“Please find a seat,” the representative said. “There should be more than enough room for everyone.”
When the group had settled, the representative called their names one by one from the sheet on her clipboard. As each person answered, the group turned toward them with curious looks, like a class of students meeting for the first time. At first he tried to memorize the names and faces, but gave up when it became clear that there were too many people to remember without knowing something more about them to use as a mnemonic. Most of the prospective astronauts seemed to be in their late twenties to early forties, with a few younger and several older, and seemed to come from all over the continent.
He remembered what Katsuhiro had said when he told him about the medical certificate necessary for the testing.
“Isn’t that a little ableist?” Katsuhiro said. “No handicapped, ill, or slow people need apply, no glasses, asthma, or rheumatism in space. I’m surprised they allow women, gay, and people of color.”
“Space is sadly not accessible for everyone yet,” he had replied. “Only for the able-bodied or the extremely rich.”
“Yes, as I said,” Katsuhiro finished.
Now he recalled his brother’s words, but none of the candidates looked super-human; they seemed like people he saw every day in the city.
After the roll call the space organization’s representative asked them to turn on the computers at their desks. A few candidates couldn’t find the switches and had to glance at the others to see where they were placed.
“Is this the first test?” someone asked loudly, and everyone laughed, even the representative.
“When you have all turned on your computers, please click our logo in the upper left corner of the screen,” the representative said. “Then start by filling out your name, date of birth, and address, and choose ‘send.’ After that you may start the first test when you are ready to begin. This test is in our intranet only, but will be timed and look quite similar to what you have completed earlier online. We’re testing you electronically and individually for easier and faster scoring.”
28
ALTHOUGH THE TESTS RESEMBLED THE ONLINE versions, they were longer and more complex, and the time to answer them was shorter. As before, attention, memory, perception, and intelligence were tested, with the addition of basic mathematics and engineering. He added and subtracted, divided and multiplied, predicted the next symbol in the sequence, read black and white dials, and memorized colors and patterns. After a few challenging hours during which the only sounds in the large room full of people was the clattering of keyboards and the clicking of mice, the representative asked them to finish up the test and follow her to the cafeteria in fifteen minutes.
“Please leave your bags,” the representative said when the break started. “They are perfectly safe here. I will hand you tickets for lunch, but any extra beverage you must pay for yourselves, so do bring money if you would like something extra to drink.”
A few people muttered under their breath, but joined in the rest of the group as they rummaged in bags and wallets after payment.
The representative led them through more corridors to what looked like the main thoroughfare of the building, a long and wide hallway with a lot of traffic, their footfalls and voices filling its space. From here smaller corridors branched off to more peripheral parts of the facility, the openings interspersed with narrow floor-to-ceiling windows which looked out on the winter-stripped garden and the gray clouds outside. Lining the corridor’s interior wall were display cases and miniature exhibitions. The main hallway ended in a circular atrium filled with chairs and tables and potted indoor trees beneath wide skylights. Along the wall stood a row of counters with stacked trays and plates, cutlery in plastic cases, bread in baskets, cereals in bowls, bottles of soda, beer, and wine, jugs of coffee and hot water for tea, juice in dispensers, jams, lunch meats, mixed salads and fresh fruits in chilled bowls, and steaming pots and pans with a variety of soups, fried fish, baked vegetables, and grilled meat.
The space organization’s representative handed out meal tickets to the group and the candidates lined up by the counters. Some of them were already talking with each other; perhaps they were from the same city, work place, university, or organization.
He chose a generous helping of fried salmon, baby asparagus, green salad, and ice water, loaded the plates up on his tray and carried it to the counter.
“Any extra beverage?” the employee behind the till said as she took his lunch ticket.
He shook his head, took his tray, and started looking for the other candidates. A sizeable group of them occupied one of the largest tables in the dining area, by a window facing the garden.
“Is it taken?” he asked the woman at the end of the table.
“No, please join us,” she said and smiled.
More candidates arrived at the table and the small talk started up. As expected in a group of strangers, the chat consisted mostly of introductions, talk of home city, job, education, but also why they had applied to the program. After a short while the conversations were surprisingly easy for a large group of people that had never met before. They already had several things in common, not just the two previous rounds of tests. Most had been interested in space science and exploration from an early age, and had pursued their education and job opportunities accordingly.
“I love science and know how challenging exploring space is, but I also call myself a space romantic and will always be one,” the oldest of the candidates said, a tall man with a thinning hairline who worked as a teacher and journalist.
“Me too,” several others said and laughed, clearly identifying with the description. There were too many names to remember, but he already recognized several of the candidates by their faces or clothes.
“What happened with the project that planned to land people on Mars as a one-way trip?” someone said.
“They had a website to apply at, but there were rumors that you had to donate to the program to be considered for selection. After the finalists were picked, there was no more news about the project.”
“Did they go bankrupt?” someone asked. That had been the fate for numerous companies in the current economic downturn, which seemed to have no end.
“They were probably a scam from the start. They claimed they were sending people to Mars, but had no spacecraft, no solutions for radiation and nutrition, no habitat modules, and no scientific experiments, or backing.”
“That’s reassuring,” another candidate said.
Laughter rippled through the group.
“How about the astronaut training program on the eastern continent that was broadcast as a reality show?”
“I think they ended up with three or four candidates who are still waiting to be launched,” another said. “No idea to where.”
“Best to go with someone who’s actually sent people into space before,” someone else remarked, to more chuckles from the others.
29
IN HIS DREAMS HE WATCHED THE FULL MOON flare like a star, licking the sky with long protuberances that died down momentarily to cascade new lunar ejections. The moon flares pulled at him like magnetism, crackled on his skin like electricity, and burned like the sun.
Cosmic radiation, he thought and scrambled like a rodent to find shelter, anywhere, everywhere. While he scuttled along a barren stone plain, a helicopter veered into the radius of the searing tongues in the firmament, the aircraft black and silhouetted against the glare of the raging moon, and exploded in a plume of fire, the rotor blades and fuselage dissolving, melting, dripping to the ground.
He kept fleeing from the cosmic radiation, and then Michael was there, inviting him home. He suspected that Michael was still hurt by his unfaithfulness and moving to the cabin, but he pretended not to notice and followed Michael down to the basement. There, Michael’s parents were waiting for them. Michael handed him a folded note ruled in blue, like a school notebook. The note displayed Michael’s
phone number in black ink. He stared at the digits, but they were blurry and morphed fluidly
into other numbers, even when he folded the note and opened it again for closer inspection.
Michael then showed him pages of a comic book story he had been working on, and with visible pride handed him sheet after sheet of drawn panels. He didn’t know Michael could draw, or even that he liked comic books, and took in the artwork with surprise. The pages were as mutable and fuzzy as the phone number on the note, but he squinted and rotated the sheets to make as much sense of them as possible. His skin still burned so he knew they weren’t safe, but he hoped the lunar rays were like alpha radiation, as long as they had something thicker than a sheet of paper between them and the source, the damage was reduced.
The fluid, metamorphosing panels of Michael’s artwork contained black and white drawings of city buildings, a leafless forest, a blank sky, and tiny figures that were searching for something that was just around the corner from them, behind nearby trees, or beneath the gravel on the ground. The characters were so small he couldn’t make out their faces or tell them apart, and although he tried to grasp the story by reading the panels over and over, they shifted and changed like the lunar flares, and he was at a loss of understanding what the story was about.
“It’s wonderful,” he lied, “thank you for showing it to me,” and handed the sheets back to Michael.
Michael was smiling broadly, looking boundlessly happy, as if he had asked him for marriage. Above them the air rumbled and shrieked as the rays from the moon pierced the heavens and the roof and their flesh.
He woke in the hotel room the space organization had billeted them in. Sweating, he threw the lumpy duvet aside, but did not get up to avoid disturbing the candidate who slept in the bed on the other side of the room. Even through the curtains the windows were pale and gray. With the hotel being situated by the sea, the management had apparently chosen diaphanous fabrics and sunny dawns to double-lined drapery and darkness for restful sleep. The sun was still not up, but close.
The previous day the tests had continued until five in the afternoon, then the space organization’s representative had taken them back to the foyer with the star-gleaming floor. A large coach had pulled up outside the front and taken them to one of the many hotels along the beach outside the city center. It had been dark when they arrived, but the fifteen-floor building was lit by orange floodlights and stood like a shining pillar among the grass-tufted dunes. Less than twenty meters from the broad stairs and entrance, which were also flooded with orange light, the ocean rolled slow waves ashore, and the smell of the sea and the sand granted a fleeting illusion of summer.
In the reception and in the restaurant at dinner they encountered only a few other guests, two middle-aged couples traveling together, a small group of senior citizens on tour with a guide, and a cluster of visitors from the western continent who talked loudly and laughed even louder, and left the next morning in two minibuses. Other than them the hotel was cold and empty and seemed to be waiting quietly for warmer weather and busier times.
30
ON THE SECOND DAY AT THE ASTRONAUT TRAINING center he was prepared for more mathematical, perception, attention, and intelligence tests, but when the candidates were gathered in the small foyer in the morning, the representative informed them that the time would be used for medical and psychological tests. Some in the group exchanged glances.
As the previous day, the representative led them past the hallway with the mezzanine and spectrum of banners, through the narrow corridors, to the room with the desks and the monitors. There she presented them with the tasks at hand:
“Today we will be asking you questions about your past and present health, and also the health of your closest family members in order to rule out certain hereditary diseases. These questions may feel uncomfortable and you are not obliged to fill out the form, but unless we know a little bit about you and your family’s medical history, it will be very difficult to assess you.”
“You may refuse to answer the questions, but it’ll cost you the spot in the program,” one candidate muttered.
“These tests are not timed so you may leave for small breaks or lunch whenever you wish,” the representative continued. “I recommend that you save your progress in the tests so you don’t lose any data during the break. Good luck, everyone, and feel free to ask if you have any questions.”
The first document was a medical questionnaire where he filled out his name, address, phone number, email address, and birth date. He then ticked boxes to answer whether he had undergone recent surgery and for what illness or injury, if he had any chronic diseases or allergies and describe them, whether he had had any serious illnesses such as cancer, stroke, or heart problems as a teenager or as an adult, and what infectious and other diseases and health issues he had experienced as a child. He typed, “broken fingers, right hand,” for recent surgery, and ticked off none for chronic diseases, as well as chickenpox, influenza, middle ear infection, and colds under childhood ailments, and colds for adult infectious diseases. The questionnaire reminded him of those he had filled out for his military service and health insurance, but were more exhaustive and took longer to complete.
“Let’s hope this test stays with the space organization,” one of the candidates behind him murmured.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” the person next to her replied.
The second questionnaire was even more detailed and invasive. It contained almost the same categories and questions as the first test, but this time pertaining to his immediate family: parents, siblings, and children. Even grandparents were included in the list.
“Are they really allowed to ask about our families’ health?” one candidate said so loudly everyone could hear it. The representative had left them to the tests. “It’s not like we’re inbred or anything.”
“This is not just about present diseases,” another candidate replied. “Common health issues like diabetes and certain cancers also have a large hereditary component to them, and they want to know how likely we are to develop those in the future.”
“I’m not going to tell them anything,” a third person said. “I have no right to give out detailed information about other people’s health.” Several candidates expressed their agreement.
He started to fill out the form, slowly and hesitantly, and not only because he wasn’t certain what diseases his brother had had when they were small, and even less so his parents, but whether he really ought to report on the health of his family without their consent. If he lied, or pretended that he didn’t know or remember what diseases the members of his family had contracted in the past, would the space organization track down the correct information from medical records anyway?
He simply didn’t know, so he filled out the form for his family’s medical history as correctly, but also as vaguely, as he could. Sprained thumb, chickenpox, mumps, influenza, and cold he ticked off for his younger brother. As far as he knew and could remember none of his immediate family had suffered any serious diseases or injuries when they grew up, and if they currently did, they hadn’t told him about it. For his parents he could only fill out influenza and cold as he assumed they had experienced that as children, but he didn’t know of anything more. He was even less familiar with the health status of his grandparents in the past, but ticked high blood pressure for his maternal grandfather and type two diabetes for his paternal grandmother.
After that followed detailed questionnaires about his mental health and that of his family. These documents listed a host of mental illnesses, from depression to schizophrenia, including phobias he’d never heard of, and he didn’t tick any of them. Finally, he started on a series of psychological examinations. The first test mapped the five main components of personality: extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Since he had been through a similar psychological evaluation in the military, he assumed there would also be intervie
ws with psychologists, probably for those who passed the current round of tests. He answered the personality questionnaire as truthfully, but also as favorably, as he could.
The second questionnaire reminded him of certain personality tests he had taken online for fun, but it contained more questions, many of them repeated or rephrased, and seemed to go into much more detail than the simple tests found on the internet. He assumed the space organization wanted to know as much as possible about the candidates’ personality types and psychological profiles. His responses to those kinds of personality tests hadn’t changed much since he first started taking them for fun online, and now he gave the same answers as he always did.
The last portion he also recognized from personality tests online, but again it was a more advanced and detailed version. This test mapped possible personality disorders or other psychological issues. As with the mental health questionnaire, it contained a long list of phobias, this time accompanied by a short explanation. Was he afraid of heights, confined spaces, the sight of blood, going to the dentist, going to the doctor, spiders, insects, hair, water, or fire? Did he feel the need to check whether he had locked the door, switched off the stove, or pulled out the electrical cords twice or more in a row? Was he compelled to wash his hands for more than five minutes, to shower or bathe more than twice a day, to not step on cracks on the sidewalk, or count things repeatedly? How often did he drink, smoke, gamble, take illegal drugs, or purchase sex (including the use of pornography) per week?
Thinking it might look odd if he didn’t tick any of the phobias, he checked spiders. There would probably be few arachnids in space, except for lab specimens. For the addictions he typed in numbers befitting a monk or someone who lived alone in the mountains.
31
ON THE THIRD DAY OF TESTING THE CANDIDATES were called out of the meeting room in groups of three for a medical examination. While the others waited their turn, they continued to fill out any unfinished forms from the previous day.
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