Even as he worked, Jupiter cast its eerie amber light through the domed ceiling. He’d orbited it before; in the game, narrowly avoiding being tugged into the planet’s fierce gravity a hundred times. It was more dazzling in real life, of course. Those furious red rings, whorls and flurries surging and descending on convection currents across its gaseous surface.
What would it be like to see Saturn from this vantage? When he’d been young, Jesse had imagined the texture of each of Saturn’s rings was spiral-grooved, like a vinyl record. That he could roller-skate across their flat surface, taking in the heavens. In Dalton, he’d learned that the rings were actually made of millions of shards of ice and rock, some of them small as a grain of sand and others large as a car.
They were accelerating every second, and in eight months they would be the first humans to see the planet and its giant moons close up. But the thought of reaching it frightened Jesse a little. He’d once heard Sheppard refer to it as ‘the Rubicon’ – the point of no return. Once they approached the planet, Igor would launch the gravity-assist drive. An engine that would push them through the gravitational field of Saturn at the right trajectory to pick up some of its gravitational energy. They would begin to travel at about one seventh the speed of light, fast enough to soar into interstellar space and towards James Dalton’s binary stars. Once they’d reached their neighbouring solar system, they would swing by the planets in the opposite direction, at the right angles, to slow their speed and allow the Damocles to finally be captured in the orbit of Terra-Two. By then, both Eliot and Harry would be in their forties, skilled enough to steer the ship and perform the engine burn entirely without the senior crew. And Igor would not be there to see it.
It was this fact that upset Jesse the most. Igor would never see Terra-Two. Finally, one evening, Jesse mustered the courage to talk to the old man about it. ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ he asked, lingering behind in the kitchen once their group lesson was over for that afternoon. ‘I heard that the reason you defected from the USSR, the reason you agreed to work on this mission, was because you knew you would be old by the time the project was over but the UK Space Agency promised that no matter what, you could fly with us.’
‘You heard right,’ Igor said.
‘But I don’t understand why,’ Jesse said, ‘when you…’ He didn’t want to say it out loud. He looked down and fiddled with a loose thread on his overalls.
‘I will have completed my own mission,’ Igor said. ‘We all have a different mission, Jesse. We’re all compelled by different gods, fleeing different demons. Shall I tell you something?’
Jesse leant across the table and nodded.
‘You know, I was one of the first men to set foot on Mars.’ Jesse nodded again. Everyone had seen the historic picture of the Soviets pushing their flag into the surface of Mars. Four astronauts. Igor had been the youngest man on the team. ‘I returned like a man in love,’ Igor said. ‘Once I was back on Earth, I longed for the flight, for the sight of my planet from a vast distance, for a vision of the stars unobscured by atmosphere, for the sensation of weightlessness that was so natural to me it was as if I’d been waiting for flight the entirety of my life.’
He spoke with such fervour his eyes lit up. He spoke about how he’d gone on to serve longer and longer missions in spartan hab-labs on the surface of the red planet, digging trenches to shelter from solar storms, performing experiments and broadcasting his results back to Earth. It was not an easy or glamorous life, but it was everything he had ever wanted. When Earthbound, he’d slump into a depression, slip out of the bed where his wife slept, pass his children’s bedrooms to stand outside and behold the sky. Aching like a lovesick mariner.
‘When I learned about my sickness,’ Igor said, touching the bony hollow of his chest, ‘I knew what I had to do.’ He left his wife, his children and grandchildren behind in Norilsk and smuggled with him the plans for the gravity-assist drive — the key to interstellar travel.
‘So,’ he said to Jesse, ‘I try my best. I kept myself healthy as possible until launch. When we reach Saturn, my work will be done.’
His wish was for his body to be launched naked into the vacuum of space, where his cells would not decay and he’d drift for eternity by icy moons and elliptic galaxies, the Eagle Nebulae and the Pillars of Creation, by star nurseries and the resplendent remnants of supernovae. Some part of him would be an eternal witness to the collapse and creation.
‘There are worse things,’ he told Jesse, ‘than death.’ And, for the first time, Jesse believed it.
Chapter 37
JESSE
07.02.13
A NEW DATE FOR the Orlando mission was selected by the NASA and UKSA directors in London and Houston. This time, it happened to fall on Jesse’s twentieth birthday.
The morning of the mission, piano music skittered into his dreams, and Jesse ascended into consciousness picturing David Bowie’s mismatched eyes. ‘You know how it goes,’ Eliot said with a smile, turning the volume dial up on his speakers. “ ‘Is there life on Maaaaaaars?’ ” he shouted as the cellos began to play. Jesse laughed, rolling out of bed and rubbing his eyes. Eliot was already dressed in his flight suit, although a dried crust of toothpaste flaked around the left side of his mouth.
‘You must know the song?’ he said as the strings reached their first buzzy crescendo.
‘Of course I know the song,’ Jesse said, getting to his feet. And they caught the chorus again; this time they shouted it.
‘Happy birthday, man.’ Harry said, clapping Jesse on the shoulder. ‘Old man.’
‘Thanks,’ Jesse couldn’t help but remember waking up in his bedroom one year ago. It had been a miserable day, overcast and threatening snow. He’d just returned from months of training for the backup crew and abandoned all hope that he would ever set foot on this ship.
They all sang the chorus again, one final time, at the top of their lungs. Jesse was so happy to be alive, to be on the Damocles, with these people that he almost cried.
‘Do you feel any older?’ Eliot asked as the string arrangement began its glissando slide into the song’s finale.
‘I feel years older,’ he said. And then there was silence.
‘Hey,’ Harry said, and raised his eyes to the window, ‘look.’
Europa loomed large in their view. Jesse had seen the moon so many times in the piloting simulation that the sight of it gave him an odd sense of homecoming. He had sacrificed two weeks of nights to level eight on the simulator, trying to lock a new module onto a docking port. A Sisyphean task that required the most delicate manoeuvres he had ever mastered, shifting the module an inch a minute, only to crash at the final moment when the muscles in his wrist seized with cramp.
In the window, that morning, Europa’s surface looked brittle and delicate as the edge of an egg, shining with so much reflected light.
Suddenly, Jesse gleaned something of the enormity of the Orlando mission. The American crew were hoping to make the moon habitable. It had an oxygen atmosphere, and an ocean roiled metres beneath the frozen crust of the planet, two ingredients necessary for life. But it was still far from hospitable. It was around -160°C at the equator, a temperature at which cell membranes crystallize and fracture. It was pelted daily by radiation and nothing could grow. The Orlando’s crew had nevertheless progressed in leaps and bounds, engineering single-celled organisms that were now able to multiply in sub-zero temperatures. Their hope was to eventually terraform the planet. Atom by atom, they planned to bend it into submission. To cover the crust with mutant lichen and moss, to one day fill the sea with alien plants. It would be decades before Europa was terraformed, if ever. Long before that happened, Jesse and his crew would be on Terra-Two, breathing the temperate air and leaping into lagoons.