Debbie gave the thumbs-up. Abu gave the thumbs-up, and once again the astronauts of the Mars mission were out in space.
It’s the soundlessness that’s so hard to describe. This was what Steve was noticing on his first space walk. Even in the capsule there’s always something to listen to. There’s the music that gets piped in from Earth, downloaded classics, popular music, the ragas that Abu was trying to teach Steve about; the bleeping of various machines, life-support systems, the crackling of the communications array; the chorus of voices from Houston, Lorna, DeWayne, Fielding, Kathy Fales, Amin, who had become their friends in the time aloft, checking in, as if from out of nowhere, as if from the radio station of nowhere. The ominous ping of microscopic asteroids hitting the hull, which only made a sound inside. The hiss of oxygen inflow. It was all about sound, until you set foot outside.
And as soon as they did, as soon as the two men set foot outside, they saw the Pequod, the ghost ship, it seemed, summoned from out of a perpetual night sky. Steve wasn’t sure that anyone else really existed out here, besides himself and Abu and Debbie. He didn’t realize how much he missed the rest of the unruly, malodorous company of humans until the only humans around were waving to him through an air lock.
He and Abu got tethered, and they watched the right flank of the Pequod, the nearest face of the craft, dead in the water, it seemed, slower than it took a mechanical pencil to drift across the capsule. All the ignition that would be required had long since taken place, and now it was inert, until, right on schedule, the gaffer’s hook on the side of the Geronimo allowed them to reel in the other ship and secure it with some cables and some electromagnetic cleats. The two crafts sat like this, as close to motionless as you can be and still be moving, ever so slightly, because of the drift from the Pequod’s thrusters. Steve said to Abu, “Okay, can you take it from here?” He heard the crackle of Abu’s microphone, “Let’s get the rapist onboard.”
And now the first unalloyed disaster of the Mars mission. Steve, according to what Houston had exhaustively detailed for him, was meant to turn back and fetch Debbie, and bring her out onto the surface of the capsule, and then the four of them, nearly half of the entire crew of the Mars mission, would meet between the two ships, like on a section of No-Man’s-Land between the two Koreas, or at the Wailing Wall checkpoint. At that stage, there would be no tethering of Debbie and Brandon, because they were only going as far as the hatch on the other ship, and if they were flush against their handlers, it should have been okay; it should have been. Steve turned his posterior on the Pequod and headed back for Debbie. He ought to have known there was something wrong when she wouldn’t say anything to him, when she assumed the space equivalent of passive resistance, until he wasn’t even sure, at first, if there was someone still in the space suit.
“Goddamnit, Debbie,” he said. “I can understand you’re upset, and I can understand how scared you are, but please don’t make this more dangerous for me. I have a kid at home, and he’s sick right now, and the last thing he needs today is for something to happen to all of us. I’m begging you, just do what they want us to do and let’s get the hell back in the spaceship and go see the new planet. Can we do that, please?”
At some point that rag doll in the space suit shook off his hand and stepped beside him out onto the surface of the Geronimo. Steve looked out across the hull of the ship, which seemed rare and proud in the starlight, and he saw Abu and Brandon coming in the other direction. Which meant, yes, that the Geronimo was now entirely emptied, with all of them out in the great beyond of interplanetary space, and the two little constellations of astronauts neared the halfway mark in the march of prisoner exchange. It seemed, like everything else in space, an impossible distance to traverse, and yet, considering the 33 or so million miles they had come, it wasn’t much. Eventually, they were all there, and the four of them hovered at the midpoint of their little journey, at least as we all reconstructed it, and there was a moment when Debbie and Brandon were standing there facing each other, and that’s when Steve thought he heard something in his intercom, something he was later uncertain about, the moment when Brandon grabbed Debbie by the shoulders and shouted. The exact words, unfortunately, are lost to history, though there has been much conjecture since. Abu reached out to stop him, and then there was some kind of explosion.…
… What kind of explosion? What kind could there have been? It wasn’t an explosion you could have heard, because what you heard out there was nothing, because that was all there was to hear, nothing. So what was the explosion? How to be startled in space, when nothing exactly is what seems to be happening most of the time, when nothing is what time looks like. Well, there was a special provision in the space suits for ignition, if needed, some minor propulsion, in case an astronaut needed to drift, and this was intended only for use out of range of other astronauts, but Debbie had nonetheless ignited some of the oxygen propellant, and had used it to lift off. Because she wasn’t attached. She wasn’t tethered. When Steve looked up, he saw that Abu had tried to get out of the way and was now rotating wildly at the end of his tether, and Brandon was laid out flat against the side of the ship, clinging on to the spot where Abu’s tether was attached to the hull, and Steve’s first thought was, Well, everything is okay. But then he looked out into space. He looked into space, and what he saw was Debbie heading off from the ship, heading out, heading for the Van Allen belt, heading for Jupiter, and his heart plugged in his throat, at the significance of it, of what he had to do, which was to jump, because he had a generous length of cable and he could still go after her, at least part of the way.
“Debbie, what the hell are you doing?” he called.
Abu’s voice erupted too. “Debbie, for godsakes!”
Steve drifted out on the cable, reaching for her, but when he thought he was getting close, there was a second burst from her oxygen pack, and she accelerated, farther out. “Abu,” he called, “what do I do? What do I do?”
Abu was trying to haul himself in from the end of his cable. He was out of breath; he was at the limit of what he could do. Nevertheless, he said, “I’ll go after her.”
“No, no. I’ll do it. Get Brandon into the capsule. Can you get Laurie and Arnie on the horn? It’s my problem; it’s my fault. I’ll go.”
And Steve took hold of the cable from where it was fastened to his space suit, and he unhitched it. Kids, the space walk may be the freest you ever feel, but that doesn’t mean you are in any rush to relinquish that tether. Especially for such a grim purpose. Steve blasted a little bit of propellant out of the tank and headed after Debbie Quartz, who had about nine hours of oxygen left and all of space-time in which to use it. Unless, that is, she blasted the vast majority of oxygen out of the tank, which you could do if you were of a mind and knew how the suits were constructed. You could do it if you were very close to an alternate oxygen source or would be in the next two or three minutes.
December 15, 2025
Things have been a little heartbroken here, gang. We are not a contented crew; we are a worried and downhearted crew. For example, Laurie and Arnie were watching the whole thing with Debbie. They were watching and unable to intervene. They were watching and screaming into various intercoms and communicators. Like everything in the register of the space walk, the altercation between Debbie and Brandon took place in a nearly eternal slow motion. Laurie and Arnie were able to see it, to anticipate its outcome, to cry out, to punch into their texting keyboards, Code 14, Code 14, which must be the code that Houston is really tired of getting from us. I’ve heard recordings of Laurie sobbing to Houston (from some unauthorized site of Mars mission feeds), while Arnie tried to comfort her. Laurie and Debbie had been really close before liftoff.