by Joe Hart
Ander pressed the screen a last time, and a new window opened. He stared at the line of text in its center before sinking back in his chair.
“What’s it say?” Gillian asked, her heart punching at her ribs.
Carson stepped close to the doctor, reading over his shoulder before turning back to her. “There’s one access listed for a shift down to the surface fifteen minutes after we left in the lander.”
“Who?”
“Dennis Kenison.”
“I want stun guns out and ready when we go through the door, clear?” Carson said as they hurried down the main corridor in the crew quarters. The two men striding beside him both nodded, hands going to the Tasers on their belts as Gillian followed behind. Her heart was pounding, had been ever since Carson said Kenison’s name out loud ten minutes before. But something felt off. Kenison hadn’t seemed like someone capable of any of this. He’d been terrified before they’d tested him, a man waiting for a death sentence. He was either an unbelievable actor, or . . .
“You sure you want to be here for this?” Easton asked from beside her.
“Yeah. Definitely.”
“Good thing there’s no guns up here, or shit could get messy.”
“This is it,” Carson said, slowing to a stop before a door exactly the same as the dozens they’d already passed. Before they’d left the upper level, Carson had had Ander check Kenison’s key scans. He’d entered his room two hours ago and hadn’t keyed through any other checkpoints since.
And that was something else that bothered her. Why had he used Pendrake’s key to leave the hydros in her room but his own when shifting to the surface?
Gillian brushed the thought away as Carson glanced at the two security personnel before swiping a card across the door’s reader.
There was a click, and Carson pushed forward, moving fast inside the room. The men behind him followed, and Gillian hesitated before going after them.
Kenison’s room was much larger than her own, with two windows facing into space and what must’ve been a queen-size bed beside a large desk. There was artwork on the wall, several small pieces of abstract done in black and white.
She saw everything but registered none of it.
At first she couldn’t make sense of the shoes hanging five feet off the floor, her mind trying to relate it to some type of zero-gravity interference. But then her eyes traveled up Kenison’s form to the purple hue of his face, the ashen stub of tongue protruding from between his teeth, and the belt cutting deep into his throat as he dangled from a support in the ceiling.
THIRTY-SIX
Gillian stared at the screen before her, not seeing the data she clicked through with absent strokes of her finger.
The lab was quiet, the hum of the station itself an undertone broken only by an occasional whisper of the oxygen-exchange system. She had come here directly after leaving Kenison’s room, knowing the lab would be the only place anything would make sense, the only place things had ever made sense after Kent had been diagnosed. The image of Kenison’s twisted features continued to flash through her mind, taking up position alongside Tinsel’s. She’d passed a crew member on the way here carrying a compact ladder in the opposite direction, realizing later it was for climbing onto to cut Kenison’s body from the ceiling.
She jolted as the door swished open and Birk entered, two steaming cups of coffee held before him.
“The finest space roast I could summon, Doctor,” he said, placing her cup on the table.
“Thanks. It’s really not that bad, considering,” she said, taking a sip of the dark brew.
Birk made a face. “It is, for lack of a better word, shit.”
She laughed. “I guess we can’t be too choosy. Can’t zip over to Starbucks. Although that name would make a lot more sense out here.” Birk gave her a blank look. “Never mind. It was a joke.”
“Thank you for informing me.”
“Watch it or I’ll fire your ass, kid.”
He sighed, glancing at his cup. “If we were at home, I would make it with egg, like my mother.”
“Egg? In the coffee?”
“Of course. It is the best. An old Swedish tradition.”
She shivered. “Sounds disgusting.”
Birk smiled evilly. “Really? You’ve drunk it dozens of times, Doctor.”
“What?”
“Whenever it is my turn to bring coffee to the lab, I always make it with egg.”
“You monster.”
He bowed slightly. “You’re welcome.”
The levity felt good after the last twenty-four hours. Her eyes and tongue were still sore, but her lungs no longer ached when she breathed in deeply. Gillian returned her attention to the screen, scrolling through Kenison’s test results before continuing on to Mary Cranston’s.
“Do you think it is over, Doctor?” Birk asked.
“You mean what’s happening here?” She sat silently for a long time. “No.”
“Then we cannot go home.”
“There’s nothing I’d like more. But if we leave now without knowing if there’s something wrong with shifting, I wouldn’t be able to help Carrie.” Her voice tried to close off before saying her name.
“Maybe there is another way now that you have perfected our work. Perhaps the surgeons at—”
“There’s no surgery that can fix all of the tangles. Not yet anyway. And I can’t risk her life when there’s an answer right here.” She pointed at the screen. “I can feel it.”
“But what was this Kenison trying to hide by killing Tinsel?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—” But she stopped herself before she could say the rest of the thought. The inkling that had been gnawing at her from the second after seeing Kenison dangling from his own belt. “There’s something we’re missing,” she said.
Birk stifled an enormous yawn before staring down at his coffee with a look bordering on loathing.
“You should go to bed, it’s really late,” she said.
“You as well, Doctor?”
“I’ll stay here for a bit. Don’t think I could sleep if I tried. Plus, now I’ve got the run of the place since I’m no longer a murder suspect,” she said, holding out her key card.
“That reminds me, Carson told me earlier your new room is ready. It is directly beside my own.”
“And here I was just getting used to that Shangri-la they had me in.”
“It is most certainly a leap up.”
“Step up.”
“Yes, yes.” He waved his hand at her. “You’re sure you want to stay? I can wait until you’re ready.”
“Get out of here, Birk. Before I fire your ass.”
“You know what would make you feel better?” he said, standing from his chair.
“What?”
“Egg coffee.”
She picked up a pen and hurled it at him, and he dodged to the side and headed for the door. When he was gone, the silence closed in once again.
Gillian scanned back through the pages of test results.
Normal.
Normal.
Normal.
Nothing physically wrong with their neurons. Why did she keep coming back to that? And why each time did she hear a train, the steady clack of its Johnny Cash rhythm playing in her head even now?
Nearly an hour later, the door to the lab opened, and she turned, expecting to see Birk again, feigning an inability to sleep just so he could mother-hen her.
Instead, Eric Ander stood in the lab’s entrance.
For a beat he said nothing, then gestured at the room. “I hope I’m not interrupting. I know I get very aggravated whenever someone barges in while I’m working.”
Gillian gathered herself, the surprise at seeing the old man giving way to a trickle of disquiet. “No, not at all. Come in.”
Ander moved to the table and placed his hands on the back of the reclining medical chair Kenison had sat in only days ago. As if reading her thoughts, he turned the chair back and forth a
nd said, “Doesn’t seem real, does it?”
“No. It doesn’t.”
“You were there, I’m told.”
She nodded.
“I never figured—” He stopped himself, clearing his throat. “I knew Dennis well. Worked together for several years prior to the launch. Stout mind, great scientist. This is so terribly out of character.”
“Everyone’s a mystery. Even to themselves.”
“Perhaps you’re right. This will be hard on Orrin,” he added after a moment.
“They were friends?”
“Yes. Became fairly close after Orrin received his clearance to join the mission. They both had an affinity for old movies. Watched them together sometimes up on the screens near our quarters like a couple of kids.”
“I’m sorry.”
He glanced at her. “Thank you. When something like this happens, it always makes you reflect on yourself, your actions. Could you have done something different? Did you miss a warning sign? And to think he was the one responsible for Mr. Tinsel and for nearly . . .” He motioned to her before gazing around the lab. “Those who attempt great and wonderful things always say there are setbacks and hardships on the road to success, but it doesn’t really do anything like this justice. The loss of life in vain is the greatest loss of all.”
Gillian noticed something she hadn’t spotted before beneath the brilliant arrogance and defensive bluster: compassion.
“Why did you choose this?” she asked. “You could have done anything with your talent. Why interstellar travel?”
A sad smile creased his face. “Why did you become a neural radiologist?”
“I’ll trade you.”
“What?”
“My story for yours.”
Ander smiled again and settled into the chair. “Seems fair.”
“I was a radiology technician years ago. My husband was diagnosed with Losian’s, and I thought I could save him. Went back to school, got my doctorate, started my research on the side.”
“He passed, didn’t he?” Ander said quietly.
“Yes. He did. And now my daughter is dying too.” Her eyes began to burn, but she went on. “That’s why I’m here.”
Ander gazed down at his hands, the wrinkles and lines seeming to entrance him. “Losian’s. Yet another horrid side effect of the larger disease that’s killing the Earth. I’ve read dozens of articles linking the rise in pollution to the condition. If we don’t succeed in this endeavor, maybe that’s how we’ll all go: without memory into the void. And there will be no one to remember us.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“My mother. That’s why I’m sitting in this chair right now,” he said after a pause. “She was from Syria. She and my father met during the last years of the uprisings there. He was a doctor volunteering abroad to help in war-torn nations. She had been caught in a firefight and wounded. She lost several fingers on her right hand, and the injury was infected by the time my father was able to treat her. It was love, just like that.” He snapped his fingers and smiled. “At least that’s what my father always said. I was born a year later.” Ander blinked, his vision turning inward. “I can barely remember her, mostly her outline when she would tuck me into bed. We lived with her sister and mother in a part of the city that was beginning to be rebuilt. My father continued to work both in the country and abroad. Then the fighting started again.”
Gillian watched him reach up and rub his face, noticing for the first time he had a fine growth of white whiskers on his cheeks.
“I was six then. My father had applied a year before for our US citizenship. I had been approved, but we were still waiting for my mother’s papers. When the fighting got worse, she made him take me away. He told me it wouldn’t be more than a few months and she would join us in our new home. But she never came.”
The old man grew quiet, eyes glazing. “What happened?” Gillian asked gently.
“Two days after we left for America, a bomb hit our building. I learned later no one could say what side it belonged to, such is the folly of war. My father received the news weeks after it happened and couldn’t bring himself to tell me. Every day I would ask him when Mother would be here, and he always said, ‘Soon.’” Ander smiled sadly. “So while I waited, I dreamed first of boats that could speed across the sea to retrieve her and the rest of my family. Then of planes that could fly straight there and back in less than a minute. I dreamed.”
Gillian saw Ander’s eyes shimmer as he looked away across the lab. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“It was a very long time ago. But I never forgot my dreams of traveling, even after my father finally told me Mother would never be coming home.” He slumped lower in the chair as if the story had drained him.
Gillian tried to think of something to say, but everything seemed a paltry shadow of comfort.
“I’d like you to test me,” Ander said, straightening.
“Test you? Why?”
“Because I believe you might be right.” His jaw worked, and it seemed to take a titanic effort for him to speak. “There may be something wrong with my machines.”
Gillian sat forward. “Why do you say that?”
“I . . . I have forgotten certain things.” Ander grimaced. “And at first I didn’t know if it was old age or something more. My mind isn’t what it used to be.”
“What have you forgotten?”
“The house I grew up in with my father, my best friend’s name from high school and what he looked like, the sound of my wife’s voice.” His words broke at the end, and she saw the moisture return to his eyes. “First they were indistinct, so I didn’t pay attention to them, and now they are gone completely. I worried it might have something to do with shifting when several of the crew complained of the same thing, but I couldn’t get myself to accept it.” Now he was crying, tears leaking down through the wrinkles of his face like rain through drought-ridden hills. “I needed to continue testing. That’s why I wanted Carson to bring me one of the two originals from Earth: to reevaluate the design.”
Gillian felt a cold crumbling inside her, something collapsing in on itself. And all at once she was furious with the old man, full of rage that his pride had kept so much hidden.
Some of her anger must have bled into her expression because he continued. “You have to realize I thought everything was fine. I found no substantial correlation between teleportation and the symptoms. And I wanted to help, I’ve spent my whole life wanting to help when others couldn’t. This was my chance.”
His shoulders shook as he wept, and despite herself, Gillian reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for telling me.”
Ander wiped at his face and sat back fully in the chair.
She went through the preparations for the test automatically, mind on a sidetrack fully consumed with the implications of what Ander had told her. If he hadn’t been truthful, who else hadn’t?
After she had drilled the hole in his skull, inserted the port, and injected the luciferin, she stood before him. He looked frail, nearly skeletal, reclining in the chair beneath the harsh overhead lights.
“Find your happiest memory, Doctor. Tell me when you have it.”
He closed his eyes. She waited.
“All right,” he finally said.
Gillian moved to the table and touched the control screen, tapping the injection command.
The luciferase flowed through the tube.
She watched in awe again as the compounds did their work. Ander’s mind was revealed to her, there in flashing brilliance all that made him who he was.
Gillian froze, the last of the synapses firing on the screen. An idea, amorphous and huge, loomed over her, too indistinct to grasp, but there nonetheless. It was like the passing shadow of a low-flying plane, darkening all around her and then gone, leaving only an impression of its presence behind.
Ander grunted, his eyelids fluttering. She moved to his side. “Can you
hear me, Doctor?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” he said, but fresh tears had sprung to his eyes. He started to sit up out of the chair, but she pushed him back.
“Let me unhook you.” She went to work on detaching the port, then bandaged the miniscule hole in his skull. She fed the scan into the mainframe computer and turned back to him. “I’m not trying to pry, but do all your happiest memories make you cry?”
Ander laughed quietly. “Just that one. I thought about the day Orrin came home from his deployment.”
“Is that where he got his injuries?”
“Yes. He was the leader of his explosive ordnance disposal team. When the military called, I thought it was the one all parents of soldiers dread. They would only tell me he had been injured in a roadside attack. Later I found out he was the sole survivor of his squadron.”
She recalled Orrin’s quiet way of speaking, his thoughtful stares. “That must’ve been horrible for him.”
“It was. He had . . . many struggles. It’s another reason I’m worried about him after Dennis. First Ivan, now this.”
“Dr. Pendrake and Orrin were close?”
Ander glanced at her, and for a second she expected him to get up and leave without replying.
“Ivan was Orrin’s therapist,” he said. “He helped him through dozens of ordeals on Earth. It was good Orrin wasn’t the one who found Diver in Ivan’s room that morning. I’m afraid he would have killed him with his bare hands.”
Gillian let the silence spool out, a barrage of thoughts assaulting her.
A soft bleep issued from the touchscreen, bringing her back to the present. She studied the results returned from the quantum computer for several minutes before turning the display toward Ander. “Completely normal. No neurological tangles or any other evidence of damage.”
He frowned, gazing at the readouts. “I don’t understand,” he said almost to himself.
“Neither do I,” she said. “Neither do I.”
Gillian stepped off the elevator onto the crew-quarters level, her footfalls echoing back to her throughout the empty hall. She and Ander had discussed other possibilities for another half hour before the physicist bid her good night, saying he was too exhausted to think clearly and perhaps they could continue working in the morning. As they’d parted ways, she realized something had changed in her assessment of the old man. There was an open, genuine quality about him she hadn’t noticed before, possibly stemming from his scientific straightforwardness. In any case, she found herself warming to him despite his prior dishonesty.