“I just don’t get it,” Tal continued. “If we’re talking nuclear war—we would know. If we’re talking asteroid—we would know. And if we’re talking worldwide epidemic—well, fuck, I’m no epidemiologist, but I hardly think things would be fine one day, everyone dead the next.”
Devi shivered but said nothing.
“So what now?” Thebes asked. He was looking at Harper. They were all looking at Harper, their commander, who raised his palms in defeat.
“There’s no…precedent. They didn’t cover this in the training manual. I think we have to continue as planned and hope that as we get closer to home we can initiate some kind of contact. There’s not much else we can do in the interim. Unless someone has a different idea.” The four other crewmembers slowly shook their heads. “Okay, so I guess we can agree that the next step is to stay the course and see how the situation develops.” He paused. “Ivanov!” Harper shouted. “Agreed?”
The door to the lavatory slid open and Ivanov took his toothbrush from his mouth. “If it makes you feel better pretending there is some other option, that we are actually making a choice, okay, great—agreed.” Then he shut the door again.
Tal rolled his eyes and muttered asshole to no one in particular.
Thebes gave Devi a paternal pat on the back and she let her head rest on his shoulder, just for a second, then got up and climbed back into her bunk. She shut the curtain and the glow of her light was extinguished a moment later. The crew disbanded silently, defeated. There was nothing else to say. Thebes took his book and went to bed. Tal did one more set with the weights, then put them away. Inside her little compartment Sully let her gaze linger on the photo of her daughter. She closed her eyes and listened: there was the murmur of Devi’s Hindi prayer, the shrill music of Tal’s handheld videogame, the scratch of Harper’s pencil on paper, the rustle of Thebes turning pages, and the hum of the ship beneath it all. Ivanov was cursing under his breath as he left the lavatory, but later, as she drifted off to sleep, she thought she heard his muffled sobs.
THE NEXT MORNING, Sully opened her eyes a few minutes before the alarm buzzed at 0700. She turned it off, staring at the stiff ripples of the curtain, then she let her eyelids flutter back down. The prospect of returning to work in the comm. pod seemed like an unhappy chore. It was difficult to see the point of it now. She didn’t care about the data rushing into her machines anymore, or the groundbreaking conclusions she might draw from all the brand-new information, the fresh discoveries that lay at her fingertips. She didn’t want to leave the centrifuge at all. She wanted gravity to go on holding her.
Her dreams that night had taken her back to the surface of Callisto, where she had stood not so long ago, watching the fawn-colored stripes of Jupiter whirling, the Great Red Spot churning. Beyond the curtain, first light began to strengthen, but she didn’t rouse herself to see it. Not today. It was as real as her dream and nowhere near as beautiful. She went back to sleep, back to Jupiter’s moon, and let the artificial sunrise go unobserved.
THREE
ONE DARK AFTERNOON, after the sun had gone down but before the sky had erased all its evidence, Augustine and Iris headed out to the hangar. Iris wanted to go for a walk—a long walk, she said—and the hangar seemed like a new and interesting destination. Augie hadn’t been there in a long time—not since his last flight in, the previous summer—but the eerie blue twilight, casting shadows on the snow, stirred his sense of adventure. They would be far from the observatory when the deep darkness of early evening fell, but they took a flashlight, and at the last minute Augustine swung a rifle across his back and made sure the chamber was full. The weight of the gun barrel against his shoulder blade and the thick yellow beam of light swinging across the blue snow in front of him quenched his apprehension.
He carried the flashlight in one hand and steadied himself with a ski pole in the other. Navigating the shifting snowdrifts on foot was difficult—his arthritis was getting worse. Iris skidded fearlessly down the mountain, running out in front of the flashlight’s reach, turning occasionally to see what was taking him so long. He was out of breath before they were halfway there, and his knees had already begun to ache, the muscles in his thighs to burn. He should’ve taken the skis, but they were too big for Iris, and it didn’t seem fair to make her walk while he sliced through the drifts. After almost an hour of walking, the roof of the hangar came into view, a glint of corrugated metal against the endless snow. Iris began to move even faster, wading through the soft drifts on her short but determined legs.
As they came closer, he noticed that the long sliding doors of the hangar were wide open. Snow had begun to accumulate inside. Where the floor was bare he could see dark oil stains soaked into the concrete. It was the scene of a hurried departure. A set of ratchet wrench sockets lay scattered across the concrete like hexagonal stars in an earthbound constellation, the empty case tossed nearby. Augustine closed his eyes and imagined the plane on the tarmac, researchers on board, luggage stowed, and one last military mechanic rushing to collect his things, picking up the case without latching it and watching the wrench sockets spin across the floor. Augustine had heard the Herc take off from the observatory, then watched it climb into the sky from afar. Here, he couldn’t help but fill the long, white runway with an imaginary plane. Augustine pictured the copilot hanging his head out the hatch, shouting Come on, while the mechanic decided to let the fallen pieces lie where they were, throwing the empty case down with them and running to board the waiting plane, climbing the rickety staircase, then kicking the stairs away and swinging the hatch shut. The plane thundering down the white runway, lifting up nose-first into the sky. Returning to a world Augustine no longer had access to.
Where the plane might have idled was the empty, derelict runway: the plastic glimmer of unlit LEDs, orange flags half-buried in the snow. The staircase was still there, knocked on its side, one loose wheel spinning in lazy circles in the wind. Augustine held one of the wrench sockets in the padded palm of his mitten, then let it fall to the ground with a hollow clatter. It reminded him of his father—the smell of stale grease, the tools and machine parts scattered around the hangar. Augustine used to watch his father sleep, feet propped up on the recliner, mouth half-open, a ragged snore erupting from deep in his throat. And the smell—that thick, oily smell that wafted off his father’s clothes like an unlit fire or the underbelly of a diesel truck. The television would be flickering in the background, his mother either working in the kitchen or lying down in their bedroom, and Augie would kneel on the carpet, feeling the rough polyester fibers pressing into his shins, pretending to watch the television but watching his father instead.
Augustine brushed the snow off a large stainless steel toolbox in the hangar and forced open the top drawer. A jumble of drill bits and screwdrivers stared back at him, a tangled spool of wire, an assortment of thick bolts. He shut the drawer. Something moved in the corner of his eye and he turned toward the runway outside to see Iris climbing on the fallen staircase like a jungle gym.
“Careful,” he called to her, and she raised her arms above her head in a defiant no hands gesture. She edged along the thin metal framework like a balance beam. He continued investigating the hangar, shining the flashlight into the dim corner and kicking snow off mysterious shapes buried beneath the drifts. A few limp, frozen piles of cardboard, more toolboxes, a stack of tires. Augustine arrived at a sizable mound covered with a stiff green tarp and fastened with bungee cords. He unhooked the cords and drew back the tarp to find a pair of snowmobiles. Of course, he thought. He, along with his luggage, had been shuttled to and from the runway on his various arrivals and departures from the observatory via these snowmobiles. In previous years, Augie had left the observatory during the summer months, when the precipitation from the melting snow clouded the atmosphere and thin blankets of fog rolled off the Arctic sea, up into the mountains, stretching over the sky like a scrim that prevented him from doing his work. He would go somewhere warm on his escapes from the Arctic: the Caribbean, Indonesia, Hawaii, a different world entirely. Staying at extravagant resorts, eating nothing but shrimp cocktail and raw oysters, drinking gin at noon and then passing out on the pool furniture and burning to a crackling red crisp. What I wouldn’t do for a few liters of gin right about now, he thought.