Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  “She’s Syrian. We met during the war in 2017.” Even rather disliking him, Sophia recognized that the hefty accent was made pleasant by his bass pitch.

  “How old was she?” asked Sophia.

  “19 … I was 27.”

  Let’s burp this baby. “Come on, give it up. How did you two meet?” she continued, now genuinely interested.

  He studied her, she stared back. After a pause, he breathed heavily. “Arriving at Aleppo from our air base, we were attacked by rebels. Two comrades were killed and a third lost his eyes and half his scalp … he grabbed his best friend and begged to be executed, instead our patrol vehicle broke out of the convoy for the nearest hospital. He died on the operating table. Walking back through the rows of beds and stretchers of people agonizing and dying, I saw this girl sobbing quietly … I couldn’t not stop … they told me she had lost her family the night before.”

  “Does she speak Russian?”

  “Enough.”

  Does he mean to stop asking or is he answering? But this was emotional hardball, so Sophia poked again. “How is she going to cope in Russia with you being gone for six years?” Even Derya looked at her disapprovingly. Had she gone too far?

  “She will go to live with her parents.”

  The truth landed hard on Sophia. When Sergei met Iman, she had just lost her husband and children. “I am so very sorry.”

  Derya’s hand unconsciously probed for the long-gone mane around his nape. It was the twenty-fourth parabola and this felt like Disneyland compared to the SEAL-like diving tank training of two days ago. A roller coaster hanging from the clouds. As a passenger who invariably woke up when an airplane experienced turbulence, looking through the window in dread of the wing snapping off, this had been illuminating. Turned out any jet commercial aircraft could become a Vomit Comet. Strip out everything from the cabin and cushion the fuselage inside. Ready.

  The airplane was climbing the twenty seconds at a forty-five-degree angle—three times steeper than a passenger plane’s take-off—so his body was glued by imaginary tape to a wall. For once, “jeez!” Yi’s new buzzword, to be used never less than once per sentence, is spot on. In a second the 2-g gave way to 0-g and Derya’s body was released from any force or pressure. The airplane had stopped climbing and was now languidly cruising for twenty-five seconds before bolting down the forty-five-degree angle of a ten-mile-long invisible hill to start again. You don’t truly understand slavery until you are freed. The sensation was as fresh as that first time: there was no sense of falling; levitation meant the body, all of it, in and out, stomach, joints, skin, and muscles were instantly in a state of Zen.

  Derya looked at a weightless James and Sergei. Hard not to be appreciative, being there purely in the name of team spirit. If I was one of them, I would have found a way to skip this. He then stared at Sophia picking her cute little nose. A catwalk pose for the flashes. She noticed.

  “What? Only men can do it? We’ll live together for six years, you better start treating me as an equal.”

  He smirked. “Go deeper for the full harvest—Uncle Newton one more time?” She nodded, grinning.

  With their bodies hovering unattached to any surface, they extended the arms and used their index fingers to push against one another. They flew into opposite walls. Newton’s Third Law: for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. In the frictionless world of zero gravity, even Sophia’s minute body becomes Atlas’ close relative.

  The group of about forty people were enjoying the summery sunset over drinks. The large clouds patching the sky reflected sunlight in purple tones, like neon lights in a Mediterranean nightclub. With no next-day homework other than to sleep until late, the ambience was chilled and the music loud.

  Training’s over. We disband tomorrow morning, thought Yi, while watching the rest of the crew. With three locations and seventeen different projects competing for their man-hours, it was unlikely they would see much of each other until they were back in Houston two weeks from now. Except for Sophia and James, who would fly out to London on the same flight. The former to attend her friend’s wedding, the latter to marry said friend. Yi had met Belinda only once but it was enough to develop a crush on her. There’s nothing wrong with it. And anyway, it’s absolutely one-sided. Even he had a man-crush on James. Who wouldn’t? The couple wasn’t just Hollywood-looking: Belinda’s credentials were also august, with hundreds of citations from her astrobiology papers. He gazed at the physical enormity of Sergei. My father was big even by Scandinavian standards. I was supposed to have been raised on yak milk, instead I grew on watery rice at a boarding school. He spotted a drunken Derya making a large group of people laugh. Very un-German. Sergei was silent as Derya was extroverted, but Yi felt he understood Sergei and still didn’t know what to make of Derya. He’s so ridiculously smart, he may be solving differential equations in his head as he clowns around. Maybe that was the issue: his deft mouth sometimes seemed to be operating independently from his head.

  “Right there!” shouted Yi a few minutes later, pointing to the dying Sun after reconfirming with his phone app. Everyone turned and started squinting. A bright white star separated from the orange circle and climbed the darkening sky. The International Space Station whizzed by at 4.8 miles per second—New York to London in just twelve minutes—the speed needed to avoid falling back to Earth. At barely 350 feet in length while cruising 250 miles above the ground, spotting it using the naked eye was equivalent to making out the Statue of Liberty from Washington, D.C., a feat only possible in the early morning or late evening, when daylight didn’t overwhelm the tiny blob glowing in the sunrays.

  In two minutes, the ISS had vanished into the east, but its wake stayed with Yi. The last outpost of humanity, which Shackleton will visit before the longest, most outrageous voyage ever attempted.

  14 | Wedding

  A week later, May 2026, 383 days before launch

  LONDON, UK

  The round-the-clock hum of Kensington High Street, not 200 feet away, became subdued as the wedding guests walked through the cloistered entrance of St. Mary Abbots church. Centuries permeated the Gothic building: the intricate ribbed vaulting high above the nave, the tall pointed arcade arches, the ornate multicolored Catherine window crowning five stained-glass windows filtering the outside light into a diaphanous palette of oranges, purples, and reds that painted the altar below.

  “—she then tells me about this American prince and Jimmy, I won’t lie, I frowned some more,” Belinda’s father was giving a speech to the about-to-be-married twosome and the couple of hundred seated guests. “Irish, Scottish, American, all perfectly good mates but—look, I relish wind turbines and what they stand for, just not on my lawn. Then I pondered and pondered some more. See that look on her face? Never saw that. Until she met you … as I am about to give away the most precious thing I have, I’m sure you’ll excuse me for attaching a few strings. We Englishmen have ventured through uncharted seas across the ages, but yours is infinitely wider. That’s a degree of boldness nobody can possibly relate to. Your price to embark on this crusade in the name of exploration is a pledge: promise me you’ll come back. Promise me you two will grow old together.”

  An exultant Belinda looked at James in surprise. “Better late than never,” she whispered. Thomas Addington had been unapologetically against their union, yet here, for the first time, he seemed to be not only approving the marriage but blessing the lengthy wait. Overjoyed as he was, James couldn’t forget his conversation over the phone with Thomas a week before: no children until he came back to Earth.

  “I promise.”

  15 | The Spacesuit

  Four months later, September 2026, 272 days before launch

  HANGAR ONE, MOUNTAIN VIEW

  The spacesuit meeting had been heating up in the breakout room. With four plywood walls and no roof for dozens and dozens of feet before the hangar ceiling, it looked like a stage set apartment in a college theater play. There were eleven inc
reasingly agitated engineers, three belittled managers from the spacesuit contractor, and Sergei. He was the only crew representative, a measure of how many loose ends the mission still needed to gather.

  To understand spacesuit requirements, it is necessary to understand the reality of death for an unprotected human body exposed to the vacuum of space. Reality is less gory than fiction, but equally gloomy. Instead of exploding pufferfish-style, human flesh doubles its size, a Schwarzeneggerization of sorts. Suddenly doubling internal tissues means everything, from muscles to blood vessels, ripping apart. So, death is certain, just unfortunately not instantaneous. Another misconception is blood boiling, which does not happen because our skin is impervious to a vacuum, meaning the blood remains pressurized within the body. Snap freezing by exposure to hundreds of degrees below zero won’t happen either, because outer space is devoid of matter so there is no way to rapidly transfer heat out of the body, only crawling thermal radiation. Instead, death will come from unspectacular oxygen deprivation. Any air instantly escapes the lungs and respiratory tract; thirty seconds after that, the person blacks out; five to seven minutes later, there’s irreversible brain damage; and complete brain death comes within fifteen minutes. R.I.P.

  Therefore, the spacesuit essentials are maintaining the internal pressure, supplying oxygen, carbon dioxide removal, temperature regulation, and mobility. Nice add-ins are the collection of solid and liquid waste, protection against micrometeorites, and shielding against ultraviolet radiation.

  Before this mission, the conservative answer was the Michelin Man marshmallow principle of inflating a stiff spacesuit to compensate for the vacuum. However, this comes with two fat side-effects: ungainly weight and poor mobility.

  There is another approach that was developed by NASA and the US Air Force in the 50s and 60s but which has never before been implemented. This is the skintight suit concept, where the mechanical pressure against the skin prevents the swelling of the human body. A much simpler temperature regulation system is thrown in for free: body perspiration removal via breathing through the spacesuit. Instead of looking like Neil Armstrong on the Moon, you end up looking like Lance Armstrong on Earth.

  Two of the engineers buckled from frustration and broke into recriminations, cursing the bravado decision of two years ago when the golden rule of aerospace engineering was ignored: do not innovate unless you must. They didn’t need to, yet they chose to.

  The spacesuit was operating fine. A descendant from an MIT prototype that had been worked on since 2005, it was a materials science masterpiece. Light, tough, safer than a traditional suit. All thumbs up. But complex engineering has a tendency to progress by way of balloon squeezing. An improvement here may knock off a working part here or there.

  The crisis triggered two days before, when an astronaut doing a spacewalk for final spacesuit certification experienced, in his words, “My grandma’s final-stage cataracts.” The visor fogged up and vision was seriously impaired. The problem was time, or lack thereof.

  “I know this is taboo around here but I’m going to say it anyway. What if we procure standard spacesuits as spares?” offered the less mousy of the contractors.

  Only one engineer bothered to answer. “The Payload Team has over-optimized to save a tenth of an ounce on each of five spoons, and you want to send them 1,500 pounds … of spares? Good luck knocking on that door.”

  Sergei, mute until now, said, “Read that?” pointing to a large sign that was disseminated around the hangar.

  “No Band-Aids Before Mission Launch.”

  16 | No More Time

  Two months later, November 2026, 208 days before launch

  PACIFIC HEIGHTS, SAN FRANCISCO

  The two old friends were on a rooftop with a panoramic view of the hilly San Francisco, a city outlining the future yet architecturally dwelling in a quaint, early-20th-century style. It was sunny but the wind was prickly. That explains Leonard’s goosebumps, James wanted to think.

  “Are you asking me as a friend?” said Leonard.

  “I’m asking you as a mentor.” I’m asking you as the father I wish I had. Their relationship went back a decade. On his third summer in college James had taken an internship at Blue Origin, the famed rocket company. One day at dawn, as Leonard was leaving—the perennial bachelor had always been a workaholic and night owl—he spotted James curled up crying under a desk. In his apartment the previous night, James had found his visiting father among empty bottles, pointing a pistol in his mouth. When he noticed his son he said, “Are you ashamed of me, you little bastard? Am I not good enough?” He aimed his wobbling arm at James, cocking the gun. “Think you’re so special, uh? Our genes are corrupted, girly. No matter what, you’ll end up a drunkard like me—maybe I can shoot you now and spare you the misery.” That morning James moved in with Leonard and did not see his father again for years.

  Leonard rested against a wall. The relaxed stance contrasted with his serious demeanor. He finished yet another cigarette, mashing it out against the brickwork—he had given up his pipe a few doctor appointments back.

  “An additional year. Maybe nine months if we are willing to take measured risks.” Leonard had been appointed as member to the Shackleton’s board of directors, giving him an exceptional vantage point over the mission status. “There are still too many unknowns. Interfaces that could go wrong—worse yet, we don’t know which ones. You can’t cover the Sun with a finger, Jimmy. The mission needs more time.”

  “We can’t.”

  “No, it’s you that can’t force the current schedule on an engineering undertaking of this magnitude. The project is inanimate, it doesn’t give a damn about aggressive deadlines. We’re not ready.”

  “Are you finished?”

  “No, I’m not. That was Leonard the mentor. Now comes Leonard the friend.” He picked a folded paper from the pocket of his customary garment, an embroidered olive shirt. “An ugly fading piece of history” as he calls it. The ‘ugly’ was James’ addition. Jerry Garcia had thrown the pulpy shirt into the crowd during a Grateful Dead concert sometime in the 70s. Leonard put on a pair of glasses missing an arm. “‘For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.’ You know who said that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. You know when he said it?”

  “Yes.”

  “As his conclusion on the causes of the Challenger disaster. NASA management’s estimates were wildly over-optimistic, differing by tens of times from those of the engineers doing the actual work—do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “The haunting echo from the past.”

  “You know the rules, Leonard—you taught them to me. This is orbital mechanics. If we don’t launch this June, the window closes until the following year.” Every twenty-six months, the orbits of Earth and Mars put the planets at one quarter their average distance—this creates an optimal launch window to the red planet. It illustrates a critical piece of space traveling: timing. Planets are constantly transitioning. Earth and Saturn complete an orbit around the Sun every 365 days and twenty-nine Earth years, respectively. The optimal launch window happens during a month every few decades, and that was June 2027.

  James never smoked, but this time he accepted Leonard’s new king-size for a couple of puffs. They long remained quiet, watching the glittering bay.

  “There’s a thousand hawks waiting for a misstep to rip us apart, including the root of many of our evils, America’s honcho,” said James. “Meanwhile, Saturn doesn’t wait, we postpone to the following year and the mission stretches to seven and a half years … there’s no runway left. If we delay, it’s not just possible but probable that all we have done crumbles into dust. Don’t think I’m being gung-ho, I have regular nightmares about the one hundred ways we could die. But there’s no backing down now. We launch this June. And whenever the idea of delaying creeps into your mi
nd, I want you to remember this: I am already homesick from an expedition that hasn’t yet started. Each day we postpone, my return gets more distant.”

  James couldn’t fall asleep that night, haunted by a different echo from the past, a memory set to the soundtrack of David Bowie’s “Starman.” It had happened a few weeks prior on a promotional visit to New York with Belinda.

  Hordes flooded the Lincoln Center Plaza in front of The Met, symphony hall, and New York City Ballet buildings. The crowds were mostly children, thousands of them.

  A few hundred steps from accessing The Met entrance someone screamed, “It’s Jimmy and Belinda!” Like a circling crowd in Mecca, they were quickly surrounded by screaming kids trying to shake their hands, get autographs, take pictures.

  Later inside, “From the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is StarTalk, where science and pop culture collide.”

  For the next hour the children’s avid, inquisitive minds explored everything from space to religion to family to aspirations to climate change to Pixar movies. “Can we sign the hull of Shackleton?” (yes, but); “You should make a free astronaut university for people that are really really good but can’t pay, like my brother” (maybe once I come back); “Why aren’t you bringing a pet?” (we are, it’s a bonsai tree); “Why aren’t more women in the crew?” (ouch); “Is it possible for someone like me to name the moonlets that Shackleton will discover in the Saturn rings?” (let’s do it).

  “Finally, we talked over the phone,” said the host. “They had an urgent request. No, they demanded my help. It wasn’t easy. They required special permits. A charter plane. Heck, they even required security clearance at La Guardia to get here on time. Hailing from Washington State to Florida, from El Paso to Detroit, from small towns to metropolises, Jimmy, allow me to introduce … the Shackleton Cadets.”