Galactic Adventures

by Tristan Bancks

  Z sits and straps himself in. The intern checks the straps and, a few seconds later, Zarif begins to spin. The first 30 seconds of his ride are much the same as Yada’s, but without all the trash-talking. Then Palatnik asks him to look down, look up and look to the side. When he is finally asked to lean over and look at his feet, we all clench our fists, half hiding our faces, just waiting for him to hurl. But he keeps spinning and after three minutes, a minute and a half longer than Yada, Palatnik stops the chair and says, ‘How do you feel?’

  Zarif nods his head, purses his lips. Everybody is tense. Then he says quietly, ‘I feel fine.’

  Palatnik shakes his head gently and makes notes. ‘Remarkable,’ he says. ‘You did better than many training astronauts first time in the chair.’

  Zarif unstraps, stands up and, staggering sideways just once, is led back to his seat. The group clap him. Everybody says, ‘Good on you,’ and ‘Nice one’. Then Palatnik says the dreaded words, ‘Who’s up?’

  For some strange reason my hand starts to rise. I don’t actually want to be next, but there’s a disconnect between my arm and my brain. My brain is saying, ‘Hey, what are you doing, arm. Stop. Dude, seriously. Did you see what happened to Yada?’ But my arm won’t listen. I think my arm kind of wants to beat Z. It creeps higher until Palatnik points at me with a yellow, chip-toothed grin and says, ‘Good. Stand up.’ So I do.

  ‘It’s a piece of cake,’ Yada says, sitting there with bare feet. I frown at her, suck back a breath and walk slowly over to the empty chair. Is this how people feel approaching the electric chair? Palatnik stands at the computer, watching, with his arms crossed, face like a funeral, as I’m strapped in.

  ‘Ready to rock?’ the intern says, like he’s only programmed to say one thing.

  ‘Born ready,’ I say, and straightaway I wish I hadn’t, remembering what happened last time someone said those words.

  The chair starts to spin.

  Yada says, ‘Lucky luck, Dash.’

  ‘Please do not be sick,’ Raf shouts. ‘For me.’

  The chair picks up pace and the words, ‘Please do not be sick,’ spin round and around inside my head, until I start feeling sick.

  ‘You okay?’ says Palatnik.

  I nod. There’s no way I’m going to be wiping my shoes. I’m ready to crush Z’s time.

  ‘Okay, lean to the left,’ Palatnik says. So I do.

  ‘And lean to the right.’ I do and the world starts to swim. Palatnik’s face is a blur. The kids streak by. I’m seeing pictures faster than my brain can process them. A window goes past, but I only realise it’s a window once my back is already turned. I’m feeling weird and wrong. There’s Palatnik again, but my brain only registers that it’s him once I’ve spun round and he reappears. I feel that rumble in my belly, the one that spells bad news.

  That’s when I notice four kids sitting in the gallery. I only realise it once I’m already spinning past them again and I do the numbers in my head. If I’m on this chair and only Z, Raf and Yada are left, then who’s the fourth kid? Scott? Next time I go by, I turn my head to slow the blur for a second and I see him. He’s sitting in my chair. He’s watching me. As I go past again, I turn my head and put the blur into slo-mo. It’s definitely him. Robert White. Sitting in my chair. Like Goldilocks. I’m seeing things, right? I’m making him up. I saw the picture of him on the web last night and now I’m hallucinating or something. What can I actually see when I’m spinning this fast? So, a third time, I lock in on the guy, and it’s him. He smiles at me.

  I feel like I should be freaking out, knowing what I know about him. I should be panicking or telling Palatnik to stop the machine, or screaming, ‘Ghost!’ But I’m not doing any of that. Somehow, I feel cool about it. No one else seems to say anything, so I guess they can’t see him. Like Yada couldn’t see him out at the junkyard. I’m the only one who can. So maybe the dude’s been sent for me. Maybe he wants to tell me something. Maybe he’s hanging around till he feels okay about what happened to him. Don’t ghosts do that in movies?

  ‘Now lean down and look at your feet,’ says Palatnik.

  I do. I think about Robert White, the stinky little ghost kid who’s stolen my chair and I smile. I spin faster than I’ve ever spun before. My feet are in focus and the floor flicks by at a thousand kilometres an hour. My middle ear knows there’s something wrong here and I don’t know what’s left or right. But it doesn’t really matter. I lose focus and let go. Suddenly I’m not worried about getting the best time or beating Z or showing Palatnik what I’m made of. My body is warm and I feel as though nothing can touch me. My mind empties. The only thing that stays is a picture of that kid.

  At the end of three minutes, when the chair comes to a stop and Palatnik and the others wait for me to serve up the second course, I don’t. I just sit there and wait for the world to stop spinning. When it does, I search for the kid, but he’s gone. If he is trying to tell me something I wish he’d hang around a little longer so I could work out what it is.

  I stare Palatnik in the face, even though it looks like he has seven faces. He shakes his head and snorts, ‘All right, who’s next?’ But I know I’ve done well. He knows I’ve done well. The others cheer for me.

  I stagger to the right as I’m led back to the chairs. Even though that kid isn’t in my seat anymore, when I sit, I feel like I sit into him, I feel like he disappears into me. I don’t know any better way to explain it than that. I must be going nuts, but that’s what it feels like.

  I’m leaning on an angle and Yada straightens me up as Raf climbs into the chair. Yada puts her hand on my back and she calls me ‘Astronaut’. For the first time since being selected, I actually feel like one.

  When we’re finished I go and Skype Karl, my stepdad.

  ‘I know I’m gonna last the whole month here,’ I tell him. ‘I kicked butt on this chair thing that spins really fast and—’

  He tries to sound excited but I know that he’s busy and locked in the world of work and laundry and deliveries and stinky underpants. It makes me want to bust him out of there, to show him that there is something else. But I don’t think he’d understand. I tell him about Palatnik and he says, ‘Well let me know if he gives you any more grief and I’ll come and sort him out. Anyway, I better get back to it. We’ll speak soon, eh?’

  ‘Yep,’ I say.

  ‘Righto.’

  ‘Bye.’

  Click.

  15. School’s In

  ‘Is it true that in space you drink your own wee?’ I ask.

  There are giggles from the others.

  Palatnik scratches his face. He is standing at the front of a small classroom. There’s a smartboard behind him with the flight trajectory of a rocket plane on it. Around the walls are labelled images of space shuttles, rockets, planes, the port and the Utopia space station. I so wish classrooms in regular school were this cool. Palatnik is answering millions of questions. He does this every day. After we’ve completed his sick and twisted early morning surprise challenge, we shower, change, eat breakfast at Spirit and report to Classroom 1C. We’ve been doing the same thing every day for three weeks now.

  ‘Y’ could say that.’ He shrugs. ‘And other people’s urine. And sweat.’

  Everybody squirms. Yada pretends to vomit.

  ‘Do we really have to discuss this?’ says Rafaella.

  ‘Yeah – we do,’ he snaps. He screws the lid off a jar, shakes three or four tablets out and pops them into his mouth. He takes a lot of these things. Angry Tablets, I figure. ‘It’s important you know how the waste system works. But the thing is, it’s not so different to earth. You drink other people’s urine now, anyway.’

  There is giggling and gagging.

  ‘The purification process is just a little longer on earth,’ he continues. ‘In space, every drop of water must be treasured. Think
about it. It costs a lot of money to bring fresh water up from earth, so the urine and sweat are filtered. They’re processed through chemicals and all the bacteria are exterminated. Then the end product’s ready to drink the next day.’

  ‘That is so disgusting,’ Rafaella says, clutching her throat.

  ‘What’re you talking about?’ Palatnik frowns. ‘It’s not disgusting. It’s life. It’s the same on earth. Water containing all our urine evaporates, forms clouds, rains down. We collect it in dams, mix it with chemicals and filter it, drink it, pee it out and on it goes. It’s just a shorter trip from toilet to table in space.’

  Rafaella’s brown skin almost turns green just thinking about it.

  ‘And how do we go to the toilet in space if poo floats?’ I ask, trying to get another laugh.

  ‘Excellent question,’ he says. ‘In fact, you can be my volunteer. Wait here.’

  He leaves the room. What’s he going to make me do this time? I thought that after I aced the vestibular chair he might get off my back, but, if anything, he seems to have it in for me even worse in the week since then.

  A minute later he’s back, wheeling something about the size and shape of a port-a-loo. ‘Move those tables for me, will you?’

  Z moves them and Palatnik parks his john on wheels.

  ‘Ecco. Uno gabinetto,’ he says in a really bad Italian accent. He opens the door and inside there’s a toilet and a hose with a funnel attached.

  ‘Dash, take a seat, please,’ he says.

  Yada laughs and points at me.

  ‘You wanna go next, funny girl?’ he says. Her smile drops. Zarif grins. I just look at Palatnik, wondering if I really have to sit on a toilet in front of everyone.

  ‘Move it,’ he says. I climb the two steps and sit on the throne. ‘Grab the hose.’

  I take hold of it. It’s kind of like the hose on a vacuum cleaner.

  ‘Now, girls and boys, you will all use a funnel and hose like this when going pee-pee on Utopia.’

  ‘Oh, please, no,’ groans Rafaella.

  ‘Well, on my second mission to the international space station,’ he says, ‘there was a “space tourist” – one of those guys paying $20 million for ten days in space – who went to the toilet and forgot to turn the vacuum on.’

  Our faces all screw up. ‘What happened?’ says Yada.

  ‘It was fine while it was floating through the air. It’s just when it hit the walls that it wasn’t so sweet. Can you imagine having to ask a team of astronauts to help wipe up your poopy?’

  Everybody laughs.

  ‘It won’t be so funny when it happens to you, so watch closely. This will be your only demonstration.’

  ‘Where’s the vacuum switch?’ says Zarif.

  ‘I’ll get to that. You sit in, use these velcro straps and this metal bar to tie yourself down.’ Palatnik straps my feet and legs in. ‘You don’t want to float off halfway through. Then click the vacuum switch here – like so.’ A little pump starts whirring. ‘Do your thing into the hose or, if it’s poop it will be sucked down into the waste disposal unit. The liquid will be recycled. The solid waste will be stored then transferred to an unmanned transport ship which, when full, will be released, de-orbited and burnt up in the earth’s atmosphere.’

  ‘Burnt poo!’ Yada howls.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ barks Palatnik.

  ‘Can I get off now?’ I say.

  ‘Did I say that you could?’

  Raf breaks the tension. ‘Okay, can we move on?’

  ‘You want some privacy to finish up?’ says Palatnik and Z laughs.

  I glare at Palatnik and he glares back. I unstrap myself. I’m not going to sit there looking ridiculous. I climb down from the toilet and take my seat again.

  ‘We have one week left here and about three weeks’ work to get through.’ Palatnik picks up his clipboard. ‘Which is actually about two years worth of work in a training program for real astronauts.’ He likes to remind us regularly that we’re not real astronauts.

  ‘Hand these out for me, slave,’ he says. It’s the pet name he uses whenever he gets me to do a job for him. I’m so sick of it. I stand up and snatch the timetables from him. The others gather around, grab them from my hand and head back to their desks.

  I scan mine. The days of the week are listed across the top. On the right hand side, in seven days time, there’s a box coloured in red. It’s labelled ‘Launch Day’. Feb 27. My birthday. I can’t help smiling. Raf is laughing and Yada squeals behind me. Seven days. That’s it. But it’s seven days jammed with work from 5.00 in the morning till 9.00 at night. There are Centrifuge and Vestibular Chair runs, two-hour workouts in the gym and pool, another medical. Then, the day before the launch, skydiving.

  ‘Excuse me, is the skydive compulsory?’ I ask.

  ‘It is if you’re still here,’ he says.

  ‘Well, how is it going to help us in space?’

  ‘It’s for emergencies on take-off and landing and it tells us valuable things about your ability to deal with high-pressure situations. It will be a tandem dive, which means you’ll be strapped to an instructor. Is there a problem?’

  ‘No, sir.’ I rub my hands together, crack my knuckles one joint at a time. The skydiving is the one part of the whole thing that I’m really scared of. Everything else I’m psyched for, but I just can’t deal with falling. I like to go up, not down. I mean, why jump out of a perfectly good plane?

  The next few days are intense. Let me give you the speed-version. We hit the Zero-G Jet again and I do much better this time. No sickness and, without Scott there freaking me out, I find the courage to fly across the plane and do a couple of spins. They’re not as good as Zarif’s, but they’re not bad. I get a toothache, though, and Palatnik tells me that gas can build up under a filling at altitude and make your teeth explode. That was really nice of him.

  We learn about life on Utopia – how to eat and drink in zero-gravity, how to brush our teeth without the paste floating away and how to shampoo our hair with this cream stuff that you don’t wash out. Rafaella is not happy with any of this, but it’s the funnest part of space school yet.

  We do skydiving drills each morning. I try to power through, telling myself it’s going to be cool, telling myself there’s no need to worry. But I know that there is.

  I’m slammed with challenges and study and trying to sleep. Living the dream is way harder than you think it’s going to be. Palatnik keeps piling the pressure on. It feels like he’s working me twice as hard as the others, but I don’t care anymore. Well, I thought I didn’t care. With two days to go before launch, we get a chance to fly the rocket plane simulator. That’s when things between me and him explode.

  16. Crash Burn

  I grip the control stick. I’m wearing a headset, but all I hear is static. My seat is the same as the captain’s chair in the cockpit of a rocket plane. I watch a flat screen monitor set into a console with dozens of gauges, lights and buttons. I’m excited and terrified at the same time. I’ve played plenty of online simulators, but this is the real deal. I feel like a fighter pilot. Zarif and Raf sit on either side of me at identical consoles. Yada is on the other side of Raf. We’re in a small dark room, dedicated to sims.

  ‘I’m only going to explain this once, so listen up,’ Palatnik says. ‘Here is your controller. Here is your velocity gauge. Here is your flight path and landing track. That’s all you should need for now. This is an emergency landing situation. I want you to bring this ship down safely. You got that?’

  Yada, Raf and I look at him with blank faces. Zarif watches his screen. He hits some buttons.

  ‘Let’s see if any of you monkeys can fly,’ says Palatnik. ‘And – go.’

  The simulator screen springs to life.

  The gauges tell me that the plane is travelling at
27,000 kilometres per hour and increasing, but my altitude is dropping rapidly. I’m at 125,000 metres – 119,000 – 115,000. If there was a gauge for my heart rate, the needle would be red-lining. But I need to be cool. If this were an actual situation I would have to bring this baby down. And what if something does happen up there? What if Palatnik dies? Or the co-pilot passes out and I have to save the day?

  ‘You are about to enter earth’s atmosphere,’ Palatnik says. ‘Prepare for the burn.’

  The controller shakes violently in my hand and my seat goes mental, rocking all over the place. Warm air rushes from vents, heating my face. I can see what look like flames and the nose of my plane glows red on the monitor. The shaking becomes so intense, I do all I can just to keep a grip on the controller as we crash back into earth’s atmosphere.

  A red light flashes on the panel in front of me and a siren goes off.

  ‘That’s a ballistic re-entry, my friend. That means, in a real-life situation, your body would be experiencing 10Gs – that’s ten times earth’s gravitational pull. You probably would have blacked out and you currently have no control over your craft,’ he says behind me.

  I quickly glance over to see if anyone else’s console is flashing. But no one’s is.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I say. ‘How do I get control of it?’

  The ground is tumbling before me on-screen. One second I’m looking at it, then it spins off to the right and suddenly up is down and down is up. Now I’m looking at the sky. I push and twist the stick, but nothing happens.

  Palatnik clicks his tongue loudly. I can feel him standing there, breathing down my neck, judging me. Then he moves on and stands behind Zarif. ‘Good,’ he says to Z. ‘A feathered re-entry. It’s clear you’ve flown before. And you were obviously listening when the instructions were given. Perhaps you can give some tips to your friend sitting next to you, once you’ve brought it home.’

  I only listen vaguely to what he is saying above the noise of the siren and the sharp hiss of panic in my ears. The screen is glowing red and I’m plummeting. It doesn’t matter which way I twist the controller now, I can’t pull the plane out of it. The graphics on screen are so photo-realistic that I actually feel as though I’m falling, as though I’m about to crash. I’m sweating bullets and I have a lump the size of a Granny Smith in my throat. The ground rushes towards me. The speakers behind make the sickening noise of a plane about to crash land. I try pressing buttons on the console, but nothing makes a bit of difference. There’s the desert – brown and yellow, rocky with the odd splodge of green. I press buttons madly, hoping that one of them will help, but it’s no use. I’m coming in super-fast, the ground rips by, and then I slam hard into the desert floor. I feel the impact in my chair and it jars my back and neck. The craft bounces and slams down again. Then the screen plunges to black.