent hull walls and faint, glowing illumination that seems almost sourceless.
Ansel has had occasion to bunk on many such stations during his seven-year tour, and the Nebulae is no better or worse than the rest.
Perhaps better in one way.
Ansel's quarters are private. He knows that the other men distrust him for this. Captain Karkinnen is the only other crewman with his own quarters. The rest of the men bunk together, six to a room, four rooms in all. It's a large crew for such a small station, and that there are no women is of no surprise to Ansel. This far out in the system, far from the eyes of the Council, women turn into victims, and then into corpses, and then vanish.
Ansel is aboard the Nebulae on behalf of one such woman.
One very, very important woman.
ENGINEERS
In the morning, Ansel wakes to the clatter of footsteps in the corridor. He lifts the mask from his eyes, and adjusts to the dim light. His compartment is very small, and he stretches out his arm to find the wall beside his bunk. He dresses in the dark, and carefully fits his prosthetic hand into its socket. He can feel the tiny motors in each finger whirr as the hand boots up.
There are voices outside now. Ansel goes to the door and listens.
Is that all of them?
Captain Karkinnen's voice.
Sir, we're missing two men.
Ansel doesn't recognize this voice, but this is no surprise. The men all sound the same to him. Admittedly, this is a problem. He is, after all, searching for one man among this thicket of engineers and machinists.
Which two? Karkinnen asks.
The second man sounds almost embarrassed. Well, sir — it's —
Out with it, the captain says.
It's Hawthorne and Lacey, sir.
Fuck. Of course it is. They'll be in the second engine compartment, then. Go retrieve them. Tell them to get their naked asses outside.
Sir, I — I don't want to interrupt —
Cover your goddamn eyes, then, Karkinnen says. Then tell them to get their asses outside.
Yes, sir.
Ansel listens to the captain storm away, and the sounds in the hallway disappear.
He leans on the door so that it won't squeak, and slides it open. The corridor is indeed empty, and then it isn't.
An engineer in a T-shirt comes dashing by, then stops when he sees Ansel's open door.
Hey, Ansel says. What's your name?
Jonah, the engineer says.
Joba, what's going on?
It's Jonah.
Sorry. Jonah. Ansel flicks his eyes in the direction of the airlocks. What's going on out there?
Well, you probably slept through it, Jonah says with obvious distaste. But we got hit.
Hit. By what?
By whatever the hell's floating around out there, Jonah says. I gotta go, so —
Has this happened before? Getting hit?
Happens maybe once or twice a year, Jonah says. I —
Asteroid, you think?
Well, it probably wasn't a bird, Jonah says.
Snarky, Ansel says. Good for you.
Jonah sets his jaw and walks off, shaking his head.
The hallway is empty again.
Ansel steps out of his room and slides the door shut. He walks silently around the corner, into the bunk wing. The four rooms are spaced evenly apart, two on each side of the hall. None of them have doors.
Ansel peeks inside each room.
Empty, all of them.
Time to get to work.
The view is ruined, cluttered with feet and arms and tools.
Sorry about that, Grant says. You heard what happened by now, I take it.
Ansel nods. Rumor is we were shot by space pirates.
Grant chuckles and shakes his big red beard. Just the usual asteroid patter, nothing more.
Anything serious?
Some pits and dings, a few panels cracked, some knocked loose. Maybe a bit more. The boys are still crawling the hull.
Ansel tilts his head and looks out at the side of the ship. The engineers are bundled up in their exterior suits, boxy glass helmets, tools clinging to their arms and chests for easy access.
Do they all go out? he asks.
They do, Grant says.
Huh, Ansel says.
You're thinking that's pretty stupid, Grant says. It's alright. I get it.
No, not at all.
A better captain might hold a couple men back, just in case something terrible happens.
It's space, Ansel says. Only terrible things ever happen.
They'll be fine, though. They'll fix her up, and come back in from the cold just fine.
A sudden banging sound echoes through the ship. Ansel doesn't flinch.
Found a loose one, I reckon, Grant says. Want some coffee?
No, Ansel says. How long are they outside?
Been out a couple hours, Grant answers. Be out probably six more. Then they'll sleep, eat, and go out again.
So the ship's empty right now.
Empty except for us two buzzards.
Ansel nods thoughtfully.
What's on your mind, Mr. Agusti? the captain asks.
Ansel rests his hands on the table. Seems like a good time to talk.
Talk, Grant repeats. What's there to talk about?
Let's talk about why I'm here.
Grant leans back in his chair and folds his arms. That's an interesting topic, considering I don't have any expertise in it.
I do, though.
Alright. Why are you here?
Ansel gets up and walks around the table. He takes a seat beside Grant Karkinnen, and leans in close.
I want to talk about Evelyn Jans, he says.
/> The men eat dinner like wild animals, then drag themselves out of the mess hall and to their bunks. Captain Karkinnen had been wrong. They hadn't spent just six more hours on the hull. Seventeen hours they'd been outside. The sounds of their ragged snores crawl through the ship.
At four a.m., Ansel sits in the dark of his room, an old screenview on his lap. He's wearing a skullcap with a wire attached to it. He plugs the wire into the tablet, and waits.
Eventually a picture jerks into view. It's fragmented, and it freezes often, but he can make out the craggy, bespectacled face of Mirs Korski. The timestamp in the corner reads 0432 : FEB 22 2586.
Outside, Ansel hears footsteps pass his door.
On the screen, a transcription of Korski's words appear.
It's been some time, the transcription reads. Your reports have been tiresome and repetitive.
Ansel thinks, It's true, and for that I apologize. But I have news.
A transcription of Ansel's own words appear: BLUE FORD HAT LOGIC FLIES HACK NEWS.
Shit, Ansel says.
He traces the wire to the skullcap's input. The jack is loose. He presses it into the side of the cap firmly.
Your last message is unclear, Korski's transcription reads.
Ansel thinks, I'm sorry. There was a Sense malfunction. I have to transmit in secret. Is this more clear?
Ansel's words appear correctly on the screen this time.
A long moment passes, and then Korski says, Better. Report.
I have news to report.
Each message takes six seconds to travel between the Nebulae and Citadel Meili, the enormous space station orbiting Earth.
Don't make me ask what it is, Korski says. I have things to do right now.
Ansel thinks, Evelyn was on the Nebulae, a satellite-class station.
Was?
She was here a long time ago.
Six seconds.
Where did she go?
She never left. That's my news.
Six seconds.
Stop toying with me. What happened to her?
It's a bit of a story.
Six seconds.
Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything Page 8