The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  The man’s forwardness could be explained by his profession; photographers made their subjects more comfortable in order to get what they wanted. And it wasn’t like Jack had lots of options when it came to flirting among ninety-three crewmembers and fifty-one scientists, excluding all the men and married women (she hoped Jack excluded married women). Either way, Maya told herself not to be flattered.

  As soon as his attention was diverted, Maya stole a greedy glance. Jack had well-proportioned, angular features and a square jaw. His sandy hair wasn’t exactly blond, ginger, or light brown but was all three at once. There were crow’s-feet at the edges of his eyes that were paler than the surrounding, unlined skin. He must have a bad habit of squinting under the strong sun to get a good look at his surroundings.

  From a distance, Jack was good-looking in a nondescript way until his features lit up with a smile; then he was gorgeous. Muy guapo! Maya’s mother would say out loud, in her Latina whisper. Maya didn’t respond to her mother’s prompts because good-looking men were mostly self-aware. The wealthier ones from good families, with polite manners and business suits, needed even less encouragement. Maya had bedded exactly three of these unattainable types, the sum total of her sexual activity in thirty-six years of age.

  It wasn’t hard to interest men in a one-night stand. Maya was attractive in a well-formed way; most said “cute” and some said “pretty.” She was so petite and reserved, sipping her drink with watchful eyes, that those three men were each shocked to feel her body suddenly brush against a hip as she stood on tiptoe to whisper in their ear. Maya always left them with one less curiosity to satisfy.

  As for the decent men who were interested in more than sex, the ones who could have made good life partners and fathers, Maya kept a kind distance. She was a first-generation American and the eldest of four daughters. Showing the most promise in school resulted in the most attention from her father, a man who believed that education was the surest and most honest way out of poverty. He pushed Maya hard until she pushed herself even harder and made all the necessary sacrifices. Her younger sisters all had children who were the spoiled loves of their grandmother’s life, but Maya was forever studying and uprooting her life for a bachelor’s degree, doctorate, post-doctorate, and finally professorship.

  Jack abruptly stood up and walked by her table. Maya tried to get a better look at the scars she had noticed when they first met. They weren’t the usual clean and faded scars of men who were once boys who crashed their bikes or fell against a radiator. One jagged scar on Jack’s neck looked dangerously close to his jugular vein. Maya was hungry for more. As with all her appetites, the key was moderation. Maya allowed herself a few breaks from good behavior as reward for a very disciplined life, such as the empty potato chip bags that came with all-night study sessions. Maya had to run five miles a day in order to stay petite and not just short, but some things were worth a steep price. Luckily, Healy had a gym with a treadmill.

  Maya stopped into the science lounge on her way back from breakfast. Instead of scouring for updates on the comet, she searched the roster on Healy’s intranet and found Jack, aka John S. Campbell. Maya googled his name and poked around until she found his portfolio website: a patchwork of documentary-style photography. Most of the photos contained people who looked through the camera to the man behind it. It was only one side of the lens, but it was the one that mattered. Jack must have seen the unique vitality in these people and captured it to share. Maya felt her barrier walls cracking.

  She quickly logged off and prepared for a day of work on deck. Healy had several safety requirements: steel-toe boots, insulated socks and gloves, neon anti-exposure suit, and hardhat. Add a dose of Dramamine for motion sickness, and Maya was ready for her first water sample cast—more than ready.

  Conditions on deck were low sixties with dazzling sunlight and strong winds. Maya allowed herself a moment to breathe the moving air through her nose and mouth to both smell and taste the salt and algae. Despite growing up in California, Maya had seen the ocean for the first time at seventeen. She never looked back at a life without it, which was fortunate. Her parents’ approval and her own ambition wouldn’t have been enough to keep her on such a long and difficult path. In the end, it was her love of the ocean that made her trudge on to a tenure track at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute. It was the same love that got her out of bed every morning and eventually on a ship bound for the Arctic.

  Healy had just passed through a gap in the eastern Aleutian Islands, a gateway from the Gulf of Alaska to the Bering Sea. The islands’ steep volcanic shores, colorful harbors, and fishing towns diminished in their wake. Ahead lay open water and the first opportunity to collect samples. Maya walked to the back of the ship and waved to another team of scientists as she passed. They hovered around a coring device, collecting soft sediment, or “delicious muck,” as Charlie referred to it.

  Dr. Charles Brodie—“Just call me Charlie”—was Healy’s chief scientist. He was also an important figure in Maya’s life with a history that dated back to her graduate school years at Berkeley. Aside from Charlie, who had handpicked and interviewed all expedition candidates, the other fifty scientists were mostly strangers or acquaintances who read each other’s publications and chatted at conferences. While the Coasties were predominantly young males, the science party had an even gender split and wider age range, from twentysomething graduate students to sixtysomething senior scientists, but all had the fraternity of a shared purpose: to study the ocean and gather hard data.

  Facts were what scientists needed to identify change and sound the alarm. Forty years of NASA satellite imagery proved that ice extent in the Arctic had decreased significantly in that time by an average of 11 percent per decade. However, the chemistry of the Arctic waters had only been mapped for the first time in 2015 aboard this very ship. It was important groundwork that Maya and fifteen other scientists aboard Healy would continue over the course of the expedition—starting today.

  A group of seven scientists stood beside a large crane at the stern of the ship, comprising half of the chemistry mapping team assigned to the first twelve-hour shift. Maya would have admonished herself for being on time and not early, but seeing Jack’s photos was well worth that price.

  Most of the faces in the team were already somewhat familiar after two days on the ship. Maya quickly introduced herself to the others: a middle-aged professor and a young postdoc, both from Oregon State University. Both had trimmed beards surrounding their smiles and gentle handshakes. Maya spotted her smiling bunkmate, Dr. Nancy Stevens. Nancy was from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The two women were getting to know each other quickly, trading family history, jokes, and worries over the comet.

  Nancy and the OSU professor were the most senior scientists with multiple research excursions in their CVs. They took charge and split the team in half. Three scientists followed Nancy in removing their boots and entering the two twenty-foot-long ISO van workstations in their socks. The OSU professor remained outside and pulled a tarp off the cylindrical frame of Healy’s rosette water sampler. Maya and two other scientists followed him in a revolving line as they opened the doors to one of the workstations, received a thirty-liter GO-Flo bottle from one of the scientists inside, and then walked over and attached it to the rosette frame. Maya moved quickly and felt the rush of endorphins that comes with reaching the summit of a steep climb to lifelong achievement. At that moment, Maya wouldn’t have traded places with anyone alive.

  Once the rosette frame was full of the empty containers, the team hooked it up to the crane by a wire cable. A scientist on the team would handle the controls for opening and closing the bottles at specified depths to capture samples, but a Coastie had to operate the crane itself. Three of them arrived just in time. Maya stood barely five-foot-two next to their towering height, but she had stopped being intimidated by such things—or anything, really.

  “Good morning, scientists!” the one named
Malcolm called out. “I’ll be your crane operator today. So who’s ready for some action?”

  Maya immediately lifted both hands above her head with her palms out. Malcolm laughed and jogged over to slap a high-ten.

  “True soldier,” he whispered.

  * * *

  GUSTAVO MOSTLY LEFT his stateroom to use the toilet. After a couple of days, he even ventured to the galley to eat a few bites of food, but he was still dropping weight. In the middle of poking another hole in his leather belt with a pocketknife, Gustavo heard a knock at the door. He expected Jack to walk in, but the cabin door remained shut. Gustavo waited until another knock sounded, louder this time. A muffled voice called out.

  “Gustavo Wayãpi?”

  The woman standing in the corridor took a quick step back when he opened his door. She repeated his Brazilian name until he acknowledged it with a nod.

  “I’m Ensign Camila Ortiz,” she said. “We saw each other when you boarded.”

  The ensign waited for Gustavo to nod again, her eyes scanning his face carefully. She asked if she could enter the room after he didn’t offer.

  “¿Prefieres español, Gustavo?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t speak much Spanish. I’m better at Portuguese and French, and best at English.”

  She scanned his physical form again, clearly confused as to why this was the case. Gustavo understood that he was confusing—even to himself.

  “I know Healy has tons of regulations,” the ensign continued in English, “but they all exist for a reason…”

  Gustavo’s focus wavered. He wished she would just state her purpose so he could say whatever words would get her to leave. All he wanted was to be left alone.

  “The accountability form lets the crew know that all hands on deck are alive and well,” said the ensign.

  Gustavo nodded immediately, but she repeated herself anyway.

  “So you must log in to our intranet and sign the form. Twice a day, by eleven a.m. and again at five p.m.—”

  He kept nodding.

  “Or, we will have to keep repeating this conversation,” she insisted.

  Gustavo saw Jack cautiously walk through the room’s open door.

  “Should I come back?” he asked.

  “No,” the ensign said. “We’re done here, right?”

  Gustavo nodded one last time. Soon as the woman left the room, he closed the door with relief.

  “I read some of your poems online,” Jack said to his back. “From a collection called The Majesty.”

  When Gustavo turned around, Jack was eagerly waiting.

  “I didn’t read all of them,” Jack admitted, “but most. They were beautiful, but they also hurt.”

  He paused.

  “I’m not a violent person,” he said, and smiled to help prove the statement, “but your poems left me with…a taste for blood.”

  Gustavo nodded. Jack had understood his words and meaning.

  “You know, I had an assignment in Brazil last year,” Jack said.

  He reached for the laptop on his desk.

  “These are the Guarani-Kaiowá people.”

  The image on Jack’s screen featured three men and one woman standing or squatting beside a plastic tarp fashioned into a shelter. They carried bamboo spears and wore body paint but also jeans and plastic flip-flop sandals. The woman was fully clothed with a sleeved shirt.

  “They were evicted from their lands and had their water resources poisoned by fertilizers and pesticides from factory farms,” Jack explained. “These families were living by the side of a busy road. They have one of the highest suicide rates in the world.”

  Gustavo was already aware of the Guarani-Kaiowá peoples’ plight. He had even traveled to Europe with one of their leaders, Marcos Verón, before the old man was beaten to death by a rancher’s henchmen. Gustavo asked Jack why he took pictures of the Guarani-Kaiowá.

  “To make the international community aware,” Jack said without hesitation. “That’s the work of good journalism.”

  “And did this awareness help the Guarani-Kaiowá?”

  Gustavo smiled at Jack’s troubled expression. Now they understood each other even more. It was good to be understood by a young man who was trying to be kind in such a forbidding place. Gustavo turned away and picked up his belt. Jack watched him loop it through his loose jeans and cinch it at the newest notch.

  “I was on my way to lunch,” Jack said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “I already ate.”

  “Looks like you could eat some more…”

  Gustavo told him to go on ahead, firmly but kindly. Hunger was for the living. Grieving in a metal box floating on a freezing ocean wasn’t living; it was hell and purgatory combined, where all one could do was wait. Is this a dream? Gustavo often wondered. Or is this death? Had Gustavo died instead of his twin brother? Or, had sorrow left him numb and frozen like the frigid sea surrounding them?

  SIX

  The Defense Effort

  Kourou, French Guiana

  August 9

  T-minus 176 days to launch

  LOVE MWANGI HAD never seen rain like this. The airstrip of Kourou, French Guiana, was flooded in water that puckered and warped with constant downpour. Less than a mile in the distance, ground traffic controllers sloshed around in fluorescent rain suits. Love stood by her plane’s open hatch and smelled the soupy climate, ignoring the flight crew as they tried to maneuver around her six-foot frame. None said a word as Love continued to stretch her cramped muscles. As a lean and leggy East African woman wearing tight jeans, studded motorcycle boots, bead and metalwork necklaces, and a striped feather earring, she made for an imposing beauty.

  An entourage of Humvees pulled onto the airstrip and parked several yards from the plane. The men who stepped out of them carried assault rifles and wore green camouflage and sky-blue helmets with two bold letters stenciled in white. In Love’s early youth, the sight of UN peacekeepers signified both grave danger and the only safety she could count on. When Love began employment at UN African headquarters in Nairobi in her late teens, those two letters took on a whole new meaning: a path away from poverty, loneliness, violence, and stigma.

  Love went and stood with the other passengers on the plane; thirty-some UN civilian personnel who all had remained tight-lipped on the fifteen-hour flight from New York City. The first peacekeeper to enter the plane’s fuselage addressed them as a group.

  “Welcome to the Defense Effort for Comet UD3,” he said. “You are now part of an international collaboration toward collective action to defend the planet.”

  Several more peacekeepers entered the plane and shook off raindrops. One called out for an interpreter, and Love stepped forward. He handed her a plastic packet containing the same camouflage poncho that the peacekeepers wore.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  Love donned the poncho and gathered her luggage. Passing by the armed men, she kept her hooded head bowed to avoid the eyes of those who could end her life with the pull of a trigger finger. The peacekeeper led her to a Humvee at the front of the line. Love hefted her duffel bag and carry-on suitcase onto the back seat and climbed in. She pulled off her poncho, left it in a dripping heap, and then stretched out on a diagonal. The knees of her jeans were already drenched and clinging like a wet skin.

  The peacekeeper got into the front passenger seat and rested his assault rifle in his lap while the driver shifted gears and eased off the brake.

  “Am I in danger?” Love asked.

  “We all are,” the peacekeeper said simply. “That’s why you’re here.”

  His accent wasn’t derived from French but probably some other Romance language. His skin was a light gold while the driver’s was as richly dark as Love’s, and yet they seemed to be fellow countrymen. Love waited quietly until the driver whispered in Portuguese while nodding back at her. His words roughly translated to “Not what I expected.”

  Love peered through her passenger window as the
y exited the small airfield. Behind a blur of rainfall, Love saw thousands of light blue helmets. In less than a mile, the Humvee turned and drove down the length of a Kourou golf course converted into military barracks with rows of tents and parked trucks that stretched on into gray mist.

  Love leaned forward and asked the soldiers more questions to distract them as she smoothly pulled out her phone. Pointing the screen down to hide its light, she typed a message to her girlfriend, Rivka:

  Landed safe. Remember what I told you.

  Love slipped the phone back in her pocket as the Humvee reached a roundabout with flagpoles dotting its circumference. Against gray rainclouds, the colorful flags of the European Union looked brighter. To Love, they called out, Welcome! Welcome, France. Welcome, Portugal. Welcome, Germany. Welcome, Norway. Welcome, Croatia. Welcome, Netherlands…Love smiled. Here was her final destination: the equatorial spaceport in French Guiana, now entirely dedicated to the international Defense Effort for Comet UD3.

  Trees and dense foliage cleared at the corner of a security fence where more than a hundred armed peacekeepers stood yards apart along its perimeter. Through the windshield, Love saw a large group of soldiers clustered around a security checkpoint. They wore dark uniforms with GENDARMERIE stitched onto bulletproof vests.

  The Humvee’s driver pulled to a stop and rolled down his ballistic glass window.

  “Interpreter!” he shouted.

  One of the gendarme soldiers stepped forward with a clipboard in a clear plastic bag. With a thick French accent, he asked for her full name and country of origin.

  “Love Mwangi,” she said, leaning into the front of the cab. “I was born in Kenya but I live in New York.”

  “Bienvenue,” he said, finding her name on his list.