When it was time to begin my ascent I paid attention to my depth gauge and timer as Simon had taught me to do and slowly rose from the bottom of the pool up, up, watching the shifting light and splash of flippers on the surface of the water above me.
When I emerged the air was full of noise and commotion. Someone was screaming. A teacher was hauling something large and dark from the water onto the pool deck. My mask fogged—I pulled it off. The large and dark thing was a person. Whoever it was their limbs were limp and heavy. Kids were yelling, climbing out of the water fast; I got kicked in the stomach, splashed in the face. I swam hard for the edge of the pool. I scanned the pool deck for Carla and Lion and Nico. Nico was climbing out of the water, and Carla was pushing through the crowd. I pulled myself out of the water, my arms and legs humming with adrenaline.
The teacher was yelling, Stand back!
I ducked between two kids. The figure lying prone on the pool deck looked like Lion. It couldn’t be him, but there were his long legs, his circle of hair, dark with water, his face. The teacher pulled off his mask and it was him and my limbs went cold.
The teacher blew air through his mouth and his torso expanded like a balloon. She thumped the heels of her hands on his chest. I crawled closer, around kids’ bare feet and shower shoes and damp towels that had been dropped to the pool deck. Carla was down on her knees next to Lion, her eyes like dark hollows in her face. Time seemed to bend and stretch. The kids around me were shifting on their feet at a normal speed but the teacher’s breaths and thumps seemed to slow. Lion’s lips were flat and blue. Carla blinked her eyes once, twice, three times—
Then with a splutter and a start Lion’s body seemed to fold in half. Time sped up and bubbles came from his mouth. The teacher pushed him on his side and slapped his back as he coughed and heaved. Spurts of water came out of his mouth, more water than I thought possible. They made puddles on the pool deck, and Carla reached her arms over his body even though the teacher tried to pull her off.
18
The next morning they wouldn’t let me see Lion at the infirmary, but I sat so long in the waiting room one of the nurses came out and told me he was going to be okay. You can visit after he does another session in the hyperbaric chamber, she said, and held open the door for me to go.
I wandered the snowy yard and tried not to think about Lion’s body lying still on the cold pool deck. His dark wet hair and blue lips. Carla and Nico were walking on the other side of the track, toward a building beyond the dormitories. I caught up to them; they were talking in low voices, their heads together.
I hadn’t seen Carla since yesterday at the dive pool, but she barely said hello.
I relayed what the nurse told me about Lion, and Carla said they already knew.
Where are you going? I asked.
You don’t need to come with us, she said.
Building 4, Nico said, and put his hood up and kicked a piece of melting snow.
I followed them through a creaking metal door. No one was inside. It was just a big room that smelled like old paint and was filled with computers that made a low hum.
Carla walked to the front of the room and sat down.
It felt colder in here than it did outside.
You know what’s going to happen now, Nico said.
What?
Carla’s going to wait for her sister Amelia to call, and she won’t. Or if she does, she’ll talk for two minutes and hang up.
I looked at Carla sitting in front of a computer’s blank gray screen.
Maybe she’s busy. She has an important job—
She doesn’t care about Carla. He walked partway to the front of the room and stood there watching.
Does anyone come in here? I asked.
Not really. There’s better equipment in Materials lab. But this is the only place they’ve got an NSP relay.
Does that mean we can listen to Inquiry?
He looked at me. There’s nothing to hear.
I sat down at a computer and turned it on. I know. But still—
Well, move over.
He sat down and began typing, and his breath made clouds in front of the screen. After a minute, the sound of static. He turned it up loud.
This is the main communications feed, he said. But there are hundreds of channels I think.
A long list filled the screen. I could figure out the labels of some—sm, galley, grow mod, stowage. They linked to different parts of the explorer or to specific systems or equipment. Nico clicked through a few of the channels and they were the same. Nothing but static.
At the front of the room Carla was still waiting. She didn’t have her notebook or anything. Her hands were in her lap.
Can we look at the communications log? I asked Nico.
He shrugged and rubbed his hands together. I guess. He pressed a couple of keys and the screen changed. How far back do you want to go?
A couple of weeks before it went dark I guess.
He pulled up the log and we started reading.
It wasn’t a back-and-forth conversation but rather a series of questions and reports because there was almost an hour and a half delay between Earth and Inquiry’s location.
Up until the week before all communications ceased, there were just checks of vital systems in the morning and a systems update in the afternoon. No changes, no developments. In the evening, a list of duties completed that day, all typical. Until a report of an unusual sound coming from a bank of fuel cells at the starboard side of the explorer. The crew’s investigation of the sound was inconclusive. A few days later, another communication; this time it was the cells in the Systems module. They were making the same sound. A humming that was out of the ordinary but didn’t seem to indicate any specific problem.
Then a much more serious report: the explorer had lost propulsion control. This communication was followed by eight days of the crew scrambling to understand what was going on. The log showed over a hundred systems checks on the power supply, and three failed attempts to mitigate the problem.
At eight in the morning on the ninth day mission control sent a message about a scheduled test of the water reclaimers, followed by…nothing. After an hour and a half control asked for a status update and still got no reply. Two hours later, the same. We scrolled down the page. In between control’s increasingly insistent questions there was only white space. No words, no signals, no proof of human beings on the other end of the line.
It’s weird to read a one-way conversation, I said.
It is. Nico’s voice was sad. I’d never heard him sound like that.
I have these cards with their faces on them, he said. The Inquiry crew. Do you have those?
I shook my head.
Everyone wanted to be them, he said. Now everyone’s glad they’re not.
I thought of Anu floating in the blue water of the NSP neutral buoyancy tank, the white tail of her tether twirling behind her.
They’re going to go get them, I said. James and Theresa and Simon and Amelia—
Maybe, Nico said.
A woman’s clear voice came from the front of the room and Nico got up and went to sit next to Carla. I stood up too. I hadn’t seen Amelia in at least a year but her voice was the same, strong and slightly impatient. She was strapped into a jump seat, and behind her was a jumble of buttons and controls. Her hair was shorter and she seemed larger, but maybe that was the way her body filled up the screen.
Hey, Carla said at the front of the room. Can you see me?
Yeah I see you Carly. What’s new? Wait, hold on a second—
Amelia unstrapped herself and turned the screen, showing a narrow compartment beyond. She floated back into view and started doing something. She was changing her clothes, pulling off her shirt and pants.
Amelia, Carla said. It’s not just me. Nico’s here.
Hi Nico. Amelia was wearing nothing but underwear and a tank top now. She started pumping water onto a washcloth, and beads of liquid sprang into the air, drifted up and sideways.
Where are you? Carla asked.
In orbit.
In orbit where?
Amelia ignored this question. The droplets of water circled her head like a halo. How’s school?
Lion got hurt. Carla’s voice wavered.
Hurt how?
He was doing a dive and his tank wasn’t right. They say he can’t come back to class for a week—
If they’re not sending him home he’ll be okay.
We all use those tanks Amelia—
If inhaling some nitrogen is the worst thing that happens to you in training you’ll be lucky. A kid in my year died.
Carla didn’t say anything. All the beads of water had drifted away now.
What else is going on?
There’s another team in Materials lab. They’re working on some kind of adhesive tape. I’m worried they’re going to beat us.
So don’t let them.
The picture distorted for a second and then went back to normal.
Lion won’t be able to help for a while and we’re stuck on the wrist—
Amelia scrubbed her face with the washcloth, and her body drifted in the air. I recognized the water pump behind her. My uncle had brought one home once and we’d taken it apart.
Is that a BREE pump? I asked.
Who’s that?
Carla sighed. June.
Amelia’s face broke into a smile. June Reed. You’ve gotten bigger. Not by much though.
I moved closer to the computer, leaned across Carla so I could see. That’s the third-generation pump, right?
What do you know about it?
I know that if you don’t change the filter every seven days, instead of every ten like the manual tells you to, it spits water.
Amelia laughed. Hey, that’s true. She clipped her washcloth to the wall and pulled a shirt over her head. Then she floated out of the frame.
Amelia, I said quickly. Can you tell us about the rescue mission? About Endurance?
Her voice came from off-screen. Carly, I told you not to talk about that.
Carla glared at me. She shifted her chair so it blocked me from the screen. Amelia, she said. The wrist—
Amelia reappeared and loosely strapped herself into her seat. She still wasn’t wearing any pants.
All right, tell me the problem—
A beeping alarm sounded. Someone in a blue uniform blocked the screen. A man’s voice said something I couldn’t make out.
Sorry Carly. I’ve got to go.
You just got on—
Next time, okay? Listen, you might not hear from me for a while.
Why?
I’ll call again. Amelia unstrapped herself from her chair, started floating away.
When?
We heard her voice and the man’s voice, but all we saw was her empty chair, the restraints waving in the air.
Amelia, Carla called. You haven’t hung up—
The voices continued.
Amelia, you’re still on!
Her face appeared again. Oops. Then the screen went black.
Carla whipped around. What were you doing, interrupting like that? Her voice got higher. My sister doesn’t want to talk about a stupid water pump—
Seemed like she did, Nico said.
Carla’s face was furious.
You know your sister’s kind of weird, he said.
I don’t think she’s weird, I said. I think she’s—
No one cares what you think, Carla said.
She went outside, and Nico and I followed. A few wet snowflakes were falling.
Carla walked fast up ahead and Nico caught up to her, leaving me alone on the slippery path. It looked like he was trying to make up with her, to make her laugh. He picked up a handful of snow, packed it into a ball, and gave it to her. He said, loud enough for me to hear, Go for it. Right here. He pointed to his chin.
She threw it right at his head, hard, and he made a big show of wiping the dripping snow from his face. There was a big red spot on his cheek, and Carla laughed. They walked toward the cafeteria together, and didn’t look back. I stood still for a minute on the frozen walkway, and then I turned around and went back to Building 4. I sat down at a computer, opened up the Inquiry feed, chose a channel at random, and turned it up loud.
19
Every day I listened closely to the news reports about Inquiry; every morning I set my tray down on a chilly table in the cafeteria and felt certain today would be the day NSP would announce the rescue mission. But I was always wrong.
I kept returning to Building 4. I’d open up the Inquiry communications feed and click through all the recognizable channels, the sm or galley or stowage, and then through some with more inscrutable labels, listed as simply ext or int or aux followed by a number. Occasionally there was a distinct crackle or blip on the line, but when I asked Nico about it he said it was just meaningless interference, caused by any number of things between Earth and NSP’s deep-space satellites—a passing station, a random piece of space junk, a natural satellite.
I think I listened to every single channel for at least a few seconds. Each of them was different, and it was sort of fascinating, the contrasts in sound and volume. Some rushed like ocean water; another crunched like car tires on gravel. One sounded exactly like the steady patter of rain.
On the weekends I’d listen to the feed for hours, and certain channels became like old friends, their sounds familiar and comforting. I thought about how each was supposed to connect Earth and Inquiry, and a picture formed in my mind of threads that stretched deep into space, like a spacesuit’s tether cord but millions of miles long.
Sometimes I listened so long I thought I heard patterns in the feed’s seemingly random crackles. But when I told Nico about it, he said I was crazy.
You think you’re going to hear something NSP hasn’t? He laughed. Dream on.
But I kept listening and started plotting the crackles in a notebook of graph paper. Date, time, length. Pages and pages I filled in. But my system didn’t take into account intensity, or sound quality of any kind. I began listening carefully to discern differences in the noises, and after a while I came up with a code for recording each crackle and blip. A letter to denote sound quality, a number to denote length.
On some channels a sound appeared once and then never again. But on others there were little blips I got to know. A high whine, a quick tick, a bubbling hum. A3, E2, F5. On one of the auxiliary channels I regularly heard G1 and H2, which were maybe not two sounds but one because they always came together: a hum of low static and then seven snapping pops.
I kept asking Nico to come and listen, and he finally agreed. Once we were in front of the computer I pulled up the AUX27 channel and played back G1 and H2.
What do you think is causing those sounds? I asked.
It could be a million different things—
They come together every three days, I told him. Approximately every seventy-two hours, give or take a few hours.
His mouth turned up on one side, a slightly crooked smile. I’d only ever seen him smile that way at Carla. Whatever you think you’re doing, mission control has already done it, he said. And they found nothing or it would be on the news.
Nico, wait, I said. Can I ask you something?
I’ve listened to enough static for one day, he said.
The wind rattled the walls of the building. It’s about the hand.
What about it—
It’s not good enough, is it? Number five.
The thumb helped, he said.
A little.
Yeah. He shrugged. Only a little.
Not much unless you’ve got a better idea. He grabbed his bag. Then he paused. Do you?
I thought of the blown-up and shrunk-down hand that hung in my mind in Materials lab, and the hand prototype I’d left on James’s desk. But I shook my head no. Nico got up and told me he’d see me at dinner, and I stayed and listened to the hums and crackles of the AUX27 channel for a long time.
20
Lion was at breakfast the next morning; he walked slowly and his eyes were tired. I asked him how he was feeling and he said he’d woken up with a bad headache but it was better now. When we all sat down at a table with our cereal and toast I said I wanted to talk about the hand. I started to explain what was in my mind, slowly. I took out the notes I’d made when I was building my hand prototype. But Carla and Lion and Nico weren’t paying attention—they were looking at the television. On the screen a woman was talking about Inquiry. She said there was going to be an announcement momentarily, and the clank of utensils and the clatter of trays went silent.
The screen cut to a man standing in front of an NSP research building, where my uncle’s lab used to be. He said the rescue mission wouldn’t be going forward. It was too risky to send another crew after Inquiry when there was no definitive proof the crew were still alive, and when there were serious unanswered questions about the integrity of the fuel cells that powered both Inquiry and Endurance. He went on, saying that after long and careful consideration NSP was suspending the Explorer program, effective immediately.
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