“It’s sort of a prisoner exchange. Believe it or not. We’re going to swap out Debbie for Brandon Lepper. Where they get these notions, I don’t know. They feel like there’s a danger with Brandon staying in the capsule with the others over there. I’ll tell you later. There are mission objectives that are uppermost in their plans here, what with so much time left on the journey, and they don’t want to lose anyone. Or that’s what they’re saying. But who knows? So he’s going to come on over here, and we’re going to have a fraternity-type environment on the Geronimo, like they have on the Excelsior. We’ll do some Jell-O shots. Or bench presses. Anyway, the docking is more time-consuming than dangerous. So if I don’t reach you for a little while, you’ll know that I was busy with this, up here in the night sky, okay?”
“Are you sure it’s safe?”
“No. But they wouldn’t do anything that was a real risk, what with so few people on the mission. That’s why we have to make the swap. I’ll get back to you as soon as we’re done. I’ll let you and Brian know that it came off. Is he feeling any better?”
“They’re hopeful about one of the synthetic antibiotics in the pipeline, and so far, yeah, he’s not so bad. He just wants to sit and watch the real-time footage of the mission.”
“You might have reruns today. Don’t believe everything you see.” Steve told her he loved her and signed off.
Abu contacted his family in Kansas City, and his parents, who were initially perturbed about the docking, since it seemed dangerous, quickly regained their composure and asked that their son contact them as soon as he was finished with the procedure. They were serious, brilliant astrophysicists, scientists of few words, and they didn’t want to clutter up the bandwidth with sentimentalities.
Then these two brave astronauts on the Geronimo sat and watched as the Pequod appeared, first on the instruments, then as a speck in the windows, and then as an ominous space hazard, with an inexorable forward progress. Off to one side was the lollipop Red Planet, which had lately become the constant companion of the mission. In the greater distance was the Earth, no bigger than any other luminous object in the soup of galaxies, nebulae, and dwarfs. And then, like some unaccountable blast from history, comes the unaccountable man-made Pequod, so close now that they could nearly wave to their colleagues, though it would be another several hours before the docking took place. And all of this because one astronaut couldn’t control himself! There wasn’t much time to complain now, however, because there was a lot of preparation and suiting up that needed to take place. Abu said he was going to unbuckle and get down and face east. Though there was no east here. But there was still the ritual.
Special coupling clasps on the outside of each of the ships had been engineered into the design of the capsules, and it was these clasps that made it possible to come alongside, but according to the training, at least two astronauts needed to be outside the ship to hand-engineer the hydraulics. Steve and Abu had already radioed to Laurie and Arnie that they intended to volunteer. But before they could even try to suit up and attach the cable that would link the two ships together, the crew of the Geronimo needed to prepare the slumbering Debbie Quartz, who was soon to bask in the warm, maternal glow of Laurie Corelli.
Now Abu and Steve headed down the ladder into the cargo hold, and they fetched out the suits from the hatch where they were stored. They had no reason to believe that Debbie, like Brandon, would be awake and alert. But when they got over to her bed, her eyes were wide open. Her expression was placid, forgiving, and oddly distant.
“What’s happening?”
Steve said, “We’re going for a little walk.”
“Where to?”
“Into the night sky.”
“Out of the ship?”
“We’re going to secure the Pequod. She’s coming alongside,” Steve said. “Then I’m coming back in, and I’m going to help you over to their craft.”
“You’re what?” She said it with a gentle amazement. It seemed that Debbie Quartz’s Planetary Exile Syndrome had begun to yield to the combination of heavy narcotics and SSRIs, and there was nothing left in the heavens, not black holes, not hulking expanses of dark matter, that could surprise her.
“We’re taking you over to the Pequod. Houston’s orders.”
“Steve,” she said, “you really don’t want to do that. That’s a big mistake. Are you… Is someone coming onboard to replace me here?”
“Lepper. He’s kind of…”
“Steve,” she said.
“Look, if you hadn’t tried to poke a hole in Abu with the soldering gun, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
Abu was already unstrapping her, and he did it with a sympathetic demeanor, as best he could, as if his tenderness would be enough to keep her from raging around the cargo hold again.
“I’m sorry, Abu,” she said.
“No apology necessary,” Abu replied, “really…”
“It’s time that I told you guys something. Before you do this. You know what’s waiting for us when we get there?” Debbie said. “You know what’s waiting for us on the surface of the planet?”
“Debbie, don’t start,” Steve said. “You won’t give it a rest with this paranoid shit. You’re scaring everyone. You’re jeopardizing the mission.”
“You didn’t get the Department of Defense briefings,” Debbie said. “I did. You think I don’t know? I know. But I also know what was in those reports, and what they’re looking for on the surface of the planet. The equatorial conditions are sterile, the surface is sterile down to four or more meters, but the place is crawling, literally, with bugs, tiny little microscopic bacteria. They’re there at the poles, and they’re there, even more plentifully, in the canyons, and the Hellas Basin. And you know why there’s DOD interest? I’ll tell you why.”
“Debbie,” Steve said, “enough. We don’t have clearance for that stuff. Houston, I don’t need to remind you, is probably listening right now. I’m taking orders from Mission Control, and the mission is on a need-to-know basis, and I don’t need to know.”
“If that’s how you want it,” Debbie said, and her eyes brimmed with tears. The three of them were drifting in the center of the cargo hold, and Steve could see it, could see that she was emotional. Something in her had given out in the course of the two months that we’d all been on this journey, and the funny, implacable Debbie he’d first met outside of a convenience store in Orlando four years ago, when they were both cadets, was gone. Part of her had been shuffled off and had been replaced by this ghostly, troubled woman. He missed the old Debbie.
“Let’s get into the gear. Laurie’s looking forward to seeing you.”
In the silence of suiting up on the Geronimo, they considered the ballet of men and machines, and how inspiring it was, this technical accomplishment, and when these meditations on technology and the future of the species were complete, they locked on their helmets.
“Do we have enough fuel to be doing all this?” Debbie asked.
Abu grunted noncommittally. The three of them closed the hatch behind them in the cargo bay. Steve pointed to the intercom, and then his voice crackled in their helmets. “Debbie, here’s how it goes. We head out, we watch the Pequod come in, we secure her with the hydraulic clasps, and when we get the okay from them that Brandon’s in their air lock, then I come back to get you, got it?”