After a particularly violent outburst, Sully watched him slouch in front of the gaming console like an old helium balloon. The levity that had been so charming, so magnetic, that had filled Tal with so much buoyancy, had dissipated into the recycled air. Eventually he crossed the centrifuge to collect the shattered steering wheel he had hurled against the wall. After silently gathering the pieces, he pooled them on the table, where he tried to put them back together. It was a futile project, but he worked on it for the rest of the day: gluing plastic to plastic, fiddling with wires, testing buttons. He just needed something to do. He didn’t give up until Thebes laid a hand on his back.
“Leave it,” Thebes said. “I need your help on the control deck.”
Tal let Thebes distract him with work, but he was back in front of the gaming console the next day. Sully couldn’t tell whether it was the games themselves that soothed him, the repetition of music and sound effects and graphics, or the excuse to emote so wildly at the end that kept him playing, again and again: win, lose, win, win, win, lose—the numbness of concentration followed by the quick release.
Devi, the youngest crewmember and unquestionably the most brilliant of them, struggled silently. While Tal and Ivanov seemed to take up more space than ever, their wild emotions overflowing their bodies, Devi seemed to shrink. She’d always been more engaged with the machines than with her colleagues, which was part of what made her such an exceptional engineer. But as the silence from Earth lengthened, she disengaged from both machines and humans. Nothing could hold her interest. She began to drift, untethered to the crew or to the mechanics of the ship itself.
Thebes noticed the lapses in Devi’s repairs—she was missing obvious problems, didn’t hear troubling sounds, passed over malfunctioning components, as if she were sleepwalking. He confided in Sully one afternoon, coming to visit her in the comm. pod while she worked through the probe data.
“Have you noticed anything amiss with Devi?” he asked.
Sully was unsurprised. She had been trying not to notice the growing shift in all her colleagues, but the changes in each of them were unmistakable. The crew was unraveling—slowly, one thread at a time.
“I’ve noticed,” she said.
Together they tried to pull Devi back to them, back to their ship. Thebes worked alongside Devi, although it meant twice as much work for him, and he told her stories about being recruited into the South African space program, decades ago, when he was a young man and the program was barely a few years old. Sully kept her company during their off hours—she tried to make sure that Devi did the required amount of exercise, that she ate and slept regularly. She asked Devi about her family, about her childhood. They tried their best, but Thebes and Sully could do only so much. None of them was immune to the growing rift between Aether and Earth. The closer they got, the wider it became, and as the silence wore on it grew cacophonous.
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, after dinner and the recreation hour, Harper called the crew together. Ivanov was the last to arrive, having skipped both dinner and recreation in favor of staying in the lab, cataloging moon rock samples. He went straight to the treadmill and began jogging in the corner, casting a glare in the direction of Tal, who was lifting weights.
“Did you want to use these?” Tal asked with mock politeness. Ivanov punched up the speed on the treadmill and ignored him.
“Now that we’re all here,” Harper began, “I think we should touch base about the blackout.”
Thebes was at the table, reading the old Arthur C. Clarke novel Childhood’s End. He dog-eared his page and joined Harper on the couch, folding his hands on the book in his lap. Devi got out of her bunk and went to sit next to Thebes, while Tal put down the weights and stayed where he was. Sully left her bunk and leaned against the lavatory door, facing the couch and the exercise area beyond it. Ivanov kept jogging, indifferent.
“I want to go over a few things,” Harper continued. “I know we’re all aware of the situation, but bear with me. At this point we’ve been out of contact with Mission Control for almost three weeks. And we’re not sure why.” He looked around at them as if for confirmation. Sully nodded. Tal began to chew on his lower lip. Thebes and Devi listened without expression. Ivanov kept jogging.
“Our comm. pod is functioning properly. Telemetry from the probes is coming in, commands to the probes are going out. Devi and Thebes are ninety-nine point nine percent certain the failure did not originate with us.” He paused again and looked to the engineers on the couch for confirmation. Thebes bobbed his head.
“We do not think it is Aether’s error,” Thebes said, enunciating each word, each syllable, so perfectly it was difficult to doubt his diligence.
“Which leaves us with some unattractive possibilities,” Harper said.
From the treadmill Ivanov snorted and hit the Cancel button. The belt slowed and stopped. “Unattractive,” he muttered under his breath, then added a few more words in Russian. He raked his fingers through his hair, which was still bouncy from being in zero G all day. Sully didn’t have to understand Russian to get the drift of his mutterings.
Harper ignored him and continued. “In every instance I can think of, we’re looking at a worldwide problem. Clearly all three of the DSN telescopes are down. The way I see it, either the equipment has failed, or the personnel has failed—or both. Other ideas?”
There was a pause. The centrifuge hummed on its axis and the life support ducts breathed. Somewhere in the zero-G section they could hear the hull of the ship groaning softly.
“It could be,” Sully offered after a minute, “that there’s an atmospheric problem. Some kind of RF pollution, a geomagnetic storm maybe—but to cause a blackout like this it would have to be one hell of a storm. Historically something like this would be brief, correlating with a solar event, but…I don’t know, it could be.”
Harper looked thoughtful. “Has that happened on this scale before?”
Ivanov threw up his hands in frustration. “A geomagnetic storm? Don’t be ridiculous, Sullivan, it couldn’t possibly last this long.”
Sully continued, “I…don’t think so. Years ago a magnetic storm upset the power grid in Canada and caused aurora borealis as far south as Texas, but Ivanov’s right, nothing I’ve ever heard of would last this long and disrupt both hemispheres. It could be something nuclear—there’ve been experiments on how nukes might affect the atmosphere in the past, but I’m not sure there’s been any hard data on it, mostly just supposition.” Sully fiddled with her clipboard as she ticked off the possibilities, vaguely aware of the chill that settled over the centrifuge as she uttered the word nuclear. “I guess it could be airborne debris, which could come from either an asteroid impact or a massive detonation. But really—the instruments we have on board should have picked up on anything like that, and there’s nothing unusual about Earth’s energy signature. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Basically we’re fucked and we have no idea why,” Ivanov interjected. He brushed past Sully and disappeared into the lavatory, shutting the door behind him.
Tal sighed. “He’s right, isn’t he? Barring the point zero one possibility that it’s our mistake.” He rubbed his face with his hands as if he were trying to wake himself up from a bad dream. It was hard to tell whether Tal was more upset that Ivanov was right or that their planet seemed doomed. No one spoke for a long moment, listening to Ivanov opening and shutting the door to the communal medicine cabinet in the lavatory.